The Enemy Within
by Colin Jordan (1989)

On the centenary of his birth it needs to be noted that the cause of Adolf Hitler is confronted and conflicted not merely by the hostility of all the regular forces of the old order, but also and no less to its detriment by others who constitute one variety or another of an auxiliary enemy within. These comprise, firstly, the Strasserites: persons claiming to be nationalists or even National Socialists, but denigrating Hitler in tune with the champions of the old order, and upholding in his place the Strasser brothers, Otto and Gregor, and Ernst Röhm, whom Hitler had to eliminate from his party because of their treacherous disruption.

Secondly, there are those who, while plentifully making use of Hitler’s name, are as plentifully harmful to his cause by their misunderstanding and misuse of it, and the consequent exploitation by the outer enemy of their association with it.

In this category we include the Hollywood Nazis: all those, in other words, who make use of National Socialism as nothing more than a political playtime devoted to its superficial trappings, thereby seeking to compensate for the deficiencies of their arrested development by dressing up, giving themselves titles, and performing sterile and egocentric antics.

Also to be included are all those who, in their virtually total ignorance of what National Socialism really is, have not the slightest perception of, or respect for, the discipline, order and authority central to it, and who are simply excited to associate with it because of the enemy’s distorted image of it as something violently notorious, and who accordingly supply the enemy with living proof of validity of their distortion.

These latter are the dismal morons whose real cause is no more than crude hooliganism plentifully embellished with Swastikas and Iron Crosses and a flourish of Hitler salutes at football matches.

At this centenary let it be confirmed that there is no room in our ranks for such human rubbish. Likewise, let it be declared that National Socialism, so uniquely responsive to harmony and beauty, health and strength, has absolutely no room for “rock”, that degenerate din of the African jungle to which the above hooligans, and also others pretending to be National Socialists, are addicted, and which, we would have them know, Hitler would most certainly have prohibited. This is something that skinheads – if they are to elevate themselves from this category, have got to learn.

Returning to the Strasser brothers, they showed themselves to be more of the nature of national communists than true National Socialists, attacking private ownership of property (although upheld in the NSDAP’s manifesto) in favour of mere possession on trust for the state (usufruct) – propounded by Otto Strasser in The Structure of German Socialism (1931) – and acclaiming class warfare in the name of the proletariat. As early as 1925 Gregor Strasser in a speech in the Reichstag called for an “economic revolution involving the nationalisation of the economy.” On the 21st May, 1930, Otto Strasser met Hitler and demanded what he called “real socialism” and no attacks on Soviet Russia. Hitler replied: “What you understand by socialism is nothing but Marxism.”

The next day in continued discussion Otto Strasser demanded the nationalisation of industry, to which Hitler answered: “Democracy has laid the world in ruins, and nevertheless you want to extend it to the economic sphere. It would be the end of the German economy.” (Who Financed Hitler, James & Suzanne Pool, Dial Press, New York, 1978; pp. 241-42)

If the Strassers had had their way, National Socialism would have never got to power, for they would have disrupted its appeal, frightening off essential support. No sensible person will really credit these men with the ability to succeed in Hitler’s place in winning and holding the hearts of a nation. Both the Strassers were confined in their concern to the economic side of the cause to the disregard of other aspects such as the racial. This deficiency, aggravated by their distortion of the Party’s economic policy, meant that they were always a couple of cuckoos in the nest.

National Socialism, properly understood, has never been a mere combination of conventional socialism spiced with nationalism, and thus yet another merely materialist doctrine.

It most certainly derives from its conception of the Folk a strong belief that this racial kinship justifies and decrees radical social justice, and thus the belief – increased by its belief in the Leadership Principle, again derived from its racial belief – that private ownership and private enterprise must be subject to national regulation and supervision to ensure that its productive efficacy is fairly distributed and in accordance with national requirements; but it has never accepted the idea that nationalisation of property is the only and necessary means to adequate social justice, any more than it has been prepared to tolerate the anarchic inequity of liberal capitalism as the only answer and necessary means of preserving private property and enterprise.

It has always stood for reconciliation, not a conflict of private and corporate interests. However, along with this economic outlook, National Socialism has always been far more than this, being first and foremost a racial outlook from which its economic outlook has followed.

