Der Fuehrer - Hitler's Rise to Power (1944) - Heiden

364 DER FUEHRERSorel had applied the term of 'myth' to the great conceptions whichresult in the birth of political movements. Rosenberg called his book:The Myth of the Twentieth Century. He gave Hitler the thickmanuscript, for it contained some rather daring passages whichRosenberg, thinking of the party's reputation, did not want to publishwithout Hitler's approval. Hitler took the pages home and put them onhis bed-table, where Rosenberg when he called saw them lyinguntouched. This went on for a year; then the author grew impatient andasked to have his manuscript back. Hitler gave it to him and said: 'I feelsure that it's all right.'The party publishing house put it out in 1930, and it turned out to be'all right' in a very strange way. To be sure, the book containedreflections on art and race no different from what Hitler would havewritten. Rosenberg defended the theory — not original with him — thatthe 'Nordic' race came from a vanished continent to the north of Europeand consequently had taken important characteristics, memories, andspiritual qualities from an Arctic or semi-Arctic environment; it was arace of blue water and gleaming ice. But the ambassador of the WiseMen of Zion, the German purified from his mixed Russian-Germanmilieu, was wildly intolerant toward all elements which he viewed asnon-German. To these belonged Russian 'Tartardom' and, to an evengreater extent, the Semites. With Gobineau and Wagner, he regarded theforce of Semitism as far broader and more dangerous than its modernJewish representatives. In this view the whole Mediterranean region andthe Latin races are permeated with Semitism, and Rosenberg, basinghimself on the researches of an insane scholar named Albert Grunwedel,took special pains to demonstrate the Semitic origin of the ancientEtruscans, who subsequently imbued all the Latin peoples with aSemitic essence.But the deepest and most widespread poison, the most dangerousproduct of the Semitic-Latin spirit, is Christianity, at least theChristianity of the Catholic Church. Rosenberg hinted that the Catholicclergy was in a spiritual sense a continuation of the old Etruscanpriesthood, concerning which he told the most hideous tales; he calledthe Pope the Roman medicine man, church history a series of atrocities,swindles, and forgeries. Though all this came