Hitler As Victim - On Wyndham Lewis

 

HE SLAPDASH SERIES OF NEWSPAPER articles in which Lewis conveyed his impressions of Berlin immediately after the first great Nazi victories in the Reichstag in September 1930, and which were published as Hitler (London: Chatto & Windus, 1931), are as notorious as they are unread: the following brief account of this work, whatever its general usefulness, will indeed lead us to some unexpected conclusions.

With his satirist’s feeling about cities, Lewis could hardly omit an initial tableau of Berlin (“Chicago, only more so if anything, but minus Bootleg, and with that great difference—that politics account for much of the street violence” [18]). The political point made here is that Nazi street violence is essentially a reaction to Communist violence and provocation; yet the inevitable narrative point is rather different: “But elegant and usually eyeglassed young women will receive [the tourist], with an expensive politeness, and he will buy one of these a drink, and thus become at home…. Then these bland Junos-gone-wrong, bare-shouldered and braceleted (as statuesque as feminine show-girl guardees) after a drink or two, will whisper to the outlandish sightseer that they are men. …” (24). With this characteristic and obsessive motif out of the way, we come to the political analysis proper, which I will resume as a series of theses:

1. “Adolf Hitler is just a very typical german ‘man of the people’. … As even his very appearance suggests, there is nothing whatever eccentric about him. He is not only satisfied with, but enthusiastically embraces, his typicalness. So you get in him, cut out in the massive and simple lines of a peasant art, the core of the teutonic character. And his ‘doctrine’ is essentially just a set of rather primitive laws, promulgated in the interest of that particular stock or type, in order to satisfy its especial requirements and ambitions, and to ensure its vigorous survival, intact and true to its racial traditions” (31-32). This is very different from the hero-worshipping tones with which Pound salutes Mussolini’s “genius”; it also conveys the stance of Lewis’ articles. He means to convey the spirit, to the British public, of a phenomenon culturally alien to it; he intends to translate and to explain the Nazi movement as a matter of some historical significance, but not necessarily to endorse it. “It is as an exponent—not as critic nor yet as advocate—of German National-socialism or Hitlerism, that I come forward” (4). It seems to me that this didactic stance is essential in grasping the symbolic value Hitler (and Germany) had for Lewis: not only are they doubly oppressed—by Marxist provocation and by the Versailles Treaty—but this oppression is formally inscribed within his text as the misunderstanding and miscomprehension of the British reader, against which Lewis must write.

2. The Nazi conception of race is a welcome antidote to the Marxian conception of class: “The Class-doctrine—as opposed to the Race-doctrine—demands a clean slate. Everything must be wiped off slick. A sort of colourless, featureless, automaton—temporally two-dimensional—is what is required by the really fanatical Marxist autocrat. Nothing but a mind without backgrounds, without any spiritual depth, a flat mirror for propaganda, a parrot-soul to give back the catchwords, an ego without reflection, in a word a sort of Peter Pan Machine—the adult Child—will be tolerated” (84).

3. Hitler’s program is exemplary as a defense of Europe, at a time when Europe’s intellectuals are at work undermining its legitimacy through their “exotic sense” (a “sentimentalizing with regard to the Non-White World” [121]). In effect, the Hitlerist has this message for the ruling classes of other European countries: “When, respected sir, and gracious lady, are you going—oh short-sighted, much indulging, sentimentally-renegade person that you are!—when may we hope that you will turn for a change to more practical interests? How about giving your White Consciousness a try for a little—it is really not so dull as you may suppose! A ‘White Australia’—that may be impracticable. But at least there is nothing impracticable about a ‘White Europe’. And today Europe is not so big as it was. It is ‘a little peninsula at the Western extremity of Asia’. It is quite small. Why not all of us draw together, and put out White Civilization in a state of defense? And let us start by mutually cancelling all these monstrous debts that are crushing the life out of us economically” (121).

4. The Nazi program recapitulates many of Lewis’ most deeply felt polemic themes: “A ‘Sex-war’, an ‘Age-war’, a ‘Colour-line-war’, are all equally promoted by Big Business to cheapen labour and to enslave men more and more. I do not like the present Capitalist system” (97). Hitlerism not only repudiates the call to hatred and division of Marxian class war, and the pernicious “trahison des clercs” of the “exotic sense,” it also gives the welcome example of a transformation of Western “youth cults” into a genuine political movement (97).

5. “Race” essentially stands for the affirmation of the specificity of the national situation: this is the sense in which Lewis deals with Nazi antisemitism. The latter is, according to him, a German national characteristic, however unlovely, and must be understood as such. But here Lewis has a counter-sermon for the Germans themselves, as they try to explain themselves to other nations: “The Hitlerite must understand that, when he is talking to an Englishman or an American about the ‘Jew’ (as he is prone to do), he is apt to be talking about that gentleman’s wife! Or anyhow Chacun son Jew! is a good old english saying. So if the Hitlerite desires to win the ear of England he must lower his voice and coo (rather than shout) Juda verrecke! if he must give expression to such a fiery intolerant notion. Therefore—a pinch of malice certainly, but no ‘antisemitism’ for the love of Mike!” (42).

6. Hitlerian economics are those of the German peasant, essentially an anticapitalist attack on banks, loan-capital, and the War Debt. Hitler is a “Credit Crank.” The Nazi opposition to Communism (“which has taken the mechanical ways of Megalopolis into the villages”) “attacks the substitution, by the Communist, of the notion of quantity for that of quality…. Upon some points, of course, the Communist and the Nationalsocialist are in considerable agreement. Ultimately, the reason why their two doctrines could never fuse is this: the Marxist, or Communist, is a fanatically dehumanizing doctrine. Its injunctions are very rigidly erected against the continuance of ‘the person’. In the place of ‘the person’ the Communist would put the thing—quantity in place of quality, as it is stated above. … So, even if Hitlerism, in its pure ‘germanism’, might retain too much personality, of a second-rate order, nevertheless Hitlerism seems preferable to Communism, which would have none at all, if it had its way. Personality is the only thing that matters in the world” (182-183). Thus, “the Weltanschauung of the Hitlerist or his near-relation (the egregious ‘Credit-Crank’) is laughing and gay compared to that of his opponent, the Communist. … On principle—for his is a deliberately ‘catastrophic’ philosophy (the word is Marx’s)—the Communist views everything in the darkest colours…. The Hitlerist dream is full of an imminent classical serenity—leisure and abundance. It is, with them, Misery-spot against Golden Age!” (183-184).

Most discussions of this book (which is generally passed over in embarrassed silence) have centered on the false problem of whether, on the strength of this “misguided” assessment of Hitler before he came to power, Lewis is to be thought of as a fascist or fascist sympathizer. The reader is generally reminded that Lewis changed his mind, and on the eve of World War II wrote an anti-Nazi counter-blast, The Hitler Cult and How It Will End (1939). But Lewis’ opinion of Hitler is by no means the most significant feature of the earlier work.

What is essential from our point of view is that Hitler is informed by all the ideological positions which will remain constant to the very end of Lewis’ life: those fundamental themes do not change, even if his view of Hitler did. Among them, and far more central than his attitude towards Hitler as a historical figure, is his attitude towards fascism as a historical force. Here, but to the end of his career, fascism remains for Lewis the great political expression of revolutionary opposition to the status quo. This fundamentally historical vision of fascism—this structural place of “fascism” in Lewis’ libidinal apparatus—is not altered by his later (and impeccable) anti-Nazi convictions, and is in fact recapitulated in Monstre gai, published only two years before Lewis’ death in 1957:

Hyperides represented the most recent political phenomenon—hated or disliked by everybody. Here was the Fascist, the arch-critic of contemporary society. On earth this newcomer proposed to supplant the enfeebled Tradition, of whatever variety, no longer able to defend itself. So this enfeebled Power of Tradition, and its deadly enemy, the Marxist Power, joined forces to destroy this violent Middleman (a borrower from both the new and the old).

(MG, 220)

Coming in the midst of the Cold War, and after the utter annihilation of Nazism as a presence on the world political scene, this retrospective evaluation of World War II may seem anachronistic, and the reader may be tempted to see it as a tired survival of thoughts that were alive for Lewis in the 20’s and 30’s. Yet the fact that fascism continued to stand as the political (and libidinal) embodiment of Lewis’ chronic negativity, his oppositionalism, his stance as the Enemy, long after the defeat of institutional fascism itself, may, I think, be better grasped from a somewhat different perspective. The figural value of fascism as a reaction is determined by the more central position of Communism, against which the anticapitalist posture of protofascism (of which Lewis approved) must always be understood. We have touched on a number of reasons why Communism could not, for Lewis, be a satisfactory solution. The ultimate one now proves to be his feeling—paradoxical after all that has been said—that Communism was a historical inevitability, and thus, in a sense, the final and most irrevocable form of the Zeitgeist, that against which the oppositional mind must somehow always take a stand.

In this sense, and in the spirit of the present study, which has been an immanent analysis of Lewis’ works, disengaging the self-critique always structurally implicit in them, we may allow his own truth-in-jest to have the final word:

I know that at some future date I shall have my niche in the Bolshevist Pantheon, as a great enemy of the Middle-class Idea … I say: “I shall be among the bolshie prophets!” My “bourgeois-bohemians” in Tarr—and oh, my Apes of God!—will provide ‘selected passages’ for the schoolchildren of the future communist state,—of that I am convinced—to show how repulsive unbridled individualism can be.

Fables Ofaggression ...

Frideric Jameson 

Hitler: A German Fate by Ernst Nieksich

 From Alain de Benoist’s Preface 

“There are two questions to which the Germans of 1945 would respond to in all likelihood with a distraught mimicry or a shrug of the shoulders. The first would be: who was the last great Prussian? The other: who was the real adversary of Hitler in Germany? One can hesitate a long time and propose, to see, various names that one will reject all the same. But to finish, one will find the only good response to these two questions.” 

“Ernst Niekisch” 

“Who was Ernst Niekisch? Out of a hundred Germans, it is not likely to find more than one who would say it. Born in Silesia in 1889, Ernst Niekisch died in Berlin in 1967; his enterprises having failed, he died in obscurity. But he was one of the great Germans of the 20th century, and his failure is perhaps a part of and a reflection of the Germany’s failure, the obscurity of his name a symptom of the loss, among the Germans, of a historical consciousness and of self awareness.” 

