ABSTRACT
National Socialism was a sort of philosophy formulated by Hitler in his speeches and in Mein Kampf (1924). Unlike Fascist Italy, the Third Reich had its doctrines from the beginning and did not invent them to suit the situation that the struggle for power had made. This ‘philosophy’ was nationalist in the sense that Hitler and his followers asserted their conviction in the political supremacy of Germany and in her future of supreme human, cultural and political achievement. Most Nazis were without the educational qualifications to know from the inside the philosophic, literary and musical heritage which was theirs by right. Hitler as a young man was a voracious reader, but not of the German classics. His reading was sporadic and tended to the pamphlet rather than the long work: he read to confirm dogmatic ideas he already had formed. The Nazi ‘philosophy’ was a social philosophy in the sense that its doctrines were about group activity and not about the individual. Hitler and his followers commended the activities of the group, the party or the masses. They mistrusted individual independence of thought and dignity of behaviour. Their militarism was the militarism of massed armies and not the heroism of individual courage. The most important characteristic of this ‘philosophy’ was that it was racist (völkisch). The racial theory on which Nazi anti-Semitism was based was popular in Austria in the last years of the Dual Monarchy. Hitler, who was Austrian, may have picked it up in Vienna between 1908 and 1913 when he lived there in some obscurity in a men's hostel. Anti-Jewish prejudice was not necessarily racist. It would not be felt against a Jew who was baptised or was assimilated by education and way of life into the society in which he lived. It was made racist through the influence of two otherwise unimportant books. A French nobleman, Arthur de Gobineau, published just after the middle of the nineteenth century a book called The Inequality of Human Races. He was himself descended from Norman stock and the thesis of his book was the immense superiority of the northern or Nordic races over all others in character and intelligence. He regarded them as the foremost representatives of the Aryan stock and as innately superior to all other races, especially to the Arab and Semitic races. Thus a Frenchman exalted the historic mission of the Germans. And an Englishman, the son of an English admiral, took up the same theme and carried it to considerable notoriety. This was Houston Stewart Chamberlain, who settled in Germany, assumed German citizenship, and identified himself wholly with the German state and race. His strange book is called The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century. It was received with much applause in Germany and was specially praised by William II and through his influence was widely circulated among the influential classes of the country. It is a survey and interpretation of universal history, full of digressions and not without inconsistencies. It regards history as embodying a conflict between the Teutonic and Semitic races. The writer recognises a certain greatness in the Jews and speaks with reverence of Christ; but ends with a fierce indictment of them as incapable of what is greatest in humanity and as guilty of intolerance and cruelty. Contrasted with the Jews stands the Teutonic race, which Chamberlain interpreted in the widest sense, so as to include not only the Germans but also the Celts, the Scandinavians, and the English; but the highest representatives of the Teutonic race are to be found in Germany. France he regards as decadent. She rejected the Reformation which was an assertion of Teutonic charac-acteristics against the Latin races and has fallen under the influence of the Jews. The future of mankind lies with the Germans, when they have found a religion worthy of them and have grown conscious of their destiny. Hitler drew many of his convictions from this book, probably directly. He might have drawn them indirectly because, although the anti-Semitic current in Germany developed out of a dislike for the Jews' spiritual and economic power, the promotion of genuinely racist hatred during the years before the War of 1914–18 was the work of Richard Wagner, the Younger, whose son-in-law Chamberlain was. Hitler may well have read articles or pamphlets emanating from the Bayreuth Group.
