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This below is Chapter 2 Section 4:
Early Anti-Bolshevism and the first rise of Hitler
More astonishing than anti-Bolshevism is, of course, philo-Bolshevism, which became noticeable early on the bourgeois, i.e. here the non-socialist side. In its beginnings it has as little to do with social motives as the first anti-Bolshevism: it refers to the Bolsheviks as the peace party, which had to evoke a natural sympathy among all those who criticized the war and the warring parties. In America and England it was the anti-imperialist wing of the Liberals and the Labor Party. However, the clear fronts blurred when the Brest-Litovsk peace agreement made it obvious that the peace of the Bolsheviks implied a tremendous advantage for the war party in Germany; but after the end of the war that sympathy was partly restored, not least because the liberal and working-class spirit of progress often did not doubt the inner kinship even when one expressed great misgivings about the methods of the Bolsheviks. Men like the Americans William Bullitt and Raymond Robins or the Englishmen M. Phillips Price of the Manchester Guardian and Arthur Ransome from the London Daily News preserved their sympathy for the Bolsheviks always, or at least for a long time, because they clearly recognized what was world-historically new and wanted to see it as world-historically positive. Immediately after the October revolution, the Berliner Tageblatt, too, by no means perceived only the national aspect, but emphasized that this event “would bring the social question to the fore in a huge way” and some of the headlines that covered the reports of the Russian civil war seemed to express an even broader sympathy for the Bolsheviks. By no means all pacifist and socially-minded Liberals and Labor politicians allowed their dislike of the reactionaries and imperialists of their own country in the first instance to determine their approval of even what was very early called the policy of extermination of the Bolsheviks, but Bernard Shaw nonetheless voiced a symptomatic point of view when he said, with only slight detachment, that the Bolsheviks had raised the right questions and shot the right people.
The strangest form of philo-Bolshevism was bourgeois national-Bolshevism in Germany, which arose from the horror of the Versailles peace terms and saw only one means that could help, namely, Bolshevism, which would have a less despotic character in Germany than in Russia, provided it came to power with the support of wealthy and educated circles. At least Paul Elzbacher, with whose name this tendency was earliest connected, showed a certain domestic political sympathy because he found it welcomed that Lenin had spoken out “in favor of the merciless punishment of dissolute and lazy workers,” and he hoped that cooperation at least would give protection against the destruction of ancient cultures “from the shallow ‘civilization’ of England and America.”
But if by no means all of the bourgeoisie were anti-Bolsheviks, then even less all socialists were philo-Bolsheviks; it was precisely among them that a sharp enmity quickly developed, which was certainly more pronounced in the leading groups than in the proletarian masses. Besides, nothing is less surprising when one keeps in mind that the Bolsheviks' seizure of power primarily served to eliminate the other socialist parties.
Lenin's oldest comrade-in-arms, the former members of the Iskra editorial team, saw this seizure of power as nothing more than the consistent continuation of Lenin's well-known tactic of creating a party of devoted followers by pushing out the genuine Marxists and independent thinkers. Plekhanov's sentence about the “insatiable striving to seize power” has already been quoted. Martov called the Bolsheviks an “hangman’s party” as early as 1918, and the harshest criticism was made by Pavel B. Axelrod. For him, Bolshevism was “Asiatic,” a betrayal of the most elementary principles of Marxism, a “dictatorship over the proletariat (and the peasantry),” a group “which was resurrecting the barbarism, cruelty and inhumanity of times long past” which constitutes itself as the “new ruling class” within the framework of a new type of “slave regime.” Therefore, Axelrod saw confirmation of the thesis that he had already put forward before the outbreak of the World War, namely that “the Lenin clique should be characterized as a gang of the ‘Black Hundreds’ and as common criminals within the Social Democrats.”
