In the early 1900, there were 2 millions Jews in Austro-Hungary of
which 200,000 in Vienna alone. When Hitler arrived in Vienna in 1907
the topic of the Russian Jews, ousted of Russia since the first
pogroms 20 years earlier, was still as hot as before. The publication in
1906 of "The Revolution in Russia" by Rudolf Vrba, an author known
for his exagerations and false statements and arguing that the
pogroms were the Christians' battle against the Jewish threat, faned
the anti-semitism of people in Austria. In Vienna, Hitler lived in a
cosmopilitan city where anti-semitism was virulent and very well
spread out. It was almost a normal deed of Viennese life.
A hotbed of anti-semitism
If Hitler must be taken at face value, he was anti-semitic in high school
: according to his teacher Josef Keplinger, young Hitler diligently
studied the alledged differences between races and he even once
divided the class into two groups : Aryans and non-Aryans according
to the colour of their hair. Where the dark haired Hitler put himself, the
story does not say. Then we know that after he left high school, he
used to read in Linz the very anti-semitic Linzer Fliegenden
newspaper with writers like the fanatical anti-Semites Guido von List
and Jorg Lanz von Liebenfels. And if Hitler must be taken verbatim, he
would have started to hate the Jews as soon as his second year
(1909) in Vienna as he explained profusely in Mein Kampf :" I didn't
know what to be more amazed at: their verbal agility or their art in
lying."
Then we have the testimony by earsay of Simon Wiesenthal (1), the
Nazis hunter, who passed away on September 20th, 2005 : according
to some Doctor Ronald he met in Portugal in the early 1950s Hitler
was treated for syphilis by the father of one of his friend. Hitler would
have contracted syphilis from a Jewish hooker in Vienna, hence his
hatred of the Jews. The SS would have distroyed the files of this
doctor in 1938 after the Anschluss. Wiesenthal even suspected that
Hitler's niece- Geli Raubal- suicide in 1931 was triggered by the fact
she had contracted syphilis from Hitler.
Personally, I doubt this interpretation. Wiesenthal was a very
respectable and courageous man but his deductions and informations
have been sometimes overstretched (1): in any case, a Wassermann
test performed on Hitler in 1940 was negative. The reality may be
more complex : firstly, imperial Austria was a hot bed of
anti-semitism, secondly Mein Kampf was much more a political
springboard than a credible autobiography. Actually on his arrival in
Vienna, Hitler was far from being violently anti-semitic, if we must
believe the testimony of Rudolf Hanish, his co-lodger at Mannerheim
men's hostel in 1909. His views were ambiguous to say the least : on
one hand, he would praise the Jews for their sense of business and
their ability to take risks, he would hold in high esteem Jews like the
poet Heine, the conductors-composers Mahler and Mendelssohn or
the Rothschild who financed the Mannerheim hostel or he would quote
Gotthold Ephraim Lessing's (1729-1781) Nathan the Wise, as a
parabole of religious tolerance.
And on another hand he would be influenced by politicians like Karl
Lueger, Vienna's mayor, Schönerer, leader of the Pan-Germans, or
Karl H. Wolf, leader of the German Radicals who were anti-semitic
extremists. On the question of the nationalities, according to Hanish,
Hitler always took the most extreme positions, criticizing the
Hapsburgs' federal principle.
Modernists vs. Conservatives
Of course all Modernists were not Jews : Gustav Klimt, Alfred Roller,
Oskar Kokoschka, Alban Berg, Otto Wagner, Adolf Loos were not. But
in the spirit of the epoch -the "Zeitgeist"- if you were a Modernist you
were suspected of being a Jewish sympathizer, even a "Jew-slave".
And if you were too successful, the conservative press would run
stories pointing to your Jewish ancestry as the Alldeutsches Tagblatt
did for the librettist Hugo von Hoffmannstahl : "his great-granfather,
purported an article, was a Isaak Löw Hoffmannstahl".
