BOLSHEVISM

from

MOSES to LENIN

A DIALOGUE BETWEEN ADOLF HITLER AND ME

by Dietrich Eckart

Translated from the German by William L. Pierce

Reprinted from National Socialist World, Spring, 1966.

EDITOR'S FOREWORD: The following material has been translated from a pamphlet found in the NSDAP Hauptarchiv. Its German title was Der Bolschewismus von Moses bis Lenin: Zwiegespräch zwischen Adolf Hitler und mir, and it was originally published in Munich in March 1924 from unfinished notes on which Dietrich Eckart had been working in the autumn of 1923.

Dietrich Eckart was born on March 23, 1868, in the Bavarian town of Neumarkt, which is about twenty miles southeast of Nürnberg, and he died on December 26, 1923, in Berchtesgaden. He was a poet, a playwright, a journalist, scholar, and a philosopher, as well as a dedicated fighter for the National Socialist cause. Among his better-known works are his play Lorenzaccio and his translation and adaptation to the German stage of Ibsen's Peer Gynt. He was for a while editor of the Völkischer Beobachter, and he wrote the NSDAP song, with the famous words "Deutschland erwache," which later became a NSDAP byword.

The reader interested in more details of Eckart's life, as well as a fairly extensive sampling of his poetry, is referred to Alfred Rosenberg's book, Dietrich Eckart: Ein Vermächtnis (Munich, 1928 ff.)

Der Bolschewismus is of interest to Americans today for three reasons. First, it is the last earthly work of the man who, as the intimate companion of Adolf Hitler during those critical, early years in Munich, helped prepare the spiritual foundations of National Socialism. Eckart had been seriously ill as he was writing the pamphlet, and his arrest and temporary imprisonment, as a consequence of the Munich putsch of November 9, 1923, were followed shortly by his death.

Second, it is instructive, as being representative of a certain category of propaganda. Eckart was a practical propagandist as well as an idealist and a poet, and Der Bolschewismus is an excellent example of his style. Aimed at the reader with the equivalent of a high-school education, it is skillfully contrived to avoid tediousness and maintain a relatively unsophisticated audience's interest while making a rather extensive, if not intensive, historical investigation of the Jewish question. It achieves this by relegating the great majority of documentary evidence to footnotes and by liberally interspersing historically significant points with spicy or amusing tidbits.

Third, it is of considerable interest, even today, for its own sake. Although the last forty years have unfortunately provided us with considerably more experience of Jewish-Bolshevist activities, Eckart did quite well with the materials available to him in 1923. Of particular interest is his use of the Old Testament, as a history of the Jews, to throw light onto more recent Jewish activities.

Eckart's notes for Der Bolschewismus were still in rather rough and unfinished form when he died, and this will be evident at a few places in the text which follows. The editor has slightly condensed the original material during his translation, omitting several of the more ragged portions and such things as untranslatable puns, as well as a few sections which have limited interest for present-day readers. Additional footnotes have been added by the editor in a few places, and these are so designated.

* * * * *

"Yes!" he cried. "We've been on the wrong track! Consider how an astronomer would handle a similar situation. Suppose that he has been carefully observing the motion of a certain group of celestial bodies over a long period of time. Examining his records, he suddenly notices something amiss: 'Damn it!' he says. 'Something's wrong here. Normally, these bodies would have to be situated differently relative to one another; not this way. So there must be a hidden force somewhere which is responsible for the deviation. And, using his observations, he performs lengthy calculations and accurately computes the location of a planet which no eye has yet seen, but which is there all the same, as he has just proved. But what does the historian do, on the other hand? He explains an anomaly of the same type solely in terms of the conspicuous statesmen of the time. It never occurs to him that there might have been a hidden force which caused a certain turn of events. But it was there, nevertheless; it has been there since the beginning of history. You know what that force is: the Jew."

"Yes, certainly," I replied, "but to prove it, to prove it! For the last fifty or hundred years, so far as I'm concerned, it's been obvious; indeed, a good deal further back, perhaps even in pre-Christian times..."

"My dear fellow," he replied to me, "we can read in Strabo (1) that already in his time, shortly after the birth of Christ, there was hardly a place to be found on the whole earth which was not then dominated by the Jews; dominated, he writes, not merely inhabited. Already decades earlier, Cicero (2) — at that time a great and powerful man, my friend! — suddenly lost his nerve when, in his well-known defense plea in the Capitol, he was obliged to point out the great influence and the cohesiveness of the Jews: 'Softly, softly! I want none but the judges to hear me. The Jews have already gotten me into a fine mess, as they have many another gentleman. I have no desire to furnish further grist for their mills.' Similarly, the influence of the Jews with Augustus was so great that they completely intimidated Pontius Pilate, who, as deputy of the Roman Emperor, was certainly not a nobody. Thus he said, 'For God's sake, away with this sordid Jewish affair!' as he reached for the washbasin and condemned Christ, whom he considered guiltless, to death. (3) Considering these things, my friend, every child knows — or rather, could know — how late the hour already was at that time."

