Tag Archive for: Adolf Hitler

VIDEO: Hitler’s Early Days As A Communist

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There is photographic, video and contemporary reports of Adolf Hitler being elected into the Socialist Bavarian People’s State and the Communist Bavarian Soviet Republic. While historians have acknowledged that this happened, they’re reluctant to come to any conclusions regarding it (since it will fundamentally undermine their own narratives). In this video, we’re going to dive into the evidence and the debate surrounding this topic. Was Hitler a Communist in 1919? Let’s find out.

WATCH: So, Hitler was a Communist in early 1919

Hitler: Essential Background Information – University of Kentucky

Adolf Hitler (1889-1945) is unquestionably the central figure in the story of the Holocaust.  It was the combination of his virulent hatred of Jews and his success in creating a political movement that was able to seize control of Germany that made the campaign to exterminate the Jews possible.

Hitler’s origins:  Hitler was born in a small town in Austria in 1889.  He was the son of a local customs official and his much younger third wife.  Hitler’s father was an illegitimate child and it is uncertain who his father was, but there is no evidence for the legend that this unidentified grandfather was Jewish.  Hitler’s father was harsh and distant. He had a closer relationship with his mother, and her death from cancer when he was 17 was traumatic for him.

Hitler had a normal education.  As a young man, he showed no special talents.  He wanted to study art, and moved to Vienna after his mother’s death in hope of being accepted to art school, but was turned down for lack of talent.

Sources of Hitler’s anti-Semitism:  Because we have very little reliable information about Hitler’s early life, it is hard to determine exactly when he became a confirmed anti-Semite.  His own account, in his book Mein Kampf, is not entirely accurate:  by the time he wrote it, he wanted to make it appear that he had adopted anti-Semitic ideas quite early in his life.  Prejudice against Jews was widespread in the early 20th century, but there is no evidence that Hitler’s family was particularly anti-Semitic.  Discussions of Hitler’s antisemitism focus on three periods in his life:

  • The Vienna years (1909-1913):  Hitler later claimed this was when he developed his antisemitic outlook.  Vienna had a large Jewish minority (about 10% of the population when Hitler lived there).  It was also a hotbed of ethnic conflict, as members of all the different populations of the Austrian Empire (Czechs, Poles, Croats, Hungarians) migrated to the rapidly growing capital.  Hitler observed the success of the city’s popular mayor, Lueger, who was regularly re-elected on a virulently anti-Semitic program.  He also probably read some of the widely circulated racist and anti-Semitic literature that was easily available in the city.  Many of these pamphlets also claimed that Jews were the main architects of modern capitalism, and that they lived off the sweat of honest non-Jewish workers.  On the other hand, Hitler was a regular visitor in at least one Jewish family’s home, and his efforts to support himself by selling paintings were made possible primarily by Jewish art dealers.  In other words, Hitler had not yet made anti-semitism the center of his life during this period, despite his later claims.
  • The war years and the defeat of Germany (1914-1919):  although he was an Austrian citizen, Hitler volunteered to serve in the German Army at the start of World War I.  He served through all four years of the conflict, although he rose only to the rank of corporal.  He identified completely with the German cause, and was deeply disturbed by the defeat of 1918.  Like many disappointed soldiers, he believed that the army had been “stabbed in the back” by traitors.  Although German Jews had loyally supported their country during the war, they were more likely than other Germans to welcome the new, democratic Weimar Republic established after the defeat.  This led to accusations that Jews were responsible for Germany’s defeat.  In addition, the war had led to the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the establishment of the Bolshevik or Communist regime there, devoted to the overthrow of capitalism.  In 1919, there was a short-lived attempt to create a Communist government in Germany as well.  Enemies of the Communists pointed to the role of a few Jews in this movement and labeled Communism a Jewish conspiracy.  Modern scholars, particularly Hitler biographer Ian Kershaw, tend to see these years, rather than the Vienna period, as the time when Hitler’s ideas about Jews really became fixed.  This focuses attention on the impact of the war, rather than the ethnic hatreds in pre-war Austria.
  • The first years of the Weimar Republic (1919-1923):  After the war, Hitler lived in Munich, a city overrun with bitter ex-soldiers and others angry at the new democratic government in Berlin.  He began to associate with some of the many groups formed to agitate against all the evils affecting Germany:  capitalism, Communism, the unpopular Treaty of Versailles, democracy, and the Jews.  By September 1919, Hitler had clearly come to see the Jews as the organizing force behind these problems.  He also began to speak of Germany’s need to conquer additional territory—Lebensraum or “living space”—for itself, at the expense of the “Jewish Bolsheviks” in Russia.  There was nothing original about his ideas.  He did begin to make a name for himself, however, because of his unusual speaking ability.  By 1920, he had become one of the most popular agitational speakers in Munich.  He took over one of the many small ultra-right-wing groups, the German Workers’ Party (later renamed National Socialist German Workers’ Party, or Nazis for short) and built it up into a larger group, although its support was still mostly limited to Munich and surrounding areas.  Anti-Semitism was a regular part of Hitler’s message throughout this period.  By 1923, he thought anger against the Weimar Republic was widespread enough to make the overthrow of the government possible; he wanted to set up a right-wing government, but did not yet imagine himself as its leader.  This Beer Hall Putsch (Nov. 9, 1923) failed when the army and the police refused to support it.  Hitler was arrested, and his movement seemed to have failed.  During this period, Hitler became an effective propagandist for anti-Semitism, but his ideas on the subject had formed earlier.

The Stages of Hitler’s Rise to Power (1924-1933)
After the Beer Hall Putsch in 1923, Hitler was tried and sentenced to prison.  Most observers assumed that his political career was over.  The extreme economic problems that had weakened the Weimar Republic in its first few years eased starting in 1924, and fewer people were attracted to political extremism.

  • 1924:  In prison, Hitler writes Mein Kampf, setting out his ideas.  In his absence, it becomes clear that no one else can create a successful ultra-right-wing movement
  • 1925-28:  Hitler, released from prison, reconstitutes the Nazi Party under his exclusive leadership.  The Party does very poorly in elections, but this period allows Hitler to recruit a small but devoted group of followers, including many who would be leading figures in the Nazi regime after it came to power.
  • 1929-32:  the start of the world economic depression following the crash of the United States stock market in October 1929 gives Hitler a chance.  As unemployment skyrockets in Germany, voters turn against parties associated with the Weimar Republic.  The Nazis score a series of successes in state elections.  Hitler benefits from the deep divisions among the other German political parties.  The Communists hope to profit from the Depression.  They blame Germany’s problems on capitalism, call for a revolution, and refuse to cooperate with any of the others parties.  Conservative nationalist parties blame parliamentary democracy and the Versailles treaty for Germany’s problems.  They hope to use the economic crisis to overturn the constitution and restore an authoritarian system similar to the pre-war monarchy.  They see Hitler as a potentially useful ally.  The Social Democratic Party is the strongest defender of the democratic system, but blames the “bourgeois” pro-capitalist parties for the economic crisis.  The Catholic Center party has the greatest weight in the government, but has no remedy for the Depression.  By contrast, the Nazis offer a simple explanation of the crisis—it’s the fault of the Jews—and a simple program for ending it.  In national parliamentary elections in September 1930, the Nazis score an unexpected success, winning 18% of the vote and becoming the second-largest party (after the Social Democrats).  In 1932, Hitler runs for president against the celebrated war hero Hindenburg and wins 37% of the vote.
  • 1932-1933:  An unpopular coalition government led by the Center Party fails to gain support, and new parliamentary elections are called in July 1932; Hitler’s party wins 37% of the vote, while the Communists get 16%.  No majority coalition in favor of democracy can be established any more.  Various right-wing politicians compete with each other to create a government that will rule by decree.  Hitler is offered a place in one of these schemes, engineered by von Schleicher, in August 1932, but refuses because he would not have full control.  New elections are held in November 1932 to break the deadlock.  For the first time since 1929, the Nazis’ share of the vote goes down, to 32%.  Fearing that his moment may be about to pass, Hitler becomes more conciliatory to Schleicher.  On January 30, 1933, an agreement is announced:  Hitler will be named Chancellor (prime minister).  Despite the broad support for the Nazis, the party will have only four seats in the cabinet.  Schleicher and other conservatives expect Hitler’s extremism to undermine his popularity; they will then be able to dismiss him and keep power themselves.

Significant points about Hitler’s rise to power: (1) Hitler’s success owed a great deal to the weakness of democracy in Germany; (2) it took the Great Depression to create the conditions in which Hitler could come to power; (3) although his party did become the largest in Germany, Hitler was not elected to office; the Nazis never won an absolute majority of votes, even in the final elections held after they came to power in March 1933; (4) Hitler became Chancellor thanks to the calculations of right-wing nationalist politicians who thought they could use his popularity to destroy the Weimar system.

