This “iron law of nature” represented the beginning and end of all his lucubrations. From it he drew such lessons as that “all imaginable means” were permissible in the struggle for survival of nations: “persuasion, cunning, cleverness, persistence, kindness, wiliness, and brutality,” or that there was basically no contradiction between war and politics, rather that “the ultimate goal of politics” was war. The idea of such an iron law pervades Hitler’s concepts of justice and morality, which he tried to pattern on what happened in nature. It also underlies his belief in the Fuhrer principle as well as his concern with nationalistic and openly bellicose racial selection. He boasted of his intention of marching over Europe in great “blood-based fishing expeditions” to help blond, pale-skinned human material “spread its blood” and thereby win dominance. Within this philosophy of total struggle, obedience ranked far higher than intelligence, readiness for action far higher than insight, while fanatical blindness became the highest virtue. “Woe unto him who lacks faith!” Hitler sometimes cried. Even marriage was seen as a union for purposes of selfperpetuation, while the home was defined as a “fortress from which the battle of life is waged.” Using rough analogies between the animal world and human society, Hitler pronounced the superiority of the ruthless over delicately structured organisms, of strength over mind. The apes, he claimed, trampled every outsider to death as an enemy of the community, “and what was right for apes must be even more applicable to men….”12
One might suspect a trace of irony in such statements, but that is belied by the earnest tone of conviction with which Hitler cites the eating habits of apes as confirmation of his own vegetarianism; the apes showed the way. And, he continued, a glance at nature reveals that the bicycle, for instance, is correctly conceived, whereas the airship is “totally insane.” Man has no choice but to look to the laws of nature and follow them; there can be “no better system” than the merciless principles of selection prevailing among wild animals. Nature is not immoral: “Who is at fault when the cat eats the mouse?” he asks scornfully. Man’s so-called humanity is only “a tool of his weakness and thus in actuality the most cruel destroyer of his existence.” Struggle, conquest, destruction are immutable. “One being drinks the blood of another. By dying, the one furnishes food for the other. We should not blather about humanity.”
Hitler’s complete blindness to the rights of others and others’ claim to happiness, his utter amorality, are nowhere revealed so clearly as in this “unconditional reverence for the… divine laws of existence.” There is surely an element of late-bourgeois ideology here, which tried to compensate for the decadence and feebleness of the age by glorifying mindlessness and equating brutality and primitiveness with the natural and primeval state of things. It would also seem that such a creed provided Hitler with a lofty justification for his personal coldness and lack of feeling. He could better deal with his aggressive impulses by converting struggle, murder, and “blood sacrifice” into acts of obedience to a divine command. “By defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord,” he wrote in
War and destruction were essential to restore the shaky balance of the world: that was the morality and the metaphysics of his policies. Pursuing his favorite game of letting the epochs of history unreel before his eyes in broad vague outline, mulling over the reasons for the decline of peoples and cultures, he always discovered the cause of their downfall in their failure to obey their instincts. The crumbling of mighty systems of power could be traced to a flouting of Nature, especially to miscegenation. For although all creatures adhere strictly to the instinct for racial purity, and the “titmouse seeks the titmouse, the finch the finch, the stork the stork, the field mouse the field mouse,” man is prone to act contrary to the laws of nature and to commit biological adultery. Impotence and the death of nations from old age were simply the revenge taken by Nature for the denial of her primal order: “Blood mixture and the resultant drop in the racial level is the sole cause of the dying out of old cultures; for men do not perish as a result of lost wars, but by the loss of that force of resistance which is contained only in pure blood. All who are not of good race in this world are chaff.”13
Behind this stood the doctrine of creative racial nuclei: since primeval times small Aryan elites have prevailed over the dull, slumbering masses of historyless inferior peoples, using them to further those abilities that are the mark of the Aryan genius. Aryans are the Promethean bearers of light. They alone are capable of establishing states and founding cultures, “forever kindling anew that fire of knowledge which illumined the night of silent mysteries and thus called man to climb the path to mastery over the other beings of this earth.” Only when the Aryan nucleus began mingling with the subject people did decline and downfall follow. For “human culture and civilization on this continent are inseparably bound up with the presence of the Aryan. If he dies out or declines, the dark veils of an age without culture will again descend on this globe.”14
This was the very peril mankind was once again confronting. Unlike the times of demise of the great empires of antiquity, what was now threatening was not just the extinction of a culture but the end of all higher humanness. The decay of the Aryan nuclear substance had gone further than ever before. “Germanic blood on this earth is gradually approaching exhaustion,” Hitler warned. He saw the forces of darkness pressing in from all sides, as if aware of impending victory. “I tremble for Europe!” he exclaimed in one speech and conjured up a vision of the old continent “sinking into a sea of blood and grief.” Once again, “cowardly know-it-alls and critics of Nature” were undermining Nature’s elemental laws. These scoundrels were agents of an “all-embracing general offensive” that appeared under numerous guises: Communism, pacifism, the League of Nations, all international movements and institutions in general. Similarly, the Judaeo-Christian morality of pity and its verbose cosmopolitan variants tried to persuade man that he could overcome Nature, raise himself up to be master of his instincts, and achieve eternal peace. But the truth was that no one could “rebel against a firmament.” The indubitable will of Nature determined the existence of nations, their clashes in war, the division of mankind into masters and slaves, the brutal preservation of the species.
