Last night, I finished reading "Into the Darkness: An Uncensored Report from Inside the Third Reich at War" by Lothrop Stoddard. This is a newly released paperback from Noontide Press, first published by Duell, Sloan and Pearce in 1940. ( For further information, <greg@ihr.org> )
"Into the Darkness" is a title well worth reading for people interested in an unvarnished view of the Third Reich - fascinating in some parts, unsettling and jarring in others. It was written by an American journalist who visited Germany in the first bitter winter of 1939-1940 and who described a country digging in for a very long war.
I must tell you honestly there are passages in this book - if true! - that shocked me to the core about the harshness of the German regime at the time. It is certainly not the country that I remember as I experienced it as a first-grader in 1944-45 - when life should have been much, much worse due to the bombings, the many casualties, the huge influx of refugees into the rump of Germany etc.
Yet the book is not the traditional post-WWII black-and-white judeo-centric hate pulp that we so commonly get served up in traditional Nazi- and German-bashing titles of this genre in the Western world. I have been told - don't know if it is true! - that Stoddard was half-Jewish. The book reads a bit like that - on one hand, he is fascinated and sometimes even thrilled by what he sees, but every now and then, there's still the sneering voice.
I talked to Ernst last night about my shock at some of the passages about the portrayal of Germany at war and wondered if the times and actions by the regime were as cruel as described - even though there are many other passages and chapters in the book that describe Germany and its Volk in a favorable light and in a way America has never been allowed to see the people and the times.
Ernst reminded me of something I already knew: that most publications about WWII Germany are run through the Jewish filter, since it was mostly Jews who were the German-English speakers during the war, and refugees, émigrés with the right connections in the highest places in media, film and publishing in America afterwards.
But even so!
Ernst replied somberly: "Where there's a lot of sunlight, there you will find the sharpest shadows."
I would say that, on balance, this title has the ring of honesty - and if times were as harsh and uncompromising as described, then many Germans still alive will remind us that they must be seen and judged against the backdrop of conditions at the time in Germany from which they arose - the currency collapse, the Weimar Republic in all of its unspeakable liberal filth, and how the excesses of wealth by Jews with overseas connections, coupled with the fear in the upper and middle classes of the blood bath unleashed by Marxist-Bolshevik revolutions in Russia, Ukraine, Hungary and the near-civil war in Germany in the end CREATED Hitler and his iron broom.
Here is a small piece of that backdrop. Coincidentally, it was sent to me by someone from Australia who gave his statistical source as "Republic to Reich" A History of Germany 1918-1945 by K.J.Mason.
I am editing it slightly to make it flow more smoothly:
WHEN THE PRICE OF A LOAF OF BREAD = THE PRICE OF A SMALL TOWN
In 1918 the German Armies, outnumbered by Allied Forces and undermined on the home front by traitorous Bolsheviks, surrendered. WWI was over - for the Allies.
The price of a loaf of bread in Berlin was 0.63 Marks. (RM)
After the Allies had met in Versailles in 1919 and finished stripping Germany of its self-respect, sovereignty, homelands, colonies, its fleet, most of its rural products and almost everything else that wasn't concreted into the ground, the German Reichs Mark (RM) - unfortunately tied to the International Exchange rate - had been devalued from 4,2 Reichsmarks for 1 Dollar to 14 RM for 1 Dollar.
Most of Germany's foreign reserves were slowly being used up in buying back its own coal from France and Belgium - coal needed to heat homes, cook, and keep the factories working. By 1923 the German population had no money left to pay the ridiculous reparation claims of the Allies.
Germans started to 'passively resist' the Allied demands.
The Allies responded by sending in thousands of troops and, in revenge, devalued the exchange rate for the Reichsmark again.
In January 1923 the price of a loaf of bread had risen to 250.- RM
As German 'passive resistance' spread, and in some cases turned violent, the international financiers and bankers just kept altering the exchange rate for the Reichsmark.
Whereas in July 1922, $1 US Dollar cost RM 493.- , by July 1923 $1 US Dollar cost RM 350.000.-
In July 1923 a loaf of bread cost RM 3,465.-
If you had relatives in the USA, as many European Jews did, for a few cents they could buy up jewelry, art collections and other precious items from the Germans as the latter were forced to sell their possessions just to feed their families.
By August 1923 for $1 US Dollar you were getting 4,600.000.- RM - which was more than enough to buy a few larger homes or villas from middle class German families who had no more possessions to sell and who no longer had a job, or even food to eat. Some "US citizens" were able to buy up whole streets of houses or businesses - for a handful of dollars.
In September 1923 a loaf of Bread in Berlin cost 1, 512.000 RM.
By November 1923 , $1 US Dollar was worth 4.200.000.000.000.- R Marks.
With a mere $5 US Dollars, anybody could buy whole towns of homes and businesses.
By year's end of 1923 a loaf of bread in Berlin cost RM 201,000,000,000.
Almost every German family had lost its possessions, savings, jobs and homes. Many major businesses, industries and factories had gone into the hands of international bankers and "foreign citizens."
The German economy had been destroyed, the currency was worthless, the population was starving. The Reichsmark had been backed by Germany's gold reserves but most of the reserves had been eaten up by the foreign-imposed inflation.
The BIG WINNERS were the international banks and many of their tribal relatives living in Germany. The International Bankers had, without firing a shot, almost totally destroyed a Nation and its people.
For every action, there is a reaction. The bankers were clearing the way for the one man who, ten years later, put the country back on its feet again.
How was it done?
I cite here a paragraph from this Stoddard book that gives you a feel for how Germany felt at the time, and why that war was fought so bitterly to the last drop of blood and the last inch of soil:
"Adolf Hitler and Paul Joseph Goebbels, acknowledged masters of propaganda, have systematically forged a naturally disciplined people into an amazingly responsive psychic union. The result has been that, behind the world's mightiest military machine, we discern an even more formidable psychic mechanism - an entire people, 80 million strong, welded into a living juggernaut of Mars. . . such as perhaps only Germans can devise and run. Human history has probably never seen its equal..."
Ingrid
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Thought for the Day:
"Who is afraid of a fat revolutionary?"
(Winston Churchill)