Englishman started Nazism

Title

Creator

Beaumont, A. F.

Language

English

Year

1939

Subject

Chamberlain, Houston Stewart, 1855 – 1927.

Hitler, Adolf, 1889 – 1945.

Rights

In Copyright - Educational Use Permitted

Fulltext

"The man who paved the way for Hitkr ! The founder and educator of Germany's future?" This is how Alfred Rosenberg, one of the Fuehrers henchmen, describes-an Englishman? Even this astounding tribute has been excelled by the praise of Hitler himself. With justice, for the real inspirer of the Nazi movement was not an, Austrian corporal, but a man of Hampshire. His influence throughout Nazi Germany has always been tremendous and increases with ew2ry passing year. Who was this mysterious Englishman?, His name was Houston Stewart Chamberlain. As the- name suggests, he belonged to one of the oldest and most distinguished famili.es in our country. "My father was English, my mother Scotch, and one of my grandmothers Welsh, so I can call myself a true son of Great Britain," he used to say when he first went to Germany. He mastered the German language, and decided he preferred it to his own mother tongue. Henceforth every word he wrote was in German! His researches led him to write a mammoth history of mankind. It was entitled The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century, and tried to prove that race counted more than anything else in the development of civilization. Houston Chamberlain argued that ~II progress in Western E1.1rope was due to an "Aryan" race which originally came from northern India and whose modern descendants are the Teutonic peoples. Western civilization, he concluded, could only be saved by the domination of a "pure and ruthless" Germanic stock. The book was a best-seller throughout Germany. Sometime between 1908 and 1912 this book fell into the hands of an unemployed and embittered youth in Vi.enna. Here was just the gospel for which the young Adolf Hitler had been seeking. To his mind Houston Chamberlain's thEOry seemed to explain all the wickedness and shame he saw around him.-A. F. Beaumont, in Tit Bits. 66 PANORAMA

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