Hitler and Royal Bavaria

At the end of World War I, the last Bavarian monarch, King Ludwig III, had relinquished power, though without abdicating, in the face of the German Revolution. He went into exile, later returned to Bavaria but had to leave again due to fear of assassination. He died in Hungary in 1921. However, the experience of radical revolutionary rule seemed to shock many Bavarians back to their senses and his funeral was a mass demonstration of support for the old monarchy. His son and heir, Crown Prince Rupprecht, refused, however, to use the occasion of his father’s funeral to seize power even though many thought such a coup could be successful. He was a celebrated war hero, a former army group commander on the western front, and after the death of his father was referred to by many as “Your Majesty”, even by some in the local government. The Crown Prince was adamant that he wanted the monarchy restored but only by legal means. He refused to recognize the Weimar Republic and was as upset about the state of affairs that prevailed in his country as every proud German was.

Brownshirts leader Ernst Roehm

Crown Prince Rupprecht refrained from entering the political fray himself but made it clear that he supported the creation of a “…constitutional, social monarchy with universal suffrage.” This seemed to be a very real possibility as monarchist support in Bavaria seemed increasingly widespread. However, Bavaria was also the birthplace of the Nazi Party and the aspiring dictator, Adolf Hitler, would find an implacable enemy in the person of the Bavarian crown prince. Hitler had served in a Bavarian regiment in World War I and started his political career in Bavaria (he belatedly had to renounce his Austrian citizenship to enter politics). However, traditional, Catholic conservatism ran strong in Bavaria and Hitler would actually find less support there than in other areas. In 1923 Hitler had tried to enlist the Crown Prince in his “Beer Hall Putsch” but the royal would have no part of it. He had earlier sent his supporter Ernst Roehm (who he would ultimately have killed) to try to enlist the support of the Crown Prince, but the Bavarian heir would have no part of it. Hitler tried to tempt the Crown Prince by hinting at supporting a restoration but never outright promising it due to the support among many Bavarian monarchists for seceding from Germany, which Hitler would not allow.

To his credit, Crown Prince Rupprecht was never taken in by the vague promises of the Nazis. It was all a deception of course as, privately, Hitler admitted, “that he couldn’t stand Rupprecht von Bayern” and never had any intention of restoring him to his throne. Fortunately, there were considerable numbers of loyal Bavarian monarchists who did support the heir-to-the-throne and as the Nazi Party grew in power, others in Bavaria increasingly looked to Crown Prince Rupprecht for their political salvation. The royal war hero commanded sufficiently widespread support in Bavaria to be seen as a potential savior from the Nazis, pushing some that were probably not monarchists at all to get behind the idea of a royal restoration. Despite being born in Bavaria, the Nazi Party actually had less support there than most would think. Finally, as the Nazis grew in power throughout Germany, Bavarian politicians began to look to Crown Prince Rupprecht as their savior. The Crown Prince himself certainly thought something needed to be done to spare Bavaria from Nazi rule and offered to step in and take charge of the government himself if no one else had the spine to stand up to Hitler.

Kronprinz Rupprecht

Finally, a plan began to take shape for Crown Prince Rupprecht to step in as a sort of Bavarian dictator with the title of “Staatskommissar” so that he could do things that the existing political establishment lacked the will or courage (or both) to do. Many Bavarian monarchists naturally supported this plan as a prelude to the restoration of the monarchy but so did many Social Democrats, so frightened were they by the sudden and rapid rise of the Nazi Party. Everything seemed favorable as every day brought more supporters as the Nazis gained more power. However, the plan was thwarted when the elderly (and increasingly senile) President Paul von Hindenburg was induced to appoint Hitler Chancellor of Germany. After that, the Nazi dictatorship was swiftly established and numerous Bavarian monarchists were thrown into prison by the new regime. Crown Prince Rupprecht refused to be reconciled with this new state of affairs. He refused to fly the Nazi flag at any of his residences and when Hitler requested the use of one of the royal castles to entertain state guests, the Crown Prince refused.