The best biographies of Hitler:  historians rely on the three serious and thoroughly researched biographies of Hitler.  There are other good books about Hitler, but there is also an enormous literature of very dubious quality dealing with him, which often relates rumor as if it was fact.  The three essential books about Hitler are:

  • Alan Bullock, Hitler: A Study in Tyranny.  Originally published in 1952, this book is now somewhat dated but still very readable and essentially accurate on the stages of Hitler’s rise to power.
  • Joachim Fest, Hitler.  Originally published in 1973, this is the most important examination of Hitler’s life by a German scholar.
  • Ian Kershaw, Hitler (2 vs., 1999 and 2000):  Even longer and more detailed than Bullock and Fest, Kershaw’s recent biography incorporates the latest research on topics such as Hitler’s early life, and shows why many of the stories about Hitler included in earlier biographies are no longer considered reliable.  This will undoubtedly be the standard biography of Hitler for many years to come.

©2024. Dr. Rich Swier. All rights reserved.

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The Nazi Roots of Hamas

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What the true origins of Hamas reveal about its nature.

On Oct 7, Hamas, a terrorist organization born in part out of a collaboration between Nazis and Islamists, carried out the greatest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust.

The butchery of men, women and children and the elderly, was not only ‘Nazi-like’, it was in some ways the final act of a Nazi crime nearly eight decades in the making.

In 1946, the Muslim Brotherhood held its founding conference in Gaza at the Samer Cinema. The movie theater which had opened two years earlier and would be shut down, along with much of Gaza’s movie theaters as the Islamist movement strengthened its grip over the area, represented the secular Western culture that the Islamic organization wanted to destroy.

It was a modest beginning for the group that would eventually become known as Hamas.

The Muslim Brotherhood’s expansion into Israel began a year earlier in 1945. The Brotherhood’s foreign backers, the Nazis, had surrendered earlier that year. The thousand pound checks which had helped take the Brotherhood from just another fringe Islamist theocratic movement to a dominant force in Egyptian political culture would no longer be coming. And Nazi Germany’s armies would not be arriving to help them kill all the Jews.

Without the Nazis, the Brotherhood no longer had the money or any protection from the British, who might seek to punish their Nazi collaboration, or the Egyptian monarchy which was worried that the Islamist group was seeking to overthrow it. By 1948, Egypt had banned the Brotherhood and Hassan al-Banna, its charismatic leader, had been shot dead in the street a year later.

Al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, had admired Nazi organizations and methods. A British report noted that he had made “a careful study of the Nazi and fascist organizations. Using them as a model, he has formed organizations of specially trained and trusted men who correspond respectively to the Brown Shirts and Black Shirts.”

The Muslim Brotherhood from which Hamas sprang had been built in imitation of the Nazis.

The Nazis and the Brotherhood had fundamental religious and ethnic differences but shared common goals: especially when it came to the Jews. A Nazi agent who helped funnel money to the Brotherhood reported on one of its conferences calling for Jihad in Israel.

Hitler’s Mufti, Hajj Amin al-Husseini, had helped bring the Muslim Brotherhood together with the Nazis. And it was Husseini, who after their defeat, provided the focus for the Brotherhood.

Hajj Amīn al-Husseini had met with Hitler, urged him to exterminate the Jews of Israel, and recruited Muslims to fight for the Nazis. He had hailed the Muslim Brotherhood as “the troops of Allah” while Al-Banna praised Hitler’s Mufti as the “hero who challenged an empire and fought Zionism, with the help of Hitler and Germany. Germany and Hitler are gone, but Amin Al-Husseini will continue the struggle.”

The Muslim Brotherhood and Husseini’s Jihadis in Israel would carry on Hitler’s work.

The defeat of Nazi Germany marked the end of the hope that the legions of the Third Reich would storm into Egypt and Israel, and that their local allies like the Brotherhood and the Mufti would be able to wipe out the Jews and all their political adversaries across the region.

Instead the Brotherhood would have to replicate the Nazi model, building a political organization with a paramilitary arm that would seize power in Egypt, Gaza and across the Muslim world.

The Muslim Brotherhood set up cells across to Israel beginning in Jerusalem.

Al-Bana turned over this mission to Said Ramadan, his son-in-law and a key Brotherhood figure who would later usher in an alliance with the Saudis that would allow the organization to bring in new wealth and expand worldwide. In Europe. Ramadan would direct the rise of the central Muslim Brotherhood operation in Munich, at a mosque set up by ex-Nazi Muslim soldiers who had defected to the Third Reich during WWII. A CIA report from the 1950s described Ramadan as a “fascist type” who was obsessed with driving the Jews out of Israel.

Setting up Brotherhood organizations across Israel was more than an expansion, it was a mission. With the Nazis gone, invading Israel was a way to allow the Brotherhood to build up its military capabilities without triggering an immediate crackdown by the authorities.

The Brotherhood’s new capabilities were aimed at Israel, but also at Egypt and at shoring up the power of local clans. Its presence in Gaza was part of an alliance with important families, including the Shawwas, who had been close to the Ottoman Empire and were mistrusted by the British. Said al-Shawwa, the Ottoman mayor of Gaza, had served on the Supreme Muslim Council alongside Hajj Amīn al-Husseini. And the Gaza Brotherhood would go on to be headed by Zafer Sahwa whose experience had come out of the Islamic Scouts.

The Scouting movement had struck a different chord in the Muslim world than it did the UK. Islamic scouting was explicitly meant to prepare young boys for Jihad. Some Islamic scouting movements were Nazi inspired. Al-Husseini’s scouting movement in Israel called themselves the ‘Nazi Scouts’ and dressed in Hitler Youth outfits. The Muslim Brotherhood had founded its own scout group “based on the concept of Jihad” and also modeled on the Hitler Youth.

In the months before Israel’s declaration of independence, Hassan al-Bana arrived in Gaza to witness the first wave of assaults by Brotherhood forces against Jewish communities.

Kfar Darom, a beleaguered Jewish village in Gaza, was the first target. After months of siege, the Muslim Brotherhood’s battalion attacked the village of Kfar Darom where dozens of Israeli militia members protected 400 men, women and children. The Brotherhood’s attacks were beaten back with determined resistance until its Jihadists were forced to retreat leaving behind seventy of their dead. Among the Jihadi attackers was an Egyptian named Yasser Arafat.

The Brotherhood had been defeated, but only temporarily. When Israel forcibly removed the Jewish communities of Gaza in 2005 to end the Israeli presence in Gaza, Hamas leader Mahmoud Zahar entered the Kfar Darom synagogue and laid claim to it in the name of Islam.

The Muslim Brotherhood’s first Jihad failed badly, but it succeeded in its true goals. Its role in the invasion of Israel alongside the Egyptian military built an alliance. After Muslim Brotherhood mobs rioted against the British in the streets, Egyptian officers used the prearranged opportunity to seize power. The relationship between the Egyptian military and the Muslim Brotherhood was rife with tension from the beginning and like so many such relationships in the region, the internal rivalry was redirected into violence against non-Muslims. In this case once again Israel.

The Brotherhood’s mobs had paved the way for a military coup by destroying Egypt’s westernized nightlife, including its theaters. In Gaza, they were once again tasked with doing the military’s dirty work by attacking Israel, but once again the core purpose of the Brotherhood was to ‘Islamize’ Gaza, and eventually Egypt and the whole world, through its terror campaign.

Long before the Six Day War, during which Israel reclaimed Gaza, Muslim terrorists known as ‘Fedayeen’ or ‘those who die for Allah’ struck across the border with the aim of murdering Jews. Terrorist atrocities included the Massacre at Scorpions’ Pass during which the men, women and children on a bus coming back from a beach town were massacred.

The alliance between the Egyptian military and the Muslim Brotherhood was the first true modern Islamic terrorist operation. Egyptian military officers trained and dispatched terrorists out of Gaza to cross the border and murder ordinary Israelis. The Egyptian government dismissed the atrocities as the work of local Bedouin Arabs over whom it had no control.

The Israelis knew better, but the plausible deniability established by the Egyptian government and the Brotherhood was good enough for the United Nations. When Israel struck back at the terrorists, it was condemned for attacking civilians and when it targeted the Egyptian officers behind the attacks, it was accused of provoking a regional war. Terrorism had transformed a war between nations into a conflict between a state and insurgents posing as civilians.

Seventy years later, this is still the role that Hamas plays for Iran and Qatar among others.

In exchange for waging war on Israel, the Muslim Brotherhood received financing, training and the authority to maintain control over those areas that it used for its operations. Under the umbrella of a Jihad against the Jews, it was able to enforce Islamic law and maintain a ruling class made up of its members and influential families allied with the Brotherhood.

Israel’s defeat of Egypt in the Six Day War and subsequent liberation of Gaza left the Brotherhood and other terrorist groups adrift. Deprived of secure bases in Gaza, a new generation of ‘Palestinian’ terrorist groups was launched under the Soviet umbrella, most famously the PLO, claiming to pursue a ‘Palestinian’ state through international terrorist attacks like airplane hijackings and the Munich Massacre at the 1972 Olympics.