The anarchists made an even more fundamental criticism than the Mensheviks. While they could not deny that the ultimate goals of the Bolsheviks were identical to their own goals—the establishment of a world society of free individuals—they rejected the means used by the Bolsheviks, namely the development of an outrageously strong state power; and they did not believe that this remedy, early or late, would produce its own opposite. Thus the American anarchist Alexander Berkman, a friend of the better known Emma Goldman, wrote immediately after the overthrow of Kronstadt: “The experience of Kronstadt proves anew that the government, the state—whatever its name or form—is always the mortal enemy of the freedom and self-determination. The state has no soul, no principle. It has only one goal—to secure the power and keep it at all costs. This is the political lesson of Kronstadt.”
Rosa Luxemburg, like her friend Paul Levi, would probably have been accused of anti-Bolshevism by Lenin's orthodox followers in 1921. Her pamphlet on the Russian Revolution, written in prison in 1918 and published by Levi in 1922, with all due respect to Lenin and Trotsky, raised a number of objections that were fundamental in character. Admittedly, when Rosa Luxemburg described freedom as the “freedom of those who think differently,” she hardly meant the liberal freedom of every citizen and therefore also of “reactionaries,” but the connection between “life in the soviets” and “general elections, unrestrained freedom of the press and of assembly, and free struggle of opinion” nevertheless included the principled rejection of party dictatorship, and was a plea for that Soviet democracy of all socialist working people, as the Petersburg masses had wanted to implement in October 1917 and as the Kronstadt rebels demanded again in 1921. Indeed, it did not take long before the Communist Party of Germany launched a struggle against “Luxemburgism,” which was accused of overestimating the spontaneity of the masses and neglecting the role of the party.
All of this involved intra-communist disputes. A different tone is perceptible in the social democratic criticism, which although it still sees itself in part as intra-socialist, also shows an unmistakable tendency to expel Bolshevism from the socialist camp and subsume it under the term bourgeois.
Thus, according to Otto Bauer, the Bolshevik Revolution accomplished what the bourgeois revolutions had achieved in Western Europe: the destruction of the feudal agricultural system and the establishment of the bourgeois property system in the countryside. In Russia the proletarians now ruled, and one worker vote was therefore equal to five peasant votes in the elections. But the party leaders very quickly became more and more preponderant, so that one can at best speak of a despotic socialism. This path is not without historical consequence and necessity, but it can never be the path of the western European industrial countries, which must represent a gradual further development of bourgeois democracy. On the other hand, Russian communism is closely related to Spengler's Prussian socialism, because both are caught in the state-believing delusion that “the omnipotence of a ruling minority can and should force the obeying masses to adopt higher forms of life.”
The man who had been the supreme authority on all questions of doctrine in the pre-war social democracy, Karl Kautsky, expressed himself far more sharply, not only in newspaper articles but also in several treatises. For him, Marxism is part of the humanization process that has led the workers’ movement out of its original savagery and also out of its inner proximity to the terrorist phase of the French Revolution. Bolshevism therefore meant a relapse into bestiality, because it wanted to replace the Marxist class struggle with civil war. The ultimate reason for this was the immaturity of Russian conditions. The Bolsheviks allowed themselves to be carried away by a mass psychosis, and therefore they understood the social quality of the citizen as a biological one, against which they proceeded with the savagery and brutality of the rising workers’ movement. Hence the victory of Bolshevism was a defeat of socialism, and this was also shown in the emergence of a new bureaucracy, a new ruling class, bringing back militarism and installing terrorism: “Shoot them—this has become the be-all and end-all of communist governmental wisdom.” This Bolshevism was an anti-human and anti-socialist relapse into barbaric conditions, and that is why Kautsky finally calls it a “Tatar socialism.”