When he hoped to gain monarchist support, Hitler tried to give the impression that he would restore the monarchy in Bavaria (as in other parts of Germany depending on who he was talking to) and enlisted prominent Bavarians to try to convince the Crown Prince to endorse the Nazis. Ernst Roehm was one such figure as was his former Freikorps commander Franz Ritter von Epp, a former friend of the Crown Prince and a former monarchist but one who had abandoned that to embrace the Nazi cause. None of them succeeded. While on a visit to King George V of Great Britain, Crown Prince Rupprecht stated that he supported a “reasonable” German rearmament but felt certain that Hitler was completely insane. He still held out hope that the monarchy would be restored but, unlike some, he had the wherewithal to realize that it would not be because of the Nazis, despite their many implied or overt promises. Nor was the Crown Prince alone as there were many devout, traditional, Catholic Bavarian monarchists who were determined to resist the Nazis. One of the most prominent was Baron Adolf von Harnier but he was found out by the Gestapo and arrested in 1939.

Adolf Freiherr von Harnier

With the arrest of Baron von Harnier and the discovery of his hopes of restoring the House of Wittelsbach to the Bavarian throne, the Nazi state came down on the old Bavarian Royal Family. Properties were confiscated and, at the end of the year, Crown Prince Rupprecht and his family were forced to flee to the Kingdom of Italy where they were given sanctuary by King Victor Emmanuel III. Despite the close alliance between Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, Victor Emmanuel III was still the King of Italy, above Mussolini and there was nothing anyone could do to harm the Bavarian royals as long as the Savoy monarchy protected them. Furiously, Hitler banned the Crown Prince from returning to Germany and the royals settled in Florence. Likewise, Crown Prince Rupprecht never relented in his staunch opposition to the Nazi regime. Of course, there was little the Crown Prince could do under the circumstances, even his life in Italy was not totally free from worry, but he never gave up hope that the monarchy would be restored and as the war went on, it seemed more and more likely the Nazi regime would fall. He had very definite ideas about what should replace it.

One of the problems that the Nazis had with the Bavarian royal house (and some other German monarchists did as well) was their openness toward secession and the break-up of Germany. In 1942 a British diplomat who met with the Crown Prince reported that he envisioned a South German monarchy that would include Bavaria and the Austrian-Tyrol while the Rhineland and Hanover would form another state and Schleswig, Mecklenburg, Brandenburg, Saxony and Posen combining to form another that would separate western Europe from the Soviets. At least that was one idea. In 1943 the Crown Prince sent a memorandum to the British government volunteering to take charge of things in Germany when the Nazi regime collapsed, seemingly implying his willingness to assume the role of German Kaiser. However, more common was the proposal of joining Austria to Bavaria in a new South German monarchy. Unfortunately, after 1943, things became much more dangerous for the Bavarian Royal Family. The King of Italy dismissed Mussolini and began trying to extricate Italy from the Axis and the war. The Germans promptly began moving in to take control of as much of the Italian peninsula as possible.

The Crown Prince & Princess in Italy

The Crown Prince left his residence and was hidden by an Italian colonel, allowing him to evade the German occupation forces. However, his family was not so fortunate. They were in Hungary at the time and when the Nazis occupied Hungary in 1944 Crown Princess Antonia (of Luxembourg) and the children were taken prisoner on direct orders from Hitler himself. They were sent to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp and were later moved to Dachau. Within the month they were liberated by American troops but the trauma of the ordeal had weakened Crown Princess Antonia and she never fully recovered, dying nine years later in Switzerland. The Crown Prince’s son, Duke Albrecht (future head of the family), was moved from place to place as well before being liberated by the French in Austria. When the war ended in 1945, U.S. General Dwight Eisenhower sent a special plane to fly Crown Prince Rupprecht back to Germany but while they were very polite and friendly, no one was prepared to take his ideas for post-war Germany under serious consideration. The Allies had already made their own agreements concerning the occupation and division of Germany and none of them included a restoration of any of the German monarchies, even one that had been so staunchly anti-Nazi from the beginning as the Royal House of Bavaria.

