|
Reaction to Lorden on Hitler
30 October 2004
[The following are Peter Lorden's article "Wolfman!" from Instauration July 1998, followed by reaction in Instauration October 1998]
Wolfman!
Deep in the gloomy Görlitz Forest, near a Polish town once called Rastenburg, lie the mouldering ruins of a complex of concrete bunkers. It's a lonely place. Especially at night, when branches cross the face of a full moon, it seems haunted by the spirit of the man who had this fortress built as the headquarters for his assault on Russia. When the surrounding forest shivers to that sound of dreams turning into nightmare -- the desolate howling of wolves -- it is easy to imagine these tunnels patrolled by the ghost of a familiar figure with a little mustache stuck on a dead-white face.
Much has been said and written about the demonic side of Adolf Hitler's nature, but little of its totemic aspect. Many ancient peoples believed that identifying a tribe with some wild creature would enable its members to share in the creature's strength, cunning and ferocity. Totemic symbolism still survives among sports teams and national emblems like the British lion and the American eagle. But no other leader of modern times has personally espoused a totem animal as Adolf Hitler did.
Whether this was due to some influence in his childhood or to the occult teachings associated with his early guru, Dietrich Eckart, Hitler appears to have been obsessed in his adult life with wolf images. It was as though his psyche had literally introjected all the characteristics of that animal. While it cannot be said that he actually suffered from lycanthropy, the belief that one actually is a wolf or some other subhuman animal, Hitler's malevolence towards his enemies does suggest a subconscious identification with a beast he may have thought of (quite wrongly) as being both ruthless and solitary. On social occasions during the early 1920s, where he was quite ill-at-ease, he often had himself introduced as "Herr Wolf." His given name is a contraction of Adelwolf, "noble wolf." His longest-serving personal secretary was Frau Johanna Wolf. He called his forward HQ for the invasion of France Wolfsschlucht, (Wolf's Throat) and the Rastenburg HQ Wolfsschanze, (Wolf's Lair), while to his Ukrainian HQ near Vinnitsa he gave the most appropriate name of Werewolf! (Dr. Gottfried Wagner, great-grandson of the composer, tells of how his family often socialized with Der Führer, then known to them as "Uncle Wolfie.")
Hitler himself was very much a lone wolf. He often told his closest associates, "You'll never know what I'm thinking." Even when he was holding forth until 2 o'clock in the morning with oft-repeated reminiscences, as he regularly did while stuffing himself with cream cakes, he never gave anything away. People who saw him sentimentalizing over pigtailed little girls or his Alsatian pup, Wolfie, would not have recognized the face that looked so avidly on the photos of SS atrocities he ordered rushed to him from the East, or the film he had Goebbels make of the failed bomb-plotters writhing on meat hooks.
Such dissimulation was essential to a man who had so much to hide. But Adolf's native secrecy may have been reinforced by his contact with the Thule Society, an occult circle nursing ancient ideas of Aryan supremacy. We know that Eckart taught him how to behave socially, and to eschew tavern-brawling as inappropriate for a rising young politico. Did someone in that circle also teach him some black-magic technique for strengthening his will and projecting his personality by identifying himself with the power of a totem animal? Be that as it may, we know that Hitler could cast an extraordinary spell when he needed to do so. Time after time he bent to his own way of thinking a conference of generals who only afterwards would realize that their objections were still valid.
The high brass objected to every territorial step he took and were forever counseling caution. But in the early days Hitler always seemed to be right! In the Rhineland, Austria, Czechoslovakia, he got away with it. Even later -- in Greece -- and the lightning grab of Yugoslavia from under Stalin's nose -- his famous "intuition" seemed to be infallible. (Its first great failure would not come until January 1941, when he assured Mussolini, "if the Americans enter the war, we shall have nothing to fear from them." However impressive his knowledge of the Old World, Hitler knew nothing of the New. Despite being warned many times against waging "a war on two fronts," Hitler, who dismissed America as a "mongrel nation," never grasped the enormous potential of either the United States of the Soviet Union.
