by Baron Bodissey
GatesofVienna.blogspot
TUESDAY, MAY 26, 2009
This is a series of recent articles on The Hitler Myth by Duns Ouray, as published at Het Vrije Volk in the first week of May. It was translated into English by our Flemish correspondent VH, who added some notes and illustrations.
The Hitler myth
By Duns Ouray
One day you just do not believe it anymore.
“Hitler was a unpredictable idiot. A dictator who ruled Germany with an iron fist. He had a special gift: with his speeches he was hypnotizing his audience.
“The industrialists financed the Nazis to make profits from the German rearmament. Hitler was nothing more than a sock puppet of the capitalists. Hence the fierce struggle of the Nazis against the Social Democrats and the Communists.
“The Holocaust was anti-Semitic madness. But without the German law-abiding culture, the Holocaust could not have happened. “Befehl ist Befehl” [An order is an order] was the motto.
“The followers of Hitler were socially frustrated. The middle class were hoping to climb the social ladder with a membership in the NSDAP.
“With the military defeat in 1945, Nazism was consigned to the dungheap of history.”
That was roughly the image of Nazism I grew up with. The image that was presented to you in history class, in films, and in the newspaper. This image we might call “the Hitler myth”.
It is not the first time that myth has won out over reality. Perhaps Plato’s myth about the death of Socrates is the oldest example. Another historical myth is the idea that the [American] Indians had a high culture, a pacifist mentality, and lived in harmony with nature, and that they were exterminated by white settlers.
This poses the following question: when does a myth win out over the reality? My answer: when all parties that benefit prefer the myth over the unwelcome reality. The Indians have an interest in their role as victim. And from the side of Westerners, history is written by left-wing pseudo-intellectuals: they want to paint capitalist society, and Christian America, in as bad a light as possible.
Back to the Hitler myth. At some point in time I started doubting. Just as children start having doubts about Santa Claus. It simply cannot be true. In this I was struggling with the following questions:
If Hitler was a madman, how could he come to power?
Can anyone really hypnotize his audience with a speech?
If Nazism only attracted losers, how could they suddenly grab power?
The Holocaust is a major operation and a historically unique. Would the motive for this have only been anti-Semitism? For anti-Semitism is (literally) as old as the way to Rome.
If Hitler was a sock puppet of the major capitalists, why did he call himself a national socialist?
This was the first speech of Hitler as Chancellor… a strange little man that is just screaming anything. Do you feel the spell of his hypnotic power come over you?
Via a “health care fund” the Dutch State pays the cost of health care of the below average income segment of our people. This fund is hailed as “a pinnacle of civilization”. However, it was established by the Nazis on November 1, 1941 [during the occupation of the Netherlands].
In 2006, the PvdA (Socialists) blocked the loosening of Dutch employment protection. The labor unions even called this employment protection “holy”. However, this measure was also introduced by the Nazis.
The dependent child allowance, one of the shrines of the Christian Democrats [German political party], was introduced by the Nazis in 1941.
After a long leftist life, Jacques van Doorn wrote German Socialism. In this book he demonstrated that historians traditionally portray the conservatives, the Reichswehr, the nobility and industrialists as the trailblazers to Hitler. However, the NSDAP was one of the few political parties in the German Weimar Republic that was not funded by these groups.
Did the massive support for Nazism really suddenly evaporate in 1945?
With so many contradictions, our image of Hitler cannot possibly be based on reality. There is a Hitler myth, but how could that occur?…
The rest of this thought-provoking article, Parts 2, 3, and 4, continue at GatesofViennaBlogspot.
