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The son of a serial murderer
Adolf Hitler’s father Alois Schicklgruber was a highly suspicious figure and it is still not 100% clear who exactly he descended from. The most likely scenario is some degree of incestuous relationships. In the manifesto “Mein Kampf” Adolf describes his father in a dry tone, whom he does not even mention by name:
“As the son of a poor, small cottager, he had already suffered at home. When he was not even thirteen years old, the little boy at the time packed up his bags and ran away from his hometown, the Waldviertel. […] A bitter decision to set out on the road into the unknown with three coins in his pocket.”
The following paragraphs of “Mein Kampf” talk about how his father grew “old” at an early age because of poverty and misery, which means bitterness, and really wanted to become a civil servant after completing an apprenticeship as a craftsman. Interestingly, Adolf leaves this brief description without really going into detail about Alois’s character and the extent to which he was able to convey any significant virtues. How badly had Alois been treated as a child and what damage had that caused him? Did tangible personality disorders develop? Adolf keeps the matter a secret. If the father had been somewhat normal, Adolf could have exploited and embellished him for propaganda purposes in “Mein Kampf”. Instead, Adolf simply explains that he came across military books in his father’s library that aroused his enthusiasm. Mind you, it wasn’t the father who aroused this enthusiasm. But the books lying around. It would have been easy to exaggerate here, as happens in many other parts of “Mein Kampf”, and to subtly elevate the story into a fairytale-like quality. After all, Adolf gives the impression that he was chosen by providence, but born into simple circumstances, just as portrayed in countless fictional heroic stories. But instead of a romanticized portrayal, it just says that Alois was a narrow-minded, small-minded bourgeois who wanted his son to have a boring career that left no room for heroic deeds.
At the age of 36, Alois married Anna Glasl-Hörer, who was about 14 years older than him and the adopted daughter of a senior, wealthy customs official. Money seems to have played the decisive role here, because it is highly unlikely that Alois chose a 50-year-old woman who could no longer have children out of deep love. An inheritance was probably in prospect and perhaps his father-in-law could also use various relationships in the civil service as a payback. In any case, Alois’ career made great progress and he was known for strutting through the offices in uniform and constantly being addressed by his title. With the help of a few witnesses, he was formally renamed from Schicklgruber to Hitler (actually Hiedler), although this was also about inheritance. As expected, his ailing wife Anna had no children and he had fun with at least one, probably several, mistresses. From 1880 onwards the couple were separated but still legally married because there was no such thing as divorce. Anna had become an obstacle that blocked Alois’s path to remarriage and, moreover, he could not inherit as long as she was alive. It suited him that she died in 1883 at the age of 60 and no longer needed to be looked after and cared for. One of his sons later accused him of being extremely violent at home, so one has to wonder whether Anna actually died of natural causes or was perhaps murdered.
Apparently Alois had only married her for opportunistic reasons anyway and, according to his sons, he was a bitter, violent man who always fought doggedly for wealth. How easy it would have been to poison her coffee when she was considered sickly and no one would suspect anything and no police officer would show up and make unpleasant inquiries. In the same year of her death, he quickly married the 22-year-old cook Franziska Matzelsberger, with whom he had previously had an extramarital affair and fathered Alois Hitler Jr. This was followed by the birth of their daughter Angela. Alois may have already cheated on his new wife Franziska with an even younger housemaid named Klara Pölzl, his second-degree niece. At Franziska’s request, Klara had to leave the household and look for a new job. A little later, according to official information, Franziska died of tuberculosis and Alois, as usual, left no stone unturned and married his previous housemaid, Klara Pölzl, just six months later, on January 7, 1885. You have to keep this pattern in mind soberly:
- Alois cheats on his first wife with a lover.
- The first woman he benefited from dies early, which is in his interest.
- He marries his previous lover and then cheats on her with another lover.
- The second wife also dies quite quickly and he marries the affair from before.
If his third wife had also died and he had immediately taken another mistress as his wife, the police would probably have actually come to his house to investigate. However, there were no investigators in the small town who were alarmed and investigated the suspicion that Alois might have poisoned his first, second and even third wive. The easiest murder weapon would have been arsenic, a toxic pesticide that was easy to obtain and causes all sorts of ailments and cancer. The first woman was considered chronically ill anyway and could have been easily eliminated with a steady dose. Tuberculosis was determined to be the cause of death for woman number two, but the quality of medical diagnoses back then, especially in rural areas, is not even remotely comparable to today. Tuberculosis was a typical disease of poor, malnourished people and was often misdiagnosed when lung cancer was actually present. In the case of gradual arsenic poisoning, cancer often develops, for example in the lungs and other organs. Alois could theoretically have poisoned his second wife without it being noticed much in the village. There are many documented criminal cases in which perpetrators for base reasons repeatedly used arsenic or similar poisons to commit murder. Let’s take the illustrative case of the American Judias Buenoano: She had been exposed to abuse as a child (like Alois Hitler probably was), married an air force officer and collected three life insurance policies when he suddenly died after a mysterious three-month illness. Her next lover also died after a few years due to a strange illness and she again collected several life insurance policies. Her adult son survived an “accidental” poisoning, but “drowned” while on a boat trip with his mother, who was once again getting a bunch of life insurance money. The next lover ended up in medical treatment with a mysterious illness and survived. Police then discovered that the “vitamins” she had given him contained paraformaldehyde and arsenic. The bodies of her former lovers were exhumed and clear evidence of poisoning was found.
Perhaps Alois Hitler was a psychopathic murderer of a similar caliber. His third wife, Klara Pölzl, definitely had a bad fate. Two of her children died early of diphtheria, another of hydrocephalus, another of measles. The daughter Paula survived, as did Adolf. The two children from their father’s second marriage, Alois junior and Angela, also lived in the household. Alois’ career was going well, because of his inheritance he owned several houses and he was able to retire with considerable wealth.
Alois Jr. later complained that his father regularly beat him with the whip to the point of fainting. Even the family dog was not spared. In Austria at the time, corporal punishment was considered normal, no one would have given any importance to a child’s statement and there were no youth welfare offices and investigations like there are today, which means that there was no protection for children whose fathers were violent beyond the usual level. Adolf remained silent about his own experiences.
He even wrote about love, but also called his father ruthless and narrow-minded. The two had an extremely bad relationship and often argued about his poor school grades and his desire to become an artist. It is said that in the first years of school there were consistently very good grades, but that the decline came from the age of eleven onwards, i.e. exactly when the requirements increase and more is required than just reading and basic arithmetic. In “Mein Kampf” he calls himself a ringleader and rebel at school who broke the rigid structures of the Austrian province and refused to be molded into a normal citizen. The whole point of this review is to spin the fairy tale of the unique boy who was chosen by Providence to one day go to Germany, reunite it with Austria and free it from communists, migrants and Jews. In reality, his laziness, arrogance and jokes were not well received by those around him. It was the typical fake rebellion that only a child whose parents have a certain level of wealth can afford. Adolf was not ready to leave his home like his brother Alois Jr.
The historians Timothy Ryback and Florian Beierl found a diary from Adolf’s sister Paula, as well as a shared diary from Adolf’s other two siblings.1 One of the diary entries describes how the father beats Adolf in the attic and the mother intervenes at some point out of fear of her Husband Alois can no longer control his anger. In addition to beatings, there was also the threat of turning off the money and throwing Adolf out the door at the age of 18, which, given his poor school performance, would have meant that he would have had to somehow survive for the rest of his life. If Alois would simply disappear from the scene, Adolf’s problems would be solved for the time being and, fittingly, this is exactly what happened when Adolf was 14 years old and Alois was only 66. On January 3, 1903, he collapsed during breakfast in the Wiesinger Inn and died on the spot. There are different reports about the official cause of death, such as a stroke or an inexplicable collapse, which is not surprising given the primitive medical conditions at the time. There was no autopsy. Arsenic poisoning can certainly cause strokes and other dramatic effects. Cyanide causes shortness of breath, headaches, dizziness, vomiting, convulsions and fainting.
Perhaps Adolf had come up with the same idea of poisoning as his father had before. A final, decisive dose at home in Alois’s morning coffee would have been enough to trigger the collapse during the morning pint in the inn. There may have been some whispers in the village in advance about the civil servant who had married a woman who was much too old and of rich parents, who then died relatively quickly so that he could marry his affair. And perhaps such a rumor reached Adolf and his siblings and they began to ask themselves whether there might be something to it. According to observers, Adolf cried violently for his deceased father, although the emotional outburst was perhaps a mixture of guilt and long-suppressed hatred. He was now free from the tyrant and could benefit from his savings. The danger of expulsion and disinheritance at 18 was averted, he became the man in the household, his mother was protected from then on and continued to clean and cook for him, without ever really demanding much from him. From the perspective of a modern detective, the matter would definitely have been worthy of an investigation and an autopsy of the dead man, as the material motive for murder was clearly present and there was serious tension between the suspect and the dead man. How often did Adolf fantasize about killing his father during the fights? As a small child he felt powerless and rigid with fear, but as a 14-year-old he must have been aware of his father’s many weak points. It would have been relatively easy to kill or stab a sleeping or heavily drunk Alois, but of course it would have called the police into action. Ambushing him in the dark on his way home from the bar and murdering him in the street would have led to an investigation and he would have needed a watertight alibi. On the other hand, it was much easier to poison his father’s coffee and the idea could have come to him because he suspected his father of having killed his first two wives like that, or he simply read about poison often enough in Karl May’s stories. In Mein Kampf, Adolf quotes his father’s rigid rejection of his desire to become an artist with the words:
“Painter? No, not as long as I’m alive, never.”
As soon as his father stopped living, Adolf was finally able to seriously pursue his dream of being an artist. The following year, Hitler had to transfer to the secondary school in Steyr because of bad grades and could finally have done something on his own initiative to go his own way, but he was just lazy again and, according to “Mein Kampf,” found it to be an absolute stroke of luck, a “difficult “lung disease” to be diagnosed by a doctor. That meant a year off school and the mother was also convinced that a career as a civil servant was out of the question for his health. For the next while, everything went as Adolf had wished and he was able to enjoy doing nothing, but then fate struck again: His mother fell ill with breast cancer in 1907 and died quite soon afterwards. There is no evidence that Adolf had anything to do with this, although it is noticeable that Alois’s third wife also died prematurely. At least it is easy to imagine that Alois also cheated on his third wife before his death and would have liked to marry a younger affair. Gradual doses of arsenic or other poisons could certainly cause cancer in a person, and because of the limited medical care available at the time, there was neither effective treatment nor a complete diagnosis. Maybe Klara Pölzl had other tumors, but we will never know. Adolf’s mere suspicion that Alois might poison Klara would have been enough of a motive to kill Alois. Historians and forensic scientists could have drilled down here long ago, but the traces have now largely been removed. In 2012, the BBC reported that Alois and Klara’s graves were abandoned and it is not known what happened to the remains.1
At the end of the war, the graves should have been exhumed immediately and the remains examined to determine whether the bodies had been exchanged by the Nazis or whether there were signs of poisoning. However, nothing of the kind took place and historians cemented the image of the normal provincial philistine who became a singular monster through his worldview. Right-wing revisionist literature does not dare to tackle these delicate questions, while stereotypical conspiracy literature sometimes reinterprets Hitler as a Jewish Rothschild descendant or a fighter against the Jewish Illuminati.
The Hitlers’ Jewish family doctor was unable to do much about Klara’s illness at the time, which is usually interpreted by historians as significant in view of Hitler’s growing hatred of Jews, but he even saved this doctor from being arrested by the Gestapo later in 1938.
Hitler lived for around a year on his inheritance, donations from his relatives and an orphan’s pension, without starting an apprenticeship or earning any significant money himself. The art academy rejected him and normal jobs were only a necessity for him sporadically and for a short time when his money ran out and he had no other options. As soon as he had some money again, he immediately went back to doing nothing. Slowly but surely the money eventually ran out and so Hitler lived for a time in cheap accommodation, which of course was later interpreted by himself and by historians as an important building block for his worldview and his sympathies for ordinary workers. This phase would have made him hard and tough, he later wrote, although it was clear that his limitless laziness had turned him from a well-off student into a good-for-nothing who slept in the men’s dormitory on Meldemannstrasse for three years. Exactly how much money he had at his disposal through orphan’s pension and interest payments from his parents’ estate is controversial. Some historians see him as desperately poor at times, while others attest that he lived a very frugal but tolerable lifestyle. He earned a little money through odd jobs and painting postcards and pictures, with Jewish men, of all people, taking over the sale of his works. According to the residents of the home, he was unhappy and also engrossed in newspapers, books and all sorts of folk and esoteric texts.
Hitler‘s sexuality and likely career as a snitch
Hitler’s relationship life can officially be divided into two phases: The absolute and complete lack of interest in women from his teenage years up to the attempted coup in 1923 and his imprisonment in Landsberg; afterwards, as a politician in the limelight, he superficially surrounded himself with a few ladies and had an empty, fake relationship with the extremely unhappy Eva Braun. In “Mein Kampf” he kept almost everything secret about his family and private life and was unable to show anything that would have helped his self-dramatization in any way. Almost everyone bit on granite who tried to look behind Hitler’s facade and talk about private matters and the past. He had prepared a certain number of funny and harmless anecdotes about earlier times and told them exactly the same way over and over again. The anecdotes, the talk that he simply doesn’t have time for women because of his work, and finally draconian laws against every nasty rumor about him, should prevent any discussion and any investigation into his private life from the start. For a long time, the unofficial guideline in the NSDAP was that an official’s private life was no one’s business and that homosexuality was tolerated as long as nothing about it reached the public and political opponents. Hitler maintained his close men’s associations, just as the homosexual Ernst Röhm filled the control positions of his SA with homosexuals and for a while this system seemed to work, but internal power struggles of the National Socialists were fought out from the beginning with blackmail material about homosexual relationships. In 1924, shortly after the failed putsch that made Hitler an internationally known figure, he complained that his opponents were “examining his life right up to the time of my […] youth” and that they were snooping into the “most secret family affairs”, hoping to finish him off. But his supposed friends such as Gestapo chief Rudolf Diels and Ernst “Putzi” Hanfstaengl also diligently collected compromising material and even brought it abroad. The famous historians like Ian Kershaw were simply not interested in Hitler’s personality and even doubted that he had one, as if he was just a shell full of worldview and politics. Few and little-noticed history books discussed homosexuality in the NSDAP without adhering to high scientific standards. It was only in 2008 that the German historian Lothar Machtan delivered a very solid study with “Hitler’s Secret – The Double Life of a Dictator,” which is hard to contradict and which also provides clear evidence about the potential of political blackmail. However, Machtan viewed the blackmail attempts against Hitler only as an internal German matter that had been largely resolved after the major purge against Röhm and 150 other people who knew about it, as well as after various bribe payments. The many data leaks could no longer be brought under control even with the help of the dictatorial powers after the seizure of power in 1933, because incriminating files went back to his service in the First World War and even further back. Too many figures had early access to files and the motivation to have something against Hitler, although personal security was only available if the sensitive material was stashed abroad. The highly sought-after data included
- Possible police files from Hitler’s early days as an artist in Vienna, the Austrian mecca for gays. The police used all sorts of informants in the scene and Hitler could well have been caught
- Private, handwritten letters with clear content
- Hitler’s military files from the First World War and in particular everything about a trial for a homosexual relationship during the war
- Possible photos of sexual acts between Hitler, Rudolf Heß and others in detention in Landsberg, where these special luxury prisoners were housed in their own area with a modern bathroom
- Anything incriminating about Hitler’s sexual activities in Munich after his imprisonment; the phase of his political rise
- Incriminating things from the environment of Hitler’s personal entourage from Hitler’s later phase, where he acted much more cautiously
The greatest value for blackmailers and foreign secret services would have been photographs that undoubtedly showed Hitler engaging in sexual acts and that could not be dismissed as fakes or skinny-dipping in nature. There were many opportunities for such photos to be taken covertly, which is a typical practice of secret services, and of course there is also the possibility that a foreign secret service may have purchased such photos from individuals in the gay community. That the well-known historians like Kershaw not even asking the question of possible espionage activity by Hitler or other prominent Nazis is revealing and embarrassing enough, but the refusal to get to the bottom of Hitler’s sexuality is also a kind of protective wall, because if Hitler was gay, then there was a certain probability that it will be compromised multiple times. The question of sexuality goes directly into the question of possible espionage. The fact that Hitler wanted to become an artist in a big city as a teenager was almost certainly linked to his homosexuality and the fact that there was a lively gay and artistic scene in Vienna and Munich. Pursuing a staid civil service career, as his father demanded, was, however, a terrible idea, as the bourgeoisie outside of the metropolises was very narrow-minded and only accepted a classic family life. With his very close friend and probable lover August Kubizek, he lived his dream in Vienna for a while and got to know which cafes, restaurants, bathhouses, etc. were used as secret meeting places for gays. Wearing the same clothes in a partner look, they played the young bohemians, went on tours together into nature and attended the opera. After the typical falling in love phase, there was only a crisis between the two, as Hitler always only got out of bed in the afternoon and then complained about the “strumming” of the hard-working music student Kubizek. While Hitler rambled more and more about politics and ethnic esotericism, his friend’s interest in these topics was zero.
“God knows where he roamed, where he slept and how hungry he was.”
Vienna was a mecca for gays from all over Austria and after the scandal surrounding Philipp Fürst zu Eulenburg, the emperor’s best friend at the time, homosexuality was a hotly debated topic of conversation throughout the country. In 1913, the head of the secret service, Alfred Redl, was exposed as a homosexual and spy who had sold war plans to foreign powers in order to finance his luxury.1 In addition to the usual prejudices against gays, there was also the general suspicion that every gay person could in principle be blackmailed and therefore should not acquire any higher social significance. Only among artists was homosexuality socially accepted. It took almost 100 years before it became clear that Redl did not necessarily betray his country for blackmail, but was a walk-in who acted out of greed. The Austrian police certainly had an interest in establishing a network of informants to compile lists of “perverts”. At the same time, the gays had established their own secret world with codes, camouflaged meeting places and various other means of shielding. Those homosexuals with money, influence and connections were usually older and their status attracted young homosexuals from humble backgrounds. Relationships were needed for a stable artistic career and access to the higher echelons of society. It was easiest to make contacts and ask around in men’s shelters and homeless shelters, but it was also easy for the police to cast a net and use threats of punishment to pressure young men into cooperating. The fact that Hitler apparently spent his nights away and for years valued nightlife in the big city more than a career increased the likelihood that he would fall into the police’s net. In addition, the Austrian army was looking for him to be called up for military service, but conspicuously made almost no visible effort to find him for years. Gays in the military were subjected to significant and brutal punishment and, of course, stigmatization, so there was another lever that could have been used by the police or military authorities against Hitler. If he was caught, he would have had to choose between going to prison and then doing military service, or cooperating and spying on the scene. We know for sure that Hitler worked as an undercover agent after the First World War. Perhaps he was more useful to the authorities in Vienna as an informant than as a military conscript, and besides, informants were paid. The romantic relationship with Kubizek is relatively clear and with a certain probability Reinhold Hanisch and Rudolf Häusler from the men’s dormitories were also Hitler’s relationships. In addition, there were several undocumented months in which he was logged out everywhere and there was no clue as to his whereabouts. Some young men prostituted themselves temporarily or long-term in big cities in order to survive financially, although the boundaries were rather fluid between favors, relationships with older, well-off men and classic prostitution. Everyone involved was at risk of being blackmailed or betrayed by someone else.
Historians usually assumed Hitler was very poor and partly homeless during his Vienna phase, and then again as someone who always made ends meet even though he worked very little. Hitler shared a room with Häusler in Munich, the other mecca for gays, for almost nine months until they parted ways due to Hitler’s irascibility and his bossiness. The justice assessor Ernst Hepp was a kind of patron, regularly inviting Hitler to dinner, buying paintings from him, recommending him to others, giving him tickets to the opera and helping him get into the German military in 1914. Nevertheless, Hitler remained a nobody and nothing is known about any files that conclusively prove that he served as an informant during his time in Vienna. The authorities were not only interested in information about the identities of previously unknown homosexuals, but also in particular details about all suspicious travelers and migrants in cheap accommodation. All sorts of foreigners and foreign agents frequented Vienna and, for the sake of anonymity, liked to stay overnight in cheap accommodation under cover. With the appropriate approach, Hitler could have been convinced of such a deal, because Hitler was known to hate the migrants in Austria and would have viewed the spying service as a service to the fatherland. Perhaps a new self-image emerged here: I, the agent. The wolf in sheep’s clothing who tracks down unwanted people. This would have been a huge step forward from the self-image of the lazy and unsuccessful artist. Only now and then did he paint a few pictures or postcards for money, doing so from a photographic template and not even bothering to sit down in front of the actual object to paint it. He couldn’t expect to live a whole life as an artist without training and connections in a city where there were thousands of other starving artists. In “Mein Kampf” he later described in dramatic images how, in the oh-so-bad times in Vienna, he had to feel the harshness of life and fight his way through like so many men from the working class, whose leader, according to Providence, he would be. Nevertheless, he wasn’t really one of the workers, because he only lasted a very short time on construction sites or in other jobs. All he had to do was paint a few postcards every now and then to make a simple living along with other, not fully known, income. For Hitler, spying service would not only have represented a most welcome alternative to the hard grind of ordinary unskilled work, but he would have seen it as a form of warfare considered against the flooding of Austria with mostly Slavic migrants, communists and foreign spies.
In 1908 he was rumored to have contracted syphilis during sex in Vienna. In the many long and probably wild nights in the big city, infection could hardly be avoided and the medical treatment consisted of preparations containing the toxins mercury and arsenic. In “Mein Kampf” he later devoted 13 pages to the topic of syphilis and described it as a “Jewish disease,” which also gives rise to the idea that Jews themselves are like a disease. His strict vegetarianism, his rejection of tobacco and his abstinence from alcohol may have been an attempt to mitigate the consequences of infection. It is said that he always wanted to avoid being touched by strangers. Some historians suspect that Hitler simply had neurotic fears of pathogens. His later personal physician, Morell, noted in his diary conspicuous symptoms consistent with the advanced stages of syphilis and the associated brain damage. Around four years after he was supposed to report for military service, the Austrian authorities finally tracked him down in Germany, but quickly dismissed him as unfit and too weak, which is quite surprising since he reported for military service in Bavaria a few months later and was promptly accepted. The Austrian officials were certainly not gullible fools who could simply be dissuaded from Hitler by complaining. Only a valid reason could have led to his decommissioning. The historian Lothar Machtan goes into detail about Hitler’s military service in the First World War, during which there was probably a continuous relationship with the soldier Ernst Schmidt. Practically all comrades from the regiment had later, when Hitler became powerful, put whitewashed memories on record to feed the leader’s myth; how Adolf would have thrilled everyone at the front with his political views and how people would have noticed back then that he would become something really great. However, in his book, the soldier Hans Mend repeatedly made it clear, in addition to the obligatory, listlessly worded adulation, that Hitler was a cranky guy who was being made fun of.3 A secret and completely negative report from him about Hitler ended up in London and in the hands of Bavarian General Karl Kriebel. According to a note, the document was prepared for Admiral Canaris’ military intelligence agency, Abwehr, and was brought to the attention of Colonel-General Beck (who wanted to get rid of Hitler) and “some foreign diplomats.” So as soon as Hitler rose to prominence after the war in the 1920s, various people, domestic authorities and also foreign secret services could have carried out research and fathomed these connections without too much trouble. Canaris is said to have collected a whole heap of incriminating documents in order to one day be able to rid himself of Hitler and destroy his personality cult. While the Bavarian authorities had no reason to destroy Hitler’s reputation in the 1920s, some compromising material may have found its way abroad to the archives of various secret services. The soldier Mend described how Hitler gave him the impression of a “psychopath” and never had anything to do with weapons, but only ran an errand behind the front every three days. Ernst Schmidt was his “male whore” and the two were caught in the hay by their comrades. Hitler would not have had a fixed goal or a fixed conviction. Because of his public innuendos and his confrontation with Hitler, Mend was eventually arrested and imprisoned. After the war, Hitler and Schmidt, who according to Mend had a relationship during the war, made their way together in Munich, with Hitler soon encountering the gay captain Ernst Röhm and becoming his spy. Heinrich Himmler’s security service is also said to have documented a case in which Hitler posed naked for an officer during the war in France and went to bed with him. Interestingly, this information also ended up in the hands of a Brit. According to Rauschning, there was also a case in the German military against Hitler for sexual acts. So as soon as Hitler began to gain a foothold in politics under the auspices of Röhm, he was actually already unsustainable and several people had sensitive knowledge or even documentary evidence that could ruin him. Röhm was subsequently able to be sure of the loyalty of his newest pupil, due to money for the (NS)DAP from a secret fund of the Reichswehr, as well as through incriminating information, but his means of control of information could also quickly become the means of control in the event of a leak become someone else. At the latest after the failed coup attempt, Hitler was seen as relevant and dangerous at home and abroad, which would have also driven up the market value of incriminating material.
The Thule environment in which the (NS)DAP emerged was, as already mentioned, deeply influenced by propaganda associated with America and Great Britain. In addition, the head of the secret Thule lodge, Rudolf von Sebottendorf, was a suspected British agent. It is not far-fetched that Britain’s spies in Germany scoured their sources for information about Hitler as soon as he became important on the political scene. Likewise, when the Communists captured Munich, Russia’s secret services were probably able to capture police files and, over time, exploit various sources through espionage.
It was only when Hitler became Chancellor that he was able to confiscate and destroy the six volumes of police files from Munich, without being sure who had access to them in the previous years and had copies made. The Reichswehr general Otto von Lossow, for example, who was anything but enthusiastic about Hitler’s attempted coup in 1923, obtained files from the vice investigation office and the police headquarters on Ettstrasse in Munich through “good friends”: Several young men had stated on record that they had spent the night with Adolf Hitler, while Hitler usually promised money for it. If something were to happen to von Lossow or his officers, Hitler had to expect that such files would automatically end up in the press abroad. This is called a “dead man’s switch” and is a common device in the world of intelligence. Hitler’s hatred of von Lossow is well documented and the Führer, despite all his power, never dared to eliminate von Lossow. For his Dead Man’s Switch, however, the general needed partners abroad who might develop their own plans for the documents in their possession. Magnus Hirschfeld, the homosexual doctor and sexologist, spoke about original protocols about two seventeen or eighteen-year-olds, including photos, in which Hitler was “perfectly identified,” “in the most personal sense.” He sent these protocols to Moscow by special courier and what was done with them there is unknown. After he came to power, Hitler could have dismissed embarrassing publications abroad as cheap forgeries by his opponents, but given a certain amount and quality of material and, above all, clear photographs, the game would have been over for him. Another patron and mentor of Hitler after the war was the esoteric Dietrich Eckart, who had failed as an artist and medical student, became addicted to morphine and kept himself afloat through theater and politics. They lived in the immediate vicinity and traveled together through Munich’s better circles, with Eckart always giving instructions on how to dress and behave. It should come as no surprise that Eckart thought little of women. He later married a woman, but it didn’t last very long and didn’t produce any children.
From November 1922, the British Consul General in Munich named William Seeds considered the politician Hitler relevant for the first time and attributed him greater popularity among the German people than General von Ludendorff was able to achieve. From then on, the British spies would have started compiling material about the new star. Rudolf Hess also came from the right-wing ethnic Thule Society, with whom Hitler had an extremely close friendship since 1924, which is also said to have had a sexual component. Strasser even outed Hess publicly and Hess was also given female nicknames by various high-ranking party officials. In addition to Hitler, Röhm, Eckart and Mayr, Hess also met the university professor Karl Haushofer, who taught the relatively new field of geopolitics and drilled into the minds of Hitler and Hess that Germany absolutely needed a close partnership with Great Britain. This political teaching of Haushofer fit in with the ethnic propaganda circulating about the common Nordic race of Britons and Germans and also fit in with the deceptive maneuvers of British secret services, which extended well into the Second World War and led Nazi Germany to believe that the British elite (an unofficial Peace Party) wanted a partnership. Because of this apparent security through secret diplomatic channels, Hitler later decided to attack the Soviet Union against the wishes of his generals and Hess made his famous flight to Scotland. Haushofer’s son even became a traitor and sided with his British contact, with whom he may have had a love affair.4 Historians like Kershaw or the right-wing revisionists will never, ever raise the question of espionage with Hitler and his close entourage. The failed coup attempt, in which the ethnic nationalists and their frontman Hitler wanted to seize government power in Munich and then carry out a march on Berlin, should actually have meant the end of Hitler’s career and the still relatively young NSDAP. A long prison sentence and subsequent expulsion from Germany would have been a given, but Hitler’s popularity among the population would have allegedly sparked too much protest. The smartest thing for the Bavarian government would have been to use a mixture of blackmail and support, which is probably what was used. During his time in Landsberg Prison, Hitler lived in a kind of suite with a modern bathroom, endless hot water and the opportunity to receive his most likely gay companions like Hess. All that would have been necessary to be able to completely control Hitler in the future was a hidden photo or film camera behind a spy mirror. Such an action is the most normal thing in the world for secret services and would have provided the best material. Hess, who was also imprisoned, wrote enthusiastically to his mother about the wonderful “facility of the hot bath that is always available to us in the modern bathroom designed just for us.” All that was missing was the minibar. The prison director even warned the prisoners that “nude culture” was only allowed in the common anteroom5, which perhaps meant that that was exactly where the hidden camera was. Although Hess was married to a woman, she was quite surprised that she was treated like a confirmation candidate or a convent student. In 2013, recordings emerged of a US military officer interviewing Hitler’s doctors Morell and Brandt after the Second World War: Hitler was homosexual and also had female hormones administered to him.6
An American intelligence report from 1943 collected statements from people close to Hitler that he was impotent with women and had a masochistic fetish for humiliation and excrement, which he lived out with his own niece Geli Raubal before she killed herself or was murdered in 1931. Geli wanted to profit from her uncle’s fame, while Hitler specifically used her to spread rumors of a shared heterosexual relationship. But he was much more likely to have fun with his chauffeur and personal assistant Emil Maurice, with whom Geli, of all people, fell in love. There was an argument between Hitler and Maurice, and the latter is said to have even considered telling reporters from the Frankfurter Zeitung the truth. Geli became a kind of prisoner and died from a bullet from Hitler’s revolver. The actress Renata Müller also reported masochistic impulses, such as asking her to kick him while he kneeled in front of her. Finally, Müller also died suddenly. It was said that suicide by jumping out of a window, although murder was of course also a possibility. In order to counter rumors about his sexual orientation, Hitler invited attractive actresses and hired erotic dancers, but there was only talk and looking, never actual hands-on. Observers later reported that she shared a bed with Eva Braun, who, however, also attempted suicide several times. There are no eyewitnesses who clearly heard or even saw sex between the two. After Geli’s death, Hitler declared that he would stay away from women because of the tragic loss and his time-consuming fight for Germany, which was anything but convincing since, as a dictator before the Second World War, he spent a few hours of free time every day watching movies in his Berghof and other private residences and useless conversations. So there would actually have been a lot of time for relationships with women.