These lines of Sebastian Haffner, will, without a doubt, surprise more than one reader. Niekisch is a mystery, maintained also in part by himself, and the work that he devoted himself to has not been entirely elucidated to date. Within the Conservative Revolution, Niekisch was without a doubt the most remarkable of those who are frequently called “the left men of the right.” He was also the major exponent of “National Bolshevism,” a problematic expression in many respects. How can we clarify this mystery of Niekisch, except by bringing his works to public knowledge and retracing the major stages of his biography? (...)

At the same time, Niekisch also met Ernst Jünger, whose influence was also equally large on the Bündisch milieu. In 1930, Ernst Jünger would become the co-editor with Werner Lass of the “überbündisch” weekly, Die Kommenden, founded in 1925 and very quickly diffused through most Bündisch groups. It was in the autumn of 1927 that Niekisch and Jünger met for the first time. The contact was decisive, and the close links that were established between the two men were to quickly manifest themselves by active collaboration. Jünger would publish 18 articles in Widerstand between April 4th, 1927 and the 8th of September 1933. At the same time Niekisch became close to the brother of Ernst Jünger, Friedrich Georg, and with his circle: Richard Schapke, who was the future leader of Die Kommenden, the anti-Christian ideologue Friedrich Hielscher, and through contact with Jünger by the intermediary of Winnig, Franz Schauwecker, etc. Contrary to what is sometimes written, Jünger would never be a National Bolshevik, but he provided the National Bolsheviks with some of the essential elements of their conceptual cadre. And it was under the influence of Jünger, “the man of vision”, Niekisch said, that the editors of Widerstand would radicalize their ideas on the nation and extol a “new aristocracy” inspired by a Jüngerian “heroic realism.” 

(...)

Revelatory in this respect was the polemic that, in 1931, opposed Niekisch by Wilhelm Stapel, co-editor of the new conservative magazine Deutsches Volkstum. This magazine, however, was not fundamentally hostile to him. It sometimes even published texts by him and his other co-editor, Albrecht Eric Günther, in which one could read the articles in Widerstand, which followed closely in 1919-1920 the experience of “Hamburg National Communism.” In 1931, listing Entscheidung, the book published by Niekisch in the proceeding year, Stapel was nonetheless very worried about the emergence of a “German National Communism.” The book, he affirmed, belonged to the category of “either-or books,” that is to say, it merely, in Manichean fashion, addresses two brutal alternatives, as if there did not exist a third solution: “All of the German social universe, for example, is divided for Niekisch into “peasants” or “bourgeoisie.” The peasant is all that is pleasing to him (and pleasing to me), the bourgeois all that is displeasing to him (and displeasing to me). But this dichotomy is purely arbitrary. Reality is not like that.” Accused of multiplying the oppositions between “phantoms,” Niekisch also saw himself accused of “Romantic” Prussianism and opposition to the idea of Empire 

(Reichsgedanke). To conclude, Stapel declared that if the ideas of Niekisch were to be realized politically, it would simply be “the end of the German people.” Niekisch would respond to him in Widerstand in July 1931. 

With the National Socialists, the clash was more brutal. It would also be more determinant. Niekisch was, in effect, without contest, the one man in the Conservative Revolution who denounced, from very early on and with the most vigor, the Hitlerist movement. Around 1927, he accused Nazism of engaging itself in an dead end and only being motivated by “resentment” against the Jews and the November Revolution. Two years later, he systematized his critique in a new article dedicated to Hitlerism. 

This would culminate in the celebrated booklet published in 1932: Hitler – ein Deutsches Verhängis. 

The opposition between Hitler and Niekisch evidently first holds from the rigorously opposed judgments that they both had on the Soviet Revolution and the nature of Bolshevism. Not only did the NSDAP profess a fanatical anticommunism, but it inherited the Russophobia of Paul Lagarde, and in a very general fashion, the racial anti-Slavism then common in the Völkisch milieu – it only envisioned Ostorientierung in the expansionist and imperialist sense. For the National-Socialists, was neither “national,” and even less “Prussian,” since it was essentially internationalist and “Jewish.” Niekisch drew the conclusion that the “socialism” which Hitler claimed was a pure facade and that his irreducible anticommunism betrayed, despite all that he could say, his affinities with the Western, liberal, bourgeois universe. From 1929, this critique reinforced the theme of German protest against the “Roman” world. While in 1926, Niekisch then attributed Italian Fascism the merit of sharing “The intellectual structure of Bolshevism: autocracy, hatred of liberalism, use of force,” three years later, far from opposing the “modernist” ideology of Fascism to the “archaic” National-Socialism, as certain authors of the Conservative Revolution did, it is, on the contrary, primarily because the fascist movement was “Roman” and “Occidental” that he pronounced a condemnation of Hitler without appeal. In the same epoch, Ernst Jünger also affirmed: “Indubitably, Fascism is nothing other than the late form of liberalism … a brutal shorthand of the liberal regime.” Niekisch therefore takes as his rival, not the name of liberal democracy, but on the contrary, the detested liberal and bourgeois universe. From there the arguments successively cascade. Niekisch recognized that at its beginning Hitlerism could have embodied the German protest against the Diktat of Versailles, but around 1923, he added that Hitler betrayed his mission and succumbed to the Roman and Catholic solicitations to which his Austrian origins predestined him: “He who is Nazi will soon be Catholic!” Hitler’s ideology, which made “race” the universal explicative factor and the “Jew” the scapegoat par excellence, was not German, but Bavarian, “Southern,” and reactionary. Like a Roman potentate, Hitler maintained around his personality an “oriental” cult, and, to do this, appealed to the masses, whom he basely flattered. He was the opposite of the Prussian homo politicus, inspired by Protestantism and Frederick the Great. His “Third Reich,” then, was less a political project than a “religious hope.” Not only was Hitler not a true revolutionary anti-capitalist, his “socialism” only being a lure to use radicalized petit-bourgeois, but in searching for the good grace of Italy, England, and France – that Niekisch denounced under the name of “BritoGermania,” the Anglophilia of the “Hitler-Hess line” – it placed him “on the terrain of Versailles,” which showed that he had taken the role of “the gendarme of the West” by launching a “crusade” against Bolshevism. And Niekisch risked this prophecy: If Germany misguidedly gives itself to Hitler, it will surely go towards disaster. “It will remain an exhausted people … without hope, and the order of Versailles will only be stronger than ever.” 

Beginning in 1932, Niekisch made a new appeal to “the protesting Germans against fascism.” “The cohorts of Hitler,” he wrote, “find themselves on German soil as Southern European occupying troops!” To Goebbels, who he wanted to convince, he retorted one day, “You pretend to be National-Socialists, but is there anything national in your movement? Your salute is Roman, your flag equally so, the color of the uniforms of your troops makes one think of a Balkan occupation arm, your military parades of Catholic high masses! No, the German nation is another thing, it was not born in the fever of Bavarian beer halls! It was born in the protest against Rome, with the clear breeze of Protestantism and of the Prussian spirit.” Shortly after, Niekisch presented his proofs in his pamphlet, Hitler – ein Deutsches Verhängis, to Ernst Jünger, who had returned to visit Berlin in the company of Carl Schmitt and Arnolt Bronnen. The text completes his premonition of a final catastrophe in the East. Jünger would say: “Niekisch gave me the effect of a man in the middle of making a leap; I could not dissuade him from publishing the book.” Illustrated with the striking drawings of A. Paul Weber, the pamphlet attained a circulation of 40,000 readers in that year. The NSDAP struck back by launching a press campaign against Niekisch. At that date, Widerstand was already regularly cited in the monthly press review (Pressebericht) of the Reichsführer SS as one of the “principal adversarial organs” (Hauptorgane der Gegner). 

Around 1930, explained Sebastian Haffner, “Hitler and Niekisch were antipodal to each other, the two being the most irreconcilable you could find in Germany. The only thing they had in common, was their declared hate for the Weimar Republic, their firm will to make it fall such that it would fall in every manner and to be the heir of the deceased. For the rest, their programs were opposed to each other, point by point: Hitler would want vengeance on the “criminals of November;” Niekisch would want the triumph of the November Revolution; Hitler would want a Fascist counter-revolution, Niekisch would want a socialist revolution; Hitler, the anti-bolshevik crusade and the colonization of Russia with the tacit complicity of the West, Niekisch, the alliance with Bolshevik Russia against the West. Hitler throught in the terms of “race” and “space,” Niekisch in terms of “class” and “state.” Hitler would want to win the crowds so he could lead them to capitalist and imperialist politics, Niekisch would want to win the crowds so he could lead them to Prussian socialism and ascetic politics.” Jünger would declare on his part: “Niekisch was then in a bit of a situation where we find the Greens today. He was quite on the right path, and if I could express myself thus, he would have been capable of influencing the evolution towards the left: and that would have gained him a stronger consensus, particularly in the East. Compared to him, Hitler did cheap work, and that bought him this monstrous popularity.” 

In the Spring of 1932, on the occasion of the presidential elections, Niekisch tried to submit his candidacy, with the double title of the National-Revolutionary movement and of the Landvolkbewegung, whose leader, Claus Heim, of the Peasant revolt in Schleswig-Holstein, found himself imprisoned then. But, the other National-Bolshevik groups had already taken a position in favor of Thaelmann (the communist candidate), Claus Heim, who had already given his accord, reversed his support and the project failed. Some months later, Niekisch participated, beside twenty academics and researchers, in a voyage to the Soviet Union organized, from August 23rd to September 14th, by the Working Group for the Study of the Soviet Russian Planned Economy (Arplan). This group created on the margins of the activities of Vörkampfer by the economist Friedrich Lenz, for the First Secretary Arvid Harnack, who served in the same Freikorps as Friedrich Hielscher and who was to later become famous within the celebrated “Red Orchestra” espionage network. The Arplan delegation was received in Moscow, Leningrad, and Kharkov. Niekisch, whose sojourn would be cut sort by illness, encountered Karl Radek on this occasion. On his return, he published in Widerstand a resounding article, in which he gave tribute to the Soviet plan, as a means to surmount and instrumentalize modernity, affirming that the Russian people had adopted an attitude “heroism singular in the world,” forming a veritable “army of labor” and that “nothing would be easier than to transform it into a revolutionary army.” The Russians, added Niekisch, had even managed to dominate technology. It was not inevitable that it would “devour man” and that confronted Niekisch with an idea, which he had advanced a year earlier, that “collectivization is the form of social existence that the organic will must don if it wants to affirm itself in the face of the murderous effects of technology.” In this positive revaluation of technology, one notes the new influence of Jünger, who published Der Arbeiter in the course of the same year. 