The international scale of the newly born ‘Palestinian’ movement was made possible by Soviet backing which provided allies and safe houses with Marxist terror groups across Europe. The Muslim Brotherhood lacked that global foothold although under operatives like Ramadan it was working hard to replicate the infrastructure of mosques and religious centers that it had used to gain power in places like Gaza across America and Europe.

The Muslim Brotherhood today dominates Islamic groups in America and Europe because of these efforts, but at the time its terrorism lacked the scope that the Communist alliance provided the ‘Palestinians’. And yet while Arafat became an international star, the Muslim Brotherhood in Gaza was busily digging in and building an Islamic infrastructure that would outlast him.

The Muslim Brotherhood in Gaza was less interested in the fictional construct of ‘Palestinianism’ than in controlling the mosques, the educational system and recruiting young men to fight for it. Where the PLO and groups liked it worked from the ‘outside in’, the Brotherhood worked from the ‘inside out’. Instead of fighting on a global stage, it worked on ‘Islamizing’ Gaza.

The Israeli authorities, like the Americans and Europeans, paid little attention to the Brotherhood. Religious violence seemed outmoded in the era of Marxist terrorism.

The Egyptian authorities had understood that the real threat came from mosques and religious schools, but Israeli officials, unfamiliar with Islam and disdainful of it, did not take it seriously. They certainly did not want to give the impression that they were religiously intolerant. During the liberation of Jerusalem, the government had allowed the Muslim religious authorities to retain control over the Temple Mount, the holiest site in Judaism, to prove their tolerance.

The Israeli tolerance for the Brotherhood led the PLO to accuse it of being an Israeli creation. Hamas and the PLO would later spend years accusing each other of this, the worst thing imaginable, working for the Jews. The PLO’s insults would then be repeated by leftist and fringe right politicians and activists who would claim that Israel had “created” Hamas.

Hamas had technically predated the official rebirth of the State of Israel. It had always been there under various names as part of the Gaza Muslim Brotherhood. Israel had not created it, but much like most Western nations, the Israelis were guilty of tolerating it, providing it with the permission it needed to operate and acceding to what seemed like religious requests.

Instead of suppressing the Muslim Brotherhood in Gaza, the Israelis viewed its mosques and religious schools as a benign alternative to the PLO. They were looking for radical students planting bombs, not men praying in mosques. And the Brotherhood, as it did in America and Europe, and in the two years until the Oct 7 massacres, had a knack for appearing benign.

In the 1970s, Islamic terrorism had not yet become a commonplace concept. Few understood  that Islam would become the next great threat after Communism. And while the Israelis chased the PLO, the Gaza Muslim Brotherhood built up its infrastructure that would emerge as Hamas.

A decade later, the Brotherhood’s Mujama al-Islamiya, the Islamic Center, a seeming charitable organization, was reinvented as Hamas or the Islamic Resistance Movement. The mosques, schools and social welfare institutions had been a terrorist organization all along. When Hamas hides missiles under mosques, schools and hospitals, it’s doing what it was doing all along.

Hamas was a charity before it was a terrorist group. And it was a terrorist group before it was a charity. This is typical of Muslim Brotherhood organizations and owes something to the Nazis. Hamas terrorism is theologically Islamic, but it had learned from the Nazis and the Marxists, two movements that had profoundly shaped the modern Arab Muslim world, how to develop and build secret societies in the form of political organizations and how to use them to seize power.

The 1988 Hamas charter freely mixes Koranic antisemitism with Goebbelsian rants about the Jews. There is the classic genocidal Hadith that looks forward to the day “when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees” and “the stones and trees will say ‘O Moslems, O Abdullah, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him’” and the claim that the Jews are behind “the Freemasons, The Rotary and Lions clubs” and “alcoholism” that reads like it came from Der Sturmer.

The Islamic mass murder of Jews goes back to the days of Mohammed. The Muslim Brotherhood’s members did not need the Nazis to tell them to kill Jews.

But the Nazis helped finance the Muslim Brotherhood with the specific aim, among others, of killing Jews. The Nazis helped show the Muslim Brotherhood new ways of organizing, distributing propaganda and waging war. And that changed the history of the world.

The Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood continued to spin off splinter groups, some directed at a domestic power grab, others at Israel, and still others at the rest of the region and the world. Al Qaeda is dominated by such a splinter group. As are most non-Shiite terrorist groups. And Muslim political organizations, like CAIR in the United States, are products of the Brotherhood.

The Nazis were defeated, but they helped build a successor movement that is waging war, political and military, around the world. Hamas is just one of the many organizations birthed by the Brotherhood, but it is one of the few in whose origin story the Nazis had a significant role.

The Nazis had wanted the Muslim Brotherhood to wage war on the Jews in Israel.

On Oct 7, Hamas, an organization born in part out of a collaboration between Nazis and Islamists, carried out the greatest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust.

Those who defend the massacre are not just collaborating with Hamas, but with the Nazis.

AUTHOR

DANIEL GREENFIELD

EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Meet the First American Journalist to Interview Hitler—and the First Expelled From Nazi Germany

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In a 1990 interview, legendary English singer and songwriter David Bowie opined that being famous was not itself “a rewarding thing.” The co-composer (with John Lennon) of the 1975 funk rock hit, Fame claimed that “The most you can say is that it gets you a seat in restaurants.”

Fame is certainly fickle. Some people get it but don’t deserve it; others don’t get it when they do. It can also be disappointingly fleeting.

Its enemies include short memories, ideological bias, and new generations.

Fanny Crosby comes to mind. When my grandparents were young, millions of Americans were singing her songs. One President of the United States after another (21 in all) wanted to meet her. When she died in 1915, she was widely regarded as among the best known and most beloved women in the country. Now, I’d wager not five percent of Americans could tell you a thing about her.

Another example of fame won and lost, the subject of this two-part essay, is Dorothy Thompson. Does that name ring any bells?

Thompson deserves to be far better remembered than she presently is. Most Americans of just 80 years ago could tell you exactly who she was. Born in 1893 in Lancaster, New York, she was broadcasting news and commentary on the radio at a time when women were widely supposed to stay in the kitchen. As a foreign correspondent in the late 1920s and 1930s, she was “the undisputed queen of the overseas press corps, the first woman to head a foreign news bureau of any importance,” recounts one of her several biographers, Peter Kurth.

Her thrice-weekly newspaper column, begun in 1936, was syndicated nationally. It ran in 170 papers read by tens of millions of Americans. For a quarter century (from 1937 until her death in 1961), she authored a separate monthly column in Ladies’ Home Journal. She was known as “the First Lady of American Journalism” by 1940.

She was courted by presidents, prime ministers and potentates and admired by men and women alike for her trenchant writing. A celebrity herself, there was hardly another celebrity who didn’t relish a few moments with her. Over the years in movies and on stage, such actresses as Kathryn Hepburn, Lauren Bacall and Lois Nettleton played characters based on Thompson. She counted among her best friends the fellow journalist Rose Wilder Lane, an influential libertarian political theorist.

In December 1931, thirteen months before Hitler took power as Germany’s Chancellor, Thompson was working in Munich. She had tried since Hitler’s failed Beer Hall Putsch in 1923 to speak with the Nazi leader but he proved elusive to her and other foreign journalists.

In his biography of Thompson, American Cassandra, Kurth revealed that when she read Hitler’s political manifesto Mein Kampf in the 1920s, she “recognized it for what it was”:

…[N]onsense, ‘one long speech’ filled with lunatic diatribes about nations and races, ‘eight hundred pages of Gothic script, pathetic gestures, inaccurate German, and unlimited self-satisfaction.’

Some read Mein Kampf and, like Katherine Atholl in Britain, warned of the coming danger it foretold. Others, like Thompson, were initially more dismissive, thinking it a disgusting rant that would go nowhere. She scoffed at the future Fuehrer’s boast that Germans would come to embrace Nazi rule. “Imagine a would-be dictator,” she sneered, “setting out to persuade a sovereign people to vote away their rights.” Of course, by making the Nazis the largest bloc in the Reichstag, that’s exactly what they did.

Hitler was likely unaware of Thompson’s personal view of Mein Kampf when he finally consented to a meeting with her in December 1931. Expecting his Nazi Party to win big in upcoming elections in March 1932 (they did), he decided it was time to engage with the world. He agreed to sit down with Dorothy Thompson. The result, her 1932 book titled I Saw Hitler!, proved embarrassing for both of them.

Hitler, she wrote, came to his scheduled interview an hour late and accompanied by a bodyguard “who looked like Al Capone.”

Biographer Susan Hertog, in Dangerous Ambition: Rebecca West and Dorothy Thompson, describes the meeting:

As she watched and listened to the Nazi leader, the psychodrama began to unfold. Shy and cool at the outset, Hitler whipped himself into a frenzy, raising his voice to a crescendo, all the while banging his fist on the table to hammer his point. He spoke in a monologue, as if he were addressing an audience of thousands, and he seemed to be looking right through her. Cunningly shifting the focus of the meeting toward his own agenda, he sidestepped all but one of her questions…Dorothy was shocked to think that this great nation, this citadel of art, philosophy, and science, would voluntarily hand over its rights to a thug.

