Chapter 64:The Racial State - The Third Reich Part One: The Ideological Background of Hitler's Germany Adolf Hitler is without question the one towering figure over the 20th Century - and perhaps even of the 21st, even if measured only in the reaction against him. Because of this fame, or infamy, Hitler and the Third Reich remain one of the most controversial topics of contemporary history.
Yet despite all the intense scrutiny and historical evaluation, Hitler and the Third Reich remain one of the most difficult historical areas with which to come to grips. The reason for this is that Hitler still has a massive influence on everyday politics and life at the end of the 20th Century, and it is difficult to find any source which has an objective view of the state created by the Nazis from 1933 to 1945 in Germany. In fact, a large amount of what has been written about Hitler and Nazi Germany has been particularly subject to the pressure of political correctness: a good example is the story of 1936 Olympics and the Black American athlete Jesse Owens. The 1936 Olympics The story most repeated about Hitler and the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin, which were unquestionably put on as a political showcase for Nazi Germany, is that Hitler refused to shake the hand of the American Black athlete Jesse Owens after the latter had won a race. This myth is extremely widespread: the Encarta Encyclopedia, issued by Microsoft (1998 edition) states the following in its entry under Jesse Owens: "Owens, Jesse (1913-80), one of the greatest track-and-field athletes of all time . . . A member of the U.S. track team in the 1936 Olympic Games, held in Berlin, Owens won four gold medals. He won the 100-m dash in 10.3 sec, equaling the Olympic record; set a new Olympic and world record of 20.7 sec in the 200-m dash; and won the running broad jump with a leap of 26 ft 5I in., setting a new Olympic record. He was also a member of the U.S. 400-m relay team that year, which set a new Olympic and world record of 39.8 sec. Despite Owens' outstanding athletic performance, German leader Adolf Hitler refused to acknowledge his Olympic victories because Owens was black. Owens went on to play an active role in youth athletic programs and later established his own public relations firm. His autobiography, The Jesse Owens Story, was published in 1970." - "Owens, Jesse," Microsoft Encarta, 98 Encyclopedia.1997 Microsoft Corporation." The reality was in fact substantially different: what happened was that Hitler personally attended the first day of the track and field competition on 2 August 1936, and did personally congratulate the German athlete Hans Woellke, who became the first German to win a gold medal in the Olympics since 1896. Throughout the rest of the day, Hitler continued to receive Olympic champions, German and non German, in his VIP box. The next day, 3 August, the chairman of the International Olympic Committee, Comte Baillet-Latour, approached Hitler early in the morning and told the German leader that he had violated Olympic protocol by having winners paraded to his box. Hitler apologized and gave a promise that he would from then on refrain from publicly congratulating any winners, German or otherwise. During this day, Owens won his gold medals - and in line with the Olympic Committee's ruling, Hitler did not shake his hand, or anybody else's for that matter, at the games again. It is therefore utterly false to claim that Hitler deliberately chose to ignore Owens. In fact, in the very autobiography that the Encarta Encyclopedia extract above refers to, The Jesse Owens Story, Owens himself recounted how Hitler had stood up and waved to him: "When I passed the Chancellor he arose, waved his hand at me, and I waved back at him. I think the writers showed bad taste in criticizing the man of the hour in Germany." - Jesse Owens, The Jesse Owens Story, 1970. Another common story about the 1936 Olympic games is that Owens' victory "disproved the Nazi master race theory" - in fact the Olympic games as a whole were won by the German team with 89 medals, compared to the 56 medals won by the second placed USA team.