It was the string of early successes which wore down the resistance of his generals. In the nationwide euphoria after the seemingly miraculous conquest of Western Europe, how could almost any German resist the conviction that here was indeed a man destined to reverse the humiliations of Versailles and lead his people to new heights? Hadn't he -- in only six years! -- lifted them from theri knees, up from the misery of the Great Depression and the political confusion of the Communist-tinged Weimar Republic, to make Germany the greatest power in Europe? Though many were unhappy with his persecution of the Jews, Hitler saw to it that their unhappiness was reenforced by an element of vengeance. His propaganda laid all blame for the harshly punitive terms of the 1919 Versailles Peace Agreement on "international financiers," particularly Jewish ones.
Nazi propaganda convinced most Germans that wicked Jewish financiers were behind all of their economic woes. That impressoin was reinforced by World Jewry's declaration of war against Hitler in 1933 and by the boycott of German exports led by New York's Rabbi Stephen Wise and pioneer Zionist Chaim Weizmann. Given the crafty exploitation of all this by Joseph Goebbels, rising anti-Semitism in the 1930s is at least understandable. Many Germans could remember how harsh the terms of Versailles had been, how great their loss of territory and population, how burdensome the reparations. Hundreds of thousands had died of hunger and disease because the Allied Powers vindictively kept up their naval blockade for months after the end of the war. All of this must be taken into account in judging the generals' acceptance of Hitler's leadership -- at least until the invasion of Poland, for until then they had not really known their Wolfman.
His most direct appeal to the general public was through spectacle and speeches, best exemplified in Leni Riefenstahl's extraordinary film, Triumph of the Will. But Hitler's popularity in the 1930s also had a more solid basis. A masterly politician, he had set out from the beginning of his rule to woo the common people by introducing paid vacations and a new-style democracy in the workplace. He insisted that business must serve the community, not least by providing sports facilities. His National Labor Service, drafting people from different social strata into public works projects, such as the building of the Autobahnen and workers' housing, did much to break down the old imperial class structure. Foreign visitors noticed a new dynamism in the German social order. Even the patrician Max Warburg saw positive aspects to National Socialism, writing to his nephew Jimmy in New York, "It is a pity that this movement, which has so much good in it, is encumbered with so much rubbish, and that its anti-Semitism makes it impossible for us to line up in formation with it." Everything Hitler did (leaving aside the Jews) was designed to foster community spirit and the Ein Volk unity so necessary to his goal of conquest. And it paid off. While other nations suffered throught the Great Depression, the German leader was putting his people to work. To quote Ron Chernow, author of The Warburgs: "As Schacht's wizardy revived the economy, unemployment plunged from 6 million to 1.6 million in Hitler's first two years in power -- it made the F&$252hrer heroic to the masses." Why shouldn't he have been popular when it was due to his policies that the health and living standards of German workers in 1939 were far superior to those of the class-ridden British?
On top of all this, Hitler as a public speaker was truly phenomenal. Better-educated people, particularly members of academe and the Junker aristocracy, often despised him for his Austrian accent, his neglect of classical German, his nondescript personal history. "A marginal painter of postcards, a mere corporal?" Adolf's social "betters" often sneered when he began to speak. Then something remarkable would happen, even to them. As is some mesmeric current had suddenly been switched on, he grabbed his audience at a gut-level and thereafter held them in the palm of his hand.
Apart from this gift of a weirdly tribal oratory, Hitler owed much of his hold on people to keeping his inner wolfishness well-hidden from the world. His open anti-Semitism was the only clue to its existence. If his totemic self peeped through the clumsy verbalisms of Mein Kampf, most people dismissed them as fantasy. Even though all the horrors of WWII, he covered the track of the wolf so well that many people still doubt his responsibility for it. As General von Manstein was to testify at Nuremberg, "The Final Solution was a masterpiece of concealment." But to base a denial of Hitler's guilt on the absence of any signed order specifically linking him to the massacre of Jews, as David Irving does, is foolish. Like Stalin, Hitler took care to cover himself.