Crown Prince Rupprecht returned home as a more beloved figure than ever before due to his staunch opposition to the Nazis from the very beginning. Looking at the situation in post-war Bavaria, one would think that a restoration of the monarchy would have been easy. However, four foreign countries were then involved in Germany and a restoration of the monarchy was considered out of the question by both the Allies and the West German government which (and this is at least understandable) feared that this would coincide with calls for Bavarian independence, breaking up the federal union and weakening West Germany at a time when they were most concerned by the looming threat of a third world war with East Germany and the rest of the Soviet bloc. So, Crown Prince Rupprecht remained honored, beloved and respected but also without a throne. One German historian stated that many Bavarian people considered him their monarch anyway, regardless of what the law said, referring to Rupprecht as, “uncrowned, and yet a king”. When he died in 1955 tens of thousands of people visited his remains and he was given a full state funeral by the Bavarian government as if he had been a former monarch. In his person, he represented an older, nobler Bavaria and an example of a national figure who was untainted by the Nazi regime, who also represented all those Bavarians, not just the loyal Catholic royalists, who had opposed the Nazis from start to finish. He was a figure everyone in post-war Bavaria could, and in large part did, admire.

The Kaiser and the Führer

When the last German Kaiser, Wilhelm II, went into exile in the Netherlands in 1918 he was a man rejected by his country, betrayed by his army and demonized by the world. To understand why he came to take such a cool approach to the politics of Germany in the days leading up to the Second World War one must understand how close the Kaiser came to public humiliation and execution after the first. It had to make an impression on the crestfallen former monarch. After being vilified in the Allied press since 1914 as the very incarnation of evil itself there was no shortage of powerful individuals who wanted to see the last German Kaiser pay with his life for the mass atrocity that was the Great War. The British were the most adamant to see him hanged, the French, surprisingly, were not terribly moved one way or the other and the Americans opposed taking the life of the fallen monarch. Britain’s King George V opposed the idea but, given the clamor for it in his own country, would not speak on his cousin’s behalf. Belgian King Albert I, perhaps surprisingly and perhaps not, opposed executing the Kaiser and did speak up in opposition to such a thing.

Kronprinz Wilhelm, Dutch Princess Juliana & the Kaiser

The lack of Allied unity on the subject, the lack of any recognized legal precedent to do such a thing and the refusal of Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands to hand her guest over (as a matter of Dutch sovereignty) meant that eventually the issue, rather than the Kaiser, died after 1920. However, for about a year Wilhelm II had to have been apprehensive as his life hung in the balance. He felt considerable bitterness at having been made the scapegoat for the murderous insanity that gripped Europe in August of 1914, and rightly so for, if he was to blame, he was certainly no more guilty than the leaders of Austria-Hungary, Serbia, Russia, Britain and France. Kaiser Wilhelm II saw himself as a man who had been wronged and so he was. He refused to recognize the Weimar Republic of Germany and vowed that he would not set foot on German soil again unless it was as King of Prussia and German Emperor. When some suggested that his son, Crown Prince Wilhelm, run for president alongside Field Marshal Hindenburg, the Kaiser was repelled by the very idea. Somewhat unjustly but also somewhat understandably, Wilhelm II always viewed Hindenburg as one of his betrayers.