Ernst Röhm, the head of the Sturmabteilung, made no big secret about his homosexuality and is said to have tried to blackmail Hitler with information about his sexuality, which was then followed by the famous blindside in 1934, in which Röhm and the SA leadership were eliminated. Shortly after the First World War, Röhm worked with the officer Karl Mayr and other military officers in the “Iron Fist” organization, while Hitler was an informant in the political department of the intelligence service of the Reichswehr group command led by Mayr. Röhm is said to have been active in the hidden gay scenes of Munich and Berlin since 1924 and perhaps it was precisely this Munich scene in which Hitler gained experience and spied since 1913. Munich police reports from the period after the First World War, in which young men spoke of having sex with Hitler, were published a few years ago in Rome by Eugen Dollmann, Himmler’s friend and Hitler’s translator. However, the book was never published in German and hardly any historian dared to make the information available to a German audience. Hitler’s favorite was the tall, good-looking Rudolf Hess, behind whose back there was always whispering in party circles.7 Hitler and Röhm brought high-ranking nobles such as August Wilhelm of Prussia and Prince Philipp of Hesse into the SA, who were extremely dangerous, but never great aroused suspicion. August Wilhelm was gay himself, presented himself to the leading Nazis as naive and easily impressed, and made very significant public appearances for Hitler, whom he was able to sell as a benefactor to skeptical Germans. In keeping with his status, August Wilhelm married his own cousin, Princess Alexandra Viktoria of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg. The related British nobility had an interest in the blackmailable, manipulable and incompetent Hitler being able to assert himself in Germany. Philipp, in turn, was from the Hesse-Kassel line of the House of Hesse and, as a National Socialist politician, was Supreme President of the Prussian province of Hesse-Nassau. In 1925 he married Princess Mafalda of Savoy, whose father Viktor Emmanuel III. King of Italy and initially supported Mussolini’s fascism, then later dropped Mussolini after the Allied invasion of Sicily began. Philip had an important mediation role between the Nazis and Mussolini and served past the official channels as an extremely important diplomat until he was imprisoned in 1943 with his wife Mafalda when her father opposed Mussolini. Of course, his relatives also included Saxe-Coburg and Gotha. The NSDAP had been indoctrinated with anti-Semitic propaganda about a global Jewish conspiracy and therefore they insisted on using intelligence methods to hunt down party officials who may have had a distant Jewish ancestor. However, there was a failure to establish a basic and professional counter-espionage system. The NSDAP bosses were almost beginners in this area and it was initially Röhm’s downfall, because in March 1932 left-wing newspapers published en masse the contents of confidential letters about his homosexuality that he had written years earlier, as well as a list of previous convictions of various leaders of the NSDAP. Ironically, a co-founder of the SA named Helmuth Klotz had even published facsimiles in which Röhm’s handwriting was recognizable to everyone. In 1933 he fled to France, was caught seven years later and confessed under torture that officials from the Prussian Interior Ministry were behind the operation, but one of them, Rudolf Diels, secretly sympathized with Hitler. In this detour, Hitler was able to end Röhm. What initially sounds like a successful piece of espionage by Hitler and Diel was, however, of dubious value for the NSDAP. Diels was then allowed to set up the secret police, but apparently collected incriminating material about various party leaders and stashed this information abroad. This was his personal security, his Dead Man’s Switch, although one can of course assume whether contacts of his abroad with access to this blackmail material were looking for buyers among the secret services of Germany’s opponents. After the war, Diels worked for the American military government. It is of course theoretically conceivable whether he cooperated with the Americans during the war. Not only Röhm and his homosexual SA leadership were on the radar, but Hitler also found himself in the sights of well-informed opponents such as the Berlin police chief Grzesinski, who fled to Switzerland in March 1933, then to France and finally to the USA. The NSDAP became the strongest political force in Germany in the early Reichstag elections in 1932, but the party was violently divided internally and incriminating material was collected from every corner for internal party struggles, which perhaps also found its way abroad and ended up with secret services there. In order to gain leverage against Hitler, Röhm contacted his old colleague, the intelligence officer Karl Mayr, who had trained Hitler as an informer and agitator after the First World War. Mayr had now switched to the SPD camp and may still have had incriminating material about Hitler from his time in Munich. Kurt von Schleicher, who had been Reichswehr Minister and the last chancellor of the Weimar Republic, had Hitler’s military files and was able to use the military intelligence service “Abwehr” for further research.
Suddenly Röhm was able to fire back and force Hitler to make concessions, which in turn gave rise to Hitler’s plan to carry out a surprise beheading attack on the SA, shooting around 150 people who might have known about Hitler’s homosexuality and had evidence. After this purge, in which all sorts of safes were broken into, Hitler tightened the laws against gays and against harmful statements against the Führer. How many victims of this lightning campaign had taken precautions with a dead man’s switch, storing important material abroad with trusted people who should contact the press immediately in an emergency? It is fully documented that Ernst Hanfstaengl and Kurt Lüdecke later made credible threats from abroad and paid dearly for their silence. Gestapo boss Diels also made it clear that his dossiers were safely abroad. Hitler’s efforts to plug as many information holes as possible were as pointless as trying to erase an embarrassing porn video or data leak from the Internet would be today. But no historian has investigated the question of whether foreign secret services obtained sufficient material and actually used it to blackmail Hitler. Historian Lothar Machtan writes that when Hitler spoke in the Reichstag on July 13, 1934, he must still have been worried that “safes were opening somewhere abroad and could reveal damaging material.” Hitler’s fears in this regard did not come true, Machtan maintains, but that is only partly true. In fact, there were no public campaigns abroad that made use of damning material, although the foreign powers would have refrained from such an open campaign because otherwise, after Hitler and other Nazi greats were overthrown, the much more capable German generals would have taken power. The card could initially have been played more subtly and indirectly, at a personal meeting in which, for example, a British diplomat handed Hitler some incriminating material and claimed that it had been confiscated in Great Britain or Switzerland from the contact of a German opponent of Hitler. In this way, the British would have revealed their possession of such material in a way that did not appear hostile and would have presented themselves as friends and helpers.
The roles of Ernst Hanfstaengl and Kurt Lüdecke are particularly important here. Lüdecke worked for Henry Ford, the American car mogul, who had set up his own secret service, supplied the NSDAP with money and anti-Semitic propaganda, and established vehicle factories in Germany that later became important to the war effort. In 1922, Lüdecke brought Ford’s book “The International Jew” with him to Germany and was able to establish contacts with high-ranking Nazi officials, despite their distrust of him, and collect all sorts of incriminating information with which he later launched serious blackmail attempts from abroad. The historian Machtan assumes that Lüdecke was ultimately satisfied with hush money, but does not question whether he simply sold his material or handed it over to American secret services. Hanfstaengl had studied at the elite Harvard University and worked his way into the Führer’s environment, collecting incriminating information and repeatedly trying to question Hitler directly about private matters. Later he maintained contacts with the American newspaper mogul William Hearst and with Lord Beaverbrook, who owned the Daily Express, where articles appeared with suggestions about Hanfstaengl and Hitler’s sexuality. Instead of effectively protecting Hitler’s reputation, Hanfstaengl’s activities had the opposite effect and he became intolerable to the Nazis, whereupon, like Lüdecke, he wrote blackmail letters and eventually fled to London. Although he did not carry out his threat to make his material public, he confided in the American secret service by 1942 at the latest. The only things that have survived are things that he personally told the American agents, but one can safely assume that he also provided files or even relevant photos. At the start of the war in 1939, Hitler made one last unsuccessful attempt to buy off Hanfstaengl again and persuade him to return to Germany.
Commonly known are the old rumors that Hitler only had one testicle, which were also used in songs by the British. Hitler’s medical records from the time of his arrest in 1923 appeared at a 2010 auction and were quickly confiscated by the Bavarian government. Historian Peter Fleischmann said he caught a glimpse of it and saw evidence of a one-sided undescended testicle. In 2015, Fleischmann’s “Hitler as a prisoner in Landsberg am Lech 1923/24” was published. In their book “Hitler’s Last Day: Minute by Minute,” historians Jonathan Mayo and Emma Craigie speculated about a suspected deformity of the penis called “hypospadias.” Immediately there were headlines in newspapers around the world about “Hitler’s deformed micropenis,” although the condition is more typically characterized by a misplaced urethral opening and a curvature of the shaft. Even without early medical correction, hypospadias does not necessarily have to cause major limitations. According to a study, it is more common in underweight premature babies and attempts at surgical correction can lead to complications. Jonathan Mayo and Emma Craigie provided no files or other evidence of the suspected hypospadias. The doctor Dr. Josef Steiner Brin, who examined Hitler in 1923, noted that there were no other abnormalities apart from the undescended testicles. Perhaps the doctor had intentionally overlooked a penis problem to prevent word from spreading. Perhaps the doctor and his superiors kept the information to themselves in order to have blackmail material against Hitler. Hitler had already been examined years before, during his muster in Austria and shortly afterwards during his muster in Bavaria for military service, and major deformities should have been noticed there, even if the army probably didn’t care at the time what the condition of the young man’s reproductive organs was. The main thing was that he could march, camp and shoot. There had been constant rumors that Hitler’s private parts had been injured by shrapnel during the First World War. However, there is no conclusive evidence of any physical limitations other than unilateral undescended testicles.
Sources:
[1] Oberst Redl. Der Spionagefall. Der Skandal. Die Fakten. Verena Moritz und Hannes Leidinger
[2] Gespräche mit Hitler, Hermann Rauschning
[3] Adolf Hitler im Felde von Hans Mend, dem Schimmelreiter des List-Regiments
[4] Churchill’s Deception: The Dark Secret That Destroyed Nazi Germany. Louis Kilzer
[5] Hitlers Geheimnis. Lothar Machtan
[6] http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/nazi-doctors-hitler-was-gay-took-female-hormones/article/2517746
The esoterics and lodges
Hitler was involved with rightwing esotericists when it was still serving his career. This kind of occultism is often used during a revolutionary phase, but at later stages it is usually decided to allow only select high ranking circles and specific state-controlled institutions, not a freewheeling scene among the population. As a dictator, he had the völkisch lodges banned. Even in Mein Kampf he derides these organizations:
“It is the characteristic of these folks that they rave about old Germanic heroism, about ancient times, stone axes, gers and shields, but in reality they are the biggest cowards you can imagine. Because the same people who wave around in the air with old German, carefully imitated tin swords, a prepared bearskin with bull horns over their bearded heads, only ever preach the fight with spiritual weapons for the present and quickly flee from every communist rubber truncheon.”
Hitler was always going for upward mobility, exploiting new friends and dropping them later when they no longer suited his needs. We know from newer research that his passion was not the old Germanic tribes, but rather the Roman empire, which may have included its mystery cults. In Southern Germany with cities like Nuremberg and Munich the Romans had once injected their culture and archaeologists found places of worship of the highly secretive Mithras cult. It is not logical to assume a disinterest of Hitler for the occult when he became dictator, just because we do not have convenient files available.
As a military intelligence spy, he visited the German Workers’ Party (DAP), the forerunner of the NSDAP, listened to the talks of the organization and even became its chairman. He forced himself to use a polite, diplomatic tone when he heard about the DAP’s plans to become more of a nationalist lodge, and pointed out that it needed the potential to become a mass party, not a fringe movement. Between 1919 and 1921, Hitler had access to the library of Thule member Friedrich Krohn containing 2,500 titles. Nevertheless, Hitler deliberately avoided honoring the ethnic groups in “Mein Kampf” and in his political life. The Thule Society was not simply the secret control center of the Third Reich, as some books claimed. Hitler was also not a member of the Thule Society. His temporary sponsor, the drug-addicted occultist and artist Dietrich Eckart, soon reached the limits of his usefulness for Hitler and was rejected. The Thule Society owned the newspaper Münchener Observer, which later became the Völkischer Observer. Dietrich Eckart lent Hitler money several times and looked for donors in wealthy circles. When Hitler bought the Völkischer Observer, Eckart obtained the necessary loans of around 120,000 marks and subsequently it was necessary to raise fresh money again and again in order to maintain operations.
Eckart tried to make connections with British organizations and ended up with the “Britons” of Henry Hamilton Beamish, whose father had served as a rear admiral and as an aide-de-camp for Queen Victoria. Beamish was one of the earliest developers of the Madagascar plan to forcibly relocate Jews to this island southeast of Africa. Of course, he preached the formula “Bolshevism = Judaism” and had his fingers in groups like the Imperial Fascist League and Nordic League, which were probably intended primarily to conduct espionage against the Germans. Eckart got along brilliantly with Alfred Rosenberg, who next brought in Max Erwin von Scheubner-Richter. In March 1920, Scheubner-Richter took part in the Kapp Putsch. Wolfgang Kapp intended him to be head of the intelligence service of the new putsch government, but this did not happen after the putsch failed. He fled to Munich, where he worked with ethnic groups and founded the “Economic Development Association” as a liaison organization between the German right and Russian monarchist emigrants. The association collected considerable sums of money for the NSDAP, with the American car manufacturer Henry Ford also indirectly contributing. Scheubner-Richter also put Hitler in touch with the “steel baron” Fritz Thyssen and General Erich Ludendorff. Hitler tolerated the occultists around him as long as they were useful and brought money or important contacts. Ludendorff was immersed in the ideas of the ethnic circles, married the occultist Mathilde von Chemnitz and together they “researched” the Kabbalah. Hitler, who had brought the Iron Cross 1st Class with him from the First World War but no higher officer rank, viewed General Ludendorff, who was revered as a hero, as a competitor. When the NSDAP was temporarily banned after Hitler’s failed putsch, Ludendorff took over the leadership of the German National Freedom Party (DVFP) together with Gregor Strasser. Hitler later only tolerated the Ludendorffs and also kept Mathilde away from the Reichstag. Hitler’s love for the mystic Rudolf Hess is well known, as are the rumors at the time that the two were homosexual. Hess was a member of Thule and was inspired by the anthroposophist Rudolf Steiner, astrology and prophecies. The more of a mystic he became, the less often he was heard at the NSDAP party conferences. Thule, like all other ethnic groups, was closed by Hitler. There should no longer be any structures alongside the Nazi organizations. Tolerated occultism, such as Himmler’s SS, was integrated into the state apparatus, while groups like Thule did not receive the same honor. On July 4, 1941 there was even a decree signed by Reinhard Heydrich, according to which anthroposophists, theosophists, ariosophists, followers of “Christian Science”, spiritual healers, astrologers, occultists, spiritualists and fortune tellers were to be sent to the concentration camps. When Rudolf Hess made the fateful plane trip to England to meet apparent Nazi sympathizers from the higher echelons of society, the Nazi leadership officially murmured something about Hess’s questionable state of mind and interest in mysticism and astrology.
The British historian Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke separated myth from fact in his standard scholarly work “The Occult Roots of National Socialism,” but did not pursue any intelligence leads towards Britain, which is hardly surprising since he worked at the elite Oxford University, which was a hotbed of British espionage. In his later work “In the Shadow of the Black Sun” he dealt with the neo-Nazi scene and its esotericism, as well as the overlaps with the conspiracy theorist scene, without revealing how the icons of the international neo-Nazis were connected to the British nobility and Anglo-American espionage and how Anglo-American power circles have exerted a decisive influence on conspiracy literature for over 200 years. Hitler early on took a liking to Wagner’s schmaltzy operas, narcissistic heroic fantasies and the ethnic esotericism with ideas of the deification of the Nordic race through breeding and exterminating “inferiors”, but on the other hand he also had contempt for many ethnic-esoteric chatterboxes who had no real power and no had influential connections. In “Mein Kampf” he warned against “German ethnic traveling scholars”:
“At best, they are sterile theorists, but mostly terrible blabbermouths, and often believe that they can mask the spiritual and thoughtless hollowness of their actions and abilities with flowing beards and proto-Germanic behavior.”
One can consider it certain that he got large parts of his early forays from the cheap paper “Ostara” by Lanz von Liebenfels and later didn’t say a word about it. Ostara was heavily influenced by theosophy, which in turn was under the control of the British Annie Besant and the American Henry Olcott. The British-American establishment was interested in using lodges and propaganda to exert covert influence in Germany. Lanz von Liebenfels, who was not actually a nobleman, preached racial warfare, disparaged compassion and wanted to keep women under strict control. Only the nobles are able to generate progress and come closer to deification, he said. In his magazine Ostara, various authors quoted the texts of the British theosophy leaders Annie Besant and Helena Blavatsky. The latter was born into a German-Russian noble family and had immersed herself in the library of her great-grandfather, a Freemason with a Rosicrucian orientation. Hitler admitted in “Mein Kampf” that he had found the “granite” foundation for his views in Vienna and had read racial pamphlets, without explicitly admitting that it was probably just Ostara. In 1951, Lanz explained that Hitler had even visited him in 1909 to complete his collection of issues. The similarities between Lanz’s publications and Hitler’s beliefs are abundantly clear, even if Hitler later never acknowledged Lanz and officially designed the NSDAP without esotericism. Nevertheless, Lanz’s basic narcissistic ideas remained intact, without the Nazis or historians later investigating to what extent these writings were directly or indirectly infected by British propaganda. The Coming Race was an influential racist novel by the British aristocrat Edward Bulwer-Lytton, who studied at Cambridge and had powerful diplomats in his family. His ideas of a secret master race and the magical Vril energy were taken seriously and further processed by theosophists, which in turn partly stuck with the German ethnic lodges and books. It was later claimed that Professor Haushofer, the geopolitics teacher of Hitler and Hess, was a member of a secret Vril society. This has not been proven, but it is worth noting that Haushofer vehemently advocated an alliance between Germany and Great Britain, which was ultimately reflected in Mein Kampf and in Hess’s thinking. The Brits, as part of a strategic deception, led the Nazis to believe for a while that they were also in favor of such an alliance. Haushofer’s son became involved with the British during the war and effectively became a defector and spy. Hitler also wrote an enthusiastic letter to the American author Madison Grant, who published “The Passing of the Great Race” on racial hygiene in 1916 and studied at the elite Yale and Columbia universities. The Austrian Guido von List preached a folk-esoteric mishmash called “Ariosophy” with a similar theosophical influence as Liebenfels and was also read by Hitler. Although List was not generally “the man who gave Hitler the ideas,” as was later claimed, the leitmotifs of Social Darwinism still stuck with Hitler. After the First World War, there were increased activities of the Teutonic Order and the Thule Society of Baron von Sebottendorf, where ethnic-esoteric propaganda was celebrated and a few suspicious noblemen were also members. It was from these circles that the German Workers’ Party was founded, which then became the NSDAP. Folkish esotericism was celebrated, the swastika and “Sieg Heil” were popularized. Sebottendorf had learned the lodge system in Turkey from a likely front organization for the Young Turk movement, which overthrew the Sultan with the help of the British Empire. The lodge that Sebottendorf had taken in and trained was very likely connected to the British Empire and was tailored to the Turkish target audience. Sebottendorf’s own group later in Germany was again tailored to a German target audience and one would have to investigate the question of whether the British were pulling the strings from the background there too. Thule and the influence of the publicist Dietrich Eckart, to whom Hitler dedicated the book “Mein Kampf”, are often equated with Satanism in Christian-tinged and anti-Jewish conspiracy literature, even if ultimately no physical evidence or reliable eyewitness reports can be found for ritual human sacrifice or even summoning of demons. Eckart was never a member of Thule, as conspiracy books often claimed, but only gave a guest lecture there. In 1960, the book “Le matin des magiciens” by Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier was published and declared Eckart to be a Satanist who introduced Hitler to the cult, which was further embellished in 1972 in “The Spear of Destiny” by Trevor Ravenscroft. The latter was British and an anthroposophist, a splinter group of the British-dominated theosophists. In the 1920s, the British author Nesta Webster did her best to promote the view of a global Jewish conspiracy and Jewish communism that would have overthrown the tsars in Russia. The role of the British Empire was systematically covered up. The British theosophy leader Annie Besant, who had a great influence on the German ethnic-esoteric groups, was close to the Fabian Society, which built up socialism in Europe as a controlled opposition on behalf of the British nobility and major British capitalists. The irony that Besant simultaneously promoted socialism and inspired German ultra-rightists who see socialism as a purely Jewish conspiracy to conquer the world went unnoticed. The Munich publisher Julius Lehmann, who had considerable influence on Hitler and the NSDAP, had contacts with racial fanatics in the USA as early as 1905 and published some translations into German. Even before the First World War ended, he was already blaming “the Jews and their all-Jewish press” for the German defeat, even though Britain and American supplies were actually breaking Germany’s back. The British and American psychological warfare and propaganda departments certainly had a keen interest in playing the Jew card and convincing the Germans that Jews were the culprits. Lehman supplied Hitler with German translations of American books on racial hygiene such as Madison Grant’s Decline of the Great Race. At that time, a bureaucratic apparatus for sterilizing “inferior” people had long been in place in the USA. Before 1919, Hitler had a rather positive attitude towards Jews (his family had a Jewish family doctor), then a highly negative one, which was partly due to ethnic propaganda, but partly could also have been due to his opportunism.
The Hitlers of Liverpool
In the winter of 1912/1913, Adolf may have visited his brother Alois Jr. in Liverpool, England, who was working in the catering industry there. Since both brothers were not historically significant people at the time, the documentation is, as expected, thin, but the lack of interest among historians is quite noticeable. The man who later became a dictator and sought an alliance with the Germanic-born Britons for a long time spent time in Britain and no one is interested in it? Alois Jr.’s wife, Bridget Dowling, moved to America with her son William Patrick and tried unsuccessfully to find a publisher for her book manuscript in 1939. It was said everywhere that she was a liar who wanted to make money by being related to Adolf Hitler. Historians like Hans Mommsen believe that documents prove that Hitler was definitely in Vienna at the time in question. But a few insignificant pieces of paper have less evidentiary value than a witness statement. A few years ago Mike Unger published his book “The Hitlers of Liverpool” in which he argues that Adolf and Alois lived in a flat in Toxteth from November 1912 to April 1913, a relatively short but credible period. Short enough not to attract too much attention at home in Munich. In 1939, Bridget Dowling may well have exaggerated how Adolf’s visit had gone years before, but that doesn’t automatically mean that she had invented the entire visit. She made a few gimmicky claims about introducing him to astrology and persuading him to adopt his iconic mustache, but otherwise she was much more reserved and persuasive than several of the Fuhrer’s other early associates, whose lofty books were published and sold quite well. Some people had personal contact with Hitler before his political career and published their memories of it in book form. Why then was there a boycott by publishers and Western historians against Bridget Dowling’s descriptions? According to her, she was simply not thrilled about a ragged and strange brother-in-law from Germany who suddenly appeared on the scene. One motive for exaggerating and even inventing the matter is certainly money. But the British authorities and secret services had a motive to cover up any early connection Adolf had with Britain. If Bridget and Alois Jr. If they were German or Italian, their memories would probably have been published by publishers without any problem, even without hard evidence. Mike Unger couldn’t expect to land a bestseller with “The Hitlers of Liverpool,” because even conclusive evidence of Adolf’s brief visit to Britain would sound pretty boring at first. Why should anyone care today whether Adolf visited his brother for six months when he was still a nobody? Only in the context of Adolf’s enthusiasm for Nordic Britain, dreams of an alliance between Germany and the island, and Adolf’s reading of ethnic propaganda, which was heavily influenced by British theosophy, does the question become more relevant. Of all the countries in Europe, powerful Britain was undoubtedly the best fit for Hitler’s worldview and he had a strong motive to see the country and the people there. Normally historians obsess over every detail that might have influenced his worldview, but this they wave off, as if researching it was somehow ridiculous, absurd and disgusting in the first place. We find nothing of this in Mein Kampf and there are no other statements by Hitler on the matter, but he was always very incomplete in his descriptions and historians constantly rely on his companions and observers to fill in these gaps. Bridget Dowling described Alois Jr. as an unstable man who was addicted to gambling and pursued one outrageous business idea after another in the hope of making quick money. For example, winnings from gambling were supposed to be the start-up money for a razor blade business, with which his sister Angela and her husband were supposed to help him. He sent money to both of them, but it ended up in the hands of Adolf, who used it to pay for his trip to England. Alois couldn’t stand him, Bridget said, called him a good-for-nothing and suspected that he was trying to avoid military service. Bridget also called him a lazy and unsightly guest who would have stayed forever if only he had been let. Without knowing English, he disappeared into the streets of Liverpool for hours without ever finding a job and only returned home late at night. The descriptions are very realistic and fit with the many other information from confirmed sources. If Hitler had tried to scour bathhouses and other places in England, as he had done in Munich and Vienna, in the hope of finding gay partners, then he could have easily been discovered by the police. The strict laws against homosexuality were only substantiated in 1885 and even criminalized flirting and contact in public. The police used undercover agents and informants to hunt down gays. If Hitler had been identified, a file about him could have existed for a while.
Escaping to Munich
In May 1913, around ten years after his father’s death, Hitler inherited another modest 820 crowns. Why he suddenly moved to Munich on May 24th, a Saturday, in a cloak and dagger operation is a mystery; he even lied several times later about the time of his move and said, for example, that he had moved to Munich in 1912. One can speculate that he had already visited Munich and the gay scene there several times before, without any written records of this existing. But the haste that Hitler showed in 1913 is definitely noticeable, because he didn’t even fill out a deregistration form in his men’s dormitory, or deregister at the city administration, or inform his relatives. Perhaps Vienna had become too hot for him and he felt it was urgently necessary to disappear without anyone knowing where he was going. By then, Vienna had simply worn out for him. If he had next moved to the Bavarian province or to any normal town in Bavaria and started an ordinary apprenticeship there, we could speak of a credible new beginning in his revered Germany. Instead, he set up camp again in an expensive city with a significant gay scene and continued his strange, loitering life. He immediately got a room rented in Munich, despite the weekend, which suggests that he had explored the city beforehand and a few days later he registered with the city administration as a stateless person. His landlord’s son later explained1:
“He slept in very late, usually until midday, and spent a lot of time grooming himself.”
This fits in with the lifestyle of a homosexual who spends his nights in the scene and practices personal hygiene that is far more complex than that of a heterosexual. Hitler later said about his lifestyle:
“I didn’t want to become a painter, I only painted these things so that I could make a living and study. I only ever painted enough so that I had just the bare essentials for life.”
But he wasn’t a student at all, but spent a lot of time doing activities that were incomprehensible to his landlords or anyone else. In his new place of residence he began to read more military books and to take a keen interest in such matters, while the Austrian authorities searched for him for four years because of his refusal to serve, but without really bothering him. If he had actually already spied on the gay scene in Vienna for a police department or secret service, he could theoretically continue this activity in Munich, since gays from all over Austria regularly made a pilgrimage to Munich for a weekend and believed they were safe from the Austrian police there. It would also be consistent with the approach of a secret service to initially keep an informant on a short leash, assess his reliability and further develop his skills before using him for more important tasks or even sending him abroad. It is known from Hitler’s later military service and his confirmed spy service for the authorities after the war in Bavaria that he offered absolute subordination and a high degree of reliability to his superiors. Before the war, a similar thoroughness and a similar callous behavior would have made Hitler a suitable informant within the gay scene, in which all possible social classes frequented and about which the Vienna police wanted to be well informed. Hitler was able to charm other people, but he had no real friends, which limited his ability to be used as an informer, but at the same time made him more loyal to his superiors. What is interesting is that Hitler’s sudden disappearance from Austria coincided almost to the day with the arrest of Alfred Redl, who, as deputy intelligence chief of Austria-Hungary, had sold key military secrets to the Russians and other European powers. Redl was gay and for a long time it was suspected that he could therefore be blackmailed by the Russians. In the relatively new book “Colonel Redl. The espionage case. The scandal. The Facts” by Verena Moritz and Hannes Leidinger, on the other hand, says that Redl was a walk-in who sold information to the Russians out of financial need.2 He kept a young lieutenant happy with expensive gifts and also maintained a lavish lifestyle. So he was the typical sugar daddy who scored points with money and influence instead of youth and physical attractiveness. Whether there was a connection between Hitler’s sudden disappearance from Austria and the arrest of Redl, one can only speculate. The historian Paul Chartess sees it as a possible indication that Hitler was part of Redl’s network and quickly fled when Redl was exposed so as not to be exposed himself. Allegedly, after his hasty move on Saturday, Hitler found out about Redl’s unmasking in the newspaper the following Monday or Tuesday. But he could also have been in the know on the Saturday before his trip or the Friday before. In January 1914, just months before the outbreak of World War I, in which he would take part as a soldier, the police finally took Hitler to the consulate in Munich, where he complained about his terrible youth and his poverty. It didn’t help, he was forced to report to his homeland a month later, where, strangely enough, he was deemed unfit. After four years of escaping from the service and a lengthy manhunt, he was given a free ticket and allowed to return to Germany. If the Austrian services had considered Hitler a treasonous agent in connection with the Redl case, he would have been interrogated and, if necessary, imprisoned. Of course, it could be that there was no solid evidence against Hitler and people were simply no longer sure about him. His escape to Munich wouldn’t have exactly inspired confidence, but at least he hadn’t run away to Russia or England. In the theoretical scenario in which Hitler worked as an informant for the Austrian authorities before the First World War, his superiors or command officers could have given him the order to stay in Munich and infiltrate the German military after the Redl fiasco. Or they stopped working with him until further notice and Hitler was forced to join the German military in order to pursue new career opportunities. A spy job would have already become second nature to him, and the prospect of only surviving by painting postcards in the future or starting an ordinary apprenticeship somewhere and being bullied around for a pittance would have been a horror idea.
