Leon Degrelle Knight's Cross Holder SS-Sturmbannführer Lèon Degrelle, Commander of the Wallonie Division, 1943 - 45 Leon Degrelle poses with his wife and four of his seven daughters. At the end of the war, Degrelle’s children (including his youngest child, his son) were seized by the Allied victors and separated from one another and given different names. But through a network of friends and supporters throughout Europe, Degrelle was able to reunite his family in exile in Spain.

Approximately two hundred thousand books have dealt with the Second World War and with its central figure, Adolf Hitler.  But has the real Hitler been discovered by any of them?  "The enigma of Hitler is beyond all human comprehension," the left-wing German weekly 'Die Zeit' once put it.

Like Pavlov's Bell
The mountains of Hitler books based on blink hatred and ignorance do little to describe or explain the most powerful man the world has ever seen.  How, I ponder, do these thousands of disparate portraits of Hitler in any way resemble the man I knew?  The Hitler seated beside me, standing up, talking, listening.  It has become impossible to explain to people fed fantastic tales for decades that what they have read or heard on television just does not correspond to the truth.

People have come to accept fiction, repeated a thousand times over, as reality.  Yet they have never seen Hitler, never spoken to him, never heard a word from his mouth.  The very name of Hitler immediately conjures up a grimacing devil, the fount of all of one's negative emotions.  Like Pavlov's bell, the mention of Hitler is meant to dispense with substance and reality.  In time, however, history will demand more than these summary judgements.

Strangely Attractive
Hitler is always present before my eyes:  as a man of peace in 1936, as a man of war in 1944.  It is not possible to have been a personal witness to the life of such an extraordinary man without being marked by it forever.  Not a day goes by but Hitler rises again in my memory, not as a man long dead, but as a real being who paces his office floor, seats himself in his chair, pokes the burning logs in the fireplace.

The first thing anyone noticed when he came into view was his small mustache.  Countless times he had been advised to shave it off, but he always refused:  people were used to him the way he was.

He was not tall -- no more than was Napoleon or Alexander the Great.

His face showed emotion or indifference according to the passion or apathy of the moment.  At times he was as though benumbed, saying not a word, while his jaws moved in the meanwhile as if they were grinding an obstacle to smithereens in the void.  Then he would come suddenly alive and launch into a speech directed at you alone, as though he were addressing a crowd of hundreds of thousands at Berlin's Tempelhof airfield.  Then he became as if transfigured.  Even his complexion, otherwise dull, lit up as he spoke.  And at such times, to be sure, Hitler was strangely attractive and as if possessed of magic powers.

Exceptional Vigor
Anything that might have seemed too solemn in his remarks, he quickly tempered with a touch of humour.  The picturesque world, the biting phrase were at his command.  In a flash he would paint a word-picture that brought a smile, or come up with an unexpected and disarming comparison.  He could be harsh and even implacable in his judgements and yet almost at the same time be surprisingly conciliatory, sensitive and warm.

After 1945 Hitler was accused of every cruelty, but it was not in his nature to be cruel.  He loved children.  It was an entirely natural thing for him to stop his car and share his food with young cyclists along the road.  Once he gave his raincoat to a derelict plodding in the rain.  At midnight he would interrupt his work and prepare the food for his dog Blondi.

He could not bear to eat meat, because it meant the death of a living creature.  He refused to have so much as a rabbit or a trout sacrificed to provide his food.  He would allow only eggs on his table, because egg laying meant that the hen had been spared rather than killed.

Hitler's eating habits were a constant source of amazement to me.  How could someone on such a rigorous schedule, who had taken part in tens of thousands of exhausting mass meetings from which he emerged bathed with sweat, often losing two to four pounds in the process;  who slept only three to four hours a night;  and who, from 1940 to 1945, carried the whole world on his shoulders while ruling over 380 million Europeans:  how, I wondered, could he physically survive on just a boiled egg, a few tomatoes, two or three pancakes, and a plate of noodles?  But he actually gained weight!