But whether the leading Social Democrats see Bolshevism primarily as a Russian special path or as a barbaric regression, they always place it in stark contrast to Europe, and in the travelogue of one Social Democrat the wish is expressed “to leave the borders of Soviet Russia behind me as soon as possible,” since the monotony and poverty of life, the hunger, the absence of freedom of the press and the constant horror at the deeds of the new “Holy Inquisition,” the Cheka, was simply unbearable. But the question is hardly ever suggested whether the European might perhaps be related to the free existence even of reactionary tendencies and whether the non-Bolshevik socialists in Russia might not have done better to ally themselves with Kolchak and Denikin, because only then would they have a chance would have existed to create a society of productive social differences like in Europe. On the contrary, an equidistance from the Bolsheviks and the reactionaries remains, expressly or not, the characteristic of all Social Democrats, and this equidistance had indeed determined the practical policy of the Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries until they were finally eliminated in 1921.
The diverse European liberalism was more inclined to identify with European culture or at least with Western civilization, unless as a pronounced left-wing liberalism it did not focus on criticism of the injustices of an all too opaque society. For the Times there was “not enough room in the world for Bolshevism and civilization.” In terms of its meaning, the term totalitarianism or totalism was already familiar as an antithesis. The insecure borderline between right-wing liberals and conservatives was probably most easily recognizable by whether one noted the foreign peoples as having a particularly large share in the Russian revolution or whether one saw the Jews as a cause of a special kind. Already in the first months after the February Revolution it had irritated numerous observers, especially in France and Italy, that the champions of a peace treaty so often carried or had carried German names such as Zederbaum, Apfelbaum, or Sobelsohn. Later, some authors linked this observation with old ideas that had been common among conservatives as early as the first half of the 19th century. None other than Winston Churchill wrote in one of his essays: “This movement among the Jews is not new. From the days of Spartacus Weishaupt [translator: founder of the Bavarian Illuminati in 1776] to those of Karl Marx and down to Trotsky (Russia), Bela Kun (Hungary), Rosa Luxemburg (Germany) and Emma Goldman (United States), this worldwide conspiracy has been growing to overthrow civilization and remake society on the basis of arrested development, envious resentment and impossible equality…(This movement) was the mainspring behind every subversive movement of the 19th century, and now this gang of extraordinary personalities from the underworld of the great cities of Europe and America's has grabbed the Russian people by the collar and have practically become the undisputed master of a vast empire.” But if one may sense in such sentences an echo of the fear of conspiracies of the Abbé Barrel or Prince Metternich; Churchill, far from attributing the subversive tendencies of many Jews to the immutable racial characteristics of all Jews, emphasized the Zionist aspirations of Dr. Weizmann, which were “in particular harmony with the truest interests of the British Empire.”
The political interests of the British Empire were even more clearly in the foreground for Churchill when he advocated the idea that Germany, after its defeat, must now be made a solid bulwark against the dangers of Bolshevism, a “dam of peaceful, lawful and patient strength against the tide of red barbarism that is surging from the East” and this point of view could just as well give rise to the hope that the establishment of trade relations would lead to a mitigation of that despotism, which was frightening in European eyes. This view was championed by Lloyd George, and as early as 1921 he pushed for the establishment of trade relations with Soviet Russia.
Thus each of the established ideologies and parties developed its own anti-Bolshevism, right up to the USPD (Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany) and even into the ranks of the Communist Party of Germany, and nothing was more understandable, since Bolshevism, according to its own self-image, had declared war on the whole world and had accused each of the existing parties of lackeys toward the international bourgeoisie. But an important transition was made when entire organizations made anti-Bolshevism the main focus of their efforts.