Though she detested the Nazi movement, Thompson offered an assessment of its leader in I Saw Hitler! that vastly depreciated his potential. Of her 1931 meeting, she recalled:

When finally I walked into Adolph Hitler’s salon in the Kaiserhof Hotel, I was convinced that I was meeting the future dictator of Germany. In something less than fifty seconds I was quite sure that I was not. It took just that time to measure the startling insignificance of this man who has set the whole world agog…He is formless, almost faceless, a man whose countenance is a caricature, a man whose framework seems cartilaginous, without bones. He is inconsequent and voluble, ill poised and insecure. He is the very prototype of the Little Man.

Thompson would eat those words in short order but in the meantime, the interview boosted her worldwide profile considerably.

Why did an intelligent person like Thompson, who knew well the language, history, politics, and culture of Germany, so egregiously underestimate Hitler? Youthful naivete may partially explain it, but I believe the answer is primarily her overestimation of a people in crisis. Defeat in World War I followed by hyperinflation, political instability, and then the Great Depression combined to form the cauldron in which Germans stewed. By the early 1930s, they were more ready to flush their freedoms away than she (and many others) imagined.

Upon becoming Chancellor in January 1933, Hitler moved swiftly to consolidate power. “In less than a month,” wrote the reporter Rothay Reynolds, bureau chief in Berlin for Britain’s Daily Mail, “Germans had lost freedom of the press, freedom of speech, and freedom of assembly.” But Hitler’s popularity at home was high and rising.

Thompson by then was back at home in Vermont with second husband and Nobel laureate Sinclair Lewis. Soon, however, developments in Europe beckoned. When Nazi agents assassinated the Austrian Chancellor, Engelbert Dollfuss, in July 1934, she knew she had to cover the aftermath. Thompson flew to Austria.

After a short stint in Vienna, she headed by car to Berlin. A few days later, she learned the hard way what Hitler had thought of her book. She recounted the episode in a piece for Harper’s magazine, “Goodbye to Germany”:

I was still in my room in the morning when the porter rang up from the desk. ‘Good morning, madam, there is a gentleman here from the secret state police.’ ‘Send him up,’ I said. He was a young man in a trench coat like Hitler’s. He brought an order that I should leave the country immediately within forty-eight hours, for journalistic activities inimical to Germany.

In the space of three years, Dorothy Thompson had become the first American journalist to interview Hitler and the first American journalist to be expelled from Nazi Germany. Though she didn’t at first believe that Hitler would talk his way to power, she more than made up for lost time once he did. In her columns in the late 1930s, she frequently and mercilessly assailed him and his Nazi thugs. That alone should earn her fame and recognition to this day and forevermore.

What were Dorothy Thompson’s political and economic views? Did she see any resemblance between the fascism of Hitler and the New Deal of Franklin Roosevelt? What influence did Rose Wilder Lane’s libertarianism have on her? Why is she largely forgotten today?

These are questions I will explore in my next article. Stay tuned.

For Additional Information, See:

The Last Call at the Hotel Imperial: The Reporters Who Took on a World at War by Deborah Cohen

Dangerous Ambition: Rebecca West and Dorothy Thompson by Susan Hertog

Dorothy Thompson: A Legend in Her Time by Marion K. Sanders

American Cassandra: The Life of Dorothy Thompson by Peter Kurth

Dorothy Thompson and Rose Wilder Lane: Forty Years of Friendship, Letters 1921-1960 by William Holtz (editor)

Reporting on Hitler: How Foreign Correspondents in Nazi Germany Battled to Expose the Truth by Will Wainewright

Dorothy Thompson’s Political Guide: A Study of American Liberalism and Its Relationship to Modern Totalitarian States by Dorothy Thompson

The American Journalists Who Defied Nazi Intimidation (PBS video)

AUTHOR

Lawrence W. Reed

Lawrence W. Reed is FEE’s President Emeritus, Humphreys Family Senior Fellow, and Ron Manners Global Ambassador for Liberty, having served for nearly 11 years as FEE’s president (2008-2019). He is author of the 2020 book, Was Jesus a Socialist? as well as Real Heroes: Incredible True Stories of Courage, Character, and Conviction and Excuse Me, Professor: Challenging the Myths of Progressivism. Follow on LinkedIn and Like his public figure page on Facebook. His website is www.lawrencewreed.com.

EDITORS NOTE: This FEE column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

ZOA Accuses Yad Vashem of ‘appalling’ censorship of Jerusalem Mufti’s ties to Hitler

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Less than two weeks ago, the world’s largest Holocaust Museum, Jerusalem-based Yad Vashem, was reported to have removed a photo of Haj Amin al Husseini — the grand Mufti of Jerusalem — with Hitler.

Israel National News gave the background:

I would like to introduce a notorious Nazi SS general, a leading Muslim cleric and the father of a nation – all in one.

This person is Haj Amin al Husseini.

Husseini was the powerful patriarch of the leading Arab clan in Palestine in the first half of the twentieth century. He used his political power and religious influence for his life’s motif – the murder of Jews.

The article describes the influential role of this high-ranking Muslim cleric in working with Hitler and his henchmen to murder Jews, including Jewish children, during the Holocaust:

Husseini intervened in a deal that would have saved a train load of Jewish children for a bribe. Husseini would not allow one Jewish child to escape the gas chambers.

If anyone feels a need to conceal or undermine any part of history to avoid offending Muslims, he or she needs to ask the question: what kind of Muslim would not find the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem’s role in murdering Jews loathsome to begin with?

The decision by Yad Vashem to remove the photo of the Mufti tying him to Hitler did not go over well with Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) President Morton Klein, who “slammed the museum and its head Dani Dayan for an ‘appalling’ censorship of history.” Klein didn’t mince words, nor should he have done so, since the decision by Yad Vashem has worrying implications, particularly given the contemporary rise in Islamic antisemitism throughout Europe and North America.

It is no secret that the Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas grossly undermines the Holocaust: in his PhD dissertation, which he later turned into a book, Abbas claimed that the number of victims in the Holocaust was less than a million. He also once claimed that “the Nazi mass murder of European Jews was the result of their financial activities, not anti-Semitism.” Abbas has also vowed that not one Israeli will live in a future Palestinian state.

The Palestinian jihad (expressed to the world as a “resistance”) against Israel is foundational in the Palestinian National Charter, the PLO Charter, Fatah Charter, and the Charter of Hamas. It is broad-based, as is reflected in the fact that five neighboring Arab states attacked Israel in 1948. The same jihadist impulse is very much alive today, and gaining in influence. A founding father of this movement of hatred is the Mufti, Haj Amin al Husseini.

Yet the Chairman of the Yad Vashem Directorate, Dani Dayan, argued that “the notorious Mufti’s role in the Holocaust was ‘marginal,’ his meeting with Hitler having ‘a negligible practical effect on Nazi policy,’ and thus the famous image depicting him with Hitler ‘was never displayed’ in the museum.

The Breitbart news article states that the photo was “allegedly removed and never returned during renovations in 2005.” Mort Klein says that he can “vouch and state as a matter of fact that I, Morton Klein, personally saw that picture on Yad Vashem’s wall when I was there.” 

Dayan also argued that “the museum would not fall prey ‘to any political agenda,’ while warning that demands to expand focus on the Mufti are tantamount to forcing the museum to ‘partake in a debate on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,’ and may even ‘legitimize Holocaust distortion’ by others.”

Is Dayan insinuating that the facts presented in the Israel National News article, The missing photo of Hitler and the Mufti of Jerusalem, about the Grand Mufti are exaggerated or distorted? Is he claiming that Klein did not see the photo he insists he saw? Or could it be possible that the head of Yad Vashem never knew that the photo was once displayed?

These are pertinent questions that need followup, given Dayan’s explanations. Yad Vashem is a fine museum that teaches expertly about the Holocaust. To remove or undermine an important part of history such as the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem’s alliance with Hitler in the Holocaust is a cause for concern.

According to the official German record of the meeting between Adolf Hitler and the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem on November 28, 1941 at the Reich Chancellory in Berlin, Husseini told Hitler that “the Arabs were Germany’s natural friends because they had the same enemies as had Germany, namely the English, the Jews, and the Communists.” He also thanked Hitler for supporting “the elimination of the Jewish national home.”

Husseini was an Arab nationalist leader who presented himself “as a preeminent defender of Islam and of Muslim rights in Palestine.” He vehemently opposed Jewish immigration to their historic homeland. To this day, the Nazi swastika is often seen flying in Gaza. Husseini is specifically named in the archived records of Heinrich Himmler, Reich Leader of the SS and Chief of the German Police.