A reach for the Old Testament, a brief flipping of pages, and — "There," he cried, "the recipe from which the Jews always brew their hellish broth! We anti-Semites are really something. We manage to find out everything except that which is really important." Word for word, he emphatically read with a hard voice:

"And I will set the Egyptians against the Egyptians: and they shall fight every one against his brother and every one against his neighbor; city against city and kingdom against kingdom. And the spirit of Egypt shall fall in the midst thereof; and I will destroy the counsel thereof: and they shall seek to the idols, and to the charmers, and to them that have familiar spirits, and to the wizards. (4)

"Yes indeed," he laughed bitterly, "now the people will seek to Dr. Cuno, and Dr. Schweyer, and Dr. Heim, (5) and whatever other charmers and wizards they have. When asked why Germany has become a pigsty these gentlemen will answer reproachfully, 'You yourselves are to blame. You have no more good breeding, no faith, only selfishness and conceit. Now you will try to put the blame on the Jews. It's always been like that when you have needed a scapegoat. Then everyone has jumped on the Jews and persecuted them unmercifully. And just because they had the money, and because they were defenseless. Is it any wonder that a few individual Jews are behaving in a reprehensible manner now? After all, one finds some black sheep in every group. As if there weren't a good number of decent Jews! Look at their piety, their sense of family responsibility, their sober way of life, their readiness to make sacrifices, and, above all, their ability to stick together! And you? At one another like dogs and cats: sheer insanity!'

Thus will the charmers and wizards prattle on and on, till one night the blood sign will appear on all the Jewish houses, and the infuriated masses, led by the Jews, will swarm forth to smite all the firstborn in the land again as in Egypt." (6)

"Remember how it was here in Munich during the communist takeover?" I interjected. "The houses of the Jews certainly weren't marked with blood, but there must have been a secret arrangement, because among all those who suffered the misfortune of a house search not one was a Jew. As a matter of fact, one of the stupid Red troopers who had me by the hair answered my sarcastic question by explaining that it was forbidden to search the Jewish houses.

"And in 1871, in Paris, the Jewish defense also ran according to plan. There the communists destroyed whatever they could, but the many places and houses of the Rothschilds remained completely intact. (7) All this enables us to understand the place in Exodus according to which 'a mixed multitude' also left Egypt with the Jews."

"In Egypt the scoundrels' scheme succeed only about halfway," he finished. "The Egyptians became masters of the situation at the last moment and sent the 'mixed multitude' to the devil, together with the Jews. There must have been a desperate struggle. The slaughter of the firstborn reveals that clearly enough. Just as they have done with us, the Jews had won the great lower stratum of the population for themselves — 'Liberty, Equality, Fraternity!' — until one night they sent out the order, 'Down with the bourgeois! Kill them, the dogs!' but things didn't turn out so well as they had expected. That portion of the Egyptian nation that had remained patriotic turned the tables and booted Moses, Cohn, and Levi out of the country, followed by the inhabitants whom they had incited. During this exodus they carried along as much stolen booty as they could manage, the Bible reports with satisfaction. It also reports, in no uncertain terms, that the Egyptians were glad to be rid of them. (8) The best, though, was the reward the Jews gave their stupid accomplices. Suddenly they began calling them 'rabble,' (9) whereas formerly they had called them 'comrade' and pretended to love them. Imagine the faces these deluded ones must have made in the desert when they heard this."

"The murder of seventy-five thousand Persians, in the Book of Esther, no doubt had the same Bolshevist background," I answered. "The Jews certainly didn't accomplish that all by themselves."

"No more," he confirmed, "than the dreadful bloodbath over half the Roman Empire, which took place during the reign of Emperor Trajan. Hundreds of thousands of non-Jewish nobles in Babylonia, in Cyrenaica, in Egypt, and on Cyprus butchered like cattle, most of them after the most abominable torture! (10) And today the Jews still rejoice over that. 'If only the various centers of rebellion had cooperated,' triumphs the Jew, Graetz, 'then perhaps they would have already been able to give the Roman colossus its death blow at that time.' " (11)

"The Jews call our Sedan Day (12) celebration barbarous," I remarked. "But they find entirely in order the fact that, year in and year out, they still, after all this enormous time, celebrate in the synagogues their heroic deed concerning the seventy-five thousand Persians, in the feast of Purim."

"None of this evidence seems to make any impression on us, however," he said dryly. "One would think us deaf and blind.

"Before the first clash with the Egyptians, the head scoundrel, the modest Joseph, had pretty well prepared: the seven lean cows, all the granaries filled, the people raging with hunger, the reigning Pharaoh a perfect flunky of the Jews, and Joseph, with a corner on the grain supply, 'ruler over all the land'! (13) All the lamentations of the Egyptians were in vain; the Jew held the warehouse closed with an iron fist until they, in return for a bit of bread, were obliged to give away first their money, then their cattle and their land, and finally their freedom. And suddenly the capital was swarming with Jews; old Jacob was there, and 'his sons, and his sons' sons with him, his daughters, and his sons' daughters, and all his seed'—the entire hodgepodge. (14) And Joseph 'wept a good while' for joy. Afterward, he said to his brothers: 'ye shall eat the fat of the land,' and 'the good of all the land of Egypt is yours.' (15)

"But some time after this glorious Egyptian citizen of the Jewish faith, one hundred and ten years old, had died, the old Pharaoh also passed away and was succeeded by another Pharaoh, who 'knew not Joseph,' and, seeing the multitude of Jews, who meanwhile had grown very powerful, he became quite frightened. He feared lest: 'when there falleth out any war, they join also unto our enemies'; (16) thus he was smarter than Wilhelm II, (17) who hoped for their support. The Jews must work, he decided. In all seriousness, work. 'Unmerciful,' wailed the Jewish chronicler. No wonder that they breathed vengeance. After all, for what did one have the Pöbelvolk, if not to do the work?

