Most people think Hitler and his genocidal policies were an aberration...a monstrosity...a unique product of an evil mind. Not quite. Hitlers Holocaust was the culmination of millennia of Western history. Given the Euro-Christian imperative to conquer, it was perhaps inevitable that one man would try to conquer all. How did this come about? For the roots of Hitlers madness, we must part the veils of time. The story begins, as so many stories do, with God. In the beginning.... If the Europeans favorable geography and natural resources predisposed them to go forth and multiply, so did their Judeo-Christian philosophy. Christs word spread throughout the Roman Empire and beyond because it complemented European culture. The justification for every princely or papal conquest lay in Biblical passages such as: When the Lord your God brings you into the land which you are entering to occupy and drives out many nations before you—Hittites, Girgashites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites, and Jebusites, seven nations more powerful than you—when the Lord your God delivers them into your power and you defeat them, you must put them to death. You must not make a treaty with them or spare them. You must not intermarry with them, neither giving your daughters to their sons nor taking their daughters for your sons; if you do, they will draw your sons away from the Lord and make them worship other gods. Then the Lord will be angry with you and will quickly destroy you. But this is what you must do to them: pull down their altars, break their sacred pillars, hack down their sacred poles and destroy their idols by fire, for you are a people holy to the Lord your god; the Lord your God chose you out of all nations on earth to be his special possessions. ~Deuteronomy 7:1-6 Hitler was intimately familiar with Christian doctrine from his early life in Lambach, Austria. As David A. Meier writes in Hitlers Rise to Power: There was an old Catholic Benedictine monastery in the town. The ancient monastery was decorated with carved stones and woodwork that included several swastikas. Adolf attended school there and saw them every day. They had been put there in the 1800s by the ruling Abbot as a pun or play on words. His name essentially sounded like the German word for Swastika, Hakenkreuz. Young Hitler did well in the monastery school and also took part in the boys choir. He was said to have had a fine singing voice. Years later Hitler would say the solemn pageantry of the high mass and other Catholic ceremonies was quite intoxicating and left a very deep impression. As a young boy he idolized the priests and for two years seriously considered becoming a priest himself. He especially admired the Abbot in charge, who ruled his black-robbed monks with supreme authority. At home Hitler sometimes played priest and even included long sermons. Hitler simply took the idea of the chosen people to its logical extreme. Since White Anglo-Saxon Protestants had come to dominate civilization, he thought they—not the meek—were destined to inherit the earth. As Rhawn Joseph, Ph.D., writes in The Mind of Adolf Hitler: The Early Years: Adolf Hitlers mad genetic vision embraced the ancient religion of the wondering Israelites; and like Moses, Hitler preached ethnic cleansing, racial purity for the Chosen Master Race, and woe to all inferior and subhuman species of woman and man. And like the ancient Israelites whose god demanded the death of all inferior evil women and men—innocents whose only crime was to live on land the Israeli god had decided should belong to his own godly children—Adolf Hitler proclaimed that the lands should be cleansed of all inferior peoples. Hitlers Third Reich would be the incarnation of the First Reich: the Holy Roman Empire, which lasted from AD 962 to 1806. He believed he was doing Gods work, and said as much in Mein Kampf (1923): Hence today I believe that I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator: by defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord. (Volume 1, Chapter II) What we must fight for is to safeguard the existence and reproduction of our race and our people, the sustenance of our children and the purity of our blood, the freedom and independence of the fatherland, so that our people may mature for the fulfillment of the mission allotted it by the creator of the universe. (Volume 1, Chapter VIII) Playing cowboys and Indians But Hitler had a more immediate source for his genocidal beliefs than dusty chronicles of crusades and pogroms. He had only to note the self-righteous nation practicing ethnic cleansing across the sea. Yes, young Adolf was inspired by none other than the good ol US of A. Born in 1889, the year before Wounded Knee, Hitler was well aware of the American Holocaust. As Meier explains about the youngster in Hitlers Rise to Power: His favorite game to play outside was cowboys and Indians. Tales of the American West were very popular among boys in Austria and Germany. Books by James Fenimore Cooper and especially German writer Karl May were eagerly read and re-enacted. May, who had never been to America, invented a hero named Old Shatterhand, a white man who always won his battles with Native Americans, defeating his enemies through sheer will power and bravery. Young Hitler read and reread every one of Mays books about Old Shatterhand, totalling more than 70 novels. He continued to read them even as Führer. During the German attack on the Soviet Union he sometimes referred to the Russians as Redskins and ordered his officers to carry Mays books about fighting Indians
Posted on: Sun, 31 Aug 2014 12:32:22 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015