Yasser Arafat’s birth name was Rahman Abdel-Raouf Arafat al-Qudwa al-Husseini. He was a blood relative of the Grand Mufti, and learned a great deal from him. His Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) was created for the purpose of “liquidating” Israel. To this day, that is what the Palestinian “resistance” and “liberation” are about: annihilating Israel “from the River to the Sea.” The Palestinian quest to delegitimize Israel with the objective of obliterating the Jewish state has become a globally “acceptable” form of antisemitism.

The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance includes this in its definition of antisemitism:

Manifestations might include the targeting of the state of Israel, conceived as a Jewish collectivity. However, criticism of Israel similar to that leveled against any other country cannot be regarded as antisemitic.

No country’s existence is questioned more than that of Israel. No one even questions the violent jihad conquests in the Middle East, which turned it into Islamic territory. Yet they question the irrefutable archeological evidence and historic claims of Jews in their tiny homeland.

The history of antisemitism very much includes the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. A picture speaks a thousand words, as is proven by the photo of Hitler and Grand Mufti. Appeasement, meanwhile, never works. It does the opposite: it encourages more antagonism. Dani Dayan knows this. He declared in 2017 that the “real war” is the “intimidation, disruption and attempted silencing of pro-Israel voices on U.S. college campuses.” He was addressing the phenomenon of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement targeting the Jewish state. A month before his statement, he faced the hatred of the Palestinian movement against Israel when was “repeatedly heckled and disrupted during a speech at the City College of New York. There, students from the CCNY chapter of the Students for Justice in Palestine and other anti-Israel groups protested and temporarily disrupted the event.”

Supporters of Israel look to Yad Vashem to tell the truth. Mort Klein makes a powerful case for Yad Vashem to return the picture to its museum, certainly not for political purposes, but to do justice to the history of the Holocaust, in which Husseini played such an important role.

EXCLUSIVE: ZOA Accuses Holocaust Museum of ‘Appalling’ Censorship of Palestinian Mufti Ties to Hitler

by Joshua Klein, Breitbart, December 5, 2021 (thanks to Tom):

[CLICK HERE FOR A PHOTO OF HITLER WITH MUFTI HAJ AMIN AL-HUSSEINI]

Following a published letter by the head of “Yad Vashem” — Israel’s premiere Holocaust museum and research center — defending its refusal to display an infamous photograph of leading Palestinian “Mufti” [Islamic legal authority] Haj Amin al-Husseini meeting with Nazi leader Adolf Hitler during the Holocaust, Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) head Morton Klein slammed the museum and its head Dani Dayan for the “appalling” censorship of history.

Klein blasted Dayan on Friday, calling his defense of the infamous image’s absence “abominable” and criticizing his denials of its removal, while urging him to “reinstate” the picture.

After years of pressure and a recent op-ed by a longtime tour guide at the site attacking the museum’s stance, Dayan addressed the issue on Thursday, claiming the notorious Mufti’s role in the Holocaust was “marginal,” his meeting with Hitler having “a negligible practical effect on Nazi policy,” and thus the famous image depicting him with Hitler “was never displayed” in the museum…..

Klein, who has headed the nation’s oldest pro-Israel organization for nearly two decades, called out the museum for attempting to “appease” Palestinians.

“As a child of Holocaust survivors born in the displaced persons camp in Germany who lost most of my family to Hitler, I find it really appalling for Dani Dayan to actually be censoring out a part of Holocaust history at the major Holocaust museum in an attempt to appease the Palestinian Arabs,” Klein said.

He also accused the museum of seeking to placate “a Palestinian Authority that pays Arabs to murder Jews, names school streets and sports teams after Jew killers, promotes hatred and violence in every aspect of their culture, and has refused offers of statehood, clearly showing the issue is not land, but Israel’s destruction.”…

Klein noted the Mufti’s “significant” role during the Holocaust, particularly his plans to construct a concentration camp while claiming that painting his “historic” role in the Holocaust as “marginal” is “turning a blind eye to the truth of history.”

“The Mufti helped train the SS Waffen [Nazi military] battalion to kill Jews, and he and Himmler were planning a concentration camp in Samaria [the West Bank],” he said. “It didn’t happen because Germany lost the war, but he was planning with him.”

“It’s all history,” he added. “It’s not a secret.”

Calling the Mufti “one of the monsters in Jewish history,” Klein reiterated that having “one of the leading figures in the Arab world praising Hitler and urging him to kill Jews” is “not a minimal, trivial part of Holocaust history.”

“One of the leaders of the Arab world was working with and promoting Hitler,” he said. “He was so close to Hitler and his plans to murder Jews that [SS officer Heinrich] Himmler made the Mufti an honorary SS general.”

“That’s not trivial,” he added. “That’s part of history.”

He also noted the Mufti’s involvement in “training Bosnian forces to kill Jews.”…

COLUMN BY

CHRISTINE DOUGLASS-WILLIAMS

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EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Biden is Wrong: US Didn’t Have Good Relationship With Hitler — But the New York Times Did

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Did the United States really have a good relationship with Adolf Hitler before he started World War II? Joe Biden made this bizarre claim during Thursday’s debate with President Trump. Trump said of North Korea’s Kim Jong Un: “North Korea, we’re not in a war. We have a good relationship. People don’t understand. Having a good relationship with leaders of other countries is a good thing.”

Biden shot back: “We had a good relationship with Hitler before he, in fact, invaded Europe, the rest of Europe. Come on.”

Come on, Joe! The U.S. didn’t have a good relationship with Hitler before he “invaded Europe. The German dictator was, however, beloved in certain quarters, including the editorial offices of the New York Times.

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt didn’t attack Hitler directly before the war began, but relations between the U.S. and Nazi Germany were by no means good. In September 1938, Roosevelt sent a telegram to Hitler lecturing him about the importance of keeping the peace and stating: “The conscience and the impelling desire of the people of my country demand that the voice of their government be raised again and yet again to avert and to avoid war.” Implying that Hitler was a warmonger was hardly a hallmark of cordial relations between the two countries.

Failing to get a satisfactory response from Hitler, on October 11, 1938, Roosevelt announced that he was increasing national defense spending by $300 million (over $5 billion in today’s dollars). No one thought that money was going to build up our defenses against Britain and France.

Some in America, however, loved the Führer.

The historian Rafael Medoff recently noted that on July 9, 1933, just over five months after he became Chancellor of Germany and years after his virulent anti-Semitism and propensity for violence had become notorious worldwide, the New York Times published a fawning puff piece on Hitler that rivals even today’s media adulation of Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and Nancy Pelosi in its one-sidedness, myopia, and disdain for essential facts.

Pulitzer Prize-winning “journalist” Anne O’Hare McCormick traveled to Berlin to become the first reporter from an American news outlet to interview the new chancellor, and she was an intriguing choice for the Times editors to make to conduct this interview, as in the presence of this man whose name has become justly synonymous with evil, she was decidedly starry-eyed: “At first sight,” McCormick gushed, “the dictator of Germany seems a rather shy and simple man, younger than one expects, more robust, taller. His sun-browned face is full and is the mobile face of an orator.”

As if that weren’t enough, she continues with a description of the Führer as outlandish and adulatory as likening the supremely zaftig Stacy Abrams to a supermodel: “His eyes are almost the color of the blue larkspur in a vase behind him, curiously childlike and candid. He appears untired and unworried. His voice is as quiet as his black tie and his double-breasted black suit.”

McCormick labored to portray Hitler as more modest than his public persona might suggest: “In the country he has plastered with banners and insignia he wears only a small gold eagle in his buttonhole. No flag or swastika is in sight.” He is also, she signaled to her readers, reasonable and genuine: “He begins to speak slowly and solemnly but when he smiles — and he smiled frequently in the course of the interview — and especially when he loses himself and forgets his listener in a flood of speech, it is easy to see how he sways multitudes. Then he talks like a man possessed, indubitably sincere.” What’s more, “Herr Hitler has the sensitive hand of the artist.

The intrepid New York Times reporter doesn’t seem to have asked Hitler if he had a significant other, but no one would have been surprised after reading all this if the two of them had become an item.

However, McCormick’s interview was not all about Hitler’s sun-browned face and blue larkspur eyes. In the 29th paragraph of a 41-paragraph article, she recounts that she asked him: “How about the Jews? At this stage how do you measure the gains and losses of your anti-Semetic [sic] policies?” Hitler answered, she said, with “extraordinary fluency,” and she records his answer – a tissue of victim-blaming and excuse-making – at considerable length.

Then, McCormick recounts, “seeing the second part of the question was not going to be answered, your correspondent referred to the position of women.” Ah, yes: when the interviewee doesn’t want to answer the tough question, go on to something easier. The Times and its allies today always keep this in mind when interviewing Democrats. This surrender mollified Hitler as well: “Herr Hitler’s tension relaxed. He smiled his disarming smile.”

Little did Anne O’Hare McCormick realize, as Hitler’s blue larkspur eyes twinkled in her direction and his disarming smile made her heart flutter, that all these years later, the New York Times would still be publishing puff pieces about authoritarian thugs. And old Joe Biden, as he contemplates the approaching end of the presidential race from his Delaware basement, can rest secure in the certainty that no matter what outrageously false or crazy thing he says, that same New York Times will cover for him, too.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Twitter piles on Richard Dawkins over Eugenics tweet

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The eminent expert in communicating science botches his explanation.