Throughout his early and largely bloodless triumphs, Hitler cleverly preserved the image of a relatively civilized man -- certainly more civilized than Stalin. His propagandists could argue that Germany had some legitimate claim to the territories acquired prior to the invasion of Poland. Even the invasion of Poland coulde not be entirely faulted, inasmuch as chunks of Prussia had been given to Poland at Versailles. But it was in that country that Hitler first let the wolf out! He'd kept Himmler's SS and the Gestapo on a short leash until then. In Poland he let them loose. For fear of offending the Bolsheviks holding the other half of that country, he could not yet unleash the massive destruction of Polish Jewry which would follow his invasion of Russia. But he was making a start. And Jews were not the only target here. He wanted the whole head of Poland cut off! Officers, priests, academics, politicians -- all who might be capable of leadership were to be annihilated. That was his direct order to Himmler.
It is to be remembered here that this decapitation of a subject people had a ghastly precedent, for Hitler had seen the Bolsheviks doing just that to rebellious Ukraine. Even down to his concentration camps, Hitler's regime was largely modeled on that of the Bolsheviks. Stalin's inhumanity encouraged Hitler's! If the Soviet dictator could get away with having some 7 to 8 million people systematically starved to death in the Ukrainian Holocaust of 1932-33, why should Wolfman blink at a mere million in Poland? Himmler had posed that question at a time when Nazi leaders still toyed with the fantasy of resolving "the Jewish question" by shipping them all off to Madagascar. As quoted in Gerald Fleming's Hitler and the Final Solution -- a book which documents Adolf's personal involvement in that event -- Himmler said in 1940 that "out of inner conviction" he rejected "the physical extermination of a race through Bolshevik methods as un-Germanic and impractical." Convictions? Was Himmler kidding himself or just his "Circle of Friends," those Western industrialists and financiers who weer then backing Hitler against the Bolshevik threat?
In any event, the wolf was out, his black-uniformed minions killing and torturing (as no wild animal ever could) throughout that half of Poland which Hitler had secretly agreed with Stalin should be his. And people who had hitherto been making every allowance for Adolf could no longer deny his real nature. For them, it was as if the relatively civilized face of a statesman had hinged down to let the wolf glare out, its swastika-pupilled eyes fixed on the prey, its jaws frothing in delight. His generals were appalled. Regular Army men, accustomed to a soldier's code, were disgusted by what the SS and Gestapo were doing in Poland. They tried their best to have the worst offenders prosecuted.
This alone should cast doubt on Daniel J. Goldhagen's claim that German soldiers -- and civilians -- were all full-bore Nazis. Whatever the atrocities committed in the East, the Wehrmacht as as whole had no use for either the SS or Gestapo. Army regulars despised them, resenting both their arrogance and their cruelty. Wehrmacht units in Paris took great pleasure in arresting Nazi extremists when it was thought that the 1944 bomb plot on Hitler's life at Rastenburg had succeeded.
The efforts of the generals in Poland to bring Himmler's murderers to justice were blocked by Hitler. He issued a decree that SS personnel could only be tried by their own courts, thus removing them entirely from the jurisdiction of the Wehrmacht. Hitler told his generals in May 1941, a month before Barbarossa, tha tthe war against the Soviet Union was to be a racial and ideological struggle in which all civilized rules must suspended and no quarter given to the Untermenschen. According to Pierre Galante's Hitler Lives and the Generals Die, Hitler repeated this genocidal message in March 1942:
I don't want to hear any talk of humanitarianism where the East is concerned. They are all Asiatics. Stalin and the Czars knew how to handle such people, and we must adopt the same methods....That's why I have taken this responsibility out of the hands of the Wehrmacht and entrusted it to certain Party officials who are less fastidious about such matters...."