Like many of his compatriots, Niekisch was completely overtaken by the National-Socialist rise to power. In the first issue of Widerstand in January 1933, Hitler was then described as “the man without talent” (Talentlose) par excellence. In February, Niekisch published in his journal an article entitled: “The Epoch of Class Struggle.” There he declared: “Never has there been in Germany a cabinet so reactionary as that which we have now … Does the event of January 30th represent a national revolution or not? … Hitler is chancellor: that is for him without a doubt a personal success. He is the chancellor of a bourgeois reactionary cabinet: that is certainly not a success for nationalism.” 

But the hour of repression was already at hand. The first organization forbidden by the new regime, on February 4th 1933, was the Black Front of Otto Strasser. On the night of 8th to 9th March, Niekisch was arrested with his wife by a group of SA, then released a few days later. His apartment was searched. Moreover, in March, the weekly Entscheidung was banned, after publishing 23 issues. Widerstand, in contrast, continued its publication for some time. In January 1934, the magazine adopted a new symbol on the first page, drawn by A. Paul Weber: on a black colored background, an eagle, in its claws a sword and a sickle, its chest bearing a hammer. At the end of July 1933, it published articles by the philosopher Hugo Fischer. Yet, in August 1933, it was still a question among official milieus regarding a ban on Widerstand, which was finally pronounced on the 20th of December 1934. Niekisch would then accuse one of this former collaborators, the philosopher Alfred Baeumler, of having played a role in this ban. 

Sebastian Haffner said that Niekisch “would spend four years in the Third Reich during which he was the last known and openly declared enemy of Hitler.” Pressured by his friends to leave Germany – Jünger, notably, advised him to seek refuge in Switzerland – Niekisch chose to make an “interior emigration.” Between 1933 and 1937, he would continue to write and tentatively constitute in secret his “Resistance Movement”, which henceforth merited this name more than ever. Though under constant surveillance by the police, he also made a number of trips abroad, thanks to the support of some patrons like Alfred Töpfer. Previously, he had almost never left Germany, now he traveled widely to Switzerland, Holland, France, Belgium, England, Scandinavia. In the summer of 1935 he even sojourned to Italy, where he met emigres … and Mussolini. 

In 1933, Niekisch worked on a project for a book which was titled, Deutsche Mobilmachung, echoing Jünger’s essay on “total mobilization.” There he repeated his critiques of National-Socialism and described Lenin as the all time heir of Luther, of Frederick II, of Fichte, of Hegel, of Nietzsche, and of Marx! The manuscript, sent to Joseph Drexel, would be seized by the Gestapo. But it was mainly in his two essays of 1934, Die Dritte imperiale Figur and Im Dickicht der Pakte, published in the following year, that begins a new turn, a turn then stillborn by the political conjuncture and the following events. 

Distributed as Privatdruck, in a confidential fashion, Die Dritte imperiale Figur, a mythic work and virtually untraceable, is perhaps the most important of Niekisch’s books, at the same time the draft of an unfulfilled vision. Niekisch no longer reasoned in terms of immediate politics. Like Jünger, and without a doubt under his influence, he reformulated his ideas in an idealist language which gave the notion of Figur, Figure, (Gestalt in Jünger’s terms), a fundamental role. The history of Europe, according to him, is before all the history of confrontation between grand Figures, each having a ratio, that is to say a spirit involved in a particular metapolitical project. The two great Figures of the past are the “Eternal Roman,” supporting the Western political project, at the same time Catholicism and Fascism, and the “Eternal Jew,” whose ratio was strictly economic and embodied in global liberalism. Faced with these two enemy Figures, both issuing from the Mediterranean and Roman space, Niekisch no longer believed in the “provincial” Figures of the Soldier, Peasant, the Germane, which he had previously praised and who risked being manipulated by the dominant Western ratio. He wish to greet the advent of another emblematic Figure, the Third Imperial Figure, that of the Worker, master of the “technical space,” who must establish on a global scale a new order, at the same time organic and technical, socialist, and proletarian. The technical ratio was then called to supplant the economic and metaphysical ratio. The Worker, “the New Barbarian,” engendered by the “new force” of the “Russo-Asiatic element” would liquidate the West, and its reign would permit the establishment of an Empire extending upon a world totally rid of bourgeois values, and at the same time it would correspond, Niekisch remaining in the Hegelian tradition, to the reign of the Spirit. 

The kinship of the Third Imperial Figure and of Jünger’s Worker was obvious. They were not totally dependent on each other. For Niekisch, the old socialist, the collective worker is closer than the individual worker, in the strict sense, it is a less abstract Figure, resulting in the metamorphosis of the proletariat itself, redefined in an idealist manner. The Worker was also the embodiment of the “Bolshevik.” In 1935, Niekisch would then say he placed Jünger “between Spengler and Marx.” But the most important consequence of this new vision was the abandoning of the all reference to nationalism. Jünger, who, at that time, had already begun to distance himself from politics (in 1932-1933 he only published three articles in Widerstand), lead the way in this domain. Around 1929, Jünger would write: “The word nationalism is a flag, very useful to clearly fix the original combat position of a generation during the chaotic years of transition; it is by no means, as is believed by many of our friends and also our enemies, the expression of a superior value; it designates a condition, but it is not our goal.” For Niekisch, the reference to the nation would become problematic since he would call for the formation of a Germano-Slavic “great space” – from Flessingue to Vladivostok! – and would multiply his acerbic criticism against Southern Germany and the “Bavarian miasma.” Contrary to other National-Bolshevik groups, who continued to see the nation as the absolute and final value for them, Niekisch, in the the Die Dritte imperiale Figur then perceived the nationstate as a bourgeois creation from the epoch of the French Revolution. “When the bourgeoisie celebrate the cult of the nation,” he wrote, “they secretly sacrifice to the their true idol, the god Mammon.” The nation was then no longer an unsurpassable reference. The state itself was no longer an absolute, but a simple means for the accession of the Figure. Niekisch rallied to the idea of imperial idea that he had condemned some years earlier, but he gave to it a somewhat planetary resonance. The unification of the “Russo-German great space” was only a prelude to the “ultimate empire” (Endimperium) that would extend across the entire earth. “If the nation is overtaken in the long term,” observed Louis Dupeux, “it is for reasons that hold neither for the economy, nor for any universalism, but to accomplish the accession of the Figure to the imperial rank.” 

Niekisch also used the notion of empire to criticize anew Hitlerian racism: “No empire is a community of blood: it’s a community of faith and more generally a community of spirit.” He defended himself from falling into antisemitism. The Figure of the “Eternal Jew,” he said, belonged to the past. “To engage in antisemitism, it’s to revolve around the Jew.” Dignity required he challenge Nazi antisemitism, which was a “bourgeois German” antisemitism. Niekisch also gets to the Völkische and the “romantics,” who wanted to return to the past (“that is not the way back to the roots”) and he would propose that they “flee to countryside.” He finally renewed his attacks on National-Socialism, which he continued to consider as a bourgeois movement, even exclusively bourgeois, which he compared with insistence to Bonapartism: “Caesarist Democracy of the masses should become a major coup for the capitalist bourgeoisie.” 

Im Dickicht der Pakte develops this critique with the angle of foreign policy. Niekisch contested that the world was divided into three camps: the communist camp, the capitalist camp, and the fascist camp. There were only two camp, he said, from the fact of “Hitlerian betrayal.” Germany found itself once again attached to the Western camp. It was the reason for which, he added, the game of the democracies consisted of dragging Hitler into a “thicket of pacts.” Niekisch then reproached the Third Reich for legitimizing the bourgeois order by making a defense of private property, and for the first time, “not wanting to go beyond the national state” and rejecting “imperial ambition.” But this book, for the first time also, put equally into doubt the revolutionary capability of Russia. Russia’s admission to the League of Nations in effect scandalized Niekisch, who spoke of a “voyage to Canossa” and demanded if the USSR, “by renouncing its savage mission of global revolution,” wouldn’t become one a day “a Western European power with State capitalism.” 

On the 22ndof March 1937, at seven in the morning, then preparing for a journey to Czechoslovakia, Niekisch was arrested by the Gestapo and then incarcerated. Simultaneously, a dragnet permitted the questioning of 70 other members of the Widerstand Circles, including Joseph Drexel and Karl Tröger. The archives of the movement and the correspondence of the publishing house, concealed by Drexel in a seat of an insurance company in Nuremberg, were also seized. No organ of the press would not be seized. 

The proceedings only opened two years later. On January 3rd1939, Ernst Niekisch, Joseph Drexel, and Karl Tröger appeared in secret before the Volksgerichthof, presided over by Dr. Thierack. The clandestine activities of the Widerstand Circles, together with most of the texts published by Niekisch since 1933, were retained as evidence and figured in the accusation file. After a week of debate, on the 10thJanuary, Niekisch was condemned for “preparations for high treason” and violation of the law banning political parties to life in prison, the confiscation of his property, and the forfeiture of all his civil rights. His companions were also condemned to prison time: three years and six months for Drexel, one year and nine months for Tröger. The integral text of the judgment, discovered after the war at the American Documentation Center in BerlinDahlem, would only be published in 1978. In Switzerland, the trial was discussed at length by Adolf Grabowsky in the Nationalzeitungof Bâle. Fourteen authors were charged, including Niekisch’s wife, who would be judged starting on the 17thof February and condemned to various penalties. Ernst Jünger, who saw Niekisch for the last time at the start of 1937 in Goslar, would write in his notebooks on the date of September 1st1945: “Ernst Niekisch is among these exceptional beings who, in the Civil War, had courage. I could not have imagined, before the events, that this courage would be astonishingly rare … I saw how one man such as Niekisch stood in his refusal to capitulate. Dead silence all around.” In prison, where he was incarcerated in particularly painful conditions, Niekisch developed a system of self discipline, that Sebastian Haffner described as “the last product, the supreme product, inspired by all of the Prussian spirit known to history.” He held conferences before an imaginary public and imposed upon himself a rigorous use of his time. “I would invent a system of physical and intellectual hygiene that I would rigorously observe,” he recounted in his memoirs, “I would stretch myself to use my time well. The first hour, I would work on philosophy, the second hour sociology, then I would reflect on a book I projected to write. After a meal, I would continue my intellectual exercise. History of literature, economic sciences, sometimes mathematics, aesthetic problems, those were the subjects on which I concentrated myself at present …” His friends, they were trying to survive. Certain ones among them, during the war, found themselves in the service of counterespionage. Joseph Drexel, imprisoned in Amberg, then freed after having his sentence expunged, would be arrested again after the attempt of July 20thand sent to the camp in Mauthausen with the reference “R.U.” (“Rückkehr unerwünscht”, “no hope of return”). However, he would be liberated in January 1945. Karl Tröger, who enrolled in the Wehrmacht after his sentence, the penalty of prison having been converted to preventative detention, would die of a cerebral congestion due to overwork, on the 25thof March 1945 in Schmerze, in the environs of the town of Brandenburg an der Oder where his friend Niekisch was then detained. 

