"The individual may establish with pain today that with the appearance of Christianity the first spiritual terror entered into the far freer ancient world, but he will not be able to contest the fact that since then the world has been afflicted and dominated by this coercion, and that coercion is broken only by coercion, and terror only be terror. Only then can a new state of affairs be constructively created."
This passage shows many of the author's most important characteristics: a muddled reading of history (not wholly untrue in this case), a delight in force and terror, a great desire for cleansing and renewal and, above all, a clear revolutionary purpose. Since he endlessly attributed all of his country's misfortunes to "Jewish civilisation", nobody reading this passage could doubt his intentions towards Jews if he came to power.
The author is Adolf Hitler and the extract is from "Mein Kampf" ("My Struggle".) Mein Kampf has become somewhat topical now since it will soon be available to Germans. I had thought it was banned in Germany but it was unavailable for copyright reasons, which have now ended. So Germans can now read the thoughts of the Führer for themselves. I advise them to do so.
(The Olympic Games also make Hitler somewhat topical. It was the Nazis in the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games who first staged the procession of the Olympic torch from Athens, copied ever since. New German broadcasting technology allowed a TV signal to reach into space for the first time. At the other end of the universe, the first TV message that the aliens will hear from Earth is Hitler opening the 1936 Olympic Games.)
Mein Kampf comes in two parts, "A Reckoning", written in 1924 in Landsberg Prison, and "The National Socialist Movement", in 1926. I bought a copy in Cape Town twenty years ago but then only flicked through it for the juicy bits (there aren't many). Now, however, I have grimly plodded through the whole thing. It is mainly dull reading, and worse in the original German I am told. But it does give insights into the nature of evil or, to be more accurate, a revealing lack of insights into the nature of evil. It may have implications for South Africa today.
By far the greatest impression you get from Mein Kampf is the contrast between the genius and massive will that Hitler employed to incarnate his evil ideas and the sheer ordinariness of the ideas themselves. You can read the book through from cover (627 pages in my edition), and you will not come across one piece of bigotry, racial hatred or conspiracy theory that you have not heard a hundred times before in the school playground, on trains or in pubs.
Here is a typical example of his explanation of national economic problems.
"Marxism created the economic weapon which the international world Jew uses for shattering the economic base of the free, independent national states, for the destruction of their national industry and their national commerce, and accordingly, the enslavement of free peoples in the service of the supra-state world finance Jewry."
If you change "Marxism" to "Capitalism", "Jew" to "Imperialist" and "supra-state" to "global", and listen to almost any South African radio talk show on economics, you will hear exactly the same arguments.
Mein Kampf is often described as an exact schedule of what Hitler would do if he came to power. It is not quite that but not far from it. No Russian reading it (including Stalin) could have had the slightest doubt that he intended to seize Russia for its land and raw materials. He makes his foreign ambitions crystal clear and also his domestic aims, including the ending of democracy, the smashing of the German class system, the emphasis on healthy bodies ahead of healthy minds, and the need for the individual to be subservient to the community, which would be lead by the man of will.
Reading Mein Kampf, you cannot avoid hearing the pounding of the drums of war and the rumbling of railway coaches carrying Jews to the gas chambers. But does Mein Kampf explain Hitler's love of war and hatred of Jews? Yes, for the first; no, for the second. For Hitler the only purpose of history, and obviously the only purpose of his own life, is the nation's quest to glory by violent struggle and destroying all enemies. In Mein Kampf, as in all of his speeches, Hitler never promises material comforts or a better life. All he ever promises is struggle, glory, duty, sacrifice and heroism. And the most splendid heroism of all is war - the bloodier the better.
Mein Kampf gives no insight whatsoever why Hitler hated the Jews so much. In fact, as you read it, you cannot help wondering if he did hate them so much, which makes the fact of the Holocaust even more terrifying. None of the people who knew Hitler before he came to power reported any personal antagonism towards Jews. The officer who recommended him for an Iron Cross for his bravery in the 1st World War in 1918 was a Jew. In page after page Hitler blames Jews for all the woes of Germany and all corruption and wickedness in the world. But he never attempts to give any serious substantiation for these views. The only proof he cites of Jewish inequity is the silly "Protocols of the Elders of Zion", a known forgery, used in third rate conspiracy theory. If this is the best he can offer, you can't help feeling that his personal hatred of Jews is not very sincere.
After December 1941, when the war was lost, Hitler ordered the full implementation of his genocide against Jews and other undesirable people. The Nazis were simultaneously very proud and very ashamed of the "final solution" of the Jewish problem. The most chilling words you can ever hear (available on YouTube) are those of Himmler briefing SS troops on the necessity of slaughtering every last Jew, even if they might find it a bit unpleasant from time to time. He sounds like a prim schoolmaster advising the boys that they must spend Saturday afternoon tidying up the litter in the playground. But when the wife of a senior Nazi officer accidentally got onto one of the trains to the death camps, she herself was sent to the gas chambers in case she told what she had seen. Hitler never once went to a camp to see Jews being killed.
