An attack against whites is raging full bore these days (it’s July of 2020).  Hoards are roaming about desecrating and toppling statues of white heroes.  Every center-stage talking head and computer key tapper and every school teacher and administrator from grade school to graduate school is steadily piling on—racism, racism, racism, racism, racism, racism, racism, racism, racism, racism, racism, racism . . . and racism.   Seriously, I’m wondering whether Goebbels with the Jews and the Turks with the Armenians had worse things to say about their prey than what I’m hearing about my people—who, by the way, as far back as I can trace, worked a small peanut farm, went deaf tending a roaring-loud machine in a factory, stood arms and hands in the air with shoulders throbbing cutting people’s hair, rang up a cash register all day at Schuneman’s Department Store in downtown Saint Paul, Minnesota, came up with the money (just barely) to pay the rent for the second-floor rooms in Mr. Jensen’s house we were living in, bought me corduroy pants to wear to Davis Grade School, and oppressed absolutely nobody on the face of this earth.

I’m not up on history enough to know to what extent, if any, the Jews and Armenians bought the horror story being told about them, but it’s scary how many white people these days, particularly the young, are, in self-flagellating fervor, beating their heads against cement walls.  I go all the way back to Adlai Stevenson, who ran as the Democrat candidate for president in 1952.  Dignified, urbane, quick-witted.  I’m comparing him to the current presumptive Democratic nominee—a shaky, nursing home apparition—putting down an entire race of people and offering slurred promises, scout’s honor, not to select one of them to be on his ticket as vice-president.   It takes my breath away.

The Black Lives Matter thugs, Antifa marauders, and establishment bad-mouthers didn’t spring up from nowhere.  What we are so painfully experiencing is a continuation, and escalation, of what’s been going on for decades.  In 2009, eleven years ago—and it could have been written years before that—with a focus on elementary and secondary schooling, I wrote this (I’ve added some present-day parenthetical inserts):¹

We need to put forth a positive narrative of the white race to counter the negative one being imposed on our children.  The late scholar Neil Postman wrote that a narrative 

tells of origins and envisions a future; it is a story that constructs ideals, prescribes rules of conduct, provides a source of authority, and, above all, gives a sense of continuity and purpose.²

The narrative, the story, of whites being preached to our children these years is one in which the themes are not the truly remarkable accomplishments of whites but rather repression and injustice: racism, sexism, economic and political exploitation, arrogance, and exclusion.  The late critic and novelist Susan Sontag, honored far and wide and a regular on the commencement speech circuit, proclaimed, “The white race is the cancer of human history.”  Especially villainous in the story are white men, or, in the parlance of the day, white males—insensitive, boorish, authoritarian, violent.

The challenge facing humankind, the current narrative has it, is to put whites in their proper place, which, depending on the version of story being told, is either on a par and mixed in with everybody else or chastened and deferential at the back of the line.  Absurdly, whites are being charged with bringing themselves down; and even more absurdly, many are taking on the task.  Is there any other group of people—blacks, Jews, anybody—you could con into self-abnegation and turning on their kinsmen?

White young people are taught the contradictory beliefs that 1) race doesn’t exist—it is a social fiction, 2) race does exist but doesn’t matter, and 3) race exists and matters, and for them their race is something to feel guilty about and atone.   Decades of teaching college students and I never heard one of them point out the irrationality of that package of assertions.  Though I don’t want to conclude that it got by all of them; white students know to keep their mouths shut, even with someone like me who has the appearance at least of being on their side.  In any case, they got the basic idea, and I believe great numbers took it to heart: they have no business feeling one iota of positive connection with their race, their European heritage, or one another.

What’s going on in our schools is nothing less than a subtle genocidal attack against a race of people.  The first step in this pogrom is to get white children and only them—no one else is taught this—to reject, even disdain, their racial identity.

Prominent educator Herbert Kohl reflects widely held views in the field of education when he writes about a university class he instructed in which he sought to “level the playing field” by teaching white students that their culture is “no more permanent or special that other cultures.”³

Kohl says he discouraged whites from seeing themselves as separate and distinct or feeling pride in being white.  His lessons—coming after years of similar ones in many other classrooms and in countless movie theaters and on countless television screens—bore fruit: he reports with obvious satisfaction that his white students said they “hated being called white” and were “annoyed” and “angry” that they are white.    Kohl is Jewish; would he have been as proud of getting Jewish students to say they were annoyed and angry that they are Jewish?

White students need to hear another story, another narrative, about their race.  They need to hear of their adventurous and visionary and daring and spiritual ancestors—farmers, warriors, philosophers, poets, scientists, architects, civilization builders.  To be sure, white history isn’t an unblemished record, but the main thrust of the white race isn’t the tale of oppression being imposed on us.

Last weekend, I was sitting with a friend at the lake front in Burlington, Vermont.  There were hundreds of people around where we were— parents and children, young couples, older people.  There was a gentility, a peaceful flow, a grace, to the people and the setting.  It was safe where we were.  I remarked to my friend how impressed I was with the architecture in the lake front area and in the downtown stores and offices just behind us, and how everything was kept up so well.  After a time of silence, she said, “You know what I’m thinking?  Everybody here is white.  This is what they built, this is what they created; this is how they live when they are among their own.”

Young white people—all white people—have a right to acknowledge the worth as their race, and to be proud of it, and to feel connected to it, and to feel responsible for continuing and extending its best aspects.  A white narrative needs to include the reality that this way of life is threatened.  There are fewer and fewer Burlingtons now days (and how long will Burlington be Burlington?) and more and more Detroits and Londons and Cincinnatis.  My hometown of Minneapolis, a lovely, safe city of lakes when I was growing up, has gone through drastic demographic changes and, predictably, much of it isn’t lovely and safe any longer.  It has come to be called—I find this so sad—“Murderapolis.” [Unemployed, ex-con, drug-using, bad-check-passing, arrest-resisting, and future-mural-idol George Floyd graced the city with his presence after leaving his young daughter and her mother in Houston.] It goes unreported, but white people everywhere are under siege and fleeing—it’s disdainfully called “white flight” by people who live in gated communities.

