Germany and England
by Nesta Webster
Chapter VI
HITLER AND THE JEWS
Since, as was shown in the preceding article, the main cause de guerre against Hitler is his treatment of the Jews, it is most urgent for people in this country to know the truth about it. But that is just the difficulty. The British public derives its information from the newspapers or the radio, both of which are largely controlled by Jews and in their turn receive their information from Jewish sources.
Thus all that reaches it comes to it through a Jewish filter. It is only when we read in the papers something about which we ourselves know the truth that we see how grossly the public is misinformed.
Ever since certain Jewish papers abroad announced whilst I was living peacefully with my family in London, that I was really in Austria – a country I have never been to in my life – forming one of a secret Council of Five for carrying out pogroms and political assassinations all over the world, I have realised that there is no limit to the Jewish faculty for invention, and therefore that what appears in the papers with regard to Nazi Germany may be equally devoid of truth.
As long ago as 6 December, 1923, the Jewish World of London announced that “Adolf Hitler has been incarcerated in a lunatic asylum, having been found hopelessly insane.”
Propaganda of the same grotesque kind is carried on by word of mouth and the guileless British public swallows the wildest stories about the man who is represented to it as a sort of ogre eating babies in a cave.
I have seriously been asked whether it is true that Herr Hitler takes pleasure in watching Jews being tortured and even a learned man, accustomed all his life to weighing evidence, told me in a frenzy of indignation that the tortures inflicted by the Nazis equaled those of the Russian Cheka. I asked him for his authority for this statement and he referred me to a book of which he did not know the author’s name or anything about him.
Where however does this savant spend his summer holidays? Very happily – in Germany! At the same time, although a great Dante scholar and in private life the gentlest of men, his hatred of Mussolini is such that he declares himself unable any longer to appreciate the Russian language. To such a pitch of fanaticism may the best brains be brought under Jewish influences!
The first thing therefore to discover with regard to any story of anti-Semite violence is whether it is true or pure invention. Having proved the former the next thing is to find out (a) whether it was ordered by the Government or the act of irresponsible individuals, and (b) whether it was a reprisal for injuries received.
This is where the régimes of Germany and Italy on the one hand and Russia on the other differ so entirely.
In Soviet Russia cruelties far too horrible to be described merely as persecution were and are committed by the State Department once known as the Cheka, having its own locale in the Lubianka with Chinese and Jewish torturers all complete.
Can the Gestapo, or secret police of Germany, in any way compare with this? There is certainly nothing in the nature of the Cheka but there are concentration camps where prisoners are said to be “beaten up” – so for the matter of that are rioters beaten up by the American police. But no evidence of instruments of torture on the Russian or Chinese model has ever been produced.
Is it not moreover the fact that some of the acts of violence committed against the Jews has been spasmodic outbreaks of popular feeling, not ordered by the Government and even in certain cases condemned by it?
Moreover how far were such outbreaks by individual Nazis reprisals for those outrages committed on their comrades?
Here again we see the difference from the cruelties of the Bolsheviks. For the tortures inflicted by the Cheka and the commissars all over Russia have not been acts of counter-violence but barbarities inflicted on innocent men, women and children who had done no harm to anyone.
In Germany on the contrary the most horrible cruelties were committed by the Communists, who in that country as in Russia were predominantly Jews, before Hitler came to power; hundreds of Nazis were assassinated, others blinded or maimed for life, and once the Jewish power was broken they hurled themselves on their former oppressors. This was more particularly so in Austria where Nazi violence was greater than in Germany.
The frightful programme of the German Communist party was no figment of the imagination, as the raid on the Karl Liebknecht Haus clearly proved. There were all the secret preparations for world revolution, underground passages running all over Berlin, plans for blowing it up, and also whole departments devoted to planning the destruction of the British Empire.
Making, however, all allowance for provocation and irresponsible acts that the Nazi government may not have been able to prevent, we cannot help deploring certain of the methods employed against the Jews in Germany and Austria.
Persecution is never justified, and Jew-baiting whether by speech or print is not only cruel but stupid, for it defeats its own ends by enlisting sympathy in other countries with the Jewish cause; Herr Streicher with his Stürmer has doubtless had the effect of bringing many people abroad over to it.
A German tells me that only this kind of propaganda appeals to the uneducated classes in Germany and acts as a continual reminder to them of the Jewish danger. This may be true and the reason why Low’s equally oppressive caricatures of Hitler and Mussolini continue to appear in the British press. There may be no other way of keeping up hatred of the “Dictators” in the minds of the less educated British public.
