Der Fuehrer - Hitler's Rise to Power (1944) - Heiden

HE IS BOTH TERRIBLE AND BANAL 65nations to his will by revolutionary mass uprisings; the real JewishSocialist of France, Germany, and Italy, however, is an intellectual whohad to rebel against his own Jewish family and his own social classbefore he could come to the workers.Karl Marx, the prototype of the supposed Jewish labor leader, came ofa baptized Christian family, and his own relation with Judaism can onlybe characterized as anti-Semitism; for under Jews he understood thesharply anti-Socialist, yes, anti-political Jewish masses of WesternEurope, whom as a good Socialist he coldly despised.The Jewish Socialist leaders of Austria in Hitler's youth were for themost part a type with academic education, and their predominant motivewas just what Hitler at an early age so profoundly despised, 'a moralityof pity,' an enthusiastic faith in the oppressed and in the trampled humanvalues within them. The Jewish Socialist, as a rule, has abandoned thereligion of his fathers and conse-quendy is a strong believer in thereligion of human rights; this type, idealistic and impractical even in thechoice of his own career, was often unequal to the test of practicalpolitics and was pushed aside by more robust, more worldly, lesssentimental leaders arising from the non-Jewish masses. An historicexample of this change in the top Socialist leadership occurred in SovietRussia between 1926 and 1937 when the largely Jewish leaders of therevolutionary period (Trotzky, Zinoviev, Kamenev) were bloodilyshoved aside by a dominantly non-Jewish class (Stalin, Voroshilov,etc.); the last great example of the humanitarian but impracticalSocialist leader of Jewish origin was Leon Blum in France.It was in the world of workers, as he explicitly tells us, that AdolfHitler encountered the Jews. The few bourgeois Jews in his home citydid not attract his attention; if we believe his own words, the Jewish'money domination' flayed by Wagner made no impression upon him atthat time. But he did notice the proletarian and sub-proletarian figuresfrom the Vienna slums, and they repelled him; he felt them to be foreign— just as he felt the non-Jewish workers to be foreign. With amazingindifference he reports that he could not stand up against either of themin political debate; he admits that the workers knew more than he did,that the Jews were more