Twitter may not be the best medium for explaining the science of eugenics to a wary public, as the sometime Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science at the University of Oxford, Richard Dawkins, discovered this week.

Professor Dawkins, now aged 78, renowned as an evolutionary biologist and as the author of best-sellers about genetics and atheism, most recently Outgrowing God, chose to tweet about eugenics. This may have been prompted by a Twitter storm about back room boys at 10 Downing Street (of which more below). His words were not calibrated to endear him to the public:

Reactions? They ranged from “You absolute pin-headed simpleton” to “How’d the application of this play out in 1940s Europe?” to “The thing about people who believe in eugenics is that they always believe themselves to be the superior kind of human. No-one ever thinks that it could make people like them obsolete”.

Dawkins had to back-pedal very quickly to explain himself:

Dawkins was clearly not playing in the First Division this week. Professors in the Simonyi chair are supposed to make the public sympathetic to science, as its website explains:

The task of communicating science to the layman is not a simple one. In particular it is imperative for the post holder to avoid oversimplifying ideas, and presenting exaggerated claims. The limits of current scientific knowledge should always be made clear to the public.

Even scientists were exasperated. Dave Curtis, the editor of Annals of Human Genetics (a journal which was once titled Annals of Eugenics), posted a long Twitter thread explaining why humans cannot be bred like cattle and roses, contra Professor Dawkins. First, “humans have long generational times and small numbers of offspring. This would make any selective breeding process extremely slow”. Second, humans live in very different environments and most of the variation in their traits is due to the environment. It would be very difficult to identify individuals with ideal traits.

“We should bear in mind,” he adds, “that harsh selection pressures have been acting on humans up to the present and that there may be very little scope for overall improvement. In any event, we can confidently say that selective breeding to improve desirable traits is not practicable.”

The long and the short of the matter, in Dr Curtis’s opinion, is this: “People who support eugenics initiatives are evil racists. Also, modern genetic research shows that eugenics would not work.”

It’s surprising that Professor Dawkins thought that his puff for human eugenics would be applauded. James Watson, who won Nobel Prize in 1962 for discovering DNA, has become a non-person after expressing eugenicist opinions which were interpreted as racist.

Just a whiff of eugenics was enough to force the resignation of one of Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s advisors recently. Opposition research on Andrew Sabisky, a political “contractor” at 10 Downing Street, uncovered six-year-old opinions which were quickly denounced as eugenic and racist.

For example, in a comment on a 2014 blog post made by a user called “Andrew Sabisky”, it was suggested that compulsory contraception could eliminate a “permanent underclass”. It read: “One way to get around the problems of unplanned pregnancies creating a permanent underclass would be to legally enforce universal uptake of long-term contraception at the onset of puberty.”

Having used internet history to make Sabisksy history, the media moved on to savaging Dominic Cummings, a key advisor to the PM who had hired Sabisky . A blog post from 2014 contained ideas which were described as eugenic. He suggested that the UK’s National Health Service IVF service should offer human eggs sorted by IQ to make a level playing field for rich and poor parents who want babies with a high IQ.

Prof Richard Ashcroft, a medical ethicist at City University, told The Guardian that this was nonsense: “This idea that we can use biological selection to improve individuals and society, and that the state through the NHS, should facilitate this, really is pure eugenics.”

The fracas demonstrates the schizophrenic attitude of the public towards eugenics. On the one hand, the word “eugenics” evokes racism and Nazism. It is this sense which has been weaponized to undermine the new PM. On the other hand, parents who want perfect children are encouraged to eliminate “defective” embryos. The media happily provides a platform for bioethics to promote such ideas. Another Oxford professor, Julian Savulescu has often explained why he supports eugenics:

“We practise eugenics when we screen for Down’s syndrome, and other chromosomal or genetic abnormalities. The reason we don’t define that sort of thing as ‘eugenics’, as the Nazis did, is because it’s based on choice. It’s about enhancing people’s freedom rather than reducing it.”

COLUMN BY

MICHAEL COOK

Michael Cook is editor of BioEdge.

FOR MORE ARTICLE ON EUGENICS CLICK HERE.

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EDITORS NOTE: This MercatorNet column is republished with permission. © All rights reserved.

On his 127th Birthday Hitler Takes Selfie with Planned Parenthood

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Hitler_Holding_Paper_HashtagPlanned Parenthood activists were reminded today of their organization’s pro-Nazi roots when an unexpected supporter arrived today to join their rally, introducing himself as Adolf Hitler.

Sporting an iconic “drip pad” mustache, Mr. Hitler unfolded his hand-written sign in support of Planned Parenthood’s founder, Margaret Sanger, assuring everyone that he is fully on the side of weeding out the unfit in order to create a cleaner race.

“I admire Margaret Sanger enormously, her courage, her tenacity, her vision,” Hitler told the stunned onlookers. “Mrs. Sanger was a huge proponent of the forced sterilization program of the Third Reich, leading a heroic personal fight to purify the white race by exterminating Jews, Slavs, and especially blacks, through government-mandated abortions.”

Speechless at first, Planned Parenthood supporters finally found words to express their indignation by repeatedly chanting “black lives matter,” hoping to shout down Hitler before any of the media reporters could record his comments.

“I understand,” Hitler nodded. “As Margaret Sanger said, we don’t want the word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population. We just need to quietly pull out these human weeds and stop all those reckless breeders from spawning degenerate and defective children who never should have been born, nicht wahr? All the feel-good rhetoric aside, this is the purpose of your organization anyway, is it not?”

The group responded with another chant, “Racist, sexist, anti-gay, Adolf Hitler go away!”

“The more things change, the more they stay the same,” observed Hitler dreamily, while taking a selfie in front of the Planned Parenthood building with his phone camera. “We used to chant back in the day, just like that.”

After communicating with the activists in this manner for about half an hour, Hitler folded his sign and inquired if anyone knew where the closest chapter of the Ku Klux Klan was, preferably the one where Margaret Sanger used to speak about her views on pure race and eugenics. Since no one could give him directions, Hitler entered “KKK” into Google map search on his iPhone and slowly walked away, looking for the nearest hotspot.

Here’s a blank picture of “Hashtag Hitler” for kollektive usage.

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EDITORS NOTE: This column originally appeared on The Peoples Cube. While this column is political satire the link between the Eugenics movement in the United State, Margaret Sanger and Planned Parenthood are real. Please read our column: Planned Parenthood Openly ‘Targets’ Black Community. In this column you will read the words of Margaret Sanger that mirror what is said in this column.

Why the Holocaust Should Matter to You by Jeffrey Tucker

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People tour the nation’s capital to be delighted by symbols of America’s greatness and history. They seek out monuments and museums that pay tribute to the nation state and its works. They want to think about the epic struggles of the past, and how mighty leaders confronted and vanquished enemies at home and abroad.

But what if there was a monument that took a different tack? Instead of celebrating power, it counseled against its abuses. Instead of celebrating the state and its works, it showed how these can become ruses to deceive and destroy. Instead of celebrating nationalist songs, symbols, and stories, it warned that these can be used as tools of division and oppression.

What if this museum was dedicated to memorializing one of history’s most ghastly experiments in imperial conquest, demographic expulsion, and eventual extermination, to help us understand it and never repeat it?

Such a museum does exist. It is the US Holocaust Museum. It is the Beltway’s most libertarian institution, a living rebuke to the worship of power as an end in itself.

I lived in Washington, DC, when the Holocaust Museum was being built, and I vaguely recall when it opened. I never went, though I had the opportunity; I remember having a feeling of dread about the prospect of visiting it. Many people must feel the same way. Surely we already know that mass murder by the state is evil and wrong. Do we really need to visit a museum on such a ghastly subject?

The answer is yes. This institution is a mighty tribute to human rights and human dignity. It provides an intellectual experience more moving and profound than any I can recall having. It takes politics and ideas out of the realm of theory and firmly plants them in real life, in our own history. It shows the consequences of bad ideas in the hands of evil men, and invites you to experience the step-by-step descent into hell in chronological stages.

The transformation the visitor feels is intellectual but also even physical: as you approach the halfway point you notice an increase in your heart rate and even a pit in your stomach.

Misconceptions

Let’s dispel a few myths that people who haven’t visited might have about the place.