Otto Strasser left the NSDAP in 1930, setting himself up in opposition to Hitler. In 1931 he was behind the SA mutiny in Berlin – where many SA men were former communists – led by the Berlin SA chief, Captain Walter Stennes, who was advised and encouraged in the revolt by Otto Strasser. The authors James & Suzanne Pool, in their book earlier referred to, reach the conclusion (p. 378) that “the evidence indicates that Stennes was financed by several important industrialists who were intent on destroying the Nazis.”

Otto Strasser himself admits in his book Flight from Terror that the foremost financial backer of Stennes was the Jewish multimillionaire, steel and coal industrialist Otto Wolff.

Money also came from the major industrialist Hermann Bücher. Hitler, by personal intervention on the spot, quickly swung the great bulk of the SA men away from Stennes and Strasser.

On Hitler’s attainment of power in 1933, Otto Strasser went first to Austria to continue his anti-Hitler campaign, then to Czechoslovakia. The Jew, Fritz Max Cahen, head of the German Resistance Movement against Hitler, describes in his book Men Against Hitler (Jarrolds, London, pp. 140-42), how, when he was in Prague in 1935, he had a conference with Otto Strasser and others leading to a plan for united opposition to Hitler, and how thereafter he met Strasser at least once a week.

The periodical World Jewry (28th August, 1936) carried the following report from its Prague correspondent: “The well-known rival of Herr Hitler, Otto Strasser… has published an appeal to the German Jewish emigrants to join the newly-formed organisation of German Jews headed by Herr Rossheim.” … “In his opinion, the solution of the problem of the Jews in Germany lies in the direction of assimilation…”

In 1938 Otto Strasser moved to Switzerland, and afterwards to France. The British ambassador in Berlin, in a letter to the British Foreign Secretary on the 18th July 1939, said, “So many people, such as Otto Strasser and others of this world are seeking with intense pertinacity to drive us to war with Germany.”

According to W.J. West in The Truth Betrayed (Duckworth, London, 1987), at the time of the Burgerbraukeller bomb plot, November 1939, which failed to kill Hitler as intended – and which the German authorities held to have been masterminded by the British Secret Service working through Otto Strasser – there were in fact very strong links between Strasser and the British authorities through Sir Robert Vansittart (Permanent Head of the Foreign Office and later Chief Diplomatic Advisor to the Government) who in October 1939 recommended to the Foreign Secretary Otto Strasser and Hermann Rauschning (another defector responsible for a volume of lies entitled Hitler Speaks, exposed by Swiss historian Wolfgang Haenel). After the failure of the bomb plot it is significant that Vansittart turned against Strasser, clearly implying that his reputation was bound up with it (W.J. West, p. 155).

Otto Strasser’s friend and supporter, the author Douglas Reed, describes in the Prisoner of Ottawa (Jonathan Cape, London, 1953 pp. 172-75) how the former, while in France during the earlier part of the war, plotted against Germany with the Jew Georges Mandel, then Minister of the Interior in the Reynaud Government. With the fall of France, the roving traitor moved to Portugal from whence in 1940 the British helped him to reach Canada to continue his dirty work there.

Material from Otto Strasser went to make up the book Der Führer which was issued in the name of “Konrad Heiden”, which, along with Rauschning’s above-mentioned collection of lies, was used in formulating the indictment of the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg whereby leading Germans were put to death and barbarously so by slow strangulation.

Strasser material was also made much use of by Dr. William C. Langer as acknowledged in his book The Mind of Adolf Hitler (Seeker & Warburg, London, 1972), a piece of wartime propaganda he was assigned to concoct by the American dirty tricks department known as the OSS.

The kind of help muck-spreader Strasser gave to Langer can be distinguished from Strasser’s own offering of ordure entitled The Gangsters Around Hitler (W.H. Allen, London, undated but on British bookstalls in the middle of the war). Typical of its filth is his tale of a film made, he claims, of two titled ladies from the War Office executed for espionage:.. when Hitler is unable to sleep he orders this film to be shown again and again, as he sits alone in the cellar which houses his private cinema” (p. 43). Otto Strasser died in obscurity in Munich in 1974.