"By now, the Egyptians had forgotten dear Joseph, who was dead and gone but there was no lack of others on whom to blame the state of affairs, namely the landowners, the industrialists, the bourgeois. According to the Jews, no one else was responsible. 'Proletarians of all countries, unite!' And the masses believed it and turned on their own flesh and blood for the sake of the 'chosen people,' who had brought on all their distress in the first place. But to us they touchingly read aloud in school the beautiful story of Joseph and his brothers. No doubt many teachers 'wept a good while.' It's enough to drive one to despair."

He paused with a dark look at the Book of Hate.

"And so it goes, through the entire Old Testament," he began again. "Indeed, I'm telling you nothing new, but we must bring it home to ourselves as often as possible in order to be able to negate the constant hypocritical babble. Really, the Book of Joshua should suffice; such a thing of uninterrupted genocide, of bestial cruelty, of shameless rapacity and cold-blooded cunning—Hell incarnate! And everything in the name of Jehova, in fact, according to his express wish! When the city of Jericho fell victim to the Jews through the treachery of the harlot Rahab, neither man nor beast, neither young nor old remained among the living; only the harlot was spared. She and her whole, noble family were rewarded with the privilege of living in Israel. (18) And what good-natured peoples they were who, one after another, were completely exterminated! Delitzsch, who has thoroughly investigated that period, writes, for example, about the Canaanites: on all the hills, under every shady tree, they rendered adoration and reverence to the sun god and to the salutary goddess Aschera; and he compares this beautiful, poetic custom with the pious way of our Catholic villagers, serving the Almighty in remote mountain chapels." (19)

"Joshua alone," I emphasized, "was responsible for the massacre of thirty-one kings, with all their people. Among those nations exterminated in these predatory raids were several who had yielded themselves trustingly to him. Each time the sinister words, 'let none survive,' were heard. I am inclined to believe that the Pöbelvolk or at least their descendants, must have still been the obedient shock troops of the Jews, not because the work was so atrocious, but because the children of Israel have always let deluded Gentiles do their dirty work, particularly where danger was involved. Besides, they would not have been strong enough to subdue the peoples to whom they were opposed, without the bellicose enthusiasm of their brutalized comrades.

"Of particular interest is the evident satisfaction with which the Jews have deliberately enumerated each of the slain kings one is reminded of the prophet Isaiah. In one place, he raves as if possessed: 'The Lord is angry at all the Gentiles; he will deliver them to the slaughter; their land will became burning pitch; it will become a wasteland, soaked with their blood; there will be no nobles in the land; their princes will die out.' (20) Between Isaiah and Joshua were hundreds of years, but in that whole time the infernal rage of the Jews against non-Jewish royalty hadn't changed a bit."

"And in all eternity nothing will change," he proceeded, "so far as the attitude of the Jews toward our kings and our leaders is concerned. To destroy them is their eternal sin, and when they can't accomplish this by force, then they will use cunning. Whenever we have a strong leadership, the Jews are obliged to keep their noses clean. Our leadership can be truly strong, however, only if it is based completely in our people; only if it concerns itself with the welfare of the least among them just as much as with that of the wealthiest of them; only if, in the firm conviction of its own worth, it bars every alien influence from the beginning; only if it is not merely national, but is also social, down to its very bones. No matter what others may say, I assert this: a time will come when all the elite nations of the world will have such a leadership; and then everyone will be astonished to see that, instead of grating on one another as has previously been the case, they will treat one another with respect and consideration. For then there will be no more whipping up of land greed, of an itching for power, of suspicion—sentiments which exist in unmixed form only in the isolated few, and not in the more trusting general populace, anyhow. There will be an end to the lying praise of an indiscriminate human brotherhood, which would be possible, if at all, only under the supposition that one had from the first excluded that eternal mischief-maker, the Jew. But had this been done, there would be no need to push the universal brotherhood idea; the various peoples would find themselves compatible of their own accord."

III

"Tell me," I interrupted him; "strictly speaking, do you consider the Jew to be national, or international?"

"Neither," was the answer. "One who really feels international has as much regard for the rest of the world as he does for his own nation. Were our so-called international swarms really like that — fine. But I fear that they are secretly more concerned with the attitude of the rest of the world toward themselves than with their own attitude toward the world. Internationalism requires basically good intentions. But the Jew fundamentally and completely lacks these. He hasn't the remotest idea of classifying himself with the rest of humanity. His aim is to dominate others in order to extort from them at his leisure. Were he really interested in comradeship, he has had the longest and most abundant opportunity for it. Jehovah command to him to make no alliances with foreign peoples, but, on the contrary, to devour one after the other, went straight to his heart. (21) Everywhere one greeted him with cordiality, at first: in ancient Egypt, in Persia, in Babylonia, in Europe; the cloven hoof appeared everywhere. The early Germanic conquerors found him with a number of arrogated rights and made no move to dispossess him of these. He was allowed to do business wherever and however he wanted, even in the slave trade, toward which he has always been peculiarly inclined. Like everyone else, he could hold public office, including the magistracy; and his so-called religion was protected by the state. Thus wrote Otto Hauser, who is an excellent source of fascinating illuminations regarding the Jews." (22)

"I should say so!" I nodded. "One must partake of him with caution though, otherwise one may not see the black forest for the 'blond' trees. (23) On the whole, I prefer Werner Sombart, even though his Berlin lectures swarm with Jews."

