Through a Glass Darkly

Oliver Stone portrays Alexander the Great as gay (via Instapundit
and Ann
Althouse) and whether or not that was the case, it illustrates the potential
dangers of learning history according to Hollywood. While the Third Reich still
remains a potent historical image only the very old have any first hand
recollection of it and there is the danger the term 'Nazi' may become just as
much a figure of speech as 'working like a Trojan' -- a reference to nothing
anyone understands in particular. When people aver that 'Bush is like Hitler',
it presumes the speaker has a clear historical knowledge of what Hitler was
really like, an assumption which is increasingly invalid.

For one, Hitler would have taken a very dim view of Jesusland,
a country which George Bush is said to be in the process of founding, whose
geographic location is to the immediate south of the United States of Canada. Martin
Bormann said, "National Socialism and Christianity are
irreconcilable." Hitler, according to Klaus Fischer's Nazi
Germany stated that "one day we want to be in a position where only
complete idiots stand in the pulpit and preach to old women." In a
concession to popular feeling, however, the Nazis offered the public certain
acceptable 'faith traditions' including something called "Gottglaubig",
a dished-up creed heavily overladen with ancient Germanic pagan beliefs with
versions of rituals for birth, marriage and death.  "By 1938, carols
and nativity plays were were forbidden in the schools, and the words 'Christmas'
itself was replaced by the word 'Yuletide'."

It has been fashionable to equate teaching the Western classics to spreading
an oppressive and fascist ideology. The views of the ultimate fascist on
education would surprise many. Hitler did not believe that the classics or
intellectual excellence had any more value than dirt on the bottom of a shoe.
What he wanted was street fighters, brawlers and unthinking thugs. Articulating
his vision of education, Hitler
said:

"I will have no intellectual training. Knowledge is ruin to my young
men. I would have them learn only what takes their fancy. But one thing they
must learn - self-command! They shall learn to overcome the fear of death,
under the severest tests. That is the intrepid and heroic stage of youth. Out
of it comes the stage of the free man, the man who is the substance and
essence of the world, the creative man, the god-man. In my Ordensburgen there
will stand as a statue for worship the figure of the magnificent,
self-ordaining god-man; it will prepare the young men for their coming period
of ripe manhood."

Maybe Oliver Stone had the right idea, but the wrong historical figure. The
Nazis were swingers in their own way, not at all like the stuck-up inhabitants
of Jesusland. The wife of Martin Bormann, for example, thought having a menage a
trois was a great
idea. "A fanatical adherent to Nazi ideology, she bore her husband ten
children, the first being named Adolf, after his god-father. Of her husbands
mistress, Manja Behrens, she wrote "See to it that one year she has a child
and next year I have a child, so that you will always have a wife who is
serviceable". The Nazis were big fans of alternative families, as
exemplified by the Lebensborn
program.

As you know the Lebensborn program had two main components. The first was
the encouragement of non-marital pregnancies between Aryan youths with the
off-spring raised as Nordic supermen. The second, and more disturbing aspect
of the program was the kidnapping of children from occupied territories and
the distribution of these children to "Aryan" families. During this
program about 200,000 children were kidnapped from Poland. It is estimated
that about 50,000 Ukrainian children were kidnapped and about 50,000 from the
Baltic regions. Even countries like Norway and France were not immune from
such kidnappings and most of the children that survived the Lidice massacre (Czechoslavakia)
were taken into the Lebensborn.

It would come as a surprise to many that Hitler believed in state control of
the economy. In a speech
Hitler gave to German business in 1934, he said:

Private enterprise cannot be maintained in the age of democracy; it is
conceivable only if the people have a sound idea of authority and personality.
Everything positive, good and valuable, which has been achieved in the world
in the field of economics and culture, is solely attributable to personality.
When, however, the defense of this existing order, its political
administration, is left to a majority it will irretrievably go under. All the
worldly goods which we possess, we owe to the struggle of the chosen.

