Sorry National Socialist,(Nazi-oh-nal So-zee-al-ist)
also a request for next month:
Into the Darkness by Lothrop Stoddard
Lothrop Stoddard’s memoirs of being a foreign correspondent in Germany in the early months of the war is a truly unique document. Stoddard, as a racialist and eugenicist, is obviously sympathetic to many of National Socialism’s goals, but is also very troubled by the “nationalistic hatreds” tearing Europe apart.
Stoddard’s account gives us the human side. He tries to give us the perspective of people – whether ordinary farmers, clean-cut SS men, mid-ranking Party officials, or leaders such as Walther Darré and Heinrich Himmler – on their day-to-day work and the rationale for it. This is a wonderful book for actually understanding various aspects of the Third Reich on their own terms: The project of a Volksgemeinshaft (national community) of “mystical communion” and solidarity, the Hitler Youth’s goal of instilling good habits (akin to scouting) and racial consciousness, the moral signalling of giving to the needy with the Winterhilfe (Winter Help), the eugenics courts (“if anything too conservative,” Stoddard says), and a vast propaganda machine that has “systematically forged a naturally disciplined people into an amazingly responsive psychic unison.”
For instance, Stoddard cites the fourth of the “ten commandments” which all young boys and girls must learn to recite by heart in the new Germany:
All thy qualities of body and spirit perish if though diest without heirs. They are a heritage, a donation from thine ancestors. They exist as a chain, of which though art a link. Durst thou break that chain, save under stern necessity? Thy life is straitly bound by time; family and folk endure.
The horror! Quick, show our girls some reruns of Sex and the City!
We get a sense of the Third Reich in 1939–1940 (before the victory in the Battle of France), not as the great juggernaut of both National Socialist and Allied propaganda, but as an insecure country in a hated war. The little inconveniences of daily life suggest a deeper fragility and vulnerability: ubiquitous ration cards, a dangerous lack of certain foods (edible fats), the systematic recycling of waste, and the blacking out of cities at night to avoid Allied bombing (hence the book’s title).
Stoddard’s analysis of the Third Reich, it seems to me, has aged very well. He sees National Socialism as an extraordinary but understandable response to the similarly extraordinary conditions of early twentieth-century Germany. There was a whole “lost generation” shaped by the constant insecurity and violence of the First World War, famine, subjugation by the Versailles settlement, Bolshevism, and the Great Depression. National Socialism represents that lost generation’s coming to power. The Third Reich’s successes are explained by Stoddard as the result of “[a]n absolute dictatorship over an industrious, resourceful people.” Stoddard senses something terrible is going to happen to the Jews, given the atmosphere, and specifically cites the Armenian precedent." -Guillaume Durocher
counter-currents.com/2016/04/understanding-hitler-and-the-third-reich/