"Now, he says the same thing!" he cried. "According to him the Jews were by no means always second-class citizens. In antiquity one even found them often with special privileges which absolved them from certain duties, such as military service. (24) It was never their strong side to risk armed conflict. In the War of Liberation, (25) the Jews of Deutsch-Krone, in Pomerania, sent a petition to the king, requesting permission to remain home from the campaign in return for money. In this petition they argued that ten thousand talers would be of much more use in the war effort than the frankly questionable fighting ability of a Jew. The petition was accepted, not only from them, but also from the Jews of five more of the seven Prussian districts." (26)

"Yes, I know that place in Hauser," I added; "it is authentic. He also quotes there from Mayer's Encyclopedia, however, a statement which calmly claims that the Jews, through their heroic spirit in the War of Liberation, proved themselves as worthy German citizens."

"Just as they did in the World War," he winked expressively. "If I had my way, I'd require placards to be hung in all the schools, at every street corner, and in every public room, on which would be printed nothing but Schopenhauer's description of the Jews: 'Great masters of the lie'! (27) There is no better description. And it applies without exception to every Jew equally, whether high or low, stock exchange tycoon or rabbi, baptized or circumcised. Our servile people! Provoked for thousands of years! And the innocents are taken in again and again by this blatant swindle. It is understandable that they become surly with the Jews, but only after the latter have shamelessly abused their naive good nature and plundered them to the skin with their usury and fraud. And that has been the case everywhere: in the old Roman Empire, in Egypt, in Asia, later in England, Italy, France, Poland, Holland, Germany, and even, as Sombart writes, 'in the Iberian peninsula, where the Jews have experienced so many blessings'!

"And the game they're playing today, they have been at for two thousand years," he continued. "I think that suffices to characterize the nature of Jewish internationalism. Now we still have left to consider the national feeling of the Jews. Naturally not that of the one for Germany, of the other for England, and so on. Not many mice are to be caught with that bait any longer. 'Send me a box full of German soil, so that I can at least symbolically defile the accursed country,' wrote the German Jew, Börne; (28) and Heinrich Heine sniffed out Germany's future from a toilet bowl. (29) The physicist, Einstein, whom the Jewish publicity agents celebrate as a second Kepler, explained he would have nothing to do with German nationalism. He considered 'deceitful' the custom of the Central Association of German Citizens of Jewish Faith (30) of concerning themselves only with the religious interests of the Jews and not with their racial community also. A rare bird? No, only one who believed his people already safely in control, and thus considered it no longer necessary to keep up pretenses. In the Central Association itself, the mask has already fallen. A Dr. Brünn frankly admitted there that the Jews could have no German national spirit. (31) We always mistake their unprincipled exertions to accommodate themselves to all and everyone for impulses of the heart. Whenever they see an advantage to be gained by adopting a certain pose, they never hesitate, and certainly wouldn't let ethical considerations stand in their way. How many Galician Jews have first become Germans, then Englishmen, and finally Americans! And every time in the twinkling of an eye. With startling rapidity they change their nationality back and forth, and wherever their feet touch, there resounds either the 'Watch on the Rhine,' or the 'Marsellaise,' or 'Yankee Doodle.' Dr. Heim does not once question the fact that our Warburgs, our Bleichroders, or our Mendelssohns are able to transfer their patriotism as well as their residence of today to London or to New York on the morrow. 'On the sands of Brandenburg an Asiatic horde!' Walther Rathenau once blurted out about the Berlin Jews. (32) He forgot to add that the same horde is on the Isar, the Elbe, the Main, the Thames, the Seine, the Hudson, the Neva, and the Volga. And all of them with the same deceit toward their neighbors. Our charmers and wizards, however, distinguish between respectable and not-so-respectable, between settled and newly immigrated, between western and eastern Jews, and if worse comes to worst, they shrug their shoulders and mutter, 'Every country has the Jews it deserves.' It means nothing to them that it was a Jew who coined this fine-sounding phrase. Nor that in the case of Germany, considering the quality of the Jews we have 'deserved,' it becomes a resounding slap in the face. 'All Israel stands openly in the British camp!' announced the American union leader Samuel Gompers in 1916. And that includes the German Jews too, as the American, Ford, well knew. He has written of the faithlessness of the so-called 'German' Jews toward the country where they live, of the fact that they have united themselves with the rest of the world's Jews toward the ruin of Germany. 'Why?' jeers the Jew. 'Because the German is a vulgar scoundrel, a backward, medieval creature, who hasn't the faintest idea of our worth. And we should help such rabble? No, he has the Jews he deserves!' Such arrogance is indeed staggering to behold."

I reminded him of Russia. "Before the revolution, the Jews condemned her as a downright sewer of vileness, even though they were the evident vermin in that sewer; now, the same Jews are at the helm, and, wuppdiwupp, the same Russia is a great nation."