Those of us who recognise most clearly that the Jewish question must be faced cannot but (?) with that Herr Hitler, on taking over the immense power conferred on him, did immediately forbid any displays of violence and, further, ordain that no Jew should suffer merely on account of his race but only for conduct proved by fair trial to be reprehensible.
Arbitrary imprisonment or punishment is a system which has been abhorrent to every Briton from the time of the Habeas Corpus Act onwards. Again when limiting the number of Jews occupying posts in the professional classes, we regret that this very necessary measure of justice to the Germans should not have been carried out in a manner which could have raised no reasonable protests in foreign countries.
The Nazis in this respect displace the same lack of psychology as the Jews in their attitude to anti-Semitism. For directly the latter detect in anyone the least inclination to oppose Jewish supremacy in any sphere, and fail either by bribery, flattery, or intimidation to win him over, they proceed to attack him. If sufficiently important, in the Press, to injure him in his career even to the point of depriving him of his livelihood, and thus force him into an attitude of anti-Semitism against his will. Both Jews and Germans fail to realize that persecution only strengthens the case of their opponents.
Another accusation frequently brought against the Nazi movement is that it is anti-Christian; if it were so it would be no new thing. For in spite of the piety that prevailed in a large part of old Germany atheism flourished there more freely than in any other country in the world (see my “World Revolution,” p. 309). In 1931 the Russian “League of the Godless” found there its strongest support; a “general offensive against the Christian Church” was planned in Berlin, which was to become the headquarters of the Bolshevist anti-religious campaign. The advent of Hitler to power necessitated the movement being transferred to Czechoslovakia.
Nazi Germany is thus less anti-Christian than the Germany of some years ago, and it takes no part in the militant atheism and revolting blasphemies of the previous Godless movement. Only amongst a portion of the present Nazis the theory of “Nordic” superiority descending from Nietzsche, making of Germans the supermen of the world, has led to a race-ist “religion,” regarding Germany as their only god and the formation of a powerful German bloc in the East of Europe as their final aim.
But this is where these extremists of Nazi-ism come up against another race-ism, for the Jews are still more convinced than their race is superior to all others; indeed in the Cabala the goyim (Gentiles) are denied human attributes – “the Jews alone are to be styled men” – and they look forward to the day when they shall rule the whole world and all other nations shall be wiped out. I admit I find the idea of a German bloc in the East of Europe less unpleasant.
Those Nazis, however, who oppose Christianity on the grounds that it is the outcome of Judaism have surrendered their strongest weapon, since it was this exclusive Jewish race-ism that Christ denounced, preaching instead love for all mankind.
Hitler himself gave the lie to the former theory in Mein Kampf, where he pointed out that Christianity is the very antithesis of Judaism and recalled how Christ drove out with a whip the money-changers from the temple of the Lord.
No one condemned the Jews more severely than did Christ, and one wonders, if He came to earth to-day, how many professing Christians would be willing to receive Him; too often their sympathies are with the money-changers rather than with Him who drove them out. If this was the attitude of some of the German clergy one can understand Hitler’s determination to prevent them propagandizing from the pulpit.
I write however as no blind admirer of Hitler or of Nazi-ism, for, like most Britons, I prefer a regime of greater liberty, such as we enjoyed in the days when England was a free country, to one under which, however necessarily, it is curtailed.
We must not forget that Hitler rendered an immense service, not only to Germany but to all Europe by stemming the tide of Bolshevism when it was flowing westward; later the Berlin-Rome-Tokyo axis was formed for joint action against the Komintern – on the lines advocated by the Netherlands Minister in the famous deleted passage of the British White Paper in 1919* - and Great Britain’s misguided opposition to it made co-operation between our governments in this matter impossible.
*See The Patriot, December 8, 1938.
But Hitler might have realized more clearly that the policy of the British Government, under pressure from the Socialists and Jews, was not that of British patriots who are in exactly the same impotent position as his own Party before 1932, and therefore that in speaking of “England,” this wide difference of opinion should be taken into consideration.
Moreover by driving out the Communists and Jews into other countries in such a way as to enlist sympathy for them, instead of keeping them humanely under control in his own, he disregards the fact that he is helping to spread Bolshevism abroad and actually to strengthen the Jewish Power.
The Nazi theory of Nordic superiority is also rather weakened by the fact that some of Hitler’s worst enemies have been Germans whom he believed he could trust.
The terrible Röhm purge, -- though in no way comparable to the massacre of British officers in their bedrooms in Dublin on 21 November, 1920, of which some of the instigators were received with honour by Mr. Lloyd George at 10, Downing Street, eleven months later -- or again with the recent purges of Stalin, was the result of this misplaced confidence.