When they reported good progress in the genocide, he seemed pleased but not excited. In July 1944, upper class German officers lead by Stauffenberg tried to kill Hitler with a bomb. They failed, were arrested and executed, slowly, by being hanged on thin wire suspended from meat hooks. The execution was filmed, and Hitler watched the film over and over again, giggling with delight as they writhed in agony. He never showed any such emotion in the killing of the Jews. His hatred of Jews was abstract, vague and impersonal, as if the Jews simply meet the requirements of a suitable ideological enemy and an object of blame. It seems to have been a synthetic hatred.
Hitler's socialism shines throughout Mein Kampf. He hated capitalism. He was obviously caught up in the revolutionary mood of Europe after the 1st World War. It was he who put the words "National Socialist" before the "German Workers Party" he had joined in 1919 and then taken over. He is always for the community not the individual; for industry serving the nation not profit; for the economy to be controlled towards a higher purpose. There was much in Marx he agreed with and, even more, much in the Communist Party in Germany he admired but ...
I don't think Hitler could have come to power without the communists. In Mein Kampf he tells how he admired the violence and fanaticism of the Communist Party compared with the insipid, hand-wringing "bourgeois" political parties in Germany. But it was obviously wrong because it was controlled by Jews and didn't understand the importance of race. He tells in some detail how he copied and then exceeded communist methods. He chose the bright red in the Swastika (which he personally designed) precisely to match the red in the Hammer and Sickle.
Where the communists used bands of thugs to smash up rival political meetings and intimidate the populace, he used bigger and more brutal gangs to counter them. They delighted in violence. He delighted in it even more. Where ordinary people in Germany ran scared before the chaos and violence in the streets, he won their support not by promising peace but by leading the most violent gang in the land. At every twist and turn, he outfought and outwitted the communists. He understood them perfectly and they didn't understand him at all. He used them to come to power, and when he came to power he crushed them with effortless ease
Mein Kampf is always at its most interesting when Hitler tells of his methods, which were often new and brilliant, rather than his ideas, which were always commonplace. Hitler had many gifts. He was a skilled organiser. He had a great flair for design and theatre: his Nazi uniforms were copied around the world; his massive rallies, using light and sound, could match anything that Hollywood ever offered; his Swastika became one of the four great symbols of the 20th Century (the other three being the Hammer and Sickle, Mickey Mouse and Coca Cola).
Above all he was a genius in exploiting the media for propaganda. The most shocking parts of Mein Kampf are where he explains how to persuade the common man, whom he describes as having a brain like a pea and a memory like a sieve. Hitler tells that the only effective method is constant repetition of very simple slogans, which is exactly what he used. Hitler is like a crude version of Machiavelli, as honest and ruthless, but without the subtlety.
By far Hitler's most effective tool was oratory. He came to power on his speeches, and is rightly regarded as the greatest mob orator of the 20th Century. Again there are fascinating parts of Mein Kampf when Hitler explains the art of mass oratory. He goes into technical details. All of Hitler's great speeches are masterpieces of preparation, discipline and detail. They are usually in three parts.
At first he is hesitant, as if uncertain of himself, inviting the audience to lean sympathetically towards him. Then he begins to expand, raising his voice, inviting a response from the audience and warming to the response. Then finally the shrieking staccato frenzy - producing hysteria and adulation in the huge crowds. Every word and gesture in these speeches is under strict control. Hitler could lose his temper on cue.
Mein Kampf shows no such discipline. It is rambling, shapeless and repetitive. It would be greatly improved if it were cut to less than half of its actual length. The great orator is no great writer, nor as he explains in the book does he rate the persuasive value of the written word nearly as high as that of the spoken word.
In the Second World War, the most potent fighting force was the German Army. Man for man nothing on Earth could stand up to it. It could only be beaten if it were heavily outnumbered and outgunned. The greatest shock of the War was the quick, crushing defeat of the numerically superior French Army by the German Army in 1940. Nothing like it had happened in the First World War. Why was the German Army so vastly improved? Much of the credit must go to Hitler.
In Mein Kampf, Hitler places a lot of importance on physical training for boys and girls. In power, he put his words into policy. Up and down Germany, young people were conscripted into healthy activities: outdoor camps, PT classes, gymnastics, boxing, hiking and wholesome food. It worked. William Shirer, an American journalist in Germany at the time, wrote: " ... one saw the contrast between the German soldiers, bronzed and clean cut from a youth spent in the sunshine on an adequate diet, and the first British war prisoners, with their hollow chests, round shoulders, pasty complexions and bad teeth ..."
But more important was the mental abilities of the German soldiers. They were intelligent, flexible and quick thinking. They all showed initiative. If the commanding officer was killed, the next in rank could easily take his place and think like a leader. They could read a battle but could quickly adjust if the battle changed. To a large extent this was a legacy of the superb Prussian military schools of the 19th Century. But Hitler improved upon them by making the army more democratic and meritocratic.
He hated the Prussian military class system where you could only become a general if you had a "Von" before your name. Under him promotion was on merit. As a dictator, his democratisation of the Germany army might be compared to that of the French army under another dictator, Napoleon. This is another policy he had announced in Mein Kampf.
