Hitler: Born at Versailles

466 Pages·1987·1.431 MB·English

by  Leon Degrelle

Hitler, Born at Versailles
June 18, 2012
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Introduction
For most Americans the globe-girdling catastrophe that we call the Second
World War is now a matter neither of personal experience nor of memory, but
of wood pulp and celluloid, books and films. Larger still is the majority for
whomthecataclysmicFirstWorldWar-oncespokenofas"TheGreatWar"-is
ancienthistory,ananticpreludetowhatthosewhoparticipatedinitsometimes
like to call "The Big One." For most of us, perhaps, the two wars compare as
do contrasting movies from the two eras. Our image of the First World War is
brief, grainy, silent, with black-and-white, herky-jerky doughboys "going over
the top"; we picture the Second as panoramic, technicolor, reverberating with
stereophonic sound and fury, armadas of ships and planes and tanks sweeping
forward to destiny.
A further disparity may be found in the popular historical and political as-
sessment, such as it is, of the two wars. The majority of Americans doubtless
still believes that the key to the Second World War is a simple one: a.demonic
megalomaniac, Adolf Hitler, rose up to lead Germany to world domination and
instead led his people to well-deserved ruin. Yet the view of the First World
War held by the Americans of today, it is safe to say, is rather more tepid
than the white-hot feelings of many of their grandparents in 1917, when "100-
per-cent Americans" agitated to "Hang the Kaiser!" and mobs sacked German
newspaper offices and presses in the worst outbreak of ethnic bigotry in our
country’s history. For the contemporary generation the origins and course of
theFirstWorldWararemurkyandobscure. Eventheterriblehecatombsofthe
Western Front have faded into oblivion, and Kaiser Bill and his spike-helmeted
Huns have long since been superseded by the Fuehrer and his goose-stepping
myrmidons.
The evident lack of interest of even the literate American public in their coun-
try’sfirst“famousvictory” ofthiscenturyhasbeenmirroredtoacertainextent
bytheprofessionalhistoriansoftheLeft-LiberalEstablishment,whichofcourse
holds sway in the colleges and universities of not only American but the entire
Western world. The professors have their reasons, however. The more compe-
tent among them are aware that shortly after the First World War, in a signal
achievement of historical scholarship, Revisionist writers in this country and
in Europe unmasked the mendacious propaganda disseminated by the British,
French, Tsarist Russian, and American governments.
Professors such as Sidney Bradshaw Fay, Max Montgelas, Georges Demartial,
and the incomparable Harry Elmer Barnes overthrew the historiographical and
moralunderpinningsoftheverdictexpressedinArticle231oftheonerousTreaty
ofVersailles,thatGermanyandherallieshadimposedanaggressivewaronthe
TripleEntenteandthusboreallresponsibilityforthecalamity. TheEnglishman
Arthur Ponsonby demonstrated just as convincingly that the atrocity charges
against the Germans, including such canards as a "cadaver factory" for soap
and the like from the corpses of fallen German soldiers, were manufactured and
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spreadbyteamsoftalentedfabricators,notafewofthem,likeArnoldToynbee,
reputable men of scholarship ostensibly dedicated to the search for truth.
The modern school of historical obfuscators, propagandists more than scholars,
andthuscognizantoftheneedforaconsistentpatternofGerman“guilt” and“ag-
gression” throughoutthiscentury,longagoundertooktorollbackandsuppress
the achievements of Revisionist scholarship on the origins of the First World
War. Inspired by the German renegade Fritz Fischer, whose Griff nach der
Weltmacht (Germany’s Bid for World Power,1961),theyhailedwithhysterical
relief,theyhavedismissedwithsovereigndisdainthenotionthatpowerssuchas
France,theBritishEmpire,TsaristRussia,orSerbiamighthavebeenmotivated
by aggressive designs. The professors have employed a second sleight-of-hand
trickagainstRevisionistfindings. Ithasbeentheirtactictoseparatequitearti-
ficiallytheoriginsandcourseofthewarfromitsresult,theParispeacetreaties,
aboveallthatofVersailles, andfromtheineluctableconsequenceswhichflowed
from that result. For them, and for their public of university students and ed-
ucated laymen, Versailles was an entirely justified consequence of the war, and
AdolfHitlersprangupeitherasamanifestationoftheGermannation’stwisted
“id” (Freud and his numerous epigoni and camp followers) or the puppet of
the “Ruhr barons” (the Marxists), propelled along his way by something these
professors are always careful to refer to as the “stab-in-the-back legend.”
Our leftist educators have also been adept at evading an honest evaluation of
the Red terror which swept across Central and Eastern Europe in the wake of
the German collapse, although they have wept copious tears behind their pink
spectacles over the crushing of Communist juntas in Bavaria, Berlin, and Bu-
dapest. Thedeliberatefailureoftheprofessorstomakesenseofthecataclysmic
events of 1914-1920 in Europe has now been redressed, however, by a man of
both learning and action, a confidante of statesmen and a worthy comrade of
heroes: the Belgian exile Léon Degrelle.