My book One Sheaf, One Vine is made up of the personal statements about race from seventeen everyday white Americans, who if it hadn’t been for my book would be publicly silent [just as, to a remarkable degree, everyday white Americans have been publicly silent throughout this recent post-Floyd rampage].⁴  Those who control the public discourse don’t want us to hear from them, and anyone, like me, who makes them visible is subject to attack.  Hear from two of the white people who speak out in my book:

The first is a forty-year-old man from the northeastern part of the United States.

People who think of themselves as enlightened and on the moral high ground in matters of race write off people like me as ignorant racists.  Unlike them, so it goes, we pre-judge people.  If only we were exposed to racial and ethnic diversity we would learn to value different kinds of people—etcetera, etcetera, you’ve heard the line.  You’ll notice that most of these people doing the pontificating and finger pointing about racial equality and harmony and the virtues of integration and multi-racialism do it from the far distance of the leafy suburbs or a university campus somewhere.  The fact of the matter is that, unlike practically all of them, I have lived up close with the reality of race in America.  And regardless of what they might like to think, I am not stupid or unenlightened or their moral inferior.  Those who look down their noses at people like me should come live for a year or two or three where my family and millions of other white families live.   Let their children grow up and go to school in this pigsty and be threatened and attacked and robbed and raped.  Then they can talk. 

The second is a twenty-eight-year-old woman who is leaving southern California for Washington State or Oregon, or perhaps Canada, she’s not sure, in the face of the non-white infusion of the area in which she lives:

I just want to live a normal life, preferably with a family, but if I can’t have that, a life with good friends in a community where I feel safe and I’m free to walk down the street without looking over my shoulder.  I want to be able to express pride in my people and admiration for our white ancestors and continue their traditions without minority harassment and interference.  When I am really old, I want to live in peace instead of like the old people in the neighborhood where I live who are eighty-ninety years old without the energy or the money to escape. 

This is going on, and our children are hearing their race and heritage denigrated in schools, and they are being deluged with crude and vulgar messages and images from the lowest rung of black culture, and they are the victims of racial discrimination when they apply for college or a job, and demographically their race is steadily disappearing from the face of the earth.

I received an e-mail yesterday from a father who told me that his daughter, who had worked incredibly hard in school and had graduated at the top of her high school class, had been rejected by all the Ivy League schools she had applied to while many of her black classmates with far lower academic achievements and test scores had been admitted.  He said his daughter “cried and cried.”

After reading what this father wrote, I cried and cried.  A new narrative should include this white girl, along the invitation to white people to expel their sense of isolation, their feeling of separation from one another, their atomization, and join with their racial kinsmen to put a stop to this injustice and cruelty.  Doing that isn’t about being against anyone or hurting anyone.  Rather, it is about racial self-love and self-preservation and self-determination, which are the rights of every race of people.

*   *   *

The campaign against whites sets up a demonic category—white—and puts every last white person in it, whether they be from Silicon Valley or rural West Virginia, are a janitor or corporate head, old or young, liberal or conservative, or from the distant past or alive now.  They are all the same, and they are all bad, bad, bad.

What does that accomplish?

It replaces reality with a narrative.   What white people actually did, or do, or are—the incredible complexity of that—becomes a simple, and negative, story.  Now, the basis of truth isn’t facts or logical inference; it is the story.  All you need to keep the story going is a single instance that seems to affirm it.  A police-related death in Minneapolis—ah yes, the story is true.

It makes the grievances of blacks, thirteen percent of America’s population, the national agenda.  It makes a group of people all-important who on their merits deserve little or no attention until they get their acts together.  It gives people unearned respect.  It relieves blacks of personal responsibility, a basic tenant of this culture and society,

And frighteningly, ominously, as it did with the Jews and the Albanians, it sets whites up for being debased, abused, taken down, robbed, assaulted, and killed.  Narratives are deadly serious business.

*   *   *

Part of exploiting, injuring, and displacing people is to keep them from thinking about what you don’t want them thinking about.  Stories keep concerns, questions, issues, and possibilities out of peoples’ minds.  To illustrate, here are a couple of white people who at one time were prominent in American life who have been excised from the past—David Starr Jordan and Lyrl Clark Van Hyning.   Those currently in power don’t want us to know about Dr. Jordan and Ms. Van Hyning because if we did, we might be prompted to think about things they don’t want us getting into.  As you read through these accounts of the lives of these two people, think about what that might be.

*   *   *

David Starr Jordan (1851–1931) was a distinguished naturalist and social philosopher, published poet, and the first president of Stanford University. He was described by his biographer as “one of the most versatile men America has produced, winning distinction not only as an educator, philosopher, and scientist but also as an explorer, crusader for peace, advisor to presidents, and statesman.”⁵

Jordan was openly and proudly racially conscious.  He used the term “Aryan” and asserted that the “whole body of the ‘blond race'” constituted a brotherhood.  He held that race was “the blood of a nation” and the primary determinant in its history.

Jordan’s believed white racial superiority to be the observation of every intelligent person.  Jordan asserted that northern European peoples have the highest level of the qualities needed to produce a superior society and culture.  Very important to Jordan, Nordics didn’t have what was most detrimental to civilization building: a high percentage of dissolute and disorganized.  He cautioned that even the most favorable surroundings “can never change a bad breed into a good one.”

Jordan saw America as a Nordic nation:  “Its freedom was won and its integrity maintained by Nordic methods,” he wrote.  “Who gave them this chance?” he asked.  “Did they not take it for themselves?  They have had liberty, education, and self-government because they wanted these things and wanted them badly enough to put forth the effort to get them.”

