More Dull German History—The Stuff That Led to Nazism

Are you ready for yet another brief history lesson? History is important because the mistakes, hatreds and prejudices of the past will ever emerge anew, albeit in different forms. This time I speak about the rise of nationalism in Germany and how that led to Nazism and their horrible attempts to cleanse Germany of Jews, Gypsies and others to create a pure Aryan race.

Of course, there's no one definition of nationalism. A nation is not a state. A nation is not simply an ethnic group, although many would like to make it so. It seems that a nation is defined as a group of people who view themselves as united. So in the United States, we have always struggled with what it means to be a nation. We have continued to this very day with a healthy tension between the rights of individual states and the control of the federal government.

But back to Germany in the late 19th century. Until 1871 Germany was nothing but a fragmented patchwork of states of all kinds and sizes. It had been so since the 16th century reformation. Some were called kingdoms. Others were called duchies. Yet others were city states. There were Prussians, Saxons, Bavarians, Austrians and Hungarians. The two most powerful nations dominated by German-speaking aristocrats were the Kingdom of Prussia and the Austrian Empire. The Austrians had many ethnic groups. German-speaking people had no absolute numerical majority. In 1867 the Austrian House of Hapsburg agreed to share power with the central European Kingdom of Hungary, forming the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the second largest in Europe, after Russia.

Not to be outdone, the Kingdom of Prussia under Prince Wilhelm Frederick and his Chancellor or Prime Minister Otto von Bismarck created the Second Reich—Hitler later formed the Third Reich. Wilhelm was declared German Emperor. The emperor was president of the new federation, with a bunch of other dukes and principalities sharing in the rule of the new nation.

 I won't go into all the complicated politics, jealousies, tensions, attempted assassinations and revolutions that ultimately led to the horrors of World War I. The only point I wish to make is that Bismarck's new empire was a disappointment to those who longed for a unified Germany. The Second Reich did not include Austria.

In the imagination of these pan-Germans, there was no room for Jews. They were not part of the Aryan race, but rather a rootless, desert people who exploited true Germans. They had no right to be called Germans.

Anti-Semitism was strong across Europe and particularly in Germany and France. By the time of Bismarck, over sixty years before Adolph Hitler became Chancellor of Germany, the idea of a German race, the Aryans, dominated the imaginations of millions. Hitler did not create anti-Semitism. He exploited it to his own ends as he formed a truly German-Aryan nation that included Austria.

Welcome The Master Race

In yesterday's Blog I mentioned Christopher Hale - Writer and producer for the BBC and Discovery channel, among others. His Himmler's Crusade is a brilliantly written resource for understanding SS Fuehrer Heinrich Himmler's passion to discover the roots of the Aryan race in Tibet, of all places.

The New Master Race

For a century before the rise of the Nazis, German intellectuals had been hard at work to undermine the authority of the Bible and the status of its original language, Hebrew. This movement is know today as Higher Criticism. Those scholars put great emphasis on explaining events and history by reference to natural causes and events. Armed with such presuppositions, they led the charge to discredit biblical teachings about Adam and Eve being the first humans and the different races being descended from the three sons of Noah. Jewish genealogy of mankind was toppled from its pedestal.

The Germans in particular, but also the British, guided by scholars like Immanuel Kant, William Jones and Max Mueller, looked to India and then to Tibet as the real place where human civilization began. The culture of the Indians, they claimed, came from Tibet, just as agriculture, numbers, the game of chess, etc. seem to have come from India.

As to language, Sanskrit was spoken by those cultured warriors of northern India. These masterful northerners conquered the world. They founded colonies from Egypt to Scandinavia. The proof was in their words. All Indian and European tongues, they insisted, sprang from the same common source. Frederich Schlegel of Jena University gave these great northern masters a name, based on the Sanskrit: Aryans. Because of their association with the north of India and Europe, they came to be called Nordics. The word Aryan meant in Sanskrit 'aristocrat' or 'nobleman.' Schlegel and his camp connected Aryan with the German word Ehre, meaning honor.

To quote Christopher Hale, "The Aryan version of history blitzkrieged through German culture. In philosophy, folklore, geography and philology the Aryans made a triumphant entry, stomping down from the Himalayas and civilizing the world. They were the common ancestor of Indians, Persians, Greeks, Italians, Slavs, Scandinavians, Anglo-Saxons, and especially Germans! Especially Germans! Aryans were soon being called Indo-Germans and given the status of Wagnerian heroes; they were youthful, tall, blond, generous, brave and creative" (p.28).

Give a big welcome to the Master Race!

Hyperborea, Lemuria, Atlantis, Aryans and the Nazis

Aryan: Encyclopedia - Aryan

I've often wondered why various questionnaires asking about race give me the option to call myself Caucasian. The whole thing is quite suspect today, but this particular concept of a Caucasian race can be traced back to the early 1800s when a German (sic!) scientist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach named it after the peoples of the Caucasus region, stretching from Russia south to Iran. Blumenbach and others in his day were big into measuring skulls (phrenology). So, based on his skull-measuring research, he divided us humans into five races:

• Caucasian or white
• Mongolian or yellow
• Malayan or brown
• Negroid or black
• American or red

Blumenbach's work had big time influence on ideas about race in the 19th century. How then did the Nazis in the early part of the 20th century come up with the term Aryan and the idea that the Aryan race was destined by the gods to rule the world?

Aryan is a word derived from the Indo-Aryan Vedic Sanskrit and Iranian Avestan terms meaning "noble." During the 19th century an idea spread that people from India and Iran were the earliest Europeans. This theory was used by some British imperialists to justify British control of India. After all, they said, the founders of Indian culture were of the same race as the Anglo-Saxon invaders who established the British Raj.

Lemuria

Dr. N.S. Rajaram explodes that whole theory in an interesting article, "Aryan Invasion—History or Politics." He traces the idea of an Aryan race to the German scholar Friedrich Max Muller (1823-1900). Muller settled in Oxford from 1848 to the end of his life. He spoke not only of a definite Aryan language, but also of a corresponding 'Aryan race.'

The idea was picked up by the Nazis. As I said, it had been floating around Europe all through the latter part of the 19th century and into the first part of the 20th. Many Germans wanted to be free from the Jewish heritage they linked to the Bible and the Christian church. So they insisted that the true roots of Western culture were to be found in India and the mountains of Asia (Caucasus) rather than in the ancient Near East. This pseudo science supported their antisemitic prejudices.

Once again link these ideas to HPB, Madame H.P. Blavatsky and her book The Secret Doctrine. Christopher Hale gives us an interesting summary of HPB's teachings in his introduction to Himmler's Crusade—The Nazi Expedition to Find the Origins of the Aryan Race.

According to HPB the whole thing started several million years ago when some spiritual essences called the Self-born inhabited the Imperishable Sacred Land. However, their imperishable kingdom sank beneath the ocean. Next came the Hyperboreans. After their disappearance the Lemurians appeared on a vast continent in the Pacific eighteen million years ago.

This continent was also destroyed in a cataclysm of fire and flood. About 1,850,000 years ago a fourth race made up of giants, appeared on the fabled continent of Atlantis. They discovered electrical power, powered flight and built enormous temples and pyramids. But, alas, their continent also sank into the ocean.

But all was not lost. An elite priesthood escaped to the Gobi Desert and then into the Himalayas and the lost Tibetan kingdom of Shambhala. These surviving Atlanteans passed on their wisdom to the Aryans, who began to spread south and west across the globe, producing the great, white Anglo-Saxons.

So, look out. Here comes the Master Race. More on this another time.