Sources:
[1] http://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/print/d-42648884.html
[2] Oberst Redl. Der Spionagefall. Der Skandal. Die Fakten“ von Verena Moritz und Hannes Leidinger
Hitler in the First World War
According to Hitler’s own account, service in the First World War was his first heroic deed, his test of maturity as a German man, the actual beginning of his vocation, his turning away from a staid existence, an awakening experience and also the trigger for his later political activity. As a politician and leader, he subsequently wore his Iron Cross First Class uniform in public and even in private to demonstrate how he distinguished himself in the war. After the end of the Third Reich, historians showed conspicuously little interest in primary sources about Hitler’s time at the front in World War I. A few postcards and letters were evaluated, doubts were expressed about the exaggerated stories of Hitler’s former comrades, and that was it. In principle, historians have adopted Hitler’s lies that he was political in the First World War and that he fought as a particularly fearless soldier. Historians have also continued Hitler’s cover-up about homosexual relationships during his service. A thorough review was only published in 2010 by Thomas Weber using primary sources from archives in Munich as a book titled “Hitler’s First War”. The war broke out in August 1914 and Hitler, who had recently been decommissioned in Austria as too weak, reported to a Bavarian regiment. Whether he got a special permit for this, as he later full-heartedly explained, or whether no one was simply interested in his citizenship is controversial. At first he enthusiastically jumped into the fray, which perhaps had something to do with the naive view of the war at the time. He, who had constantly read adventure novels by Karl May, was at the beginning of a momentous adventure. Had the war turned Hitler from nobody to future leader? The men of the List Regiment had been hastily trained and poorly equipped, and the scrawny painter Hitler was already running out of steam during the practice marches. The first real battle at Ypres was a massive failure and several comrades fell to British machine gun fire before they could do anything, while the exhausted Hitler most likely took cover somewhere and ducked his head. In the battle that followed shortly, the regiment was physically exhausted and it was only through luck that Hitler did not end up as one of the many corpses on the battlefield, but that did not stop him from writing in a letter that the British had been defeated in the battle. The files show that he did not shoot a single enemy.
Just eleven days after his arrival at the front, his job became that of a dispatcher, transporting messages several kilometers away from the front line and also being allowed to sleep at a safe distance. Other runners had to be in the trenches directly at the front and suffered heavy losses. In Mein Kampf, Hitler made it sound like he was an ordinary soldier at the front throughout. The fact that he was soon given the much more pleasant position of a dispatcher at a considerable distance from the front was either luck or the result of a lack of suitability in the trenches. Korbinian Rutz, a simple soldier from the List Regiment, later stated under a pseudonym that Hitler only spent ten days at the front. After being arrested by the Gestapo and spending three months in the Dachau concentration camp, he promptly changed his account. For the rescue of a superior, for which not Hitler but a comrade was responsible, Hitler, along with a few other soldiers, received the Iron Cross as an award. The closer you were to certain officers, the higher your chance of receiving the medal. But while Hitler lived at a great distance from the front and carried out reporting missions, his comrades died in the hail of bullets, from untreated injuries, exhaustion in the mud and the poor supply of drinking water and food. Hitler’s job could also be dangerous, but his daily risk was significantly lower than that of the front-line grunts in the trenches and nothing justified his later claim that his job was the most dangerous of all. As an influential politician and later as a leader, he could be sure that many former comrades would support this fairy tale. However, the files and some realistic reports from soldiers paint a completely different picture: Hitler was even able to sleep in a real bed for a long time, an hour’s walk from the front, and found time to paint and for political discussions. Actually, his long service should have meant a promotion to officer, but he never got one and, according to reliable sources, didn’t want one in order not to have to go to the front and lead men who saw him as an oddball who never drank, never went to a brothel and liked to sit alone in the corner with his nose in a book. His letters to the Popp family (the landlords of his apartment in Munich) became increasingly hopeless as the war progressed. In “Mein Kampf” he described:
“The romance of battle […] was replaced by horror. The enthusiasm gradually cooled, and the exuberant jubilation was suffocated by the fear of death.”
Even someone as emotionally numb as Hitler could no longer withstand the constant stress. As usual, he was helped by his narcissistic fantasies and his interpretations of random events, such as the artillery shell that would have hit him if he hadn’t just followed an inner inspiration and moved a few meters away. This is said to have fueled his belief that he was being guided and protected by higher powers because fate had great things in store for him. His comrades didn’t think much of him and joked that he would starve to death in a canned food factory because he was unable to open a can with a bayonet1.
Hitler also served his superiors at a safe distance from the front, which included washing laundry and the like, in which he showed the deepest submissiveness. Strangely enough, in his book (published by the British Oxford Press) the historian Thomas Weber is not at all interested in the topic of Hitler’s homosexuality and emphasizes those sources that describe Hitler as a relatively popular comrade and not as a suspicious loner, although of course it is not left unmentioned that that the officers could not see any leadership qualities in him. Hitler would not have been completely unpopular in this environment, but he was miles away from the shameless fiction of later propaganda. Comrade Schmidt, who, according to Mend, had a relationship with Hitler, was also quite young, like Hitler, had a passion for art, stayed away from women for most of his life and had a childless marriage late in life. The historian Weber is of course aware of the stubbornness and opinionatedness that Hitler displayed towards “ordinary” people on construction sites and elsewhere in political discussions before the war, while Hitler appeared submissive to his superiors and, in principle, to anyone with influence. According to the soldier Mend, whom the historian Weber dismisses as a liar, Hitler was nicknamed “the goofy Adolf” during the war, threw excessive temper tantrums when someone of his rank contradicted him, and displayed feminine traits and flattery toward officers. Mend’s descriptions match the descriptions of numerous other people who got to know Hitler better and fit Hitler’s strongly narcissistic personality2:
“He was hypocrisy personified. One face showed the eager busybody in front of his superiors and, if necessary, in front of his comrades. It was quite common for Hitler, when at rest or with his staff at the back, to hear that some success had been achieved at the front, to rush excitedly among the people, waving his arms and shouting: “We have won! We showed the French (or English) again!” But he was always the informer who ingratiated himself with his superiors as soon as there was an advantage for him. That’s why our comrades were wary of him.”
Morale in the List Regiment became increasingly poor, the number of deserters increased and in the midst of all the chaos there was hardly any room left for camaraderie and solidarity. After an injury, Hitler was allowed to go to the hospital and briefly return home to recover, where, according to folklore, he came to the realization that Jews and their propaganda were destroying Germany’s readiness for war. In reality, he was a very clueless and unprincipled advantage hunter and Germany simply did not have enough resources to compete any longer with all of the war’s opponents. In August 1918, Hitler was awarded his Iron Cross First Class, the highest medal a soldier of his lower rank could receive, and this award was not only a door opener to the world of politics after the war, but an elementary part of the myth that is Hitler celebrated around his person. He wore the Iron Cross on countless occasions and used it during his rise to power to put himself on a level with generals. Records of the mission for which the medal was awarded are sparse; all we learn is that it was a particularly dangerous errand to troops at the front. Overall, of course, it is unfair to the men at the front of the trench, whose lives were constantly in danger, and since he had a direct line to the leaders of his regiment, his chances for the order are better from the start. For the rest of his life he wanted to give the impression of a special war hero, superior to any general in military matters, without ever having led men, planned missions or even developed campaigns. He is said to have continued his education and picked up things behind the front in his protected environment and it is said that he had a reliable detailed memory for types of weapons or fire rates of machine guns, which is anything but impressive. In 1918 he suffered his second injury from minor contact with combat gas and ended up in the psychiatric ward of the hospital in Pasewalk, where he was diagnosed with hysteria, which meant nothing other than a nervous breakdown. According to Hitler’s account, he was temporarily blind and his eyes burned like coals, which is ruled out according to the files. One of the doctors later confided to American intelligence that Hitler was also considered a psychopath. In Pasewalk he spent the remaining time in safety until Germany’s surrender, while his regiment was crushed in the final battles of the war. It is not known whether he suffered another psychological breakdown when he received the news of the defeat, or whether he was simply making up another episode for his fake hero epic, but one can make informed speculation about one based on his psyche and his life situation at the time gigantic life crisis:
- He wasn’t part of the winning team, but rather one of the losers
- The military, his surrogate family, was in dissolution. He was not in contact with his biological family even during the war.
- A further career in the military with future prospects in peacetime seemed highly unlikely, as he was virtually excluded from promotions and the military would be dramatically reduced in size.
- An artistic career was just as hopeless as before. At almost 30 years old, he still had no educational qualifications or completed vocational training.
After the war, many men made a new start, established themselves professionally and started a family. But not Hitler. According to his previous comrade Mend, he was living in homeless shelters again and was traveling in Munich with his comrade and sex partner Schmidt. Hitler tried in vain to find a leading and comfortable position with the communists and then, out of revenge, became an agent of the right-wing Freikorps Epp.
Sources:
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/aug/16/new-evidence-adolf-hitler
[2] Mend-Protokoll
The spy
Hitler later recalled these uncertain days:
“During this time, endless plans chased one another in my head. For days I thought about what could be done, alone, and the end of every consideration was always the sober realization that, as a nameless person, I did not have even the slightest prerequisite for any expedient action. “
If you take him at his word, it could mean that his decision was completely open as to which side he should join in the future. Hitler initially kept a low profile and did not leave Munich, although he could have joined the various Freikorps instead, like many soldiers in the Reichswehr and officers like Rudolf Hess. A solid theory is that Hitler spied on the communists in Munich and passed relevant information to the right-wing Freikorps. According to historian Ernst Deuerlein, Hitler even tried to firmly join the USPD or the communists. Was he a turncoat or did he infiltrate the left or was he even recruited as a Russian spy? Did Russian secret services capture files that proved Hitler’s homosexuality and spying activities before the war and was he recruited with this blackmail material? One would actually assume that Hitler and the rest of the Germans had a desire for revenge against Great Britain after the First World War, but the British secret services cleverly used a mixture of espionage, lodges and ethnic propaganda to counteract this. The common Nordic descent of Germans and British was strongly emphasized, all of the world’s great evils were blamed on the Jews and “the Jews” were even held responsible for Germany’s defeat in the First World War. Suspicious circles from Britain and the USA diligently spread misleading conspiracy literature and the Protocols of Zion and also wove the leitmotifs contained therein into theosophical and other esoteric books, which were enthusiastically read in ethnic circles in Germany. Hitler’s descriptions in “Mein Kampf” and his later plans to forge a Nordic alliance with the British show that after the First World War he did not feel hatred for the British Empire, but rather a great respect. He allegedly found it absurd that Germans and British were killing each other at the front. Why not join the winners of the war, i.e. the British? Defeated Germany could hardly muster enough resistance on its own against communists and the Jews, who were ostracized by Hitler as the masterminds of a global conspiracy. After the First World War, there were many young German soldiers in precarious situations who, consciously or unconsciously, allowed themselves to be recruited or at least influenced in their thinking by British or other foreign secret services. The secret services paid and always had a suitable excuse to justify or reinterpret the betrayal. Secret societies such as the “Germanic Order” based on the Masonic model and its cover organization “Thule Society” also diligently recruited members. The Bavarian lodge leader was, as already described, Baron von Sebottendorf (born Adam Glauer), who apparently became a Freemason in the Turkish city of Bursa and learned the basics of the lodge there, although the recognized British historian Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke suspects that this lodge in Bursa was a front organization for the illegal Young Turk movement that wanted to overthrow the Sultan. The Young Turks were, in turn, the project of the British Empire, which makes Sebottendorf look quite suspicious. It would have been typical for the British secret services to establish all sorts of lodges in Germany and to design them in a ethnic, esoteric manner in order to be able to recruit officers and other people of interest as members. In 1909, when Hitler was still living in Vienna, Turkey was in turmoil and the new Young Turkish government put its own navy under the command of a British admiral, the banker of the British royal family Ernest Cassel took over the Turkish central bank and various British advisors spread throughout possible ministries. So was Sebottendorf just a new Adam Weißhaupt? Where the Illuminati Order at the end of the 18th century was tailored to the trends of the time and wanted to destroy the French monarchy, Sebottendorf’s organizations after the First World War were exactly suitable for the target audience of militant German patriots who fought the communist council republics. The strongly anti-Jewish texts that were published and inhaled by the ethnic-esoteric lodges naturally also included the Protocols of Zion and Henry Ford’s series “The International Jew” from America. Sebottendorf didn’t let anyone know where the money came from which he used to advertise the Teutonic Order. Eventually he was able to start his own offshoot, the Thule Society, and use his wife’s money to buy a newspaper, which he promptly renamed “Völkischer Observer”. He popularized the swastika and the slogan “Sieg und Heil”, set up a fighting league that liberated Munich from the communists and had one of his lodge members establish the German Workers’ Party, which eventually became the NSDAP. But, like Adam Weishaupt so many years before, he also made huge missteps and, for example, was unable to prevent membership lists from falling into the hands of the communists. Several Thule members were arrested and murdered and so Sebottendorf quit, traveled abroad, returned in 1933, was deported and was rumored to have worked for British intelligence between 1942 and 1945. People close to Thule infiltrated the Munich Red Army and spied on the Communist Party, which could mean that Hitler may also have acted as an informant there and had stayed in Munich for this purpose. Even before the war, Hitler had enthusiastically read books and pamphlets whose content overlapped with Thule and similar groups. On April 26, 1919, communist police stormed the Four Seasons Hotel, which had served as the headquarters of the Thule Society and similar organizations, and made about 20 arrests. Four days later, seven Thule members who were in the hands of the military police, including Prince Gustav Franz Maria von Thurn und Taxis and three other nobles (Heila Countess von Westarp, Franz Freiherr von Teucherl, Friedrich Freiherr von Seidlitz) were shot in the Luitpold Gymnasium. Prince Gustav in particular needs to be examined more closely for possible espionage activities in connection with the British. The Thule Kampfbund, which had gathered men and weapons outside Munich, marched almost unhindered into the Bavarian capital and shot 300 communists. Sebottendorff followed the events from a safe distance and not only refused to fight himself, but his failure to keep key documents secret had made him unsustainable as a leader. Immediately after the recapture of Munich, Hitler was pulled aside so that he could betray individual comrades who had cooperated too much with the communists and were promptly shot for it. The exact circumstances are unknown, which means that we don’t know for sure whether Hitler actually deliberately and systematically sounded out his comrades over a significant period of time, or whether Hitler simply improvised something after retaking Munich to make himself important and around himself to adapt to the new balance of power. It is also possible that he had previously been recruited by the communists as an agent and, after the right-wing nationalist Freikorps recaptured Munich, he deliberately betrayed unimportant comrades in order to protect important communist agents and make himself more interesting for the Freikorps. After the defeat of the communists, Hitler was transferred to Department I/bP in Reichswehr Group Command 4, which was responsible for intelligence and propaganda and trained him further as an undercover agent or informant. His superior Karl Mayr described him with the following words:
“When I first met him, he seemed like a wandering dog looking for his master.”
Hitler was ready
“to ally himself, for better or for worse, with anyone who would treat him with kindness.”
For the first time in his life, Hitler was actually allowed to be a student in a professional training institution and listen to lectures, such as those given by Gottfried Feder, who rattled off the usual nonsense about the world Jewish conspiracy and was in contact with Thule and the esoteric Dietrich Eckart. The German Workers’ Party (DAP) had already emerged from the Thule environment and Hitler was pressured by his superior Mayr from the secret service to join the party, for which he was even granted special permission. Hitler’s oratory talent, which was nothing particularly special, especially in the early stages, but at least better than that of his comrades, was just one of several reasons for this. Hitler came from a humble background and was therefore able to generate additional credibility and sympathy among the people at a time when Germans were very skeptical of the upper class of nobility and senior military officers. It also shows what kind of pseudo-democracy people were foisted on from the shadows. The DAP was essentially a construction put together on the drawing board that both invoked Germany’s old greatness but also lured the masses with the supposed advantages of national socialism. In “Mein Kampf” a few years later, Hitler wrote pages and pages about the harsh conditions of the poor workers, as well as about the problems of the middle and upper classes, in order to promise different readers what they wanted to hear. Not only the Bavarian authorities had an interest in managing the political and mental processes among the people, but the British secret services must also have understood how worthwhile exerting influence here would be. It was only with Hitler’s work in the Bavarian secret service that militant anti-Semitism and the fight against a supposedly Jewish global conspiracy became an issue for him. Russian propaganda also found its way to those around Thule and the DAP: Alfred Rosenberg, who over time became a kind of chief ideologist for the National Socialists, brought the fake “Protocols of Zion” with him from Russia to Germany, thereby inspiring Eckart and others the rest of the Thule environment. No one suspected Rosenberg, who came from Russia, studied in Moscow and arrived as a destitute migrant, of being an agent.
The early infiltration of Germany by US industry
Before the Second World War, the USA officially had no real foreign intelligence service that would have been comparable to the later CIA. If ordinary historians don’t have any files that can be evaluated, then they simply assume that America had no significant espionage capabilities against other countries. Over the course of the 1800s, the initially small United States had to expand and had to keep an eye on rivals such as Spain, France and Mexico. In the north, Britain still had large territories (Canada), but hostility to the British was staged at the top. Global industrialization and banking became a race in which only the fastest and most aggressive players would prevail. The USA could simply copy the British Empire’s methodology of establishing secret service structures that were not officially visible. The financing was private, so that no accountability was owed to the democratic state structures, whatever space could be provided was used, and the staff was recruited primarily from the upper strata of society, which were closely linked to families, and with the help State ID printing companies and corporations could put together a legend for agents at any time. In the German Empire of the later 1800s, the temptation to trade with the Americans was great. However, every single major US company that set up shop on German soil potentially brought spies with them. Britain had long had ancient spy networks on German soil that had been set up by the Guelph, Wettin and Reginar nobility. The British repeatedly appear to have coordinated operations with the Americans. The Rockefeller companies Standard Oil and Chase Bank started their business with Germany early and gradually intensified it. In 1936 there was a partnership between the J. Henry Schröder Bank in NY and the Rockefellers. Baron Bruno von Schröder and Baron Kurt von Schröder were on board. Bruno had previously served in the Grand Ducal Mecklenburg Dragoon Regiment and then moved to the family bank in Britain and the USA. The ancestor and founder of this bank was awarded the British title of Baronet by Queen Victoria in 1892 for his services to the royal household. When he died in 1910, his estate of over £2 million was among the 30 largest estates in Britain. In 1913, Schröder was the second largest bank in the City of London in terms of loan volume. It was on the same level as the NM Rothschild and Sons Bank, which had been set up by the Landgrave of Hesse-Kassel and the British Crown, and the Barings Bank, whose operators had already achieved a special position in Hanover under the Guelph nobility. Kurt Freiherr von Schröder served from the beginning of 1918 to the beginning of 1919 as a captain in the Great General Staff in the German Empire, helped to establish Nazi rule and after the war in the British occupied zone initially received a paltry three months in prison and a fine of 1,500 Reichsmarks. which was revised upwards slightly after major protests. The Schröders and Rockefellers’ joint project employs the brothers John Foster and Allen Dulles as lawyers. In 1941 the latter ended up in a senior position at the new secret service OSS (soon afterwards CIA). In the same year, in the middle of the war, Director Hoover of the Federal Police FBI complained that money had flowed through Chase Bank to Rockefeller’s Standard Oil at the behest of the German Reichsbank. It must be taken into account that the most important secret operations were planned from very high up and were strictly shielded, so that the various participants in the operation only knew as much as was absolutely necessary. Before someone like Hoover or prosecutors or banking regulators intervened too harshly, they could be told confidentially in general terms that it was all part of the US “national security” agenda. The Chase Bank in Paris helped with activities of the German embassy there for Otto Abetz. Millions were spent on French companies that collaborated with the Nazis, on the Gestapo and on France’s new military government. The American embassy and the government in Washington knew about it and did not intervene. In 1998, Cha-se announced that it would now investigate its own past to see whether the Paris branch had been “overly cooperative” in “providing banking services to Germany during the occupation”.
https://www .nytimes.com/1998/11/07/world/chase-reviews-nazi-era-role.html
Two years later, some activities at the time involving expropriated Jewish money were admitted. Nothing else.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB951271524654360876
It has never been systematically investigated how much valuable information Chase was able to capture from the Nazis and the French military government. Not just through bookings, but also through personal contacts. Another effect was that the Nazi leadership was convinced for a long time that it had enough friends in the USA and that America had no interest in intervening militarily in Europe. In addition to FBI boss Hoover, other important US government officials also suggested investigations into Chase Bank. However, Chase’s Winthrop Aldrich had a direct line to the US President and the prosecution’s investigation simply continued to drag on. Walter C. Teagle of Rockefeller’s Standard Oil knew the car manufacturer Henry Ford, who for a long time acted as a major Nazi sympathizer, the noble Sir Henri Deterding of Royal Dutch Shell, who had given considerable sums to the NSDAP, and Hermann Schmitz of I.G.Farben. Teagle made many visits to Berlin in the 1930s and became director of American I.G. Chemical Corp., a subsidiary of Germany’s I.G. Farben. In February 1938, the US banking regulator “Securities and Exchange Commission” held a meeting about the ties between the Nazis and the American I.G. via a Swiss subsidiary. Investigators questioned Teagle about the ownership of the Swiss company and he claimed not to know that the owners were IG and the Nazi government. Teagle resigned from IG’s American board but remained associated with the company. The American companies gave the Nazis tetraethyl lead, an essential additive for aviation fuel, without which Göring’s Luftwaffe had no chance. Standard Oil, Du Pont and General Motors had the rights to it and Teagle helped arrange a sale to the German Schmitz. Teagle gradually faded into the background and handed over the tasks to his confidant William Stamps Farish. His ships transported oil to Tenerife in the Canary Islands, where it was refueled and taken to Hamburg. They even refueled submarines even after the American government declared such deliveries morally unacceptable and while Roosevelt was already essentially waging war against Germany in the Atlantic. It was important for the Nazis to convert oil delivered to the Canary Islands into aviation fuel for the Luftwaffe. Once again, Farish proved to be helpful: his employee Harry D. Collier from Standard Oil had already built the corresponding plants in the Canary Islands in 1936. At the same time, Teagle had set up a refinery in Hamburg that produced 15,000 tons of aviation fuel per week for Göring. Fuel was always one of the Third Reich’s weak points, and various experts estimated that Hitler would not have been able to start the war until years later if help had not been found to make up for the shortage. For many years, Teagle and Farish had exploited Romania’s resources, established extensive oil exploration in the Ploiesti fields, and pocketed millions from Germany in the process. The head of the Reich Office, Carl Krauch, who was also the military industry leader and chairman of the supervisory board of I.G. Farben, established early on that Romania and the whole of southeastern Europe was an “area that had to be secured by the armed forces” and whose oil had to be “secured politically and militarily” exclusively for Germany. Adolf Hitler said during his visit to Finland in June 1942:
“If the Russians had occupied Romania in the fall of 1940 and taken possession of the Romanian oil wells, then we would have been helpless in 1941. […] We have large German production; But what the Luftwaffe alone devours, what our armored divisions devour, is something quite enormous. It is a consumption that defies all imagination. […] Without at least four to five million tons of Romanian petroleum we would not be able to wage the war and would have had to abandon it.”
Petroleum production in Ploiești was largely under the control of the American Standard Oil Company until 1941. On March 5, 1941, Ion Antonescu and Hermann Göring met in Vienna to discuss securing the strategic use of Standard Oil’s Romanian oil fields in the event that the United States entered the war. Shortly afterwards, Antonescu and Hermann Schmitz (Chairman of I.G. Farben) agreed with William Stamps Farish (Chairman of Standard Oil) that the German Reich would in any case exploit the oil reserves.
For this use, the German Reich compensated the Standard Oil Company with eleven million US dollars in interest-bearing securities. The German Reich declared war on the USA on December 11, 1941. The British and Americans later bombed the facilities.
Hungary was the second most important source of oil for the Nazi war machine after Romania. Teagle began drilling there in 1934. In May 1940, British authorities seized a French tanker in US waters that was sailing from Standard to Casablanca with 16,000 tons of oil; probably for further delivery to Hitler. US Secretary of State Cordell Hull actually called on the British government to release the tanker. So the tanker continued on to Africa, followed by six others. On July 15, 1941, Major Charles A. Burrows of U.S. Military Intelligence reported to the War Department that Standard Oil was shipping oil from Aruba in the Dutch West Indies to Tenerife in the Canary Islands. The American lawyer Thurman Arnold, who had previously been extremely suspicious of large corporations and cartels, entered the headquarters of Standard Oil at Rockefeller Plaza in 1942 with documents under his arm, followed by his team of secretaries and assistants. Directly behind him were Secretary of the Navy Franklin Knox and Secretary Henry L. Stimson. In the meeting room, William S. Farish was told by Arnold that the files were completely clear about the oil and patents for the Nazis. But it didn’t help, because Standard was the main supplier for the US armed forces and somewhere high up in the secret service structures everything had probably been agreed upon anyway. Farish only paid a $1,000 fine and Standard was more symbolically charged by the courts. The Davis Oil Company also had a relationship with IG Farben through Werner and Karl Clemm von Hohenberg. Karl was an agent for the German secret service, Abwehr. Werner’s father-in-law was a vice president of Citibank. The construction of a huge oil refinery for Göring’s Luftwaffe near Hamburg was led by Karl von Clemm. This oil refinery bypassed the terms of the Versailles Agreement and supplied the Luftwaffe. In June 1938, Davis’ first tanker steamed to Germany with thousands of tons of Mexican oil.
Ball-bearings
During World War II, Sosthenes Behn was an investor in the Swedish Enskilda Bank, the main financier of the ball bearing manufacturer Svenska Kullagerfabri-ken SKF. Ball bearings were indispensable for the Nazis: the Luftwaffe couldn’t fly without them, and the tanks and armored cars couldn’t roll. ITT’s Focke-Wulfs, Ford’s cars and trucks wouldn’t have worked. Focke-Wulfs used at least four thousand bearings per aircraft. No matter whether guns, bomb sights, electrical generators and motors, ventilation systems, submarines, railways, mining machines, or communication devices from ITT, everything depended on ball bearings. Sosthenes Behn had served in World War I and, according to Anthony Sampson’s book The Sovereign State of ITT, he was one of the first industrial representatives to receive Hitler after he came to power. ITT initially owned a quarter of the shares in the Focke-Wulff fighter aircraft and soon after owned the majority. The noble Kurt Freiherr von Schröder helped arrange these deals. SKF was founded in 1907 and, with its subsidiaries, was the largest ball bearing manufacturer in the world. In Europe alone they controlled 80 percent of the market. It also controlled iron ore mines, steel and blast furnaces, foundries and factories and plants in the United States, Great Britain, France and Germany. The driving force as chairman of SKF was Sven Wingquist, a dashing friend of Göring and the British Duke and Duchess of Windsor. He was a prominent partner in Jacob Wallenberg’s Stockholm Enskilda, Sweden’s largest private bank.
Vehicles
By 1940, Henry Ford controlled more than half of the American automobile market and distributed mountains of pamphlets such as the “Protocols of Zion” and “The International Jew.” Hitler believed he had an ally in him and the Ford works in Germany seemed to be enough proof for him, alongside the conspiracy ideology. From 1939 onwards, Ford factories in Germany produced many vehicles for the German Wehrmacht, after which Ford in the USA simply declared that it had lost control of them. Maurice Dollfus provided much of the financing for the new Ford automobile factory at Poissy, 11 miles from Paris in the occupied zone. Under Dollfus, the Poissy factory began producing aircraft engines in 1940 and supplied them to the German government. It also built automobiles. On October 20, 1942, the US Ambassador in London reported to US Secretary of State Dean Acheson that two thousand German trucks were earmarked for repairs at the Ford engine works in Bern. General Motors, controlled by the DuPont family of Delaware, played a similar role. Between 1932 and 1939, General Motors bosses poured $30 million into I.G. Color systems. In 1933, concurrent with the rise of Hitler, the DuPonts began funding fascist groups in America, including the anti-Semitic American Liberty League and the Clark’s Crus-aders, which totaled around 1,250,000 members. In the mid-1930s, General Motors became involved in the mass production of trucks, armored cars and tanks in Nazi Germany. Graeme K. Howard, the vice president of General Motors, was therefore even under FBI surveillance and was considered an avowed fascist who had written the book “America and a New World Order”. On November 23, 1937, representatives of General Motors held a secret meeting in Boston with Baron Manfred von Killinger, and with Baron von Tippleskirsch, the Nazi consul general and Gestapo leader in Boston. This group signed a joint agreement declaring their full commitment to the Nazi cause indefinitely. As late as April 1943 it was reported that General Motors was trading with the enemy in Stockholm. Henry Morgenthau instructed W. B. Wachtler, GM’s regional manager in New York, in a special code order to order his Stockholm boss to stop trading. However, General Motors remained unpunished after the war, as did other important corporations. According to Charles Levinson, in 1967 the United States granted the company a total tax exemption of $33 million on profits for the “problems and destruction inflicted on its aircraft and motor vehicle factories in Germany and Austria during World War II.” Conveniently for those responsible, Göring and Himmler committed suicide and took with them to the grave the secrets that Charles Bedaux, William Rhodes Davis, William Weiss of Sterling and William S. Farish also knew.