Jordan despaired of the introduction of Africans into the country and the prospect of racial intermixing.  He decried the immigration of “weaker groups” being fostered during his time by industrialists in search of cheap labor.

He prophesized that unless Jewish power in the world was held in check the result would be “nothing less than Armageddon.”

Jordan opposed war as an instrument of public policy.  He pointed out that in the American Civil War half of the best young men in the South were killed or died of disease, and that forty percent of them did not leave descendants.   Jordan noted that wars breed hatred, resentment, grievance, and the desire for revenge, which lead to future wars and even more slaughter and devastation.  He repudiated the contention you must fight fire with fire. “Fire will not put out fire,” he warned.

Along with many prominent people of his time—among them, John Harvey Kellogg of breakfast cereal fame, naturalist Luther Burbank, and Harvard president, Charles Eliot—Jordan was a eugenicist. “A race of men or a herd of cattle are governed by the same laws of selection,” he wrote.  He condemned social policies impelled by paternalism and charity that result in racial deterioration by encouraging “weakness to mate with weakness.”

*   *   *

Lyrl Clark Van Hyning (1892–1973) was a leader of a women’s movement in the late 1930s and early ’40s that centered its efforts on opposing America’s involvement in the war in Europe.⁶  At its peak, the confederation of women’s groups that conducted this campaign had six million members.  Although Van Hyning saw herself as a champion of women, she stood in stark contrast to today’s feminists.  Her politics were right-of-center.  She was highly nationalistic, patriotic, anti-communist, and critical of Jewish influence, and pro-free-enterprise.  Her orientation was, in the first instance, maternal: she saw herself as a mother and approached things from that perspective.  Only mothers, she believed, could save their sons from the war that was impending and then waged.  She upheld the traditional family, which included a strong and vital patriarchal presence. She didn’t set herself off against men: her husband and son and other men, weren’t “them” to her but rather “us.”  She didn’t portray men as competitors or adversaries, or see them as needing to be held in check or reconditioned.  Last, she was a strong Christian.  A few weeks before the invasion of Europe that everyone knew was coming soon, she declared: “Those boys who will be forced to throw their young flesh against the impregnable wall of steel are the same babies mothers cherished and comforted and brought to manhood.  Mother’s kiss healed all hurts of childhood.  But on invasion day no kiss can heal the terrible hurts and mother won’t be there.  Mothers have betrayed their sons to the butchers.”

*   *   *

What might these two lives bring up among white people, particularly young whites, that those in power want to suppress?

• The possibility of white racial consciousness and commitment. That’s for other people—in fact, all other people—but not for whites.
• The possibility that, in fact, there are qualitative differences among the races. What if instead of looking down our noses and blotting out figures like Thomas Jefferson, Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson as ignorant racists, case closed, we said, “We would do well to look into why people as capable and accomplished as these men thought about race as they did.”
• That America was founded as a Nordic nation and would have been better off staying that way. And that now, Nordic people should have the right to live their way among their own.
• That everybody concerned about Jewish impact isn’t a lunatic bent on exterminating them. That there is the possibility of considering this issue rationally, dispassionately, and objectively.
• That woman’s issues are not the sole province of the political left and its perspective. There was a women’s movement—with six million members!—that demonstrated that.
• That war isn’t simply a necessary evil, including the beloved World War II, which resulted in 50 million deaths in Europe alone. Those in power back then loved it when Iowa farm boys set down their plows and sailed across the ocean to anonymously kill European boys who looked just like them.   And they loved it that the boys’ mothers went along with it.  As a very small child in the early ‘40s, I remember seeing small stars on pieces of cloth tacked on to front doors of houses.  I have since learned that a blue star represented a family member in the military and a gold star a family member who had been killed in the war.  The Sullivan family made the news for having five gold stars for the five Sullivan brothers who lost their lives in the war.  I don’t know how the mother of the Sullivan boys thought about the war, but Lyrl Clark Van Hyning, the mother of a boy, wasn’t having any part of that government program of destruction and slaughter.  The thought of Lyrl Clark Van Hyning’s example crossing the minds of mothers sends shivers down the spine of those who want a ready supply of young bodies for the next killing spree in the Middle East.

What can be done to compete with the prevailing negative narrative about white people? In Part 2, I’ll offer some thoughts in response to that question.

Go to Part 2 of 2.

Those who are acquainted with the many books and films produced recently about the 20 July 1944 plot to assassinate Hitler led by Count Claus Schenk von Stauffenberg may have the impression that the plot was a result of the aversion of the German aristocracy to the political ambitions of a commoner like Hitler. In fact, Stauffenberg’s failed attempt was only the last of a series of attempts to assassinate Hitler that originated from General Ludwig Beck (1880–1944). Beck was not an aristocrat but belonged to the officer class and resigned his post as Chief of Staff of the German Army in August 1938 mainly on account of his disagreement with Hitler’s aggressive foreign political aims.

The German aristocracy itself was incorporated into the National Socialist movement from the twenties on without much difficulty, even though some of the aristocratic National Socialists had to tolerate the contempt of peers who were opposed to the socialist aspects of Hitler’s government. According to Stephan Malinowski,[1] in all, about 300 noble families of the lower aristocracy based in Prussia contributed about 3,600 members to the National Socialist Party, and the number of adherents from the upper ruling families rose from 70 in the thirties to around 270 by 1945. Most of these were Prussian and Protestant rather than Bavarian and Catholic, since the Bavarian Catholic aristocrats were dedicated to the House of Wittelsbach, whose crown prince, Rupert of Bavaria, was firmly opposed to Hitler and was exiled in December 1939 to Italy while other members of his family were interned for some years in concentration camps.