Hitler was very wrong about the nature of his adversary. Most Russians were not Asiatic at all. Many were descendants of Scandinavian invaders and those proudly independent Black Sea Scythians who had given the Romans so much trouble. They were tremendously brave, devoted to Mother Russia and often tougher fighters than the German troops. Blinded by his racism, Hitler would not listen, any more than he listened to his generals in the field. That towering will which had earlier brought him triumph over all their reservations was now bringing disaster. Unable to give up on his self-allotted destiny, he began to shun reality, becoming ever more isolated within a circle of yes-men. The great irony is that if Hitler had only had the sense to keep his wolf locked up, things in Russia might have gone differently -- and the West might have been spared a long struggle with "the Evil Empire." For a great many people in Stalin's domain initially welcomed the Germans as liberators, over a million defecting to their side. What could be worse, they thought, than the Bolshevik tyranny? General Hans Guderian tells in Panzer! of how warmly he was at first received by Russian peasants who would not let him leave their village until he had sampled their hospitality. That friendliness would soon turn into the hatred of outraged partisans.
For now, indeed, the Wolf was loose in Adolf's "East." And decent soldiers like Guderian could only watch with revulsion as it rampaged in the guise of Himmler's Einsatzgruppen and "Police Battalions."
* * *
Lorden Is Damned With Faint Praise
In his "Wolfman!" article (July 1998) Peter Lorden undoubtedly has the main facts right. However, like many amateurs, he has the habit of confusing valid with invalid sources. Once again he uses the forged quote on the alleged similarity between Bolshevism and Nazism from Hermann Rauschning's The Voice of Destruction. Allegedly a student of the facts, Lorden repeats the fiction that Stalin was rendered incapacitated when German tanks attacked on June 22, 1941. Actual Soviet military discussions following June 22 involved how to go forward with their own attack plans in spite of the Germans getting there first. This was the reason the Germans were able to encircle and capture so many Soviet soldiers. Stalin, the "incapacitated," was present at all these discussions.
In a previous essay, Lorden quoted a famous forgery, Hitler's alleged speech to his generals on August 22, 1939, otherwise known as Nuremberg document L-003. This alleged instruction to liquidate the Poles was fed to Associated Press journalist Louis Lochner by the anti-Nazi opposition. (See Nuremberg! The Last Battle by David Irving, p. 100.) Lorden asks us to believe that Hitler was a "Wolfman." Yet as Irving has pointed out, when news of shooting Jews was brought to Der Führer's attention he routinely ordered it to be stopped. He also specifically ordered (according to Hans Lammerer) that the Final Solution of the Jewish problem was to be delayed till the war's conclusion. This key piece of evidence was suppressed by Robert Kempner at Nuremberg.
I have no desire to single out Lorden for condemnation. Like many mainstream academics, he falls victim to tainted evidence. But if he wishes to write history, he must learn the facts not the fables. His refutation of my point regarding the failure of German Jews to distance themselves from the terror of the Jewish Bolsheviks is feeble. Well-meaning Mr. Warburg to the contrary, there was no organized protest by German Jews (or any Jews) in 1919 or afterwards to acknowledge Jewish responsibility for communism or to condemn it. The Germans drew the justified conclusion.
Lorden is entirely correct about Jewish responsibility for the U.S.S.R. The question of whether Jewish Communists were real or "religious" Jews begs the question. They were universally recognized as Jews by their fellows in the West and their ignoble Soviet murder machine was praised to the skies in the New York press.
I guess we all have our blind spots, but Lorden has a gift for invidious comparisons. Comparing Auschwitz with Lubyanka is really something. Heinrich Himmler issued a documented order to reduce the death rate in the German camps at all costs. I don't believe any such order was ever issued in the Gulag. As to Hitler admiring Stalin, that is true. But Hitler also admired the British Empire. Stalin was not quite so helpful to the Germans as Lorden imagines. Molotov in November 1940 made outrageous demands unbecoming a sincere ally. I doubt that German anti-partisan operations had the effect Lorden contends. After all, the partisans came first, the reprisals second. The undoubted failure of Germany's propaganda in the East was more probably related to (1) German failure to promise independence to the Balts and Ukrainians, and (2) the mass starvation caused by Soviet scorched-earth warfare which was unfairly blamed on the occupying Germans. No one, least of all the peasants, was shedding a tear over detested jews meeting a well-deserved fate.