Both were commoners who added the particule "von" to their name to
sound more Aryan. Both were lunatics but dangerous ones. Born in
1848, Guido List published a series of books exalting Germandom and
mythic German gods. In 1907 when Hitler arrived in Vienna, his
gruppies launched a Guido List Association -called Armanenschaft-
whose quarters were at 25 Webgasse Strasse nor far from where
Hitler lived.
Hitler repeated List's teachings in the 20s when he started his political
career : even the NSDAP platform of 1930 met the demands of List.
Number 4 clause of List's teaching was deprivation of the Jews' civil
rights; number 5 clause was subjugating them to laws for foreigners;
number 6 clause was stripping them of the right to hold public office...
Eventually Hitler thought that List's prophecy about the strong man
coming from above to free its peole was referring to himself.
Theozoology or the Sodom monkeys
The other crazy "thinker" of anti-semitic Austria was born in 1874 and
joined at 19 the Order of the Cistercians as novice Brother Georg.
Born Adolf Lanz in Vienna, he was ordained in 1896 but left the year
after to found the Order of the New Templars whose cornerstones
were the myth of the Grail, men's rights and racial purity. In 1902,
strengthened by donations from wealthy Pan-Germans Austrians, he
became Baron Adolf Georg Lanz von Liebenfels, Ph.D, born in
Messina, Sicily. As his mother was a Jew called Hoffenreich, he
prudently decided that von Liebenfels would also provided a nice
cover. The swastika was incorporated in the Templar's flag and coat
of arms. In 1906, he published an essay entitled "Theozoology or the
News about the little Sodom monkeys and the God's Electron" (sic),
and launched a magazine named Ostara that Hitler is known to have
read which was the advocate of racial purity, german supremacy and
stood against women's suffrage and equal rights. In the 30s, he was
hailed in Austria and Germany as a pioneer of National-Socialism.
There is no doubt that Hitler was a fervent admirer of those two nuts,
that he read their prose which was all over the place in the early
1900s and that he picked from them a lot of ideas and arguments.
In any case, it is in this ambiance and this context that young Hitler
lived like millions of Austrians and thousands of Vienneses.
Doubtless, Hitler was on the side of the Traditionnalists : his
character, his (poor) education and his sociological background, in
spite of his high artistic pretentions, pushed him toward Conservative
ideas and he let himself be impregnated by the anti-Semitic views,
notably the fact that "Jews were destroying beauty, dirtying
everything, exalting sex, sensuality and pornography in their press
and their works." Le goût juif was violently denounced in the
conservative press and some circles as a threat to moral values and
to the Austro-Hungarian fabric which was already torn apart by bitter
ethnic frictions.
Extravagance of debaucherie, sexuality and bestiality
Hitler who arrived in Vienna in 1908 hated that extravagance of
"debaucherie, sexuality and bestiality." But it was still only the
expression of feelings that he was not alone to harbour. His deep
disgust, his basic Conservative leanings were turned into racial
hatred by Germany's defeat in 1918.
At the end of WWI, Hitler's social consciousness was more interested
in issues like defeat responsibilities than in Art or Literature. He
convinced himself that Reds and Jews were nothing else than
profiteers, responsible for the defeat of his beloved motherland,
Germany. His hatred culminated in the conviction that "when he
defended (himself) against the Jew, he was fighting for the work of
the Lord."
Gradually, he began to hate the Jews to the point of longing for their
extermination. Just before the Armistice in 1918, Hitler was gased
and stayed some time in a military hospital where he was blind and
deaf. He was then submitted to psychiatric treatment and his care, a
Dr. Forster, thought he was actually suffering from hysteria and not
from real blindness. His diagnosis was :"A.Hitler, psychopath,
hysterical symptoms."
In early 1919, Obergefreiter (Lance Corporal) Adolf Hitler, heavily
decorated and a War hero (3) was still mobilized and returned to his
regiment in Munich. There he underwent a Reichswehr sponsored
course of systematic political education for demobilizing soldiers that
featured Pan- German nationalism, antisemitism, and anti-socialism.
