The Book Thieves

by Anders Rydell

  Chamberlain, a British cultural philosopher, had been seduced by German culture in his youth while studying in Geneva. He settled in Bayreuth and married Eva von Bülow-Wagner, Wagner’s stepdaughter. In his magnum opus, published in two volumes around the turn of the nineteenth century and running to a length of some fourteen hundred pages, Chamberlain tried to build a bridging argument that united German cultural idealism with the Aryan racial myth. For reference, he relied on the most important race ideologist of the 1800s, the French count and diplomat Arthur de Gobineau and his historical-philosophical work, Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines (Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races). Gobineau attempted, much as Carl von Linnaeus had done in the botanical kingdom, to divide humanity into various races. He believed that it was not economics that functioned as the prime mover of history—rather it was the racial struggle.9

  According to Gobineau, the different races were irreconcilable, and the greatest threat to Western society was interbreeding between races—the noble blood of Aryans being diluted with that of people of lower standing. As he saw it, the calls in the 1800s for social reform, democracy, and equality were signs that this fall was imminent. Humanity would henceforth be thrown into a more bestial state of being, incapable of refined culture. Gobineau’s apocalyptic vision of the rapidly approaching fall of man made a deep impression on Chamberlain. In his own work, a half century later, he would fix upon the Jews as the cause of this disintegration, a view that had already been proposed by his father-in-law in the pamphlet Judaism in Music, in which Wagner suggested that the Jews, by infiltrating Western culture, had started to break down the true culture rooted in the people.10 In The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century, Houston Stewart Chamberlain attempted a fusion of Gobineau’s race theory with Wagner’s anti-Semitism, while taking the ideas one step further. In Chamberlain’s universe the Germans and Jews were opposing poles, fighting a historical battle between good and evil. The tall, blond, and blue-eyed Germans were inherently infused with ideals such as duty, freedom, and faithfulness. The Jews represented the opposite of this, especially in their drive to destroy what was pure and beautiful.

  Alfred Rosenberg came to regard himself as the inheritor of Chamberlain’s ideas. He was also able to offer more tangible solutions to the “Jewish question.” According to his own version of events, he had begun his work on The Myth of the Twentieth Century as early as the summer of 1916, when he rented a house with his young wife, Hilda, in Skhodnya, outside Moscow. 11

  Like many other Baltic Germans, Rosenberg hoped that the German army would liberate Estonia from the Bolsheviks, a wish that was fulfilled in February 1918. However, the hopes of the Baltic Germans to be united with their Heimat were dashed no sooner than they had presented themselves, when the German Empire imploded in November 1918. That same month Alfred Rosenberg made the decision to abandon his home country and go back to what he regarded as his spiritual fatherland.12 Before leaving at the end of November, he held his first public speech in Reval’s city hall on the subject that would come to define him as a politician: the Jewish question and the connection between the Jews and Marxism.

  Like many other Baltic emigrants, Rosenberg settled in Munich, where several of his friends already lived. Munich’s extreme-right circles proved a good breeding ground for Rosenberg’s Jewish-Bolshevik conspiracy theory. Rosenberg, who wanted to write about his Russian experiences, soon came into contact with Dietrich Eckart, a playwright, journalist, and something of a key figure in extreme-right circles in Munich. According to Rosenberg, his first words to Eckart were “Are you in need of a warrior against Jerusalem?”13

  Soon Rosenberg joined Eckart’s obscure political party, the NSDAP—he was one of its first members. It was also in Eckart’s home that he met, for the first time, a thirty-year-old ex-corporal by the name of Adolf Hitler. According to Rosenberg, they spoke of how Bolshevism had the same degenerative effect on the nation as Christianity had once had on the Roman Empire. Neither of the men ever openly admitted to being at all influenced by the other, and throughout their friendship the two ideologues found it difficult to exchange any sort of positive recognition.