It is true that Stauffenberg and some of his fellow conspirators in the 20 July plot were shocked by Hitler’s extreme persecution of the Jews, but it cannot be clearly said that all of the conspirators were impelled by philo-Semitic sentiments since the German aristocracy was, in general, anti-Semitic and anti-Marxist like Hitler himself. Count Wolf-Heinrich Helldorf (whose 1934 essay is presented here) was in fact a vigorous anti-Semite in the thirties[2] and may even have played a part in the organisation of the Kristallnach riots, though he eventually joined the conspirators led by Stauffenberg. That all the aristocratic National Socialists did not revolt against Hitler is also clear from the fact that the editor of the collection of essays here presented, Prince Friedrich-Christian of Schaumburg-Lippe, remained a proud National Socialist even after the war.

The following three extracts from the collection of nine essays by aristocratic National Socialists that was edited by Prince Friedrich-Christian of Schaumburg-Lippe, Wo war der Adel? (Where was the aristocracy?, Berlin: Zentralverlag, 1934), show that many of the aristocrats indeed welcomed the opportunity given to them by the National Socialist movement to renew their own aristocratic estate after it had been destroyed alongside the German monarchy in 1918. In turn, the elevated codes of conduct of the aristocrats as traditional rulers of the German domains helped to strengthen the chivalrous image that is often associated with the German military of the Third Reich. It is true, however, that the SS as developed by Himmler from 1929 came to represent the real elite formation of the Third Reich since it was originally created as a bodyguard for Hitler and expressed more directly the dedication to the Führer that was the hallmark of the entire Third Reich. The members of the old aristocracy were absorbed into the SS, as well as into the earlier SA, without much strain since the old and the new elites had in common a desire to renew Germany after its devastating defeat in World War I. One feature that may have been novel, however, about the involvement of the aristocrats in the National Socialist movement is the more socialist conception of themselves that they now manifested, no longer as superior leaders of an anonymous population of subjects but as close collaborators with the latter in the task of building a new German empire.

*   *   *

Count Bernhard von Solms-Laubach [1900–1938]
Director of the National Theatre,
Standartenführer[3]

The Aristocracy is dead – Long live the Aristocracy!

We do not wish to be sentimental, we admit openly that which everybody, however, already knows. That there is no aristocracy any longer in Germany that in its entirety is still capable of representing a clear ideal. The aristocracy is dead because it has killed itself. We stand before a sad remnant, before a burial mound that has been raised up with effort but without jewels, and unlamented, to which one has given the impressive name ‘German aristocratic society’.

And there was once a time when all the names had a strong resonance and an inner significance, when all the families had a calling in the nation, all the names and all the families  as they are neatly recorded today in peerage lists and Gotha pocketbooks[4] as though for museum purposes. There was a time when the German aristocracy was a living fact, when there was bound with the aristocratic name a sacred responsibility towards the people, when the German aristocracy was the bearer of a quite definite worldview, an idealistic worldview in which one’s own advantage could have no meaning compared to the duty to serve to the utmost the people, the country, the state and its representatives. Then the aristocrat stood naturally at the very front, as a spearhead, for the affairs of his people, ready to give up and sacrifice not only his life but also his possessions, if that might help. Everywhere in the Empire they were based in their residences and castles like the conscience of the people, watchmen and preachers, but always fighters for the existence of the Holy Roman Empire,  each alone for himself, bound to one another only through the common goal – and one who did not acknowledge this goal through fighting and sacrificing and made it his own was considered a traitor, an apostate. Germany owes its life to this aristocracy.

But if Germany had depended on the present-day aristocracy it would have died along with it. The aristocrats still dwell everywhere in the Reich in their residences and castles, but it is only due to the people that they are recognised as their conscience. They no longer watch over or preach and, if they fight, then it is in defence of their property or their vanity. Every aristocrat no longer stands by himself, today they are organised, but their organisation lacks any goal that rises beyond their selfish aims.  Anyone of them that acknowledges  the goal of his nation in fighting and sacrificing and internalises this is today a traitor, a renegade.

This all of us who, members of the German aristocracy based on our origin, were able to be incorporated into the National Socialist movement during the battle period must have experienced in a personal way to a sufficient degree. One should not today expunge the fact that we took up the fight in the movement under the express disapproval of our so-called peers, that we were fought and laughed at. If we felt it as obvious to fight when our nation is in the process of fighting for its life — perhaps because we were conscious of the responsibility and the duties transmitted to us from ancient times by our name, that is, because we belonged to the German aristocracy — the opinion of our aristocratic colleagues was the opposite, namely, that we became National Socialists in spite of belonging to the aristocracy. We were, considered from the intellectual viewpoint of the German aristocratic society, actually the traitors, the renegades, and would have been condemnable if we had not been granted extenuating circumstances on account of our idiocy. Besides, it was not in good taste. Politically one had to be a German nationalist, but that one was not a monarchist was an absurd thought. For the further pursuits of the really energetic there was available, besides, the Gentlemen’s Club and, for the others, country riding clubs and — one may perhaps add — leadership positions in the Stahlhelm.[5]

To express it briefly: the German aristocracy disgraced itself to death. It pathetically missed the last chance to prove its raison d’être. Here too exceptions confirm the rule. The question is hard and clear which the people today pose to you: Where were you aristocratic gentlemen when Germany perished? What did you do when the adversity became ever more unbearable? Where did you fight and what did you sacrifice? You thought of yourselves and how you could save yourselves! You thought of yourself and the welfare of your family and perhaps regretted the misery of the people, perhaps even found it depressing, but did nothing! Did nothing! And you dare to raise a claim even today to leadership?

The people have known you for long. I shall never be able to forget with what suspicion I was accepted into the National Socialist movement and in the SA on account of my name. With what mistrust the workers stood against me at first because they attributed to such a person everything bad rather than an honest National Socialist disposition. Remarkable how this mistrust, this suspicion accorded with the attitude of the aristocratic society members! National Socialist even though one is aristocratic. This contradiction signifies the self-esteem of the aristocracy and at the same time indicates its estimation among the people. Exclusivity, which arose from the obscurantism that was inclined to rest comfortably on the laurels of one’s ancestors and to skim off the cream of history as a traditionally born leader, the self-willed isolation, detached the aristocracy from the people and killed its instinct. The result: a great yesterday, a petty today and no tomorrow at all.

