Reviewed by Mark Weber

A specter is haunting the world -- the specter of Hitlerism. That, in short, is the stern warning of this provocative book, written by an Assistant Professor of History at Ball State University (Indiana), and published by Praeger, a leading US academic publisher.

In spite of decades of vehement vilification, says author Lawrence Birken, Hitler's views have enduring and dangerous appeal -- not because they are bizarre and alien, but precisely because they are rational and well grounded in Western thought. In particular, Birken stresses, Hitlerism is firmly rooted in the rationalist and scientific outlook of the 18th-century European Enlightenment. This is not meant as a compliment, however; the author is hostile to the West and its traditions. Rejecting the American and Western historical legacy, Prof. Birken openly calls for a new, racially homogenized America.

For more than half a century, Hitler and his views have been ceaselessly demonized in motion pictures, on television and in the print media. And yet, according to Birken, the appeal of Hitlerism remains so potent that it threatens the ideal of a racially "redefined" America of "higher unity." As traditional standards and long-established cultural, racial and religious values come under ever greater attack, and as this country's racial and cultural crisis becomes ever more acute, Birken fears that those who are unwilling to accept the "redefined" society that is developing in America and Europe will turn in ever greater numbers to Hitler's alternative vision of society. Hitlerism, Birken says, will loom ever larger as a dangerously seductive "siren song."

The author has no doubt made a sincere effort to provide an informed and objective look at Hitler and his views. But even if we overlook the numerous misspellings of proper names and titles, and the often polemical prose style, this is a badly flawed work. Birken's understanding of what Hitler really thought and believed is both limited and skewed.

This is due in large part to the author's exclusive reliance on English translations of Hitler's writings and speeches (apparently he cannot read German), and a naive trust in unreliable secondary studies. These include Robert Waite's The Psychopathic God: Adolf Hitler (1977), a sensationalistic psychodramatization, and Hermann Rauschning's Revolution of Nihilism (1939), a thoroughly discredited diatribe. (See "Rauschning's Phony 'Conversations With Hitler': An Update," Winter 1985 Journal, pp. 499-500.)

Birken also quotes repeatedly from The Testament of Adolf Hitler: The Hitler-Bormann Documents, supposedly a transcript of "table talk" remarks made by Hitler in February and April 1945. These "documents" are fake, says British historian David Irving, who reports that the late Swiss banker François Genoud admitted to him that he was the author.

'A Genuine Intellectual'

Scholars and others have made a major mistake in failing to take Hitler seriously as a thinker, argues Birken, who believes that the German political leader "must be regarded as a genuine intellectual" on a par with Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud. Birken's assessment is not as startling as many might believe. As he notes, as early as 1953, British historian Hugh R. Trevor-Roper "evoked the image of Hitler as a kind of synthesis of Spengler and Napoleon, noting that of all world conquerors the German leader had been the most 'philosophical'..." More recently, German historian Rainer Zitelmann established in a study of impressive scholarship that Hitler's outlook was rational, self-consistent and "modern." (R. Zitelmann, Hitler: Selbtsverständnis eines Revolutionärs [second edition, 1989].)

Moreover, Hitler's outlook was very much a part of the Western intellectual tradition. In his "combination of an almost religious faith with a revolutionary secularism," writes Birken, "Hitler represented the continuation of an essentially Enlightenment style of thought ... Nazism, and especially Hitler's exposition of it, represented an attenuated and popularized form of the Enlightenment style of thought."

Hitler had a gift for presenting his message in an attractive, accessible form. Writes Birken:

The most attractive feature of Hitler's ideology was thus its optimism. It was not merely his mood but his message that carried an infectious excitement. He was a secular messiah proclaiming a Germanic version of the "good news." The possibility of class reconciliation, the plans for a national revival, the identification of a universal enemy whose elimination would usher in the millennium, all stirred his audiences to the very depths. Hitler spoke the language of the [Enlightenment] philosophes, a language that had almost passed out of existence in the rarefied strata of the grand intelligentsia.

Economic Views

... A careful reading of his speeches and writings suggests that he was neither a mercantilist nor a Keynesian, neither a medievalist nor a marginalist. Rather ... his economic ideas fit all too well into the classical-physiocratic style of thought.

did not restore the primacy of the state after all but, quite the contrary, subordinated the state itself to a dynamic of aggressive technological and cultural expansion. In doing this, Hitler also asserted himself against the last remnants of aristocratic civility at the same time that he opposed the emerging relativism of consumer culture.