Lorden's writings might be described as semi-revisionist. He has uncovered the damning facts about Jewish control of the U.S.S.R., while continuing to subscribe to wartime legends about Germany. Do I detect an Anglophile anti-Communist here?
472
Hitler's Not All Bad
Re Peter Lorden's "Wolfman!" article, is this meant as a joke? Or is the editor losing his marbles? Absolute power corrupts absolutely, but Hitler showed remarkable restraint in the most stressful circumstances. Ninety-eight percent of Allied prisoners came home alive, whereas only 42% survived Japanese POW camps. I abhor the execution of several dozen escaped British prisoners, but Hitler refrained from using any of the 250,000 tons of nerve gas he had available and which could have been employed very effectively.
As for the alleged film Hitler had Goebbels make of the failed bomb plotters writhing on meat hooks, have you or anyone you know ever seen it? If it were really available, it would have been a priceless addition to the Allied and Jewish projection of Hitler as the greatest monster of WWII.
115
Wolfman Reconsidered
How gracious of Mr. Peter J. Lorden, in July 1998's Instauration, to give us a portrait of Adolf the Great which allows him and his many friends to justify America's genocidal bombing of German cities and the killing of 9 million Germans after (repeat after) WWII (see James Bacque's Crimes and Mercies).
We note that Mr. Lorden quietly passes over the indispensable role of the Jews in imposing their ghastly Communist system on Russia, as well as the shameful megalomania of American rulers.
Lorden makes much of the ruthlessness of the Schutzstaffel in Poland, a part of which had been ruthlessly carved out of German territory 20 years earlier by the vindictive victors of WWI. He somehow omits this little fact.
Well, Mr. Lorden, we know all about Der Führer's errors. But in the end, history recognizes only a single error. He lost. As a result, the planet is now in a demographic tailspin from which it is unlikely to recover. Too many Christianity-driven whites like you are interested in finding guilt among our kind with which to deepen our spiritual coma and destroy our sense of self-preservation. Despite hsi fatal missteps, the Leader's heart was in the right place.
It is long past the time when people such as Mr. Lorden should have stopped producing simplistic "analyses" of their favorite bete noire (as prescribed by their string-pullers and begun looking at the whole, not just a part, of history and evolution. In particular, in this light they should inspect the shameful role of the U.S. in two World Wars and the interminable, sanctimonious and disgusting self-justification that went with it.
O'REGAN
Disgruntled Subscriber
For the first time since I've been subscribing (since inception) to Instauration I am really angered by some of its contents. I refer to "Wolfman!" Who is Peter J. Lorden? And why has Instauration stooped to print such slanderous drivel, false propaganda and outright lies? If one wants to read about some real war crimes, cruelty to helpless victims, megalomaniacal designs on ruling the earth, then read about U.S. and its allies.
The belief by "most Germans" that Jewish financiers were behind Germany's sufferings during and after WWI, was based on fact!
Is Instauration now taking over for Morris Dees, the ADL, JDL, the controlled media and the criminals in Washington who sing the praises of Israel and the long-suffering Jew? If so, I will not resubscribe.
I was born during WWII and had men in my family killed and wounded fighting in Europe. Naturally, I was taught in school to hate anything German. It was only after I began to do my own research and talked with people who lived in France during the German occupation that I learned to regard Adolf Hitler with a measure of great respect. I consider him one of the very few truly great men of history. The people richly deserving of exposure and condemnation are Roosevelt, Churchill, Stalin and the Jewish-Communist-Zionist network of evil, corrupt, power-crazed savages.