The people have become mature. The leaders and saviours have emerged from the people. Adolf Hitler arose from the soul of the people. You, aristocratic gentlemen, may bristle because that insults your vanity, because each of you in your opinion must be the leader, you might agitate and stir up trouble, as you still do today, but the aristocracy is dead, because you have killed it by your behaviour, your attitude, your selfishness. Besides, your inveighing too will cease. The aristocracy is dead and already there arises from the people a new aristocracy filled with the sacred duty of building up Germany. New names have once again a strong resonance and inner significance. A new elite has a new calling among the people. A new aristocracy rises again as the bearers of the idealistic worldview in which one’s own advantage cannot mean anything compared to the duty to serve the people, the country, the state and its representatives to the utmost. One who stands at the very front is the aristocrat!

The aristocracy is dead, long live the aristocracy!  We thank our Führer that, when the old failed, he gave and trained for the people his new aristocracy, for which it is no longer a matter of names and external appearances but which simply exists and fights.

*   *   *

Dr. Achim von Arnim [1881–1940],
Professor of Military Science, Technical University of Berlin,
SA Oberführer[6]

The German aristocracy belongs to Adolf Hitler

One can grow to be a National Socialist, but the disposition must indeed be inborn. Forms that are once internally imprinted begin to develop no matter how hard one tries to disperse them. As the son of a Prussian officer and a mother from Alsace, a certain dichotomy of temperament was allotted to me. Along with Prussian sobriety I possess enough imaginativeness and sprightliness to have a quick sympathetic understanding of new things.

My parents lived in various garrisons of the Imperial Guard and, like every officer’s son, I attended the high school. It was the nineties of the last century, in which the memory of the victorious wars of 1866[7] and 1870/1[8] was still alive. It seems to me that the German nation was brought too quickly to life through the success of Bismarckian politics. Wealth and splendour had fallen suddenly into the lap of our people, who had hitherto been modest and sober.  It thereby lost its spiritual equanimity.  The German, distinguished by his depth and his rich world of feeling, developed in the last 20 years of the century into a man of rational understanding and a materialist. The school offered no counterpoise. The teachers were not aware that they had to  conserve in the best sense the  tradition of German Humanism and the idealistic tendency of German Classicism. Of course there were among them men rich in ideas and pedagogically skilled, whose instruction I still remember with gladness.

In general, however, a  too copious information was transmitted to us and, specifically, without any political influence. I can especially not forget that, during my schooldays, no explanation of the political development of our nation was given to us. We learnt nothing about social and economic development, nothing  about the significance of the battles that began with the French Revolution, of the opposition to Liberalism at the beginning of the  previous century, of the dissemination of the mercantile spirit and of capitalism. To be sure, one occasionally heard frightful things about the  Social Democrats[9] — at the elections one was frightened by the increasing percentages of their mandate. I went to school for many years in Spandau, there there was a strong population of workers with whom  there was no connection at all. We high school students met only with our peers, and I always had the feeling that the boys of the  public school were  particularly rough  and uncouth.

But a slightly better insight was then given by my entry into the army.  In just a few months — and that is too short a time,  the prospective cadet was, when he left school,  consigned to the squads. I served in the First Regiment of the Imperial Guard and this had the best reserve troop from all of Prussia, tall blond men from the healthiest families of our nation. I had imagined the time in the ‘barrack room’ as something very unpleasant, as being  in the company of a number of coarse, immature and boorish fellows and still remember my surprise that this image did not correspond at all to the reality.  On the contrary, the  young soldiers with whom one lived  — 20 in a room — were actually, in their  moral constitution and habits, cleaner and more modest than the higher society with which I later socialised. It was also not difficult to find the right tone in communication, one just could not act like something better — and indeed one was not, for, as a scholar, one was not so familiar with the practical matters of life as the young soldiers. I then had similar good experiences as a young corporal. This first period as a soldier, which lasted only a short time, was a period of learning, perhaps not for the prospective officer but for the growing man. Nowadays, the young men, and even the women, come into contact more often, through the German Youth,[10] the  German Girls’ League,[11] the Hitler Youth and  community service, with all strata of the  working people. Thereby they develop a stable judgement and learn to have the necessary consideration in dealings with  men of different backgrounds.

The pre-war officer corps, which I entered a year and a half later, did not at all correspond to the caricature that was made of it at that time in the Liberal satirical papers and in the bourgeois world. There was alive, especially still in the older generations, the  sincerity and  loyalty of the  older generation that had fought the wars for unification. Fastidiousness in service, conscientiousness,  the  consciousness that one had to set an example through personal commitment, the feeling of responsibility for subordinates and even one of the necessity of a comradely relationship with them was totally alive.

But I became aware early of one thing, that this officer corps, not only in my regiment but everywhere else, represented an exceptional class that was, to a certain extent, separated by a glass wall from the life, activity and  feeling of the rest of the nation.  In it there lived on a portion of the eighteenth century. The officer was obligated to the warlord and felt himself bound only to him,  and, because reverence for the monarchy and devotion to its sustenance was his political morality, the officer believed that he did not need to worry about other political questions. It was the time when Germany stood at its absolute peak economically.  Everywhere great fortunes arose. One did not  know of any unemployment.  Every worker could hope that he could, through  his own industriousness and  economising, conduct his children to a higher profession. There existed therefore the total possibility that the upper strata would continually supplement itself from the people.

