<<<Part II Part IV>>>
In Part II of this series, we looked at Maistre’s “Generative Principle of Political Constitutions.” In Part III, we fast-forward to the 20th century, and examine the regime that forms the anti-foundation of our world.
Ours is an age of darkness. It besets us on all sides. Everywhere one turns, things threaten to fall apart; the center cannot hold. On this much we may all agree, whether liberal or illiberal. That is, unless you are Steven Pinker, which, thank Christ, you are not.
Our civilizational mythos tells us that the darkest point was some time in the early 1940s. We seem fascinated by it, again, liberal or not, whether out of enchantment or of horror—we cannot look away. If Maistre is right, this may prove our undoing. In this midnight hour, a man plunged himself, like Aeneas bound for Avernus, into the darkness. The descent is easy; the real work is getting back out.
Lothrop Stoddard: Into the Darkness: Nazi Germany Today (1940)
Stoddard is probably lesser known even than Filmer or Maistre, but was still prominent enough in his day to have worked his way into The Great Gatsby. A Harvard doctor, lawyer, historian, Klansman, and rabid eugenicist, his testimony before the House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization led to the passage of the Immigration Act of 1924, basically the alt-right’s wet dream. In the 1930s, Stoddard’s books were standard reading at military colleges such as the Army War College, the Navy War College, and the Army Industrial College, where he regularly lectured. At the end of the 1930s, he journeyed into the Third Reich, his views being seen as sympathetic enough to gain him unusual access to the people and institutions of wartime Germany. The result of this journey was his book Into the Darkness.
We are no less a theocracy today than any civilization ever has been. And our mythos today is that WWII was a titanic struggle between the forces of good and the forces of evil, the former triumphing over the latter forever. But also, Nazism threatens to rear its satanic head at every turn, but Nazis are both evil and stupid, but we cannot be too vigilant against this formidable foe, and so on it goes. In any case, it is obvious to everyone with even a basic familiarity that Nazi Germany presents several exegetical problems: a) how can the economic miracle be explained? b) how can the nation of Schiller, Hegel, Goethe, etc. have all decided to become barbarians at once? c) does it not seem even just a little bit coincidental that the greatest evil in history by far just happens to be within living memory?
It would be an interesting experiment to view Nazi Germany as we might view say, the Mongol invasions—with some historical detachment. That is of course impossible; one always has an ideology. While anyone claiming not to have an ideology is not to be trusted, the best thing we can do is to try earnestly to examine things in the light of multiple ideologies.
The great value of Stoddard’s book—more than that it is a primary source offering unprecedented access, that Stoddard himself was so formidably learned, that his journalism makes today’s look like a middle school book report—is that it is a first-hand account of Nazi Germany not colored by hostile ideology. And yet this is no puff piece. Stoddard is not afraid to paint particular people unflatteringly, describing a regional party leader as “a distinctly sinister-looking type; hard-faced, with a cruel eye and a still crueler mouth. A sadist, if ever I saw one.”[1] Alyssa Milano’s estrogen-fueled jeremiads are rarely so scathing. Stoddard also point-blank asks the clerical President of Slovakia about “reports that Slovakia is merely a puppet state of the Reich.”[2] He is not here to fellate anyone, nor is he under any illusions that he is going to get the full story, even in the strictest off-the-record comments. He is well aware of the rigorous sanitation process through which journalistic statements go before leaving wartime Germany and the sort of trouble into which one can get for displeasing the government—he details them for the reader. Summarizing the foreign journalist’s situation:
“There are quite a few locked doors, and he had best not try and open them. But at least he knows where he stands, and the rules of the game are made clear to him.”[3]
When interviewing Joseph Goebbels, he well understands that he is being fed “propaganda of the Goebbels brand.”[4] A summary of Stoddard’s observational powers, in contrast to, well… every journalist in the Current Year:
“Much of what I am about to say is so strange and so repellent to our mode of thought that the reader will very likely find himself in a sort of Alice-in-Wonderland realm of ideas, wherein almost everything seems upside-down from his point of view. He will therefore be tempted to dismiss the whole business as either hypocritical camouflage or arrant nonsense.