It is not difficult to discern the mark of Arthur de Gobineau upon this system. In his doctrine of the inequality of races Gobineau had first formulated the anxiety connected with the modern age’s racial conglomerations. The downfall of all cultures could be traced to promiscuous racial mixing, he had argued. This French aristocrat’s race complex, his aversion for the “corrupt blood of the rabble” clearly sprang from the resentments of an abdicating ruling class. Nevertheless, his doctrine was taken up by certain literary sects of the period and spawned a whole literature along similar lines. Significantly, Hitler simplified Gobineau’s elaborate doctrine until it became demagogically usable and offered a set of plausible explanations for all the discontents, anxieties, and crises of the contemporary scene. Versailles and the excesses of the Bavarian soviet republic, the evils of the capitalistic system, and the outrages of modern art, night life and syphilis—all became aspects of that age-old struggle whereby the lower races attempted to destroy the noble Aryan. And hidden behind it all, instigator, mastermind and power-greedy archfoe, a bugbear of mythological dimensions, stood the Eternal Jew.
He was an infernal, crazily grimacing phantom, “a growth spreading across the whole earth,” the “lord of the antiworld,” a complex product of obsessions and clever psychology. In keeping with his theory of focusing upon a single opponent, Hitler made the figure of the Jew the incarnation of all imaginable vices and dreads, the cause and its opposite, the thesis and the antithesis, literally “to blame for everything,” for the tyranny of the stock market and for Bolshevism, for humanitarian ideology and for 30 million victims tortured to death in the Soviet Union “in veritable slaughterhouses.” In a conversation with Dietrich Eckart, published after Eckart’s death but while Hitler was still in Landsberg prison, Hitler expounded the identity of Judaism, Christianity, and Bolshevism by references to Isaiah 19:2–3 and Exodus 12:38.15 He showed that the Jews had been expelled from Egypt because they had tried to produce a revolutionary mood by inciting the rabble with humanitarian phrases (“just as they do here”). From this it followed that Moses was the first leader of Bolshevism. And just as Paul virtually invented Christianity in order to undermine the Roman Empire, so Lenin employed the doctrine of Marxism to bring about the end of the present system. Thus, Hitler argued, the Old Testament already provided the pattern of the Jewish assault upon the superior, creative race, a pattern repeated again and again down the ages.
To be sure, Hitler never lost sight of the propaganda value of his anti-Semitism. He was highly aware of that aspect of things. If the Jew did not exist, he remarked, “we would have had to invent him. A visible enemy, not just an invisible one, is what is needed.” But at the same time the Jew was the focus of his emotions, a pathological mania; the form the Jew took in Hitler’s own mind did not differ greatly from the diabolical propaganda image he had created. The Jew was the grotesque projection of everything Hitler hated and craved. Certainly the thesis that the Jews were striving for world domination made good propaganda; but over and beyond such Machiavellian considerations he really believed this thesis, saw it as the key to all sorts of phenomena. He clung more and more to this “redeeming formula,” convinced that through it he understood the nature of the great
