In 1933, Irish diplomat Daniel Binchy wrote a scathing report on Adolf Hitler, the newly elected Chancellor of Germany, in Studies. The extract below shows how Binchy not only disapproved of Hitler’s racial theory, but found that it made absolutely no sense. He also describes how Hitler used antisemitism to instil in the German people a determination to defend the integrity of the nation and the ‘purity’ of the Aryan race.
Daniel A. Binchy, ‘Adolf Hitler’, Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review, Vol. 22, No. 85 (Mar., 1933), 29-47. JSTOR link: https://www.jstor.org/stable/30094970
Adolf Hitler
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Hitler’s study of history – one may be pardoned for wondering about its extent – has convinced him that the chief lesson to be learned from it is the vital importance of preserving racial purity. The destruction of great empires and civilisations may be always traced to some contamination of the ruling race with inferior foreign blood. Among the races of mankind history shows one to have been predominant over all others in war, politics, morality and culture: the Aryan race. But here we meet a difficulty. Hitler does not seem to know the meaning of the word Aryan: indeed he is not even sure of the meaning which he himself intends to attach to it. Sometimes he uses it to denote the western branches of the Indo-European race (a sense in which it is never used as opposed to the Semites and the Hindus! But on the very next page he speaks of Slavs, Latins, and other members of the western Indo-European stock as “inferior races,” denying them the august title of Aryan. The latter is usually reserved for the peoples of Germanic race, or, to use the phrase made fashionable by pseudo-ethnologists of the last century, the ” Nordic ” peoples. The Nordic race is the flower of humanity, the Herrenvolk, born to rule the world. But being few in numbers compared with the swarms of ” lesser breeds ” which surround it, it can only hope to retain its leadership of civilisation by jealously preserving its racial purity from foreign inter mixture. In this task the German people have a special responsibility; for Germany is the largest Nordic country in Europe and apparently possesses the Nordic virtues in special degree. The theory is by no means new: it counted adherents in Germany long before Hitler was heard of and, ironically enough, its chief apostles were two foreigners: the Frenchman Gobineau (1) and the Englishman Houston Stewart Chamberlain.(2) The latter’s influence is manifest in Hitler’s ethnological dissertations; and I should not be surprised if his reading on the subject has been confined to Chamberlain’s Die Grundlagen des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts. That this extreme theory has been refuted a thousandfold by history it is hardly necessary to state. Hitler may possibly believe it; his more intelligent followers certainly do not. They merely use it as a cloak to cover their crude anti-Semitism.
For anti-Semitism is the chief practical consequence which Hitler deduces from his theory. The greatest danger to racial purity comes from the Jews. They are the parasites of humanity, the leeches which batten upon the noble Nordic blood. They are united in “one increasing purpose”: the destruction of the superiority of the Nordic peoples and particularly of Germany. To secure this aim they are willing to adopt any and every device. Some of the devices with which Hitler credits them are more than passing strange: indeed they seem to be self contradictory. Thus they are at once the leaders of international capital and of the Bolsheviks who seek to destroy it. They are equally responsible for the curse of parliamentary government and for the dictatorship of the proletariat which has abolished it. In Germany they dominate both the Social Democrats, and their sworn enemies the Communists. The pages which Hitler devotes to the exposure of “the Jewish conspiracy” against Germany teem with similar absurdities. But his followers are mainly interested in his practical measures for defeating the conspiracy. They are at once simple and attractive: confiscation of all Jewish capital and landed property, suppression of the Jewish press, withdrawal of citizenship and all public positions from Jews. The policy is clever in that it appeals to the lowest instincts of the mob, its jealousy and cupidity, while cloaking them over with the “racial” argument. No impartial observer will deny that the Jewish problem is more elsewhere, but to make this a pretext for advocating wholesale robbery is hardly consonant with those high Nordic virtues of which Hitler purports to be a shining example. Yet Gottfried Feder, the party “economist” is probably right in declaring that “anti-Semitism is the foundation of our movement.”
But the expropriation of the Jews does not exhaust the State’s duties towards the sacred principle of racial purity. Indeed, the very raison d’être of the state is the preservation and development of the race. The worth of the state is to be tested, not by its form of government, but by the ” ruthless energy ” with which it repels the enemies of the race and fulfils the other conditions under which Nordic stock may flourish. It matters little whether the state calls itself republic or monarchy: Hitler has no sympathy with the Monarchist Conservatives, and some of his choicest abuse has been hurled at the very leaders of Junker nationalism who now constitute the majority of his colleagues in the Cabinet. But there are certain baneful institutions, invented by the Jews, which, being essentially alien to the Nordic temperament, cannot be tolerated. Chief among them is Parliamentary democracy.(3) Apparently our text-books err in attributing this institution to the genius of the Anglo-Saxon race, for Hitler declares it to be utterly un-Nordic: for the old Germanic conception of personal leadership and individual responsibility it substitutes government by counting heads. The most successful of modern demagogues has a profound contempt for the majority upon which he exercises his unrivalled powers of agitation: it is stupid, volatile, treacherous. Hitler believes rather in the aristocratic principle, not indeed as expressed by the “Judaised” nobility of pre-war Germany, but by an aristocracy of character. From this the ” natural leaders ” of the people are to be drawn, who, scorning the subterfuges of representative government, will answer personally for their actions. To whom they must answer we are not told.
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- Count Joseph Arthur Gobineau (1816-1882): Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines (1853).
- Houston Stewart Chamberlain (1855-1926): Die Grundlagen des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts (1890).
- In the recent political history of Germany nothing has been more amusing than the sudden emergence of the Nazis as the champions of parliamentary control against the Papen and Schleicher governments.