The 30thof September 1945, Jünger wrote in his notebooks: “Gerd also taught me that Niekisch had escaped alive from prison when they began to massacre the detainees. He had become blind and near paralyzed, and would try to reconstruct his publishing house in Berlin.” Ernst Niekisch was liberated by the Red Army on the 27thof April. He left the prison of Brandenburg-Görden near blind and incapable of walking. He had since returned home on the 5thof May. 

***

The political career of Niekisch did not end in 1945. But the man that the Russians had taken from his cell was evidently not the same man that, ten years earlier, announced the advent of the “Third Imperial Figure.” He affirmed democracy and “progressivism.” He stayed faithful to a number of his intuitions, and maybe the Soviet occupation of the Eastern part of Germany had also convinced him that the “Prussian-Bolshevik” synthesis which he had dreamed of, in part or less, had come to pass. Around August 1945, he joined the German Communist Party (KPD), and simultaneously took charge of the Volkshochschule Wilmersdorf, which found itself in the British sector where he continued to live. In Autumn he found himself in the director’s bureau of the Cultural League for the Democratic Renewal of Germany (Kulturbund zur demokratischen Erneuerung Deutschlands) and the Society of German-Soviet Friendship. We would become a member of the SED starting in April 1946. At the start of January 1946, Jünger wrote maliciously “It seems that Niekisch is completely oriented to the East right now.” The interested party responded to him not to simplify things… in 1947, thanks to the support of the historian Alfred Meusel, Niekisch became the professor charged with contemporary political and social problems at the Humboldt University of East Berlin. He would be tenured the following year. In 1949, member of the presidium of the national council of the National Front, director of the Research Institute on Imperialism, he also sat in the People’s Chamber (Volkskammer) and he found himself closely associated with the creation of the GDR. But his independent spirit would rapidly earn him hostility, and near the end of 1949, he seemed to have encountered some difficulties expressing himself. In 1951, his Research Institute on Imperialism was brutally closed. The following year, the publication of his book entitled Europäische Bilanz, which he composed most of mentally in the course of his imprisonment and which he wrote immediately after his liberation (“I noted in four short months that which had slowly matured in eight years”), attracted violent attacks on him on the part of Wilhelm Girnus, one of the party ideologues, who accused him of utilizing Marxist terminology to spread “nonscientific” ideas marked by idealism, irrationalism, and pessimism, and who designated his book as having everything of an “American edition of Spengler!” At the start of 1953, Niekisch publicly declared that the leadership of the GDR had lost all contact with the population. After an uprising on the 17th of June, he worked with the Soviets against Walter Ulbricht, resigned from the SED and definitively returned to the West. In his memoirs, he would say, “Liberty, which was opened to myself again, revealed an impenetrable thicket of new stifling subjugation.” 

This same year of 1953, Niekisch published Das Reich der niederen Dämonen. There he underlined the bankruptcy of the middle classes and their lack of moral resistance in the face of Nazism: “The bourgeoisie had the government they deserved.” Put on sale in the GDR in 1958, the book would be withdrawn from libraries there after a few weeks. Yet, Niekisch had not converted to the West! In his articles, he denounced the young Federal Republic as a “plutocracy,” taking a position in favor of neutrality and considered Adenauer to have continued the “Western” ideas of Hitler. In 1956, his text on the Figure of the “Clerk” (der Clerk), which he described as a “modern fellah” – a term apparently borrowed from Spengler – in the service of the techno-bureaucracy, raised a certain disturbance. In parallel, in his works, since Deutsche Daseinsverfehlung (1946) until the first volume of his memoirs, Niekisch rewrote his personal history and assured that it was only for tactical reasons that he frequented nationalist milieus before the war. Finally, he began, against the authorities of the Federal Republic who, under the pretext of his sympathies with the East, obstinately refused to pay the pension as a victim of Nazism as what his right, a judicial battle that would last no less than 13 years. In the judiciary proceedings, which would be obscured for some years after, Niekisch would be supported by jurists like Fabian von Schlabrendorff, and mainly by his friend Joseph Drexel, who managed after 1945 to become head of a veritable press empire in Franconia (he was notably the founder of Nürnberger Nachrichten). It was only in 1966, a few months before his death, and after the intervention of the European Commission on Human Rights, that Niekisch would finally obtain 30,000 marks of reparations and the promise of a monthly payment of 1,500 marks! 

Ernst Niekisch died in Berlin, alone, the day of his 78 birthday, May 23rd 1967. His remains were cremated in the presence of Drexel, A. Paul Weber, Schlabrendorff, and Jünger, who would later say: “I assisted at his funeral. One saw the old militants there, who seemed to have all come right from the Joseph Conrad novel, The Secret Agent, some basket cases, and some old friends. It was a dismal funeral.” 

Niekisch died apparently forgotten. The years following 1968, there appeared the first deep studies dedicated to him, a certain number of groups on the right and left would rediscover his thought and reclaim for themselves certain positions of his. Small journals like Neue Zeit, Rebell, Ideologie und Strategie, Der Aufbruch, Wir selbst, organizations like “Sache des Volkes” and the “Solidaristiche Volksbewegung”, militants and young theoreticians like Alexander Epstein, Klaus Herrmann, Armin Krebs, Henning Eichberg, Siegfried Bublies, Wolfgang Strauss, Marcus Bauer, etc, who affirmed themselves under various titles as the representatives of a new “national-revolutionary” current. Certainly, times had changed. The national-revolutionaries of the “second generation” affirmed democracy and did not retain the apology for Bolshevism nor the project of an alliance with Soviet Russia from 

Niekisch. But they did willingly support his advocacy of refusing the Western bloc, ethnopluralism, the defense of collective identities, the antiimperialist struggle, and the cause of peoples. They reclaimed German reunification in the name of decolonization and the right of the people to guide themselves, and combated the liberal West on the basis of “national liberation” (Befreiungsnationalismus). One of their watchwords was “National identity and international solidarity.” In October 1976, young national-revolutionaries from the organization “Sache des Volkes” affixed to the house of Niekisch a commemorative plaque struck with this inscription: “We will be a revolutionary people, or we will no longer be a free people.” In 1977, Rebell and Neue Zeit gave Niekisch as an example to show that “nationalism consequently leads the antifascist struggle,” while Wolfgang Venohr declared in the magazine Wir selbst, “National liberation and anti-fascism cannot and should not be opposed.” The influence of Niekisch was equally felt in certain tendencies of the “national left” (Bernt Engelmann, Peter Brandt, Herbert Ammon) who opposed themselves to Hans Matthias Kepplinger or Arno Klönne, and those who strove to unite nationalism, neutrality, ecology, and pacifism, and affirmed that the division of Germany was the principal factor of insecurity in Europe. The drawings of A. Paul Weber, who pursued, after the war, his career as a graphic designer in left wing milieus, were particularly popular among the Greens. And while many of the Niekisch’s books were reissued by the anarchist press ADHE, Helios publishing, of Mayence, lead by Karl-Heinz Pröhuber and Peter Bahn, published, starting in 1985, reprints of the great “classics” of NationalBolshevism. “Ernst Niekisch prepared his resurrection,” wrote Sebastian Haffner. “The historical and political works that he left had no equal in the Germany of the 20th century. For this moment, it’s something like a hidden treasure, jealously guarded by a handful of old comrades in struggle and grateful disciples. But when one opens his books … one sees sparks flow as if they were electrified.” 

“If on January 28th 1933,” wrote Walter Lacquer, “the president of the Reich Hindenburg had entrusted in Ernst Niekisch the responsibility to form a new cabinet, and if this cabinet was comprised of Friedrich Hielscher (Minister of Foreign Relations), Otto Strasser (Interior), Ernst Jünger (Culture Minister), Karl O. Paetel, Werner Lass, Hartmut Plaas, and some others, the task of the historian who writes the history of German National-Bolshevism today, would have been simpler than it is in reality.” But the task of the historian is never simple, and on the subject of Niekisch the most opposed opinions abound today. For Sebastian Haffner, he was “first and foremost a revolutionary socialist”; for Armin Mohler, “the most radical nationalist of all times.” Hans Matthias Kepplinger treated him as a Linkfaschist. Louis Dupeux, who did not hold him in esteem, considered him a “sonorous cretin,” and the liberal authors rested on his case to enunciate the “horseshoe theory”: the extremes touch. However, many saw in him as a premier author and thought, like Jünger, that he could have played “an important role in German history.” 

These contrary opinions fed symmetric legends. The first of which was the “Niekisch-Orthodoxy” (Mohler). Maintained after 1945 in his self interest, with the support of Joseph Drexel, it formed the basis of the biography he dedicated to Friedrich Kalbermann. Niekisch was always a man of the left, who had only made tactical concessions with the terminology of nationalism to regroup the misguided youth. It was in this spirit that Schüdderkopf could write that Niekisch was “during all of his life a man of the left, who would think as a National-Communist, but never as a Nationalist.” The inverse thesis was supported by Louis Dupeux, among others: a man “of the right and even of the extreme right,” at least from 1926, Niekisch would be employed in shuffling the cards in giving into revolutionary pathos and his massive usage of the rhetoric of the extreme left was only a “reclamation.” The two theses actually appear to be unconvincing, one way or the other. Armin Mohler and Uwe Sauermann did not do justice to the first: it suffices, to refute it, by referring to his texts. About the second, one can oppose to it the itinerary of Niekisch – like the other National-Bolsheviks – after 1933: at the hour of decision, no longer intellectual but living, existential, the least we can say is that they did not pass to the side of “reaction.” 

These two theses, equally suspicious, both rest on the theory of a “mask”: the mask of nationalism in the first, the mask of revolutionary Bolshevism in the second. The common presupposition is that he couldn’t have a socialism of the right or a nationalism of the left, and that one cannot be right and left at the same time. Such presupposition, which gives the leftright dichotomy a quasi-ontological bearing, has yet to be demonstrated. The history of ideas, in truth, rather seems to deny it. From one epoch to another, the “ideas of the right” and the “ideas of the left” are rarely the same. Is it truly impossible to use one as another to make, in the proper sense, their opposition insignificant? Niekisch appears to us, to have been a man of the right and of the left at the same time. 