The Kaiser, of course, followed German politics quite closely and hoped that an opportunity to restore the monarchy might present itself even as he gloomily admitted that such second chances seldom to never come about. His days were further darkened in 1921 when his beloved wife, Kaiserin Augusta Victoria passed away. The Kaiser accompanied the remains of his wife to the German border but could go no farther. However, some 200,000 Germans turned out to mourn her, which was noted as a hopeful sign that considerable monarchist support remained in Germany. Only the year before about 5,000 men had staged a coup in Berlin, under the nominal leadership of Wolfgang Kapp, that aimed to restore the Kaiser but it had been swiftly suppressed. In 1923 Hitler launched his “Beer Hall Putsch” in Munich which was suppressed even faster but the Kaiser certainly did not support it. He feared that behind it was an effort by the Bavarian royal House of Wittelsbach to replace the House of Hohenzollern on the German throne. In fact, however, the popular Bavarian Crown Prince had refused to have anything to do with Hitler’s wild scheme and remained staunchly opposed to the Nazis for the rest of his life.

There were various monarchist groups in Germany but the one political party most associated with a desire to restore the empire was the German National People’s Party or DNVP. However, while monarchists made up a large part of its membership, it was not a purely monarchist party by any means and as total electoral success continued to elude them, many began drifting toward an alliance with the rising power of the National Socialist German Workers Party (NSDAP); the Nazis. Eventually the DNVP would join in a coalition with the Nazis but it was only one example out of many of Hitler courting the monarchists when they could be of use to him and dropping them as soon as his goals were achieved. When Hitler began to become a major player on the German political stage he began to make some effort to court the exiled Kaiser and, having the bulk of his support in the middle to lower class, add aristocratic respectability to his movement. His choice for this campaign was his most likeable lieutenant, former First World War flying ace, Hermann Goering.

In January of 1931 Goering visited the Kaiser at his home in Doorn for the first time. It was a brief visit and somewhat stormy. Princess Hermine (the Kaiser’s second wife) stated that the conversation between the two had become quite heated, probably due to the Kaiser not being used to being challenged and disagreed with. For her part, Princess Hermine was rather hopeful about the Nazis but Wilhelm II distrusted them. For someone who had been around politics for as long as he had, there seemed to be something unsavory about them. When Goering returned in May of 1932 he stayed for a week and afterwards there were reports that the Kaiser had been completely won over. They were entirely mistaken. The Kaiser adopted a wait-and-see attitude about them but while he praised the positive changes that came with the Nazi takeover (and no one denies that these existed), he was never taken in by them and warned his family to keep their distance. When, on his second visit, Goering claimed to be in favor of restoring the imperial throne (which he certainly was not as he was set to be Hitler’s designated successor), the Kaiser stood up for his fellow German royals and insisted that such a thing would not be sufficient as the whole “princely brotherhood” had to be revived as well. The Bavarian monarchists and others of the German states should remember that in his haggling the former King of Prussia had not abandoned them.

Hermann Goering, Hitler's #2

If the Kaiser had ever read ‘Mein Kampf’ he might have known that Hitler was no friend of the old reich. He stated quite clearly that his intention was a racial state rather than a restored monarchy and that he had nothing but contempt for the Kaiser, blaming him for the mistakes of World War I (he would, of course, go on to make bigger ones). As it was, the Kaiser approved of the DNVP voting with the Nazis in the hope that they could help achieve sufficient mastery over the leftists to bring about a vote on restoring the monarchy. As for the Nazis themselves though, he could see that their claim to represent something new was simply an effort to turn both ends against the middle and had no consistency to it. He had been around long enough to know that there was no “third” direction. One could go left or right but any effort to go both was false and doomed to failure. He wrote in 1930 of National Socialism, “Social = National! - Socialism = Bolshevism = antinational and international…This socialism is therefore irreconcilable with the idea of the national.” Socialism by any other name, to the Kaiser, was still the same poison that had been preached by Thomas Paine, Karl Marx, the Paris Communards and Vladimir Lenin.