LéonDegrelle,whowasbornin1906inthesleepylittletownofBouillon,nowa
backwaterinBelgium’sLuxembourgprovince,butoncetheseatofGodefroyde
Bouillon, firstCrusaderkingofJerusalem, speaksina voicefewAmericans will
be familiar with. French-speaking, Catholic, European with a continental, not
an insular, perspective, the man who nearly overturned his country’s corrupt
power elite in the 1930’s thinks in a perspective alien to our (comparatively
recent) intellectual heritage of pragmatism, positivism, and unbounded faith
in the inevitability of "progress." Before all a man of action, Degrelle is in a
tradition of vitalism, combining an inborn elan and chivalry with a hard-eyed,
instinctualgraspofthecalculusthatdeterminespolitics-activityinrelationto
power - today foreign, for the most part, to the "Anglo-Saxon" nations.
It was precisely Degrelle’s will to heroic action in the defense of Europe and its
values that led him to raise a volunteer force of his French-speaking country-
men, many of them followers of his pre-war Rexist political movement, and to
ally with his country’s conqueror, Adolf Hitler, in a European crusade against
Communism and Communism’s citadel, the Soviet Union. Degrelle, who has
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matchlessly recounted his role in that struggle (Campaign in Russia: The Waf-
fen SS on the Eastern Front, Institute for Historical Review, Torrance, CA,
1985), began the project to which this volume is the introduction in his late
seventies. From the vantage point offered by decades of reflection in his Span-
ish exile, the former charismatic political leader and highly decorated combat
veteran has undertaken nothing less than the thorough, searching, and (insofar
as possible) objective account of the character and career of the man who once
told him, “If I had a son, I would want him to be like you”, Adolf Hitler.
ThoseinclinedtodismissDegrelle’sobjectivityinexamingthelifeofhiscommander-
in-chiefwithasupercilioussneerwillshortlyhavethemandatoryforEstablish-
mentscholarsonsomuchasmentioningthedreadname. Indeed,amplematerial
for comparison already exists in the fawning name. Indeed, ample material for
comparison already exists in the fawning biographical homages offered to Roo-
sevelt and Churchill by their one-time courtiers and authorized hagiographers,
nottomentiontheslavishpanegyricsofferedtheWesternleaders’allyandboon
companion, Stalin, by his sycophants (not a few of them residents and citizens
of the Western “democracies”).
There are those readers who will fault this first volume of Degrelle’s ambitious
project, whichdemonstratesthemoralandintellectualbankruptcyofthebour-
geois leadership of the West and their unavoidable responsibility for the rise of
Hitler. Somewillobjectthatitmighthavebeenmorescholarly,whileotherswill
quibblethatitoughttohavegivenrecognitiontomorerecenttrendsinthehis-
toriographyoftheFirstWorldWar. SuchcriticismsmissthepointofDegrelle’s
work, to reach the broadest interested and intelligent public with an approach
the French have styled haute vulgarisation, which is to say, popularization of a
high order.
Indeed Hitler: Born at Versailles, in encompassing the turbulent years 1914-
1920, boasts a thematic unity that few but Degrelle could have brought to
the period. For in chronicling the shady plots and complots of the European
regimesbeforethewar,theawfulbloodbathsoftheWesternandEasternfronts,
and the fall of empires and the rise of Communism after the war, Degrelle
is telling of the collapse of 19th-century Europe - its economic liberalism, its
parliamentary democracy, its self-satisfied imperialism, its irrational faith in
reason and progress.
Heis,furthermore,hammeringmercilesslyatthepunysuccessorsofthePoincarés,
the Lloyd Georges, and the Wilsons, the present-day “liberals” and “conserva-
tives” who dominate in the governments and the academies and the media:
skewering their baneful lies one by one.
Degrelle knows that there is little that is more contemptible than the posturing
ofouracademics,whosniveltheirloveofpeaceateveryinstancewhereitmeans
supineacquiescenceinthelatestadvanceofCommunismorofatavisticsavagery
under the banner of “self-determination” or some other such transparent lie,
but who dilate with sanguinary enthusiasm over the “necessity” of the blood
baths that marked the two world wars of this century. How the professors and
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the publicists love to chide Chamberlain and Daladier, the British and French
leaders at Munich in 1938, for their "appeasement," in attempting to stave
off yet another fratricidal war! Perhaps only a combat-hardened veteran like
Degrelle,onintimatetermswiththehorrorsofwar,canbeatruemanofpeace.
It is Degrelle’s passionate desire for a Europe, and a West, united above the
nationalistic prides and rancors of the past, which leads him to what for many
Revisonists on both sides of the Atlantic will regard as his most controversial
stance: his firm and sometimes strident condemnation of the balance-of-power
policy of the British Empire. The reader should bear in mind that Degrelle’s
hostility is aimed not at the English, Scottish, or Welsh nations, but at the
governmentsthathavemadeBritishpolicyduringthiscentury,withsuchcatas-
trophic results not only for the West, but for the people of Britain as well.