That, however, would be a shortsighted attitude. After months of intensive study and innumerable conversations with representative Nazis, high and low in the Party scale, I am convinced that the ‘Old Guard,’ at any rate, are for the most part, fanatical zealots. If the Nazi thesis were a dialectic screen hiding mere lust for power and pelf, it would never have converted so large a portion of the traditionally honest, idealistic German people. If the Nazi leaders were just a band of cynical adventurers, with tongue in cheek and wholly ‘on the make,’ it would be far easier to deal with them.”[5]
In the book, we get the impression of a truly corporatist society, one where people could still actually make sacrifices. This stands in stark contrast to us, for whom a little hardship is unthinkable. Imagine this in a COVID world:
“Another noteworthy point is that the Government made no attempt to ease the people into the war by tactful stages. Quite the reverse. Nazi spokesmen tell you frankly that they cracked down hard from the start and made things just about as tough as the civilian population could bear. Indeed, they say that severe rationing of food and clothing from the very beginning was done not merely to avert present waste and ensure future supplies; it was done also to make people realize that they were in a life-and-death struggle for which no sacrifice was too great.”[6]
He devotes a whole chapter to rationing, cataloging minute logistical details. Somehow this never manages to become tedious. The rationing is absolutely Spartan: one egg per month, everything rationed right down to thread and yarn, almost no edible fats and soap. The rationing cards have nothing to do with price; once it is determined how much meat, milk, cereals etc. the buyer is entitled to buy, they still have to pay for it. A modest bill of goods would take perhaps an hour to sort out due to the byzantine calculations on both sides of the transaction. One does not need to be told that this is not a society clamoring to reopen the economy for the good of the NASDAQ—but privation or no, it is nice to think that in some time and place people were not utterly ruled by their wallets. These people do not seem quite like us, and yet not in the way liberals would have us believe. Stoddard does not exactly paint a picture of rampant xenophobia:
“Feeling utterly helpless, I determined to seek information; so I pressed the button to the first floor apartment and as the latch clicked I went inside. As I walked across the hallway the apartment entrance opened and a pleasant-faced young woman stood in the doorway. I explained the situation, stating that I was a total stranger. Her face grew sympathetic, then set in a quick frown.
‘You say that taxi man didn’t make sure?’ she exclaimed. ‘Ach, how stupid! The fellow ought to be reported, Wait a minute and Ill show you myself.’ She disappeared, returning a moment later wearing a raincoat.
I protested that I could find my way from her directions, but she would have none of it. ‘No, no,’ she insisted. ‘Such treatment to a newly arrived foreigner! I am bound to make up for that driver’s inefficiency.’”[7]
And yet this is not a people suffering from Stockholm Syndrome as we are so often told. The man in the street of Berlin ca. 1940 actually believed to an extent in the racial ideology of National Socialism:
“The average German seems disinclined to talk much to the foreign visitor about this oppressed minority. However, I gathered that the general public does not approve of the violence and cruelty which Jews have suffered. But I also got the impression that, while the average German condemned such methods, he was not unwilling to see the Jews go and would not wish them back again. I personally remember how widespread anti-Semitism was under the Empire, and I encountered it in far more noticeable form when I was in Germany during the inflation period of 1923. The Nazis therefore seem to have had a popular predisposition to work on when they preached their extreme anti-Semitic doctrines.”[8]
These sketches of life in the Third Reich would be valuable enough, but the core of the book, and what sets it apart, are the interviews with the Nazi top brass. Let us cut to the chase: the greatest curiosity, his meeting with Adolf Hitler, is something of a letdown. This is no fault of Stoddard’s; it was not an interview, but an audience—the force of his word forbade him from publishing the text. He does, however, give a detailed impression of Hitler the man in terms of presence, which is still interesting. Stoddard shows himself to be an actual journalist in his interview with Heinrich Himmler, chief of the SS. In questioning Himmler about toleration of political dissidents, he refuses to let the question drop until he has a real answer. He asks him about Nazi treatment of Pastor Niemöller, of the famous phrase “first they came for the socialists…,” and Himmler clearly displays discomfort before saying “if foreign attacks upon us in this affair would cease, perhaps he could be more leniently dealt with.”[9] The interview with Goebbels is even more revealing. Some of the limitations of National Socialism, which the Brahmin Stoddard well understood, come into focus here, viz. its oft-noted plebeianism:
“’The English,’ I remarked, ‘seem to believe that this is a struggle between democracy and dictatorship.’