A global anti-semitic description
These same themes were prominent in Bavarian politics following the
repression of the Munich revolution of 1918-19. Because antisemitism
had not played a notable part in Bavarian politics prior to the
revolutionary disturbances, a certain Herr Adolf Gemlich was
prompted to send an inquiry about the importance of the "Jewish
question" to Captain Karl Mayr, the officer in charge of the
Reichswehr News and Enlightenment Department in Munich. Mayr
referred him to Hitler, who had distinguished himself in the
above-mentioned course by the vehemence of his radical nationalist
and antisemitic views, and by his oratorical talents. Hitler was already
feeling his way toward a political career and was eager to please his
hierarchy. All of a sudden, his pre-war feelings could be marshalled
into a global anti-semitic description of the current situation of
post-war Germany.
Four days before responding to Gemlich in the letter translated here,
he had paid his first visit to the German Workers' Party (who became
later the National Socialist Workers' Party or NSDAP) as a confidential
agent of the Reichswehr.
He was not yet a member of the party but had been approached by
Anton Dexler, his founder, to become one and he had already more or
less set his mind as he wrote later in Mein Kampf.
In the letter to Gemlich he appears anxious to establish his
credentials as a knowledgeable and sober antisemite. Compared to
the inflammatory mass-meeting oratory that he was soon to make his
specialty, Hitler's rhetoric here is quite tame, stressing the need for a
"rational" and "scientific" antisemitism. In 1919, Hitler is nothing else
than a traitor to his ex-comrades at the front, an odious snitch ready
to make a stoolpigeon of himself in order to please his superiors
whose anti-semitism was profusely met by the young Corporal. The
"compte-rendu" below demonstrates the extent of his prejudices and
the flimsiness of his ideas.
" Why we are against the Jews"
In 1920 the first mass meeting of the NSDAP was held under the
theme "Why we are against the Jews" and the first national rally of
the party in January 1921 was placed undert the slogan "Future or
Ruin", the latter being the effect of Jewish conspiracy to rule Germany
and the world.
Hitler was convinced since 1918 that the Jews and the Reds were the
first responsible German actors of the Reich's collapse and he will
never forget them. In the years that followed, all his energies were
geared towards enacting a revenge and spreading a destruction that
will regenerate his beloved Germany and kill for ever the Jewish virus,
cause of "degenerescence" and "rot". They were the ambitions of a
mad man who had not assimilated the contradictions of his time and
could not under any circumstances tolerate any contradiction. In his
book "The young Hitler I knew", August Kubizek underlined in many
occasions that Hitler could not even stand that he would not listen to
his friend's lengthy monologues at 2 o'clock in the morning. Adolf
would wake up August and yelled at him because he had fallen asleep
while he was making a lecture about his architectural projects for
Vienna.
In 1933 Marshal Hindenburg wrote to Hitler, recently appointed
Chancelor, a letter of complaint about the treatment that was
inflicted upon some German Jews. In his characteristic and
hypocritical manner, with a lot of bogus respectuous terms, Hitler
replied that he did not give a penny about it and warned the German
President that worse was in the making. This exchange of letters can
be read here.
The angry young man of 1919 was about to turn his wrath against the
Jews of Europe to cleanse the continent and to regenerate it. The only
lethal virus in pre-WWI Europe was Adolf Hitler's anti-semitism. But
this virus had been incubated in the Vienna of the 1900s. Hitler had no
personal or self-made ideas, they were all picked up from his
entourage, ill-assimilated and transformed into tools of power. Hitler
was certainly not a thinker, he was a copyer with demented ambitons.
A very dangerous one.
(1) In "The Wisenthal File" by Alan Levy, Eerdmans Publishing 1993,
ISBN 0-8028-3772-7> For instance, Wiesenthal was persuaded that Dr.
Mengele was still alive in Paraguay in the early 80s whereas he
passed away in Brazil in 1979, eighteen years after he left Paraguay.
(2) The austro-hungarian Empire of 1908 when Hitler arrived in Vienna
had a population of 50 millions people whose approximately a half
were Slavs, a quarter Germans and a quarter Latins.