The earliest of these organizations was the “General Secretariat for the Study and Combat of Bolshevism.” The founder was Eduard Stadtler, who had been a leader in the youth wing of the Centre Party before the war and was then taken as a prisoner of war in Russia, from which, however, he returned before the end of the war. According to his later report, he threw himself into hectic activity as early as November 1918 to save Germany from the fate of Russia, and found the support of authoritative politicians such as Friedrich Naumann and Karl Helfferich. On January 10, 1919, he gave a speech in the Aviators’ Club at a meeting of the business leaders, attended by captains of industry and banking magnates such as Hugo Stinnes, Albert Vögler, Felix Deutsch, Arthur Salomonsohn and others. Stadtler's invocations had the extraordinary success of creating an anti-Bolshevik fund, into which, according to his claim, no less than 500 million marks were paid; and these funds then flowed through all possible channels into the “powerful anti-Bolshevik movement” that began in early January, such as the Freikorps, which used large posters and expensive newspaper advertisements, to recruit volunteers to protect their homeland from Bolshevism and from the Poles, in the Citizens' Council movement, the “Anti-Bolshevik League,” the “Association for Combating Bolshevism,” and similar organizations. Stadtler himself wrote a brochure entitled “Bolshevism and Overcoming It.” In it he displays a surprisingly high degree of appreciation and objectivity, and only at the very end does the word pestilence appear. No anti-Semitism is perceptible, as the list of donors probably already suggests. And this pronounced anti-Bolshevism was only a soon to be temporary phase in Stadtler's activity, in his eyes obviously the result of a temporary emergency situation.
Another militant anti-Bolshevik organization, which was mentioned by the communists themselves much more frequently than, for example, the “Anti-Bolshevik League” and whose name was often used as a collective name for Freikorps, self-defense groups, etc. was the “Organization Escherich.” In its beginnings and its basic character, it was a bourgeois self-defense organization that was not to be limited to Bavaria and which made the following main demands: safeguarding the constitution; protection of persons, work and property; preservation of the German Reich and rejection of any attempts at secession; maintenance of peace and order, and defending against any right-wing or left-wing coup. The main practical task was certainly only formulated in the last demand. Also among the ten theses that were put forward in October 1920, “combating Bolshevism and National Bolshevism; rejection of all efforts aimed at the decomposition of the people” is only the third item. But here this point is particularly emphasized, as the explanation already shows, in which numerous subversive statements by leaders of the Communist Party of Germany are cited. Escherich's particular merit is emphasized, however, that he had succeeded in “what in Bavaria was a feat of strength, to keep anti-Semitism at bay.”
If one wants to visualize the prerequisites from which grew the anti-Bolshevik organization that was soon to become the best known and historically most important, then one must not limit oneself to the excited nationalism of officers like Ernst Röhm and to the anti-Marxist socialism of Gottfried Feder, but one has to look at the circle of Baltic and Russian emigrants and people close to them who had found a rallying point in Munich. The most important man among them was the poet Dietrich Eckart, who had already advocated a kind of mystical anti-Judaism in his magazine Auf gut deutsch from the end of 1918, but was only driven to practical and party-like activity through the experience of the Bavarian Soviet Republic. In the starting point, this was guided by feelings very similar to those expressed in those sentences of Thomas Mann. The core of the experience was the same for both: the fear of annihilation of the bourgeois and educated minority in the face of the threatening proletarian masses, and in both cases this was connected with an interpretation, with which one tried to make this threat understandable and controllable, namely the challenge of a foreigner leadership class. But what was the momentary mood and temporary impulse for Thomas Mann became for Dietrich Eckart the center of a worldview and the political activity resulting from it.