"In the year 1870," he rejoined, "we Germans had the privilege of being a great people. The Jews considered that the time had arrived for replacing the French emperor, who had become undependable, with a pliable president. This also seemed an excellent opportunity to establish the Commune; (33) thus the 'heroic German people.' No wonder that right behind our princes and generals a pack of gesticulating Jewish financiers rode into Paris. Meanwhile, though, we have sunk back down into the pack again. The press, 'that select tool of the Anti-christ,' as Bismarck called it, has designated us as 'Boches' and as 'Huns.' But have patience! The more quickly we approach Bolshevism, the more glorious we will become again. And one fine day it will be the English and the French who are the scoundrels. One doesn't need spectacles to see that. 'I am a British subject but, first and foremost, a Jew,' screamed a Hebrew years ago in a large English-Jewish newspaper. (34) And another: 'Whoever has to choose between his duties as an Englishman and as a Jew must choose the latter.' (35) And a third: 'Jews who want to be both patriotic Englishmen and good Jews are simply living lies.' (36) That they could venture things of that sort so openly indicates how overrun with Jews England already was then."

"The stronghold of European Jewry had its origin in the period between Cromwell and Edward VII," I emphasized. "Since then, however, the center of Jewish activity seems to have been transferred to America. They have had a good footing there for a long time. Sombart maintains that it was Jewish money which made the first two voyages of Columbus possible. (37) A Jew, Luis de Torres, is supposed to have been the first European to step on American soil. And, topping everything else, the Jews have recently claimed Columbus himself as one of them."

"That's not surprising," he laughed. "Everyone who has somehow played a role in the world, the dear Lord included, is a Jew. They even have Goethe and Schopenhauer on their list. And blessed be he who believes it. For my part, I contest them Columbus as well as Torres; ocean travel was much more hazardous then than now."

"According to Hauser," I replied, "Columbus was an Aryan, perhaps even of German descent."

"It's all the same to me," he responded. "As far as I'm concerned, he could have been a Zulu, I'd sooner attribute his deed to a Negro than to a Jew."

"Completely aside from that, it's clear that they have had America by the throat for quite a while," I continued. "No country, writes Sombart, displays more of a Jewish character than the United States. (38) We have already seen a consequence of this in the World War. In 1915, at a time when the true Americans hadn't the slightest thought of a war against us and, in fact, were so disposed toward us that any indication of a possible conflict of interest could have been smoothly and amicably settled, a secret advisory committee met with President Wilson for the sole purpose of preparing the country for war against Germany. (39) And who was the chief wire-puller in these nefarious activities, which were set into motion a full two years before the engagement of the United States in the war? The previously unknown Jew, Bernard Baruch. 'I believed that the war would come, long before it came,' he later calmly explained to the special committee of Congress which confirmed all this. And no one got up and beat the crafty scoundrel to a pulp."

"The resolution of the Jewish high command many years ago to unleash the World War is well authenticated," he said. "At the sixth Zionist Congress in Basel, in 1903, the president, Max Nordau, proclaimed: 'Herzl knows that we stand before a tremendous upheaval of the whole world.' (40) Good old Herzl! What an idealist! Our charmers and wizards were filled with awe at the thought of this noble patriarch. The scoundrel knew, however, what his filthy people had in mind for us!"

"But Herzl was a Zionist," I interjected.

"He was a Jew!" he said, striking the table with his fist. "The word Jew says everything. There is no need for any further distinction! 'God's chosen people' want to have their own 'God's country' again. Catch that: 'again'! God's people and God's country, neither of which, in reality, ever existed! Every portrayal ridicules for its depravity that general state of affairs which existed for some six hundred years in Palestine, till the Assyrians put an end to the mischief. Can you call that a country? Can't one accept the Old Testament as the authority on the matter? First we read of the uninterrupted murders and plunderings of the other peoples of Palestine, which, naturally, took many years. Then right up to the last, with the most abominable vileness, one state of anarchy followed another. The pinnacle, the flowering, the glory of Jewish statesmanship, namely, King David, was such a rascal that even the unprecedented villainy of the letter condemning Uriah was not enough for him; on his deathbed he urged his son to murder his old war comrade, Joab.

"When Cyrus gave the Jews permission to return to Palestine (from their Babylonian 'captivity') the overwhelming majority ignored Zion and remained in immeasurably rich Babylonia. Completely content there, they continued their financial speculations and other activities."

"In the year 1267," I informed him, "there were only two Jewish residents in Jerusalem. Up to the World War, the number of Jews in all Palestine had grown to only 12,000, (41) even though they had been free to return there since ancient times and certainly weren't lacking travel expenses. The remaining twenty or so millions — exactly how many is difficult to ascertain, since the Jews themselves do the counting — fatten themselves upon the sweat of others all over the world. It is hard to understand how tiny Palestine can hope to accommodate this enormous crowd."

"That's not necessary," he retorted. "The point is that it is now official. Israel has remembered itself. Its chains are cast aside. The sun of a new God's state rises over Zion. What an act! Finally liberated from bondage! Everyone is numbed with awe. The Jews grin."

"They have already issued a resolution...." I wanted to continue.