  Long afterward, Hitler commented that Rosenberg was a Baltic German with a “terribly elaborate” way of thinking, while on the other hand Rosenberg could never bring himself to praise Mein Kampf.14 Yet Hitler did make an indirect admission of Rosenberg’s role as one of the main architects of Nazi ideology when in 1937 he made him the winner of the newly established Deutscher Nationalpreis für Kunst und Wissenschaft (German National Prize for Art and Science). This was an attempt by Nazi Germany to replace the Nobel Prize. Hitler had decreed that Germans could not accept any Nobel honors after the Peace Prize was awarded in 1935 to Carl von Ossietzky, who was in a German concentration camp. Rosenberg was awarded the new prize “because he helped establish and consolidate the National Socialist global perspective both scientifically and intuitively.”15

  The actual influence of Rosenberg on ideological development has been the subject of an ongoing debate among historians since the Second World War. His importance as a figure in the regime has been perceived in a variety of ways, depending on trends in historical research. After the war he was viewed as the demonic brain behind the whole ideology. Later, during the 1960s, his role was diminished when the historical perspective in general pulled back from personality-based descriptions in order to seek out structural and social mechanisms. In the 2000s, Rosenberg has once more come into the spotlight, not least as a consequence of German historian Ernst Piper, whose extensive thesis and biography, Alfred Rosenberg: Hitler’s Chief Ideologue, suggests that Rosenberg had decisive importance by spreading anti-Semitic propaganda, transforming conspiracy theories into “truths,” and establishing ideas in relation to the Jewish-Bolshevik conspiracy in Germany. For these reasons, Piper feels that there are good reasons to designate him as the chief ideologue, which has often been questioned by other historians.

  Historians have long held that Hitler was already a convinced anti-Semite and anti-Marxist when he went to Munich—something that seems ripe for reevaluation in modern research. Since the 1990s, more and more historians have pointed to Munich’s spiritual and revolutionary climate; that this had a transformative effect on Hitler and made him into a fanatical anti-Semite. This, for instance, is the claim that the historian Volker Ullrich makes in his major publication from 2013, Adolf Hitler: Die Jahres des Aufstiegs (Adolf Hitler: The Years of Ascension). Based on such a perspective, the more worldly Rosenberg must have been highly influential.16

  It was very likely either Rosenberg or Eckart who gave Hitler The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The document was as decisive for Hitler as, a few years earlier, it had been for Rosenberg. Not long afterward, Hitler held his first speech on the Jewish-Bolshevik conspiracy in one of the city’s beer halls.

  The idea of a conspiracy had quite an explosive power at this time. The revolution in Russia and the international revolutionary workers’ movement were regarded by many more than right-wing extremists as a threat; in fact, the revolution set the ground shaking under the feet of the bourgeoisie. By designating the revolutionary movement a Jewish conspiracy, as opposed to an expression of the working classes demanding social and economic change, the Nazis gained a legitimacy that went far beyond their narrow circles.

  Adolf Hitler eventually made Rosenberg the editor in chief of the party newspaper, the Völkischer Beobachter, a position he would hold until 1937.

  Rosenberg, who had found his life’s mission, threw himself into Munich’s far-right circles with fanatical productivity. During the 1920s there was a veritable stream of essays, anthologies, and books penned by Rosenberg, most of which were a variation on a single theme: Jews. Among these was Die Protokolle der Weisen von Zion und die jüdische Weltpolitik, an edition of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion with his commentary. It was not the first German-language edition, but Rosenberg’s book sol
d very well and was reprinted three times in one year. Two years later, Adolf Hitler used the text as a foundation for his anti-Semitic attacks in Mein Kampf. The original document had already been exposed as a forgery, which Hitler dismissed as Jewish propaganda: “It is absolutely irrelevant from what Jew’s lips these revelations come; the most important thing is that they reveal, with horrifying certainty, the essential nature of the Jewish people.”17 Joseph Goebbels, who for his own part was convinced of the counterfeit nature of the Protocols, expressed in his diaries a more pragmatic approach, which would become commonplace in the movement, that he believed in “the innate but not factually based truth of the Protocols.”18

  In 1930 came the book that more than any other would cement Alfred Rosenberg’s position as the chief Nazi ideologue: The Myth of the Twentieth Century. Rosenberg, just as Houston Stewart Chamberlain had tried to do a few decades earlier, wanted to create a philosophy of his own time. But he was also attempting to solve a problem.