What no one disputes, however, is the extreme radicalism of his positions. While, if the evolution of Niekisch appears today so “aberrant” according to current political ideological categories, maybe it is because it obeys a logic which, for the most part, has become incomprehensible. “Those who don’t want to think it through could never begin to do it,” said Friedrich Lenz, while Louis Dupeux wrote: “Only the National-Bolsheviks went through with the discussion and they boldly dreamed of a truly “total” revolution for strictly national reasons.” Niekisch strove to think “through”, and it is in this by which his path exemplifies in the extreme, the greatest cross pollination of contemporary ideas. Also, with that, his thought, while bearing the imprint of many well known influences, stayed perfectly original. Niekisch, who had the nature of Cassandra, would want “realism” in a country where politics was frequently enmeshed with morality, and yet he was also unrealistic, maybe, precisely by an excess of logic and realism. He would want to give the right the ideas of the left, and the left the ideas of the right. Throughout his life, he navigated between the fronts; throughout his life, he scaled the heights. The result was a long series of setbacks, ruptures, failures, maybe even disillusionment. Niekisch was imprisoned under Weimar, imprisoned under Hitler, rejected by the authorities of the GDR, detested by those of the Federal Republic. That did not prevent him, with the social democrats, as with the councils, the “old socialists,” with the nationalists and the communists, from always affirming himself as a revolutionary that nothing could ever break. Moreover, he was in revolt, a rebel, a resistant. The word Widerstand, chosen as the title of his journal and his publishing house, has strong paradigmatic value: Niekisch was able to resist. What remains today of the ideas of Niekisch? Maybe more than one believes, and not because here and there small groups occasionally reclaim them. Since it is significant that the majority of Communist Parties in the West have rallied today to an implicitly Lassallian conception, where the proletariat that was defined by Marx has been replaced by “the immense majority of the people.” The reinterpretation of the class struggle in national terms, which lead the National-Bolsheviks to qualify Germany as an oppressed nation compared to a “bourgeoisie” constituted globally by the Western countries, also knew new fortune with the diffusion of the term “proletarian nations.” Uwe Sauermann wrote that Niekisch could well have been the prophet of all the nationalism which expressed itself in this century under the red flag, indeed those who express themselves today under the green flag of Islam. Sebastian Haffner also saw him as a precursor of decolonization. “The fundamental political idea of Niekisch”, he wrote, “is that national liberation and socialist revolution are one in the same thing, that they are two sides of the same coin. This idea, is it another thing than the common maxim of the actions of Mao and of Ho Chi Minh, of Fidel Castro, of Che Guevara, and of Khomeini? The anti-bourgeois, anti-capitalist, anti-Western revolutionary parties of the Third World all bear the same name: National Liberation Front. The socialist revolution everywhere bears the nationalist flag. As implausible that this could appear, that true theoretician of universal revolution that is on the march today is not Marx, nor even Lenin. It’s Niekisch.” 

Niekisch had without doubt many illusions about the nature of Russian communism, and his apology for “Bolshevism” could scandalize us today. Then it is necessarily to place it in context, to remember the immense hope which would sustain the Revolution of 1917 in the worker’s movement – and do not forget any more the Soviet delirium which seized, in the following decades, a large part of the global intelligentsia. The paradox is that Niekisch would admire the USSR for the same reasons that its adversaries would detest it and for the opposite reasons of those who would admire it as its partisans! Yet, if we disregard value judgments, Niekisch in his analysis, is it so wrong? In seeing the Soviet Union as an authoritarian regime of “Prussian” inspiration, alternatively Spartan, in the fashion of Niekisch, or in imagining it as the draft of “society without classes” and as the “workers’ paradise”, in the fashion of so many intellectuals of the epoch, who was more in error? And the affirmation according to which Lenin and Stalin had practically “liquidated the old Marx,” the affirmation according to which Soviet Communism had always been, in part or less, a properly Russian phenomenon, hadn’t, in a certain measure, been confirmed? Many disappointed Marxists would probably be ready today to agree that Stalinist Russia was never anything other than “National Bolshevik.” The difference according to Niekisch, it is that they would derive from this finding, the opposite conclusions. They would also willingly distinguish “Russian” Bolshevism from “Occidental” Marxism, but they would then value the second to the detriment of the first. Nevertheless, the fact remains that it was in the ranks of the Conservative Revolution, and singularly in the National-Bolshevik milieus, that this distinction, received as banal today, was made for the first time. 

As to the great book of the Germano-Russian alliance, who can say today, that he was not called, in the future, to add a few more chapters?

Hitler: A German Fate 

Ernst Nieksich 

Translated by: Eugene Montsalvat from the French volume of Ernst Niekisch’s “Hitler – une fatalité allemande” et autres écrits nationauxbolcheviks 

At: 

https://niekischtranslationproject.wordpress.com/

The Young Hitler I Knew - Introduction by Ian Kershaw

 For a vital phase during the early years of his life, his late teenage years in Linz and Vienna, when we otherwise have tantalisingly little to go on, Hitler had a personal – and exclusive – friend, who later composed a striking account of the four years of their close companionship. This friend was August Kubizek. His account is unique in that it stands alone in offering insights into Hitler’s character and mentality for the four years between 1904 and 1908. It is unique, too, in that it is the only description from any period of Hitler’s life provided by an undoubted personal friend – even if that friendship was both relatively brief and almost certainly one-sided.* For, like everyone else who came into contact with Hitler, Kubizek would soon learn that friends, like others, would be dropped as soon as they had served their purpose.

For every study of Hitler’s early years, including the first parts of my own biography, Kubizek’s story has proved an indispensable source. His recollections of his time together with Hitler, first published in 1953, are now in their sixth edition. An English translation, with an introduction by H. R. Trevor-Roper, later Lord Dacre, was published in 1954 and later reprinted, and has had to serve for those without access to the German original until the present. Yet this earlier English-language version was neither a complete nor an altogether satisfactory translation of Kubizek’s German text. Numerous passages, in fact some entire chapters, were omitted. This new translation remedies these deficiencies and omissions. For the first time, it makes the entire text of Kubizek’s recollections of his friendship with Hitler available to an English readership. This is greatly to be welcomed.

August Kubizek was born in Linz in 1888. After leaving school he served as an apprentice in his father’s small upholstery workshop. But he was musically talented, and this offered him an exit-route from the upholstery trade. While the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna was rejecting his friend Hitler, Kubizek was gaining entry to the Vienna Conservatoire to study music. He subsequently obtained a position as second conductor in the municipal theatre at Marburg on the Drau, and was just married when war broke out in 1914. He served in the Austrian Army for the duration of the war, suffering a serious lung infection in 1915 from which he never fully recovered. After the war he became town clerk of Eferding, near Linz, where his duties included organising the small community’s musical events. And there he remained, a quiet, retiring family man, helping to bring up his three sons, and conscientiously involved in the local cultural life.

In the meantime, his erstwhile friend had become famous. Kubizek sent a note of congratulation when Hitler became Reich Chancellor in January 1933, and later received a personal reply. Hitler even suggested that Kubizek might pay him a visit one day. Nothing came of this for five years. But shortly after the Anschluss, Kubizek made his way to Hitler’s hotel in Linz, and was allowed in to see his former friend for the first time since their ways had parted in 1908. Hitler greeted him warmly – though now used the formal ‘Sie’ mode of address not the more intimate ‘Du’ (which he had still used in his note to Kubizek five years earlier). Invitations followed to the Bayreuth Festival in 1939 and again in 1940, when, with Hitler at the height of his power, he and Kubizek met for the last time.

Kubizek had by then gained recognition among leading Nazis as a ‘friend of the Führer’ as a young man, and was known to have memorabilia from that time. He had already in 1938 been approached and agreed to write his recollections for the Party archive. His insights were said to be ‘staggering’, revealing ‘the inconceivable greatness of the Führer in his youth’.* By 1942, after Kubizek had joined the Nazi Party and become a local functionary (mainly in charge of propaganda and cultural matters in Eferding), he had received a direct commission from the Party leadership to write about his early friendship with the ‘Führer’. Kubizek had certainly made a start by 1943, and was given a better-paid position by the Party to help him to complete his task. But he made slow progress. When the Third Reich fell, he was interned for sixteen months by the Americans. But he had hidden his draft ‘memoirs’ and memorabilia in a cavity of a wall in his house in Eferding. These became the basis of the book, Adolf Hitler – Mein Jugendfreund, published in 1953, and an immediate sensation. Kubizek died three years later, now widely known as a first-hand witness to Hitler’s early, formative years.

But how valuable is Kubizek’s book as a source for Hitler’s life in Linz and Vienna? The core of the book, we should recall, began life as a manuscript commissioned by the Nazi Party. A copy of the second part of this original text survives today.* The fifty typescript pages, dealing with the Vienna period, are far shorter than the corresponding sections of the book. A great deal, therefore, has been added to the original account – itself composed over thirty years after the events it describes.† Glowing adulation of Hitler is abundantly evident in the typescript, whereas the book is inevitably more guarded, even though an unmistakable current of admiration remains. And the style of the original is prosaic, compared with the far more fluent, even literary style of the book. Episodes recounted briefly and without literary graces in the original text are far more extensively and elegantly described in the published work.‡ Kubizek admitted that writing the original manuscript had not come easily to him. ‘Writing for me is a cross to bear. It doesn’t suit me’, he conceded in 1949.§ There must, therefore, be some suspicion that the embellished ‘memoirs’ which appear in the book are the result of help from a ‘ghost-writer’. In fact, Kubizek acknowledged in June 1949 that his text required a complete reworking. Producing a more ‘effective’ version meant that the completion of his work ‘belonged in the hands of a writer (Dichter)’, he wrote. He even contemplated publication as a stage play.¶ The Austrian publishing house denied that it had provided any assistance. But either Kubizek suddenly discovered the art of writing, or he had help from a person or persons unknown.

Kubizek’s recollections need to be read critically and treated with great care for other reasons. The young Hitler, for example, is frequently and extensively cited verbatim in Kubizek’s published text (though seldom in the original manuscript). Kubizek is far from alone among those who later wrote of their experiences of Hitler in putting words directly into his mouth years after the events described. But it is self-evidently impossible that he could have remembered exactly what Hitler said over four decades later. The direct quotations have, therefore, to be seen as a literary device of Kubizek (or his ghost-writer) rather than precise expressions of the young Hitler. This does not in itself discredit their veracity as statements of Hitler’s views. But, obviously, they ought not to be taken at face value as quotations.