His brother Gregor stayed on in Hitler’s party till 1932 when his disruptive intrigues came to a head. Authors James & Suzanne Pool, in Who Financed Hitler (p. 382), reveal that during the autumn of that year the Jew Paul Silverberg, a very wealthy industrialist, secretly gave money to Gregor Strasser who, like his brother, while presenting himself as such a strict opponent of big business, was quite prepared to be on its payroll.

The Jewish industrialist Otto Wolff, whom we have come across as paymaster for the Otto Strasser-Walter Stennes plot in 1931, also extended his purse to Gregor in this following year. “Like Silverberg, Wolff had contributed heavily to Strasser…” (p. 454): When in December, 1932, General Kurt von Schleicher became Chancellor, he immediately offered the position of Vice-Chancellor to Gregor Strasser with whom he was conspiring as a move to disrupt Hitler’s party. Thereupon Hitler denounced him as a traitor, and he had to resign from the Party. This was not, however, the end of his subversion. He was involved in the Röhm plot two years later, and executed for this.

Ernst Röhm, head of the SA in 1934, was akin to the Strassers in political outlook, wanting to pursue a further revolution in the military sphere by elevating the SA in place of the Army, just as the Strassers wanted to regiment industry through public ownership.

If Röhm had had his way, the consequent upset to the country, when Hitler had only newly taken hold of it, would very likely have meant the downfall of National Socialism.

At that time the SA, two million strong, was – under a Röhm behaving with increasing grandeur – running out of Hitler’s control. A loyal SA commander, Victor Lutze, brought to Rudolf Hess eyewitness accounts of Röhm’s plans to overthrow Hitler and bring about a second revolution (Hess: The Missing Years, David Irving, Macmillan, London, 1987, p. 22).

Also, Hitler’s personal pilot, Hans Baur, in his book Hitler at my Side (Eichler Publishing Corp., U.S.A., 1986, p. 79) records that Hitler told the author that the Italian Ambassador in Paris had learned that Röhm was planning an uprising, and had entered into negotiations with the French who had assured him they would not interfere, and that Röhm had already drawn up his entire lists for a new government.

The Italian ambassador had notified the German ambassador in France who had informed Hitler, who, after agonizing deliberation, had to order the arrest and execution of Röhm and his leading conspirators, thereby by his prompt and necessarily radical action very rightly preventing the vastly greater bloodshed and turmoil of civil war.

The Strasserites of today, devotees of the treacherous Gregor and Otto and fellow traveller Ernst Röhm, accuse Hitler of becoming a tool of big business, and betraying his cause and his followers thereby. The crucial point in this connection is not whether Hitler accepted vitally needed money from big business or any other quarter, but whether in so doing he allowed any money from any source to pervert him from the cause he believed in and stood for, and the answer to this must on any sensible survey be an emphatic “no!” Hitler, whatever the hopes of contributors, was never for purchase, and always remained the master whatever the money.

A major authority on the subject of NSDAP funds is the book here repeatedly referred to: Who Financed Hitler, by James & Suzanne Pool. In 1923 industrialist Fritz Thyssen apparently gave 100,000 gold marks to General Ludendorff who acted as a conduit for various organisations, and part of this may have reached the NSDAP.

Industrialist Ernst von Borsig apparently contributed to the NSDAP in its early years, but not much more than to conservative parties as well. Not till 1927 did Hitler win a further supporter among industrialists, Emil Kirdorf, who thereafter mustered some financial help from others.

Throughout the period of prosperity Hitler received relatively few donations from important businessmen (p. 155). In 1928 Hess met Thyssen who arranged a loan. In the summer of 1931 the Ruhrlade (group of industrialists) gave the NSDAP on Thyssen’s recommendation a small sum (p. 278). In 1931 it was reported that Deterding of Royal Dutch-Shell both gave and loaned large sums to Hitler.

In that same year Hitler spoke at The Industry Club of Düsseldorf and Thyssen is later supposed to have written that as a result of this contact a number of larger contributions were made to the NSDAP; “supposed”, we here say, because as will be seen Thyssen’s writings are distinctly suspect.

The Pools say there may have been enough inflow to finance the current election campaign, but no great flow (p. 355). They estimate contributions from industry to the NSDAP 1930-32 as totalling not more than 600,000 marks. They mention help from Cologne banker, Baron Kurt von Schröder, but only in the form of arranging for NSDAP bills to be underwritten, not actually paid, and their overall conclusion is that “the primary source of Party revenue was not big business” (p. 385).

