Some quotes from Otto Wagener's memoirs.
Otto Wagener (29 April 1888 – 9 August 1971) was a German major general and, for a period, Adolf Hitler's economic advisor and confidant.
Look how Hitler traces back Western thought to ancient Greece and the Renaissance, and criticizes it. Then he deeply criticizes traditionalism and says he must manifest something new.
Hitler had talked himself into considerable excitement, and without pausing for any length of time, he continued.
“You still have not begun to understand that we live at a turning point of history, which, granted, has yet to reach its apogee. The individualism, which, apparent already in classical Greece, marked the Middle Ages and once more put its stamp on the modern period, has begun to falter. Not because of any changes in mankind or nations or on the basis of a new political or cultural orientation, but primarily through a complete transformation of economic life, through the development from trades to industrialization, from the journeyman and independent master craftsman to the factory hand, from small individually owned businesses to large corporations, from the personal relationship between the employer and his employee to the impersonal condition of dependence of labor on capital.
“These represent the problems of our century. To recognize them is everyone’s duty, to solve them is the task of governments. But when governments are made up only of those men who are sent to parliaments by the universal and equal ballot of the great masses, it hardly seems likely that the truly best and most suitable men will be in the government. A very busy, outstanding lawyer or a famous scientist, a great doctor or a leading industrialist simply does not have time to run for office and to devote four weeks of his life to campaigning. And then, he can’t spend his valuable time doing battle in the Reichstag.
[...]
“Then the highbrows appear on the scene and appeal to the law and the authority of tradition. These legitimists do not see that this law and this tradition were born in individualist thinking and are the pillars of a past time. What counts is to establish new laws and a new authority in place of old traditions. If this is not done, they will find that the road to socialist reconstruction will not be traveled according to plan and peaceably, but that the revolution will topple those pillars, bringing down the structure of individualism. But most of them have never even read Marx, and they view the Bolshevik revolution as a private Russian affair.
Otto Wagener. (written in 1946, first published in German in 1978).
Hitler: Memoirs of a Confidant. Edited by Henry Ashby Turner, Jr., translated by Ruth Hein (1985). Page 12-13.
https://archive.org/details/wagenerhitlermemoirsofaconfidant/page/n41/mode/2upCommentary: Hitler is anti-human-rights, because it is a selfish individual-centric construct that is ideologically incompatible with Socialism (which looks after the welfare of society as a whole).
“Here you see the difference between the former age of individualism and the socialism that is on the horizon. In the past—that is, for most people it is still the present—the individual is everything, everything is directed at maintaining his life and improving his existence. Everything focuses on him. He is the center. Everyone is a central figure, as is officially acknowledged in his vested human rights.
“In the socialism of the future, on the other hand, what counts is the whole, the community of the Volk. The individual and his life play only a subsidiary role. He can be sacrificed—he is prepared to sacrifice himself should the whole demand it, should the commonweal call for it.
“Since the introduction of universal military training, this idea has taken concrete shape. Laws have been made to punish anyone who dodges military service by self-mutilation or desertion, even prescribing death for flight in the face of the enemy. Here, therefore, the basic socialist principle prevails. But in the rest of life, individualism, liberalism, egotism continue to triumph. Even during a war someone who is not in the military can fill his pockets and amass a fortune, which he will sooner or later lose to someone else, while the poor soldiers at the front fight and give their lives for the community.
“Aren’t these liberals, these reprobate defenders of individualism, ashamed to see the tears of the mothers and wives, or don’t these cold-blooded accountants even notice? Have they already grown so inhuman that they are no longer capable of feeling? It’s understandable why bolshevism simply removed such creatures. They were worthless to humanity, nothing but an encumbrance to their Volk. Even the bees get rid of the drones when they can no longer be of service to the hive. The Bolshevik procedures are thus quite natural.
“But that’s precisely the problem we have set out to solve: to convert the German Volk to socialism without simply killing off the old individualists, without destruction of property and values, without extermination of culture and morality and the ethics ...”
Otto Wagener. (written in 1946, first published in German in 1978).
Hitler: Memoirs of a Confidant. Edited by Henry Ashby Turner, Jr., translated by Ruth Hein (1985). Page 16-17.
https://archive.org/details/wagenerhitlermemoirsofaconfidant/page/n43/mode/2upCommentary: Hitler will become MORE SOCIALIST once the state's authority is secure and not in a time of war or crisis.
“... That, furthermore, we must travel the road to the socialist reorganization of things—of that I never had any doubt. But socialist experiments are better made once order has been established. Otherwise, they slide all too smoothly into Bolshevik channels.”
Otto Wagener. (written in 1946, first published in German in 1978).
Hitler: Memoirs of a Confidant. Edited by Henry Ashby Turner, Jr., translated by Ruth Hein (1985). Page 159.
https://archive.org/details/wagenerhitlermemoirsofaconfidant/page/n187/mode/2upHitler acknowledges Socialism's ancient roots:
“Socialism is a political problem. And politics is of no concern to the economy,” he once said to me in the course of one of our conversations. “Socialism is a question of attitude toward life, of the ethical outlook on life of all who live together in a common ethnic or national space. Socialism is a Weltanschauung!