He drank only water.  He did not smoke and would not tolerate smoking in his presence.  At one or two o'clock in the morning he would still be talking, untroubled, close to his fireplace, lively, often amusing. He never showed any sign of weariness.  Dead tired his audience might be, but not Hitler.

He was depicted as a tired old man.  Nothing was further from the truth.  In September 1944, when he was reported to be fairly doddering, I spent a week with him.  His mental and physical vigor were still exceptional.  The attempt made on his life on July 20th had, if anything, recharged him.  He took tea in his quarters as tranquilly as if we had been in his small private apartment at the chancellery before the war, or enjoying the view of snow and bright blue sky through his great bay window at Berchtesgaden.

Iron Self-Control
At the very end of his life, to be sure, his back had become bent, but his mind remained as clear as a flash of lightening.  The testament he dictated with extraordinary composure on the eve of his death, at three in the morning of April 29, 1945, provides us a lasting testimony.  Napoleon at Fontainebleau was not without his moments of panic before his abdication.  Hitler simply shook hands with his associates in silence, breakfasted as on any other day, then went to his death as if he were going on a stroll.  When has history ever witnessed so enormous a tragedy brought to its end with such iron self control?

Hitler's most notable characteristic was ever his simplicity.  The most complex of problems resolved itself in his mind into a few basic principles.  His actions were geared to ideas and decisions that could be understood by anyone.  The laborer from Essen, the isolated farmer, the Ruhr industrialist, and the university professor could all easily follow his line of thought.  The very clarity of his reasoning made everything obvious.

His behaviour and his life style never changed even when he became the ruler of Germany.  He dressed and lived frugally.  During his early days in Munich, he spend no more than a mark per day for food.  At no stage in his life did he spend anything on himself.  Throughout his 13 years in the chancellery he never carried a wallet or ever had money of his own.

Computer-Like Mind
Hitler was self-taught and made not attempt to hide the fact.  The smug conceit of intellectuals, their shiny ideas packaged like so many flashlight batteries, irritated him at times.  His own knowledge he had acquired through selective and unremitting study, and he knew far more than thousands of diploma-decorated academics. I don't think anyone ever read as much as he did.  He normally read one book every day, always first reading the conclusion and the index in order to gauge the work's interest for him.  He had the power to extract the essence of each book and then store it in his computer-like mind.  I have heard him talk about complicated scientific books with faultless precision, even at the height of the war.

He had trained himself in philosophy by studying Aristotle and Plato. He could quote entire paragraphs of Schopenhauer from memory, and for a long time carried a pocked edition of Schopenhauer with him. Nietzsche taught him much about the willpower.

His thirst for knowledge was unquenchable.  He spend hundreds of hours studying the works of Tacitus and Mommsen, military strategists such as Clausewitz, and empire builders such as Bismark.  Nothing escaped him:  world history or the history of civilizations, the study of the Bible and the Talmud, Thomistic philosophy and all the masterpieces of Homer, Sophocles, Horace, Ovid, Titus Livius and Cicero.  He knew Julian the Apostate as if he had been his contemporary.

His knowledge also extended to mechanics.  He knew how engines worked; he understood the ballistics of various weapons;  and he astonished the best medical scientists with his knowledge of medicine and biology.

The universality of Hitler's knowledge may surprise or displease those unaware of it, but it is nonetheless a historical fact:  Hitler was one of the most cultivated men of this century.  Many times more so than Churchill, an intellectual mediocrity;  or than Pierre Lavaal, with him mere cursory knowledge of history;  of than Roosevelt;  or Eisenhower, who never got beyond detective novels.

The Young Architect
Even during his earliest years, Hitler was different than other children.  He had an inner strength and was guided by his spirit and his instincts.