It is very doubtful, however, whether the threat of the revolutionary tribunal and even the murder of the hostages in the Luitpold Gymnasium would have had such grave consequences if the concrete presence of Russian experiences had not given this fear of annihilation a monumental and convincing background. One of the men who was able to pass this experience on to Eckart was Dr. Max Erwin von Scheubner-Richter, who had been active for a time as the German vice-consul in Erzurum during the World War and had tried with all his might to oppose the expulsion and extermination of the Armenian population by the Turks, which he evidently perceived as asiatic. But in 1918 he returned to his homeland in Riga, and here he had seen how the Baltic aristocracy, and, in practice, the Baltic Germans as a whole were declared outlaws by the invading Bolsheviks from Russia and by the native Bolsheviks and made the object of a policy of extermination, which did not seem to differ fundamentawlly from those Armenian massacres, although of course Scheubner-Richter also knew that these Baltic Germans were a numerically small upper class. Then he went to Munich, where in 1921 he founded his “Economic and Political Reconstruction Correspondence on Eastern Issues and Their Significance for Germany,” which closely followed the events in Russia and produced numerous translations from the Russian émigré press. He also organized the emigre congress in Bad Reichenhall, which in June 1921 brought together numerous monarchists who, in their speeches, spoke out most sharply against the Bolsheviks as a “gang of foreign criminals and fanatics,” but also against the Cadets [translator: the Constitutional Democratic Party in Russia; not military cadets] because they had betrayed Russia together with the the British and the French. In the German press, this congress was met mainly with the worried contempt which is often shown to the defeated who do not want to admit their defeat, and even the Neue Zürcher Zeitung spoke of the “right-wing Bolsheviks” had gathered in the Bavarian spa town with the tolerance of the von Kahr government, while the Vorwärts [newspaper of the Social Democratic Party] saw “new Koblenz” [city in Germany that was a gathering point for French royalists emigres during the French Revolution] emerge from reactionaries. But there is no doubt that to these men the reports that many contemporaries regarded as gross exaggerations were credible, such as those that the rule of Bolshevism, including those who died from starvation, claimed no fewer than 35 million victims. And just as credible for them was the news that Berlingske Tidende had brought a few months earlier and which appeared a little later in the Völkischer Beobachter was: the Chinese Cheka was now committing the worst of all atrocities imaginable: they were placing a rat in a pipe or in a cage placed on the body of a convict and by igniting a fire forcing the animal to eat its way through.
But in principle, Winston Churchill and Thomas Mann could also have believed such reports. A qualitatively new interpretation becomes visible, however, if one looks at the brochure of another Baltic who also belonged to Dietrich Eckart's circle: Alfred Rosenberg's “Plague in Russia.” Its core is the combination of two facts, which cannot be denied as such, but rather need to be corrected in their detail: the downfall of the “national Russian intelligentsia” and the bourgeoisie, on the one hand, and the high proportion of “Jews,” i.e. people of Jewish origin, in the leading positions of the party and the Soviet government, on the other hand. From this Rosenberg turns the planned extermination of all culture and all freedom through “foreigner” elements and especially Judaism. Unlike the Latvians, Chinese and Caucasians, in fact, the Jews, as a “red International,” are only adopting the principle of their own “golden International,” capitalism, with the aim of creating “a centralized and organized slave state.” However, one must to go deeper into history. The Cheka, for example, is certainly linked with the tsarist Okhrana in some respects, but it was far from being able to “operate so coldly, organize it in such a planned manner and carry it out so systematically and soullessly” because it was still allowed to ascribe to a “European character.” The Jews of the Cheka, however, are resuming the old struggle of Islam and the Mongol armies and are nothing other than a "new deployment of the Near Eastern spirit against Europe.” This attack now puts Germany back in the center of world events, because the plague that destroyed Russia will now also destroy Germany, if a new and yet again old-Germanic worldview of German men does not in time confront the “un-Volkish internationalism” and conquer the “Asiatic-Syrian spirit hostile to us all” by tearing Germany out of the fateful path of “Kerensky fiasco” and making possible the “atonement for the atrocities of the Jewish terrorists.”
Nothing would be more unfounded than to assert that the anti-Bolshevism of Eckart, Scheubner-Richter and Rosenberg were isolated, curious or even incomprehensible in the contemporary world. But at the same time it has specific characteristics that do not allow similar-sounding statements by Thomas Mann, Churchill or Kautsky to be used for comparison without restrictions. The peculiarity lies above all in the historical-theoretical explanatory value that is ascribed to anti-Semitism, so that a historical mythology has to emerge that aims to be a counter-image to the Marxist theory of history and can only all too easily come into opposition to all that really characterizes Europe in history: to Christianity and the Renaissance, to the Enlightenment and German idealism, to capitalism and socialism. But another new quality was achieved when this theory, which was already far removed from its empirical basis, was made the source of an agitational and mass-effective worldview. It is precisely here that Adolf Hitler’s typological place can be found.