In reality, however, that took place only to a small degree. The institution of the ‘one-year service’[12] formed an absolute class border.  One who had taken this test — he did not even have to have served for a year —  belonged to the cultivated and higher strata, everybody else was a subaltern and belonged to the people. If we look back retrospectively at this period with Liberal eyes, we must ask ourselves how it was possible that Social Democracy rose so powerfully in a period  when everybody had a good income. From a materialistic standpoint there is no answer to that. But from the idealistic standpoint, it is a  question of the longing of a great part of our people who had reached adulthood in the course of the century for a national community, for a spiritual rapprochement with the so-called higher strata. Not all of us overlooked the role of the Jews in that period. But one who spoke of a Jewish danger was laughed at as a fantasist. If as a young man I had been invited to become a Freemason I would have accepted the invitation in the belief that one may find a rich spiritual life in this order. But this spiritual  life and this  understanding were lacking precisely in those classes with whom we officers socialised. The bureaucrats, owners of large landed properties and other highly placed persons with whom we socialised were duty-conscious and industrious but matter-of-fact men careful of their careers.  Only seldom did one find intellectually open-minded and  artistically inspired personalities.  The attitude to the  people was benevolent but derived from a feeling of  an obvious inborn social superiority. Manual work was considered as inferior compared to intellectual work, which we supposedly performed.

We would have been able to obtain stronger impressions  of the life and feeling of the people if there had existed the possibility of being instructed on worldview, political and social questions.  But who would give this instruction?  We officers were considered educators of the youth entrusted to us and doubtless did our best. Indeed, in the education for the soldier’s profession and war, performance was at an optimum. But the worldview education which we had to impart through our instruction had to be a failure because we ourselves lacked the necessary knowledge. It was indeed so, as the Führer said: before the period of service nobody cared about the young man, and after his service period neither.  One knew hardly anything about the Marxist organisations and the trade unions.  Their intensive propaganda work was hidden from us.

Then there came the war and very close contact with all strata of the population on the front in cohabitation, for weeks, in damp trenches and in basic accommodation. I definitely believe that not only I but all the older officers of the front felt that we had a close sense of bonding with comrades of all service grades and that in moments of danger it did not matter if one wore the epaulets of an officer or a corporal’s cross or a lance-corporal’s button. To all those who felt in this way the Revolution,[13] with the sudden revolt of the soldiers against the officers, was then a bitter disappointment. One recognised soon that it was not the good elements of our squad that became mutineers and deserters but young elements that had been poisoned in their hometowns and were inexperienced, who had to suffer the bitter deprivations of the wartime in the last years and had perceived the affliction in their homeland. With no defenses, they were exposed to the influence of Red propaganda. The revolution period separated the men. The major part of the officer corps and the members of the former higher classes were starkly against the revolution and its manifestations. These men saw only the ugly external images and wished to hide from the knowledge that here a people who had been misguided strove for a better social status through a semi-conscious longing. They should not at that time have separated themselves in this way from the people but followed the path that Adolf Hitler did, attempting from the start to give the people what it strove for and to combat what was pernicious.

While most of the officers, also demoralised, had to take up the difficult battle for survival and persevered in their rejection of the social questions, I remained for a while vacillating and searching. Finally ,thrown in the country, I found myself one day, in 1925, a District Leader of the Stahlhelm. One had heard something of Adolf Hitler and his movement in Munich only through the Putsch. It is astonishing and hardly believable today how little one knew, here in the country in the east, of the National Socialists. I saw my duty as saving the small town workers, and especially the rural workers, in my district, filled with estates and small cities, from Marxism. These were strata of the population into which the Red organisation had not yet penetrated fully. The Stahlhelm had inscribed on its shield the spirit of the soldiers of the front, that is, the community of the comrades in the trenches. With lorries and bands we drove through the country, held speeches in every village — whereby there was also a ‘beer movement’ — and founded everywhere local groups of the Stahlhelm. Even the landowners and — what was not always very easy — the agricultural bureaucrats were won over to our ideas and, in this way, we succeeded in the beginning in achieving something that was of course not even closely as well-thought out, but similarly felt, as what Adolf Hitler strove for.

If later, after a seven-year activity as Stahlhelm leader, I turned my back on the organisation, I must give the reasons for that without wishing to hurt the former comrades of the Stahlhelm who had been won over to our cause. There had entered a certain torpidity in my feelings on account of the faltering politics of the federal leadership, which had to wriggle through with difficulty between a more conservative and military orientation and a social orientation, and, in the meantime, National Socialism had arisen among us. In all villages and small towns there were Brown departments, and the Stahlhelm people were the proof that these were really more active, that, in neighbouring Berlin, hard battles for rule were fought in the Red quarters, that a strong atmosphere of intellectual tension emanated from the Hitler movement and that a good and clearly orientated press helped the movement to move forward. The Stahlhelm found itself at a dead end since it did not want to fight in a parliamentary way and did not have the power to rise to power with arms. Finally the social question also seemed to me to fade somewhat. The workers won over by me and bound to me for a long time expressed many doubts about the goals of the Stahlhelm. They seemed to them as if they were all about a movement in favour of the old ruling classes.

So finally there was a certain discord because I freely acknowledged my view which favoured National Socialism, and that led to my exit from the organisation, which made some sensation at that time, when the SA was prohibited. There followed a period of bitter hostilities on the part of former friends and comrades. But I can only say that I have not regretted my step one day and have seen during my career in the SA so much that was elevating and invigorating that it seems to me a good fortune to be able to continue to experience the present times. If the Prussian aristocracy for the most part showed at first little understanding of the way that I took that must be explained by its strong adherence to the Prussian tradition. The feeling of rulership cultivated through the generations, especially of the rural aristocracy, perhaps made it difficult to find a way to our people the way we in the SA did. But I think that the conviction must seize some earlier, others later, but hopefully all one day, that another way than the one that our Führer has taken is not passable for our German people. If we wish to come through victoriously in the tremendous fight for survival that we must still undertake in order to sustain our nation, given our unfortunate international situation and our unequal mixture of races, it will happen only if all the strata of our sorely tested people march together with complete trust, and that is possible only in National Socialism.