He could draw skillfully when he was only eleven years old.  His sketches made at that age show a remarkable firmness and liveliness. He first paintings and watercolors, created at age 15, are full of poetry and sensitivity.  One of his most striking early works, Fortress Utopia,' also shows him to have been an artist of rare imagination.  His artistic orientation took many forms.  He wrote poetry from the time he was a lad.  He dictated a complete play to his sister Paula who was amazed at his presumption. At the age of 16, in Vienna, he launched into the creation of an opera.  He even designed the stage settings, as well as all the costumes;  and, of course, the characters were Wagnerian heroes.

More than just an artist, Hitler was above all an architect.  Hundreds of his works were notable as much for the architecture as for the painting.  From memory alone he could reproduce in every detail the onion dome of a church or the intricate curves of wrought iron. Indeed, it was to fulfill his dream of becoming an architect that Hitler went to Vienna at the beginning of the century.

When one sees the hundreds of paintings, sketches and drawings he created at the time, which reveal his mastery of three dimensional figures, it is astounding that his examiners at the Fine Arts Academy failed him in two successive examinations.  German historian Werner Maser, no friend of Hitler, castigated these examiners:  "All of his works revealed extraordinary architectural gifts and knowledge.  The builder of the Third Reich gives the former Fine Arts Academy of Vienna cause for shame."

In his room, Hitler always displayed an old photograph of his mother. The memory of the mother he loved was with him until the day he died. Before leaving this earth, on April 30, 1945, he placed his mother's photograph in front of him.  She had blue eyes like his and a similar face.  Her maternal intuition told her that her son was different from other children.  She acted almost as if she knew her son's destiny. When she died, she felt anguished by the immense mystery surrounding her son.

Humble Origins
Throughout the years of his youth, Hitler lived the life of a virtual recluse.  He greatest wish was to withdraw from the world.  At heart a loner, he wandered about, ate meager meals, but devoured the books of three public libraries.  He abstained from conversations and had few friends.

It is almost impossible to imagine another such destiny where a man started with so little and reached such heights.  Alexander the great was the son of a king.  Napoleon, from a well-to-do family, was a general at 24.  Fifteen years after Vienna, Hitler would still be an unknown corporal.  Thousands of others had a thousand times more opportunity to leave their mark on the world.

Hitler was not much concerned with his private life.  In Vienna he had lived in shabby, cramped lodgings.  But for all that he rented a piano that took up half his room, and concentrated on composing his opera. He lived on bread, milk, and vegetable soup.  His poverty was real. He did not even own an over-coat.  He shoveled streets on snowy days. He carried luggage at the railway station.  He spent many weeks in shelters for the homeless.  But he never stopped painting or reading.

Despite his dire poverty, Hitler somehow managed to maintain a clean appearance.  Landlords and landladies in Vienna and Munich all remembered him for his civility and pleasant disposition.  His behaviour was impeccable.  His room was always spotless, his meager belongings meticulously arranged, and his clothes neatly hung or folded.  He washed and ironed his own clothes, something which in those days few men did.  He needed almost nothing to survive, and money from the sale of a few paintings was sufficient to provide for all his needs.

Search For Destiny
Impressed by the beauty of the church in a Benedictine monastery where he was part of the choir and served as an altar boy, Hitler dreamt fleetingly of becoming a Benedictine monk.  And it was at that time, too, interestingly enough, that whenever he attended mass, he always had to pass beneath the first swastika he had ever seen:  it was graven in the stone escutcheon of the abbey portal.

Hitler's father, a customs officer, hoped the boy would follow in his footsteps and become a civil servant.  His tutor encouraged him to become a monk.  Instead the young Hitler went, or rather fled, to Vienna.  And there, thwarted in his artistic aspirations by the bureaucratic mediocrities of academia, he turned to isolation and meditation.  Lost in the great capital of Austria-Hungary, he searched for his destiny.

During the first 30 years of Hitler's life, the date April 20, 1889, meant nothing to anyone.  He was born on that day in Braunau, a small town in the Inn valley.  During his exile in Vienna, he often thought of his modest home, and particularly of his mother.  When she fell ill, he returned home from Vienna to look after her.  For weeks he nursed her, did all the household chores, and supported her as the most loving of sons.  When she finally died, on Christmas eve, his pain was immense.  Wracked with grief, he buried his mother in the little country cemetary.  "I have never seen anyone so prostrate with grief," said his mother's doctor, who happened to be Jewish.