Adolf Hitler adored no one as much as Dietrich Eckart, only Scheubner-Richter he called “irreplaceable” with strong emphasis after his death at the Feldherrnhalle, only with Alfred Rosenberg he was in permanent contact throughout his whole life as the leading head of the Volkischer Beobachter, even if he denied him a powerful government position for a long time. Yet there is no doubt that Hitler's anti-Semitism pre-dated his acquaintance with these men. In some accounts, he looks like a relic of Lueger’s anti-Semitism and Schönerer’s anti-Habsburg yearning for a Greater Germany; Walter Laqueur even claimed that anti-Bolshevism was not even present in Hitler during the post-war years and that he did not pay much attention to Russia.
In fact, the first conclusive document from Hitler's own hand, the letter to a certain Gemlich, which he wrote at the request of his superior as an education officer of the Reichswehr on September 16, 1919, i.e. before his party days, is almost entirely filled with conventional anti-Semitism: Judaism is characterized above all by the “dance around the golden calf,” and as the main power of “mammonism,” it represents the “racial tuberculosis of the peoples,” which can only be successfully fought by a “government of national force” whose ultimate goal is “unalterable” to remove the Jews altogether. Only towards the end is there a comment in a subordinate clause that the Jews “were also the driving forces behind the revolution.”
Furthermore, it cannot be denied that in the speeches from 1919 to 1921, which Hitler held for the still quite insignificant “German Workers’ Party” or the NSDAP, the dictates of Versailles and slogans such as “Germany alone” were quantitatively in the foreground.
But the question is where the most moving impulse appears. And there is much to suggest that the recurring “annihilation of the intelligentsia” or the “mass murder of the intelligentsia” was such an impulse and that no warning was meant more urgently than the one that in Germany no conditions like those in Russia should arise with the “300,000 executions” of the recent years; the “slaughter of the intellectuals” in the “Russian charnel house” would find its repetition in Germany if a national “counter-dictatorship” did not remedy the “unfortunate tearing apart of the nation into two classes that are now deadly hostile to each other.” The interpretation and explanation almost always follow immediately: that it is a question of a “Jewish blood dictatorship,” that the Jew is “the leech” and the “strangler.”
But now and then a different tone becomes audible. In a report on a speech given in May 1921 it says: “Hitler addresses words of deepest seriousness to his handicraft brothers: Let go of your prejudice against the other classes of your people, the bourgeoisie that you see on the big screen does not live with champagne and parties, the officer that is portrayed to you in your Jewish newspapers does not exist, it is not the student who would like to force you under a knot, see the reality…this is what the healthy sections of the bourgeoisie looks like. And the rest of you, do not see the worker as the fatherless journeyman…it is not the German worker who robs and plunders, free him from his seducers. The hour of birth of the new German people strikes in deep distress.”
There is almost no anti-Semitism to be felt here. Here and elsewhere, Hitler presents himself as a champion of class reconciliation in the interests of the national power or even welfare state, from the standpoint of the national intelligentsia, which he apparently counts himself as a member. The turning against the Marxist doctrine of class struggle is the decisive factor and the view of the destruction of the intelligentsia by Bolshevism is the most moving. It is quite possible that such anti-Marxism was in line with history; at least that is how it has developed in all Western states. Certainly this core is also passionate in itself. This is clearly evident in the issue of the Völkischer Beobachter of April 10, 1920, where it says under the headline “The Outlawed Bourgeoisie”: “Let the Bolsheviks do whatever they want with the ‘Burschoa,’ the Chancellor (Müller) will not lift the smallest finger for them…There is no point in somehow covering up the hard facts or even glossing over them. The bourgeoisie has now got under the wheels and will be crushed more and more every day if it does not pull itself out of its inactivity by force.” As a clear example from a somewhat later time is an appeal by the party leadership of the NSDAP shortly after the Rathenau murder: “Do you want to see thousands of Germans at the lampposts in every city first? Do you want to wait until, like in Russia, Bolshevik murder squads become operational in every city and transports anyone who does not want to submit to the dictatorship to kingdom come as a ‘counter-revolutionary’? Do you want to stumble over the corpses of your wives and children, who, just as in Moscow and Petersburg, must be neutralized because they are the ‘multipliers of the bourgeoisie’? ‘No,’ you will yell. And yet we say to you: all of this will happen here with the same regularity as in Russia, if you don't remember that you must fight now if you want to live.”