In what was to become an act of extreme irony, the American president of the time, Franklin D. Roosevelt, then involved in an election and concerned about the reaction in the USA's southern states, refused to see Owens at the White House: Owens was later to remark that it was Roosevelt, not Hitler, who snubbed him. This is a good example of one of the more outstanding distortions which have sprung up around Nazi Germany, all as a result of a political agenda linked to Nazi Anti-Jewishness. It is also true that it is the victors' prerogative to write the historical account of events: this too has served to cloud the issue of the Third Reich and to make it into the political hot potato that it remains over fifty years after it vanished. "THE BIG LIE" - HITLER WARNED AGAINST IT Another good example of the type of deliberately false representation which has sprung up around Hitler and Nazi Germany is the story of the "Big Lie." Most often it is repeated that Adolf Hitler invented the "Big Lie" technique, to the effect that "the bigger the lie, the more people will believe it." It is presented as evidence that Hitler himself used this technique. Once again, just like the 1936 Olympics, the truth is actually precisely the opposite: in fact Hitler warned against the Big Lie technique, attributing it to his enemies, the Jews. The quotation from where the 'Big Lie" story emanates, is in Hitler's book, Mein Kampf, Chapter 10, where he writes about the "big lie" technique being used by Jews against the World War German General Ludendorf. It is by deliberately misquoting this section of Mein Kampf, that it is alleged that Hitler propagated the "big lie" technique - when in fact, as can be read, he specifically warned against it: "But it remained for the Jews, with their unqualified capacity for falsehood, and their fighting comrades, the Marxists, to impute responsibility for the downfall [of Germany in WWI] precisely to the man who alone had shown a superhuman will and energy in his effort to prevent the catastrophe which he had foreseen and to save the nation from that hour of complete overthrow and shame. By placing responsibility for the loss of the world war on the shoulders of Ludendorff they took away the weapon of moral right from the only adversary dangerous enough to be likely to succeed in bringing the betrayers of the Fatherland to Justice. All this was inspired by the principle -- which is quite true in itself -- that in the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily, and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods. It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously. Even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt and waver and will continue to think that there may be some other explanation. For the grossly impudent lie always leaves traces behind it, even after it has been nailed down, a fact which is known to all expert liars in this world and to all who conspire together in the art of lying. These people know only too well how to use falsehood for the basest purposes. From time immemorial, however, the Jews have known better than any others how falsehood and calumny can be exploited. Is not their very existence founded on one great lie, namely, that they are a religious community, whereas in reality they are a race? And what a race! One of the greatest thinkers that mankind has produced has branded the Jews for all time with a statement which is profoundly and exactly true. He (Schopenhauer) called the Jew "The Great Master of Lies." Those who do not realize the truth of that statement, or do not wish to believe it, will never be able to lend a hand in helping Truth to prevail." - Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, Chapter X NAZIS SUPPRESS DEMOCRACY A trademark characteristic of Hitler and the Nazi Party - they never made any secret of it - was their abhorrence of democracy. Firmly believing in the leadership principle, where one leader took the responsibility for the major decisions, as soon as the Nazis came to power, they started with a program of entrenching themselves in power to the exclusion of other parties and opposition movements. This anti-democratic movement extended past the political front: freedom of the press and eventually freedom of speech was also suspended. Although these were reversals of the democratic process, Germany was not alone in this: indeed, even at the end of the 20th century, still only one country on earth - the United States of America - guarantees its citizens total freedom of speech: every single other country on earth has one or another form of restriction on free speech, most notably in the area of race relations, where all European countries have made it a criminal offense to discuss racially related topics which are openly debated in America. Hitler Elected to Office It was thus ironic that Hitler came to power by being voted into office, and not through a coup (although he tried that early in his career in 1923; he failed and served nine months in prison as a result). In the election of March 1933, the Nazi party received the single largest share of the vote, giving them 44 per cent of the seats in the German parliament. This in itself was not an outright majority, but when the smaller nationalist and right wing parties were added to the Nazi total, Hitler in effect had 52% of the popular vote behind him. These smaller parties were to later of their own free will merge with the Nazi Party. Fifty two percent of the popular vote is a total that most modern politicians would regard as an overwhelming majority: Most Western European governments come to power with far less, usually around 30 to 40 per cent of the vote.