Princess Hermine, who had actually met Hitler once, remained hopeful and after the visit by Goering she asked her husband if he might have some place of honor in the restored German Empire if their hopes were realized. The Kaiser remained dubious and said, at best, he might give him command of the air force. He was more positive about the prospects of Mussolini and Italian Fascism under which the monarchy remained in place and which hearkened back to Italian tradition and history in Imperial Rome. However, when he sent one of his courtiers to Rome to convey his greetings to Mussolini, the Duce refused to even see him, so that was the end of that. When Hitler began his talks with Field Marshal Hindenburg, President of Germany, the Kaiser was disgusted by the whole scene, still regarding Hindenburg as a traitor and dismissing Hitler as “a fool”. The higher the Nazis climbed the less likely it seemed that they would do any favors for the monarchists. As far as Hitler was concerned, giving the former German monarch a pension as a former head-of-state was more than sufficient.

Wilhelm II, last legitimate German leader

When some of the Kaiser’s private sentiments were leaked to the Nazi leadership, Wilhelm II did all in his power to separate his family from them. He dismissed his openly pro-Nazi courtier, Leopold von Kleist, urged his son Prince August Wilhelm and his grandson to leave the Nazi Party as well as Princess Hermine’s son Georg (though they did not listen). When one of his former courtiers asked permission to stand for office as a Nazi the Kaiser refused on the grounds that anyone who worked for him should have nothing to do with politics (since he regarded the entire German government as illegitimate). When the man protested, defending the Nazis, the Kaiser took it as proof enough that he was not a loyal monarchist and never had been. There would be no more visits from high-ranking Nazi officials, which was as well for the Kaiser who was happier to have as his guests on his birthday the deposed kings of Saxony and Wurttemberg. When the Nazis did finally come to power, with some DNVP members in the coalition, some raised the issue of a restoration but found no support and after the Reichstag fire and Hitler’s assumption of dictatorial powers, any realistic chance of working within the system to bring the Kaiser back came to an end.

From that point on, the whole hope for the Kaiser to enjoy his own again would purely depend on the generosity of Hitler or the overthrow of his regime. An overthrow was not likely to happen as Hitler enjoyed widespread popular support and was successfully suppressing those who opposed him. An early target, of course, was the Jews. Critical historians have tried to portray the Kaiser as an anti-Semite and he certainly made some anti-Semitic statements but it would be a total deception to portray this as being anything at all like the Nazi position. When the Kaiser condemned “the Jews” he did so in the context of condemning a variety of peoples whom he believed had betrayed him. However, when the Nazis began their first organized persecution of Jews the Kaiser was disgusted, famously saying that it made him ashamed to be a German for the first time in his life. Such activities, he thought, showed the Nazi regime to be gangsters, unworthy of a position of national leadership. Still, for the time being, care had to be taken not to offend Hitler or it would have meant ruination for everyone.

Princess Hermine & Kaiser Wilhelm II

The 75th birthday of the Kaiser was a turning point. There were public celebrations in Germany which Hitler ordered broken up. He then followed this up by outlawing all monarchist organizations, something Wilhelm II considered “an act of war against the House of Hohenzollern”. Even Princess Hermine, who had been the most hopeful regarding the Nazis being the short-cut to restoration, finally lost her rose-colored glasses and dropped all sympathy for the new regime. The Kaiser was further alienated when the Nazis began to remove from public view any lingering traces of the monarchial past. The mutual loathing of Nazi government in Berlin and the exiled court in Doorn was obvious and ever deepening. In terms of policy, the Kaiser approved of Hitler ignoring the Versailles Treaty, the building back up of the military and the steps taken to redress German grievances but disapproved of the anti-Semitic program. In any dealings with the regime in Germany he was polite and correct but knew that they had only been trying to use him and so was careful to keep a space between himself and them. When war came in 1939 the Kaiser doubted that Hitler would ultimately succeed.

