An Alternative Interpretation of a Paragraph in Himmler's "Secret Speech"
(with digression on the nature of fascism, in bold red, towards the end)
Dear Mr. Porter!
LETTER 24
An Alternative Interpretation of a Paragraph in Himmler's "Secret Speech"
(with digression on the nature of fascism, in bold red, towards the end)
Dear Mr. Porter!
First of all, let me say that I'm in total support of all historical revisionism in general, but especially regarding the Holocaust issue which I've become convinced of is one of the biggest, if not THE biggest, lies ever perpetrated in known history. I think Your exposé of the Holocaust as a massive Bolshevik lie is one of the most clinical I've read. I have to say there is a lot of information to read and I haven't read all the material on Your site, but I've read quite a bit of it and I'm very impressed with the meticulousness of Your work. I'll be as brief as I can...
... me and a friend of mine are having a discussion about the question of whether the National Socialists in Hitler's Germany had a pronounced and deliberate plan to exterminate the Jewish race, as in killing every single Jew on the face of the earth. He gave me a couple of quotes from speeches made by Hitler and Himmler respectively, and I proceeded to go to your site to see if you had any material or comments on these quotes. You did. In fact, you had quite a bit, and as I was reading Your translation of the 4th October 1943 Poznan speech by Himmler, I think I came across a possible interpretation which was overlooked on Your part. Your commentary is here http://www.cwporter.com/posen.htm I'll quote from your article, I hope You can see my emphases:
START OF QUOTE "I want to mention another very difficult matter here before you in all frankness. Among ourselves, it ought to be spoken of quite openly for once; yet we shall never speak of it in public. Just as little as we hesitated to do our duty as ordered on 30 June 1934, and place comrades who had failed against the wall and shoot them, just as little did we ever speak of it, and we shall never speak of it. [Bear this in mind for later./Miklós] It was a matter of course, of tact, for us, thank God, never to speak of it, never to talk of it. It made everybody shudder; yet everyone was clear in his mind that he would do it again if ordered to do so, and if it was necessary. I am thinking now of the evacuation of the Jews, the extirpation ["Ausrottung"] of the Jewish people. It is one of those things that's easy to say: "The Jewish people will be extirpated" ["wird ausgerottet"], says every Party comrade, "that's quite clear, it's in our programme: elimination ["Ausschaltung"] of the Jews, extirpation ["Ausrottung"]; that's what we're doing." And then they all come along, these 80 million good Germans, and every one of them has his decent Jew. Of course, it's quite clear that the others are pigs, but this one is one first-class Jew. Of all those who speak this way, not one has looked on; not one has lived through it. Most of you know what it means when 100 bodies lie together, when 500 lie there, or if 1,000 lie there. To have gone through this, and at the same time, apart from exceptions caused by human weaknesses, to have remained decent, that has made us hard. This is a chapter of glory in our history which has never been written, and which never shall be written; since we know how hard it would be for us if we still had the Jews, as secret saboteurs, agitators, and slander-mongers, among us now, in every city -- during the bombing raids, with the suffering and deprivations of the war. We would probably already be in the same situation as in 1916/17 if we still had the Jews in the body of the German people. The riches they had, we've taken away from them. [From the Jews./Miklós] I have given a strict order, which SS Group Leader Pohl has carried out, that these riches shall, of course, be diverted to the Reich without exception. We [The SS and the German people./Miklós] have taken none of it. Individuals [Individual SS men, that is./Miklós] who failed were punished according to an order given by me at the beginning, which threatened: he who takes even one mark of it, that's his death.
"A number of SS men -- not very many -- have violated that order, and that will be their death, without mercy. [Remember the reference above?/Miklós] We had the moral right, we had the duty to our own people, to kill this people which wanted to kill us ["dieses Volk, dass uns umbringen wollte, umzubringen"]. [Translator's note: it is unclear whether the writer is referring to the Jews as a race, or to the Jews as saboteurs, agitators, and slander-mongerers; see above].
[ATTENTION! In my opinion the writer is not referring to the Jews AT ALL - Himmler is here referring to the number of SS men who violated the order that forbids the SS to steal for themselves from the riches the SS had confiscated from the Jews!!!]
"But we don't have the right to enrich ourselves even with one fur, one watch, one mark, one cigarette, or anything else. Just because we eradicated ["ausgerottet"] a bacillus [The bacillus of CORRUPTION and nothing else!/Miklós], after all, doesn't mean we want to be infected by the bacillus and die. I will never permit even one little spot of corruption to arise or become established here. Wherever it may form, we shall burn it out together. In general, however, we can say that we have carried out this most difficult task out of love for our own people. And we have suffered no harm to our inner self, our soul, our character in so doing." END OF QUOTE.
I think this is a mistake, or at least a possible alternative, in the actual meaning of this crucial passage. My interpretation is that Himmler here is not at all talking about the killing off of the Jews, he's talking about eradicating the spiritual corruption in the SS which manifests in individual SS men yielding to the temptation of greed and making themselves guilty of the same crime the SS and the Nazis accused the Jews of, that is stealing what does not belong to them! He is referring to the execution of these SS men for stealing out of the riches they've confiscated from the Jews, and his reference to "never talking about it in public" concerns this shame of the SS for having to put their own "comrades who had failed against the wall and shoot them". I'd be very interested in your view regarding this matter.
With respect,
"Miklós"
[COMMENT: Taken as a whole, and in context, you may very well be right, if we are willing to accept another more or less figurative usage of the word "kill"; but the real question is, who is "us"? An SS man who steals some diamond jewelry or a fur coat is certainly "killing" the spirit of National Socialist honesty, integrity, and self-sacrifice for the good of the national community; but is he literally (or even figuratively) trying to kill "us", i.e., Himmler and the other decent National Socialists?