(3) In addition to the Iron Cross 1st class and 2rd class, Hitler received
the Military Cross 3rd class with swords (Sept.1917), the
Regimentsdiplom for outstanging bravery and the
Verwundeterabrechnen (Medal for Wounded) in May 1918, the
Dienstauszeichnung (Service Medal) 3rd class in August 1918.
(4) No statement could be more false : Judaism is before all a religion
and people who adhere to this faith are Jewish whatever is their
ethnic origin. In Russia Catherine the Great authorized the Jews to live
in the settlement of Pale as of 1791 and they developed such a good
community there that lots of Orthodox Russians moved in and opted
for the Judaic faith. Those "Jews" were ethnic Russians. Pale was
abolished in 1917. The whole Hitlerite construction is based on false
arguments, a biaised analysis and terrible historic misconceptions or
prejudices.
(5) Note that Hitler himself was largely inbred as his mother was
nothing else than the grand niece of his father and she always called
her husband "my uncle". The irony of this statement apparently failed
to appear to Hitler.
* Pictures from the Ukraine by courtesy of Steve, Virginia, The Axis
Forum
| Massacres of the Ukrainian Jews by the Nazis and the Caucasian people of Ukraine in 1941-42 |
| Those Ukrainian Jews have no idea why they were summoned and assembled in this place before to be cold blood shot by the SS. |
| Poland, 1945. |
| Old Russian Jews obviously conspiring to take over Germany and the world |
| Non Jewish women acclaiming the Fuehrer during his entry in Austria after the "union" (Anschluss) |
| LAW OFFICES OF THE N.S.D.A.P. |
Hitler, Himmler, Heydrich & Assoc.
| Was Hitler really anti-semitic ? A RACIAL TUBERCULOSIS OF THE NATIONS |
| NSDAP : Our mission, eradicating Jewish influence from Europe. |
| Anti-semitic exterminators at Law since 1933 |
| Today, people tend to forget what was the political and cultural atmosphere of pre-war Vienna : among other battles between the different nationalities of the Dual Monarchy (2), it was a city of constant battles between the Modernists (i.e. the Jews) and the Traditionnalists (i.e. the pan-Germans). |
| And in the same way, not all Traditionnalists were pan-Germanists, some were good Austrian monarchy supporters but still there was a pro-German coloration. Among the most influential anti-Semites were two Austrians from Vienna whose names are totally forgotten today but who exerted upon Austrian and German masses a considerable influence : Guido List aka Guido von List and his closest disciple Adolf Lanz aka Lanz von Liebenfels. |
| List divided the world into two groups, the Aryans masters who came from the North and the herd people or slaves. List's worst enemies were the internationals, the Jews and Freemasons and the Catholic church who were waging a war of extermination against the Aryans. Many secret societies like Armanenschaft proliferated at that time in Vienna and their mutual sign of recognition was the Swastika, a sign of the invincible : Thule Society, Bayreuth Circle, Sollnian Circle... |
| Old Jews being directed to the place of their execution by SS officers in Lembech (Polish: Lwów) in 1941-42 |
| Effectively it was in 1905 that Freud published his theory of sexuality, it was in 1906 that was played the Premiere of The Spring's Awakening by Wedekind, a play considered as "highly pornographic" by the censorship Bureau in Vienna and as "vices and threat of infection" by Hitler. It was in 1906 that was published Robert Musil's novel "Young Törless" which portrayed the link between violence and sexuality in young people and it was at the same epoch that Sacher-Masoch wrote his "Venus in Furs" that described young men being whipped by strong fur-clad women. |
| "Ever since Jean-Jaques Rousseau's Confessions, it has been well known to all educationalists that the painful stimulation of the skin of the buttocks is one of the erotic roots of the passive instrument of cruelty (masochism)." (1905) Sigmund Freud. Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality |
| Russian Jews being ghettoed by the Nazis in 1941-42 |
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| "Today we must examine ourselves and we must eliminate from our midst the elements that have become bad" (January 1921) |