"Yes indeed," he cried, "if anywhere, this is where the cat jumps out of the bag! The resolution of the Pan-Jewish Conference of 1919, in Philadelphia!: 'The Jews are citizens of the new Jewish state of Palestine, but at the same time they have complete rights of citizenship of whatever countries they choose to live in.' One must read that non plus ultra of arrogance twice, indeed, a hundred times, in order to be sure one isn't dreaming. Imagine instead: 'The English are citizens of Great Britain. Each Englishman who chooses to live in Germany or France or Italy retains all his rights of English citizenship, but at the same time he has the complete rights of citizenship of the country in which he is living.' Now ask yourself what a scream of indignation, not we or the French or the Italians, but the Jews themselves would raise if the English people had actually made such a resolution! The Pan-Jewish Congress, however, issued its resolution as categorically as a command.

"This assembly comprised representatives of all the Jews of the world, including the Zionists. Their intentions were, in short, that the Jews should stay where they were and that the new Zion should simply have the purpose, first, to strengthen their political backbone, second, to gratify their arrogance, and last but most important, to provide them a state where they could carry on their dirty business without fear of detection.

"I think we can form a pretty good idea of Jewish nationalism from this."

"Okay. So they are neither national nor international," I acknowledged. "What, then?"

"In terms of our customary concepts," he shrugged, "it really can't be defined. It is a rank growth over the whole earth, sometimes advancing slowly, sometimes leaping ahead in great bounds. Everywhere it sucks voraciously at the lifeblood of the planet. What was in the beginning a swollen abundance will become in the end nothing but dried-up sap. Zionism is the visible, surface aspect. It is connected underground to the rest of the monstrous growth.

"And nowhere is there to be found a trace of opposition to this thing."

"One might say," I laughed, "that the wolves have split themselves into two packs. It has been agreed that one of these shall abandon the land of the sheep in order to go live somewhere, quite among themselves, as pure vegetarians."

"There is one thing above all of which we must always keep in mind," he tendered, "one thing of which we must always remind ourselves: 'Great masters of the lie'! One need only forget Schopenhauer's words for an instant in order to begin slipping under the influence of their deceptions. To be sure, we also lie but, in the first place, not as a matter of habit and, in the second place, clumsily. Any really experienced judge of human nature is able to detect the lie of an Aryan, even a very shrewd one. Sherlock Holmes himself, however, would be at a loss when confronted with the Jewish cold-bloodedness in deception. A Jew is only embarrassed when he inadvertently blurts out the truth. If he should happen to deliberately tell the truth, it is always with a mental reservation, thus making a lie even of the truth."

"Indeed, Luther," I replied, "said to the Jews: 'You are not a German, but a deceiver, not a Frenchman, but a faker.' (42) His synonym for Jew was 'liar'!"

That's what everyone who knows them says of them." he rejoined, "from the Pharaohs up to Goethe and our time. It has been said in every dead and living language: in Greek, Latin, Persian, Turkish, English, French, or what have you. One would hope that these universal condemnations, throughout the whole world, would give our charmers and wizards at least a little to think about. God forbid! Not even Christ was able to reach them. He stood there among the cringing Jewish rabble, his eyes flashing, the very image of scorn, and his words fell among them like whiplashes: Ye are of your father the devil, and the lusts of your father ye will do. He was a murderer from the beginning and abode not in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his own: for he is a liar and the father of it. (43) But to our charmers and wizards that means no more than the unintelligible stammering of a child."

"They delude themselves by believing that to be only a stern but well-meaning lecture of the Lord to his beloved people of Israel," I underscored his irony.

"Christ," he continued with a raised voice, "was never other than perfectly straightforward and frank. God, not to feel the fact that there two fundamentally different worlds opposed one another! In Palestine after the Babylonian captivity there was a great lower stratum of non-Jews ruled over by Jewish moneylenders, powerful through their usury. One can read that in the book of Nehemiah (especially in chapter five — Ed.). Sombart says that it leaves absolutely nothing to be desired in the way of clarity. (44) The outstanding point is that the real population, composed of oppressed peasants, was of an entirely different race than the Hebrews. Gradually the Jews forced their religion on them. Christ himself growled about that: 'Woe onto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For ye encompass sea and land to make one proselyte....' (45) To the Jews, Galilee was the land of the Gentiles, whose population 'sat in darkness,' as they impudently imagined. (46) They said: Can there any good thing come out of Nazareth?' and 'Art thou also of Galilee? Search, and look: for out of Galilee ariseth no prophet.' (47) The Hebrews were so firmly convinced of the non-Jewish ancestry of Christ that they counted him among the especially hated Samaritans. (48) We live and learn! There are many more such examples."

One could hardly recommend a better policy than that which lets each man find salvation in his own fashion," I stressed. "The tacit assumption in that policy, though, is that each man's fashion should involve some sort of decent sentiment, some genuine belief, and not just a contemptible Phariseeism. This distinction should have been expressly emphasized long ago. It wasn't, and the religion of the moneychanger has received the benefit of this misguided tolerance. Christ was not so tolerant. With a whip he put a stop to the business of the children of the devil, even though he had said, 'Love your enemy'!"