In some ways my most disturbing personal image of Hitler is as a clown. It produces in me a strange kind of terror. The man who committed the worst crime in history has also probably inspired more comedians than anybody else in history. Charlie Chaplin in his film "The Great Dictator" got a lot of laughs from American and English audiences for his impersonation of Hitler speeches. He might have got more if he had simply shown newsreels of Hitler's actual speeches. The pale face and cartoon features, the flapping arms, the shrieking - all of these had the characteristics of a sad clown.
My mother, born in England in 1916, told me that whenever BBC radio broadcast Hitler's speeches in the 1930s, the reaction in her household was unvarying: they all roared with laughter. Tragedy and farce are inextricably entwined. Nobody feels this more strongly than small children. There is no topic so horrible that little boys cannot make disgusting jokes about it and be convulsed with mirth. (I think this is what is meant by "Old Adam".) At my primary school (Fish Hoek) in the 1950s, the class comedian was G, who always used to have in his pocket a black comb for use as a moustache in Hitler impersonations. We all knew Hitler had killed six million Jews and had tried to kill some of our parents (including my father on the Atlantic and my mother in Alexandria) but whenever G put on his black comb and started ranted like the Fuhrer we always doubled up with laughter.
Was Hitler himself aware that while he might be a hypnotic master to some audiences he might be a clown to others? It would have been an agonising thought but I'm sure he was much too good a psychologist not to be. Ridicule is deadly dangerous for any politician but far more so for a budding dictator. Hence the all important role of satire in guarding democracy.
Does Mein Kampf have any implications for South Africa? The most obvious thing it does is to expose the nonsense of any comparison of Nazism with Apartheid. Hitler makes clear his loathing of Jews and other enemy races and his intentions to destroy or expel them. Apartheid, which was just an excuse for minority white rule, constantly explained how much it respected black people and wanted them to develop their own culture. (Verwoerd once went out of his way to deny publicly any suggestion that whites were biologically superior to blacks.) The masters of apartheid didn't seem to mind too much the suffering and humiliation of the black majority but that was the inevitable consequence of their policies rather than the deliberate intention.
Only once in Mein Kampf was I actually startled. This was upon reading, "And how the youth had longed for such a slogan!" Hitler was explaining how delighted the youth were when he gave them a doctrine of violence and belonging. Among the hordes of poor, confused, aggressive, unemployed young men in Germany, Hitler appeared like a brutal saviour offering them hope, certainty and ferocious purpose. What if he appeared before the unemployed youth in South Africa today? What if he appeared before those living in fear of criminal gangs and corrupt policemen?
In our townships and squatter camps, drug lords, known to everyone and flaunting their criminality, jeer at authority and ruin the lives of the helpless. Hitler would kill all the drug lords in a weekend. Would the helpless not welcome him? What in fact is the chance of a black Hitler emerging in South Africa and offering the unemployed masses not the anaemic nonsense of Marxism but the red meat of National Socialism?
I don't know. I think not but I can't really explain my reasons for saying so.
Mein Kampf only explains the nature of evil in the sense that it doesn't explain it at all. Looking at the personal life of Hitler tells as little. On YouTube, you can watch a 1958 interview with his sister, Paula Hitler, speaking fondly about "mein brüder". She looks like a sweet, lonely old tannie, with features quite close to Adolf's. She explained how, when they were children playing at Red Indians, Adolf always wanted to be the chief. From there to Auschwitz?
There really is no explanation, if it is an explanation at all, other than Hannah Arend's phrase about the "banality of evil". A potential for immense evil lurks in all the ordinary places of human existence. Do we know how to protect against it? Of course. Eternal vigilance against bullies and dictators, impartial rule of law, a free and critical press, liberal democracy, satire, sharp opposition parties, an automatic suspicion of those in power - all of these would have nipped Hitler in the bud. He rose because they were not in place.
If you doubt the banality of evil, please read "Mein Kampf".
NOTES:
1. Mein Kampf gives an accurate forecast of Hitler's strategies if not his tactics. For example, he makes it clear that he wants to take over Russia and he rules out any pact with Russia. In fact he did have such a pact in 1939.
2. I am aware that communism has killed far more people than Nazism, and that Stalin and Mao each killed far more people than Hitler. But the nature of Hitler's genocide makes it for me the worst crime in history.
3. The Great Dictator was released in 1940. Charlie Chaplin said afterwards that if he had known about the full horror of Hitler's regime he would never have released it. It seems to me all the more reason to release it.
4. Verwoerd, angrily denying the notion that blacks were more like apes than whites, gave counter evidence: "Caucasians also have certain characteristics that Negroids do not have but are ape-like. They have so much hair. Their legs are short in comparison to their upper body." This was like Hitler saying that in some ways Aryans were more ape-like than Jews
5. My copy of Mein Kampf was published by Hutchinson and translated by Ralph Manhein.
This article was published with the assistance of the Friedrich-Naumann-Stiftung für die Freiheit (FNF). The views presented in the article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of FNF.
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