InanycasethispanoramicintroductiontothelifeandtimesofAdolfHitler,the
key figure of this century, is a grand beginning to a project worthy of Degrelle,
the Belgian who sought the Golden Fleece as the Caucasus in the service of his
nation and his culture nearly fifty years ago.
Theodore J. O’Keefe
June, 1987
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Author’s Preface
An assassination which might have remained no more than an outrageous inci-
dentinthehistoryofterrorismhasinsteadhadadecisiveanddisastrousimpact
onthetwentiethcentury. Itprovokedthe"GreatWar"of1914-1918;madepos-
sibletheOctoberRevolutionoftheSovietsin1917;enabledHitler’srisetopower
in1933andsubsequentlyaSecondWorldWar; andaboveall,theconfrontation
of the two contemporary giants, the U.S.S.R. and the United States, with, as
its issue sooner or later, a devastating Third World War. What seemed at first
a transient, if major, news story - the murder of Austria-Hungary’s Archduke
FranzFerdinandandhiswifeatSarajevoinBosniaonJune28, 1914-wouldin
several days be revealed as the fruit of a convoluted political plot. At first the
affair seemed limited to Austria and Serbia, notoriously quarrelsome neighbors.
Butattheendoffourweeks,itwasclearthattheSerbs,atthethresholdofthe
Balkans, had been cunningly manipulated by Pan-Slavists in the imperial Rus-
sian court. For its part, the Austrian government was joined to Germany by a
politicalandmilitaryalliance. Inturn,theRussiangovernmentwaslinkedbya
militarytreatytotherulersofFrance,desperatetoregainAlsace-Lorrainefrom
Germany,whichhadannexedthoseprovincesin1871. Furthermore,theBritish
establishment, incensed at the rise of Germany’s economic power and the ex-
pansionofitsfleet,hadmovedeverclosertoFranceanditsrecentrival,Russia,
in the previous few years. The stage was thus set for a cataclysm which would
shake the White world with unprecedented fury. Within five weeks, thanks to
several bullets fired by a nonentity in a sleepy Balkan town, the great powers of
Europewouldbeateachother’sthroats. Then,withneithertheTripleEntente
of Britain, France, and Russia nor the Dual Alliance of Germany and Austria-
Hungaryabletoforcetheothertoyield,thewarringnationswouldfindnoother
solution but to drag nineteen other countries into the slaughter. By virtue of
promisesasfalseastheywerecontradictory,thecompetingsideswouldofferthe
selfsame spoils of war in secret compacts with two and sometimes three differ-
ent nations. Millions of people would be auctioned off, without their knowledge
or consent, as booty for their nations’ bitterest rivals. To arouse anti-German
hatred to a fever pitch, the powers of the Entente charged the Germans with
the most shameful atrocities, stirring up a vengeful fury which, together with
the short-sighted greed and stupidity of the victors, would result in the Treaty
of Versailles. This treaty, which crushed Europe’s foremost power, Germany,
beneath a burden of shame and reparations, which amputated vital territories
from the body of the nation, and rendered it defenseless against enemies within
and without, at length was successful only in provoking a new and inevitable
Europeanwar. TheintelligentmindsofEuropeforesawtheconsequencesofthis
treaty even before it was imposed. One of the principal negotiators, Britain’s
David Lloyd George, warned the treaty makers at Paris in 1919: "If peace is
madeundertheseconditions,itwillbethesourceofanewwar."Andsoitwas,
for without the Treaty of Versailles the rise of an unknown infantryman, born
in Austria and hardened on the Western Front to absolute power in Germany
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wouldhavebeenanimpossibility. AdolfHitlercameintotheworldatBraunau-
am-Inn, but politically he was born at Versailles. June 29, 1919, the day the
treaty was signed, not only ended the First World War - it began the Second.
Contents
I Ambush At Sarajevo 12
1 Black Hand In Sarajevo 13
2 Europe Reacts 17
3 The German Dynamo 23
4 Ambition and Revanche 27
5 Poincaré and Caillaux 34
6 Remote Conspiracies 39
7 Russia Mobilises 45
8 German Restraint 49
9 The Word of a King 53
10 Damning Documents 58
11 A Tsar Gives In 63
12 Tragic Farce 67
13 Death of a Pacifist 72
14 The Lies of Politicians 75
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CONTENTS 8
15 A Sudden Zig-zag 78
16 Britain on the Brink 82
17 “The Most Colossal Folly ...” 85
II The False “War of Right” 88
18 The Road to France 89
19 Feet of Clay 100
20 Armed With Hatred 112
21 Debacle on the Dardanelles 121
22 Italy Joins the Fray 127
23 More Balkan Intrigue 172
24 Cannon Fodder from the Colonies 178
25 The Slaughter Drags On 184
26 Rout in the East 188
27 Trembling Resolve 193
28 Stabs at Peace 202
29 President Wilson, "Colonel" House 212
30 America Chooses Sides 217
31 Big Business 221
32 The Lusitania Affair 227
33 Wilson Wavers 235