The psyche of Hitler
Before the war began, Albert Speer had been just one of Hitler’s favorite architects and was commissioned with absurdly expensive building projects, the most grandiose of which were never realized. He had to accompany the leader at all times and describes his daily routine, surrounded by a close circle of people, over the years: Getting up in the late morning, having breakfast, then one or two work meetings. Lunch. Long walks. Dinner. Then two films were shown. Then there was more lame conversation until he went to bed around one in the morning. The people believed that the leader was working obsessively day and night, but he did next to nothing and handed over tasks to other officials. Martin Bormann in particular had an absurdly high degree of decision-making power, as he could simply have Hitler approve many things and manage access to him. The Americans had long since discovered through their best psychologists with the help of intelligence information that Hitler had a narcissistic personality disorder. The Russians probably knew this too. The most important characteristic is a severe aversion to reality and clinging to fantasy ideas about one’s own greatness and future successes. Failure is always someone else’s fault, and Hitler’s favorite avoidance maneuver was to accuse his generals and other officials of a lack of “will.” With this highly elastic conceptual concept, he was always able to bend any situation in his head and dismiss facts. He also clearly showed the symptoms of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD): His shortened attention span and erratic work habits were observed by virtually everyone who had significant contact with him. People with ADHD can be distracted by any stimulus, no matter how small, causing them to stop what they are doing to focus on a new stimulus. We clearly see that Hitler mostly preferred a low-stimulus environment, such as Obersalzberg or the later Führer headquarters, with always the same, rigid routines. The lack of prioritization was also typical. People with ADHD perceive all stimuli as equally important. As a result, it is very difficult for them to decide which task to start with because everything is important to them. Hitler didn’t want to go through files or have complex discussions, but rather make decisions “from his gut” that had often been suggested to him by someone else. Albert Speer noticed Hitler’s extreme procrastination early on. Work was always done at the last minute. Poor time management is a key characteristic of ADHD. Those affected can often talk a lot and listen little. There was an unwritten rule among Hitler’s close followers that they had to listen to the same hollow monologues. With their impulse control disorder, people with ADHD can become angry or offended very quickly, seemingly for no reason or because of it slightest occasions. The motor restlessness is manifested by constant movements, tapping the foot or drumming the fingers. People with ADHD quickly become offended when criticized and take criticism extremely personally. When combined with a narcissistic disorder, some of these ADHD traits are further exacerbated. As a teenager, Hitler’s father intended him to have a career as a civil servant, which was of course a pure horror idea for someone with ADHD. Hitler wanted to become an artist and did not have the discipline necessary to study art or have a regular career. Sometime in the morning he got up from his bed in a men’s homeless shelter, toiled away all night and occasionally painted a few pictures for money. By the time World War II began, Hitler’s life of procrastination was over, but his inability to concentrate on an unpleasant subject that he did not enjoy was always evident. He always had a book nearby that listed details about weapon systems, and he always wanted to impress experienced generals with a few memorized numbers in order to demonstrate superiority without having to read up on complex material. Speer quickly noticed that Hitler didn’t read any real books and Hitler pointed out that he had acquired the core of his knowledge at some earlier point and was now putting it into practice. He usually made his important decisions in advance before talking to the generals. Before the Nuremberg party rallies, he retreated to Obersalzberg for weeks to write his keynote speeches. Speer commented:
The date was getting closer and closer; The aides urged him to start dictating, keeping everything away from him, including building plans and visitors, so that he would not be distracted from his work. But Hitler put it off week after week, then day after day, only to be reluctant to go about his mandatory tasks under extreme time pressure. Most of the time it was too late to finish all the speeches and Hitler usually had to spend the nights during the party conference to make up for the time wasted at Obersalzberg.
During the war, Hitler was given amphetamines, exactly the type of stimulant prescribed to people with ADHD. From then on, Hitler was able to concentrate for longer, but he physically deteriorated and was more prone to overestimating himself. Martin Bormann in particular seemed to be able to play Hitler like a violin. Speer observed the dynamics: A direct discussion about a matter, with all the difficulties and detailed questions, led to nothing, especially when the mood was bad. Instead, you had to have built up the right relationship with Hitler, use flattery, make mean jokes about officials you wanted to harm, incorporate subtle comments and launch the desired idea with the right timing. Hitler was superstitious, believed that “Providence” would regularly speak to him through signs and he even interpreted a reddish northern light as a premonition.
The following statement by Hitler is reported by Rauschning:
“War is the most natural, everyday thing. There is always war. War is everywhere. There is no beginning, there is no peace conclusion. War is life. War is every struggle. War is the original state.”
This meant not just war with weapons, but the entire human life and every single moment and every single conversation. The evidence almost certainly suggests that Hitler had narcissistic personality disorder, antisocial disorder, post-traumatic stress, and emotional instability. Left-wing historians had tried in vain to create a convincing psychoanalysis of Hitler with their interpretation of Sigmund Freud, but then poured out ideologically colored talk, according to which only middle-class circumstances and “right-wing” worldview could have been the breeding ground. If the left had dared to really learn about personality disorders, they would inevitably have been forced to condemn their own heroes like Marx, Lenin, Stalin and Mao in the strongest possible terms and to reject their inadequate explanation of evil. In psychology or psychiatry, it is considered inadmissible to diagnose someone from a distance and posthumously with personality disorders. At the same time, it is important to know that even in a clinical setting, professionals can regularly miss narcissistic or antisocial personality disorder if the person being examined deliberately gives misleading answers. Only a brain scan of the living person, a posthumous brain examination and a genetic test can provide complete clarity. So we can’t diagnose Hitler clinically, we can only get as close to the truth as possible. So-called “profilers” from investigative authorities do not diagnose, but rather try to create a personality profile that is as precise as possible and pay attention to warning signs.
For the development of narcissism or antisocial disorder (psychopathy), it is not absolutely necessary that the person in question had an exceptionally bad childhood, as genetic risk factors also play an important role here. As already described, horror seems to have prevailed in Hitler’s childhood and youth and fighting actually seemed to have been commonplace:
- The father’s fight against his children’s disobedience
- Adolf’s fight for his dream career
- The possible poisoning of the father’s first two wives
- Adolf’s fight for recognition in his school environment
- Adolf’s possible fight against his father with poison
- Mother’s battle with cancer
- Adolf’s possible battle with syphilis
- The authorities’ fight against homosexuals
- The struggle between homosexuals for access to higher societies
- The struggle to survive as a poor artist in Vienna and Munich
Those affected take refuge in a fantasy world that corresponds to their wishes and experiment with how they can control or at least influence other people using lies, manipulation and covert methods. This requires the art of dissimulation, acting, as well as a nose for people’s weaknesses and longings.
In narcissism, an idealized fantasy image of one’s own self is created and this fictional character is presented to the world. To maintain this construct, it is necessary to constantly provide “narcissistic food” in the form of recognition, dominance, displays of power, attention, positions and money. Narcissists without success do not necessarily show great, artificial self-confidence, and we recognize in Hitler exactly the behavior of the unsuccessful narcissist until the beginning of the 1920s, before his social and political success increasingly escalated his outward self-confidence into sheer megalomania. All observers of Hitler who were able to speak openly confirm his pathological stubbornness despite his lack of qualifications, his constant entanglement in contradictions and his unwavering belief in his inspiration and instincts. A normal conversation about the pros and cons of an idea was absolutely impossible; Hitler lectured from above and angrily countered every legitimate objection in the same way: Only he had the inspiration that his plans would all work with enough will and obedience, he was not interested in details, the experts were all stupid anyway, he was basically smarter. Every conversation was a fight for him and he used every means to win, including outright lies, contradictions and feigned superiority. Observers unanimously spoke of Hitler’s extremely strange temper tantrums, during which he drummed on the walls like a child and stammered incoherent words. In Hitler’s ears, every contradiction was a nasty blow to his indomitable, omniscient fantasy of himself. He never had the patience to listen to annoying details or to have to explain specifically what he planned to do with the economy. Most of the time he lacked any professional plan and the necessary knowledge, but that didn’t stop him from falling back into a tirade against the incompetent generals or the useless economists, all of whom lacked instinct and will and genius. For example, he expressed his unshakable belief that America was too internally torn to ever again take part in a war against Germany in Europe, that the British had become too weak and wanted a deal, that psychological warfare could easily be used to wreak havoc in France etc. He had almost no knowledge of the subject and the myth of the autodidact collapses upon closer inspection, because Hitler collected books but did not have the patience to read them and so he never published anything scientific himself , which referred to a wide range of specialist literature. He had absolutely no idea about money, which his unstable existence always proved, and so he was inspired by the belief that you could print as much money as you wanted and keep prices constant through force.
His opponents in Britain and America must have been pleased by his lack of logical, systematic approach and professional decision-making. Rauschning explained:
“He’s always an actor. He takes up what he has just heard and knows how to use it in such a way that it must appear to the listener as Hitler’s old intellectual possession. Perhaps Hitler told a visitor after me the exact opposite of what he presented to me as the result of deep political considerations.
[…] It has often happened to me – and I think to everyone who had anything to do with Hitler – that if you referred to something he had said in the past, you were looked at in astonishment or experienced harsh rejection – he never had anything like that said.”
Even Hitler’s humor was only a weapon in the form of mockery and contempt. When Hitler was confronted with complaints about the atrocities in concentration camps, he immediately became enraged against those who spoke out about these “ridiculous” events.
He behaved like a naughty boy. He shouted in shrill, high tones, stamped his feet, hit the table and walls with his fists. Foaming at the mouth, in his excessive temper he panted and stammered something like “I don’t want to! All away! Traitor!”
In his twisted logic, he claimed political terror as his right, his tool and even as moral, because the population’s fear of concentration camps saved him from having to carry out hundreds of thousands of individual actions against rebellious people. But it is striking how much he always stayed away from direct forms of killing and violence. During the First World War he failed to kill a single enemy for several years. Even as a dictator, he seemed to be very afraid of seeing the violence with his own eyes. Even the famous British historian Ian Kershaw noted that Hitler never personally visited a death camp, even though they were the fulfillment of his fantasies from Mein Kampf.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1481809/Hitler-kept-himself-aloof-from-the-dirtiest-work.html
Hitler did not kill his competitors such as Röhm and Strasser himself, but let others take over this task. His boundless hatred was directed at anyone who did not show complete subservience, but he was careful not to commit violence himself. Several observers have reported his chronic sleep disorders and nightmares, from which he tried to escape by staying awake for long periods of time, meaningless conversations with his servants, watching movies and other trivialities. In his childhood he was already exposed to unhealthy stress and almost guaranteed physical violence, which, together with the loss of his mother and siblings, may have led to diffuse, “complex” post-traumatic stress syndrome. The horror of military service and the post-traumatic disorder could have been the trigger for his nightmares. Hitler’s medical records from his hospital stay towards the end of the First World War would provide more information about the “hysteria” diagnosed at the time, but these records disappeared at the end of the 1920s. For the staff, Hitler was just another psychological wreck among many. What is also consistently reported is his inability to do sustained, systematic work. Even at school he only dedicated himself to the activities that he enjoyed; in Vienna he wasted his time eating cake and visiting the gay scene; during the First World War he only did the bare minimum, and until the outbreak of the Second World War he suppressed everything , which seemed annoying or inconvenient to him while important reports were piling up on his work table. Many people prefer to focus on press reports about themselves. Expert Sam Vaknin explains that narcissists are either over-ambitious worker bees or lazy, parasitic bums. Their main activity, their main goal, is to ensure the supply of narcissistic supply.
http://samvak.tripod.com/journal58.html
Hitler fluctuated back and forth between laziness and overexertion, and especially later had his personal doctors prescribe him all sorts of medication to increase his performance. Also typical are Hitler’s systematic manipulation of the past and the cult of personality, which was a mammoth task to cover up the true self with grandiose, clichéd fantasy. During World War II, the US War Department’s Secret Service (OSS) collected information about Hitler’s personality and had researchers carry out analyses. The report “A Psychological Analysis of Hitler: His Life And Legend” never uses the term narcissism and the personality disorder did not appear in the official literature of the time, but the Anglo-American secret services probably had extensive knowledge of the phenomenon.
The OSS knew that for a while Hitler thought of himself as just the drummer who would draw attention to the coming Messiah of the German people, but later attributed the role of savior to himself. Several witnesses, such as Dietrich Eckart, reported Hitler’s comparisons of himself to Jesus Christ and allusions to driving the money-changing Jews out of the temple with the help of a whip. Röhm, the head of the SA, explained:
“He would love to sit in the mountains today and play god.”
On page 134, the OSS describes the essence of the narcissist word for word in its report:
“The denial of the true self by creating a diametrically opposed image, and then identifying with that image.”
With this assessment, the OSS had an effective weapon, because manipulating a narcissist is not particularly complicated and Hitler, with his incompetence and arrogance, was Germany’s greatest weak point. The obvious strategy was to first let Hitler have his way and to appear to confirm his lofty fantasies, then to blackmail him with compromising material and persuade him to attack the Soviet Union.
The aristocrats help Hitler
The last person who could have prevented Hitler’s dictatorship at the last moment was Paul von Hindenburg, who had headed the Supreme Army Command during the First World War, while Hitler was a simple dispatcher who spent most of his time away from the front.
Von Hindenburg came from a fairly young and insignificant noble line, had a great career in the military in the German Empire, fought in the Franco-Prussian War in 1870/71 and was retired in 1911 with the award of the Order of the Black Eagle, whereupon he joined the Guelphs -stronghold of Hanover. At the outbreak of the First World War he was 67 years old and again took command, although his role in successful battles was completely exaggerated in public and thereby laid the foundation for his later political career. He became Field Marshal and received the Star of the Grand Cross of the Iron Cross. In August 1916, together with General Erich Ludendorff, he took over the Supreme Army Command, which quickly gained influence on the politics of the German Empire and practically deposed Kaiser Wilhelm II from power. Ludendorff’s father came from a Pomeranian merchant family whose family tree can be traced back to King Erik. The Principality of Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel is a forerunner of the Kingdom of Hanover (see also British throne).
After the First World War, von Hindenburg and Ludendorff spread the so-called “stab in the back legend” through the Supreme Army Command (OHL), according to which the German army remained “undefeated in the field” and that the defeat was ultimately due to treacherous socialists and international Jewry. This view fit exactly with the anti-Semitic conspiracy propaganda that was increasingly circulating in English-speaking and German countries and also attributed the outbreak of the war to a Jewish plot. Ludendorff and von Hindenburg said that one of the British generals named Neill Malcolm used the metaphor to them in a conversation after the war that Germany “had the knife stabbed in its back.” With this propaganda in mind, right-wing radicals also committed a number of political murders in the early 1920s, such as those of Matthias Erzberger and Walther Rathenau. One of the men who killed Rathenau in 1922 believed him to be a member of the “three hundred elders of Zion,” reminiscent of the legend of the 300 Jewish families from Count Cherep-Spiridovich’s conspiracy book. Adolf Hitler wrote in the Völkischer Observer in 1923:
“We must always remember that every new external battle, with the November criminals behind us, would immediately thrust the spear into the back of the German Siegfried.”
The unacknowledged military defeat caused the National Socialists and the military leadership to fail to recognize the role that the economic and military power of the USA had played in this defeat. This led to the significant underestimation of American capabilities in World War II. Von Hindenburg retired again in 1919 and once again chose the Guelph stronghold of Hanover as his home, where he was made an honorary citizen and provided with a villa. In 1925 he was elected Reich President and had a broad base of ethnic, right-wing organizations that were heavily infiltrated by the Guelph network and influenced by the Guelph anti-Semitic conspiracy propaganda. Von Hindenburg made his son Oskar and Wedige von derschulenburg his adjutants. Brüning described von der Schulenburg as the secret informant who informed the NSDAP leadership in detail about the discussions with the Reich President. Ludendorff took over the leadership of the German National Freedom Party (DVFP), which wanted to inherit the NSDAP, which was temporarily banned after the Hitler putsch, and which had as a member Hermann von Treuenfels, the aristocratic employer of the spy Martin Bormann, who later kept all of the Third Reich’s military secrets transmitted to Russia. One of the leading politicians of the DVFP was Ernst Graf zu Reventlow, who was part of the early nobility with connections to the Danish Welf nobility and the House of Schleswig Holstein-Sonderburg. In the Reich presidential election in 1932, Hindenburg was confirmed in his office for another seven years. On January 30, 1933, Hindenburg appointed Adolf Hitler as Chancellor. On February 1, 1933, he dissolved the Reichstag and was soon rewarded with donations of around one million Reichsmarks. After his retreat to his East Prussian estate Neudeck at the beginning of June 1934, von der Schulenburg had the aged Reich President Hindenburg completely isolated from the outside world for the remaining weeks of your life. Important politicians were therefore unable to warn Hindenburg and suggest that he use the command of the Reichswehr to prevent the establishment of the Nazi dictatorship at the last minute. The background of the von der Schulenburgs is revealing: There was, for example, the Hanoverian lieutenant general Alexander von der Schulenburg (1662–1733). His sister Ehrengard Melusine was the long-time mistress of the Hanoverian Elector and British King George I. After studying at university, Alexander von der Schulenburg joined the army and took part in the Turkish Wars from 1683 to 1688. He then went into service in Braunschweig-Lüneburg and fought against the French from 1688 to 1697. During the War of the Spanish Succession in 1704 he was a major general in the army of the Duke of Marlborough (member of the Privy Council, Churchill family). In the Battle of Oudenaarde on July 11, 1708, Alexander von derschulenburg was a lieutenant general in the entourage of the Elector Prince of Hanover (later: King George II). In the Battle of Malplaquet he commanded a cavalry division under General von Bülow. The Bülows have many Guelph connections, particularly with the houses of Hanover and Braunschweig, and were represented in the Third Reich on several occasions, including
- Bernhard Wilhelm von Bülow, State Secretary in the Foreign Office from 1930 to 1936. As early as 1933, he gave instructions to collect material on the alleged “disproportionate penetration of Jews in public life in Germany” as an argumentative aid to justify Germany’s Jewish policy towards foreign countries. .
- Friedrich von Bülow was a German department director at Friedrich Krupp AG who was sentenced to twelve years in prison as a war criminal in the Krupp trial. His functions included managing the Krupp Group’s labor camps, where concentration camp inmates and prisoners of war had to do forced labor.
- Harry von Bülow-Bothkamp is listed in US President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s office files as a key figure in National Socialism.
The nobility had already indirectly influenced National Socialism through the early infiltration of the ethnic lodges and through a massive campaign of conspiracy publications. As already explained, the publications appear to have been tailored to ensnare the Nazi leadership. After World War II, there were a few half-hearted attempts by historians to examine the role of the nobility.
Karina Urbach’s 2015 book “Hitler’s Secret Helpers” is practically the first study to ever examine the international dimension of the nobility with regard to the Third Reich. The original English edition was published by Oxford University Press and is therefore unsurprising that it does not conceive of the nobility as a true intelligence network, even though the widespread and widespread nobility were already by their nature an ambitious group that had amassed power over centuries by the individual members communicating and coordinating with each other confidentially. The nobles helped Hitler to rise and gave him support in the social arena. In 1933, Hitler had almost no international contacts and relied on the nobility to use their diplomatic network. Urbach relies on the simple explanation that the nobles were simply afraid of Bolshevism and were hoping for improved status through the National Socialists. Prince Philipp of Hesse (1896-1980) was primarily responsible for the Third Reich’s relations with the Duce, the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini. He went on numerous secret missions past the Foreign Office and was married to a daughter of the Italian king, so all doors in Rome were open to him. Another key networker was Carl Eduard Duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, the grandson of Queen Victoria. He was a Nazi from the very beginning and Hitler’s most important liaison to the English kings Edward VIII and George VI. With his shuttle diplomacy, he gave the impression that he could possibly get England on Germany’s side. Then there was Prince Max Egon of Hohenlohe-Langenburg (1897-1967). After the Counts of Gleichen died out in 1631, the Counts of Hohenlohe-Langenburg received the Thuringian county of Obergehen with Ohrdruf in the Duchy of Saxe-Gotha. The Hohenlohe-Langenburgs had cross-connections to the houses of Saxony-Meiningen and Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg. Queen Victoria and Prince Albert were related to the royal houses of Coburg, Leiningen and Hohenlohe. The Royal British archives on the subject are closed for the foreseeable future, as are various aristocratic archives. 70 members of the nobility alone joined the NSDAP before 1933; in 1941 there were already 270. According to researcher Malinowski, almost 3,600 nobles joined the NSDAP from 350 randomly examined families, including 43 Bismarcks and 41 Schulenburgs. And one in four of them before 1933. The number of noble officers rose from 900 to 2,300 between 1933 and 1935.
Karina Urbach also writes about Hitler’s “dear princess” Stephanie zu Hohenlohe-Waldenburg-Schillingsfürst, who opened important doors and was awarded the NSDAP’s gold party badge despite her Jewish ancestors. She took on secret assignments for the British Lord Rothermere, who owned important newspapers, and negotiated directly with the British Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax. She established relationships with high-ranking, apparent Nazi sympathizers in England and became an honorary member of the Anglo-German Comradeship. Although she is generally considered a German spy, she could have been thoroughly manipulated by the British or, in theory, could have just as easily worked for the British. Urbach does not see the Guelphs as a secret service, but rather as service providers who had found a “niche” as secret diplomats for the Nazis:
“But a group that was once so powerful does not cease to exist overnight. It is looking for new niches – and one niche was secret diplomacy. Their international network was the ideal prerequisite for this. It had grown organically over several generations and had always brought her many benefits.”
Duke Ernst II of Coburg invoked the unity of the members of his house in a secret memorandum from the 1840s. In the 19th century, there was certainly discussion among the German public that the “German Empire” could go to war against Britain and that this would create a loyalty problem among nobles on German soil who were too closely related to the British royal family. The German Empire was formally a unified state, but ultimately just a patchwork of various mini-kingdoms, counties and principalities. Carl Eduard, Duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, for example, was the grandson of Queen Victoria and this connection was quite obvious, but the Guelph network was a much larger organization, the parts of which went back a long way. Various Guelphs were considered “German princes,” although they saw themselves primarily as Guelphs and not as Germans. Exactly who was loyal to whom was difficult for outsiders to determine, and the British monarchs had gradually concealed the extent of their power behind a series of politicians, some of whom were completely unaware that the policy was controlled by the secret service. Even the German Emperor Wilhelm II of the House of Hohenzollern had Queen Victoria as a grandmother and that is why it was so difficult to see the Guelphs as the closed unit and organization that they were. Arthur Connaught rejected (for strategic reasons) the succession to the Duchy of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, and instead the German Emperor, the British Queen Victoria and the Duke of Coburg agreed on the young Charles Edward (Germanized Carl Eduard), because he was so seemed as if he could become a “real German”. Carl got a deep insight into the Prussian state apparatus and married the daughter of the Duke of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg, a lineage from the Guelph-dominated complex, and he joined a bunch of patriotic clubs. At the beginning of the First World War, the international orientation of the Guelph network became even more evident, as the Russian royal family had for a while been under control of the Schleswig-Holstein and Hesse lines. The Grand Duke of Hesse had to pose as a loyal patriot of the German Empire, while his sister Alexandra was the Tsarina of Russia and another relative of his was King George V of Britain. The Duchess of Coburg was insulted as a “Russian spy” and had to change her citizenship twice. The outcome of the First World War was a crushing defeat for the Habsburgs and Hohenzollerns, the competitors of the Guelphs. In Britain the royal family was renamed the innocuous-sounding “Windsor”. During the war, noble families financed hospitals in their castles as a PR campaign. The women collected medals of merit from the Red Cross. In the German Foreign Office, around 70% of the 550 diplomats were aristocrats. It was not just the aristocratic men who carried out “secret diplomacy” throughout Europe during the war, but also the women, who were largely kept out of public reporting. Karina Urbach writes:
[So] noble houses with Russian relatives tended to support fascism much earlier. The German-English houses of Coburg, Hesse, Leiningen and Hohenlohe were all related to the Russian pretender to the throne and all four actively supported National Socialism. The Duke of Coburg proved to be Hitler’s most vehement supporter.
The two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Louis Kilzer showed in his book “Churchill’s Deception” that the nobility in Britain deliberately carried out a huge deception to make the Nazis believe they were willing to cooperate. In another book, he exposed the high Nazi official Martin Bormann as a spy who passed on all of the General Staff’s and Hitler’s secret plans to the Russians. As already mentioned, Bormann had supporters from Guelph circles. The argument used again and again that the nobility ran into the arms of the National Socialists out of fear of Bolshevism does not stand up to closer scrutiny, even if one believes the official narrative of the communist revolution in Russia. Lord Sydenham of Combe and the Duke of Northumberland Alan Percy busily gave anti-Bolshevik speeches in the House of Lords alongside all the publications they published. Northumberland published the newspaper The Patriot, which was also strongly anti-Semitic. Lord Rothermere created the United Empire party. It was always said that the Jewish conspiracy was behind Bolshevism, behind decomposition and behind the First World War. Fortunately, Carl Eduard Duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha’s pocket calendar was preserved by chance. A comparison with English and Russian archives shows that he was extremely diligent in promoting right-wing radical and anti-Semitic groups. He supplied money and contacts and hidden weapons for right-wing groups such as the Wikingbund, the Deutschvölkischer Schutz- und Trutzbund and the Young German Order. Urbach writes:
“In all the decisive foreign policy crises of the 1930s, Hitler sent Carl Eduard to Great Britain as a secret helper.”
Italian dictator Mussolini is confirmed to have worked for the British secret service MI5 early in his career. The Guardian newspaper reported in 2009:
Archived documents show that Mussolini entered politics in 1917 with the help of a weekly wage of £100 [equivalent to about £6,000 today] from MI5. This must have seemed like a good investment to British intelligence. Mussolini, then a 34-year-old journalist, was not only prepared to ensure that Italy continued to fight alongside the Allies in the First World War by publishing propaganda in his newspaper. He was also prepared to send his people to “persuade” the peace protesters to stay home. Mussolini’s payments were approved by Sir Samuel Hoare, an MP and MI5 agent in Rome, who was then leading a staff of 100 British intelligence officers in Italy.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/oct/13/benito-mussolini-recruited-mi5-italy
Carl Eduard, the Duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, brought figures on board for the Nazis such as the steel magnate Fritz Thyssen, the banker Hjalmar Schacht and the industrialist Günther Quandt. He also provided support for Freikorps troops in the fight against communists and was indirectly involved in the Kapp Putsch. Carl Eduard placed a co-conspirator, Lieutenant Commander Ehrhardt, at Callenberg Castle and gave him the cover identity “Neumann”. There were also connections to the terrorist secret group “Organization Consul”, which carried out various attacks. At the same time, he worked on serious conservative politicians. Hitler was still a small number at the time, but he was able to become friends with Carl Eduard early on. Hitler’s attempted coup in 1923 was a quick shot that rather disrupted the larger plans. Ehrhardt, the lieutenant captain, actually expected to become the great leader because he had the support of Carl Eduard. Coburg was the first city in Germany to be ruled by Nazis. Citizens saw a picture of increasing unity and legitimacy of the right-wing camp; not least due to the practically identical conspiracy propaganda at home and abroad. Carl Eduard’s cousinPrince Josias of Waldeck and Pyrmont was SS and police leader for the military district to which the Buchenwald concentration camp belonged, as well as adjutant to Heinrich Himmler. The latter and Hitler both became godparents for Josias’ son. Himmler’s father had been an educator for the Bavarian royal family, which was connected to the Guelphs. A subcamp of the Buchenwald concentration camp was located in Neustadt near Coburg.
Hermann Göring had already been enthusiastic about nobility as a child and had Hermann von Epenstein, Knight of Mauternburg, as his godfather (and perhaps secret father). The expensively restored Veldenstein Castle was made available to the Göring family as a residence. Hermann Göring also visited his “surrogate father” Epenstein at Mauterndorf Castle, which he later called “the castle of his youth”. Göring married a Swedish noblewoman and maintained all kinds of contacts with the nobility, especially with the Princes of Hesse, Prince Max of Hohenlohe, Prince Viktor of Wied and Duke Adolf Friedrich of Mecklenburg-Schwerin (a brother-in-law of the Queen of the Netherlands). Mussolini visibly integrated the Italian royal family into the fascist regime. In the 1920s, important British figures such as Winston Churchill, the Duke of Westminster and Oswald Mosley traveled to Italy. Carl Eduard provided Hitler with tons of contacts, but for a long time he did not let it be known that he really wanted Hitler as leader, because there were a whole range of other possible candidates. A year after the seizure of power in 1933, Coburg became a representative abroad, also using the German Red Cross as a cover. Hitler repeatedly blasphemed the Americans and the British, but at the same time he was considered an Anglophile and seemed to hope that he could keep the Anglo-Americans passive and, above all, buy American technology. In addition to Hitler, Rudolf Hess, Alfred Rosenberg and Ribbentrop also maintained relevant contacts, traveled extensively and had confidential meetings in noble castles and country houses. The Nazis were led to believe that a British network of the upper class of nobility and industry (including the organization “The English Mystery”) had great Nazi sympathies, wanted to fight Bolshevism and prevent further wars against the Germans. The Prince of Wales (King Edward VIII from 1936) in particular was ensnared by the Nazis. Urbach writes:
“Hitler therefore used all available channels to London – official and unofficial – to ensure that the British government would not take action against Germany.”