Berlin, 15 January ,1934.

*   *   *

Count Wolf-Heinrich von Helldorf [1896–1944]
Police Commissioner of Potsdam
Gruppenführer[14]

The Aristocracy and National Socialism

The entire public and private life in Germany today is influenced in a decisive manner by National Socialism. Everything that was ready and willing to cooperate in the building up of the nation is gathered under the sign of the swastika. We have to regretfully acknowledge that the bearers of old aristocratic names are involved to an extremely small degree in authoritative positions in this work of construction within the movement and in the state. This fact is especially surprising considering that the NSDAP has declared not once but many times that it would reach out its hand for the purpose of cooperative work to anybody who would place himself at its disposal unconditionally. The reasons that led to this superior aloofness of the aristocracy should be investigated here, and I think that we will reach a conclusion most easily if we review once again the political development in our nation during and after the war and, in this way, examine the attitude of the aristocracy to the National Socialist idea.

The ruling and state-governing classes in the Bismarckian empire were the officer and bureaucratic classes. Aristocratic officers and bureaucrats stood here in a preferred and leading position. When Germany decided in 1914 on the fateful four-year long armed conflict and the Prussian German army marched in the glow of its centuries-old military culture to the defence of the homeland and carried the war to hostile countries, the Prussian German aristocracy, following the old tradition, occupied a leading position within this national army. This army fought and won in the battlefields of the whole world and, at its head, fought and bled the German aristocracy. Once again, before the great collapse of the monarchy and the aristocracy, those fit for military service from the aristocratic families were conscious of their proudest privilege sanctified by tradition: they died a heroic death in a natural fulfilment of duty.

If, later, people repeatedly and rightly pointed to the total inaction of individual families and members of the German aristocracy, one must, on the other hand, rightly acknowledge and ascertain that no class in Germany took part in this four-year long conflict with such an enormous sacrifice of blood and death as the aristocracy and declare that the best of us have fallen.

In the political leadership of the German nation in the pre-war and war years the aristocracy did not live up to its duties. The aristocracy and the people no longer understood each other. The aristocracy no longer spoke the language of the people and thus it failed, detached and separated from the people, both in internal and in external politics. In the foreign policy of that time, which was especially strongly influenced by the aristocracy and unfortunately also by Jewry, there was no politician or statesman who rose even a little above the average level. After the enormous blood sacrifice of the international conflict, the aristocracy seemed to have exhausted its last strength, which had been kindled in its old families even during the war. Only a few of us confronted the mutineers of 1918 vigorously. The throne and altar were abandoned, the Kaiser empire crumbled, and with it the aristocracy.

The history of the revolution is at the same time the history of the collapse and disintegration of the German aristocracy. The heroes of yesterday, the pillars of support of throne and altar, soon became spineless servants of a state that could be created only after the strongest supports of this state had bowed down before traitors and mutineers. When the red flags of the revolt fluttered and the mobs raged in the streets, they of course complained and protested but they forgot to fight, and found the required justifications for everything that they did and were not sparing in declarations dripping with patriotism. The majority of the aristocracy accepted the situation as it was. The majority of the aristocracy came to terms with the Weimar Republic. For the majority of the aristocracy and especially for the older generation it was still only a matter of a lesser evil that one had to put up with, in order not to lose everything. On major patriotic festival days the uniforms of the old regiment were brought out now and then to keep up tradition, one gave pleasant speeches at war associations and expressed the hope that God would indeed grant us better times once again. None of us wanted battle itself. Indeed it was much more convenient to be promised peace and order from the Weimar Republic and, for that reason, to change one’s attitude a little. It is worth mentioning that, in this period, Jewish families with and without noble surnames played the principal role in the aristocracy. Everything pressed round the golden calf and one was able to note, for example, with trembling fear, in Berlin society in the years 1924–1925, that degenerate aristocrats were tolerated guests in rich Jewish families, that all the so-called good houses were open to a notorious criminal like, for example, the Jewish state secretary Weismann.[15] In general, one who disseminated propaganda for the ‘Realpolitik’ of the ‘statesman’ Gustav Stresemann,[16] eulogising with many fine speeches in cities and the state, was valued as a specially intelligent aristocratic comrade. One put up with everything, even the worst phenomena of the time, and even the German aristocratic association, as a socio-economic organisation of the aristocracy, was in no way directive but satisfied itself merely with transferring external forms of the past to the republican present.

The aristocracy organised itself after 1918 chiefly in the German National People’s Party[17] and the Stahlhelm and, in the battle years, both groups virtuously did everything that was in their power to make life bitter for us few National Socialists from the aristocracy and to mock and denigrate us and our battle for the German nation. The first great election assembly will always remain in my mind in which I was to appear in Halle for the first time in my life, in 1924, as a speaker for the National Socialist Freedom Party. In front of an overflowing assembly that absorbed with enthusiasm the programmatic representation of the National Socialist battle goals there spoke, after me, as a respondent, the party secretary of the German National People’s Party, and also the Stahlhelm leader in Halle, Senior Lieutenant Düsterberg,[18] and a war-blinded Communist. While the performances of the latter were completely moderate, Mr. Düsterberg, who, as is well-known, is Jewish, used the opportunity to oppose the young freedom movement in the harshest way.  Even at that time I was amazed by the blind hatred that filled this man but did not know that the formerly active officer of the military staff was Jewish.

Therewith I come to the saddest chapter in the history of the German aristocracy of the present. We stand before the shocking fact that that part of the population that, according to blood, race and a centuries-long tradition, was called and, as we believe, is still called to present to its people statesmen and soldierly fighters in the great freedom fight that the National Socialist movement had conducted for 14 years stood aside without any understanding of the great changes that had occurred in the German national soul, retreated into a completely misunderstood aristocracy and, often not without justification, invited upon itself the hatred and the contempt of large masses of the people.