After the conquest of Poland, a courtier wrote to Hitler (as the Kaiser would not) pointing out that nine Prussian princes had served at the front and after the German invasion and occupation of the Netherlands an honor guard was posted at Doorn. Churchill, once his enemy, had offered to take the Kaiser away to England but Wilhelm II refused, preferring to stay where he was and, in any event, would not countenance “escaping” from German troops. When the Nazi regime expressed their displeasure that there had been no formal word from Doorn about the Nazi victory over France, the Kaiser finally sent a message of congratulations. However, while the Kaiser certainly did relish the defeat of France as revenge for 1918 his message was less than well received as the Kaiser referred to the victorious troops as ‘his’ army and expressed his hope that the monarchy would be restored. Hitler, upon reading the message, referred to the Kaiser as “an idiot”. At his home, the Kaiser would often go out to chat with the German guards and to the horror of the  strict Nazi-types these men soon began snapping to attention, saluting and treating the Kaiser as if he were still their sovereign. Hitler was less than pleased.

Seyß-Inquart, Mackensen, Canaris, Christiansen,
Haase and Densch at the Kaiser's funeral

Not long after, on June 3, 1941 Kaiser Wilhelm II passed away. Hitler was still thinking of using the former monarch for his own purposes. He envisioned an elaborate state funeral in Berlin, with Hitler playing the mourner, walking behind the coffin to give the appearance of himself as the “legitimate” successor to the past imperial leader. However, this dream fell apart when the last will of the Kaiser was produced. Wilhelm II had suspected that such ambitions were on the mind of Hitler and he forbid such a thing. If Germany would not have him back in life, they would not have him back in death. He expressed his wish to be buried on his estate at Doorn, that his funeral be simple and that no Nazi pageantry be allowed. Hitler was furious and immediately forbid any German officers to appear in uniform at the service, refused to send any high-ranking Nazi official but did send a wreath, making sure it was draped with a very large swastika in a last act of spitefulness.

However, in spite of Hitler’s order, a number of serving German officers attended the funeral in uniform (and there was a small official delegation) such as Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, head of military intelligence, General Friedrich Christiansen of the German occupation forces in the Netherlands, Admiral Hermann Densch, III Corps commander General Curt Haase and others. Nazi commissioner for the Netherlands Arthur Seyss-Inquart was the highest ranking political official present but the most prominent attendee was General Field Marshal August von Mackensen who appeared in his old Life Guard Hussars uniform, clutching the marshal’s baton that the Kaiser had given to him in the First World War. The 91-year old veteran was a committed monarchist. He was also suspected of “disloyalty” to the Nazi regime and, as most know, Admiral Canaris was later executed on such a charge after it was found he was actively working to thwart the Nazi Party. Hitler himself, of course, would have a very different sort of funeral, his remains being doused with gasoline and burned in a ditch.

On the mind of the Indian judge?

The Nazi Fuhrer and the German Kaiser never met each other and remained at odds to the very end. However, Hitler did do the Kaiser one service, inadvertently, in that he gave the world a new German villain to rail against. After the Nazi regime of Adolf Hitler, few people could summon that much outrage against the Kaiser. Efforts to link the two proved to be intellectually weak and taken seriously by very few. Hitler was the new bogeyman and the Nazi state the new example of perfect evil on the world stage. The old Kaiser quickly faded from memory in favor of the new global antagonist. However, after World War II, the name of Kaiser Wilhelm II was invoked in a rather strange way.  In his dissenting opinion at the Tokyo War Crimes Trial Indian Justice Radhabinad Pal lumped the Kaiser together with Hitler and the Allies when he compared America’s use of the atomic bomb to “the directives of the German Emperor during the first World War and of the Nazi leaders during the second World War”. It was a bizarre comparison but probably the last time the Kaiser was linked to Hitler on the world stage.

Was the "Mad Baron" a Nazi?