One word in this appeal has been omitted. Without this word, these sentences, like the previous ones, would be a call for decisive self-defense, as is obvious and fully justified in a civil war, as soon as this civil war has actually started or even threatens to start. This is the rational core, admittedly under a condition that was not really given even in Germany, and certainly not in the other Western states, and gained credibility only through the Russian example. But the word Jewish before dictatorship is already an interpretation that closes itself around the core, so to speak.
Apparently, the party of the counter-dictatorship and of the counter-civil war party could not gain any real counter-belief, any excessive counter-passion, which was on a level with the belief and passion of the enemy, from the German threat alone and even from the presence of the Russian example. This is especially true of Adolf Hitler. He was driven to an extraordinary degree by the need to find a fundamental cause, a pathogen, a culprit, and he discovered this culprit in the Jew. In doing so, he took a further step on the way of the concretization on which the communists had gone when they replaced the historically outdated system of fully sovereign states with the morally guilty bourgeoisie. And Hitler's step was not an arbitrary and merely an accidental one. In a similar way, only in the opposite direction, Karl Marx had made the transition from the Jews, who were still considered the cause of mammonism by many early socialists, to the capitalists and ultimately to the capitalist system, and in connection with this he had transformed the old concept of extermination into the idea of merely pushing away a small group of capital magnates who had become an obstacle. So in a certain way Hitler went back to the early socialists and thereby created the possibility of countering the universal doctrine of Marxism not only with the serious and possibly correct words just cited, but also with a passionate and passion-generating doctrine of the calamities of the present world and of it causes stemming from a distant history. This anti-Semitism, however, necessarily led to the equation of capitalism and Bolshevism or of liberalism and socialism as equally international phenomena and thus tended to reject the bourgeoisie it had started from. As a result, however, simple nationalism, the other starting point, was set against opponents so strong and so many that it had to look for a stronger base, for example the Germanic race. In a sense, bourgeoisie and nationalism turned against themselves and became an anti-bourgeois and anti-national doctrine, which could thus step onto the same broad level as Marxism.
The real and most moving experience of Hitler, reinforced but not generated by the environment of Eckart, Scheubner-Richter and Rosenberg, was thus in all probability the experience of Bolshevism or communism, which, according to Hitler's understanding, caused the German defeat through its agitation, which divided the nation through its doctrine of the irreducible opposition between bourgeoisie and proletariat, and which, following the Russian example, threatened the bourgeoisie or the national intelligentsia with extermination. The expansion to anti-Marxism was obvious, despite the social-democratic hostility to the communists, and was also carried out by Mussolini and Italian fascism. Anti-Semitism, on the other hand, was an interpretation, a key, which on the one hand merely exaggerated and visualized a genuine peculiarity of the enemy, namely the difference between the mostly intellectual leadership and the masses, but which above all allowed the formation of a counter-ideology that tended to universality, and made possible the development of a fanatical counter-passion which Mussolini always stayed away from. As anti-Bolshevism and anti-Marxism, National Socialism belongs to the type of fascist movements; as a doctrine of the Jews as the universally guilty, it represents the most radical manifestation of this type, i.e. it is radical fascism. All of its main features can already be grasped in Hitler's early speeches during 1920 and 1921.
One possible objection is that Hitler was an anti-Semite in Vienna even before the war, that is, that his anti-Semitism was more original than its alleged core, anti-Bolshevism. But from Hitler's later account in “Mein Kampf” it emerges with great clarity that the reason for the experience here, too, was a great and vivid social event, namely the massive demonstrations by the socialist workers. And a look at the anti-Bolshevism of contemporaries proves that at least one logical distinction can be made between fear-inducing experience and ideology-producing key.