Hitler was critical of both capitalism and Marxism -- the first because it was "insufficiently democratic," and the latter because it was "too democratic" or "leveling." While supporting economic growth across national boundaries, "Hitler also took what he considered to be a conservative stand against the coming hyper-commercialism of an emerging global economy."

Views on Race and Religion

Far from being aberrant or bizarre, his views on race were consistent with those of most prominent Westerners in the decades before the Second World War. And while Birken does not specifically mention it, Hitler's racial views were comparable to those of Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson and Winston Churchill.

Contrary to popular belief, Hitler never supported notions of breeding a homogenous blond "hyper-Aryan" race. Accepting the reality that the German population consisted of several distinct sub-racial groups, he stressed the German people's national and social unity. A certain degree of racial variety was desirable, he thought, and too much racial blending or homogeneity could be harmful because it would homogenize and thus eliminate superior as well as inferior genetic traits.

Hitler believed that "both conservative prudery and radical eroticism" harmed society, and he opposed birth control because it tended to lower the genetic quality of the society that practices it.

While he was critical of Christianity, Hitler was no atheist. "The religion of Hitlerism was thus essentially a kind of deism," concludes Birken. Like Thomas Jefferson and other prominent early American leaders, Hitler equated God with "the dominion of natural laws throughout the whole universe." Thus, "for Hitler, national socialism was natural socialism."

Attitude Toward Jews

Hitler's hostile attitude toward Jews, Birken writes, was neither irrational nor aberrant. He saw "Jews as the personification of a great lie": that is, while they pretended to be merely a religious community, in fact they constituted a self-selected national-ethnic group with international ambitions. Because he regarded the Jews as the enemies of all peoples, Hitler held that combatting Jewish power and influence should be the common duty of all nations -- a view that Birken calls an expression of "Germanic universalism."

The United States

But Hitler also saw ominous trends during the 1920s and 1930s. Echoing the views of American industrialist Henry Ford, he was dismayed by the spectacular growth of Jewish power and cultural influence, and regarded Franklin Roosevelt's "New Deal" administration as a virtual revolution in American life, through which Jews largely usurped the country's traditional ruling class.

A Persistent Allure

In a real sense, Hitler's defeat implicitly became the defeat of the European nation-state and the Enlightenment values that underpinned it. Germany's heirs, the United States and the Soviet Union, were both fundamentally transnational, multiracial empires whose territories were seemingly unlimited.

This new world order is less durable than it might appear, says Birken. The recent collapse of the multi-ethnic, multi-racial Soviet Union, he warns, portends similar problems for the American empire. Even a mere contraction of the economy could threaten "to dissolve the United States into several races." In Birken's view, racial nationalism threatens "the continued existence of the United States." He warns:

What Hitler said in the thirties is thus what our racial nationalists are saying today: namely, that a genuinely inclusive multiracial nation violates the natural order of things. The United States must either be a white-dominated state or a collection of breakaway republics made up of this or that group.

Birken fears that Hitlerism will become ever more attractive to those who reject today's supra-national "consumer capitalism," and who resist the rapidly emerging "genuinely inclusive multiracial" order. This alternative vision has appeal beyond America and Europe, Birken believes. As he notes, Hitler's fight against the British empire -- a war he actually never sought nor wanted -- "won him [Hitler] the admiration of colonial peoples from Ireland to India ...."

A New 'Cosmic' Nation

Given the reluctance of many Americans, particularly conservative Whites, to warmly embrace this new "universal" nation, Birken says "we must have an education system that is able to instill this redefinition of American culture."

"Before we try uniting the world," Birken concludes, "let us try uniting ourselves. Until we do so, the siren song of Hitlerism will call to us."

Stark Alternatives

Few Americans today are able or willing to fully grasp the enormous implications of the radical program that intellectuals such as Birken (and political leaders such as Clinton) are spelling out for our future. But once they do (and as Prof. Birken fears) many will likely turn to Hitlerism as an alternative to the official prevailing ideology. The decades-long campaign of vilification of Hitler and Third Reich Germany may actually contribute to this by convincing millions of Americans that Hitlerism is the antithesis of the Establishment's ideology, and thus the only real alternative.

In spite of its defects, Hitler as Philosophe effectively dispels some widely held misconceptions about Hitler and Hitlerism, acknowledges the critical importance of the race issue, and boldly spells out stark alternatives for the future of America and Europe. For this the author deserves credit.

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