A Strong Soul
Hitler had not yet focused on politics, but without his rightly knowing, that was the career to which he was most strongly called. Politics would ultimately blend with his passion for art.  People, the masses, would be the clay the sculptor shapes into an immortal form. The human clay would become for him a beautiful work of art like one of Myron's marble sculptures, a Hans Makart painting, or Wagner's Ring Trilogy.

His love of music, art and architecture had not removed him from the political life and social concerns of Vienna.  In order to survive, he worked as a common laborer sided by side with other workers.  He was a silent spectator, but nothing escaped him:  not the vanity and egoism of the bourgeoisie, not the moral and material misery of the people, nor yet the hundreds of thousands of workers who surged down the wide avenues of Vienna with anger in their hearts.

He had also been taken aback by the growing presence in Vienna of bearded Jews wearing caftans, a sight unknown in Linz.  "How can they be Germans?" he asked himself.  He read the statistics:  in 1860 there were 69 Jewish families in Vienna;  40 years later there were 200,000. They were everywhere.  He observed their invasion of the universities and the legal and medical professions, and their takeover of the newspapers.

Hitler was exposed to the passionate reactions of the workers to this influx, but the workers were not alone in their unhappiness.  There were many prominent persons in Austria and Hungary who did not hide their resentment at what they believed was an alien invasion of their country.  The mayor of Vienna, a Christian-Democrat and a powerful orator, was eagerly listened to by Hitler.

Hitler was also concerned with the fate of the eight million Austrian Germans kept apart from Germany, and thus deprived of their rightful German nationhood.  He saw Emperor Franz Josef as a bitter and petty old man unable to cope with the problems of the day and the aspirations of the future.

Quietly, the young Hitler was summing things up in his mind.

First:  Austrians were part of Germany, the common fatherland.

Second:  The Jews were aliens within the German community.

Third:  Patriotism was only valid if it was shared by all classes. The common people with whom Hitler had shared grief and humiliation were just as much a part of the fatherland as the millionaires of high society.

Fourth:  Class war would sooner or later condemn both workers and bosses to ruin in any country.  No country could survive class war; only cooperation between workers and bosses can benefit the country. Workers must be respected and live with decency and honor.  Creativity must never be stifled.

When Hitler later said that he had formed his social and political doctrine in Vienna, he told the truth.  Ten years later his observations made in Vienna would become the order of the day.

Thus Hitler was to live for several years in the crowded city of Vienna as a virtual outcast, yet quietly observing everything around him.  His strength came from within.  He did not rely on anyone to do his thinking for him.  Exceptional human beings always feel lonely amid the vast human throng.  Hitler saw his solitude as a wonderful opportunity to meditate and not to be submerged in a mindless sea.  In order not to be lost in the wastes of a sterile desert, a strong soul seeks refuge within himself.  Hitler was such a soul.

The Word

All his artistic talent would be channeled into his mastery of communication and eloquence.  Hitler would never conceive of popular conquests without the power of the word.  He would enchant and be enchanted by it.  He would find total fulfillment when the magic of his words inspired the hearts and minds of the masses with whom he communed.

He would feel reborn each time he conveyed with mystical beauty the knowledge he had acquired in his lifetime.

Hitler's incantory eloquence will remain, for a very long time, a vast field of study for the psychoanalyst.  The power of Hitler's word is the key.  Without it, there would never have been a Hitler era.

Transcendant Faith
Did Hitler believe in God?

He believed deeply in God.  He called God the Almighty, master of all that is known and unknown.

Propagandists portrayed Hitler as an atheist.  He was not.  He had contempt for hypocritical and materialistic clerics, but he was not alone in that.  He believed in the necessity of standards and theological dogmas, without which, he repeatedly said, the great institution of the Christian church would collapse.  These dogmas clashed with his intelligence, but he also recognized that it was hard for the human mind to encompass all the problems of creation, its limitless scope and breathtaking beauty.  He acknowledged that every human being has spiritual needs.