  • The museum is not maudlin or manipulative. The narrative it takes you through is fact-based, focused on documentation (film and images), with a text that provides a careful chronology. One might even say it is a bit too dry, too merely factual. But the drama emerges from the contrast between the events and the calm narration.
  • It is not solely focused on the Jewish victims; indeed, all victims of the National Socialism are discussed, such as the Catholics in Poland. But the history of Jewish persecution is also given great depth and perspective. It is mind boggling to consider how a regime that used antisemitism to manipulate the public and gain power ended up dominating most of Europe and conducting an extermination campaign designed to wipe out an entire people.
  • The theme of the museum is not that the Holocaust was an inexplicable curse that mysteriously descended on one people at one time; rather the museum attempts to articulate and explain the actual reasons — the motives and ideology — behind the events, beginning with bad ideas that were only later realized in action when conditions made them possible.
  • The narrative does not attempt to convince the visitor that the Holocaust was plotted from the beginning of Nazi rule; in fact, you discover a very different story. The visitor sees how bad ideas (demographic central planning; scapegoating of minorities; the demonization of others) festered, leading to ever worsening results: boycotts of Jewish-owned business, racial pogroms, legal restrictions on property and religion, internments, ghettoization, concentration camps, killings, and finally a carefully constructed and industrialized machinery of mass death.
  • The museum does not isolate Germans as solely or uniformly guilty. Tribute is given to the German people, dissenters, and others who also fell victim to Hitler’s regime. As for moral culpability, it unequivocally belongs to the Nazis and their compliant supporters in Germany and throughout Europe. But the free world also bears responsibility for shutting its borders to refugees, trapping Jews in a prison state and, eventually, execution chamber.
  • The presentation is not rooted in sadness and despair; indeed, the museum tells of heroic efforts to save people from disaster and the resilience of the Jewish people in the face of annihilation. Even the existence of the museum is a tribute to hope because it conveys the conviction that we can learn from history and act in a way that never repeats this terrible past.

The Deeper Roots of the Holocaust

For the last six months, I’ve been steeped in studying and writing about the American experience with eugenics, the “policy science” of creating a master race. The more I’ve read, the more alarmed I’ve become that it was ever a thing, but it was all the rage in the Progressive Era. Eugenics was not a fringe movement; it was at the core of ruling-class politics, education, and culture. It was responsible for many of the early experiments in labor regulation. It was the driving force behind marriage licenses, minimum wages, restrictions on opportunities for women, and immigration quotas and controls.

The more I’ve looked into the subject, the more I’m convinced that it is not possible fully to understand the birth of the 20th century Leviathan without an awareness of eugenics. Eugenics was the original sin of the modern state that knows no limits to its power.

Once a regime decides that it must control human reproduction — to mold the population according to a central plan and divide human beings into those fit to thrive and those deserving extinction — you have the beginning of the end of freedom and civilization. The prophets of eugenics loathed the Jews, but also any peoples that they deemed dangerous to those they considered worthy of propagation. And the means they chose to realize their plans was top-down force.

So far in my reading on the subject, I’ve studied the origin of eugenics until the late 1920s, mostly in the US and the UK. And so, touring the Holocaust Museum was a revelation. It finally dawned on me: what happened in Germany was the extension and intensification of the same core ideas that were preached in the classrooms at Yale, Harvard, and Princeton decades earlier.

Eugenics didn’t go away. It just took on a more violent and vicious form in different political hands. Without meaningful checks on state power, people with eugenic ambitions can find themselves lording over a terror state. It was never realized in the United States, but it happened elsewhere. The stuffy academic conferences of the 1910s, the mutton-chopped faces of the respected professorial class, mutated in one generation to become the camps and commandants of the Nazi killing machine. The distance between eugenics and genocide, from Boston to Buchenwald, is not so great.

There are moments in the tour when this connection is made explicit, as when it is explained how, prior to the Nazis, the United States had set the record for forced sterilizations; how Hitler cited the US case for state planning of human reproduction; how the Nazis were obsessed with racial classification and used American texts on genetics and race as a starting point.

And think of this: when Progressive Era elites began to speak this way, to segment the population according to quality, and to urge policies to prevent “mongrelization,” there was no “slippery slope” to which opponents could point. This whole approach to managing the social order was unprecedented, and so a historical trajectory was pure conjecture. They could not say “Remember! Remember where this leads!”

Now we have exactly that history, and a moral obligation to point to it and learn from it.

What Can We Learn?

My primary takeaway from knitting this history together and observing its horrifying outcome is this: that any ideology, movement, or demagogue that dismisses universal human rights, that disparages the dignity of any person based on group characteristics, that attempts to segment the population into the fit and unfit, or in any way seeks to use the power of the state to put down some in order to uplift others, is courting outcomes that are dangerous to the whole of humanity. It might not happen immediately, but, over time, such rhetoric can lay the foundations for the machinery of death.

And there is also another, perhaps more important lesson: bad ideas have a social and political momentum all their own, regardless of anyone’s initial intentions. If you are not aware of that, you can be led down, step by step, to a very earthly hell.

At the same time, the reverse is also true: good ideas have a momentum that can lead to the flourishing of peace, prosperity, and universal human dignity. It is up to all of us. We must choose wisely, and never forget.

Jeffrey A. TuckerJeffrey A. Tucker

Jeffrey Tucker is Director of Digital Development at FEE and CLO of the startup Liberty.me. Author of five books, and many thousands of articles, he speaks at FEE summer seminars and other events. His latest book is Bit by Bit: How P2P Is Freeing the World.  Follow on Twitter and Like on Facebook. Email.

Turkey’s Prime Minister: Hitler’s Germany exemplifies ‘effective presidential system’

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It is inconceivable that any Western leader would favorably cite Hitler in any context, but in Turkey, citing Hitler doesn’t bring instant opprobrium. Mein Kampf became a bestseller when it was published there in 2005, and Hitler remains popular. Also, a former classmate says Erdogan used to carry a copy around when he was a young man. Hitler’s antisemitism resonates with Islamic Jew-hatred.

“Turkey’s Erdogan says Hitler’s Germany exemplifies effective presidential system,” Reuters, January 1, 2016:

Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan, who is pushing for executive powers, cites Hitler’s Germany as an example of an effective presidential system, in comments broadcast by Turkish media on Friday.

Erdogan wants to change the Turkish constitution to turn the ceremonial role of president into that of a chief executive, a Turkish version of the system in the United States, France or Russia.

Asked on his return from a visit to Saudi Arabia late on Thursday whether an executive presidential system was possible while maintaining the unitary structure of the state, he said: “There are already examples in the world. You can see it when you look at Hitler’s Germany.

“There are later examples in various other countries,” he told reporters, according to a recording broadcast by the Dogan news agency.

The ruling AK Party, founded by Erdogan, has put a new constitution at the heart of its agenda after winning back a majority in a November parliamentary election.

It agreed with the main opposition CHP on Wednesday to revive efforts to forge a new constitution….

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Washington, D.C. 1943: A Tragic History is About to Repeat Itself

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On October 6, 1943, a delegation of American rabbis arrived at the White House for a personal audience with President Franklin Roosevelt. They planned to present to the president irrefutable proof that the Nazis were conducting a wholesale annihilation of European Jews.

As they arrived, the rabbis knew that this was a decisive moment—the last chance to stop the Holocaust before the last of European Jewry was extinguished.  They were denied a meeting.

The ensuing tragedy is, of course, well known. No coordinated Allied rescue was launched. The flames consumed six million Jews. Six decades later, America is ignoring the appeals of the state of Israel concerning Iran’s plans to wipe out the Jews with atomic bombs.

Today, you and I have been chosen by God to stand in defense of Israel. The Jewish people are under attack and facing threats on every side. They need to know that they are not alone, that their Christian friends around the world are standing with them.

The Jerusalem Prayer Team has made our support of Israel and the Holy City plain by building and opening the wonderful Friends of Zion Museum just 600 meters from the Temple Mount. Every day we are telling the true story of Christian love for the Jewish people to hundreds of visitors from all around the world.

We made the decision not to charge people to visit the museum in order to ensure that as many people as possible could be touched by this powerful witness. The operating costs are massive—electricity, maintenance, personnel and more—and we are continuing to improve the experience, including translating the presentation into still more languages. We need your help today so that the light of Christian love will not go out.

Your gift will allow us to continue the wonderful outreach of the Friends of Zion Museum…and feed hungry Holocaust survivors, encourage Believers to join us in prayer, and launch the new Friends of Zion Ambassador Institute. But none of this is possible without your help. Please stand with us in the gap for Israel and the Jewish people with your gift today.

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EDITORS NOTE: The featured image is of the historic Rabbis’ March On Washington in 1943 to stop the Holocaust.

On His 127th Birthday Hitler Takes Selfie with Planned Parenthood

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Hitler_Holding_Paper_HashtagPlanned Parenthood activists were reminded today of their organization’s pro-Nazi roots when an unexpected supporter arrived today to join their rally, introducing himself as Adolf Hitler.

Sporting an iconic “drip pad” mustache, Mr. Hitler unfolded his hand-written sign in support of Planned Parenthood’s founder, Margaret Sanger, assuring everyone that he is fully on the side of weeding out the unfit in order to create a cleaner race.

“I admire Margaret Sanger enormously, her courage, her tenacity, her vision,” Hitler told the stunned onlookers. “Mrs. Sanger was a huge proponent of the forced sterilization program of the Third Reich, leading a heroic personal fight to purify the white race by exterminating Jews, Slavs, and especially blacks, through government-mandated abortions.”