Edward abdicated and was succeeded by George VI. After the Polish campaign, Carl Eduard remained active internationally. He tolerated the concentration camp and was traveling with, among others, the German ambassador Count von derschulenburg. The Swedish King Gustav V also supported the Germans. Operation Willi was the German code name for the SS’s unsuccessful attempt to kidnap the Duke of Windsor in July 1940 and get him to work with German dictator Adolf Hitler to achieve either a peace settlement with Britain or a restoration of the throne after the German one to achieve the conquest of Great Britain. When the Second World War broke out in September 1939, the Duke became a liaison officer for the British military mission with the high command of the French army. In fact, he served as a British military intelligence agent. After the war, Victoria Melita accused her father Carl Eduard of sexually abusing her since she was 12, which her brother confirmed.
“Like a plague bacillus,” the connections between nobles and Nazis spread, complained Helmuth Graf von Moltke in a letter to an Englishman. He did not become an influential general like others in his line, but rather a resister against the Nazis and worked with the US secret service OSS. The Moltkes come from Mecklenburg and have a significant connection to Denmark and therefore Britain. Field Marshal and second-in-command of the Army Walther von Brauchitsch is another special case. His mother came from the Scottish-English noble Gordon family, which was firmly anchored in the British colonial empire. Baron Gordon of Drumearn, for example, sat on the British Privy Council. After his school education, the young Walther von Brauchitsch served as page of Empress Auguste Viktoria of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Augustenburg. Her father came from the House of Oldenburg and was connected to the thrones of Britain, Denmark and Russia. The mother Adelheid zu Hohenlohe-Langenburg descended from Princess Victoria of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld. Adelheid’s grandmother married the Duke of Kent and Strathearn, the fourth son of King George III, in May 1818. of Great Britain and Ireland; they were the parents of the future Queen Victoria (1819–1901).
Hitler preferred to surround himself with people from the lower middle class who were similar to him. An exception was his head of protocol Vicco von Bülow-Schwanke, son of the Prussian Field Marshal Karl by Bülow. This noble line served Hanover, Braunschweig-Lüneburg and Mecklenburg in the past. Hitler then replaced him with another nobleman, Baron von Dönberg, who in turn had dangerous connections to Hesse and Thurn and Taxis. But from the Fuhrer’s point of view, these were not dangers, but rather advantages. The nobility had assured the people early on that fascism would, in principle, be similar to classical aristocratic rule in important aspects and that there was no need to worry. Hitler believed he could successfully use the nobles as diplomats in Italy and Britain. He even thought he could recruit all sorts of sympathizers from the British through the noble diplomats. In 2000, two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative author Louis Kilzer exposed Martin Bormann as a spy in his book “Hitler’s Traitor,” who had revealed all of Hitler’s and the General Staff’s relevant military plans down to the last detail. When he was young, Bormann worked for Lieutenant Colonel Hermann von Treuenfels in Mecklenburg. The Mecklenburg royal family plays an important role in its connections to the British throne, the Russian royal court and the Danish royal family. Mecklenburg-Strelitz emerged from the division of Mecklenburg. Adolf Friedrich IV, Duke of Mecklenburg-Strelitz (1738-1794) was the son of the Princess of Saxe-Hildburghausen. In 1761 he married his younger sister Sophie Charlotte to George III, King of Great Britain. In 1764 he became the first Mecklenburg prince to receive the Order of the Garter, the most exclusive British award. Duke Adolf Friedrich V of Mecklenburg-Strelitz was the child of Princess Augusta Karoline of Great Britain, Ireland and Hanover. Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop had only been adopted by a distant noble relative, but he tried his best to make noble contacts. He created the “German-English Society” with high-profile nobles such as Carl Eduard Duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha. State Secretary Ernst Freiherr von Weizsäcker was not at all comfortable with Hitler’s war plans. On June 24, 1943, at his own request, he was appointed German ambassador to the Holy See in Rome. To Pope Pius XII. According to his own statements, he had a friendly relationship. Hermann Göring, the Commander-in-Chief of the Luftwaffe, loved to go hunting with princes and chatted about all sorts of things. Heinrich Himmler often visited Baron von Sangern’s castle. Field Marshal Werner von Blomberg became Commander-in-Chief of the Wehrmacht and, in consultation with Walter von Reichenau, organized the swearing in of the Reichswehr soldiers to Hitler. On November 5, 1937, Blomberg took part in Hitler’s conference with Commanders-in-Chief Werner von Fritsch (Army), Erich Raeder (Navy) and Hermann Göring (Air Force) as well as the Reich Foreign Minister Konstantin Freiherr von Neurath. Blomberg and Fritsch doubted that the Wehrmacht could even win a European war.
Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt enforced the famous halt order at the Battle of Dunkirk, which enabled the Allies to evacuate around 370,000 trapped soldiers from Dunkirk to Great Britain. The order to stop ultimately went back to Hitler, but decisive action would still have made it possible to encircle the British. The British thanked him by releasing him in 1949. The military historian Sönke Neitzel said in 2020 that Rundstedt failed several times in the war; including the Allied invasion of Normandy. Some noble resisters who attempted late assassination attempts on the leader became known. There were also repeated contacts between high-ranking officers in Britain, but no negotiated solution was reached. There were many unofficial communication channels. Opportunities for espionage accordingly. After the Second World War, there was once again no systematic, comprehensive investigation into which noble spy networks had revealed the (primarily military) secrets of the Third Reich. Instead, we only saw new stab-in-the-back legends for the right-wing target audience. The noble founder of the NPD party, Adolf von Thadden, was ultimately exposed as an agent of the British secret service MI6. In popular conspiracy literature, the old fairy tales about the Elders of Zion were spun and the typical legal revisionism immediately arose.
Money
Yelling in beer halls is not enough to seize power; a mountain of money is necessary to pay for the party apparatus, the thugs on the streets, the election campaigns, rent for buildings, the newspaper offices, the travel costs, the office paper and so on Paper clips. The question was repeatedly asked to what extent the many small, medium and large donors were actually convinced of Hitler’s radical agenda or whether these donations were just opportunism because they hoped for jobs, economic developments, government contracts and various other lucrative opportunities from the NSDAP. The anti-Semitic propaganda and the relationship with the nobility made the party seem like a promising patriotic venture with an international circle of supporters, an international right-wing bloc in the fight against world Jewish communism. Hitler never knew much about money and so he squandered huge amounts of money on his way to power. Rauschning gossiped about Hitler’s chronically empty party coffers and how he regularly banged on the table during the election campaign and shouted at his party officials that he “needs a thousand marks tomorrow.” The infamous putsch attempt was not only an attempt to take a quick shortcut to power, but was also done out of sheer desperation: after Hitler’s attempted putsch in 1923, the authorities discovered that the NSDAP had assets worth 170,000 gold marks When the party came to power, it was in debt of several million marks and the SA men had to take to the streets, rattle their guns and beg for money.1
As expected, ordinary historiography is very sparing in its descriptions of who from abroad significantly supported the NSDAP and Hitler. There are a few historical studies that actually shed light on Anglo-American aid and there were also complicated court cases brought by former forced laborers against companies like Ford or General Motors, which had set up important factories in Nazi Germany. Of course, normal history books do not dare to express suspicions of espionage and to pursue such theories. There were also fakes that circulated, such as the notes of a “Sydney Warburg” with the title “De geldbronnen van het Nationaal-Socialisme: three gesprekken met Hitler” from 1933. It was only after publication that the Dutch publisher is said to have noticed that The supposed author from the famous banking family did not even exist and had the printed edition destroyed and only three copies of it made it abroad. The British museum owned one of these but did not release it to researchers. Copies of the original text are now freely available. There was constant mystery as to who the real author could have been and whether it was targeted disinformation.
“The content is hair-raisingly funny: Hitler, consuming mugs full of beer, receives Rockefeller’s emissary Warburg in the back room of the Bürgerbräukeller, whom he considers to be a German “Aryan” despite his world-famous Jewish name and from whom he, not at all modestly, demands a hundred million marks .”2
The historian Antony Sutton also followed the false leads that had been laid out via “Sydney Warburg”, which is why he was wrongly cast in the corner of anti-Semitic conspiracy authors, although he made it clear again and again in his research that the common conspiracy literature Jewish bankers were constantly placed at the center of things like the revolution in Russia in a completely irrational way. Sutton’s long career as a researcher waded through mountains of primary source material on American companies’ technology sales to the Soviet Union. He discovered that important Anglo-American circles were also conducting significant business with the Nazis. Sutton later received original documents from the American network Skull & Bones, which dates back to the British Empire3.
Sir Henri Deterding, Knight of the British King
The Dutchman Sir Henri Wilhelm August Deterding was the extremely rich main shareholder of the oil company Shell with connections to the nobility. His partner Marcus Samuel had the support of the Rothschild banking house, which in turn had been set up by the nobility. In 1920 he was knighted by the British King George V of the House of Hanover.
Shell’s major shareholders included the Dutch royal family, which of course made a decisive contribution to bringing the Hanoverians to the British throne.
Glyn Roberts revealed in the book “The most powerful man in the world” that Deterding financed Hitler as early as 1921, before the British consul in Germany became aware of Hitler. 4 million guilders flowed through the agent Georg Bell, but the NSDAP was chronically bankrupt and in debt at the time. After the failed coup attempt in 1923, the Bavarian government confiscated everything; the assets and the liabilities. But Deterding also gave money to the right-wing Freikorps and to Alfred Rosenberg.
Deterding bought oil fields in the USA and also entered the Russian market with the help of the head of British military intelligence George Macdonogh, who was also involved in the notorious “Royal Institute of International Affairs”, whose counterpart in America became the Council on Foreign Relations. These were no longer just think tanks where the aristocracy, politicians and large corporations came together to promote transatlantic cooperation, but rather structures of the Anglo-American empire. Deterdings explained that his motivation for donations to the fascists was the intention to roll back Soviet communism; Which is really surprising, since the Anglo-American power circles and corporations in Deterding’s environment supported the young Soviet Union with important technology sales.
The exact total amount he donated to the Nazis is unknown. In 1937 there were 10 million guilders for Hitler and 40 million Reichsmarks for the German Winter Relief Organization. Glyn Roberts estimated a total of £55 million, but many documents are simply no longer traceable.
Reichswehr
In its early days, the NSDAP was fed with money from a secret Reichswehr fund. For a while, Adolf Hitler received both regular pay from the Reichswehr for his spying work and a wage for his party work.
Folk circles
Dietrich Eckart lent Hitler money several times and looked for donors in wealthy circles. When Hitler bought the Völkischer Observer, Eckart obtained the necessary loans of around 120,000 marks and subsequently it was necessary to raise fresh money again and again in order to maintain operations.
Older women
Hitler was still quite attractive in the 1920s and his career in politics made him even more desirable to women. Several older women felt drawn to him and his agenda, donated generous sums of money and often tried to set him up with their daughters. Since Hitler was gay, nothing came of it.
Various industrialists
The co-owners of the famous C. Bechstein piano factory gave Hitler money and art objects as collateral for loans early on and taught him how to dress properly.
Ernst von Borsig, owner of a locomotive factory, and Hermann Aust, managing director of a Munich malt coffee company, wore the donation pants and arranged for other donors. Then there was the “Schlotbaron” Emil Kirdorf and other figures from the economic midfield. Max Erwin von Scheubner-Richter even received a dedication in the first volume of Hitler’s book Mein Kampf for the money he was able to raise. After the failure of the Kapp Putsch, he fled to Munich and created the “Economic Development Association” to attract money from right-wing Russian émigrés who were interested in overthrowing the communists in the Soviet Union. Scheubner-Richter was also able to swindle money from other patrons and he established the extremely important contact with the major industrialist Fritz Thyssen. Russian Grand Duchess Viktoria Fedorovna hoped that her husband could one day ascend to the Tsar’s throne, so she moved the gems in her possession to promote the Nazis. The former Russian general Wassili Biskupski established contact with the Russian Commerce, Industry and Trade Association in Paris. Half a million gold marks are said to have flowed.
Italy
The Prussian Prime Minister Otto Braun estimated election donations from Italy at a total of 18 million marks:
“Hitler receives enormous amounts of money from Italy. They reach Munich through a Swiss bank.”
Dawes Plan and Young Plan
Under US President Calvin Coolidge there was a “friendship treaty” with Germany in 1924. The banker Charles G. Dawes was supposed to turn the German Reichsbank inside out and stabilize the German currency with the help of a bond of 800 million gold marks, which could be used to cover loans to the German economy. By 1929, around 21 billion marks in loans flowed to Germany from foreign (mainly American) banks and export companies. Germany was supposed to pay around 36 billion marks in reparations to the Allies and at the same time borrow around 33 billion marks in order not to go completely bankrupt, but of course this meant that it became very dependent. One of the architects of the Dawes Plan was Owen D. Young of Morgan Bank, who also worked at the corporate giant General Electric had a managerial position and a short time later became director of the New York Federal Reserve Bank (department of the central bank). The influential historian Carroll Quigley called it the J.P. Morgan delegations that used the authority and seal of the United States to implement financial plans that only served their own financial interests. They wanted to take a total of 132 billion gold marks from Germany over a period of 57 years. Hitler’s financial juggler, Hjalmar Schacht, was convinced that the impact of the audacious Young Plan caused a great panic among many wealthy Germans and led them to finance Hitler. The industrialist Fritz Thyssen said this after the war:
“I only turned to the National Socialist Party when I became convinced that the fight against the Young Plan was inevitable if the complete collapse of Germany was to be averted.”
Germany had become dependent on foreign currency from American creditors and was therefore severely affected by the global economic crisis in 1929. The NSDAP knew that more misery meant more votes and party donations.
In 1930, the Young Plan replaced the Dawes Plan because Germany was threatening to collapse under financial pressure and the ruling politicians were becoming increasingly unpopular among the people. The reparation payments were changed to 36 billion Reichsmarks and the regulations were relaxed. The German National People’s Party (DNVP), the NSDAP and the “Stahlhelm” association wanted to overturn the still very bold Young plan with a referendum, but failed.
Union Banking & Brown Brothers Harriman
The environment of the Skull & Bones secret society and its relations with Germany were revealed in detail by historian Antony Sutton in the 1986 book America’s Secret Establishment. The mainstream ignored the matter completely. In 1992, Webster Tarpley published the book “George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography,” which provided further insights and source documents about the companies “Union Banking Corporation” and “Brown Brothers Harriman,” which were run by members of the Skull & Bones organization. Tarpley’s book was published by Lyndon LaRouche and only attracted attention in conspiracy theorist circles. John Loftus wrote on the subject in his 1994 book “The Secret War Against the Jews.” He had worked at the Department of Justice and from 1979 was assigned to the Office of Special Investigations as an investigator tasked with tracking down Nazi war criminals in the United States. A Dutch TV report with interviewees such as Tarpley and Sutton was withdrawn shortly before broadcast. Michael Kranish published a detailed article in the Boston Globe newspaper in 2001, bringing the matter into the mainstream. The company network in which Prescott Bush, the father of the later US President George Herbert Walker Bush, was also involved, included, among others, the American Ship and Commerce Company, Consolidated Silesian Steel Corporation, Hamburg-America Lines, Harriman Fifteen Corporation, Harriman International Company, Holland-American Trading Company, Steamless Steel Corporation and Silesian-American Corporation. The US government carried out confiscations due to trade with enemy Germany.
Ford
The crazy Dietrich Eckart knew Warren C. Anderson, the European president of the American car manufacturer Ford. This is how contact came about with CEO Henry Ford, who had not only distributed the Protocols of Zion but a whole series of other anti-Semitic writings. Ford regularly gave money to Hitler and built factories in Germany that were later used for war production. An estimated 78,000 trucks and 14,000 tracked vehicles rolled off the assembly line for the Wehrmacht. The Ford works were spared from Allied bombing until the end of 1944.
The cartels of big industry
The bonds from the Dawes Plan created the cartels IG-farben, General Electricity Company (AEG), Deutsche Amerikan Petroleum AG and Vereinigte Stahlwerke. IG Farben, for example, had around 500 foreign company investments. There were American directors and high American financial participation. The cartels brought technical innovations from America, formed the foundation of German arms production and helped Hitler come to power. The newspapers in America were by no means naive, but even warned of the danger of a new war. Opel was granted tax exemption in 1936 so that the US company General Motors could expand production capacity. GM subsequently invested more in production in Germany. The companies Alcoa (Aluminum Company of America), DuPont and Dow Chemical supplied the Germans with important technologies. Behind it was also the financial power of Wall Street in the form of J. P. Morgan, the Rockefeller Chase Bank and the Warburg Manhattan Bank.
Flick & Thyssen
Friedrich Flick initially positioned himself broadly with his party donations, but then relied on the National Socialists. He benefited enormously from forced labor and expropriation, and after losing the war he was able to become one of the richest men in West Germany. Tax investigators discovered that the Flick Group had given money to politicians from all parties in the Bundestag, triggering the so-called Flick affair. Fritz Thyssen claims to have been too naive and only later realized what he had gotten himself into. He tried to escape, was arrested and after the war was considered “uninteresting” to the Allies. He had his own book “I Paid Hitler” withdrawn and there was no German edition. He did business with Americans from the group Skull & Bones and had studied in London. He also raised funds from other German industrialists for the Nazis.
Russia
After the First World War, the Russian secret services massively infiltrated German society and all military and administrative organs. In retrospect, an absurd excuse was given for the pact with Hitler: it would have bought time and tried to secure peace. Vladimir Putin also says today that the pact was concluded in order to “not allow” a “direct clash” with Nazi Germany.4
In 1931, the German Communist Party received an order from Moscow not to pursue the terrorist line any further. Word got around that the NSDAP was supposed to destroy bourgeois society and moderate social democracy before the communists could succeed. Dimitri Manuilski, top official of the Communist International, called Hitler the most undoubted, if unconscious, ally of the world communist revolution. The leading KPD official Erich Wollenberg discussed directly with Stalin in Moscow in 1932 and had to hear that war was inevitable. When Wollenberg replied that a communist revolution in Germany would make war unnecessary, Stalin immediately broke off the conversation (see Paul Chartess, Strategy and Technique of Secret Warfare).
Stalin’s advisor Radek said that same year that German workers would have to endure the Nazis in power for two years. And so it happened that in 1931 and 1932 the KPD repeatedly formed a kind of cross-front with the Nazis. Anyone who complained about this to the Red Socks was sorted out. The German officer Karl Mayr, who had trained Hitler as an informant, heard from Röhm in 1932 that one third of the SA would consist of former members of the “Red Front Fighters’ Association”. According to his comrade Mend and other sources, Hitler tried to stay with the communists in Munich after the First World War to have a career. National Bolsheviks were welcome in the NSDAP until 1928. A few days after the NSDAP’s election success in 1930, the British ambassador in Berlin, Sir Horace Rumbold, asked the Prussian State Secretary Robert Weismann where the National Socialists got their money for the election campaign and was told that Russia was an important source. On September 13, 1930, the Berliner Tageblatt asked in the article “Relations with Moscow” where the National Socialist funds came from and, in response, quoted relevant documents and the statements of a former Soviet ambassador from Paris. Receipts for payments to the National Socialists are in the Moscow archives. Hitler responded to the article with a counter-statement and partly distanced himself from Ernst Graf zu Reventlow, a nationalist-anti-Semitic drummer who had invoked a cross-front with the communists. Reventlow’s publication in the Rote Fahne was part of a temporary cooperation between ethnic and communists after Karl Radek’s so-called Schlageter speech in June 1923. As part of the cooperation, high-ranking communist officials also appeared as speakers at ethnic events. On January 13, 1926, the Reich Commissioner for the Supervision of Public Order Hermann Emil Kuenzer emphasized in a report on the communist movement to the Reich Ministry of the Interior that the “extreme right” was “not unsympathetic” towards the violent, revolutionary actions of the KPD, and referred to an article by Reventlow in the Deutsches Tageblatt. In public, the Nazis often appeared staunchly anti-communist, the SA fought battles with the KPD in the streets and, as is well known, after Hitler came to power, KPD members were harshly persecuted. A price that Moscow was apparently willing to pay. The Reichstag fire was the pretext for arrests of members of the KPD, but at the same time the many Soviet spies within the National Socialist Party, the SA, etc. remained unaffected. There was a flourishing trade and a lot of arms technology cooperation between Nazi Germany and the Soviets after 1933. The Stalin biographer Antonov-Ovsejenko reported on specialists from the Soviet NKVD who visited Germany’s Gestapo in 1933/34. Apparently the Russians advised the Germans how to set up a surveillance apparatus and center the entire state on the leader. As a thank you, the SD (secret service of the SS) fabricated false evidence with which Stalin was able to eliminate his competitors in Russia. The Soviets were already negotiating with France and Great Britain in the summer of 1939. The Russian pact with the Germans was a guarantee of war and it must have been prepared for a long time. Canaris secretly sabotaged this nonsense wherever he could and talked the Italians out of taking a position against Poland. The German leadership knew that Russia was being courted by the British and French, but apparently they were in the dark about the extent of it. The USA promised 5,000 fighter planes against the Germans and delivered tank technology, armor plates and entire factories. The former Russian general Biskupsky used his connections in Paris and collected donations for the Nazis from members of the anti-communist Russian Commerce, Industry and Trade Association.
Sources:
[1] Wolfgang Zdral, Der finanzierte Aufstieg des Adolf H.
[2] http://www.zeit.de/1982/51/maerchen-ueber-hitler
[3] AMERICAS SECRET ESTABLISHMENT: An Introduction to the Order of Skull & Bones. Anthony Sutton
[4] http://www.faz.net/aktuell/politik/ausland/europa/putin-verteidigt-den-hitler-stalin-pakt-13587368.html
Punch card tabulating machines for the Holocaust
IBM-Lochkarten-Rechner, Shutterstock.com
Jewish Germans in the 1930s were among the most assimilated Jews in the world, had often long since left the Jewish faith behind, married Christians and were sometimes barely aware that their grandfather, for example, was Jewish. They usually didn’t look any different from the rest of the population and their number was only a fraction of the total population. By the standards of a normal dictatorship, there was nothing left to do. But as we know, the Nazis had internalized the anti-Semitic fairy tales from conspiracy literature and assumed that there was a Jewish mega-secret service that could draw on the support of the broad masses of Jews to infiltrate society and prepare revolutions. To make matters worse, Anglo-Americans also provided the technology necessary for the Holocaust.
The American investigative journalist Edwin Black visited the large American Holocaust museum with his parents, who had narrowly escaped the Holocaust, where a large punch card calculating machine from IBM was on display. It simply said that such devices had been used for a census in Germany in the 1930s. Black stared at this machine that could do much more than just count people and began to do his own research. The previous Holocaust specialist literature had practically nothing to offer on this subject. The company International Business Machines (IBM) already had a dominant position in the USA in the early 20th century and was constantly fed with taxpayer money and lucrative government contracts. IBM CEO Thomas J. Watson was also a member of the Masonic network, which gives the impression that IBM functioned more as a government institution than as an ordinary company in the market. Edwin Black began assembling a team to research IBM, which eventually grew to over 1,000 people in several countries who collected, translated, and analyzed data.3 In his later book, “Nazi Nexus: America’s Corporate Connections to Hitler’s Holocaust,” he dedicated the role of other US companies such as General Motors, Ford and Standard Oil, which had considerable influence on the Nazi armament. The book “War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create a Master Race” is about the American eugenics organizations that exerted influence over the Nazis. Before the era of punch card calculators, it was incredibly laborious to even count people, let alone build databases with multiple characteristics per person where you could do targeted searches and sorting. What takes years or months to do manually with pen and paper can be done automatically in weeks or days using punch card calculators. Whether it was the new US welfare state system, or the administrative bureaucracy in corporations worldwide, or the organization of armies, everyone benefited from the speed advantage of the new technology, which largely goes back to a man named Herman Hollerith.
He graduated from the “Columbia University School of Mines” at the age of 19. Columbia was started in the American colonies as an elite educational institution by the British King George II, a Guelph from the House of Hanover. There are tons of cross-connections to the American scientific societies and the Royal Society. In part, Columbia functions as a training ground for talent, but this support also comes at a certain price, regardless of the tuition fees, whether the graduates are aware of it or not. In 1882, Hollerith was still teaching at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), another elite institution, where he experimented even more with punch cards. His machines became popular worldwide and his company merged with others to form the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company (CTR), which was later renamed International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) under President Thomas J. Watson. Watson came from a rather humble background and had already had an increasingly successful career as an aggressive businessman alongside his membership in the Freemasons. In Germany there was the “Deutsche Hollerith-maschinen Gesellschaft mbH” (Dehomag), which was related to IBM, there were other subsidiaries and companies throughout Europe and Switzerland, while the IBM headquarters were in New York. From the very beginning, the National Socialist regime enthusiastically used the machines for all sorts of tasks and IBM still maintains tight-lipped that it simply did business with Germany early on with the best of intentions, like many other US companies, and that the Nazis finally used the technology misused for evil purposes. The same explanation b
Ford and General Motors also followed suit.
It would have been obvious for the American secret services (which did not officially exist before the OSS and the CIA) to infiltrate agents into the corporations that did business with Germany and to conspiratorially recruit informants in Germany under the cover of the corporate activities. Foreign espionage against the Third Reich is an absolute taboo subject for historians. Whether and to what extent US spies used IBM structures against Germany, for example, and what IBM headquarters knew or did not know, still needs to be researched. In principle, it is part of the basic logic and approach of secret services to use corporations as vehicles. According to official history, the United States had no foreign intelligence service to speak of until the Office for Strategic Services was hastily created during World War II. Ordinary historians have completely failed in this area or are subject to censorship. The OSS and its successor CIA emerged from the American secret society “Skull & Bones,” which existed long before and dates back to the British Empire.
Watson, Schacht and the Freemasons
The Scottish Rite of Freemasonry in Denver, USA, lists IBM boss Thomas Watson as a member of the Freemasonry Association.7 The details are obscure. Anyone who has reached the third degree can consider themselves a full-fledged Master Freemason, although there are even more advanced, exclusive systems such as the Scottish Rite, which goes up to a 33rd degree. As a Freemason, the doors to success opened for Thomas Watson. The American media gave him and IBM plenty of attention and free PR, whereupon Watson, in typical Masonic style, donated money to charity and in return was rewarded with various memberships and honorary doctorates. In 1937, he wrote in a letter to the Nazi Economics Minister Hjalmar Schacht how happy he was that the assets of IBM’s predecessor CTR had been protected in Germany after the First World War. Schacht was also a Freemason and was later acquitted at the Nuremberg Trials. In 1906 Schacht was admitted to the Urania Masonic Lodge for Immortality, where Friedrich Wilhelm Prince of Hesse Philippsthal-Barchfeld had also previously been a member. This prince served as a rear admiral in the navy and came from the Guelph House of Hesse, which was closely related to the British throne and the Russian tsars. More precisely, he came from a branch of the landgrave’s house of Hesse-Kassel and he married a total of four times, including Princess Maria of Hanau (also Hesse) and Princess Auguste of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg.8 Friedrich Wilhelm died several years before Hjalmar Schacht in The Urania lodge was admitted, but there is a strong suspicion that the Guelphs used both their extensive families and the Freemasonry created under the British Guelph King George I for espionage and maintained classic espionage networks on German soil. Friedrich Wilhelm was also an honorary member of the Grand Lodge of Prussia, which is now called the “Royal York of Friendship”; At that time it was one of the eight recognized Grand Lodges in the German Empire. The Urania was one of the four original subsidiary lodges of this Grand Lodge.
On July 27, 1765, the then 26-year-old Duke Edward Augustus of York, brother of George III, King of England, was admitted. The Duke was in transit in Berlin and took on the role of protector of the lodge, which was named the “Royal York Lodge of Friendship” in his honor. This close connection to England led to an association with the Grand Lodge of England on June 24, 1767.