The song of the nightingale, the pattern and color of a flower, continually brought him back to the great problems of creation.  No one in the world has spoken to me so eloquently about the existence of God.  He held this view not because he was brought up as a Christian, but because his analytical mind bound him to the concept of God.

Hitler's faith transcended formulas and contingencies.  God was for him the basis of everything, the ordainer of all things, of his Destiny and that of all others.

The Measure of Greatness
by Dr William L. Pierce, 
Head of the National Alliance and author of The Turner Diaries, and Hunter.
NATIONAL VANGUARD Editorial from 1989

April 20 of this year is the 100th anniversary of the birth of the greatest man of our era -- a man who dared more and achieved more, who set his aim higher and climbed higher, who felt more deeply and stirred the souls of those around him more mightily, who was more closely attuned to the Life Force which permeates our cosmos and gives it meaning and purpose, and did more to serve that Life Force, than any other man of our times.

And yet he is the most reviled and hated man of our times. Only a few tens of thousands of men and women, in scattered groups around the world, will celebrate his birthday with love and reverence on April 20, while all of the scribblers and commentators of the controlled news media, the controlled politicians, and the controlled churchmen will pour out their hatred and venom and lies against him, and those lies will be believed by hundreds of millions.

What is the measure of greatness in a man?

Only the most vulgar and doctrinaire democrat would seriously equate greatness with popularity -- although in any polling of average citizens on their choice for the greatest man of the century there are certain to be substantial numbers of votes for Elvis Presley, John Kennedy, Billy Graham, Michael Jackson, and various other high-visibility lightweights: charismatic entertainers on the stage of politics, rock concerts, spectator sports, or what have you.

More serious citizens would pass by the lightweights and choose men who have changed the world in some way. We would hear choices like Franklin Roosevelt ("he saved the world from fascism"), Albert Einstein ("he taught us about the nature of our universe"), and Martin Luther King ("he helped us achieve racial justice"), depending upon whether one's personal inclinations lay more in the direction of politics, science, or racial self-abasement, respectively.

All of this raises several very interesting issues. There is, for example, the question of how we came to the preposterous state of affairs prevailing today, wherein we place the destiny of our nation, our planet, and our race in the hands of a mass of voters whose powers of judgment are manifested in such things as the type of television entertainment their preferences have pushed into prime time and the type of men they have elected to public office. And there is the equally weighty question of how, knowing the ease with which this mass is misled, we permitted virtually all of the media of mass information and entertainment to fall into the hands of a race whose interests are so diametrically opposed to our own.

Perhaps even more pertinent to a consideration of human greatness, however, is the question of how our system of values came to be turned on its head, so that Franklin Roosevelt is regarded as a hero and Adolf Hitler as a villain, not only by the stolid and stunned masses, but also by a majority of the supposedly "educated" elite, many of whom pride themselves on their intellectual independence.

Whether we judge the greatness of a man by his intrinsic qualities of character and soul or by his accomplishments, Adolf Hitler had greatness of a very high order -- if we use the standards which have been traditional in our race.

We cannot, of course, make comparisons with all the "mute, inglorious Miltons" whose lack of notable accomplishment has made them anonymous, despite the sterling inner qualities they may have possessed. But when Hitler's character is held up beside those of other 20th-century political leaders, he stands as a giant among pygmies.

At the prosaic level, we can note his ascetic personal habits, compared with Winston Churchill's habitual drunkenness and noto-rious self-indulgence; or his personal loyalty to those who had been his comrades in the days of political struggle, compared with Joseph Stalin's habit of murdering his former comrades by the dozen, as potential rivals, as soon as he no longer needed their services; or his direct, frank, and straightforward manner, compared to the cunning deviousness which was Franklin Roosevelt's trademark. At the spiritual level, the inner differences between Hitler and his contemporaries are even more striking. Hitler was a man with a mission, from the beginning. The testimony of his closest associates, from his boyhood days to the end of his life, agrees with the observations of more distant and impartial observers: Hitler had a mystical sense of destiny, a sense of having been singled out and called by a higher power to devote his life to the service of his race.