  National Socialism lacked a real philosophical foundation. The Nazis did not in any real sense have a Karl Marx or a “sacred text” on which to base themselves. Admittedly Mein Kampf had been accorded almost biblical status in Nazi Germany, but unlike Marx and Engels, Hitler had not created a fundamental or timeless philosophical system that could still be applied fifty or a hundred years after his death. Hitler liked to speak of the Thousand-Year Reich, but in Mein Kampf he was mainly busy with day-to-day business: the Weimar Republic, Jews, the Versailles Treaty, Bolsheviks, and expansion to the east. These were political challenges that could be resolved in his own lifetime. But what would happen after that? Rosenberg wanted to fill this vacuum.

  The Myth of the Twentieth Century did not have the same political firepower as Mein Kampf; it was both elaborate, puffed up in its use of language, and in many ways just as “terribly elaborate” as Hitler had described its author. Its cornerstone was almost banal in its simplicity: the eternal battle between good (Aryans) and evil (Jews). This battle ran like a defining red line through Western history. On this point Rosenberg did not part ways greatly from Chamberlain; the only operative difference was that Rosenberg would make the racial myth politically useful.

  It was not so much the foundations of a new philosophy that Rosenberg wanted to lay down; it was rather a new religion. The solemn language of the book, almost like something out of the Old Testament, was a deliberate device. Rosenberg wanted to evoke a prophecy, a race theory based on a mystical framework, writing, “Today a new religion stirs and wakes—the myth of blood; the belief in the defense of blood is the same as defending man’s divine nature.” According to Rosenberg, “Nordic blood” had begun to be victorious at long last, and it would replace “the old sacraments.”19

  Like Chamberlain, Rosenberg felt that the races had inherited attributes, and the love of freedom, honor, creativity, and a true sense of consciousness could only exist in the “Nordic races.” The foremost of these was “the heroic will.” It was by recourse to this idea that the new German would be formed, a heroic man tied to his earth through blood—ready to sacrifice himself in a heroic death. Between the two racial extremes, Aryans and Jews, Rosenberg went on to make subdivisions of other peoples such as Arabs, Chinese, Mongols, black people, and Indians, in each case scrutinizing their moral characteristics and creative achievements. Admittedly the Arabs had created the lovely arabesque, but “this is not true architecture, merely handicraft.”20 In cases where “Nordic attributes” appeared in other races, it was because of imitation or interbreeding with Nordic blood. Jews, on the other hand, lacked all capacity to form a higher culture “because Jewishness, as a totality, lacks a soul from which higher virtues can spring.”21

  The blood myth was not an individualistic belief, because Aryan blood was connected to a higher collective “racial soul.” This was the soul that tied all Aryans together: “The racially interconnected soul is the measure of all our ideas, our will, and our actions.” To Rosenberg, individualism was as damaging as universalism. “A human being in his own right is nothing; he only acquires a personality once he is integrated in sense and soul with thousands of others of his race.” Rosenberg further claimed that the history of philosophy had omitted any consideration of this blood myth because it could not be expressed within a rational system. It was not possible to understand the “racial soul” in a rational, logical way, because “race is untouchable—it is an inner voice, a feeling, a will. Germans have to awaken and listen to the voice of their blood.” Rosenberg ended his book with a prophecy about when this would happen: “The holy hour for Germans will be at hand when the symbol of their reawakening—the flag with the swastika—has become the only true confession of faith in the Reich.”22

  • • •

  About a month after Rosenberg had been assigned to lead the party’s “spiritual and ideological development and education” in 1934, he held a speech at the Kroll Opera House in Berlin, where the German parliament had moved after the fire in the Reichstag. The country’s gauleiters, local Nazi Party leaders from all over Germany, had gathered to hear him. From the podium Rosenberg said, “If we were just satisfied with having power over the state, the National Socialist movement would not have achieved its goal. The political revolution in the state has admittedly been completed, but forging the senses of the intellectual and spiritual human being has only just begun.”23 This was the goal that he had formulated in The Myth of the Twentieth Century, which would now be implemented: “It is the great task of our century: on the basis of this new myth of life to create a new human being.”24

  The foremost tool for this spiritual transformation would be the educational system of the Third Reich. Propaganda could affect people, but education could change them at their very foundations. The Nazification of the traditional school system on all levels, from kindergarten to university, was implemented in steps after 1933. The Nazis would come to view the school system as a significant part of the ideological rearmament of the Third Reich, but it was regarded as a long-term goal—a transformation that would shape generations to come.