Beyond this, some of Kubizek’s recollections have more than an air of fabrication about them. His story of Hitler denouncing to the police a kaftan-clad Jew was probably an embellishment of a well-known episode in Mein Kampf (on which Kubizek drew quite extensively in his book). The description of a visit together with his friend to a synagogue sounds equally dubious. The claim that Hitler joined the Anti-Semitic League in 1908, and registered Kubizek for membership at the same time, is plainly wrong. No such organisation existed in Austria at the time. Kubizek’s passages on Hitler’s anti-semitism, in fact, deserve generally to be treated with scepticism. They are clearly designed to distance himself from his former friend’s radical views (which he, almost certainly wrongly and in contrast to Hitler himself, dated back to the influence of home and school in Linz), though his own anti-semitism had not been concealed in the manuscript version.

Another story described by Kubizek, and repeated in countless books on Hitler, also seems elaborated to the point of near fantasy. This is the lengthy episode of the nocturnal climb up the Freinberg, a mountain just outside Linz, following a visit to a performance of Wagner’s Rienzi, an early work about a Roman tribune of the people who was eventually cast down by his one-time followers. Kubizek has Hitler, in near ecstasy, elucidating the meaning of what they had seen in almost mystical terms. After the war Kubizek remained insistent that the story was true.* The evening evidently left its mark on him, and he reminded Hitler of it when they met at Bayreuth in 1939. Kubizek concludes his chapter on the ‘vision’ by telling how Hitler recounted the episode to his hostess, Winifred Wagner, ending: ‘in that hour it began’. But this was Hitler showing off his ‘prophetic qualities’ to an important admirer, Frau Wagner. Whatever happened on the Freinberg that night that so impressed the impressionable Kubizek, nothing ‘began’ then.

A further episode, that of Stefanie, a young woman in Linz who, Kubizek claims, was Hitler’s first love, has a distinctly improbable ring to it. There can be little doubt that Kubizek greatly embellishes what was at most a passing juvenile infatuation. But the story has at least one point of interest. Franz Jetzinger, a librarian in Linz who himself was working on Hitler’s early life, was able to track Stefanie down. She did exist (though she knew nothing of Hitler’s supposed passion for her at the time). In his letters to Jetzinger, Kubizek refers to her surname before she married – Isak.* It was plainly Jewish-sounding. She was, in fact, not Jewish – though neither Hitler nor Kubizek could have known that. The irony that Hitler’s one and only boyhood ‘flame’ might have been Jewish at least suggests that Kubizek’s emphasis upon his friend’s pronounced anti-semitism already in Linz is incorrect.

Despite these, and other, undoubted weaknesses, limitations, and distortions – even outright inventions – which underline the need for great caution in using Kubizek, his account of his experiences with Hitler cannot be dismissed – as it was by the more scholarly, but jaundiced, early historian of Hitler’s youth, Franz Jetzinger – as a mere ‘work of fable’. Jetzinger was originally on good terms with Kubizek (who showed him his typescript and memorabilia of his time with Hitler). But he became an implacable critic once Kubizek’s book appeared. His own book on Hitler’s youth, which appeared three years later, is replete with attacks on Kubizek.† Jetzinger was certainly able to expose Kubizek’s memory as fallible. Kubizek admitted that his original typescript contained errors, which he put down to the constant interruptions through Party work at the time. He insisted, however, that he was telling the truth, and not making things up.‡Jetzinger’s scholarship is, in fact, not invariably superior to Kubizek’s vivid pen-picture of the young Hitler, and contains some weaknesses of its own, both factual and interpretative. Kubizek’s description of a distraught Hitler at his mother’s deathbed in December 1907 was, for instance, rejected by Jetzinger, who, largely on the basis of the oral testimony of an old lady he himself described as ‘senile’, preferred the image of a heartless son turning up only once his mother was dead. Jetzinger’s interpretation was for long preferred by most historians. But Kubizek’s version, though not without factual errors, nevertheless has the backing of two crucial witnesses: Hitler’s sister, Paula, and his mother’s Jewish physician, Dr Eduard Bloch. On this important point, Kubizek’s account is preferable to Jetzinger’s interpretation. Kubizek is here an important source.

In another instance, as the detailed research of the Austrian historian Brigitte Hamann has shown, Kubizek proves a reliable source despite Jetzinger’s sustained attempt to discredit him.* This is the question of his financial standing during his time in Vienna. Where Kubizek portrays Hitler as hard-up, Jetzinger claims that inherited money left him well-off. Certainly Hitler was not poverty-stricken until his money ran out, after contact with Kubizek had been broken off. But the picture of a modest, even downright frugal lifestyle painted by Kubizek was accurate, whereas Jetzinger’s calculations had exaggerated the funds allegedly at Hitler’s disposal (again something taken up in a number of secondary works). Once more, Kubizek proves an important source and corrective.

Above all, for all its manifold flaws, Kubizek’s book rings true in the portrait of Hitler’s personality and mentality. In particular, the lengthy parts of the book which tell of Hitler’s views on history, art, architecture, and music (where Kubizek was especially at home) illustrate facets of his character which become only too familiar in later years. The docile, impressionable, compliant Kubizek, a few months older than his friend but with a pronounced inferiority complex, was a perfect receptacle for the domineering, opinionated, know-all young Hitler. He listened. Hitler talked – and talked, and talked. The dogmatic opinions – and outright prejudices – on art and music are similar to those we come across in the later Hitler. The precise words Hitler used can only be Kubizek’s invention but the sentiments are surely genuine. And since it is certain that Hitler and Kubizek did spend a great deal of time in each other’s company for close to four years, in Linz then in Vienna, and since they were both passionately interested in music and art, it can be presumed that these topics figured prominently in their conversations and made a lasting impact (even if not a precise one) on Kubizek’s memory.

Like so many ‘memoirs’ and recollections of those who knew Hitler at first hand, Kubizek’s account is faulty and inaccurate in many respects. Medieval historians are used to working with flawed and inaccurate sources which can nevertheless provide important insights. Kubizek’s book has to be used in a similar way – recognising its deficiencies, but acknowledging the intrinsic value of the portrait of the young Hitler which it provides.

Ian Kershaw

Manifesto For The Abolition Of Interest-Slavery - Gottfried Feder

Volumes of books have been written on the 3rd Reich and the Second World War that deal primarily with Adolf Hitler, his generals, the War, or other “exciting” tangents from the European Theater in that period of time.

However I doubt that the families of the millions of men and boys who died in that tragedy known as WWII would refer to any of it as “exciting,” and this publisher would be in agreement with them. What is often left out of these books are the core principles and foundations of National-Socialism (Nazism) that got Hitler elected and brought Germany out of the depression before any other affected nation had.

Adolf Hitler’s economic system – heavily influenced by the genius of Gottfried Feder – was unlike anything the world had ever seen, and it worked better than anyone predicted at the time. National-Socialist economics were of pivotal importance to Hitler’s government, but those policies are sadly very poorly understood today for a variety of reasons, including the aforementioned lack of “excitement” surrounding economic policies of 70+ years ago on the other side of the world. As the reader will soon come to understand, “breaking the bondage of interest-slavery” was strongly emphasized, though most Americans have never considered the idea of life without interest on a house or car payment. Gottfried Feder discusses this in his Manifesto, and almost all of what he says in it applies today as it did in 1919. Some authors and Nazi sympathizers have even suggested that if Germany’s brilliant economic ideas had spread to other nations, this would soon lead to the end of endless profits and power for the banksters, and hence the need for the Allied powers to bring Germany to her knees.

Germany’s currency and trade systems begin to give one an understanding of the causes of World War II. This was stated by Hasting W. S. Russell, who wrote at the beginning of the War: “A war of financiers and fools, though most people, on the allied side at any rate, do not yet see very clearly how financiers come into it. . . . Financiers also desired war as a means of overthrowing their rivals and consolidating still further their immense power. . . . Hitler not only engaged in barter trade which meant no discount profits for bankers arranging bills of Exchange, but he even went so far as to declare that a country’s real wealth consisted in its ability to produce goods; nor, when men and material were available, would he ever allow lack of money to be an obstacle in the way of any project which he considered to be in his country’s interests. This was rank heresy in the eyes of the financiers of Britain and America, a heresy which, if allowed to spread, would blow the gaff on the whole financial racket.”

Gottfried Feder (an early mentor of Hitler) had been advocating banking reform as early at 1917, and was ardently against interest slavery and usury. In his Manifesto he stated that the source of the banker’s power and wealth comes not from work, but from “the effortless and infinite multiplication of wealth which is created by interest.” Instead, the German State offered loans for a set price. For example, marriage loans up to 1000 marks were implemented and were repayable in interest free installments. A quarter of the loan was forgiven at the birth of each child. Via this method, people were never stuck paying off an interest charge each month like they are today with the credit card scam, but instead their payment actually went towards paying off their initial debt.

Adolf Hitler describes the National Socialist monetary system in a succinct paragraph: “If ever need makes humans see clearly, it has made the German people do so. Under the compulsion of this need we have learned in the first place to take full account of the most essential capital of a nation, namely, its capacity to work. All thoughts of a gold reserves and foreign exchange fade before the industry and efficiency of well-planned national productive resources. We can smile today at an age when economists were seriously of the opinion that the value of currency was determined by the reserves of gold and foreign exchange lying in the vaults of the national banks and, above all, was guaranteed by them. Instead of that we have learned to realize that the value of a currency lies in a nation’s power of production, that an increasing volume of production sustains a currency, and could possibly raise its value, whereas a decreasing production must, sooner or later, lead to a compulsory devaluation.” He added, “We were not foolish enough to try to make a currency [backed by] 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.” The National-Socialist economy is one based off work and production.

The twenty-five point “Program of the NSDAP” reflected the teachings of the influential Feder.

Among these points are: “10. It must be the duty of every citizen to work either mentally or physically. The activities of the individual may not conflict with the interests of the general public but must be carried on within the framework of the whole and for the good of all.”

Within two years of Adolf Hitler being elected, the unemployment problem had been solved and the country was back on its feet. It had a solid, stable currency, no debt, and no inflation, at a time when millions of people in the United States and other Western countries were still out of work and living on welfare. Germany even managed to restore foreign trade by using a barter system: equipment and commodities were exchanged directly with other countries, circumventing the international banks. This system of direct exchange occurred without debt and without trade deficits.