"Yes," he replied, "but we must understand what Christ meant by 'enemy.' We can love an honorable and decent enemy, even a brutal one, who is frank and forthright in his enmity. And at the same time we can beware of him. But Christ never dreamed that we should love men whom no love whatever could dissuade from their implacable determination to poison us, body and soul. Indeed, he himself did not do that. On the contrary, he continued to strike with his whip as hard as he could. And the words that he flung with indignation into the faces of the rabble breathed of irreconcilability itself. To me, he acted very proudly in the founding of his religion: there was very little contradiction between his sermons and his deeds! Why, then, have the 'pious' never followed his example? They least of all. They mercilessly persecute even their decent adversaries—as a matter of fact, only their decent adversaries. Their eyes remain closed to the most cunning bunch of swindlers in existence. The Bavarian People's Party, for instance, knows quite well that we are defending the Christian foundations of our nation without mental reservations. They also know, however, that we can make no common cause with them as long as they adhere to their present policies. And so they turned to the Jews, hoping to remain in power with their help. They surprised themselves. Dripping with friendliness at first, the Jews turned on them murderously when they had gotten the upper hand."

"That was inevitable," I agreed with him. "Fortunately, the Jews would not be able to provide us with that same sort of dreadful experience, for we do not betray and murder our own flesh and blood for the sales of profit. So far as we are concerned, the Bavarian People's party could even remain in office, provided they clean the manure out of they pigsty and perceive the correctness of our views. We are not willing to tear ourselves apart just for power. But we want Germanism, we want genuine Christianity, we want order and propriety, and we want these things so firmly established that our children and grandchildren can remain satisfied with them."

"They consider that impossible," he said, "and therefore they consider our program nothing but empty phrases, of no more sincerity than the empty phrases with which they consciously try to peddle themselves to the people. But our goals are not only possible, they are certain, even if we don't attain them tomorrow. But first a beginning must be made. So far, never and nowhere has there been a truly social state. Everywhere and always the upper crust has leaned much more strongly to the principle, 'what is yours, is mine,' than to, 'what is mine, is yours.' These wise ones have only themselves to blame for the fact the lower stratum, full of rage, now is committing the same error. The Jew is able to take advantage of both these groups. One of them provides for his affairs, the other carries them out. Therefore, we oppose them both. We will put an end to unfair privileges as well as to slavery."

"Decidedly," I replied. "Our front stands against both left and right. A strange situation; from two directions we must ward off attackers who also fight one another. The Reds scream at us as reactionaries, and to the reactionaries we are Bolsheviks. From both sides the Jew directs the attack on us. The lower stratum doesn't see him yet and, thus, hates us from sheer stupidity; the upper stratum sees him but thinks it can serve its own selfish purposes with him and thus, shoots us in the back more from unscrupulousness than stupidity. One really needs a good deal of faith under such circumstances in order to maintain one's courage."

"Which we have, God be thanked, in a hundred ways," he said, laughing, as he stretched himself. "No words were spoken more directly to our hearts than 'Be not afraid'! (49) And that was supposed to have been said by a Jew? Those creatures of eternal fear? Crazy!"

"Every time new and promising opportunities for meddling have arisen," he brought out, "the Jew has been immediately involved. He has demonstrated an uncanny ability to sniff out like a bloodhound anything which was dangerous to him. Having found it, he uses all his cunning to get at it, to divert it, to change its nature, or, at least, to deflect its point from its goal. Schopenhauer called the Jew 'the dregs of mankind,' 'a beast,' 'the great master of the lie.' How does the Jew respond? He establishes a Schopenhauer Society. Likewise, the Kant Society in his work, in spite of the fact that — or, rather, because — Kant summarily declared the Jewish people to be a 'nation of swindlers.' (50) The same with the Goethe Society. 'We tolerate no Jews among us,' said Goethe. (51) 'Their religion permits them to rob non-Jews,' he wrote. (52) 'This crafty race has one great principle: as long as order prevails, there is nothing to be gained,' he continued. (53) He categorically emphasized: 'I refrain from all cooperation with Jews and their accomplices.' (54) All in vain; the Jewish Goethe Society is still there. It would be there even if he himself had expressly forbidden such knavery."

"With exactly the same right," I interjected, "the two of us could join a Talmud Society. What impudence that would require! Inconceivable."

"Not to the Jew," he replied. "To him impudence has no meaning. He is only able to think in terms of advantage or disadvantage, profit or loss. One must approach him with a different sort of measuring stick."

"Our charmers and wizards," I rejoined, "all fall for their trick. Goethe, Kant, Schopenhauer seem to be nothing but babblers to them."

"Bah, Goethe!" he interrupted contemptuously. "Not even the saintly Thomas Aquinas is able to reach these people. The great father of the Church has described in his writings our relationship with the Jews in terms of a voyage on a ship. The Jews, embarked on the same vessel with the Christians, play a characteristic role: while the Christians are occupied with sailing the ship, the Jews plunder the storeroom and bore holes in the hull. St. Thomas recommends that they should be relieved of their booty and chained to the rudder. What an atrocity! How un-Christian! Poor Jews! One can learn so much from them! At least, according to Drs. Heim and Schweyer. And so the world goes on, governed with the same wisdom as in the time of Joseph's Pharaoh."