Again I cannot understand how a man of Hitler's brilliant intelligence can ever have trusted Ludecke, whom after one interview in 1924 I judged immediately as a man not to be taken seriously, and never again admitted within my door. He departed hurling insults at this country, and the gullible British public has now filled his pockets with money for the book I Knew Hitler, which is in reality a treacherous attack on the leader who at last saw him in his true colours.
Yes, Hitler has not been altogether happy in his choice of friends – and there are perhaps others. . . but what government is free from treacherous elements? Did Mr. Chamberlain ever dream that whilst the whole world rang with applause at his great and heroic work for peace, he would find men of his own country and his own party base enough to attack him? Was there not reason to trust his opinion and that of Monsieur Daladier, formed by personal contact with the Führer, that there was good ground for the hope of peace between the Democracies and the Dictatorships in future?
Great capital has recently been made out of Hitler’s hostile references to France in Mein Kampf, which having been written five years after the war, seemed to breathe a spirit of irreconcilable hatred.
But the point never explained to the British public is that at the time Hitler expressed himself in this manner the French had just occupied the Ruhr, a procedure which those of us who stood by France agreed with her in regarding as the only means for obtaining the reparations due to her by Germany, but which evoked a storm of protest from the Labour Party, the T.U.C., a number of Liberals and Conservatives and also from Mr. Lloyd George, who wrote on the subject with violent indignation in the Hearst Press.
If this was how they felt about France at that moment, Hitler, as a German, can hardly be blamed for describing her in one of those famous passages in Mein Kampf as “the inexorable enemy of the German people,” and if he has declined to omit them from later editions of his book it was because they expressed what he felt at the time they were written.
No author can be expected to rewrite his earlier works because circumstances have led him to adopt a different point of view. Ramsay MacDonald has never asked to withdraw his books in favour of Socialism when he assumed the leadership of a predominantly Conservative Government. But from the moment of Hitler’s accession to power he showed by deeds his change of attitude, and from May 1933, to September, 1938, he repeatedly made attempts to bring about an understanding with France.*
*See Appendix II p. 35.
Unfortunately all these overtures were met with incredulity, just as in England the hand of friendship held out again and again by Hitler was rejected, although during the pre-Hitler era any gesture by the German delegates to the League of Nations was received with rapture. It is not as if any risk would have been a conciliatory spirit, to stop the attacks that were constantly made on him in our Press and to co-operate with him in securing the peace of Europe.
Even if this last offer had proved delusive what purpose could be served by treating it as if it were so and destroying all hope of understanding?
Hitler has never in the past shown himself the enemy of England. Already in Mein Kampf he declared it to be the country with which he most ardently desired German friendship.
Dr. Ernst Hanfstaengl, one of his earliest supporters and later his Foreign Press Chief, told me recently that in those days of 1923, Hitler, in recalling his experiences as a soldier during the terrible years of the War, said that nothing in his eyes seemed more insane and deplorable than the wholesale slaughter between the Germans and English. It was very painful to him to have to fire on Englishmen and at moments the sight of the dead bodies of the splendid Highlanders made him feel quite sick.
These are the sentiments which the war-mongers in our midst are trying to destroy by continued attacks on Hitler for which he naturally feels he is justified in retaliating. If they succeed in exasperating him beyond endurance, to the point of making him cry out: “Then let there be war!” they will have gained their end and we shall have them to thank for the world chaos that will follow.
Those of us who most admire Herr Hitler for his courage and patriotism earnestly wish that he would disregard all such provocations as unworthy of his notice and refrain from retorts which only give satisfaction to his opponents. For nothing could be further from the sentiments he has expressed in the past than to afford the Jews the triumph of seeing the two great Nordic nations, between which he has hoped for friendship, again.
NOTE. – Since this article was written news has come from Germany which adds further emphasis to what is said in it with regard to the persecution of the Jews; but as is also pointed out we must accept with extreme caution all that appears in our Press on the question.
If, however, these reports are true, those of us who stand for the principles set forth by THE PATRIOT from the beginning deplore as much as any other body of opinion the cruelty and injustice of avenging on the whole Jewish population of Germany a crime committed by one of their race. At the same time no evidence has been brought forward to prove the contention that the Jewish boy who so brutally murdered young Herr von Bath was not instigated, whilst the outrages committed by hooligans all over Germany were instigated.
In the case of a political assassination the murderer is always represented as a solitary fanatic and pays the penalty. Those who planned the crime go free – they are too powerful to be brought to justice. The Grand Orient of France which has already instigated so many Masonic murders and the Central European Bureau of the Komintern which since the occupation of the Sudenten land has moved from Prague to Paris keep their own secrets.
Next - Chapter 7: "A War of Hate"