The Poison Dwarf

Most of the leading cadres of the Third Reich were, on a simple human level, tiresome bores, Martin Bormann being the most boring of all. There are exceptions, most notably Hermann Goring, the regime’s number-one sybarite, a sort of cross between Nero and Falstaff. But the personality who fascinates me most is Josef Goebbels, Minister of Propaganda, widely known, even among his own party comrades, as the poison dwarf.

Dwarf he certainly was; of large head, slight frame and low stature, he was born with a club foot. In every way he was the antithesis of the Nazi ideal of the Aryan superman, all so much ideological window-dressing. He was also an intellectual, of a sort, in a movement made up of so many thuggish boneheads. Above all he was a propagandist of outstanding brilliance, one who always knew exactly how to tailor a political message. As a speaker he was, at a visceral level, even better than Hitler, evidenced, above all, in his infamous 1943 Total War oration.

Now he is the subject of a new biography – Joseph Goebbels by Peter Longerich, published recently in Germany, with an English translation planned. It’s based on a detailed study of the Propaganda Minister’s diaries – he was a life long scribbler -, emphasising the personal as much as the political. He is depicted as a depraved sexual obsessive, full of mawkish sentimentality.

His affairs during his period of power were notorious. Control over the German film industry gave him control over the casting couch, earning him another sobriquet – the ram. Looking at him, looking at his obvious lack of physical attraction, he seems to be a classic example of Henry Kissinger’s dictum, that power is the ultimate aphrodisiac. But even before he achieved senior office he had a variety of affairs, which suggests a personality with sufficient power to overcome his physical handicaps.

Paradoxically, though he promoted the racial ideals of the regime, even if he did not represent them, the closest he came to downfall was over a passionate romance he had with Lida Baarova, an actress and a Slav. It was only after Magda, Goebbels’ wife, appealed to Hitler, that he was forced to drop her. Thereafter his standing in the inner circle went in to decline, only to be revived during the war, when he became Hitler’s most important lieutenant and the real face of the Third Reich.

I’ve read some of Goebbels’ diaries, fascinating documents, an exploration of his personal politics and his psyche. The most fascinating of all is that for the period of 1925 to 1926, leading up to the point when he was appointed Gauleiter of Berlin. Never intended for publication, they give away far more than the later documents. He writes in a staccato, machine-gun like fashion, brief sentences, often little more than exclamations. This is an obsessively vain individual, preeningly so, almost school girlish in his expressions of sentiment, most dripping of all when it comes to his descriptions of Hitler. There is no better illustration that evil is not always banal. Sometimes it’s histrionic.

Exorcising the past

I saw from a report in the press on Saturday that the exhibition on Hitler and the Nazis, currently on show in the Berlin Historical Museum, is drawing the crowds, hardly surprising, considering that it’s the first time ever such an event has been staged. It’s part of a ‘coming to terms’ process long delayed in Germany, which suffered for so many years from a self-induced historical amnesia.

Now comes Das Amt und die Vergangenheit (The Ministry and the Past), an official publication by the Foreign Ministry detailing the department’s activities during the Nazi era. Das Amt has caused a minor stir; it even featured in the main evening news broadcast here not so long ago. The issue is this: the official line long taken by the Foreign Ministry is that it was not complicit in the crimes of the Nazi regime; that it was manned by ‘gentlemen’ in every way different from the downmarket fanatics in other branches of government. This is far from being the case, as Das Amt has confirmed. The Foreign Office was complicit in the very worst crimes, including the Holocaust.

I have to say that I was more than a little surprised at this ‘revelation.’ The historical record is absolutely clear. Though there were certainly diplomats who took an active part in resisting and undermining the regime, most were complicit even in the basest actions. Joachim von Ribbentrop, the Foreign Minister himself, was convicted and hanged on a charge of crimes against humanity, amongst other things. During the War, when normal diplomatic activity all but ceased, one of the remaining functions of the Ministry was to ensure the co-operation of Germany’s allies and satellites in the deportation of their Jewish populations to the death camps.