Wave the flag of anti-Semitism and a flag with a swastika on it and the first thing to come to mind is Hitler and the Nazi Party. With his rather unsavory reputation, accusations of anti-Semitism and the presence of the swastika symbol among his army many writers have been unable to resist the urge to link Baron Ungern von Sternberg with the Nazis and to portray him as a sort of proto-Hitler. Is there any truth at all to these allegations? As with most of the sensationalism surrounding this man the short answer is -no. However, let us take a look at this step by step.

First, there is anti-Semitism. I will say from the outset that the commonly held belief and the most widespread popular view is that the Baron was violently anti-Semitic. There is probably a reason for that, true or not. However, I will add, there are reports (in the minority but they do exist) that one of the Baron’s top subordinate commanders was Jewish, that he employed Jewish agents across the Far East and was not really anti-Semitic at all. That would seem slightly hard to believe but the fact remains that this is yet another “fact” about the Baron that is not as solid as is often believed.

However, even if we are to allow that the Baron was an anti-Semite, it would have to be kept in context with his time and place. He was coming out of the period of the late Russian Empire and the Civil War; an environment in which anti-Semitism was widespread. The White Russian movement, not entirely fairly, is well known for this today. However, it was not, unlike Hitler, racial in origin. It was based on the information they had (some accurate, some famously forged) about who the leading enemies of Tsarist Russia were. The infamous “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” may be held to be a forgery today, but it was widely believed at the time and while that work can be counted false there was a significant number of Jews involved in the anti-Tsarist, Bolshevik revolutionary movement. That does not justify blanket cruelty but it is important to understand where such hatred was coming from.

It must also be pointed out that, while you could find swastikas displayed among the ranks of the Baron’s motley army, it had absolutely nothing to do with anti-Semitism in any way. Although it never seems to matter regardless of how often it is pointed out, the swastika was a very common symbol, found all over the world, long before Hitler ever adopted it as his own and it is especially prevalent among the Buddhists of the Far East and Mongolia is no exception. Some have said the Baron had a swastika flag. This is possible, but I have never seen it. The only flags of the Baron forces I have seen was one bearing a large “U” and another bearing the Romanov crown and initial of Grand Duke Mikhail on one side and the face of Christ on the other. However, I have seen pieces of uniform, shoulder straps, from the Baron’s army which displayed the swastika. These were probably worn by the Mongolian troops as the various nationalities had distinct uniforms. When present the symbol was present as a Buddhist religious symbol and nothing more.

This leads to the biggest difference between the Baron and Hitler and the one that matters most because it has become the one most defining aspect of Hitler and the Nazi Party and that is racism. Plain and simply the Baron was as far from being a racist as is possible. Not only did he lack racial prejudice, he lacked ethnic or religious prejudice as well. He was a Baltic German whose loyalty was absolute an unquestioning concerning the predominately Slavic Russian Empire. He was raised a Lutheran amidst a majority of Russian Orthodox Christians and was as comfortable with them as he was with Tibetan Buddhists and Mongol animists. He admired Asian culture immensely, even when they had been the enemies of his country as was the case with the Japanese.

The Baron adopted Mongol dress, learned their language and even married a Chinese woman (Manchurian to be precise). His army included Russians, Mongols, Tibetans, Manchus, Japanese and others. In fact, his Russian soldiers sometimes complained that he favored the Mongol soldiers over those of his own race. The Baron had a vision, insanely horrific to some -but a vision all the same, and that vision was all that mattered to him, not differences of race or ethnic background which he would certainly have viewed as absurd and unimportant. He was also, quite unlike Hitler, not someone who sought power for himself. The primary goal in his life was to restore monarchies, which he did in Mongolia and hoped to do in China and Russia. He was always adamant that he was simply a military commander and that it was the Bogd Khan who ruled the country and had final say on all political matters.

