THE ROBERT W. WHITAKER ARCHIVE

Antonio

Not only did Hitler not start anything, he fell into his opportunity almost by accident. He stayed in the army after the war supposedly because his only other option was the post office. The Wehrmacht put him to work as a snitch surveilling some of the many Bolshevik groups springing up in post war Germany.

When his superior, Captain Mayr, sent him to spy on the Nazi's, Hitler reported back that the group was irrelevant, run by a railroad mechanic, and made up of factory workers and tradesmen. They didn't even have an official rubber stamp.

Captain Mayr reported directly to General Ludendorff, who decided Hitler should join this little group, prevent it from going Red, and see if he could build it up into a passable anti-communist force. It's not entirely clear when Hitler stopped working as an operative for the German army. But the fact remains that rogue elements of the old German establishment took over the party for their own purposes, in effect backing into it like a shell corporation. Only later did Hitler realize a larger vision for the group and himself.

A blueprint for the future perhaps?

Comment by Antonio Fini

ME:

I keep begging you for responses. That is because I usually work alone, and your input is a welcome relief.

Also, you commenters are the few people I find worth really listening to.

I really sit up when Antonio comes through.

I hope that makes you feel good, because I offer damned little flattery or diplomacy.

There is a secret to the German General Staff that no one discusses today. It was a bunch of famous generals based on STAFF. The Germans had no trouble understanding this.

In Britain, Ludendorf would have been a mere "staffer" under Hindenburg. But what everybody among the military experts knew in 1914 was that each big-name member of the German General Staff was the follower of a top staffer he had appointed.

Unlike any staffer today, Ludendorf was famous in Germany. Hindenburg, like other German Generals, understood that he was a great front, but he needed a genius BEHIND him.

Normally, if someone knows he is none too bright, he appoints staff that is none too bright. For reasons I find mysterious, the German General Staff routinely appointed it brains and said so.

This shows that German generals were almost inhumanly loyal to their CAUSE rather than their egos.

In the late nineteenth century Germany had another really weird characteristic. They saw the industrial age coming. Every other country in Europe encouraged its young people to learn Latin and Greek at Oxford and Cambridge and the Sorbonne. Germany was the ONLY country that set up universities to teach chemistry and pushed its most promising young people to study SCIENCE, which was look upon by the rest of Europe as a smelly business for peasants.

As to Hitler coming through because of chance, this is a bit like the German General Staff HAPPENING to hire genius. I wonder if Ludendorf didn't have the idea that somehow, this Hitler guy was DIFFERENT. He could have sent anybody, but he had a sneaking suspicion that Hitler was a genius, too.

By the way, Ludendorf's paper was the LAST non-Nazi publication banned in Germany by the NSDAP after it took power. Ludendorf kept raising hell with the Nazis because he said they were a bunch of WIMPS. Ludendorf said they were soft on Jews and they didn't BAN Christianity:

"Christianity is evil because it talks about human brotherhood and, in cowardly fashion, it preaches PEACE."