Schacht’s mother was the Danish Baroness Constanze Justine Sophie von Eggers. The earliest known representative of the family was apparently the bailiff Johan Eggers from the Mecklenburg, Hanover and Holstein regions in 1286. There was also a Christian von Eggers, who was raised to the status of imperial baron in 1806 as a royal Danish state councilor and chief procureur at the German Chancellery. He studied law at the universities of Kiel (named after the Guelph Duke Christian Albrecht of Schleswig-Holstein-Gottorf), Halle (founded by the Guelph Elector Friedrich III of Saxony) and Göttingen (founded by the British Guelph King George II). and political science and then entered the Danish civil service in Copenhagen. In 1785 he was appointed professor of camera science and in 1788 professor of law. He also worked as a legation councilor (diplomat) for Denmark and as chief public prosecutor for Schleswig-Holstein. His father was a royal Danish conference councilor and vice-chancellor at Glücksburg. Olga Eggers, Hjalmar Schacht’s cousin, became one of Denmark’s leading Nazis and anti-Semitic propagandists. Schacht initially made a career at Dresdner Bank and at Darmstädter und Nationalbank KGaA. The Dresdner Bank goes back to Jakob Kaskele, a Jewish court factor (court Jew) among the Saxon Guelph nobility in Dresden, whose son Michael rose to become the royal Saxon councilor of commerce. The Kaskels later married into the Oppenheim or Oppenheimer family, who, like the Rothschilds, were allowed to pursue a career under the supervision (and probably control) of the nobility. There are even more cross-connections between Dresdner Bank and the Guelphs. This bank later became the “house bank of the SS” and benefited most from the crimes of National Socialist rule, such as the wars of conquest, forced labor and concentration camp construction projects.10 The Darmstadt and National Bank goes back to a creation by Abraham Oppenheim, whose family was associated with the Rothschilds was closely connected and who, together with Gerson Bleichröder and other bankers, made it possible to finance the Prussian-Austrian war of 1866 through a government loan. Bleichröder and the Rothschilds were also the starting point a few years later to seek money for Prussia’s war against France, through which France (Britain’s main competitor) was extremely weakened and had to withdraw its troops from Italy, whereupon the Guelphs overrevolutionaries such as Garibaldi and Mazzini were able to bring the Vatican – France’s ally – under control. Schacht was also a representative of the Reichsbank on the board of the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), which was founded in 1930 on his initiative. There he constantly implored his colleagues to “give Hitler a free hand in the East.” Also on the panel was his personal friend, Sir Montagu Norman, the Governor of the Bank of England. Montagu was a British Baron, member of the British Privy Council and Grand Officer of the Order of the Crown. His father was already an influential banker and director of Brown, Shipley & Co. which had a partnership with the US bank Brown Bros. & Co. which in turn merged with the Harriman family (members of Skull & Bones) to form the bank Brown Brothers Harriman & Co., which did important business with the Nazis. Among other things, Prescott Bush (Bones member) worked for Brown Brothers Harriman, the father of George H.W. Bush, the future CIA director and US President. Montagu’s paternal grandfather had already been a director of the Bank of England and his maternal grandfather was a baronet, also a director of the Bank of England, the Lieutenant for the City of London and he was also connected to Brown, Shipley & Co. (later Brown Brothers & Harriman). Montagu was the godfather of one of Hjalmar Schacht’s grandchildren. Both were in the “Anglo-German Fellowship” organization, where important people from Britain and Germany feigned mutual sympathies and where corporations such as Price Waterhouse, Unilever, Dunlop Rubber, Thomas Cook & Son, the Midland Bank and Lazard Brothers were also represented. The sister organization “German-English Society” in Berlin had members such as Rudolf Hess, Ernst August of Hanover (Duke of Braunschweig and Lüneburg, Prince of Hanover, Prince of Great Britain, son of Princess Thyra of Denmark) and Carl Eduard Duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha (grandson of the British Queen Victoria). The Nazis felt they were in good company; surrounded by Anglo-American friends and sympathizers.12 The interesting question is whether the Nazis were actually systematically caught up in the Guelph espionage. Ordinary historians would simply say that the nobles were naive and hoped to ride the wave of the Nazi movement back to their former glory. While Nazis and nobles celebrated together, Watson from IBM in Germany took control of Dehomag. The systematic oppression of Jews began, which was regularly reported by the American media, including the NY Times in the hometown of IBM headquarters. As a result, German export goods were increasingly boycotted in America, which hit the Nazi economy hard. However, US citizens initially learned nothing about the punch card calculators and punch cards that IBM brought to Germany in large numbers. Dehomag did not have the name Watson or IBM and did not sell anything to the USA. Under US President Roosevelt with his new welfare state, IBM’s volume doubled and achieved a virtual global monopoly of 90% of the market. A punch card calculator was not a universal calculating machine like a modern computer that you can unpack, turn on and use for all sorts of purposes. Instead, the engineers had to tailor the systems to the task at hand, whether the administration of the US welfare state, the German Reichsbahn or the systematic registration of Jews in Germany. IBM poured more and more money into Dehomag, which had Nazis on its books as managers, in order to maintain the impression of sovereignty and “public health”. German Jews, or Germans with some kind of Jewish background, had actually long since become very similar to the rest of the population. Between 1869 and 1871 almost all restrictions on Jews in Germany were lifted. Nobody knew their exact number. In 1933, the year it seized power, the Nazi regime first set out to carry out a census of 41 million Prussians using calculators. 600 holes per individual card were possible in different combinations. Even better cards came later. Normally, such a pen-and-paper count would have taken years. With the machines it was done in four months. An armada of helpers was recruited to find all possible records of where Jews lived and what they owned and worked. The data was transferred to the punch card system, checked for errors and evaluated in various ways, for example according to search parameters such as the concentration of Jews in different areas. IBM made profits that were maneuvered to avoid taxes with clever accounting and various subcompanies and companies. The NY Times even reported on the first concentration camps and quoted Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” in context. Were Times editors unaware of what IBM was doing? Or were they not allowed to report it? IBM’s Watson had connections to the President (also a Freemason) and the US State Department. Watson was not only enthusiastic about Hitler, but also considered Mussolini a pioneer. The Italo-Fascists were not crazy about race and anti-Semitism. The Guelphs in Italy were still very strong, as was the king there. In his early days as a journalist, Mussolini was confirmed to have been an agent of the British Secret Service. Watson’s career reached dizzying heights and he was offered more and more positions and tasks; He was wanted as a director of the US Federal Reserve and as a trustee of Columbia University (King’s College). US Secretary of State Cordell Hull, an important contact of Watson’s, received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1945 after the anti-Semite Alfred Nobel, who invented modern explosives, was the son of an arms contractor and placed the awarding of the Nobel Prize in the hands of the “Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences”. President Franklin Roosevelt came from a long-established family with connections and membership in the Freemasons. IBM received more and more orders in the USA and Germany from Siemens, Mannesmann, Opel, Daimler, Zeiss, the Reichspost, Reichsbahn, Luftwaffe and IG Farben. Whether Americans realized it or not, the Holocaust was turning into a vast open-field eugenics experiment. In the first years of the Nazi Empire, the very elaborately produced punch cards came exclusively from America. There could be almost no deviations or production fluctuations, otherwise the machines would have read the holes incorrectly. A new machine count of Jews with newly defined definitions of what exactly defines a person as a Jew resulted in the number of 1.5 million citizens. Nazi Germany had become IBM’s second most important customer after the United States. Dehomag also had banks and other financial institutions as customers. Due to a lack of data protection, the machines could be used to specifically search for money and expropriate people and companies. Watson celebrated lavish parties with the Nazis. Because of a complicated nesting of profits, tax avoidance and conspiracy, Dehomag looked German on paper. The “Social Security Act” in the USA brought IBM a sixfold increase in business because millions more citizens had to be bureaucratically managed using punch cards. The citizens who benefited from state-sponsored health care or unemployment insurance certainly did not know that on the other side of the Atlantic, almost identical punch cards were used to register the subjects of the Third Reich and designate Jews for forced labor and extermination. Since IBM in America continually received new government contracts and tax money for further research, the company essentially functioned like a government institution. With one or two maneuvers the government gave the impression that it was preventing IBM from becoming a monopoly and saving the “free market”, but this was nothing more than cosmetic, as IBM only lost a few percent of market share as a result. Watson had risen to the International Chamber of Commerce and US Chamber of Commerce, preached slogans such as “Peace through Trade” and was awarded one of the Nazis’ highest decorations, the Order of Merit of the German Eagle. In their conceited wisdom, the NSDAP calculated that there were 2 million “Jews” in Germany and were able to trace them back to the last village, since they had even searched the archives in the churches to see whether someone’s ancestor had converted from Judaism to Christianity ages ago. The people who were driven out of business and their homes by the Nazis were completely surprised by the speed and precision of the authorities. As soon as the soldiers arrived, they immediately unpacked their exact lists, which were created thanks to IBM technology. The NY Times was always well informed about what was happening in Germany and also informed readers in the hometown of IBM’s American headquarters, although not completely. American foreign espionage, which officially existed on a negligible scale, must also have been well informed. Exactly how many top spies there were in the Third Reich and how many spies and spy networks perhaps included the Guelph nobility is still a secret. IBM had spread in Austria and in the other countries that were successively conquered by the Nazis. After Kristallnacht, the international horror became so great that Watson suddenly presented himself as an opponent of Hitler with a contrived letter. He and the IBM parent company made themselves less visible, but Dehomag continued to be promoted. There were also company constructs in Switzerland that were used as new, less harmless intermediate points. In 1938, Nazi Germany was almost bankrupt because of the international boycott campaign, which Schacht said. confirmed by the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC). 750,000 people in the empire worked on collecting, transmitting and analyzing data rather than producing anything useful. It wasn’t just about Jews, but also about generating new tax revenue in general. Those who were declared Jews often fled to the nearest neighboring country, which was soon taken over by the Nazis. The NY Times reported after the Polish Blitz that 250,000 Polish Jews were already listed as dead and 3 million more Jews in Poland were in acute danger. Reinhard Heydrich, head of the SD, had a secret conference in Berlin and it was a top secret affair.
The operational order was passed on to the leaders of the task forces that committed massacres in the newly conquered areas after the Wehrmacht had moved on. In addition to the usual ideological madness, the argument was used that Jews in Poland, for example, could become partisan fighters and communist revolutionaries like they once did during the Russian Revolution. Conversely, some German generals warned that it contradicted basic military logic to carry out such cruel and extensive purges instead of treating the populations in the conquered territories decently and turning them into a bulwark against Russia. Those who were not shot immediately ended up in ghettos that had to be located near railroad tracks. Of course, the Reichsbahn also worked with IBM punch cards and the IBM technology had long been in Poland and counted the Jews in good time. When the NY Times reported that 1.5 million Jews in Poland were at risk of starvation, the reader still learned nothing about IBM’s role. The entire administration of the empire and its military depended on punch cards and machines that had to be regularly maintained by specialists. Without IBM there would have been war, but not necessarily a blitzkrieg. In the US State Department and the Federal Police FBI, more and more officials became suspicious of IBM and Watson had to return his Nazi medal, whereupon he was bitterly insulted by the Nazi media. From August 1940, IBM in the USA was able to play dumb and wash its hands innocence because the Third Reich made certain changes at Dehomag. The NSDAP and the generals quickly discovered that punch cards could also be used against Germany. In Algeria, military resistance was quickly organized with southern France, the British and Americans with the help of machines and competent espionage. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers and specialists were mobilized and drove the German troops back into North Africa. Other US companies were scolded in America for their Nazi dealings, such as Standard Oil from the Rockefellers, General Motors and the Brown Brothers Harriman bank. This didn’t have any really serious consequences for these companies. IBM dutifully delivered machines to the British code breakers at Bletchley Park, to various US secret services and to the military. For example, IBM was instrumental in the Normandy landings, managed military conscription, and was able to keep track of almost every single U.S. soldier during the war. There were some Americans of Japanese ancestry living on the U.S. West Coast who were considered a risk because of the war with Japan. Some of these people had to move to another part of the USA, the rest were taken to internment camps under Executive Order 9066.
Of course, this undertaking was managed using IBM punch cards. The camps consisted of hastily and cheaply constructed bungalows, where 25 people were often crammed in instead of the planned four. In 1942 the infamous Wannsee Conference took place in the Third Reich for the “Final Solution to the Jewish Question”. The punch cards recorded who had to work what, where, for how long, and who had to die. The tattoos had become necessary to identify prisoners more reliably so that mix-ups didn’t mess up the databases. In early 1944, SS statistician Richard Korherr reported to Adolf Eichmann five million dead Jews through various methods. Various cover terms were used, such as “evacuations”, “smuggling through” or “special treatment”. The “European Jew Balance” was that European Jewry had almost lost half of its population of 10 million people since 1933. On January 1, 1944, the statistics office was moved to the Thiergarten hunting lodge of the former Princes of Thurn and Taxis near Sulzbach on the Danube near Regensburg. The Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Forces used IBM technology combined with a form of psychometrics for the bombing campaign against the Third Reich. Not only was it precisely managed where and how much was bombed, but also how this changed the morale of the German population. Psychologists evaluated information from the secret services, which prepared reports on the Germans’ willingness to continue supporting the war. With this psychometrics, the Americans were able to transfer the knowledge they had gained to the bombing campaign against Japan, including the first atomic bombing. After the war, Dehomag continued and was cashed in by IBM and the occupiers. The punch card computers were used to rebuild the German economy. Many apartment blocks had been bombed, but not the valuable factories in D Germany, which originally went back to US companies such as General Motors and Ford.
Sources:
IBM and the Holocaust Expanded Edition, Edwin Black
America’s Secret Establishment: An Introduction to the Order of Skull & Bones, Antony C. Sutton, Trine Day
Die auffallend vielen “Tode” des Martin Bormann: Für wen arbeitete Hitlers Sekretär nach 1945? von Alfred H. Mühlhäuser
Hitler’s Traitor : Martin Bormann and the Defeat of the Reich, Louis Kilzer, Presidio Press
http://www.denverconsistory.org/aboutFM.html
https://freimaurer-wiki.de/index.php/Urania_zur_Unsterblichkeit
https://freimaurer-wiki.de/index.php/Royal_York_zur_Freundschaft
Dresdner Bank im “Dritten Reich” Hitlers willige Banker, https://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/dresdner-bank-im-dritten-reich-hitlers-willige-banker-a-401271.html
Freimaurer, Carbonari, Welfen und Remington-Gewehre schufen das geeinte Italien, Alex Benesch, http://recentr.com/2019/06/24/freimaurer-carbonari-welfen-und-remington-gewehre-schufen-das-geeinte-italien/
Hitlers blaublütige HelferWie Adelige dem Nazi-Diktator zur Macht verhalfen, https://www.focus.de/wissen/mensch/nationalsozialismus/neues-buch-ueber-den-diktator-hitlers-heimliche-helfer-kamen-aus-dem-adel_id_5942942.html
World War 2
The aspects that have so far been almost completely neglected in the investigation of the Second World War are the systematic sabotage of warfare and diplomacy by Hitler, the possible activity of Hitler as an agent for one or more foreign secret services, the likelihood of further spies under the NSDAP leadership, the large-scale British deception maneuver with the “Peace Party,” as well as the extent of early coordination between America, Britain and Russia. The following are the broad phases of World War II:
- The annexation of Austria and Czechoslovakia
- The conquest of Poland
- The successful attack on France and the escape of British forces from mainland Europe
- Securing supplies of oil from Romania and steel from Sweden
- The limited air war against Great Britain and the lack of an invasion
- Attack against the Soviet Union and wage a hopeless multi-front war
- Stronger British bombings against Germany
- The USA enters the war and invades Europe
- Collapse on multiple fronts and German surrender
Initial situation
We already know that Hitler vastly overestimated himself and greatly underestimated his opponents, which was partly due to his narcissism and partly to his inadequate knowledge of the world and military matters. For him, with enough will, anything was possible; he followed his inspiration, believed he had providence on his side and that he was a genius. Nevertheless, his countless disastrous decisions throughout the war cannot be explained simply by his narcissism, for he had always been able to take advantage of other people’s work and pass off other people’s ideas as his own. The generals, in turn, were able to cede fame to Hitler, quietly disempower Hitler after a war and only use him as a puppet.
We also know that Nazi Germany received significant industrial aid from the USA and that Hitler propagated the false view that no major threat could be expected from the democratically effeminate countries. The Anglo-American disinformation found its way through Professor Haushofer and Rudolf Hess to Hitler and other greats of the Third Reich, so that the unrealistic idea of being able to forge an alliance with the “Nordic” brothers from America and Britain spread.
It is also very likely that the Anglo-Americans and Russians had incriminating, highly embarrassing material on hand about Hitler, including photos of homosexual acts. Furthermore, it is practically guaranteed that there had already been extensive infiltration of Nazi Germany with foreign spies before the war began and that there was insufficient competence in the Reich to do anything about the situation. As far as we know, the Germans had no significant spies among their opponents.
The geopolitical situation in 1939 did not differ dramatically from the situation in 1914, when the established major powers France, Great Britain (including the USA) and Russia wanted to prevent Germany from becoming stronger.
The big theater play
In 1994, two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Louis Kilzer published the astonishing book “Churchill’s Deception” with the major publisher Simon & Schuster, which explains Britain’s devastating strategic deceptions that stalled the Nazis and led them to believe that an Anglo-German deal was being sought would have given Hitler free rein to attack Eastern Europe and Russia.
The British secret structures created the illusion that there was a “peace party” on the island, an unofficial association of the former King George, various nobles and other influential Brits who were well-disposed towards the Germans. In many secret meetings in Italy, Switzerland and Portugal, meaningful diplomacy was undermined and clarity was made impossible.
Colonel General Franz Halder later explained to the Americans that Hitler really believed he could invade Poland relatively safely because the security guarantees from the French and British were just hot air. Although no one actually came to the Poles’ aid, the British and French declared war against Germany.
In “Churchill’s Deception,” Louis Kilzer avoids the question of whether Hitler and other Nazi greats were agents of foreign powers and also avoids an account of the extent to which Anglo-American industry pushed into the German market before the war and created capacities of military importance had. Kilzer would probably have had to look for another publisher for his book if he had taken a more comprehensive look. Despite at least 10 editions, “Churchill’s Deception” never appeared in German. In “Hitler’s Traitor: Martin Bormann and the Defeat of the Reich” published by the much smaller publisher Presidio Press, he finally addressed the question of top spies in the Third Reich. Bormann was one of the most important people in the regime and his career was promoted early on by aristocratic circles from the Guelph environment. With his stenographers, he was able to obtain the German General Staff’s military plans down to the last detail and forward them in a timely manner. Kilzer was able to prove that Russia had received the information, but Bormann was probably an agent of an aristocratic secret service centered in Great Britain. The British deception maneuvers with the fictitious “Peace Party” were not only aimed at Hitler, but were also intended to convince all leading figures in the NSDAP and the German military. The more agents Britain was able to place in Germany’s leadership, the greater the chances of success of this venture. After the successful conquest of Poland, Hitler and his loyal yes-men in Berlin spread the false belief that the war could soon be ended because an agreement would be reached with the British through unofficial channels. Hermann Rauschning, former head of government of the Free City of Danzig, reported that Hitler ultimately wanted to conquer Great Britain after subjugating the Soviet Union. The beautiful words in “Mein Kampf” about the British were just tactics. Rauschning’s notes, which were published under the title “Conversations with Hitler”, must be taken seriously because they describe a large number of symptoms of Hitler’s narcissistic personality disorder, even though no official specialist literature on the condition existed at the time and because Rauschning’s reports differ from those of others Strongly cover observers. Particularly in his dealings with his generals, Hitler demonstrated thousands of times exactly the pathological stubbornness that Rauschning described. After the initial successes in Czechoslovakia and Poland, Hitler was drunk with megalomania and the feeling of godlikeness.
“With a monstrous complacency, Hitler indulged in plans that were all the more astonishing because they seemed to lack any prerequisites for implementation. […] The surprise attack, the blitzkrieg, lightning-fast turns from west to east, sudden blows to the north, should be one of the most infallible means of combat. The revolutionary destruction of the enemy through sophisticated methods of psychological war is another. Hitler’s imagination roamed the entire universe. He wanted to hit England at all their weak points.”
Hitler’s psyche had been an issue for foreign countries since the early 1920s and it was not difficult to guess that Hitler’s already pathological arrogance could be greatly increased through open and covert appeasement. In the 1980s, for flimsy reasons, Rauschning was vilified by legal revisionists and those around David Irving as an imposter who just wanted to sell as many books as possible. However, with several university degrees and even a doctorate, he was, firstly, a serious academic, secondly, as head of the government of Danzig, he was actually in a position to attend several meetings with Hitler, and thirdly, he did not claim any sensationalism or any special relationship with the Führer, but simply provided a debunking of Hitler’s excessive arrogance coupled with incompetence. The right-wing revisionists were extremely angry about Rauschning’s Hitler lore, which involved the extermination of Jews, and called his book Propaganda of the Allied Victorious Powers, even though when Conversations with Hitler was published in 1938, World War II had not yet begun. Germany neither had significant agents in Great Britain or Russia, nor was the Nazi leadership’s education abroad sufficient. As a result, the peace party’s theater was not rejected from the outset as transparent nonsense and people were content with words instead of deeds. Germany could have simply responded to the British’s covert advances by saying that they would not consider anything other than concrete, understandable offers. A key figure in the British theater was the Duke of Hamilton, who had received his education and probably his secret service contacts at the elite training centers of Eton and Oxford. The biggest celebrity, however, was the Duke of Windsor, formerly King Edward VIII of the Saxe-Coburg and Gotha clan, who passed the throne to his younger brother George VI. had to resign in order to be allowed to marry an American. He became one of the most important carrots to be hung in front of the Nazis. A well-kept secret was the true relationship between Great Britain and the USA and the German general staff would have reacted completely differently if it had been understood that it was in fact a monolithic Anglo-American empire. In addition, an estimated 95% of the Soviet Union’s armament was based on Anglo-American technology. The US president pretended to have no interest in interfering in Europe and Hitler swore to his confidants that the Yankees were not capable soldiers and would never get involved in Europe again. Even the people who made contacts abroad for Hitler were suspect, such as the notorious Ernst Hanfstaengl, who had befriended Winston Churchill’s son Randolph and took him on Hitler’s plane once or twice during the election campaign in Germany. Hanfstaengl had studied at the American elite university Harvard and there met the future US President Franklin D. Roosevelt, whose family had worked for the Anglo-American elite for generations. He raised donations for the Nazis and was considered an expert on foreign countries, collecting incriminating material from the start and ultimately wanting to blackmail Hitler. The Churchills’ invitation to Hanfstaengl and Hitler to have dinner together was rejected by the Führer for some unknown reason. Only Hanfstaengl went and, while drinking and smoking, Winston Churchill asked him what Hitler thought about the idea of an alliance between Germany, France and England. Another intelligence failure for the Germans was the Prussian-born Briton William de Ropp. Hitler, Heß and Rosenberg thought they had a formidable agent in de Ropp to attract sympathizers in Great Britain, but de Ropp was a British spy and brought other British spies to the Nazis, such as Frederick Winterbotham. He pretended to be a senior air force officer and concealed the fact that he worked in the airspace department of the secret service MI6 and had set up the Royal Air Force’s secret service. Later he even led the decryption of German radio communications by the codebreakers at Bletchley Park (Ultra Project). Disguised as a sympathizer, he traveled to Germany in the mid-1930s for meetings with Hitler, Rosenberg, Hess and various German military leaders. Hitler lied that he wanted an eternal alliance with the British after defeating the Soviets, while Winterbotham feigned great sympathy for Nazi Germany. Winterbotham was even presented with details about the Wehrmacht’s attack plans against the Soviet Union by German General Walter von Reichenau and Eric Koch, because this boast was intended to make enough of an impression and also show Winterbotham’s friends that they were serious. Winterbotham’s spies had already discovered early on that Germany was allowing fighter pilots to be trained in the Soviet Union by violating the Treaty of Versailles, and his colleagues had long since known all sorts of Hitler’s other secrets. Lord Londonderry, a cousin of Winston Churchill and Minister for the British Air Force, visited Hitler, Heß, Ribbentrop, Himmler and Hermann Göring’s kitschy Karinhall house outside Berlin several times. Göring had only been a captain in the Reichswehr and, because of his relationship with Hitler, was allowed to jump five ranks at once and become a general; while Londonderry personally pioneered innovations such as the Hurricane and Spitfire aircraft and radar. He was once chosen by King Edward VII for a secret diplomatic mission and received his noble title in the Royal Victorian Order. One can assume that he too was just fooling the Nazis. An organization called the “Anglo-German Fellowship” had been specially created with influential figures such as the head of the Bank of England, representatives of private banks such as Barclays and various aristocrats, while in Germany Ribbentrop led the sister organization called the “German-English Society”, where Guests such as “Carl Eduard Duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha” also showed up. The latter married Princess Viktoria Adelheid of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg and rose to become head of the Red Cross and Obergruppenführer of the SA in Germany. After the Second World War he only had to pay a fine of 5,000 marks. The Anglo-German Fellowship had relationships with important appeasement politicians such as Chamberlain, Halifax and Hoare (the so-called Cliveden Set), who in turn worked with the American ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy, the father of the later US President John F. Kennedy. The Anglo-American establishment was always well informed and was able to give the American side the impression for years that it never wanted to get involved in European wars again.
Lord Londonderry was informed by Hitler of the secret plans for the attacks against Poland and Czechoslovakia as early as 1936 and promptly passed this information on to the British government. This seemingly small detail turns the entire prehistory of the Second World War on its head, because it would have been extremely easy for the British to warn the Poles, Czechs and Slovaks accordingly and then make it clear to the Nazis that this conquest of “Lebensraum” was not possible will tolerate. In 1936, the German military was still miles away from being able to wage war. David Lloyd George, former Prime Minister of Great Britain during the First World War, met Hitler for the first time at his Berghof in 1936 and the two lavished praise on each other. What was hard to beat in terms of schmaltz was the way in which Lloyd complimented the botched National Socialist economic policy and how his daughter greeted the Führer with “Heil Hitler”. But she wasn’t the only one who had been trained accordingly: In 2015, the tabloid “The Sun” published a 17-second film showing the seven-year-old future Queen Elisabeth, her sister Margaret, the future King Edward VIII and their mother Elizabeth, who raises her hand in the Hitler salute and is promptly imitated by the others. The Sun estimates the film was made at Balmoral Castle in Scotland in 1933 or 1934. The Duke of Windsor sat on the throne as King Edward VIII for a relatively short time and then abdicated so that he could marry the American Wallis Simpson, who more or less consciously took part in the deception against Germany. In 1941, even the American Federal Police FBI became suspicious because the two had visited Hitler at the Berghof, Simpson may have had an affair with the German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop and may even have given him secret (false?) information. Historians believed she was a spy for Germany, although she was more likely a vehicle through which disinformation could be spread to the Nazis. After 80 years of secrecy, records became public in 2017, according to which the Duke and his wife had put pressure on influential Americans so that they in turn put pressure on US President Roosevelt not to interfere in the war in Europe. Winston Churchill was extremely upset about this and historians like to point to his broad campaign to draw America into the war, but there is a very good chance that it was all part of a campaign of deception against the Germans. The German generals in particular had great concerns about a possible US entry into the war and would probably have acted differently if America’s government had positioned itself openly and honestly from the start as a sworn partner of Great Britain.
The Daily Mail newspaper, owned by Lord Rothermere, published a letter from Hitler in 1937 with the usual nonsense about a partnership between the two Nordic nations. Rothermere once served as air force president in the government of David Lloyd George, another conspirator who feigned friendship with the Germans and publicly called Hitler the “greatest German alive.” According to MI5 documents, he regularly paid money to Stephanie von Hohenlohe, who was suspected of being a German spy, and wanted to infiltrate her deeper into high-ranking Nazi circles. MI6 circulated the claim that French intelligence had uncovered documents promising Stephanie a fortune if she succeeded in convincing media mogul Lord Rothermere to launch a campaign for the return of Polish territories to Nazi Germany. She had also been instrumental in organizing the visit of the Duke of Windsor and Wallis Simpson to Germany and she had an affair with Hitler’s personal assistant, Fritz Wiedemann, who was transferred to the USA, and the British agent Sir William Wiseman in vain from Hitler warned. Wiseman earned a lot of money as a partner at the bank Kuhn, Loeb & Co. Which side Stephanie von Hohenlohe ultimately worked for, whether she was only interested in the money and how far she understood the larger game is unclear. Nevertheless, it did its part to foster the illusion of a pro-German establishment in Britain. Winston Churchill was invited to come to Germany, but he was not in office at the time and declined because he was now playing the role of a harsh Nazi critic. The idea that the British Empire would accept Germany as an expanding Eurasian land power was downright idiotic, and yet you could see Hitler, its Nazi functionaries and even some of his generals. Churchill instead met with Ribbentrop at the German embassy in London and stated bluntly that England would have no interest in a Germany that swelled to three times its size. Ribbentrop replied grandly that war would be inevitable if Britain refused. In November 1937, Hitler finally ordered his generals to prepare for war. There was now no room for critical figures: on February 4, 1938, 16 generals were forced into retirement and 44 others were transferred. The War Ministry was now turned into the High Command of the Wehrmacht (OKW) under Lieutenant General Wilhelm Keitel.