  Some of the first measures were highly predictable. One was to “cleanse” the school system of “Jewish influence,” targeting both teachers and pupils. Already on April 25, 1933, a law was introduced to limit the number of Jewish pupils at public schools. Much of this cleansing took place organically by the rejection of Jewish applicants to schools and the firing of Jewish teachers without any explanation. At the universities, Jewish professors were attacked by pro-Nazi student federations, which demanded their resignations. Those who hung on to their jobs faced discrimination and humiliation. Among other things the Berlin student federation demanded that all “Jewish” research should be published only in Hebrew, this being a way of simultaneously banning Jews from the German language while exposing their alleged infiltration.25 Even teachers that were liberally disposed became targets of this intellectual pogrom. Not only were Jews and freethinkers excluded from the school system, the Nazis also opposed women having access to higher education, which, it was believed, might lead to demands for equality. In the Nazi worldview, the role of women was mainly about producing children for the new “master race.”

  In 1936, Jewish teachers were banned by law from teaching at public schools, and in 1938 all Jews were barred from the universities—even as students. Nazis and pro-Nazi ideologues were given prominent positions at the most important universities. Many of these were a part of Alfred Rosenberg’s circle, including Ernst Krieck and Alfred Baeumler, two of the most important Nazi pedagogues in the Third Reich who were also charged with devising the foundations of the new German school system. The regime gained particular legitimacy from the famous philosopher Martin Heidegger, who in 1933 joined the NSDAP and was made rector of the university in Freiburg.

  One of the first large-scale reforms was the centralization of the school system, which, like most things in Germany, had previously been very much decentral
ized. This was a necessary measure in order to make the education system serve Nazi dogma. Germany had never and would never again be so unified as under the Third Reich—a result of the regime’s totalitarian efforts to create “a people.”

  When the Nazis came to power, the German school and university system was considered the best in the world. No other school system had produced more Nobel Prize winners. By 1933 Germany had won thirty-three Nobel Prizes, while the United States had won only eight. The university in Göttingen, under the prefecture of Niels Bohr, was regarded as the world’s leading center of theoretical physics. The problem for the Nazis, however, was that a disproportionately large number of Nobel Prizes had been given to German Jews, such as Albert Einstein, Gustav Hertz, and Paul Heyse.

  Just as Chamberlain and Rosenberg had categorized people according to their inherited or racial abilities in art, architecture, and even their general personalities, every race also had its own unique “physics” and “science.” The German physician and Nazi, Philipp Lenard, who had won the Nobel Prize in 1905, developed these theories in a four-volume work during the 1930s. Lenard proposed the existence of something he described as “Japanese physics,” “Arab physics,” “black physics,” “English physics,” and then “Aryan physics”—the latter the only true one. The most damaging of all was “Jewish physics”: “The Jew wants to create contradiction everywhere and dissolve existing relations so absolutely that the poor naïve German cannot find any sense in it at all.”26 Similarly to the cultural sphere, there was a concept that science had fallen into disrepair and created a “fragmented reality,” as Education Minister Bernhard Rust put it, this being the work of the corrosive Jews.27 In other words, relativity theory was too confusing to fit into the totalitarian worldview of the Nazis, who were quite determined to make the fragmented world whole again. Not unexpectedly, Rosenberg was an admirer and protector of Lenard. One positive result of these twisted ideas was the slowing down of Nazi atomic research. Ironically enough, research largely carried out in German universities by Jewish scientists such as Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, and Robert Oppenheimer ended up giving the United States the first atomic bomb.