His childhood companion August Kubizek has related extraordinary evidence of this when Hitler was only 16 years old.(August Kubizek, Adolf Hitler, mein Jugendfreund (Graz, 1953), pp. 127-135). Twenty years later, while he was in prison after an unsuccessful attempt to overthrow the government, Hitler himself wrote of his motivation in a way which suggested the range of his vision:

"What we must fight for is the security of the existence and reproduction of our race and our people, the sustenance of our children and themaintenance of the purity of our blood . . . so that our people may mature for the fulfillment of the mission allotted them by the Creator of the universe."

Every thought and every idea, every doctrine and all knowledge, must serve this purpose. And everything must be examined from this point of view and used or rejected according to its utility. Then no theory will stiffen into a dead doctrine, since it is life alone that all things must serve. . . .

. . . The National Socialist philosophy finds the importance of mankind in its basic racial elements. In the state it sees on principle a means to an end and construes that end as the preservation of the racial existence of man. . . .

And so the National Socialist philosophy of life corresponds to the innermost will of Nature, since it restores that free play of forces which must lead to a continuous mutual higher breeding, until finally the best of humanity, having achieved possession of this earth, will have a free play for activity in domains which will lie partly above it and partly outside it.

We all sense that in the distant future humanity must be faced by problems which only a highest race, become mas-ter people and supported by the means and possibilities of an entire globe, will be equipped to overcome. . . .

Thus, the highest purpose of a National Socialist state is concern for the preservation of those original racial elements which bestow culture and create the beauty and dignity of a higher mankind. We, as Aryans, can conceive of the state only as the living organism of a nationality which not only assures the preservation of this nationality, but by the development of its spiritual and ideal abilities leads it to the highest freedom. . . .

A National Socialist state must begin by raising marriage from the level of a continuous defilement of the race and give it the consecration of an institution which is called upon to produce images of the Lord and not monstrosities halfway between man and ape. . . .

It must set race in the center of all life. It must take care to keep it pure. It must declare the child to be the most precious treasure of the people. It must see to it that only the healthy beget children . . . .

The National Socialist state must make certain that by a suitable education of youth it will someday obtain a race ripe for the last and greatest decisions on this earth. . . .

. . .Anyone who wants to cure this era, which is inwardly sick and rotten, must first summon the courage to make clear the causes of this disease. And this should be the concern of the National Socialist movement: pushing aside all narrowmindedness, to gather and to organize from the ranks of our nation those forces capable of becoming the vanguard fighters for a new philosophy of life. . . .

We are not simple enough to believe that it could ever be possible to bring about a perfect era. But this relieves no one of the obligation to combat recognized errors, to overcome weaknesses, and to strive for the ideal. Harsh reality of its own accord will create only too many limitations. For that very reason, however, man must try to serve the ultimate goal, and failures must not deter him, any more than he can abandon a system of justice because mistakes creep into it, or any more than medicine is discarded because there always will be sickness in spite of it.

We National Socialists know that with this conception we stand as revolu-tionaries in the world of today and are branded as such. But our thoughts and actions must in no way be determined by the approval or disapproval of our time, but by the binding obligation to a truth which we have recognized."(Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf)

Hitler's opponents, Churchill and Roosevelt, were party politicians, with the minds and souls of party politicians. Great, impersonal goals, just as truth, meant nothing at all to them. The only thing that counted was the approval or disapproval of their times: the outcome of the next election, a good press claque, votes. Only Stalin shared in any way Hitler's disdain for approval; only Stalin was motivated to any degree by an impersonal idea. But the idea that Stalin served was the alien, destructive idea of Jewish Marxism. And while Hitler served the Life Force with the instincts of a seer, Stalin served Marxism with the instincts of a bureaucrat and a butcher.