He didn't believe in international trade either. Immediately upon taking
over, Hitler embarked
on a program of making Germany self-sufficient in every strategic commodity.
"The goal of the re-organization of the economy was to achieve German
self-sufficiency (Autarky). In September 1936, a Four-Year Plan was launched. It
was intended to make Germany self-sufficient in coal, iron, steel and other
basic raw materials and improve the economy by initiating public works and
financial aid to industry and agriculture." What he ended up with was a
hybrid economic system not unlike that recommended by many 'progressive'
economists. Wikipedia
summarizes Nazi economics.

It is important to note that the Nazi Party's conception of international
economics was very limited. As the National Socialist in the name NSDAP
suggests, the party's primary motivation was to incorporate previously
international resources into the Reich by force, rather than by trade (compare
to the international socialism as practiced by the Soviet Union and the
COMECON trade organization). This made international economic theory a
supporting factor in the political ideology rather than a core plank of the
platform as it is in most modern political parties.

In an economic sense, Nazism and Fascism are related. Nazism may be
considered a subset of Fascism, with all Nazis being Fascists, but not all
Fascists being Nazis. Nazism shares many economic features with Fascism,
featuring complete government control of finance and investment (allocation of
credit), industry, and agriculture. Yet in both of these systems, corporate
power and market based systems for providing price information still existed.
Quoting Benito Mussolini: "Fascism should more appropriately be called
Corporatism because it is a merger of State and corporate power."

Rather than the state requiring goods from industrial enterprises and
allocating raw materials required for their production (as in socialist /
communist systems), the state paid for these goods. This allows price to play
an essential role in providing information as to relative scarcity of
materials, or the capital requirements in technology or labor (including
education, as in skilled labor) inputs to produce a manufactured good.
Additionally, the unionist (strictly speaking, syndicalist) veneer placed on
corporate labor relations was another major point of agreement. Both the
German and Italian fascist political parties began as unionist labor
movements, and grew into totalitarian dictatorships. This idea was maintained
throughout their time in power, with state control used as a means to
eliminate the assumed conflict between management labor relations.

If Hitler was altogether more evil than we can conceive, he arose from a time
and circumstance which few if any can still remember. Any comparisons between
the 1945 and 2004 are likely to be inexact. Those who point to the shooting of Jihadi
in Fallujah by a US Marine as evidence that America is drifting into Nazism
would do well to remember that in 1945, American troops who arrived in Dachau
were so disgusted by what they saw they executed
hundreds of SS guards on the spot. This is a link to remarkable photographs
of the incident.

"The killing of unarmed POWs did not trouble many of the men in I
company that day for to them the SS guards did not deserve the same protected
status as enemy soldiers who have been captured after a valiant fight. To many
of the men in I company, the SS were nothing more than wild, vicious animals
whose role in this war was to starve, brutalize, torment, torture and murder
helpless civilians." Flint Whitlock, The Rock of Anzio, From Sicily to
Dachau: A history of the U.S. 45th Infantry Division

The facile comparison of Hitler to the modern leftist bogeymen du jour
lends itself to distortion. Most people are tolerably familiar with the Third
Reich's oppression of homosexuals. But relatively few know that a special
badge was minted in Dachau for assignment to the Jehovah's Witnesses: the
purple triangle.

Red was for Communists, Social Democrats, anarchists, and other
"enemies of the state"; green was for German criminals; blue was for
foreign forced laborers; brown was for Gypsies; pink was for homosexuals;
purple was for Jehovah's Witnesses and black was for asocials, a catch-all
term for vagrants, bums, prostitutes, hobos, alcoholics who were living on the
streets, or anyone who didn't have a permanent address. The
"work-shy," or those who were arrested because they refused to work,
wore a black badge.

That Nazi medical experiments were carried out on Jews is common knowledge.
But what about Roman
Catholic priests? Hitler was remarkably even handed in his treatment of
religions.

After the war, Dr. Schilling was arrested by the American Army and charged
with participating in a "common plan" to violate the Laws and Usages
of War because he conducted experiments on Dachau prisoners, using various
drugs in an effort to find a cure for malaria. Most of his subjects were young
Polish priests whom Dr. Schilling infected by means of mosquitoes from the
marshes of Italy and the Crimea, according to author Peter Padfield in his
book entitled "Himmler." The priests were chosen for the experiments
because they were not required to work, as were the ordinary prisoners at
Dachau.