Once in power, the Nazis then combined their mastery of propaganda with an extended program of political and social reform. Within three years, this had persuaded the vast majority of Germans to vote for Hitler. Upon taking office in 1933, Hitler made a public speech asking the Germans for four years in office, after which he would hold a referendum to test the popularity of his government. This referendum was duly held with the simple question " Do you approve of the National Socialist Government or not" being printed on the ballot papers. The result even surprised Hitler: a staggering 44,461,2787 "yes" votes, or 98.8 per cent of the qualified voter total of 45,453,691 was recorded. "No" votes amounted to a paltry 540,211 total. (Baynes, Hitler's Speeches, 1922-1939, Vol. 2 Royal Institute of International Affairs, London). Even taking into account that some people might have been too frightened to express opposition, this still indicates a level of support which would be unobtainable by any politician in any modern democracy. Internal Policies Hitler's personal popularity remained very high for almost the entire duration of the war, and serves as the single most important reason why Germans fought to the bitter end without large scale mutiny, as had happened in the First World War. This was astonishing in itself: but even more amazing when it is considered that the Nazi state became ever more authoritarian in nature. It was not long before the Communist Party had been outlawed: Germany quickly became a one party state and all other parties were eventually outlawed. Germans were given the right to vote every now and then in referendums on set issues only: in each and every case they returned over 98 per cent endorsements for whatever the government had done. Literature and art deemed to be undesirable was placed on a banned index: this automatically included any works by Jews, but also many non-Jews. The famous book burning incident occurred only once: after that, books deemed undesirable were simply not printed in Germany any more. Economic Reforms On all fronts, the German state was revolutionized: with one of the most significant being with the economy. When Hitler came to power in 1933, 30 per cent of the working population was unemployed: by 1938, Germany had a labor shortage. In this economic recovery, Hitler hit upon something which helped to arouse the everlasting hatred of the international banking community: instead of basing Germany's recovery on enormous loans from foreign and local banks, Hitler based the German economy onto a barter system, by which he could get much of what he needed by exchanging German surplus for the surplus of other countries - in common language, by swapping. The next radical change Hitler brought about was to take the right to print money away from private banking institutions - which he viewed as Jewish - and restored the sole right to print money to the German state itself (it is interesting to compare the contemporary systems in both Britain and America, where consortiums of private bankers - the Federal Reserve in America and the Bank of England - print the money and then "sell" it to the governments, incurring the massive national debts of these countries). Freed of the peculiar and complicated system of instant national debt through the issuance of their own money, the German economy took off like a rocket. Hitler also abandoned the Gold Standard as a means of weighting the Reichsmark: money in Hitler's Germany was not based on gold but on the capacity of the German people to produce goods. Hitler said in 1937: "We were not foolish enough to try to make a currency coverage of gold of which we had none, but for every mark that was issued we required the equivalent of a mark's worth of work done or goods produced. . . .we laugh at the time our national financiers held the view that the value of a currency is regulated by the gold and securities lying in the vaults of a state bank." (CC Veith, Citadels of Chaos, Meador, 1949.) Workers' Rights Labor Unions were dissolved and reformed under the authority of the state controlled Labor Front. The right of workers to strike and of management to lock workers out were both forbidden, and the state actively intervened in labor disputes. The unemployment problem was tackled by the creation of great building projects, most notably Hitler's pet project, the Autobahns. The standard of living increased dramatically, with workers for the first time being able to travel abroad in state sponsored holidays through the "Strength through Joy" program. Children were obligated to serve in the Hitler Youth or its female equivalent as a form of national service: the meetings of these youth organizations were timed to be on Sundays at exactly the times that the main churches held their services. Soon the pews began to empty of young people who preferred to go camping or playing sport rather than sitting in church. Nazi Atomic Science Another common myth about Nazi Germany is that the country was not able to build an atomic bomb of its own because it rejected the "Jewish science" of Albert Einstein and other Jewish scientists. This has however been proven to be untrue with the 1999 release of previously top secret files on Nazi Germany's race to build an atomic bomb. Among the materials now available to the general public in the Munich state museum, are research notes by famous German physicists who took part in the program, such as Werner Heisenberg and Otto Hahn, as well as notebooks, photos