294
German Veteran Speaks Up
I can't quite agree with Peter Lorden's "Wolfman!" Though most of his statements may be right, we have to consider that the German generals (after the war) had to do a little black-and-white painting of their own. I served in the German army in Russia in 1943-44. The contacts we had with the Waffen-SS were normal and cordial, like the U.S. Marines have with the U.S. Army. I am not so sure about General Manstein's assessment that "The Final Solution was a masterpiece of concealment." His book was probably written soon after the war, when Manstein heard about the Final Solution in the prevailing blasts of propaganda.
As an occupying army, the German forces were always on the defensive against terror attacks. Any law-abiding citizen who went about his own business had nothing to fear. The only people tortured were partisans who refused to sing. If one was captured, the army or Gestapo naturally wanted to know where his companions were hiding and when they were planning yet another attack.
Summary justice is always wrong. Even in wartime. The Einsatztruppen shot anti-German activists in the partisan-infested areas of Poland. Had the partisans not blown up vital rail supply lines, no Einsatztruppen would have been needed. Presumably the Allies could have won the war without the partisans. If the Allies had agreed on a cease-fire, food supplies would have reached the concentration camps. But the aim of the Allied forces was to put the German leaders in the most difficult position possible.
Canadian Subscriber
Still Another Swipe at Lorden
The mendacious scribblings of Peter Lorden ("Empire of Evil," August 1998) disgrace the pages of Instauration. Is he a fifth columnist trying to give credence to the Holohoax? Hitler stated that his National Socialism cadre must be like the Bolsheviks tactically, until they held the reins of power. That is to say, they should utilize very small, highly disciplined, ruthlessly militant cells for operations and communications. It is the only way to survive against a power system bent on your destruction. By the way, Hitler was democratically voted into the chancellery by a significant majority of Germans. Did Stalin ever win an honest election?
Does Lorden think Instaurationists are similar to the masses of asses in this demographic monstrosity called a nation? Just because he affirms the Communist Holocaust, the real Holocaust, does not exonerate him from degrading the one man and movement that could have saved our race from oblivion. Consign Lorden to writing for American Heritage of any of the other politically correct kosher fishwraps that purport to stand for "Western values." Keep him from defiling Instauration.
089
German Hater
Peter Lorden tips his hand when he refers to the German Shepherd as "Alsatian." This misnomer gained currency after WWI with the visceral haters who choked on "German." Lorden is not only rabidly anti-Hitler, his fanciful writing shows him to suffer from Germanophobia. Glad he's out of the closet.
Canadian Subscriber
Wagner Connection Omitted
Peter Lorden's article on Hitler, "Wolfman!", presented a Lon Chaney-like Hitler. Quotes from Gerald Fleming and a genocidal Hitler howling at the moon are not the type of material I expect to see in Instauration. The "Wolf" story is interesting, but it is odd that Lorden did not cite the exchange between Hitler and his secretary, who questioned him (David Irving's Hitler's War, p. 383): "Why Wolf again -- just like the other headquarters?" Hitler replied, "That was my code name in the Years of Struggle." To grasp the meaning of "Wolf" for Hitler, one must turn to Richard Wagner's Die Walküre, Act I, in which Siegmund declares:
Wolfe, der war mein Vater...
Wehrlich unstark war Wolfe;
Geachtet floh
Der Alte mit mir;
lange Jahre
lebte der June
mit Wolfe im wilden Wald:
manche Jagd
war auf sie gemacht;
doch mutig wehrte
das Wolfspaar sich.
Wolf was my father...
Warlike and strong was Wolf
many enemies he found...
The old man fled
into exile with me;
for long years
the boy lived
with Wolf deep in the forest:
often they were hunted
by their foes;
but the Wolf-pair stoutly
defended themselves.
Neglecting the Wagner connection in Hitler's use of this "code name" renders all proper understanding of the subject impossible.
088
|