Undoubtedly correct woulb be the objection that even in his early days Hitler was by no means only an anti-Semitic anti-Bolshevik or anti-Marxist, but that his motives were diverse and connected to his contemporaries to a very different extent.
He shared the motive for the struggle against Versailles with almost all Germans and beyond that with all revisionists in Europe, not least with Soviet Russia, where Lenin emphasized no less emphatically than Hitler that Versailles was far worse than Brest-Litovsk.
Just as clearly recognizable, but no longer shared by all Germans, was the Greater Germany motif, which in Hitler's case often implied the invocation of the right to self-determination.
Only in 1919 and 1920 the motif of living space hinted at became noticeable, linked to a Darwinian-radical-liberal conception of natural law: it was unjust that a Russian should have 18 times as much space as a German. Probably very few of his compatriots would have agreed with the equation of farmland and tundra on which the argument depended, but nevertheless a genuine experience lay at the bottom of it, the experience of the English blockade and German rule in Russia between Brest-Litovsk and the collapse.
The anti-Bolshevik motif was the most European among Hitler's motives; he shared it with almost all bourgeois Europeans and Americans, and the term bourgeois must be understood in the broad sense that includes the Social Democrats or right-wing socialists. But in his case it was particularly sharply opposed to philo-Bolshevism, which was also a bourgeois phenomenon, albeit a marginal one. Above all, it was so sharpened and exacerbated by its extension to anti-Marxism and even anti-liberalism, that it was far removed from generality.
An extraordinary concretization took place through the anti-Semitic motive, which allowed a synthesis: the Jews were to seen as the cause of Germany’s defeat and, above all, of its internal turmoil, which prevented the natural relationship of German rule over Europe from being realized and a definitive security against the Jew-induced threats of annihilation by Bolshevism and Americanism from being achieved. With this motive as well, Hitler was isolated neither in Germany nor in Europe, for strong traditions of both the left and the right pointed in this direction. But in their totality, their inner allocation and above all in the unbridled passion that they generated and by which they were in turn sustained, they were nevertheless something individual. If one were to say that Hitler was even more of a German, indeed a European citizen, than a bourgeois German, then something right would be struck and yet again a wrong way be taken, because he would be identified with too many other people. In the inner necessity of opposing the communist main opponent with an adequate counter-belief, Hitler was in some ways anti-bourgeois and anti-German at the same time: unacknowledgedly, the hated horror-vision was for him, in a certain way, at the same time, the guiding role model.
But for the first two motives it is already true that in the radical form that Hitler’s passion gave them, they could only be implemented in reality through a “revolutionary totalism,” and if they are all taken together, then there is no doubt that a kind of affirmation of war that was alien, indeed unknown, to the German Kaiser and the Russian Tsar in 1914, and to which only the affirmation of war and civil war by the Bolsheviks was analogous, which, however, in terms of purpose and ideological background, represented the exact opposite.
Thus, even in those early years, when hardly anyone in Germany knew him and and when even in Munich he was regarded just as a drummer and demagogue, Adolf Hitler occupied an distinctive typological place within the framework of anti-Bolshevism, which was by no means merely a German, but a pan-European, yes, even a pan-Western phenomenon. But until July 1921 he was only the promoter of a tiny party, while the Communists had been the focus of public attention for three years. Then, however, he demanded and received dictatorial powers. As the strongest embodiment of a counter-belief and a counter-passion, he was able to create the Führer-party, which could oppose that other “vanguard party” (as Lenin had put it) as a tendentious peer and strive for its destruction. The year 1923 was the year of the greatest crisis in the German Reich and its capitalist or bourgeois system, and it was to bring the opposing possibilities of destruction to light just as clearly as the survival of the system and the mere and temporally limited ban of the two extreme wings of its party landscape.