It also seems very strange, in accordance with your interpretation, to refer to the SS, or individual members of the SS, as a " Volk ". If it were " diese Leute, die unsere Treue töten wollte", or something of that nature, then the meaning would be quite clear: that the reference was to disloyal SS officers, and not Jews. But you may be right. If you place more weight on the preceding sentence -- "A number of SS men -- not very many -- have violated that order, and that will be their death, without mercy" -- then you are most certainly right.
Something like this in a will or a contract could lead to decades of litigation and cost millions of dollars. I once knew an English accountant who had worked in an office in some colonial country, and he said that when he left the colony they were still working on the liquidation of a tea plantation that went bust 150 years before.
We're getting there with this ridiculous "secret speech" -- 60 years with no end in sight -- and with a lot more at stake.
My own view (for what it is worth) is that the origin of the document is unknown; its authenticity is unproven; and that the text is ambiguous; I don't think the language is clear enough to provide definitive proof of anything.
There's a famous Italian comedy entitled: " Così è se così vi pare" -- "right you are if you think you are"; I think it's one of those situations.
BEST WISHES,
CARLOS W. PORTER]
"Miklós":
In my opinion, generally, Himmler and the National Socialists refer to the German people analogously as a unified, organic body - one organ - "infected" so to speak, with the "bacillus" of Jewry, and hence the need to "clean" the body - corpus - of this "infection". To me that doesn't necessarily imply the literal killing of the Jews, but rather the restoration to health of the German "body" or "organ", by expelling the Jews. The Fascist view of the nation and the people as a "corporation" lies at the heart of the Western (deliberate?) misunderstanding and (again: deliberate?) misrepresentation of Fascism as a unification of Big Business and the State, when in fact the Fascists didn't use the word "corporation" to mean business corporation; hence the misleading and erroneous reference to the Bush regime as a fascist regime, when in fact all powerful Neocons are self-confessed Marxists, Leninists and Trotskyites. Therefore the Bush regime should rightly be called a Leftist/Bolshevik regime. In my opinion.
"Miklós"
[COMMENT: Thanks for your comments. You make some very important points. Of course it would be going too far to say the Himmler speech isn't about Jews at all. It's obvious that much of what is controversial in the "speech" is about the Jews, but if it doesn't prove that Six Million, or any millions, of them were exterminated, which is obvious, then it doesn't really make much difference what else it means. I don't think the thing is entirely authentic in its present form.
What you say about fascism is quite correct.
The essential economic idea of fascism is compulsory arbitration in labour disputes. A "corporative state" is one in which all members of a certain industry, both workers and employers, belong to the same organization, usually referred to in English as a "vertical trade union" ("sindacato verticale" or "corporazione"), and are forced to negotiate. There are no strikes, but there are no lockouts, strikebreakers or mass dismissals either.
There is almost complete job protection.
The ideal of capitalism is personified by Andrew Carnegie, who spent hundreds of millions of dollars on charity, including libraries for his workers; but when they went on strike (for example, at Homestead, Pennsylvania in 1892) he imported hundreds of strikebreakers, goons and mercenary private police (Pinkertons) who fought running gun battles with his strikers for four and a half months, so that hundreds of people were killed; then he wondered why his workers were too tired to go to his libraries at ten o'clock at night!
The ideal of communist agitators like Woodie Guthrie is the striker, with his Molotov cocktail, dynamite bomb or iron bar, murdering strikebreakers (invariably men even more desperate than the strikers themselves).
Fascism does away with all of this.
Obviously, as with all systems, the system only works well if competently and fairly administered.
"Stato corporativo", etc., is probably best translated as "guild State": economic fascism is a sub-variety of guild socialism, inspired by the guilds of the Middle Ages.
"Guild" is one of the meanings of "corporazione".
A "corporation", in the American sense of a "limited liability company", is usually referred to in Italian as a "società"; "corporazione" is much more abstract and is a very unusual word by comparison. For example, a "multinational corporation" is usually referred to as a "società multinazionale". "Incorporation", in the sense of "company formation", is "costituzione di una società". The same thing is true in other Latin languages.
"Stato corporativo", or the like, rather implies an "integral state", a "state in which the nation is one body", or some similar concept, almost always borrowed from Catholicism ("brothers in the body of Christ", for example).
Most fascist terminology is so vague and so mystical as to be almost entirely meaningless. For example, my favourite, "Spain is a unity of the spiritual in the universal" (from José Antonio Primo de Rivera). Does that mean anything to you?
Most neo-cons are Jews, and to Jews, philosophies are irrelevant. The only thing they are interested in is creating vast bureaucracies in which they personally wield absolute power.
The problems of the modern Western world are essentially racial, and will not be solved by slogans like "all power to the municipalities", and so on and so forth, borrowed from the 1930s.
In the 1930s, most European nations were relatively homogenous; the problems were extreme poverty, gross social injustice, primitive agriculture and class exploitation.
Most modern European "fascists" in the true sense are refugees from a museum, a mausoleum, and their literature does not interest me.
They are cowards who want to have their cake and eat it. They want what is positive in National Socialism, without having to admit that they are "racists".
Of course, where "globalization" is concerned, economic problems have not changed since the 1930s; but a racial element has been added, particularly through immigration.
BEST WISHES,
CARLOS
4 JANUARY 2005]
Himmler, with cigar
Caution: Smoking may be hazardous to your health.
After all, Himmler smoked, and look what happened to him.
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