If one has the patience or the curiosity to go down certain conservative rabbit holes in social media, one will encounter a small corner of the movement in which one finds a latent or explicit desire to somehow rehabilitate Adolf Hitler and the National Socialists (i.e., the “Nazis”).
This is often found in the form of comments or memes that take the position that the National Socialists were the defenders of “the West” against a militant left then growing in Europe. For example, one meme superimposes the phrase “I tried to save you” over Hitler’s face. This image and similar images are generally accompanied by comments to the effect that Western Europe would somehow today be better off if the National Socialists had managed to implement their preferred regime type across Europe. The overall message is that Hitler was some sort of 20th-century Joseph de Maistre seeking to defend Europe from the wrecking ball of the left’s revolutionaries.
But I have some bad news for these self-proclaimed defenders of “tradition.” The National Socialists were not in favor of traditional Western institutions. Far from being the enemies of the revolutionary left, the National Socialists were the left, only committed to a type of totalitarianism slightly different from that of the Leninist left.
The National Socialists were—as the name would suggest—socialists. Moreover, they were totalitarian socialists, and their institutional model was Soviet totalitarianism.
Destroying the West to Save It
Hitler, of course, hated all Westerners who did not subscribe to his revolutionary ideology. This is the man who ordered the complete destruction of the city of Paris when it became clear that the Wehrmacht would be driven out of northern France. Hitler is also the man who issued the Nero Decree that ordered that all infrastructure in Germany—including that necessary to feed civilians—be destroyed in an effort to slow down the Allies. According to several accounts from his staff, Hitler was unconcerned by the fact that this would reduce the German population to a state of utter starvation. For Hitler, German civilization did not deserve to survive since it had failed in its war against the Slavs and other presumed inferiors of Europe.
It’s an odd “defender of the West” who seeks to starve millions of Westerners to death.
Indeed, had Hitler any real regard for preserving Western institutions from the Bolsheviks, he would certainly never have invaded Poland. After all, by the 1930s, it was the Poles—not the Germans—who had become the primary eastern bulwark against the westward spread of Soviet communism.
(The fact that Bolsheviks controlled Russia, of course, was yet another “gift” to the world from a German regime. Had the Imperial German Army not destroyed the Tsar’s army in 1918, Lenin would have never been able to take control of the Russian state.)
Were Hitler interested in weakening Soviet power, he would have, at the very least, sought a stronger Poland as a buffer state between central Europe and the Soviet east. Instead, Hitler signed a treaty with the Soviets designed to destroy Poland and hand over eastern Poland to Soviet communists.
In reality, Hitler was hardly concerned with defending Western civilization but was driven by far more parochial concerns centered on taking back Danzig from the Poles and subjugating the “inferior” Polish Slavs. Polish racial inferiority, of course, was explicit in Nazi law and Nazi ideology. Heinrich Himmler was sure to leave no doubt of this when he said that the policy was to ensure that “all Poles will disappear from the world“ and when he said ”the great German people should consider it as its major task to destroy all Poles.”
The National Socialists Were Leftists
The fact that the National Socialists were most at home with the revolutionary left is further explored in detail by the great Austrian polymath Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn in his book “Leftism: From de Sade and Marx to Hitler and Marcuse.”Kuehnelt-Leddihn was far too well informed to fall for simple-minded theories about Hitler’s alleged good intentions or noble quest to save Christendom.
Regarding Hitler as a “basically mediocre neurotic,” Kuehnelt-Leddihn noted that Hitler “certainly subscribed to Benito Mussolini’s ‘Everything within the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State’”—a slogan utterly contrary to traditional Western thought. Hitler had also “drunk from almost the same ideological sources” as socialists such as Mussolini, yet this was modified by Hitler’s enthrallment with Czech national socialists. The ideology of the Czech national socialists lent to Hitler many of his core, essentially leftist, beliefs: “anticlericalism, an intimate synthesis between nationalism and socialism, trust in the working class, the peasantry, and the lower middle class, [and] opposition to the nobility.” This ideology was also anti-capitalist and therefore against the bourgeoisie.
The nationalist component of this ideology led to the historical accident of the National Socialists being placed on the right even though, as Kuehnelt-Leddihn noted, nationalism was not “conservative” in the European context:
“In Germany after World War I, most unfortunately, the National Socialists were seated on the extreme right because to simpleminded people nationalists were rightists, if not conservatives—a grotesque idea when one remembers how antinationalistic Metternich, the monarchical families, and Europe’s ultraconservatives had been in the past. Nationalism, indeed, has been a by-product of the French Revolution (no less so than militarism).”
But even for those who find such nuances about nationalism unconvincing, the National Socialist opposition to traditional European institutions can be seen in Nazi hatred for the great conservative power of Europe, the Catholic Church.
Kuehnelt-Leddihn connects Hitler’s anti-Catholicism to his early years living under the conservative Austrian regime, which Hitler loathed. After the war, when the Austrian state threatened to arrest Hitler for desertion, this, according to Kuehnelt-Leddihn, “gave further nourishment to Hitler’s hatred for the Catholic Church.”
The realities of National Socialist policy reflect this well, and the Party remained disfavored by the Catholics during the rise of the Third Reich. Kuehnelt-Leddihn wrote:
“A study of the numerical development of the different parties in the four elections preceding Hitler’s advent to power is most interesting. ... Maps which I have published elsewhere show distinctly that religion was a main factor in the territorial growth of National Socialism. ... There is no doubt that the Nazi victories were gained primarily with the aid of the Protestant or, to be more precise, the ‘progressive’ post-Protestant areas: A mere glance at the statistical maps proves it.”
For example, Dachau Prison camp contained a barracks specifically dedicated to clergy, where more than 2,700 clerics were imprisoned. Nearly 95 percent of these were Catholic clergy. More than a thousand Catholic priests died in Dachau. Non-German clergy fared even worse than those at Dachau. St. Maximilian Kolbe, a Polish citizen, was deliberately starved to death at Auschwitz for political “crimes.”
The National Socialists were more than happy to substitute new religious practices of the variety we would expect from any left-wing movement today. It’s no surprise that many high-ranking Nazi officials were obsessed with Germanic paganism, occult rituals, and a variety of what we might call “new age” religious beliefs.
Yet in spite of all the evidence, the “Hitler-tried-to-save-Europe” meme seems to endure among some of those who fancy themselves as very edgy or contrarian defenders of “Christendom” and “the West.” Moreover, by buying into the idea of Hitler as some sort of defender of the West, those who favor rehabilitating the National Socialists promote the left’s propaganda line that the Nazis were conservatives, reactionaries, Christians, or some other type of European traditionalists.
Of course, that shouldn’t surprise us. The National Socialists were never anything better than useful idiots for those who sought to destroy the West. Hitler’s modern-day defenders are no different.