and correspondence between scientists and Nazi authorities. The documents show that German research into the atomic bomb was parallel with efforts in the United States, but that the Third Reich lacked materials to build one only because of the Allied bombing campaign. A November 1945 report by two U.S. investigators, six months after the German defeat in World War II, says ``only the lack of plutonium'' kept Adolf Hitler from building an atomic bomb. (Nazi Atom Bomb Files To Be Opened, Associated Press, January 1999). If the Allied bombing campaign had been any less severe, there can be no doubt that Nazi Germany would have been able to build an atomic bomb as well - which may well have changed the course of the war. Medical Advances An overview of Nazi medical advances makes interesting reading for the modern health conscious person: Nazi scientists were amongst the first in the world to warn of the dangers of radiation; asbestos, lead, cadmium and mercury (all of which have only re-emerged in the health field many years after the end of the Second World War, when much German medical research was dismissed as Nazi hallucinations). In addition to this, German medical journals of the 1930s and 1940s were the first in the world to warn against the ill effects of artificial food colorants and preservatives in food and drinks, and stressed the need for a return to "organic" or natural ingredients in pharmaceuticals, cosmetics, fertilizers and foods. Vivisection Outlawed The very first law passed by the Nazi controlled parliament of the territory of East Prussia in 1933, under the premiership of Herman Goering, was the abolition of vivisection, or experimentation on animals. This law also included a ban on the Jewish ritual whereby meat is made kosher: the ritual includes the slitting of an animal's throat and letting it bleed to death while a rabbi prays over the dying animal: this was rejected by the Nazis as a barbaric way of slaughtering animals which inflicted unnecessary pain. Eventually the anti-vivisection law was extended throughout Germany. Nazi Germany also forbid the use of the pesticide DDT on the grounds that it was a health hazard (it would be decades before this policy was adopted by other countries) and instead used a German produced version known as Cyclone-B. Hitler Backed Anti-Smoking Drive Nazi Germany was also the first country in the world to actively launch anti-smoking campaigns: in July 1939, the Bureau against the Dangers of Alcohol and Tobacco was founded, with the Reich Health Office sponsoring cash prizes for research into the effects of nicotine upon human chromosomes. In June 1942, the Institute For The Struggle Against Tobacco was founded at the University of Jena in Saxony, funded personally by Hitler who gave 100,000 Reichmarks of his own personal money to the project. By 1944, Germany had also become the first country in the world to ban smoking on public transport.
NAZIS DISCOURAGE Alcohol ABUSE In 1937, the Nazis enacted laws prohibiting the sale of alcohol to minors and enacted stiff penalties for drunken-driving, introducing the first blood tests for automobile drivers suspected of being under the influence while behind the steering wheel. As part of the state's efforts to control drinking, the SS undertook the promotion of mineral water. The SS's business interests in mineral water extended to the point where by 1945 it controlled 75 per cent of all Germany's mineral water production. HITLER AND CHRISTIANITY Also contrary to popular belief, Hitler and the Nazis were not Christians, and were in fact vehemently opposed to that religion, which they saw as a Jewish originated belief system. In public, Hitler accepted or even praised Christianity when it was anti-Jewish, but in private, he detested it, as a reading of his personal dinner table chat recorded by Martin Borman and published as "Hitler's Secret Conversations", Farrar, Straus and Young, New York, 1953: “The heaviest blow that ever struck humanity was the coming of Christianity. Bolshevism is Christianity's illegitimate child. Both are inventions of the Jew. The deliberate lie in the matter of religion was introduced into the world by Christianity. Bolshevism practices a lie of the same nature, when it claims to bring liberty to men, whereas in reality it seeks only to enslave them. In the ancient world, the relations between men and gods were founded on an instinctive respect. It was a world enlightened by the idea of tolerance. Christianity was the first creed in the world to exterminate its adversaries in the name of love. Its keynote is intolerance. Without Christianity, we should not have had Islam. The Roman Empire, under Germanic influence, would have developed in the direction of world-domination, and humanity would not have extinguished fifteen centuries of civilization at a single stroke. Let it not be said that Christianity brought man the life of the soul, for that evolution was in the natural order of things." - Adolf Hitler, ibid, Night of 11th-12th July 1941. "Christianity is a rebellion against natural law, a protest against nature. Taken to its logical extreme, Christianity would mean the systematic cultivation of the human failure." - Adolf Hitler, ibid, 10th October 1941, midday. Part Two: Racial Hygiene - Nazi Germany's Racial Laws Part Three: European Support for Hitler Part Four: The "Final Solution" - Nazi Policy towards Jews All material (c) copyright Ostara Publications, 1999. Re-use for commercial purposes strictly forbidden. |