Das Amt, from what I have read, really only provides additional empirical support without breaking any new ground. It seems to be of greater use as an exercise in myth-breaking, in destroying a cosy and rather snobbish departmental consensus. The way it came about is rather interesting in itself. Joschka Fisher, the first foreign minister from the Green Party, a man with particular sensitivity over Holocaust issues, was disturbed by the self-congratulating complacency of the department, which even saw diplomats eulogising former Nazis in obituaries. The details have destroyed all remaining illusions. Eckart Conze, one of the four authors of the 880-page Das Amt, has gone so far to describe the Ministry under the Nazis as a “criminal organisation” in an interview with Der Spiegel.

The past is a ghost only ever put to rest by understanding, not denial.

The Death of Horst Wessel

If you know anything at all about Horst Wessel it’s probably only because he wrote the Nazi Party marching song named after him. He was murdered in 1930 in Berlin. The KPD, the German Communist Party, may have denied its involvement, but the full facts came out during the trial of Albrecht Höhler. Although the Communist Party did not officially ‘approve’ of assassination it was a tactic they indulged in quite freely.

These are the facts as I understand them. Wessel's landlady, Elisabeth Salm, was anxious to get rid of him and his girlfriend, Erna Jänicke. Salm's former husband had been a member of the Rotfrontkämpferbund, the Communist equivalent of the Sturmabteilung, and it was to them that she went to for assistance on the evening of January 14, 1930. Her appeal was well-received, because Wessel, the leader of Sturm 5, an SA section, in one of the roughest neighbourhoods of eastern Berlin, had been a source of considerable annoyance. The party had even published 'wanted' posters, though no action was taken because they did not know his exact address. With Salm's appearance they now did.

The group that went to Grosse Frankfurter Strasse that same night, where Wessel had his lodgings, consisted of Erwin Rückert, the leader of the second Bereitschaft of the RFKB, his deputy, Albrecht or Ali Höhler, a career criminal with some sixteen convictions, including one for pimping; Sally Epstein; Max Jambrowski, who told Salm that they were going to give Wessel a 'good proletarian hiding'; Joseph Kandulski, Max Zieger and half a dozen others. When they arrived at the apartment Epstein and Zieger were posted outside as sentries, while Ruckert, Höhler and the others climbed the stairs. When Wessel answered the door he was shot in the face by Höhler.

Soon after the incident the local headquarters of the KPD started to spread the story that it had simply been a quarrel between 'pimps' over the affections of Jänicke. Heinz Neumann, the propaganda chief, warned Rückert and his troop that if any of them revealed the truth they would be treated in the same fashion as Wessel. Ali Höhler, the weak link, and now a major source of embarrassment to the Party, was given financial assistance from Roter Hilfe, a Communist aid organisation, to escape to Prague; but once there he was simply dropped. Unable to support himself he returned to Berlin in early February, where he was soon arrested. During his trial, angered by his treatment, he denied the official KPD line. His accomplices were all arrested and also sentenced to prison terms.

After the Nazi seizure of power in 1933 Höhler was murdered by the SA (not the Gestapo, as commonly said). Zieger and Epstein were re-tried and sentenced to death and all of the others sent to concentration camps, including Elizabeth Salm, who died at Belsen in 1945.

I’m posting the song below for the record.

Walther Darré-the Father of Green Fascism

Walter Darré, a leading member of the Blut und Boden (Blood and Soil) movement, and later Nazi Minister of Agriculture, deserves to be better known as the father of Green Fascism. There are many aspects of this thinking that could quite easily be fitted in to the Ecology Movement. For example, in his capacity as Reich Minister for Agriculture, he was an early exponent of organic farming. When one strips away the racism from Blood and Soil and the other aspects of his oeuvre, then the familiar patterns emerge: the need for new farming techniques; a radical rethinking of the links between agriculture and industry; he even called for an end to 'globalisation', though in a different form of words!