“But in actual fact there is nothing new about this Weltanschauung. Whenever I read the New Testament Gospels and the revelations of various of the prophets and imagine myself back in the era of the Roman and late Hellenistic, as well as the Oriental, world, I am astonished at all that has been made of the teachings of these divinely inspired men, especially Jesus Christ, which are so clear and unique, heightened to religiosity. These were the ones who created this new worldview which we now call socialism, they established it, they taught it and they lived it! But the communities that called themselves Christian churches did not understand it! Or if they did, they denied Christ and betrayed him! For they transformed the holy idea of Christian socialism into its opposite! They killed it, just as, at the time, the Jews nailed Jesus to the cross; they buried it, just as the body of Christ was buried. But they allowed Christ to be resurrected, instigating the belief that his teachings, too, were reborn!
“It is in this that the monstrous crime of these enemies of Christian socialism lies! With the basest hypocrisy they carry before them the cross—the instrument of that murder which, in their thoughts, they commit over and over—as a new divine sign of Christian awareness, and allow mankind to kneel to it. They even pretend to be preaching the teachings of Christ. But their lives and deeds are a constant blow against these teachings and their Creator and a defamation of God!
“We are the first to exhume these teachings! Through us alone, and not until now, do these teachings celebrate their resurrection! Mary and Magdalene stood at the empty tomb. For they were seeking the dead man! But we intend to raise the treasures of the living Christ!
“Herein lies the essential element of our mission: we must bring back to the German Volk the recognition of those teachings! For what did the falsification of the original concept of Christian love, of the community of fate before God and of socialism lead to? By their fruits ye shall know them!
[...]
Christ’s deep understanding of the necessity of a socialist community of men and nations.
[...]
“You see, Wagener: our mission is not an economic one. Of course, the economy and its ethics must also be adapted to the conditions of this socialism. I agree with all your plans. But they are not primary. To fill the Volk with the reborn faith and the Weltanschauung of Him who once before was a savior in the peoples’ deepest hour of need—that is primary! And since the old people are usually inextricably enmeshed in their economic interests and egotistical petty shopkeepers’ mentality, we can, in the main, seek support only from the young people. It is youth that will once more conquer the tme kingdom of heaven for its Volk and for all mankind!”
Otto Wagener. (written in 1946, first published in German in 1978).
Hitler: Memoirs of a Confidant. Edited by Henry Ashby Turner, Jr., translated by Ruth Hein (1985). Page 139-141.
https://archive.org/details/wagenerhitlermemoirsofaconfidant/page/n167/mode/2upHitler says that the USSR is not actually Socialist, but practices "state capitalism". This is, in fact, a criticism that you can find many present-day Communists make against the USSR and historic Communist regimes. The rest of this passage about making conditions better for the worker so they aren't slaves of capitalism almost sounds like something a typical Bernie-Sandersite would say, LOL. Also note that Hitler once again says Marxism and its implementations will always fail to bring about true Socialism, but National Socialism will achieve what they fail to do.
I will never forget one occasion, when Feder, wearing a supercilious smile, came to my office to explain that Hitler completely disavowed my socialist ideas and plans. He was, Feder claimed, an admitted follower of individualism and economic liberalism. When I remonstrated, Feder assured me that he had just been talking with Hitler and that in a half-hour discourse Hitler had expounded to him the correctness of the principles of individualism.
I immediately went down to Hitler’s office—we were still in the Brown House on Brienner Strasse—and no sooner did he see me than he called out, “I’m glad you’re here. I was just weighing the pros and cons of liberalism with Feder. And I made an astonishing discovery.
“Individualism, which is in the process of being replaced by socialism—and we’re determined to lend a helping hand to abolish and replace it—is actually already being buried by industrialization. Yes, it’s already in its grave. For, thanks to growing industrialism, with all its consequences—associations, corporations, trusts, and monopolies—actually only a very few people are left who might imagine themselves to be living their individual lives. But even they are under a misapprehension. For they, too, are slaves of those who wield power. All the others, anyway, have become merely working links in the universal enterprise. From early to late, men toil on perpetual treadmills. And when all is said and done, when they fall, exhausted, into bed at night, they have worked for no more than preserving their primitive slaves’ lives, perhaps at one time or another a little bit enhanced. But even then their life has no other meaning.
“So all that is left of individualism is legislation, civil law, as well as the piles of paragraphs in the democratic constitution, with their mentions and guarantees of universal human rights and fundamental rights that, economically speaking, have long ago ceased to exist.
“Industrialization has deprived the individual of all liberty, placed him in thrall to capital and the machine. The state is not the organization for self-rule by free individuals who call themselves citizens, but the central organization for the mills of labor growing out of industrialization, in which any independence or individualism is ground to dust. This is most crudely evident in the Bolshevik state, with its state capitalism.