"Namely, by statesmen," I completed, "who are so busy ruling that they completely fail to notice that not they but others actually rule; by men like Czar Nicholas, who indulged himself in the same self-deception and got a bullet in the head for it. As early as 1843 Disraeli gave us a hint of what we should expect there. 'The mysterious Russian diplomacy is organized by Jews,' he boasted. Also, 'the mighty revolution which is in the making in Germany is evolving entirely under the leadership of Jews.'" (55)

"Most of our revolutions," he said, "whether initially with desirable goals or not, have evolved under Jewish leadership. The revolutions of vulgar predisposition were, for the most part, the work of Jews; and those with loftier tendencies were soon subverted into a darker course by Jews. In the case of the struggling young Christianity, for example, the Jews, quick as a flash, began hanging onto its coattails. Consider Paul, properly called Schaul, who was a rabbinical student. That Schaul first chose the Roman-sounding name, Saulus, and then had himself renamed Paulus gives cause for thought. Still more, the fact that in the beginning he persecuted the fledgling Christian community with first-rate ferocity. I don't know: mass murderers who later become saints—is that not too much of a marvel? Indeed, the Jew Weininger supposed that Christ had also originally been a criminal. (56) But, my God, a Jew could say that a hundred times, and it still need not be true on that account.

"As a Jew, Paul certainly knew that of all the peoples of the world the Jews, first and foremost, needed their souls saved. 'Go not...to the Gentiles,...But go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel,' demanded Christ. (57) Paul ignored it. He went to the Greeks and the Romans and brought them his 'Christianity.' A 'Christianity' with which the Roman Empire became unhinged. 'All men are equal! Brotherhood! Pacifism! No more privileges!' And the Jew triumphed."

"I always think," I spun the thread further, "of the admirable Herr Levine in the Berliner Lokalanzeiger. (58) He suddenly burst out one day, as if in rapture: only a Jew could have done that; could have, with Paul's impudence, put himself in the middle of the Capitol and there expounded a doctrine which must bring about the utter ruin of the Roman Empire! That's what the man said, word for word; I still remember it perfectly."

"It certainly hits the nail on the head," he rejoined. "It may be a long time yet before Christianity recovers from Paul. Oh, what gullible souls we are! A Jew murders hundreds of Christians; suddenly he notices that the rest only become even more zealous; the well-known light dawns on him; he pretends to be converted, throws himself into the great pose, and behold: even though he deviates in nearly all his doctrines from the other apostles, we listen devoutly to his sermons. The simple teachings of the Master, which the most childlike mind might comprehend, we must have 'explained' to us by a Hebrew."

"The Jew," I replied, "certainly must be tempted to say, 'Why are you so stupid that you let everyone make fools of you?' And there are many charmers and wizards who, on account of his extraordinary cunning, or 'spirituality' as they call it, look upon him with timid admiration."

"If it depended on mere possessions," he returned, "they would be justified. Someone named Goldstein once boasted that the Jews administer the spiritual property of the German people. (59) A pity that he didn't add how they administer it.

"Well, let us be thankful that there will always be men who, for example, will read Goethe through the eyes of Goethe and not through the slimy spectacles of Goldstein. They may not be professors, but perhaps vagabonds of a sort. A breed, anyway, which will not become extinct and through which the original Goethe will be safely preserved. The Jews can then quietly 'administer' the new Goethe. It will not be begrudged them." (60)

"Suppose, however," I interjected anxiously, "the 'vagabonds' also listen credulously to them and fall into the trap?"

"It lies in the nature of the 'vagabond,'" he laughed, "to have a heart so full that it matters not how his head happens to be persuaded; it will always be his heart that determines the outcome. They feel intuitively that which the clever, despite their understanding, are not able to see. And they preserve it. One may deceive their heads, but not even they have authority over their spirits."

VI

"And, you see," he pounded on the table, "they alone are to be thanked that at least part of our Christian heritage, as well as our other cultural legacy, has survived administration by the Jews. Where are they? Where were they? Among high and low, among the kings and the soldiers, among the popes and the mendicant friars, among the learned and the illiterate, everywhere. But not among the nothing-but-rich; but not among the nothing-but-clever; but not among the greedy and the insatiable; but not among the Pöbelvolk. Here the Jew is at home. Whatever appears here in the way of spiritual possessions he matter-of-factly administers; it is his own. Just as everything was transformed into gold for King Midas, every deep and meaningful word is turned into filth at his touch. But for the others, for the..."

"Vagabonds of the spirit," I threw to him.

"Everything remains as of old," he nodded. "There have been popes of Jewish blood. (61) Also there has seldom or never been a shortage of other dignitaries of the same descent in the Church. Was that which they stood for Catholicism? No, it was Judaism. Let's take just one thing: the selling of indulgences. The very essence of the Jewish spirit. We are both Catholics, but dare we not say that? Are we really supposed to believe that there has never been anything in the Church with which one can find fault? Just because we are Catholics, we say it. That has nothing to do with Catholicism. We know that Catholicism would have remained intact even if half the hierarchy had consisted of Jews. A number of sincere men always held it high, though often only secretly, many times even against the pope. Sometimes there were many such men, sometimes few.

"The investigation of the Jew and his activities should have been the alpha and the omega of our historians. Instead, they investigate the bowel movements of the past.

"Karl the Great favored the Jews at every turn. It seems to me that his slaughter of the 4500 Saxons at Verden — the best German blood — and his Jewish advisers had something to do with one another.

"The notorious insanity of the Crusades bled the German people of six million men. Finally the Hohenstaufen, Frederick II, succeeded through mere negotiation, without striking a blow in securing the Holy Land for Christendom. What did the curia do? Full of hatred, they hurled the ban of excommunication on Frederick and refused to recognize his treaty with the sultan, thus neutralizing his great success. It seems that, to those pulling the strings, the incidental bloodletting was more important than the avowed objective of the Crusades.