‘Dictatorship!’ shot back Dr. Goebbels scornfully. ‘Isn’t the National Socialist Party essentially the German people? Aren’t its leaders men of the people? How silly to imagine that this can be what the English call dictatorship! What we today have in Germany is not a dictatorship but rather a political discipline forced upon us by the pressure of circumstances. However, since we have it, why shouldn’t we take advantage of the fact?’”[10]
This ceding of frame to the enemy conspicuously foreshadows our DR3; apparently the Right is not quite done with it. The Third Reich was indeed a dictatorship, and there is nothing wrong with that in and of itself. If Filmer can sing the praises of the dictator, why not Goebbels? Stoddard is clearly impressed with Goebbels’ rhetorical power; one does not get to be Minister of Propaganda for nothing. The class collaboration at the heart of National Socialism comes across far better than the fetishization of “the people”:
“The new trend [of military fraternization between classes] is due to two causes. In the first place, it is part of the Nazi philosophy to break down class and caste distinctions, and weld the whole nation into a conscious Gemeinschaft—an almost mystical communion, as contrasted with the rest of the world. In such a socialized nationhood, the traditional caste barriers, first between officers and soldiers, secondly between army and civilians, are obviously out of line. The present German army is undoubtedly more of a Volksheer—a People’s Army, than it ever was before. This new tendency is also furthered by the fact that with better education, specialization, and technical training of the rank-and-file, officers and men are more nearly on the same plane. The old Imperial Army, unmechanized and made up so largely of peasant lads commanded by Junker squires, was a vastly different institution.”[11]
The blut und boden ideological plank is likewise sound. Minister of Food and Agriculture Richard Darré explains that agrarian policy was not limited merely to food production, but based itself on the obvious fact that that no nation can prosper without a sound rural population. This involves securing for farmers not only a decent living, but also respect, and a national culture rooted in the soil. Stoddard details the legislative and institutional changes made to bring this about: the establishment of the National Food Estate, a gigantic vertical public trust, a corporation bringing the interests of all involved in food production into alignment; the Market Control Statute which links all of this to the consumer, a vast system of price controls protecting profit but not profiteering; and the Hereditary Farmlands Law reviving the old Teutonic concept that land ought to be inalienable and the family tied to an estate of its own. This is only one example, involving agrarian policy—Stoddard offers similar examples in industrial policy, recreational, educational, and many others.
However, Stoddard also underlines some of the deepest errors of the Third Reich, errors which one will not find in contemporary histories, errors which were far deeper than the strategic ones that doomed it, and which are of far greater import. Dictatorship—Filmer would call it monarchy—is the mark of a healthy society, but there are some things into which the absolute sovereign ought not to intrude, for both his own good and that of his people. In discussing the educational system, Stoddard explains that the Hitler Youth demanded of its members strict loyalty to the state above loyalty to the family, subverting fatherly power by encouraging children to disobey their parents. This caused the traditional patriarch of the German family to object to the claims of the Hitler Youth on the home even when they might be in sympathy with the regime. Often children denounced their own parents to the authorities, leading to many personal tragedies. This underlines the main failure of Nazism, which is also where it fundamentally dovetails with left-wing socialism: its commitment to creating a (National) Socialist Man. In ignoring man-as-he-is—or more properly, the Teuton-as-he-is—National Socialism unmoors itself from anything like blut und boden.
There is more. The Reich repeated the civilization-destroying error of the Greek tyrant Cleisthenes.[12] Stoddard writes,
“The Federal States have been abolished. In their place are Gauen, or provinces, which designedly cut across State lines with the avowed intention of making the inhabitants forget their historic local attachments. That was what the French revolutionists did when they abolished the provinces of royal France and cut the country up into Departments. This was done so arbitrarily that the French Departments have never developed much vitality. The Nazis claim that they have avoided this mistake by laying out each Province as a logical region based on a combination of history, geography, economics, culture, and common sense.”[13]
The problem here is not the top-down social ontology, but the deliberate sabotage of localism. If the aim is to weld the people into an organic whole, destroying local, historical consciousness is not the way to do it. This error was not isolated; as Stoddard details, what was done here with political borders was also done with law. This innovation and experiment in such ancient institutions as the family, law, and historic local identities characterizes the fatal flaw in National Socialist ideology: it placed modernism, development, and the principles of the Enlightenment above the archaic Aryan spirit at the core of its ideology, a spirit which it misunderstood.
This is not the sort of critique available in contemporary histories of the Third Reich, whose analysis is almost universally shallow and nakedly biased, and it is this that sets Stoddard’s work apart. His is not a history, not so much a narrative, but a snapshot of a moment in time. But a picture is worth a thousand words, and can unravel a narrative, which is why you will find this book conspicuously absent from college reading lists. If it were present, then students might actually be able to produce sound critiques of National Socialism that accept its framing of Germany’s historical destiny in terms of the Aryan spirit. And what fun would that be?
It is one of history’s great ironies that a glimpse into the Teutonic spirit, by way of the Aryan spirit, lay across the Maginot Line, in the work of a Frenchman. The Reich needed only consult this seer to have placed its ideology on the surest of foundations. In Part IV, we will cast our iron gaze across the Rhine, and then across the steppe.
<<<Part II Part IV>>>
References
- Stoddard, Lothrop (1940). Into the Darkness: Nazi Germany Today. Duell, Sloan & Pearce, Inc. p. 56.
- Ibid., p. 82.
- Ibid., p. 46.
- Ibid., p. 70.
- Ibid., p. 264.
- Ibid., p. 65.
- Ibid., p. 35.
- Ibid., p. 286.
- Ibid., p. 258.
- Ibid., p. 68–9.
- Ibid., p. 77.
- Maxwell III, Edward (2020, Jul. 16). “Tyranny and the Modern State Cult”. The American Sun.
- Stoddard, p. 268.
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