A comparison of careers leads us to a similar ranking of greatness of soul. Churchill and Roosevelt were born into the political establishment. They fed at the public trough for years, in one office after another, grabbing greedily at opportunities for a bigger serving of swill. But it was circumstance, not their own efforts, which thrust them onto the stage of world history.

Stalin hacked out his own niche in history to a much greater extent than his western allies, and he was an incomparably stronger man than either of them. He was tough, ruthless, infinitely cunning, and utterly determined to prevail, no matter what the obstacles. Even so, his struggle for prominence and power was entirely within the Bolshevik party and its predecessors. He was the consummate bureaucratic infighter, not the innovator or the lone pioneer.

Only Adolf Hitler started literally from nothing and through the exercise of a superhuman will created the physical basis for the realization of his vision. In 1918, recovering from a British poison-gas attack in a veterans' hospital, he made the decision to enter politics in order to serve that vision. He was a 29-year-old invalid, with no money, no family, no friends or connections, no university education, and no experience. Liberals, Jews, and communists ruled his country, making him and all those to whom he might appeal for support outsiders.

Five and one-half years later he was sentenced to five years in prison for his political activity, and his enemies thought that was the end of him and his movement. But less than nine years after being sentenced he was Chancellor of Germany, with the strongest and most progressive nation in Europe at his command. He had built the National Socialist movement and led it to victory over the organized opposition of the entire Establishment: conservatives, liberals, communists, Jews, and Christians.

He then transformed Germany, lifting it out of its economic depression (while Americans, under Roosevelt, continued to line up at the soup kitchens), restoring its spirit (and much of the territory which had been taken from it by the victors of the First World War), stimulating its artistic and scientific creativity, and winning the admiration (or, in some cases, the envy and hatred) of other nations. It was an achievement hardly paralleled in the history of the world. Even those who do not understand the real significance of his creation must concede that.

And what was the real significance of Hitler's work? One of his most earnest admirers in India, Savitri Devi, has given us a poetic answer to that question. She wrote:

". . . [I]n its essence, the National Socialist idea exceeds not only Germany and our times, but the Aryan race and mankind itself and any epoch; . . . it ultimately expresses that mysterious and unfailing wisdom according to which Nature lives and creates: the impersonal wisdom of the primeval forest and of the ocean depth and of the spheres in the dark fields of space; and .. . it is Adolf Hitler's glory not merely to have gone back to that divine wisdom -- stigmatizing man's silly infatuation for "intellect," his childish pride in "progress," and his criminal attempt to enslave Nature -- but to have made it the basis of a practical regeneration policy of worldwide scope, precisely now, in our overcrowded, overcivilized, and technically overevolved world, at the very end of the dark age."(Savitri Devi, The Lightning and the Sun (National Socialist World No. 1, p. 61))

More prosaically, Hitler's work, in contrast to that of his contemporaries, was above politics, above economics, above nationalism. He had mobilized a powerful, modern state and placed it at the service of our race, so that our race might become fit to serve as an agent of the Life Force.

Perceptive and idealistic young men from every nation in Europe -- and from many nations outside Europe as well -- recognized this significance, and they flocked to serve him and to fight for his cause, even at the cost of censure and ostracism from their more parochial and narrowminded countrymen. There was never before an elite fighting force to match the SS, which by the end of the Second World War had more non-Germans than Germans in it.

The war, of course, is counted as Hitler's great failure, even as the proof of his lack of greatness, by his detractors. It merely proves that he was a man, not a god, even if a divine will worked through him, and that he could not perform miracles. He could not defend himself forever, with the governments of nearly the whole world allied in a total war to pull him down and destroy his creation, so that they and the interests they served could return to "business as usual." Even so, he gave a far better account of himself than any of his adversaries.

And what will count in the long run in determining Adolf Hitler's stature is not whether he lost or won the war, but whether it was he or his adversaries who were on the side of the Life Force, whether it was he or they who served the cause of Truth and human progress. We only have to look around us today to know it was not they.

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