His first moves as Minister of Agriculture was to introduce security of tenure for medium and small farmers, followed by the implementation of a fair pricing system for their produce. He also wrote a series of articles, including one on the dangers of erosion. It was his view that soil was a living organism, part of a cycle of growth and decay, which, if misused, would have a serious impact on the quality of the food produced He was thus opposed to intensive forms of industrial farming and the unrestricted use of insecticides and chemical fertilisers. The problem for him was that his ideas on food production and the environment were at variance with the ultimate needs of the German war economy, and he was demoted in 1942.

After the war he continued to defend and promote his ideas on small-scale and sustainable farming, including an attempt to found a society for the protection of the environment, right up to his death in 1953. I have a feeling that Prince Charles and Darré would have got along just fine.

Heinrich Himmler and the Nazi Millenium

Himmler had his own pet scheme for eastern settlement, which could be subsumed within the general thrust eastwards for lebensraum, but was quite distinct from the Generalplan Ost. All of the details are to be found in The Master Plan: Himmler Scholars and the Holocaust by Heather Pringle.

The Himmler Plan aimed at more than just lebensraum: it was a bizarre scheme for creating a rural idyll in western Russia, harking back to earlier modes of existence, and a more 'authentic' and Germanic way of life. By this, racially pure soldier-farmers would live in medieval-style German houses.

These ideas emerged in part from a work of 1929 by Himmler's close associate, Walther Darre, entitled Farming as a Source of Life for the Nordic Race. Himmler began to move towards a fuller elaboration of his plans with the foundation in 1935 of the Deutches Ahnenerbe Studiengesellschaft für Geistesurgeschichte, or Ahnenerbe for short, meaning 'something inherited from our forefathers. The Ahnenerbe scholars investigated a whole variety of things, from ancient house designs, 'Nordic' animal breeds and even, by Himmler's specific request, the sexual practices of the ancient German tribes! A model farm was also established at Mehrow to the east of Berlin, where some of the notions were tested.

It was after the invasion of Russia that Himmler began to look to wider horizons, working in collaboration with Konrad Meyer, a senior planner and agricultural scientist, on a scheme that could be presented to Hitler. This was called the Master Plan East. By this Himmler and Meyer envisaged the creation of three huge colonies. The first, stretching south of Leningrad, was called Ingermanland; the second, embracing chunks of eastern Poland, Lithuania and Latvia, was known in the plan as Memel-Narew-Gebiet, and the third, incorporating large parts of the western Ukraine and Crimea, was Gotengau.

All three of these areas were to be completely 'Germanised' within a twenty year period. All Slavs and the 'racially unwanted' were to be killed or enslaved, and the areas repopulated with small villages of German and SS settlers. Each village, Himmler told Felix Kersten, his personal masseur, "will embrace between 30 and 40 farms. Each farmer will receive up to 300 acres of land, more or less according to the quality of the soil. In any case a class of financially powerful and independent farmers will develop. Slaves won't till this soil, rather, a farming aristocracy will come into being, such as you still find on the Westphalian estates." The villages would be dominated by a manor house, occupied an SS or Nazi party leader, a little bit like the feudal lord of the manor.

Such was Himmler's view of the Nazi Millenium

William Shakespeare, Playwright of the Third Reich

Did you know that Shakespeare was favoured by the Nazis? Well, he was, performed even when Schiller, one of the greatest German poets and playwrights was not. Consider some of the following.

In 1934 the French government banned, in permanence, performances of Coriolanus because of its perceived negative qualities. In the international protests that followed came one from Germany, from none other than Joseph Goebbels.

Although productions of Shakespeare's plays in Germany itself were subject to 'streamlining', he continued to be favoured as a great classical dramatist, especially so as almost every new German play since the late 1890s onwards was the work of left-wingers, of Jews or of 'degenerates' of one kind or another. Politically acceptable writers had simply been unable to fill the gap, or had only been able to do so with the worst kinds of agitprop. In 1935 Goebbels was to say "We can build autobhans, revive the economy, create a new army, but we...cannot manufacture new dramatists."