Speechless at first, Planned Parenthood supporters finally found words to express their indignation by repeatedly chanting “black lives matter,” hoping to shout down Hitler before any of the media reporters could record his comments.

“I understand,” Hitler nodded. “As Margaret Sanger said, we don’t want the word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population. We just need to quietly pull out these human weeds and stop all those reckless breeders from spawning degenerate and defective children who never should have been born, nicht wahr? All the feel-good rhetoric aside, this is the purpose of your organization anyway, is it not?”

The group responded with another chant, “Racist, sexist, anti-gay, Adolf Hitler go away!”

“The more things change, the more they stay the same,” observed Hitler dreamily, while taking a selfie in front of the Planned Parenthood building with his phone camera. “We used to chant back in the day, just like that.”

After communicating with the activists in this manner for about half an hour, Hitler folded his sign and inquired if anyone knew where the closest chapter of the Ku Klux Klan was, preferably the one where Margaret Sanger used to speak about her views on pure race and eugenics. Since no one could give him directions, Hitler entered “KKK” into Google map search on his iPhone and slowly walked away, looking for the nearest hotspot.


Here’s a blank picture of “Hashtag Hitler” for kollektive usage.

EDITORS NOTE: This column originally appeared on The Peoples Cube. While this column is political satire the link between the Eugenics movement in the United State, Margaret Sanger and Planned Parenthood are real. Please read our column: Planned Parenthood Openly ‘Targets’ Black Community. In this column you will read the words of Margaret Sanger that mirror what is said in this column.

Real Hero Katharine Atholl: She Warned the World about Hitler by Lawrence W. Reed

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Some people can smell a rat a mile away. Others don’t notice even when the odor wafts right under their noses.

Olfactory proficiency by itself doesn’t make you a hero. But if you’re among the first to pick up the scent and warn others, and then you put your political future on the line to save society, you’ve got something that makes you heroic. As C.S. Lewis wrote in The Magician’s Nephew, “What you see and hear (and smell) depends a good deal on where you are standing; it also depends on what sort of person you are.”

Katharine Margory Ramsey combined courage and character with a great nose for rats. She had principles and the guts to stand by them.

Born of Scottish noble blood in Edinburgh in 1874, “Kitty” (as she was known to close friends) was an accomplished composer and pianist. She became the Duchess of Atholl after her husband succeeded his father as the Duke of Atholl in 1917. Author Lynne Olson, in her superb 2007 book, Troublesome Young Men (about the Tory upstarts in the 1930s who challenged their elder and leader, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain), describes her as a “diminutive woman with large, expressive blue eyes … cultured, diffident, and unworldly, with little interest in calling attention to herself.”

At the urging of her husband and former Prime Minister David Lloyd George, the Duchess stood for a seat in Parliament in 1924. She won. Only two other women had ever before been elected to the House of Commons. She became the first Conservative Party MP to hold ministerial office when Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin appointed her to a junior post in education.

Who was this Scottish Cassandra who dared so publicly to question the subsidies coming their way from the government of her own party?

The men in government assumed Atholl would be quiet and do the womanly thing: whatever she was told. Even Winston Churchill snubbed her at first, telling her directly, “I find a woman’s intrusion into the House of Commons as embarrassing as if she burst into my bathroom.” Many now think of Churchill as the sage who bravely opposed Chamberlain’s policy of appeasing Hitler, but Kitty Atholl was one of those few who worked to stiffen Churchill’s spine when it was still pliable. Churchill later came to appreciate her greatly.

As her years in Parliament wore on, Atholl’s principles deepened, and her courage blossomed. In 1935, she resigned from the leadership position of whip for the Conservative Party because of what she derisively labeled the government’s “national socialist tendencies” in its domestic agenda. She was, in her own way, a precursor to Margaret Thatcher, who was just 10 years old at the time.

The first big rat to catch Atholl’s attention was ensconced in Moscow. Less than a decade after the Bolshevik revolution, the Soviet experiment had attracted naïve acolytes in the West. Reporter Lincoln Steffens famously wrote after his 1919 visit to the USSR, “I have been to the future and it works.”

One of the worst of what Lenin would term “useful idiots” was New York Times reporter Walter Duranty, who, at the height of the Stalin-induced famine in Ukraine that killed millions, denied there was a hunger problem. The Duchess of Atholl was no such fool.

In 1931, Atholl published a 200-page book titled The Conscription of a People. It was a blistering, well-documented indictment of the savage collectivization of life in the Soviet Union. Her investigations revealed that

Russia has carried through revolution on a scale which knows no parallel, and which, even after thirteen years, is as ruthless as in its early days. She has undermined marriage and is rapidly breaking up family life. She wages ceaseless war on all religion. She is responsible for the most comprehensive and continuous experiment in the nationalization of industry, banking and trade that has ever been seen.

Atholl’s book was one of the earliest and most detailed critiques of the communist regime from a high-level British official. Forced labor, the liquidation of the kulaks, mass seizures of property, an extensive secret police network, and an unprecedented diversion of resources to the military meant one thing: the Bolsheviks were a menace to their own people and a growing threat to world peace.

The Duchess decried the British government’s extension of credit to Moscow. “Can those in any country who value liberty regard such a position with equanimity?” she asked. “Are the citizens of the United Kingdom in particular to tolerate any longer the guaranteeing by taxpayers’ money of a system so utterly repugnant to British traditions?”

The rats in Moscow were alarmed at Atholl’s denunciations. Who was this Scottish Cassandra who dared so publicly to question the subsidies coming their way from the government of her own party? (In The Fall of Troy by Quintus Smyrnaeus, Cassandra desperately tried to warn the Trojan people about the peril of a certain large wooden horse.)

After 1933, Atholl’s wrath turned against the rats in Berlin. When she read Hitler’s Mein Kampf in 1935, she entertained no illusions about where he was headed. “Never can a modern statesman have made so startlingly clear to his reader his ambitions,” she noted. She was now on her way to becoming, in Olson’s words, “the boldest Tory rebel of all.”

Even more vigorously than Stanley Baldwin, Neville Chamberlain kowtowed to the Nazi dictator. Those “troublesome young men” in his Conservative Party — such as Churchill, Antony Eden, and Harold McMillan — formed an opposition to appeasement, but at first they focused exclusively on Hitler. They sought to placate Mussolini in Italy and Franco in Spain. Atholl saw all fascist dictators the same way she saw all communist dictators: as evil men not to be trusted, let alone subsidized. She was a constant thorn in the side of men in power who wanted to cut deals with unsavory thugs of any stripe.

In September 1938, the infamous Munich conference gave Hitler a green light to forcibly incorporate the Sudetenland (a Czech region along the border with Germany) into the Third Reich. The hopelessly naïve Chamberlain famously waved the agreement on the tarmac on returning to London. “Peace in our time,” he declared. War seemed to be averted. As much of the world breathed a sigh of relief, Atholl was strongly advised by her husband and others to endorse the Munich accord. She not only refused to do so; she wrote and widely distributed a pamphlet that castigated it.

The prime minister reacted furiously. He strong-armed the local Conservative Party officials in Scotland to select a new candidate for Parliament to replace Atholl, who then resigned from the party and announced she would run as an Independent in the special by-election set for December 1938. The country’s attention was riveted on the fierce campaign that ensued. The prime minister saw to it that Atholl’s opponent received showers of cash and endorsements.

Cowed by Chamberlain, the male anti-appeasement MPs of the party wouldn’t go to Scotland to campaign for the Duchess. Churchill first accepted and then, under pressure, rescinded his approval of an invitation to speak on her behalf. As reported in Olson’s book, he at least sent a letter of endorsement that she distributed before the voting. Churchill wrote,

You are no doubt opposed by many Conservatives as loyal and patriotic as yourself, but the fact remains that outside our island, your defeat at this moment would be relished by the enemies of Britain and of freedom in every part of the world. It would be widely accepted as another sign that Great Britain … no longer has the spirit and willpower to confront the tyrannies and cruel persecutions which have darkened this age.

She lost by a heartbreakingly slim margin. Chamberlain was delighted, but after all the pressure and resources he had brought to bear against her, the verdict was no ringing endorsement of his appeasement policy. When Hitler invaded Poland less than nine months later, Kitty Atholl was vindicated. A humiliated Chamberlain sulked through the remaining few months of his tenure. Out of government, Atholl spent the war years working mightily to relieve the awful conditions of European refugees. She died in 1960 at age 85.

Katharine Atholl had smelled danger and said so, years before the elite of her own political party mustered similar courage. How different might history have been if there were more people like her?

For further information, see:

Lawrence W. Reed

Lawrence W. (“Larry”) Reed became president of FEE in 2008 after serving as chairman of its board of trustees in the 1990s and both writing and speaking for FEE since the late 1970s.

EDITORS NOTE: Each week, Mr. Reed will relate the stories of people whose choices and actions make them heroes. See the table of contents for previous installments.