“But if we realize our social economy exactly as we discussed more than once, we will come to liberate the individual from the domination of capital and all its institutions. To begin with, labor will seize possession of capital. But what is ethically most significant is the following: when the purchasing power of wages increases—when, as you say, it might even double—the initial effect will be that production will have to increase, since the demand will be greater. But next comes the great era of increasing personal gratification, with the result that the worker will still earn a sufficiency if, instead of working eight hours a day, he puts in only seven or even six.
“This moment signifies the rebirth of individuality, of the possibility of living for oneself outside the hours that serve material needs, and of devoting oneself to hobbies, cultural interests, art, science, life in general, and the family.
“To this extent, then, socialism —our socialism—leads back to individuality, and with it to the strongest impetus to a personal, racially defined, and altogether universal human evolution.”
When I told Hitler that this view without any doubt confirmed us in our systematic elaboration of our socio-economic tasks, he replied:
“Without a doubt in the world. The more we examine the conclusions to be drawn from our ideas and plans, the more surely we arrive at the conviction that they are correct and represent the genuine solution of the problems of socialism, which appear so difficult. What Marxism, Leninism, and Stalinism failed to accomplish we shall be in a position to achieve. And our synthesis is not a compromise—I should reject any such thing—it is, instead, the radical removal of all the false results of industrialization and unrestrained economic liberalism, and the redirection of this line of development to the service of humanity and the individual.”
Otto Wagener. (written in 1946, first published in German in 1978).
Hitler: Memoirs of a Confidant. Edited by Henry Ashby Turner, Jr., translated by Ruth Hein (1985). Page 148-149.
https://archive.org/details/wagenerhitlermemoirsofaconfidant/page/n177/mode/2upAfter the war in his memoir, Wagener revealed that, like Goebbels, his faith in Hitler was somewhat shaken when it was clear just how strongly Hitler rejected the INTERNATIONALIST INTERPRETATION OF SOCIALISM (i.e. Marxism/Communism). It seems that in Wagener's opinion, he faults Hitler for being too nationalist (which Wagener seems to think risks potentially derailing the Socialist cause). I suppose Wagener did not realize that even Stalin had abandoned the practicality of a truly internationalist Socialism with his "Socialism in one country" policy. Indeed, Wagener concedes that his own ideas of Socialism probably would not have succeeded to the extent that Hitler's did.
I was crestfallen. For the first time, I understood clearly the difference between my way of thinking and his, I was a socialist, an advocate of cooperation, a Christian, even in reference to the relationship and cooperation among nations and peoples beyond their own borders; and he was a national socialist, a “Zeissist,” a nationalist of the English stamp, whose socialist thinking was only for his Volk and within his own Volk. Toward the rest of the world, however, he was, in the last analysis, a crass economic liberalist, egotist, and imperialist. From this angle, his Central Europe took on a quite different significance from the one that had appeared during the Hamburg discussion. At that time, granted, rearmament was also a prerequisite for such plans. Who was it who repeatedly induced him to accept the idea of such power politics?
It is, I admit, hard to say which concept is correct. At the time I did not dare, and to this day (1946) I do not dare, simply to reject Hitler’s view. On the contrary, I must admit that all Hitler’s actions and successes in foreign affairs are such as to make his view appear the better one and to seriously shake mine. Furthermore, the respect paid to National Socialist Germany abroad and the rehabilitation of the Germans’ standing among other nations prove that the world appreciates Hitler and the road he has taken. In the final analysis, it will have to be left to events to show which road would have been the better one—though even then, there is no way of testing whether the pursuit of my way of thinking could have led to the desired goal.
Otto Wagener. (written in 1946, first published in German in 1978).
Hitler: Memoirs of a Confidant. Edited by Henry Ashby Turner, Jr., translated by Ruth Hein (1985). Page 164.
https://archive.org/details/wagenerhitlermemoirsofaconfidant/page/n193/mode/2upOk, I think that is enough quotes from Wagener to demonstrate the point. Socialism (with a small "s", and therefore talking about ideological socialism rather than just saying the name of the NS party) appears 174 times if you do a text search of the book. I'm sure there are plenty more great quotes.
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All these quotes from Wagener (a self-proclaimed Socialist who was loyal to Hitler) express the same sentiments as those found in the work of Heiden (a liberal/left-leaning Jewish journalist), Rauschning (a "reactionary conservative" who quickly became anti-NS and left the party), Otto Strasser (a self-proclaimed Socialist who was accused by Hitler of being a Marxist Socialist, and therefore _not authentically Socialist enough_, who Hitler nevertheless wanted to keep in the party if possible), as well as in Hitler's own speeches.
Now we know why False Leftists never cite primary sources regarding Hitler's own words on his Socialist beliefs when trying to "disprove" that he was a leftist. (And, if they do, it's only to use the circular reasoning that, by definition, since Hitler rejected the Marxist/Communist interpretation, he cannot be "real" a Socialist. eyeroll.)
With the information that has been provided in this thread, I think we have more than enough evidence to conclusively prove that National Socialism was indeed leftist and an authentically Socialist ideology. (But feel free to post more evidence, of course.)
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