To illustrate this difference, can anyone imagine Adolf Hitler bowing down before a half-blind Tibetan monk? Religious devotion was also another major difference even though some try to paint this as something the Baron had in common with the Nazis. Nothing could be farther from the truth. The Baron was an extremely religious man (though what that religion was has been at times debated) whereas Hitler was not. He could reference “Providence” in speeches when necessary and he indulged the occult obsessions of men like Himmler, but Hitler was not religious at all and never took even the neo-paganism pushed by some in the Nazi Party seriously. Hitler himself was the only god he recognized whereas the Baron viewed nothing as supremely significant as religion and monarchy; two things Hitler generally despised. Far from being the same or having much in common the two men were actually about as opposite as any two individuals could be.

Hitler: Right Wing Dictator?

I get a little tired of people categorizing Adolf Hitler as a "right-wing dictator". This is because, for the most part, this often seems to come from those who refuse to believe that there is such a thing as a really bad left-wing dictator. Where does this classification come from? Is it simply a monopoly on racism? Because I cannot, for the life of me, see why Adolf Hitler is considered more right-wing than left-wing. Think about it; the man was an irreligious, environmentalist, vegetarian who banned smoking and founded a party called the "National Socialist German Workers Party". Does that sound like a conservative, right-wing guy to you? Hitler was born into the Austrian Empire but had nothing but contempt for the Hapsburg domain which was far too cosmopolitan for his racial purist views and was far too accepting of Jews for his anti-Semitic taste. So much was he against his own homeland that when World War I came he went to fight for Germany rather than Austria.

Furthermore, I would say simply look to Hitler's background and his own words if any doubt remains. He scorned the German princes, insulting them in his political testament Mein Kampf and was inordinately proud of his "common" background and dismissive of the aristocratic class and the old royals. He at times made friendly gestures toward the princely class to win over conservatives but never followed through on his real or implied promises. He purposely copied the methods of the socialists and communists such as in his design of the Nazi flag, chosen, he wrote, because he had seen the hypnotic effect of massed red flags at communist rallies. When the last German Kaiser died he forbid high officials to attend the funeral and when Prince Wilhelm of Prussia was killed in World War II he so feared the monarchist sentiment that arose at his funeral that he forbid German royals from serving at the front after that. Look at his political record.

After World War I he joined the German Workers Party, not the conservatives who wanted a restoration of the old monarchy. He then molded this party into the National Socialist German Workers Party and he made it clear that his vision was an aristocracy of racial blood rather than royal blood and which adhered to a religion of blood and soil rather than Christ and the Apostles. His goal, he openly stated, was to have all class distinctions abolished, something very liberal by the standards of any country. Even when German princes embraced Nazism he was loathe to accept them and did so only for the propaganda value of their conversions. He tried to tread somewhat lightly on the subject of religion because he wanted to appeal to a very broad audience though he did find some of the writings of Martin Luther quite useful when they condemned and ridiculed the Jews. On the whole though, Hitler wanted a new version of Nazi paganism rather than Christianity as can be seen in his insistence that his elite guard, the SS, not have any firm religious convictions. The extent to which Hitler was an occultist is debatable and in all probability he did not have any religion in the common sense of the term. Oddly enough his spiritual beliefs seem most compliant with the liberal elites of today who usually state that they do not believe in organized religion but prefer a vague sort of naturalistic spiritualism. In fact, it was specifically the paganism of Nazi Germany and to a lesser extent fascist Italy that the Pope (Pius XI) condemned and which gave the most pause to more conservative but fervently Christian nationalists like Salazar in Portugal, Franco in Spain and Dollfuss in Austria.

There were right-wing elements to Hitler and some fairly conservative sorts of people among his followers, but on the whole, I cannot see how anyone can call Hitler a right-wing guy. From his background, political testament and the state he created I do not see how the man can be considered, on the whole, to be of anything other than the political left. He was no friend of monarchy, wanted all class differences abolished, legalized abortion (for non-Aryans), banned smoking, instituted gun control, was a fervent environmentalist, a vegetarian and hated organized religion in favor of a nature-based spiritualism. I ask again, does any of that sound conservative or right-wing to you?