The aristocracy took part only to an extremely small degree in the powerful battle within the country under the leadership of Adolf Hitler. It must indeed be said clearly that the aristocracy, and especially the post-war generation, succumbed frightfully quickly to the influences of liberalism and democracy. The smaller part of it encapsulated itself in the seclusion of conservative or nationalist clubs and in professional associations conducted in a parliamentary political manner. The German national Stahlhelm leaders in the aristocracy laughed at us ‘reckless and immature young people’ when we stated clearly in public that we love our German people and hate its enemies. They thought it was not ‘chic’ to get into close discussions in national assemblies with KPD[19] and Reichsbanner[20] people. If we fought in national assemblies and in the street with fellow Germans filled with hatred they spoke of us as hooligan elements that had unfortunately not learnt to behave according to their ‘class’.

Even if one accepts and understands — for the reasons that I have presented at the beginning of this essay  — that the aristocracy in 1918 did not oppose any decisive resistance to Ebert,[21] Scheidemann[22] and Noske[23] with their mutineering hordes, the meagre participation of the aristocracy in the political battle of Adolf Hitler will always remain incomprehensible. It cannot be explained or excused by anything that a class that presented to the people through the centuries leaders, and not the worst, refused adherence to the man who set about, after the collapse of the old leadership in Germany, to educate new young leaders, who however demanded even from these young leaders that they had to prove their suitability and set for each of us strong endurance tests before the title ‘leader’ was granted to us.

After the aristocracy had been unable through its own strength to change the fate of its people, we must, in retrospect, regretfully state that, even in the last part of the development of German history, which stood under the sign of victorious National Socialism, it did not understand to put a stop to its inner disintegration and cooperate in the new formation of affairs with all its forces. This failure of a valuable and, insofar as it is a question of the landed aristocracy, racially superior and healthy section of the population, is so much more regretful in that the National Socialist movement built and conducted on aristocratic principles had to correspond completely to the inner constitution of the aristocracy. Just as among the ancient Germans the best person in terms of family, clan and tribe was the heir-apparent and became the leader, so also in the National Socialist movement the best person in terms of performance and blood is the leader. People may say of the aristocracy that it is in the process of committing serious mistakes that can never be remedied, both to itself and to coming generations. There is no doubt there is forming in National Socialism a new ruling class of the German nation.  If the aristocracy stands aside from this great aristocratic national movement, destiny will pass over it and then it would be better if it decided to discard its aristocratic titles which have becomes worthless.

The aristocracy stands at the turning point of its history. It is up to it to demonstrate, through its conduct in relation to National Socialism, that race and blood can overcome darkness and class conflict. If the aristocratic principle of the NSDAP according to which only one who fulfills special duties may claim special rights for himself penetrates the aristocracy of today, and if the aristocracy incorporates itself wholly and unconditionally in the great national community of Adolf Hitler, then the possibility will be offered to it even today of recovering its position in the German nation which has been strongly shaken by the events of the last 14 years. And then the proudest privilege of the aristocracy will remain that of offering its sons to the fatherland.

[1] Stephan Malinowski, Vom König zum Führer. Sozialer Niedergang und politische Radikalisierung im deutschen Adel zwischen Kaiserreich und NS-Staat, Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2003.

[2] See, for example, Elke Fröhlich, Die Tagebücher von Joseph Goebbels, I, iii, p.470.

[3] The rank of an SS Standartenführer was equivalent to that of a colonel.

[4] The Almanach de Gotha was a standard directory of European nobility published from 1763 to 1944.

[5] The Stahlhelm was a league of ex-servicemen of the First World War that acted as a paramilitary force of the monarchist German National People’s Party (DNVP) from 1918 to 1935.

[6] A rank between colonel and brigadier-general.

[7] The Austro-Prussian war fought between the Austrian Empire and the Kingdom of Prussia.

[8] The Franco-Prussian war fought between the French Second Empire and the North German Confederation led by Prussia.

[9] The Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (SPD) was established in 1863 and Friedrich Ebert of the SPD became the first president of the Weimar Republic (1918-1933).

[10] The ‘Deutsches Jungvolk’ was the junior division of the ‘Hitler Jugend’, for boys aged 10 to 14.

[11] The ‘Bund Deutscher Mädel’ was the female youth organisation of the National Socialist party.

[12] A reference to the ‘Einjährig-Freiwillger’ volunteers of the Prussian army who, after a year’s service as volunteers, were made reserve officers.

[13] The German Revolution, or November Revolution, of 1918 was a mutiny of German sailors in Wilhelmshaven and Kiel that led to prolonged civil unrest in Germany that ended with the establishment of the parliamentary constitution of the Weimar Republic in August 1919.

[14] Section Commander.

[15] Robert Weismann (1869-1942) was state secretary for Prussia during the Weimar Republic.

[16] Gustav Stresemann (1878-1929) was a politician of the Weimar Republic who served as Foreign Minister and, briefly, Chancellor.

[17] The Deutschnationale Volkspartei (DNVP) was a nationalist and monarchist conservative party of the Weimar period which rejected the Weimar Constitution and the Treaty of Versailles.

[18] Theodor Duesterberg (1875-1950) was a staunchly anti-Semitic leader of the Stahlhelm who was discovered in 1932 to have partly Jewish ancestry. He consequently resigned from the Stahlhelm in 1933.

[19] The Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands, founded by Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, was a major political party of the Weimar Republic. It was banned in West Germany in 1956.

[20] The Reichsbanner was an organisation of the Weimar Republic devoted to upholding parliamentary democracy in Germany.

[21] Friedrich Ebert (1871-1925) was a member of the SPD and first president of the Weimar Republic.

[22] Philipp Scheidemann (1865-1939) was a member of the SPD who served as Chancellor of the Weimar Republic between February and June 1919.

[23] Gustav Noske (1868-1946), of the SPD, was Minister of Defence of the Weimar Republic between 1919 and 1920.