With Schiller suspect for his radicalism, Lessing for his humanism and even the great Goethe for his lack of patriotism, the 'Aryan' Shakespeare it had to be. Of Hamlet one critic wrote "If the courtier Laertes is drawn to Paris and the humanist Horatio seems more Roman than Danish, it is surely no accident that Hamlet's alma mater should be Wittenberg." A leading magazine declared that the crime which deprived Hamlet of his inheritance was a foreshadow of the Treaty of Versailles, and that the conduct of Gertrude was reminiscent of the spineless Weimar politicians!

Weeks after Hitler took power in 1933 an official party publication appeared entitled Shakespeare-a Germanic Writer, a counter to those who wanted to ban all foreign influences. At the Propaganda Ministry, Rainer Schlosser, given charge of German theatre by Goebbels, mused that Shakespeare was more German than English.

After the outbreak of the war the performance of Shakespeare was banned, though it was quickly lifted by Hitler in person, a favour extended to no other. Not only did the regime expropriate the Bard but it also expropriated Elizabethan England itself; a young, vigorous nation, much like the Third Reich itself, quite unlike the decadent British Empire of the present day. And why did Germany not produce its own Shakespeare? Why, the answer to that was easy: England, unlike Germany, had been free of Jews for three hundred years prior to his birth!

Clearly there were some exceptions to the official approval of Shakespeare, and the great patriotic plays, most notably Henry V were shelfed. But interestingly the reception of the The Merchant of Venice was at best lukewarm (Marlowe's The Jew of Malta was suggested as a possible alternative) because it was too ambigious and not nearly anti-semitic enough for Nazi taste. So Hamlet it was, along with Macbeth and Richard III.

Mention of that particular play allows me to finish on a note of humour; for you see the leading Nazis were not beyond scoring points against each other. In 1937 the Prussian State Theatre, under the control of Herman Göring, put on a performance of Richard. To the visible astonishment of the audience the King was depicted in Fascist style uniform with a club foot! As he shambled about the stage, malevolent, poisonous, murderous, it was all too clear to all who this was meant to be. Göring beamed!

Hitler and the Occult

It maddens me when I see references, in both fiction and fact, to Adolf Hitler's supposed interest in occult forces. He did not have an astrologer, as some have alleged.. In fact he was altogether contemptuous of the practice, and astrologers were among one of the many groups persecuted during the Third Reich.

There were, however, some among the leadership prepared to take the practice seriously, either for political ends or out of simple superstition. Heinrich Himmler and Rudolf Hess were most notable amongst the latter. The man who came closest to being the 'court' astrologer was Karl Ernst Krafft, who was arrested in May 1941 following Hess's flight to Scotland, when Hitler, in his fury, ordered a fresh purge of occultists and astrologers of all kinds. Goebbels joked at this time that it was odd that not one amongst the group was able to predict what was about to happen to them!

Fear and Loathing

I come across people on some of the social networks I belong to who express some Nazi sympathies, not people, I have to say, with whom I have any direct interaction, if I can avoid it. Some of them say that they want the right to declare their own pride of race, ‘white pride’, in the way that others express, say, black or brown pride. This is usually followed with a catalogue of complaints about this race or that ethnicity. The truth is, of course, that one does not need symbols of ‘white pride, certainly not Nazi symbols, if one has sufficient confidence in oneself and one’s inheritance. Such an identity is an expression, rather, of deep forms of fear and self-loathing, a fear of confronting oneself, a fear of confronting an essential truth: there are people who would always be at the bottom of the heap no matter how the human race was structured. I would go so far as to say that hatred of others, hatred of other races, is a form of self-defence, a way of misting the mirror. In the end if the all of the out-groups disappeared, if humanity were reduced to a homogenous whole, the mirror would demist. Then these people would see themselves for what they truly are. That is the real horror.