Economist Henry C K Liu wrote of Germany’s remarkable transformation:

“The Nazis came to power in Germany in 1933, at a time when its economy was in total collapse, with ruinous war-reparation obligations and zero prospects for foreign investment or credit. Y et through an independent monetary policy of sovereign credit and a full-employment public-works program, the Third Reich was able to turn a bankrupt Germany, stripped of overseas colonies it could exploit, into the strongest economy in Europe within four years, even before armament spending began.”

In Billions for the Bankers, Debts for the People (1984), Sheldon Emry wrote:

“Germany issued debt-free and interest-free money from 1935 and on, accounting for its startling rise from the depression to a world power in 5 years. Germany financed its entire government and war operation from 1935 to 1945 without gold and without debt, and it took the whole Capitalist and Communist world to destroy the German power over Europe and bring Europe back under the heel of the Bankers. Such history of money does not even appear in the textbooks of public (government) schools today.”

Manifesto for the Abolition of Enslavement to Interest on Money 

Mammonism is the heavy, all-encompassing and overwhelming sickness from which our contemporary cultural sphere, and indeed all mankind, suffers. It is like a devastating illness, like a devouring poison that has gripped the peoples of the world.

By Mammonism is to be understood:

on the one hand, the overwhelming international money-powers, the supragovernmental financial power enthroned above any right of self-determination of peoples, international big capital, the purely Gold International;

on the other hand, a mindset that has taken hold of the broadest circle of peoples; the insatiable lust for gain, the purely worldly-oriented conception of life that has already led to a frightening decline of all moral concepts and can only lead to more.

This mindset is embodied and reaches its acme in international plutocracy.

The chief source of power for Mammonism is the effortless and endless income that is produced through interest.

From the thoroughly immoral idea of interest on loans the Gold International was born. The mental and moral constitution grown from the lust for interest and profiteering of every kind has led to the frightening corruption of a part of the bourgeoisie.

The idea of interest on loans is the diabolical invention of big loan-capital; it alone makes possible the lazy drone's life of a minority of tycoons at the expense of the productive peoples and their work-potential; it has led to profound, irreconcilable differences, to class-hatred, from which war among citizens and brothers was born.

The only cure, the radical means to heal suffering humanity is: the abolition of enslavement to interest on money.

The abolition of enslavement to interest on money signifies the only possible and conclusive liberation of productive labor from the hidden coercive money-powers.

The abolition of enslavement to interest signifies the restoration of the free personality, the redemption of man from slavery, from the curse whereby Mammonism has bound his soul.

Whoever wishes to fight capitalism, must abolish enslavement to interest.

Where must the abolition of enslavement to interest begin? With loan-capital!
Why?

Because loan-capital, compared to all industrial big capital, is so overpowering that the great money-powers can only be fought effectively through the abolition of interest-slavery.

20:1 is the proportion of loan-capital to industrial big capital. The German people must annually raise more than 12 billion in interest for loan-capital in the form of direct and indirect taxes, rent, and the rising cost of living, while even in the boom-years of the war the sum-total of all dividends distributed by the German joint-stock companies amounted to only 1 billion.

The avalanche-like growth of loan-capital surpasses all human capacity for calculation, through eternal, endless, and effortless income from interest, and from interest on interest.

What blessing does the abolition of enslavement to interest bring for the laboring folk of Germany, for the proletarians of all countries of the Earth?

The abolition of enslavement to interest gives us the possibility of pursuing the repeal of all direct and indirect taxes.

Hear this, you value-producing men of all lands, all states and continents: all state revenues flowing from direct and indirect sources pour constantly into the pockets of big loan-capital.

The profits of state-owned businesses, including the postal service, telegraph, telephone, railroad, mines, forests, and so on, suffice entirely for the funding of all essential state commitments for schools, universities, courts, administrative agencies, and social welfare.

Thus no true socialism will bring any blessing to humanity as long as the profits from public enterprises remain tributary to big loan-capital.

Therefore we demand as a fundamental law of the state, first for the German peoples, then as a fundamental law for all those kindred peoples that wish to enter with us into the cultural community of a league of nations, the following: (...)

9. Through intensive enlightenment of the people, it is to be made clear to the people that money is and should be nothing other than a voucher for completed labor; that while every highly developed economy of course has need of money as a medium of exchange, the function of money also ends with that, and in no case should money be lent a supramundane power to grow of itself by means of interest, at the expense of productive labor.

Why have we not already done all this, which is so self-evident, which must be regarded as the Egg of Columbus for the social question?

Because in our Mammonistic blindness we have unlearned how to see clearly that the doctrine of the sanctity of interest is a monstrous self-deception, that the gospel of the loan-interest that alone makes one blessed has entangled our entire thinking in the golden web of international plutocracy. Because we have forgotten and are deliberately kept in confusion by the omnipotent money-powers about the fact that -- except in the case of a few rich people -- the interest that seems so lovely, and is so beloved of the thoughtless, is completely offset by taxes. All of our tax-legislation is and remains, so long as we do not have liberation from enslavement to interest, only a tribute-obligation to big capital, and not, as we would imagine, a voluntary sacrifice for the accomplishment of labor for the community.

Therefore liberation from enslavement to interest on money is the clear motto for the global revolution, for the liberation of productive labor from the chains of the supragovernmental money-powers. (...)

The third and most dangerous factor is the enormous growth beyond comprehension of big loan-capital through interest and through interest on interest. I must here digress a bit more and hope through a small excursion into higher mathematics to explain the problem. First some examples.

The charming story of the invention of the game of chess is well known. The rich Indian king Shihram granted to the inventor, as thanks for the invention of the royal game, the fulfillment of a wish.

The wish of the wise man was that the king should give him one grain of wheat on the first square of the chess-game, two on the second, four on the third, and thus always on each square twice as many as on the one before. The king smiled at the seemingly modest wish of the wise man and ordered that a sack of wheat be brought so that for every square the grains of wheat could be apportioned. As we all know, the fulfillment of this wish was impossible even for the richest prince in the world.

All the world's harvests in a thousand years would not suffice to fill the 64 squares of the chessboard.

One more example: many will still remember from their schooldays the torture of calculating compound interest; how the penny invested at the time of the birth of Christ multiplies at compound interest so that it doubles every 15 years.

In the year 15 after the birth of Christ the penny has grown into 2 pennies, in the year 30AD to 4 pennies, in the year 45AD to 8 pennies and so on. Very few will remember what value this penny would represent today: a volume of gold equivalent to the volume of the Earth, the Sun, and all the planets combined would not be adequate to represent the value of this penny invested at compound interest.

A third example: the fortune of the House of Rothschild, the oldest international plutocracy, is valued today at about 40 billion. It is well known that in Frankfurt around the year 1800, old Mayer Amschel Rothschild, without wealth of his own worth mentioning, laid the foundation for the gigantic fortune of his house through fractional-reserve lending of the millions that Count Wilhelm I of Hesse had entrusted to him for safekeeping.

Had the accretion of money through interest and interest on interest with Rothschild succeeded only at the modest rate of the penny, the curve would not have climbed so steeply as it has. But assuming that the Rothschilds' collective wealth increased only at the rate of the penny, the Rothschilds' fortune in the year 1935 would be 80 billion, in 1950 160 billion, in 1965 320 billion, and with that it would already exceed by far the total German national wealth.

From these three examples a mathematical law can be derived. The curve that represents the rise of the Rothschild fortune, the curve that can be derived from the number of wheat-grains for the chessboard, and the number that the multiplication of the penny produces at compound interest, are simple mathematical curves. All of these curves have the same character. After initially modest and gradual increase the curve becomes ever steeper and soon practically approaches being almost tangential to infinity.

Altogether differently, however, does the growth-curve of industrial capital proceed. Likewise sprung mostly from small beginnings, soon a strong escalation of the curves appears, until a certain saturation of capital is reached.

Then the curves run flatter, and in certain industries will perhaps even decline slightly, if new inventions have led to the devaluation of existing factories, machines, and so on. I would like to select only one example here, the development of the Krupp works. In 1826 old man Krupp died almost without assets. In 1855 Alfred Krupp received his first order for 36 cannons on behalf of the Egyptian government. In 1873 Krupp already employed 12,000 workers. In 1903 Frau Berta Krupp sold the entire works and property to the Alfred Krupp joint-stock company for 160 million. Today the total value of the stock-capital amounts to 250 million.

What does the name Krupp connote for us Germans? The acme of our industrial development. The world's first maker of [steel] cannons. A vast sum of the most tenacious, purposeful, intensive productivity. For hundreds of thousands of our folk-comrades the Krupp endeavor has meant bread and work. For our nation, weapons and defense – and yet it is a dwarf compared to the Rothschild billions. What significance does the growth of the Krupp fortune during a century have compared to the growth of the Rothschild fortune through effortless and endless accretion from interest and interest on interest? (...)

Thus for example the curve of the Rothschild fortune must be set 80 times so high as the Krupp curve. The purpose of showing the curves of course is only to demonstrate the fundamentally different character of the two types of capital. The curves of loan-capital show at first a quite gradually rising development; the development then goes faster until, ever wilder and dragging everything with it, it raises itself far beyond human concepts and strives toward infinity.

The curve of industrial capital by contrast remains in the finite! However strong the divergences that a trace may show in detail, overall the fundamental character of industrial development will always be such that after strong initial development a certain period of maturity, of saturation, follows, after which sooner or later the decline ensues.

  Nothing shows us more clearly the deep essential difference between loan-capital and industrial capital. Nothing can make the difference clearer for us between the devastating effects of loan-capital and the business-profits (dividends) of business-capital put up and risked in large industrial enterprises, than this comparison.

It cannot be emphasized enough that the recognition of the mathematical laws that loan-capital and industrial capital follow, alone shows us the clear path where the lever is to be applied for setting aright our wrecked finance-economy. We recognize clearly that not the capitalistic economic order, not capital in itself and as such, is the scourge of humanity. The insatiable interest-need of big loan-capital is the curse of all laboring humanity!

Capital must be! Labor must be! Labor alone can do little. Capital alone can do nothing!
Capital without labor can only be sterile! Therefore the most important demand, the most noble task of the revolution, the most sensible meaning of a world-revolution, is the abolition of enslavement to interest on money.

