Thirty Years of The New Order

...Hitler's policies included some regrettable features and even—dare we say so in our free country—some actions that without any great exaggeration could perhaps be called crimes...

...It is silly and entirely unhistorical to trace back the gas chamber concept to Mr...

...Hitler's early program certainly was anti-Jewish, but it did not say a word about the necessity of killing all Jews in gas chambers...

...Hitler's Mein Kampf, where it is entirely absent...

...Hitler's final years...

...Similarly, the Czechs are busy in the mining industry of former North Russia, and the Germans have been replaced in agriculture by workers from Poland and the Ukraine...

...For a long time, however, both politicians and scholars in the United States failed to grasp its real meaning...

...We tend to forget that he sponsored films which, even if we do not entirely agree with their content, were artistically excellent...

...First of all, nobody denies that the late Mr...

...And how is it to be defined...

...Indeed, Mr...

...To justify this fantastic identification, the same cold warriors even invented the word "totalitarian," which provided them with a convenient instrument for selling their antiscientific ideas to the American public...

...Hitler seems not to have realized the damage he himself inflicted on those countries...

...In the light of modern research the very concept of "Hitlerism" is increasingly useless...

...We now know that there was no "pre-determination" of this sort...

...In 1940, Jews were simply ordered to live in ghettoes...

...Following the death in 1953 of Adolf Hitler, the creator and first Great Chancellor of the New Order of True Freedom, the so-called de-Hitlerization of Nazism began almost immediately...

...It is a good opportunity for a moment of reflection...

...Let us cite just a few aspects of this long-needed revision...

...Let us take the Jewish problem...

...We may criticize this legal action (although it must be admitted that it introduced a clear-cut legal order after a period of chaos and uncertainty), but again, it had nothing to do with gas chambers...

...There are no Jews in Europe anymore, yet as a result of this, anti-Semitism has virtually disappeared from Europe—which is not the case, we ought frankly to admit, in the U.S...

...But that should not prevent us from peeping sometimes into its intricate and often misunderstood mysteries...

...The fact that no Jew in Europe was allowed to continue his life, that half the populations of Czechoslovakia, Poland and the Ukraine, and a third of the Russian population, etc., were not encouraged to remain alive, must have cast a shadow on the New Order in the eyes of many people...

...As for Mr...

...the most extensive research has failed to find this idea in any early Nazi writings...

...To do this would be to project the present onto the past in the belief that everything was preordained...

...We must not forget that, because of the profound dialectical movement of history, the same policies—unpleasant though they may have been in some respects—not only had their brighter and more positive sides, but they have contributed enormously to the dynamic and impressive progress made in the economic and cultural spheres...

...Only lately, after years of errors, have American statesmen and historians succeeded in ridding themselves of the many outdated, vulgar anti-Nazi cliches that simply identified Nazism with Hitlerism and prevented us from perceiving the complexity of Nazi history and the historical significance of the New Order of True Freedom in Europe...

...He ordered the publication of the works of Goethe and Schiller...

...We are dealing with many years of a complex historical process, each year differing from the previous and the following one...

...Who can deny that demographic mobility is one of the best tests of social progress...

...Recent research by many sober scholars, free from the primitive prejudices of a former generation, has produced an entirely different and—we firmly believe—much more genuine picture of the last decades of European history...

...historical research once again fails to prove any idea of gas chambers in that period...

...Thinking Aloud THIRTY YEARS OF THE NEW ORDER BY LESZEK KOLAKOWSKI Leszek Kolakowski, the Polish philosopher, was expelled from the Communist party in 1966, lost his job at the University of Warsaw in 1968 and is currently at Oxford...

...The Europeans have gained enormously in mobility, too...

...What, in fact, is Hitlerism...

...After President Gerald Ford's last friendly meeting with the Great Chancellor of the Third Reich, Joseph Goebbels (who, in spite of his age, is in remarkably good shape and good humor), and after the numerous meetings between Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and Reich Minister for Foreign Affairs Baldur von Schirach, we can see clearly how the present creative atmosphere of detente has ultimately prevailed over the regrettable remnants of the cold war...

...Actually, there were many stages in Nazi policy toward Jews, and at each stage all the options were open—nothing was determined by the mysterious forces of ideology allegedly working in the very cradle of the Nazi movement...

...All of the citizens of Holland for example, are now cutting trees in Northeastern Sweden, while people from the over-populated regions of Bavaria have been shifted into the areas the Dutch vacated...

...Today is 30 years exactly since the Nazi Army, having conquered the Soviet Union and Great Britain, definitively established the New Order of True Freedom in Europe...

...He abolished unemployment in Germany and later in Europe, while we now have 7 million people out of work in the U.S...

...Of course, "the past is over," as old Heinrich Himmler, Honorary President of the Americano-European Friendship Association, wisely remarked yesterday in Berlin during the banquet honoring Secretary Kissinger...

...Yet for years many cold war propagandists absurdly equated the excesses of Hitlerism with Nazism and, what is worse, kept making clumsy comparisons of Nazism with Stalin's criminal, murderous regime—fortunately overthrown by the Nazi Army in May 1945...

...Hitler himself, what a simplified image of him we are left with after years of cold-war propaganda...

...And the latest investigations of American economists have proved beyond doubt that the heavy concentration of European industry in building gas chambers and crematoria shifted its metallurgical resources from more important tasks and delayed the postwar economic recovery...

...It was not until a couple of years later that the regrettable gassing decision came...

...Let us be more modest and show more common sense, a quality that is fortunately well on its way to victory...

...Jews were deprived of some other rights, and we may criticize this as well (although after the great Nietzsche we know how little meaning the celebrated right of voting has...

...Recent research has definitively refuted this nonsensical concept...

...Industrial statistics offer another proof of the advancement that has taken place: Belgium's steel production has tripled since 1939, and lumber output in Finland—thanks largely to workers from Italy—has jumped a massive 600 per cent compared to prewar production...

...And subsequently, with the Nuremberg law the Jews were simply prevented from marrying Aryans in order to preserve racial purity...

...This article, first published in fhe Autumn issue of Survey, was spurred by a New York Times editorial celebrating the anniversary of Hitler's defeat...

...What is obvious, is obvious," as President Ford admitted during his dinner with Minister Ribbentrop after they had signed their historic Mutual-Passionate-Love Treaty...

...It has also refuted the naive view, held to this day by some scholars, that Nazism from its very beginning had, so to say, a built-in tendency that was to manifest itself in the bizarre policy of Mr...

...He built roads and impressive public buildings, carefully discussing many of the projects with his architects (some of whom were his friends...