Otto Dietrich, NSDAP Press Chief, in his revised 1955 memoirs, says of the 1931 Industry Club of Düsseldorf meeting that insignificant sums were collected at the door, and nothing great followed.

Henry Ashby Turner in German Big Business and the Rise of Hitler (Oxford University Press, New York, 1985), another major authority, debunks the notion of Hitler’s dependency on big business sustained by such as the writings attributed to Thyssen, showing in fact how little big business had to do with Hitler’s success, its contributions never being critical, and most NSDAP money coming from membership dues, interest-free loans, and the admission charges at meetings.

Peter Drucker, the economist, in The End of Economic Man (London, 1939), endorses this conclusion on page 105: “As far as the Nazi Party is concerned, there is good reason to believe that, at least three-quarters of its funds, even after 1930, came from the weekly dues… and from the entrance fees to the mass meetings …”

A markedly inferior source, although much favoured by and advertised by Britain’s contemporary Strasserites, is Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler by Antony C. Sutton (Bloomfield Books, Sudbury, U.K., 1976).

Behind the gusto of its blatant partisanship, it shows itself distinctly thin even as simply a survey of big business contributions to Hitler’s rise to power, and totally lacking in any proof that in accepting such contributions Hitler was in any way whatsoever corrupted and deflected from his course, without which there can be no culpability on his part, only good sense in gaining necessary finance without compromise.

The book I Paid Hitler, attributed to Fritz Thyssen, has been made much of by the anti-Hitler front, but in 1948 Thyssen denied authorship of the book, saying that it was the work of Emery Reves who published it without permission or payment. Reves – a Jew whose father was formerly Rabbitz – was a New York publisher running an anti-Hitler propaganda machine, who acted as literary agent for Winston Churchill, and was responsible for the fictitious book by Hermann Rauschning, Hitler Speaks, wherein Rauschning claims to have had more than a hundred private talks with Hitler in which the latter revealed the entirety of his views and plans including a world empire, whereas this liar in fact only met Hitler four or five times, never alone, and never at length.

Strasserites, along with their idiotic depiction of Hitler as the paid lackey of big business, also try to reinforce their smears with the equally idiotic tale that Hitler had Jewish ancestry.

In the case of author Douglas Reed, the addled supporter of the sordid Otto Strasser, the nonsense even stretched to the extent of suggesting that Hitler was some Satanic agent with the role from the start of misleader and destroyer of patriotic forces.

The “Hitler was Jewish” canard comes in two main variations, so take your pick! One of them makes out that Hitler’s father’s mother was once a domestic servant in the household of Baron Rothschild of Vienna, and there seduced by him. The prime source for this is none other than the book I Paid Hitler which, as we have just seen, the Jew Reves wrote while falsely attributing it to Fritz Thyssen.

The other version is that the seducing was done by a Jew named Frankenberger in his household at Graz. This whopper is said to have come to us from high NS official, Hans Frank, in memoirs said to have been written while in the custody of the Allies shortly before they hanged him at Nuremberg at the end of the war, when they may well have (as in other cases) done a bit of hand-guiding before neck-stretching.

Colin Cross, in Adolf Hitler (Hodder & Stoughton, London, 1973), says that the Graz Hebrew congregation had no Frankenberger among its members at the relevant time (p. 18); and Joachim C. Fest, in Hitler (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, 1974), says, “Recent researches have further shaken the credibility of his statement, so that the whole notion can scarcely stand serious investigation” (p. 15).

Yet the self-styled “political soldiers” of the Nutty Farce which the present National Front has become, who have never faced and are never likely to face and endure what vast legions of men and women in Germany in peace and in war did in support of Adolf Hitler as epitome of their ideals, continue to defecate their denigration of him as a fake inferior to themselves, whereby these midgets most of all succeed in exhibiting their own childish and odious charlatanry.

[This article first appeared in Gothic Ripples and later in Liberty Bell, 1989. It also featured in National Socialism: Vanguard of the Future (Selected Writings of Colin Jordan), Nordland Forlag, Aalborg, 1993.]