The House of Rothschild today is valued at 40 billion. The billionaires of American high finance, Misters Cahn, Loeb, Schiff, Speyer, Morgan, Vanderbilt, and Astor, are valued together at 60-70 billion at the least. At an interest-rate of only 5% this means an income for these eight families of 5-6 billion, which, according to the researches of Karl Helfferich, is roughly 75% of the annual income that all taxpayers in Prussia had in the year 1912. (There were at that time around 21,000,000 taxpayers, 75% of that would be about 15,000,000. For every taxpayer there are on the average 1.56 relatives; hence 23 million relatives.)  Around 38,000,000 Germans thus have had to live on what the afore-mentioned billionaires have as a yearly income.

Certainly the American billionaires are not pure loan-capitalists in the same sense as the House of Rothschild and so on. I do not care at all to argue about whether the American billionaires are really “100-million-dollar millionaires” or “1000-million-mark billionaires”; in the former case one would just have to reckon in one or two dozen additional Croesuses. Or let us simply accept Rathenau's “300”; then our inventory will certainly be in order. Here it is not important to give an exact number, but the acknowledged ratio of 300 to 38,000,000 opens our eyes about the brutal reign of international loan-capital.

Therefore let us cast off these terrible chains that can only strangle all energetic labor; let us tear away from money the power to bear interest, and ever again to bear interest until all humanity has become entirely obligated for interest to international loan-capital.

Thus it is these three points that make clear to us for the first time where alone the lever may be effectively applied for the alleviation of our internal financial distress.

For another thing, we recognize that the assault of the entire socialist world of ideas against industrial capital has been completely off the mark, because even an intended complete regulation or socialization of all entrepreneurial profit – assuming an unweakened economy – would yield a laughably meager sum, compared to the enormous financial burdens of the budgets of our Reich and our State.

Through the abolition of enslavement to interest on money the entire financial malaise can be eliminated with one blow. At once we feel solid ground under our feet again; at once it must and will become clear to us that we have only deceived ourselves in the most grotesque manner with this wretched bond-economy.

For what else is loan-capital, but debts? Loan-capital is debts! One cannot repeat that often enough. What form of madness is it when the German people in its totality have borrowed 150 billion for its war? When it has even promised itself for this a quantity of 7½ billion in interest and now feels itself shifted into the awkward situation, inevitable from the start, of trying to collect this 7½ billion from itself in the form of entirely fanciful taxes?

**

The tragic thing about this self-deception meanwhile is less the stupidity of this whole war-bond economy, of which we have always made so much better use than the rest of the world, than the fact that only a relatively small number of big capitalists derives enormous benefit from it, while the entire laboring folk, including the medium-sized and smaller capitalists, as well as business, trade, and industry, must pay the interest. And here the political side of the whole idea comes to light. Here they can recognize that in fact big loan-capital and only this [i.e. not industrial capital] is the curse of all laboring humanity. One may twist and turn the thing as one wishes, but always the mass of all hard-working people must in the end bear the cost of interest-payments on loan-capital. The middle-sized and smaller capitalists have nothing to show for their lovely interest-payments; can have nothing to show, for the sums of interest must be entirely taxed away. Whether in the form of direct taxes or indirectly in the way of indirect taxes, stamps, tariffs, or other burdens on commerce, the hard-working folk is always the sucker and big capital the beneficiary.

It is now quite astonishing to see how the socialist idea-world of Marx and Engels, from the Communist Manifesto to the Erfurt Program (especially Kautsky), and even the current socialist leaders, spare the interests of loan-capital as if on command. The sanctity of interest is taboo; interest is the holy of holies; no one has yet dared to call it into question. 

While property, nobility, security of person and possessions, the laws of the Crown, privileges and religious conviction, honor of officers, fatherland, and freedom are more or less outlawed, interest is holy and unassailable. Confiscation of wealth and socialization, thus outright violations of the law that are only somewhat sugarcoated, insofar as they are committed ostensibly in the name of the totality of individuals, are the order of the day: all of that is permitted, but interest, interest is the noli me tangere, the “touchmenot.”  The interest payment on the Reich's debt is the alpha and omega of the state budget. Its gigantic weight drags the ship of state into the abyss and yet … it is all a big swindle ... a monstrous self-deception, fostered only and solely for the benefit of the great money-powers. (...)

Swindle, I said! Interest-swindle! A strong word. But if this word has justification, which during the war was perhaps the most used word in the field and at home, it has the most justification in regard to the interest-swindle.

But what about the war-bonds? With the first 5 billion, the Reich took out of the pockets of the people savings that actually existed. The money flowed back again. Then came the new loan to suck up the money again, and with that the last residual savings. And again came the pump and sucked up the billions, and again they ebbed back again, until merrily, after this charming game was repeated nine times, the Reich had incurred 100 billion in debt.

In exchange the people of course held in their hands 100 billion in finely printed paper – at first we imagined that we had become so much richer – but then comes the state and says, “I am facing bankruptcy.”

Yes, but why? – I myself certainly cannot go bankrupt even if I occasionally take a hundred-mark note from the right upper pocket and put it into the left.Certainly it would be the biggest folly of all if we continued the folly of our war-bond economy by declaring bankruptcy.

[* Feder here is regarding the German nation as a unified entity rather than a mere aggregation of individuals: the money that has been transferred from some Germans to other Germans remains within the German nation, which means that it is within the power of the German government to adjust the distribution, perhaps to the immediate disadvantage of some individuals but for the good of the nation as a whole.]

Let us break the enslavement to interest on money! Let us declare the war-bond certificates to be legal tender with interest canceled, and the nightmare of state bankruptcy will melt away from us like March snow under the Sun.

People say to me, the cancellation of interest-payments is a disguised state bankruptcy. No, that is not true! – The specter of state bankruptcy is really only a fairytale and a bogeyman invented by the Mammonist forces. (...)

Further Program 

Although the abolition of interest-slavery is not the final goal of the new statecraft; it is truly the most incisive deed, the only deed that is able to unite all peoples into a true league of nations, against the tyranny of Mammonism that encompasses all peoples. But it is not the end. On the contrary, the abolition of interest-slavery must lead to further steps, because, as we have seen, it lays hold of the global evil by the root, and indeed by the main root.

Only when the groundlaying demand for abolition of interest-slavery is fulfilled, is the path cleared for the first time ever for the social state. This must be clearly recognized, and it must be accomplished in spite of all Mammonistic powers. The cry for socialization [while interest-slavery persists] is nothing more than the attempt to bring about the formation of a trust of all industries and to create giant conglomerates everywhere, over which big loan-capital, in spite of all wealth-taxes, will naturally also have the deciding influence again in the future. A socialistic state on a Mammonistic foundation is an absurdity and leads by nature to a compromise between Social-Democracy, already strongly contaminated with Mammonism, and big capital.

We, by contrast, demand radical rejection of the Mammonistic state and a reconstruction of the state according to the true spirit of socialism, in which the ruling basic idea is the obligation to nourish -- in which an old basic demand of Communism can find its rational and useful satisfaction -- in the form that every member of the folk shall receive his assigned entitlement to the soil of the homeland through the state's allocation of the most important foodstuffs.

We further demand, as a skeleton for the new state, a representation of the people through the Chamber of People's Representatives, which is to be elected on the broadest basis, and next to that a permanent Chamber of Labor, the central council in which the nation’s workers have a voice in proportion to their distribution by profession and economic class. Finally we demand the highest accountability for the directors of the state. This new construction of the state on a socialist-aristocratic basis will be treated in an additional work that will appear soon from the same publisher.

The prerequisite for all this construction however remains the abolition of interest-slavery. My unshakable belief, nay more, my knowledge makes me recognize clearly that the abolition of interest-slavery is not only enforceable but will and must be taken up everywhere with indescribable jubilation. For bear in mind: in contrast to all other ideas and movements and endeavors, however well intentioned, that aim at the improvement of mankind, my proposal does not want to try to improve human nature; rather it applies itself against a toxic substance, against a phenomenon that was artfully – no, diabolically – invented, completely contrary to the deepest feeling of man, in order to make humanity ill, in order to ensnare humanity in materialism, in order to rob from it the best thing that it has, the soul.

Hand in hand next to it goes the frightful, pitiless tyranny of the money-powers, for which people are only interest-slaves, exist only to work for the dividend, for interest.

Deeply troubled we recognize the frightful clarity and truth of the old Biblical proverbs, according to which the god of the Jews Yahweh promises to his chosen people: “I want to grant to you to own all treasures of the world; at your feet shall lie all peoples of the Earth and you shall rule over them.”

This global question is now laid out before all of you. Global questions are not solved with a wave of the hand, but the idea is clear as day. And the deed must be diligently propagated; we must understand clearly that we face the most formidable enemy, the world-encompassing money-powers. All force on the other side, on our side only justice, the eternal justice of productive labor.

Extend your hands to me, working people of all countries, unite!

Publisher’s Afterword 

While repetitive at times, this Manifesto clearly stresses the importance of ending interest-slavery and presents some of the many benefits that would arise from such a radical departure of what we know as the "norm." What most Americans are unaware of is how much emphasis the Nazis placed on uplifting the working class. This lack of awareness comes in spite of the NSDAP name: National-Socialist German Worker's Party.

Concern and struggle for the working class continues today, as does the movement to end profits without work - interest-slavery. Such modern struggles have been far more successful in Europe than in the United States, but there is a single American organization calling itself the "American Nazi Party" ( www.anp14.com ) that continues to harp on very similar economic principles as Feder and the NSDAP. In fact, due to the ever increasing wage disparity in the US, coupled with high unemployment rates nationwide and general dissatisfaction with the current government, such movements are currently seeing relatively strong growth.

It is clear as to why Feder's ideas have not taken root in modern society, and that is because of the influence that the international banking powers wield over most nations. In the US, the Federal Reserve is a private banking entity that is not accountable to the US Government, yet they hold tremendous power over the American economy. Had Feder's ideas been implemented here in the States, Ceteris paribus, it is almost certain that the recent mortgage crisis of 2007, which led to deep recession, high unemployment, and the big bank "bailouts" wouldn't have occurred.

This publisher hopes that the Manifesto was read with an open mind, free of any preconceived ideas about "Nazism" or the horrors of war that are so often associated with the 3rd Reich. Clearly there was much more to the ideology and practices of National-Socialist Germany than the History Channel or even most "history" books provide. Modern governments have taken much from Nazi Germany such as laws protecting animal rights, the "green" movement (see Richard Walther Darré), paid vacations and other labor comforts that we take for granted today. Would it be too absurd to suggest that maybe their economic policies held some merit as well?