At this point, the high command was already thinking about overthrowing or killing Hitler and creating a suitable myth about it, but the German generals did not want to take such a dramatic step without first negotiating with the British through secret channels. This was the next opportunity for Great Britain to reach a compromise without much effort, to make clear statements and to avoid a major war. Instead, the British only put off the German generals and there are also many indications that these generals were also betrayed to Hitler. Neville Chamberlain, in cahoots with Britain’s biggest apparent friends of Germany, became prime minister and appeased the Nazis at exactly the time Hitler needed this encouragement to calm his extremely skeptical generals. After the annexation of Austria, Chamberlain agreed that the Sudetenland could next become part of Nazi Germany. With his armada of false friends on the British Isles behind him, Hitler also took over the rest of Czechoslovakia, whereupon Chamberlain declared the phase of appeasement over and guaranteed the integrity of the Polish border on March 31, 1939. Hitler suddenly seemed confused and indecisive because the German navy was tiny and the army and air force had no war experience. Baron William de Ropp fed Alfred Rosenberg disinformation that senior officers in Britain’s air force had no desire to wage war against the Germans over Poland. In the event of a quick conquest of Poland, the world would be faced with a fait accompli and there would be renegotiations instead of war with the British and French. Hitler told Colonel General Franz Halder that the French and British were guaranteed to be bluffing and would not come to the Poles’ aid. Let us remember that the British government was privy to Hitler’s war plans as early as 1936 through its agent Lord Londonderry. The expected consequences, according to Hitler’s mantra, would be a naval blockade by Britain’s navy, economic sanctions and a formal severance of normal diplomatic relations. Next came an almost idiotic move, which was probably due to the Soviet secret service campaign on German soil: the German-Soviet non-aggression pact including the division of Poland and economic cooperation. Russia was a worst possible partner. In the end, the pact with the Russians only gave Hitler the encouragement to march further towards the cliff. When he received the translations of the latest parliamentary speeches from England and learned of a written treaty between England and Poland, he became very “thoughtful” and nervous. The French ambassador Coulondre also assured Poland’s protection. A rejection of Germany came from Italy. And so the invasion of Poland was postponed for the time being. The British agents and diplomats had to pull off a gigantic spectacle to entice Hitler and his generals to attack Poland despite public warnings from France and Great Britain. In Germany it was decided to use the amateur diplomat and Swedish businessman Birger Dahlerus to conduct secret negotiations with the (false) friends in Britain. Whatever was discussed in the many different meetings was enough for Hitler to order his military to prepare to storm Poland on September 1, 1939. From the German perspective, the venture seemed promising because they believed several incorrect basic assumptions:
- Britain would forgive Germany for attacking Poland
- The French would also remain passive if the high speed of the Polish campaign presented the world with a fait accompli
- Reinsurance with Russia would make enough impression
- America would permanently stay out of any conflict in Europe
Colonel General Jodl of the Wehrmacht High Command (OKW) said in front of the Allied tribunal in Nuremberg in 1946:
“We would have been unable to withstand a simultaneous attack by the Allies. […] That we did not collapse during the Polish campaign is due to the complete inactivity of 110 French and British divisions facing our 23 divisions holding our Western Front.”
Gerd Schultze-Rhonhof, a former major general in the Bundeswehr and historical revisionist author, also emphasized the imbalance between German, French and British military capacities in his controversial book “1939 – The War That Had Many Fathers”, but relied on dubious ones in his overall view sources and downplayed the aggressive potential of Hitler and the NSADAP.
In France, all sorts of nonsense was believed or propagated, such as the idea that the Germans had stationed up to 2,500 tanks on the western border. In reality there were only 50. A total of up to 150 German divisions were estimated, although the real number was only 88. The intention behind this serious overestimation of German fighting power was probably to create a reason for the wait-and-see attitude of the French; until Poland was conquered by the Germans. Although Britain had been forewarned since 1936, the warning does not appear to have been passed on to Poland. The British and French also made no move to get their forces into position in time to defend Poland. Instead, they formally declared war on Germany. Hitler seemed petrified at the news and, perplexed, asked his Foreign Minister Ribbentrop what to do now. In one of his typical bouts of depression, he told Hess that his entire life’s work would now collapse. Official negotiations with the British were no longer an option and all that remained was the black ice of unofficial channels for secret negotiations, where the British could ensure that nothing concrete was ever agreed on paper. The German secret services were a chaotic patchwork, infiltrated by the enemy and unable to see through the deceptions. Kurt Jahnke, who ran one of the German services for the NSDAP and for Hess personally, was in all likelihood a British or American agent. It is important to consider the double standard: Russia had also invaded Poland, but did not receive a declaration of war from France and Great Britain. The attack against Finland also had no immediate consequences for Moscow, although on the surface Russia was a much more serious competitor to the British-American Empire. If Stalin had really broken the power of the “Jewish Illuminati” over the Soviet Union, as the conspiracy literature assumes, then Great Britain and the USA would have fought the Soviet Union as the main enemy in World War II and not Germany. Winston Churchill, whose own son had flown in Hitler’s plane during the election campaign, was given a position in the British government again, there was no demonstration against the Germans and France also initially kept quiet. During the Polish campaign, Hitler gave his generals a largely free hand, who, according to Colonel General Franz Halder, wanted to avoid war with the French and British at all costs. The Führer’s assurances that no serious preparations needed to be made must have sounded like sheer mockery, and the few divisions in the west were forbidden from carrying out any combat operations. During the march through Poland, an enormous amount of ammunition had been used, many tanks were damaged and war production had only got off to a slow start, which meant that Germany was in existential danger and, for the second time, in a war against an overwhelming alliance of the USA, Britain, France and Russia. Again Hitler sent his amateur diplomat Dahlerus and again he returned empty-handed, although they even agreed to return Poland up to the corridor. William Rhodes Davis, on behalf of US President Roosevelt, even agreed to the idea that Germany could keep the corridor. Not only did Davis’ oil business include a refinery in Hamburg, but he also negotiated a deal in which Germany and Fascist Italy could build up their oil reserves before the war using cheap oil confiscated in Mexico. The NY Times estimated in an article that 12 million barrels went to Hitler and 8 million to Mussolini.
http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive/pdf?res=9803E5D61F3BE233A25751C0A96E9C946093D6CF
Of course, when the deal was over and the war had started, the British stopped further deliveries, although that doesn’t explain why they didn’t intervene beforehand was, after all, people had known about Hitler’s war plans since 1936. Chamberlain no longer played the appeaser but rather the hardliner, publicly rejecting Hitler’s proposals and calling for his abdication. Here again would have been an opportune moment when the British could have colluded with the German generals to take power away from Hitler and find an agreement before everything escalated, but as usual nothing of the sort happened. Finally, the Führer ordered the mobilization of the German armed forces, against the protest of the generals. A certain Dr. Franz Fischer, who worked for the British SIS and the German SS at the same time, sabotaged the talks between the German generals and the British contacts. The common view is that Fischer betrayed the SIS for the SS. But it is equally conceivable that he betrayed the German generals for the SIS because the British leadership had no interest in the more sensible and competent generals taking power in Germany. Hitler, whose knowledge of espionage came primarily from Karl May novels, hoped that by monitoring contacts between his generals and the British he could find out how the British really thought. And so he put 29-year-old Walter Schellenberg on the case, sending him to high-risk meetings, even though he could have been arrested and revealed everything he knew. At these secret meetings, the British (deliberately) made unrealistic demands, such as the murder of Hitler and his closest confidants, the return of Austria, Czechoslovakia and Poland, and a departure from Germany’s economic policy. So everything is just below an unconditional surrender. It is said that Hitler was quite perplexed by the developments and he only narrowly survived a bomb attack, which Himmler suspected was British secret service. But since the British had been deliberately deceiving Hitler up to that point by making a fuss about supposed sympathizers in the British upper class, and since the German generals’ offers were ignored, it seems illogical that Britain was interested in the leader’s death. The sheer number of failed assassination attempts suggests that the British, and probably Russian agents, were more likely to help keep Hitler alive. If the assassination attempt had been successful, the German generals could have reassured the population that life would go on and that they would get along quite well without the Führer. The aim was definitely to avoid an inner-German civil war between supporters of the noble officers and supporters of Hitler’s confidants. Hitler indulged in outbursts of anger and almost fired Field Marshal Walther von Brauchitsch, the commander in chief of the army. Mind you, bad right-wing revisionist literature to this day assumes that the officers continually failed and that the Führer had no choice but to take over all commands, even though he lacked any professional competence to do so and there are mountains of records showing Hitler’s serious mistakes in decisions prove. In the secret service “Abwehr”, Wilhelm Canaris and Hans Oster conspired against the Führer. After the Polish campaign, Canaris said:
“The war is lost, no matter how many victories we make; but he is lost.”
They even tried to send their agents to Pope Pius XII. to send him to act as a middleman between the defense and the Western powers. The Pope actually contacted the British embassy in Rome, but the British once again just gave him the cold shoulder. Another attempt was made by the US diplomat George H. Earle in Istanbul, who knew President Roosevelt and was supposed to convey the German resistance’s offer that Hitler would be killed and an immediate ceasefire concluded. This would have been the ideal opportunity to keep the United States out of the war, solve the problem in Europe without causing millions of deaths, and also prevent the Soviet Union from expanding violently into Western Europe. But Roosevelt couldn’t even bring himself to track down all the Soviet spies in his own government. In 1940 he made the following statement:
“I do not consider the communists a present or future threat to our country. In fact, I see Russia as our strongest ally in the next few years. As I told you when you began your investigation, you should limit yourself to Nazis and Fascists. Even though I don’t believe in communism myself, Russia is doing much better now and the world is safer under communism than under the tsars. Stalin is a great leader and while I disapprove of some of his methods, they are the only way to protect his government.”
http://www.dcdave.com/article5/121031.htm
Admiral Dönitz had calculated in 1938 and 1939 that around 300 submarines and increased aerial reconnaissance would be needed to cut off Great Britain from supplies from the USA. For a while, Germany was able to successfully sink convoys in the Atlantic, but then the Allies’ 9cm panoramic radar became ready for series production, and there were more protective vehicles and better weapons against submarines. From 1941 onwards, the German Navy’s encryption was also broken. Actually, it would have been obvious to increase the production of submarines years before the outbreak of war, but even in 1938 Hitler assured that there would be no war against the British in the following years and refused to build a battle fleet. In 1939 only 12 submarines were manufactured, and the following year only eight. In 1943, Erich Raeder, Commander-in-Chief of the Navy, was supposed to scrap all heavy ships and decommission them. He refused in horror and was then replaced by Dönitz. Military logic had called for building a fleet for the Atlantic and stationing ships in the north of Norway in order to be able to cut off the Soviets from supplies. But Hitler’s sabotage was relentless. Promising new jet aircraft were not allowed to go into production and it was not until 1942 that Messerschmitt’s Me262, an extremely fast and deadly fighter, could be built. 1939 also saw a long break in rocket development. Under these unnecessarily difficult conditions, three essential tasks had to be solved:
- Secure oil deliveries from Romania
- Secure the supply of steel from Sweden
- Protect German industry in the Ruhr area
Mussolini agreed to support the Germans, even though the value of the Italian military was considered very low. A high-risk lightning attack that could have destroyed the entire German fleet enabled the Germans to occupy ports in Norway and secure supplies of steel from Sweden. British espionage was almost guaranteed to have caught wind of the matter early on and deploying the powerful British fleet would have been easy, but the official word is that they completely missed the point. Hitler took personal credit for the success, without of course having any knowledge of the navy, and tried behind the scenes to weaken the advantage he had gained: the British approached the Narvik fjord with a group of destroyers and shot up the German destroyers there. Hitler gave his commander in chief in northern Norway, Major General Dietl, a crazy order to evacuate Narvik, which would have opened another unnecessary front and risked Germany’s steel supplies. An officer in the OKW was so horrified by Hitler’s order that he didn’t pass it on. Von Brauchitsch radioed Dietl about a promotion and ordered Narvik to be defended at all costs. Lieutenant Colonel von Loßberg is quoted as saying in 1940 that it was
“… incomprehensible that without coercion this would happen right now. The head of the WFA [Wehrmacht Command Office, meaning Jodl], however, objects that it is the personal will of the leader who does not allow himself to be discussed. It was completely unnecessary to describe Andalsnes as the most important task. There is currently “There’s not much going on, the focus is on Narvik.”
Unnecessary individual orders from Hitler had only caused confusion, it was said, and the Führer, despite his bungling, would constantly insist on the orders being implemented as quickly as possible. During the Polish campaign, Hitler let his generals do their work, but as soon as it came against Norway and the Western powers, he made himself the sole decision-maker, interfered and messed up as much as he could. The fact that steel was now secured for Germany made generals like Fromm and Halder more optimistic again. However, it should have been clear that Great Britain could not be separated from the USA and that the Anglo-Americans could boast unprecedented industrial production and massive mineral resources. Towards the end of the war, the USA produced more war equipment than all other participants in the war combined; a material battle that Germany could not win from the start. Because of the ongoing contacts with the apparently pro-German elites in Great Britain, the leader was able to spread his optimism that the British government politicians would soon be replaced by more pleasant figures, which betrays a serious ignorance of the British system of pseudo-democracy. The next immediate challenge was the fight against France and against the British troops that had pushed onto the mainland. Hitler’s idea was, in principle, to repeat the old Schlieffen plan, to get bogged down and wear out in trench warfare, i.e. to exactly meet the enemy’s expectations. Instead, the officer Erich von Manstein came up with an alternative plan to shift the troops south and make a surprise push through the Ardennes with tanks, and had the support of the commander in chief of the army group, Gerd von Rundstedt. This would make it possible to encircle the Allied troops in the north. Chief of General Staff Franz Halder was initially skeptical as to whether the tanks would actually be able to get through the difficult terrain at an appropriate speed. But when Major Helmut Reinberger had to make an emergency landing with his plane in Belgium and was arrested there with secret war plans, the conventional, Schlieffen-like plan was no longer a secret. Nevertheless, the OKW made it seem as if they were only changing details after the Reinberger incident, while the alternative Manstein plan was being secretly prepared. The fact that Hitler was enthusiastic about it was perhaps because he did not believe it would succeed and that this plan had already been leaked to the French. What Hitler apparently didn’t realize was that the French believed the Manstein Plan was just a deception intended to lure French forces south. Army Chief of Staff Halder noted in his war diary that the leader was extremely nervous and would like to order the troops to stop. In addition, Hitler again gave a series of nonsensical orders, which once again suggests that Hitler was acting under the influence of a foreign secret service. He may have been promised that a new, limited trench warfare would lead to a ceasefire in the foreseeable future. The next militarily logical step after breaking through in the Ardennes would have been to consistently surround and capture the main British and French forces in northern France. But Hitler hit the brakes, to Halder’s dismay. General von Rundstedt shrugged his shoulders and ordered the tanks to stop, expecting that after more infantrymen arrived the order would finally come to collect the British Expeditionary Force. Victory was within reach, but Hitler clearly ordered that the German troops had to wait and gave his generals stupid excuses such as that the area of Flanders was not suitable for tanks and that the Luftwaffe should sort it out, but here too Hitler slowed down and the weather wasn’t right. From time to time, Hitler made it clear that, in keeping with his ideas from Mein Kampf, he had no intention of destroying the British Empire and watching racially “inferior” nations take over the British colonies. But even if this was indeed Hitler’s strategy, they should have played it safe and taken the British troops prisoner. It would have been easy and cheap to intern these British soldiers under humane conditions and release them in the event of a ceasefire with Great Britain.
Through his (feigned) indecision, Hitler gave the British 50 hours of time before he gave the order to attack, so that hundreds of thousands of British and over 130,000 French troops were able to escape in the so-called “Miracle of Dunkirk”. Historian Louis Kilzer concludes that Hitler’s strategy was simply to gain British respect in order to ultimately get a deal with the British, but even this does not change the fact that, according to all military and strategic logic, he was the British Expeditionary Force should have taken prisoner.
The next step could have been to threaten to invade the British Isles, which would most likely have led to a ceasefire and an agreement. Hitler’s actions were the worst possible thing for Germany because the British troops escaped and the limited aerial bombardment also caused extreme anger among the British people. It is very likely that the British pulled out their blackmail material against Hitler early on, which would not only have completely discredited Hitler, but would also have cleared him to be shot down. This blackmail could easily be combined with the lies that the British secret services were orchestrating to deceive Hitler and the other powerful people in Germany into believing that it was only a matter of time before German-friendly Brits would form a new government. France, meanwhile, had lost half of its troops and many territories. In 1940, in another absurd decision, the German Luftwaffe’s production was reduced to the fifth priority level. It wasn’t until 1944 that a peak was reached, although the USA alone was already producing twice as much. If the goal had been to encourage Britain to reach an agreement, war production would have had to run at full speed and with a focus on efficiency. Nevertheless, according to the Führer’s will, Germany was not allowed to build a real strategic bomber fleet, tank projects were delayed, nonsensical projects were pursued, such as a 170-ton tank called “Maus”, and finally, they did not seriously participate in the race to build an atomic bomb. Although Heisenberg had a research reactor at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute to produce plutonium, in the end only a little over 100 scientists were assigned to it, Einstein had long since left and the extremely important Peter Debye had moved to the USA to study at Cornell University to work. Göring, Keitel, Himmler and Raeder showed little interest in Heisenberg’s statements, even though it was theoretically clear that an atomic bomb the size of a pineapple could destroy an entire city. Field Marshal Milch lamented:
“There were very good approaches, but this matter was not taken seriously or supported.”
Right-wing revisionists like Irving mostly rely on the excuse that the project was too expensive, which is only partially true, while some conspiracy literature claims that the Nazis did indeed build a workable bomb. Apparently conspiracy theorists consider the reality of the nuclear weapons program to be so poor that they have to cling to fantasies of supposed great successes that were then stolen from under the nose. Albert Speer estimated that a bomb could only have been produced with great effort in 1947, which would have put them behind the Americans but far ahead of the Russians. The earlier the project had started and the earlier rocket research had been intensified, the more a deterrent would have been available in time against the alliance of the USA, Great Britain and Russia. In mid-1943, the German stockpile of 1,200 tons of uranium was allocated to the production of hard-core munitions, pretty much the end of the nuclear weapons project. Göring also stopped the development of the Jumo 004 jet engine and the airframe of the Me 262 jet fighter. Research into anti-aircraft missiles, which would have been one of the most effective defensive measures in the world, was also canceled. What is also striking is the generally far too lax war production, which even in 1940 did not even make up 15% of total industrial production. The British politicians were all kept on a very short leash by the nobility and the intelligence chiefs, which was particularly evident in the fact that Prime Minister Chamberlain had not received the secret reports from Bletchley Park about decrypted German Enigma communications, but Churchill had. King George himself appointed Churchill as Prime Minister with dictatorial powers and the SIS launched a campaign to influence America to participate in the war, whereupon Hitler came up with the idea of disbanding 35 divisions (around 1 million soldiers). The generals like Milch, Keitel, etc. knew exactly that the British island had to be attacked now. General Blumentritt received the usual lecture from Hitler that it was not in Germany’s interest to destroy the British Empire. Lloyd George would supposedly soon replace Churchill in office and the Duke of Windsor would return to the throne. With France defeated, the Führer told his advisers that the war was now largely over. It would take a long time to match his grandiose successes and his successor will probably deal with the issue of Russia at some point. He immediately had several divisions moved east to protect against a possible advance by the Russians. The British intelligence officer Winterbotham, on the other hand, knew from his sources that Hitler would attack Russia in 1941 without first conquering Britain; one of the most militarily senseless decisions in history. To calm things down, the generals were allowed to take half-hearted measures to at least attack the British Air Force, although here too everything was sabotaged. After just 36 days it was actually over again and Winterbotham learned that Hitler had given the order to Dutch air force bases to dismantle equipment that would have been necessary for an invasion of Great Britain. Due to sabotage in armaments and operational orders, Germany lost almost 3,000 aircraft and almost as many pilots in the Battle of Britain without achieving any significant success. The British had long since moved their bases out of reach north and had built up effective air defenses by the fall of 1940. It was not until 1942 that the V-1 flying bomb with a jet engine and a capacity of 850 kg of explosives was available; Two years later the liquid fuel rocket V-2 with moderate accuracy. The military balance of power was now clearly superior to England by 5:1, and yet no invasion took place. There were also other ways to put real pressure on the British, such as control of the Mediterranean and especially Gibraltar. But Hitler acted stupid and stubborn in the negotiations with Spain, so nothing came of it. The obvious idea of occupying or buying bases in North Africa from France was also rejected by Hitler. Control of the Mediterranean would have given Germany exactly the influence it needed to negotiate a viable deal with Britain. The early conquest of Malta was rejected against all military logic and the island was left to the British, who built an important air base there. All this sabotage also sealed the demise of Rommel’s Afrika Korps. At the Battle of El Alamain there was another one of Hitler’s infamous halt orders, an orderly retreat was not possible and corresponding losses resulted. The conquest of Egypt and the Middle East oil fields on which Britain depended was stalled because the matter was supposedly not important enough; at least less important than an invasion of Russia. The generals who had to plan such an invasion felt deliberately kept in the dark by Hitler and did not know where Hitler got his information. Albrecht Haushofer, the son of Hitler’s tutor in geopolitics and a close confidant of Rudolf Hess, traveled frequently to London and cultivated a possibly romantic relationship with the Marquis of Clydesdale, which quickly crossed the line into treason. The Marquis became the “Duke of Hamilton” and played the role of the most important intermediary to the Third Reich. It was this Hamilton that Hess ultimately wanted to meet personally with his infamous flight. The Duke of Windsor also made a fuss again and kept the German espionage on their toes with the illusionary prospect that he could ascend the British throne again. For months, Hitler influenced his generals to make them believe that an attack on Russia made sense and that no major problems would be expected from the British. Militarily, things were not going well for the British for a while, as the oil wells in Iraq were in danger, while Rommel was roaming around in the traditional British area of influence and driving away the British troops. Rudolf Heß, one of the Reich’s most important secret keepers, got into his plane, which had been modified for long-haul flights, was able to fly largely unhindered to the British north and expected to meet Hamilton there, but was arrested and he was allowed to disappear without the matter being discussed to exploit the public for propaganda purposes. Stalin’s fears that the Germans would, according to obvious military logic, take Iraq, Syria and Egypt and cut Britain off from oil were unfounded. For the eccentric leader, North Africa was unimportant and Rommel was not worthy of being supplied with sufficient fuel and tanks. Since the Enigma encryption was already broken, Rommel’s supply ships were regularly sunk.
Barbarossa
Heinz Guderian and his colleagues drew up an expert plan to attack the Soviet Union, which would first involve storming the control center and industrial center of Moscow in warm weather. Hitler refused this and presented a ridiculous alternative plan to buy time, cutting back on the production of ammunition and disbanding divisions on the Eastern Front because victory was supposed to come very quickly. But what did the intelligence say about Russia’s equipment strength? Not much, because very little was known about it. At Hitler’s request, no strategic bomber fleet had been built, nor were there any naval bases in Norway capable of holding up supplies for the Russians from the United States. And of course the submarine fleet was far too small to block the Atlantic. The USA, with its seemingly endless natural resources and industrial capacity, weakened its neutrality law of 1939 so that “surplus” military equipment could be exported to Germany’s opponents. Without proper coordination and without strategic advantages, Germany then declared war on the USA. Commander-in-Chief Erich Raeder suggested striking at Suez to secure oil for Germany and Japan, to cut off Britain and to appease Turkey. The American Chief of Staff Marshall feared exactly these next steps because they would have corresponded to military logic. But Hitler’s sabotage could once again be relied upon and the USA was able to continue supplying the British in North Africa. The 1939 pact between Germany and the Soviet Union had come as a shock to Japan and failed to plan a joint German-Japanese attack against Stalin. Instead, the Japanese toiled against the USA and Russia was able to order all possible forces from the east to the west. Contrary to the claims of bad right-wing revisionist literature, there was no urgent need to attack the Soviet Union as early as possible in order to “preempt” Stalin. Hitler wanted to dare to attack as early as the fall of 1940 without being even remotely prepared to do so, which is why Keitel and Jodl clearly put the brakes on. It was clear to the experts that they were embarking on a two-front war, with only a chance of success if Russia could be defeated within months. To do this, however, it was essential that the expert plans were implemented and not Hitler’s suicide squad. Hitler and only Hitler made the fatal decisions, breaking all treaties and all international law and with the advance announcement that he would not adhere to any minimum moral standards. Stalin was of course warned several times by his spies, but initially did not take any classic defensive actions, although this would have deterred the Germans and prevented the deaths of many Russian soldiers. The usual historiography tries to explain illogically that defensive preparations had encouraged the Germans to attack even earlier and that Stalin simply wanted to gain more time. In retrospect, Stalin’s approach overall appears to be a repetition of the strategy that was so successful against Napoleon in 1812: luring the enemy into the depths of Russian territory, dismantling the opposing forces and attacking the eternally long enemy supply lines. The German generals were aware of these risks and therefore wanted to take Moscow as quickly as possible, working with surprises and using blitzkrieg methods. Hitler’s plan contained only fatal mistakes that would play into Stalin’s hands, with all of these details inevitably being whispered to Hitler by someone else, since he himself did not have the training and experience to create a detailed plan that was exactly the wrong thing for them Wehrmacht: No quick capture of Moscow, attacks against the periphery, maximum fragmentation of our own forces, static warfare instead of blitzkrieg techniques. Right-wing revisionists like David Irving later shifted the blame to Jodl, just as Hitler continually blamed his generals. In doing so, the Führer broke with the most elementary principles of warfare that Clausewitz had already established about the importance of retreat areas and mobile defense. Halder even wrote down that Moscow was not important to Hitler. Russia was able to muster up to 10 million soldiers at short notice, while the Germans only mustered three million men for the undertaking. The Soviets also had extremely effective tanks, such as the T-28, T-34 and T-35, based on American technology and manufactured in production facilities built by American companies. In a very short time, the Soviets were able to convert civilian automobile and tractor factories to the production of tanks. Historian Antony Sutton, in his work National Suicide, detailed how the Soviets purchased prototypes from various countries in the 1920s and 1930s and refined these designs. The T-27 was a vehicle weighing just under two tons and powered by a four-cylinder engine from Ford’s Model T automobile. The T-26 was a copy of the British Vickers-Armstrong, the T-35 closely resembled the “A-1 Vickers Independent” and the infamous T-34 was based on the American Christie landing gear, had Swedish ball bearings and was powered by a BMW developed diesel engine with 500 hp. The welding was sloppy, but the T-34 was fast enough and, most importantly, had enough firepower. Millions of tons of armor plates for this were delivered in the 1930s by the USA, which had officially committed itself to neutrality. If German foreign espionage had worked back then, people would have become aware that the USA, Great Britain and Russia formed a kind of world government with shared military capacities. It would have made sense to recreate the T-34 in Germany and to prioritize other developments on armament, not speed and thickness of armor. Hitler, of course, caused confusion and nonsense in tank development, without of course having had the slightest knowledge of engineering or ever having anything to do with tanks himself. The infamous German Tiger tanks were stylized into a myth, but were prone to failure due to the chaotic conditions during development and production and broke down more often due to technical problems than due to enemy fire. The American Sherman tank was a simpler design, but more reliable and was produced in significantly higher numbers.
Rommel had to repurpose his anti-aircraft guns in Africa because only these, with a caliber of 8.8 cm, had enough penetration to destroy the important British tanks. In June 1941 there were only 3,580 tanks available, half of them obsolete. The Soviets, in turn, had around 20,000 and manufactured 5,000 more per year. German production only produced a maximum of 3,000 medium tanks per year and it was not until 1942 that there was even a heavy tank called the “Type V Panther”. The same situation existed with the Luftwaffe, in which Germany actually had to rely on maximum production capacities at an early stage in order to keep up with the British and especially with the Russians, whose air force was based on American technology. The battle-hardened German troops were able to achieve initial successes in the Russian campaign, but one should not forget that Stalin had prevented preventive defensive measures and deliberately lured the Germans into the depths of Russian territory. Hitler’s reduction in ammunition production, slowed arms production and the lack of suitable winter equipment only had an impact somewhat later. The officers complained about a lack of heavy weapons and were told that Hitler was holding back tanks for operations in the Mediterranean and the Middle East, the very areas in which he had repeatedly demonstrated his disinterest. The Soviets were given vitally important breathing space by Hitler’s decisions, and no excuse in the world can sugarcoat this betrayal; Even Halder and von Brauchitsch wanted to resign because of this. When the tanks reached Leningrad, they were ordered to set up a blockade and starve the civilian population instead of carrying out a normal attack, and Hitler also withdrew tanks for a late, poorly planned attack on Moscow with weakened forces and bad weather. With the breathing space, Stalin was of course able to bring in fresh troops and equipment and send Siberian divisions south because no attack was expected from the Japanese. Mud turned to frost with temperatures of minus 30 degrees, which led to masses of frostbite and equipment problems. In the only existing tape recording in which Hitler speaks in his normal voice, he is talking to Carl Mannerheim in 1942 about the impossibility of waging war in winter and how crazy high Soviet tank production was. The recording was secretly made and hidden by a sound engineer: The Führer appears shocked at how heavily armed the Soviet Union was and that no one had any idea how tens of thousands of workers in gigantic factories there were building tanks around the clock. According to Hitler, if he had known that, he would have not attacked the Soviet Union because there was no alternative to this step. As usual, there is no admission of error about his decisions, which he made single-handedly despite the weakness of the German foreign intelligence services and contrary to the assessment of all his generals. Operation Barbarossa was far from without alternatives, but Hitler speaks of impossible Russian demands that bordered on blackmail and the danger that Stalin might launch a lightning attack on the oil fields in Romania that were vital to Germany. At that point, Germany could have long since conquered Great Britain and secured North Africa and the Middle East without attacking the Soviet Union. You can see in the audio recording how effectively and convincingly Hitler was able to manipulatively present facts. He also says that the German equipment was developed for nice weather and not for the bitter winter. He did not answer why he complained about this situation in 1942 and had not taken appropriate measures years before, both in terms of winter jackets and winter-proof tanks. The Soviet counteroffensive eventually forced the Germans to retreat, but the Führer issued one of his infamous halt orders, preventing his troops from using retreat areas and practicing the mobile defense preached by Clausewitz. And again came the senseless individual orders and the poorly coordinated individual battles, which is why von Brauchitsch resigned in protest (officially because of his health). After the disastrous winter offensive, a million German soldiers were lost, a third of the Eastern Army. Other leading officers resigned or were replaced by the leader, such as von Rundstedt, von Bock, von Leeb, and Guderian. As soon as the Wehrmacht had swept over an area on the way deep into Russia, the SS special task forces arrived and carried out absurd, completely unnecessary massacres of the civilian population, which destroyed any possibility of integrating conquered populations into the German Reich and their to gain loyalty. Hitler explained to the Japanese ambassador in a small discussion group that it was a matter of course that the Russians used mobile defenses and retreat areas; exactly what he had forbidden his own German troops to do. It would have been infinitely easier to defend the Romanian oil fields and conquer new oil fields than to try to hold a front line 3,000 kilometers long in distant Russia. The Russians had short supply routes and also received substantial supplies from the Americans, whereas the Germans had to contend with massive logistical problems. In mid-October 1942, only a quarter to half of the required trains with supplies arrived in Stalingrad from Germany. The retreat should have begun at the end of October 1942, but the Führer coldly ordered the attacks to continue. On the one hand, his narcissism plays a role here again and the idea that with enough will anything is possible, but overall one can only speak of targeted sabotage.
The following summer offensive was completely botched, so that the 6th German Army and parts of the 4th Panzer Army were trapped near Stalingrad. The only remotely realistic order would have been to break out of the cauldron as quickly as possible and disappear, but Hitler radioed the order to stay put at all costs. He might as well have ordered the men to shoot themselves. Despite these absurd acts of sabotage in series, the Führer seized more and more authority and made himself the sole decision-maker in the army groups. In the winter, Army Group A was also surrounded, but on Hitler’s orders it was initially not allowed to retreat, and then it was, but in an ineffective manner. Even in extreme situations we saw the fragmentation and attrition until the 6th Army finally surrendered. The magazine DER SPIEGEL, which in its early years relied on highly controversial ex-Nazis as sources of information and glorified the Reichstag fire, spread nonsensical blame on the generals and sounded not much different from the revisionist David Irving. Colonel General Franz Halder had long since seen through Hitler and ended up in a concentration camp. There was also a break with Jodl and Keitel. After October 1942, Hitler was the only one responsible for an overall war plan and yet new stab-in-the-back legends were created after the war. The collapse came next in Africa, since Hitler had failed to secure the Mediterranean and of course there was a threat of an invasion by the Allies in Europe. The USA produced endless amounts of war equipment that could no longer be effectively sunk by the German submarines in the Atlantic, the German encryption was completely broken so that the British could read all OKW communications, the USA almost had the atomic bomb and they had another ace up their sleeve, namely the biological warfare agents, which were created in close collaboration at the American center Camp Detrick and in the British Porton Down. Fueled by the outright lie that the Germans planned to fire their V-1 rocket containing botulinum toxin at London, Winston Churchill asked the Americans to produce half a million anthrax bombs in “brotherly assistance.” Two weeks after the successful invasion of Normandy, the US military command requested one million anthrax bombs. Production difficulties led to some frustration, but the British had a simpler alternative program in place to produce five million anthrax-contaminated “beef biscuits” that could have been dropped over German territory (Operation Vegetarian). Hitler did not even allow a biological weapons program as a deterrent; Only behind his back were there isolated research projects like Kurt Blome’s to find out whether rats infected with submarines could be released onto the American coast. The US secret service OSS spread the myth that the Nazis were procuring millions of rodents from abroad for such purposes.
Everything was already hopeless.
In 1943, Hitler waited extra long to launch a new offensive so that the Russians could strengthen their weak points. This was followed by the gigantic Battle of Kursk, in which the Soviets were superior and the Germans suffered heavy losses. A long-range strategic bomber fleet could have destroyed Soviet arms production from the air, but even the successful attack by Kampfgeschwader 55 on the Gorky tank works near Novgorod (built by the Ford Motor Company), which also produced 800 new tanks of the type The T-34s were destroyed was no reason for Hitler to change his strategy. Albert Speer and the senior officers even had a fully developed plan for the Luftwaffe, but only ineffective attacks on the Soviet railways and roads were allowed to be carried out. On July 10, 1943, the Americans landed in Italy and Mussolini was overthrown by King Viktor Immanuel, who had connections to the German nobles who had encouraged Hitler’s rise. Offensives were no longer possible; Only an orderly withdrawal and a diplomatic solution made sense, but this was categorically rejected by Hitler. Back then, there were only a few people who had an overall overview of who had made which decisions over the years. Hitler practiced a perfidious strategy of confusion, distraction and blaming others. The audacity of many revisionists to distort the facts and propagate the fairy tale that Hitler was the pragmatic genius with good intentions while his officers continually failed him is limitless. Where Hitler already played into the hands of Germany’s enemies, the bad revisionists since then have ultimately only benefited the Anglo-American Empire.
During the massive Allied bombing raids in 1944, it was discussed years later at Hitler’s Berghof that they really needed to build a strong bomber fleet. The revolutionary aircraft model Me262 was still not allowed to be built as a fighter, Hitler raged in one of his fits, but only as a bomber. At the end of 1944, when nothing would have helped anyway, the Me 262 went into series production, but not in sufficient quantities and the device was withheld from many missions. The Me 262 was so superior that only 80 of them could have stopped the Allied bomber flights. Albert Speer later said:
“It was Hitler again who made the moves that made the enemy’s air offensive in 1944 a success.”
Meanwhile, the officers bypassed Hitler’s suicidal orders to stop, accelerated the inevitable retreat and were removed from office because they did not want to take responsibility for the sabotage and murder of German soldiers. The summer offensive of 1944 became an epic disaster because Hitler had made encirclement possible through orders to maintain unrealistically long front lines.
The landing of the Allies in Normandy and the advance of the Red Army subsequently removed any scope for a ceasefire and so the only option left was surrender.
The Nazis lost the world war mainly through espionage and sabotage. Despite the multi-front war and the Americans’ gigantic arms production, things would have turned out differently if the Germans had been able to protect their secrets and shield themselves from sabotage. The war would probably have ended with a negotiated settlement. Despite his lack of knowledge and various psychological disorders, Hitler claimed decision-making power as a “leader” and still made himself dependent on a narrow circle of suspicious officials like Martin Bormann, who cleverly suggested plans to him and fended off objections from generals. Historians have documented quite well how divided and dysfunctional the Nazi leadership was, but historians almost always give a huge berth to the infiltration of the Third Reich by enemy espionage. In view of the files, no one doubts that the Soviets were always informed in a timely manner over the years about the exact plans of the Wehrmacht High Command through sources with code names like “Werther”. But who was behind the code names and what were their motives? Who had even influenced Hitler instead of just skimming off information? It is clear why the victorious powers and the nobility want to bury this chapter of history. In his “Memoirs,” Armaments Minister Albert Speer describes in detail how the war was screwed up in every conceivable way.
“Through a chain of wrong decisions in all areas, Hitler himself contributed to accelerating the end of a war that was already lost in terms of production capacity: For example, through his confused air war planning against England, through the lack of submarines at the beginning of the war, in general by failing to develop an overall plan for the war.”
He almost always accepted positive reinforcement from certain people. Most of the time he had already made his decision, or had Bormann whisper it to him, before he exchanged ideas with generals. Speer found it incredibly reckless that he was given responsibility for armaments even though he had absolutely no idea about industry, weapons and the military. The future of the empire would depend on his performance. Hitler famously disliked real experts and made decisions based on gut instinct because he thought he was a genius. He also appointed a wine merchant as foreign minister, his party philosopher as eastern minister and a fighter pilot as head of the economy. Speer was now finally caught up in the maelstrom of intrigue. Previously, he only had to show some skill to be commissioned with prestigious construction projects. Now he was in charge of a world war and had to bring the arms factories into shape, determine the needs of the armed forces, understand the potential of new technologies and navigate the rigid and dysfunctional Nazi civil service apparatus. His main opponents were Reichsleiter Martin Bormann, Goebbels, Robert Ley and Gauleiter Fritz Sauckel. These men hindered Speer wherever they could. Some of this can be traced back to a wrangling of competence, excessive ambition and incompetence. But the fact that the armament was in principle not at a level appropriate for a world war indicates deliberate sabotage:
“For example, before 1942, ammunition production was reduced or increased depending on the consumption, which occurred intermittently as a result of the Blitzkrieg, a situation that had to prevent companies from completely adapting to continuous ammunition production.”
Image: Speer
This means that they were already in the Russian campaign, which had begun with 153 divisions (around three million men). By the end of January 1942, the Wehrmacht had lost around a third of these soldiers. Only in the midst of this predicament did they stop producing ammunition in batches. In addition, the modern possibilities of industrial production for ammunition were not fully exploited before 1942. Speer was able to increase the overall output of the armament by around 60% within six months without having to significantly increase the need for manpower. Thousands of technicians who had demonstrated special achievements were given responsibility for entire armaments divisions. Despite all the successes, arms production even in 1940 and 1941 had not reached the same level as in the First World War. Until the fall of 1941, economic management was prepared for only short periods of combat with long periods of rest in between. For Speer it was clear in the spring of 1942 that the economy should have been mobilized for the war on a large scale long ago. Generals like Milch and Fromm agreed. Speer’s analysis of this was printed in the London Times on September 7, 1942, which shows that spies from his inner circle had passed on this information. Hitler wanted to avoid, by any means possible, that the population would be placed under a noticeable financial burden and that his own popularity would wane as a result. His priority was to keep the prices of goods and availability normal. The Nazi upper class was, of course, obsessed with their luxury buildings, renovations of castles and wine cellars. The British leadership, on the other hand, called for great willingness to make sacrifices among the population. Speer recognized that there were not enough workers in several defense factories to set up a second shift. He wanted to shut down large parts of the construction industry in order to shift hundreds of thousands of workers to armaments, but Ministerial Director Dr. Mansfeld explained that the Gauleiters would raise objections. In 1942 there was a shortage of well over a million workers in the war economy. Speer feared that the recruitment of non-German (forced) laborers would lead to the influx of enemy saboteurs and spies. Gauleiter Sauckel supplied too few workers and refused to mobilize more women. As late as June 1942, Hitler insisted that the production of ordinary products for the population must continue as usual. Speer had failed again with his urgent demand to switch to a real war economy. Not even the Reichsbahn could handle enough trains carrying armaments. Speer spoke of a catastrophic transport situation, but Hitler had someone else convince him that it wasn’t that bad. If the leader did not want to admit something and (as always) an official was found to persuade him, concerns were brushed aside. Transport Minister Dorpmüller explained that the shortage of trains and wagons was so bad that even the most urgent tasks could not be completed. With a lot of improvisational talent, the backlog was eliminated.
The bomb and other weapons
Experts like Albert Vögler complained to Speer that nuclear research received little support. At a special meeting, scientists such as Otto Hahn and Werner Heisenberg reported that not only was there not enough money provided, but that scientific assistants were also being drafted into military service. It was clear from specialist magazines that the USA was trying very hard to develop a nuclear weapon. The Nazis never managed to infiltrate the American Manhattan Project with spies, while the Soviets managed a large number of agents and got their hands on all relevant plans. Ironically, the nuclear spies like Klaus Fuchs were Jews from Germany who had fled the Nazis. Heisenberg said that with enough money it would be possible to build the necessary production facilities within two years. But as usual, Hitler sought advice from the same people and waved him off. At his round table he complained that nuclear physics was a “Jewish” science. Speer estimated that Germany could have had the bomb in 1947. Hitler’s view of weapons and technology remained at the level of the First World War. Nuclear physics was as foreign to him as radar systems, jet fighters and rockets.
But classic weapon systems were also screwed up: The Tiger tank was designed with an already excessive weight of 50 tons, which was then increased to 75 tons at Hitler’s insistence. Speer and his people decided to develop a 30-ton tank called the Panther, which Hitler changed to almost 50 tons. Not even the supply of spare parts worked. The entire armament was not at all designed for the eastern campaign: There was no strategic bomber fleet to attack Russian production facilities and large power plants. Neither soldiers nor vehicles could really cope with the cold temperatures in winter. And the German tanks were not suitable for traveling hundreds and thousands of kilometers. After 600 to 800 kilometers, a heavy tank already needed repairs to the engine or drivetrain. Speer and Admiral Dönitz were surprised that it was not possible to build a new type of submarine in larger numbers at an early stage.
A real series of successes would have resulted. Knowing full well that the attack on Poland would result in a war with England, Dönitz estimated that the target number of submarine weapons required for the start of the war would be around 300 boats. In the Z plan of March 1, 1939, it was decided to build 249 submarines. Germany began the naval war in the Atlantic with only 57 boats. The Navy was allocated only 60% of the requested amount of steel and aluminum for 1942. The Battle of the Atlantic failed in the spring of 1943 due to the technological inferiority of the outdated submarine types. In addition, the Enigma machine’s encryption process for radio messages had been broken by the British and their special unit in Bletchley Park. This meant that the positions of the boats were known at all times. There are many indications that classic espionage rings had already infiltrated Enigma’s development circles before the war in order to implement cryptographic vulnerabilities. In the 68-month sea battle, 781 of 820 German submarines (95.2 percent) were lost.
Canceled Battle of Britain
Against England, a strategy to gain air supremacy would have been needed and then an invasion. However, this could not be done with the Messerschmidt Bf 109 because of its short range. The aircraft could actually have been equipped with droppable additional tanks. Of course, the German bombers always needed fighter escort. The British simply moved their air bases further north. By the end of March 1941, almost 3,000 German aircraft had been shot down and in most cases the valuable pilots were lost. Field Marshal von Rundstedt and Grand Admiral Raeder felt that Hitler was never serious about invading England. By mid-August 1940, Hitler was already giving orders indicating that he preferred to go to the Soviet Union. The air force and the submarine fleet were disadvantaged for this purpose. It is said that Hitler shouted into the telephone in the Reich Chancellery that it was “not our job to smash England. We are not in a position to take on the inheritance of England, of the Empire.”
The British had launched a large-scale deception at an early stage to give the impression that the nobility was very interested in an alliance with Germany. The extent to which Hitler was influenced by noble lines such as Hesse, Schleswig-Holstein, Hanover, Saxe-Coburg and Gotha or Mecklenburg is still a secret. After the war, Lord Louis Mountbatten had all possible secret correspondence from his German relatives collected and brought to England. In the summer of 1940 there were 26 active divisions on the British Isles, only three of them armored divisions. All with poor equipment. The Germans had a five-to-one superiority. General Guderian explained: Hitler and Göring were equally to blame for this failed operation. In the Mediterranean, too, no serious efforts were made to roll back British influence. Hitler remained adamant that the United States would stay out of the matter. The Americans to him didn’t make a big impression in the First World War and didn’t make any big sacrifices. Their combat effectiveness was considered low.
Fritz Wiedemann dared to contradict and was now considered by Hitler to be an “ultra-pessimist” who should at best serve as consul general in San Francisco. In the USA, Wiedemann finally became an opponent of Hitler and National Socialism. He contacted British intelligence and specifically warned the British and Americans about Hitler. He said Hitler’s successes went to his head. “He is one of the cruelest people in the world and there can be no peace with him.” Wiedemann also informed the British of the status of German attack plans on Britain and recommended that they strike hard themselves as quickly as possible. No men with world experience took part in Hitler’s table discussions. The circle had not expanded beyond Germany and Hitler had not acquired any knowledge himself, but had created his “narcissistic space” in which he could believe his fantasies were real.
Bormann, Keitel, Lammers
During the Stalingrad crisis in the winter of 1942, access to Hitler was only possible for the vast majority of officials through Bormann, Keitel and Lammers. Bormann was Hitler’s mysterious “shadow” who never took a vacation and determined who received appointments with the Führer. He read short memos to Hitler, suggested a decision and was usually given the green light. Bormann de facto ran the internal affairs of the empire. So Hitler wasn’t really the leader, but rather the one being led. Göring was actually supposed to help Albert Speer to overthrow Bormann, but changed his attitude because of a donation of six million marks.
Image: Martin Bormann. Federal Archives, Image 183-R14128A / CC-BY-SA 3.0
Louis Kilzer, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, exposed Bormann in the 2000 book “Hitler’s Traitor” as a spy with the code name “Werther” who had betrayed all military secrets to Russia. Bormann had his stenographers take down everything the generals said in the meetings, including the details of who was leaning in which direction on which topic. The information immediately ended up with Rudolf Rössler in Switzerland, who then passed it on to Sándor Radó, who in turn sent everything to the Soviet Rasvedka. Rössler had an overview of the entire war. He prepared systematic lists of deployment plans, staging areas, sizes and specifications and their authors. He referred to news from the Wehrmacht High Command as “Werther” (alias Bormann), from the Army High Command as “Teddy,” from the Air Force High Command as “Olga,” from the Army Weapons Office as “Bill,” and from the Foreign Office “Anna.” It seems that behind these other code names there were spies of a similar caliber as Bormann.
From the summer of 1943 onwards, German intelligence was able to intercept and partially decipher radio communications between the Raswedka and Sándor Radó. The German authorities were unable to draw any conclusions about Rössler and his German sources from the radio traffic. However, it was clear to the German leadership that there were traitors at the very highest levels of the empire. However, only various radio operators in Switzerland who worked with Rössler and Radó were tracked down. The German SD secret service was already aware from December 1942 that there was a lot of radio communication from the Geneva area with a Soviet office.
Because of his young age, Bormann only entered service towards the end of the First World War and did not see any more combat operations. In the following years he worked for his former officer, the noble Lieutenant Colonel Hermann von Treuenfels, in Mecklenburg. The highest noble line there, the House of Mecklenburg (also called Obodrites or Niklotids) produced a Swedish king (1364 to 1389) and the reigning queen of the Netherlands from 1948 to 1980. The Dukes of Mecklenburg-Strelitz married into the House of Hesse, which in turn was linked to the British throne. Bormann was active in the Roßbach Freikorps, whose founder joined the NSDAP in 1922. When the party was banned in Prussia, Roßbach switched to the German National Freedom Party (DVFP). Hermann von Treuenfels was also active there. One of the leading politicians of the DVFP was Ernst Graf zu Reventlow, who was part of the old nobility with close connections to the royal families of Denmark and Britain.
The count founded the “Association against the arrogance of Judaism” in which Martin Bormann and Alfred Rosenberg were involved. Count Reventlow himself got off lightly after the war. Hermann von Treuenfels fled with his wife and remaining son to what would later become the British occupation zone.
Wilhelm Keitel, head of the Wehrmacht High Command, who, together with Bormann and Heinrich Lammers, shielded the Führer, came from a humble background and married into a family that owned a manor in Hanover, the center of the Welfen nobility which in 1714 climbed the British throne. He had a particularly steep career. As head of the high command, his approach was to unconditionally support and assist Hitler’s poor decisions. Those of the other officers who contradicted Keitel faced problems. It would have been possible for him to poison or otherwise eliminate Hitler and Bormann at any time. He also passed on Hitler’s orders to hold out during and after the Battle of Stalingrad without hesitation, even though they made no military sense at all.
Bild: Keitel. Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-H30220 / CC-BY-SA 3.0
On October 1, 1946, Keitel was sentenced to death by hanging. Hans Heinrich Lammers was head of the Reich Chancellery. He filtered the information and concerns that were brought to Hitler from the administration. Given Hitler’s well-known aversion to office work and studying files, it was Lammers who compiled all the things he saw as relevant to the government and then discussed them with Hitler in an oral presentation. After the end of the war he was sentenced to 20 years in prison. On January 31, 1951, this sentence was reduced to 10 years by the American High Commissioner John Jay McCloy; On December 16, 1951 he was completely pardoned and released from prison. In addition to Switzerland, Sweden was also a channel through which secret information flowed into the Soviet Union. People from the Wehrmacht, police and SS could easily transport information up to the borders with Sweden. Everything was then transmitted to Moscow from Sweden. In Stockholm, the German intelligence agent Edgar Klaus had contact with Madame Alexandra Kollontai, the Soviet envoy. Defense chief Wilhelm Canaris was skeptical. A file from the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA) from February 1940 described Klaus as a Jewish communist who worked for the French and Russian secret services. Nevertheless, the German embassy had issued him a passport the month before. This enabled him to flee to the German Reich before the attack on the Soviet Union. At a so-called Barbarossa conference of the defense to prepare the attack on the Soviet Union, Canaris said:
“The German armies will bleed to death on the icy plains of Russia, and after two years we will find nothing of them again.”
So Canaris had a report prepared that compiled all the material that the defense had provided about the strength and combat effectiveness of the Red Army before the attack, because Canaris did not want to be held responsible for the fact that the attack did not go as expected. In 1943, Canaris visited the American diplomat George H. Earle, a friend of US President Franklin D. Roosevelt, in Istanbul. He informed Earle of the German resistance’s plans to eliminate Hitler. After his fall, the leaders of the resistance immediately wanted to conclude a ceasefire in the West. Earle sent a report about the meeting to the White House, but received no response. With the help of co-conspirator Adam von Trott zu Solz from the Foreign Office, Canaris managed to make contact with the head of the American secret service OSS, General William J. Donovan. A meeting was arranged in the northern Spanish port city of Santander in the utmost secrecy; the director of the British secret service SIS, General Stewart Menzies, was invited to attend. Canaris repeated to them the plan for a ceasefire in the West. But his interlocutors were ordered by their governments in Washington and London to break off contact.
Doom
After the success against France, the Führer was firmly convinced that he could race to the next successes. Speer heard him say to Generals Keitel and Jodl:
“Believe me, a campaign against Russia would just be a sandbox game.”
The German secret services had no significant sources in the Soviet Union and therefore did not know how strong the reserve troops were there and that tens of thousands of armored vehicles were available. The SD had almost no professionals for abroad. The purges in the USSR in the 1920s and 1930s had made it extremely difficult to establish networks of agents there. Anyone with contact with the West was considered suspect from the start and even a joke about Stalin would get you many years in a Gulag camp. During the 1939 non-aggression pact with the Soviets, Hitler, who had no intelligence experience other than simple informant work after the First World War, decreed that no further investigations were to be carried out.
It was not until the fall of 1940 that Canaris began scouting again on his own with the help of the Finns, Romanians and Japanese. The “Foreign Armies East” organization knew hardly anything about Soviet armaments, although many things could have been learned from open sources in the USA, since entire Soviet industries had been built up with American help. In 1940, the Intelligence Service only had two agents for Russia, and that outside Russian territory. The only option left was to intercept radio communications, which was only possible to a limited extent due to the range.
People simply didn’t know how many divisions Russia had. The recruitment contingent of 1.5 million men per year resulted in at least 8 to 10 million trained soldiers. The German military attaché for Moscow, General Ernst-August Köstring, pointed this fact out to Hitler during a visit to Berlin and was promptly thrown out. Köstring’s important colleagues Norbert von Baumbach and Ralph von Heygendorff were nobles from the networks of Hesse and the Wettins of Saxony. Exactly the houses that were connected to the British throne.
The German generals feared war on two fronts. The huge military-industrial complex of the USSR was not really known to German espionage and, mind you, the Nazi leadership failed to adequately ramp up its own war production before 1942. The General Staff only saw the possibility of attacking the center of Moscow with all force and at high speed and thus paralyzing a large part of the Russian war industry. However, Hitler wanted to attack the periphery and then advance to Moscow and Leningrad at the same time. The successful blitzkrieg techniques were also banned. This made it clear that the Russians could retreat further and further and rely on their factories to supply them, while the German supply routes became longer and longer.
In August 1941, seven weeks after the start of the attack, Army Chief of Staff Halder already counted 360 Soviet divisions, more than twice as many as the Germans had deployed. The number of armored vehicles was dramatically underestimated, as was Soviet aircraft production.
By mid-June 1941, half of the German tanks were no longer operational and Hitler refused adequate supplies. The entire Eastern army was not at all equipped for a winter war. Hitler specifically reduced ammunition and weapons production at the beginning of the war on the grounds that it would be a blitzkrieg that would only last a few weeks. The entire military leadership once again pushed for a concentrated attack against Moscow. Hitler insisted on concentrating on Ukraine and Leningrad to the north. Shortly before Leningrad, the tanks had to stop in order to carry out a siege instead of destruction. The attack on Moscow was then to be carried out with heavily worn-out forces, but it was already too late for that. Napoleon’s army had also once gotten stuck in the mud. The supply problems became greater. Nothing and no one was prepared for the 30 degrees below zero cold. The fuel turned to sludge, the automatic weapons froze and the troops suffered massive losses due to frostbite. At first there was no real winter clothing because of Hitler. The Wehrmacht had to retreat, but Hitler again gave a halt order and banned mobile defense, a basic military principle. A million men were lost and Hitler replaced generals he no longer liked. The front line was a staggering 3,000 kilometers long and the German supply lines were a serious problem. The Soviets, in turn, had an intact arms industry and were able to serve the front troops over short distances.
The order came for Army Group North to capture Leningrad, while Army Group South was to capture Stalingrad. Meanwhile, the Soviets received supplies from the USA via the port cities of Murmansk and Arkhangelsk.
The Battle of Stalingrad turned into a disaster and the German 6th Army was almost surrounded; around 220,000 men, with 100 tanks, 1,800 guns and 10,000 motor vehicles. Hitler’s radio message to stop at all costs has gone down in history. The entire Army Group A was about to be encircled and it finally dawned on Hitler that it wasn’t just a lack of “will” or he was afraid of being summarily shot by the military. He allowed escape under strange conditions. The 6th Army surrendered.
Two million soldiers clashed in the Battle of Kursk. The Soviets, of course, had detailed knowledge of the German plans. Without the reports from “Werther” (alias Bormann) and the other traitors, many things would have turned out differently. But the espionage not only ensured an outflow of accurate information from the Wehrmacht High Command and other control centers, but at the same time, false views and bad plans were introduced to Hitler via the spies. If the leader had simply guessed in his decisions, his hit rate would have been much higher. He could have easily taken credit for the generals’ achievements if he had listened to them. The sheer volume, scope and detail of his wrong decisions strongly suggest that there were entire teams from Britain and the Soviet Union behind his whisperers in order to maximize their influence on him.
The “Citadel” operation failed and ultimately various generals and Field Marshal Erich von Manstein preferred to expand defensive positions instead of trying new offensives. There was at least the possibility that the conflict becomes entrenched and favorable conditions are created for a negotiated solution. But Hitler was strongly against it and forced the German troops to constantly keep moving. But by then the ground was already icy and trenches were out of the question. The men were exposed to the weather with poor winter equipment. Hitler was so cut off from reality by Bormann that he dismissed the generals’ objections as “empty excuses.” He installed and removed generals he barely knew.
Albert Speer emphasizes that at that time the Russian power plants were an easy target because there was no systematically organized air defense. A bomber fleet could have ended the power supply to Soviet war production, but such actions did not occur. Instead, the British and Americans were successful in their bombing of Germany. The extremely important ball bearing production had not been relocated to safe locations in time. 250,000 German soldiers surrendered in Tunis. Submarines were withdrawn from the Atlantic.
Things went steeply downhill with Hitler and everyone was now familiar enough with the dysfunctional system in which, despite his complete incompetence, he was allowed to make all the final decisions and was still dependent on the suggestions of his inner circle. He suffered from insomnia and always lived in the same places, like a prison with minimal space. He refused to take a tour of the bombed cities. When he had Prince Philip of Hesse come to the headquarters with Princess Mafalda, daughter of the Italian king, he already had the intention of having both of them transported to a concentration camp because Mafalda had transmitted encrypted information to Italy. The king also had Mussolini arrested. The British throne had been in contact through various channels with its German relatives in the Third Reich, who had had secret structures for hundreds of years.
Albert Speer warned that the loss of certain areas would mean a collapse in the supply of alloy metals, without which armaments production could not function. Speer announced that after the loss of the Balkans, the war would be over after another 10 months. Hitler listened to this without saying a word and then turned to another topic. He even neglected to have the modern type 44 assault rifle produced in large numbers at an early stage because he preferred classic, old-fashioned carbines.
A sudden serious illness struck Speer, and during his absence Bormann took the opportunity to badmouth him so that he would fall from grace. A friend told Speer about a conspiracy by doctors to subtly murder him. It may well be that Bormann used some kind of trick to trigger Speer’s illness in the first place. In 1943, Hitler stopped series production of the Me 262 jet fighter, which would have been able to defend German airspace. With Rheinmetall’s on-board cannon, just a few hits would have put the heavy Allied bombers out of action. The allied escort fighters would have been around 100 km/h slower than the Messerschmidt.
Bild: Julian Herzog, Creative-Commons-Lizenz „Namensnennung 4.0 international“
However, the Führer really wanted to turn the fighter into a small bomber, which was pointless due to the design. The flight characteristics deteriorated drastically due to the weight of the bombs and the hit accuracy would have been too low. Willy Messerschmitt himself had supported the idea of a small bomber in order to please Hitler. In 1944, during massive Allied bomber raids, Hitler suddenly demanded large numbers of the Me 262. He focused on the V2 rockets, which could only be used to transport relatively few explosives to England with low accuracy. Speer was optimistic that he could assemble a fighter fleet to protect Germany. But Hitler wanted the planes on the Western Front and had one of his epic tantrums in which he even demanded that aircraft production be stopped and anti-aircraft guns built instead. When the war was inevitably lost, he even went so far as to order everything in the Reich to be destroyed so that nothing would fall into the hands of the enemy. Hitler committed suicide and Bormann disappeared without a trace. There was speculation about an escape to South America. In 1972, two skeletons were discovered in the ground near the Lehrter train station in Berlin, near the former state exhibition park. Apparently one of them was Bormann. The identity was confirmed through DNA analysis in 1998.
Sources:
Hitler’sTraitor, Louis Kilzer
Erinnerungen, Albert Speer
Strategie und Technik der geheimen Kriegsführung, Paul Chartess
