More Hate - The Illiteracy of The "Brights"

One of the things I cited in that post on the relationship of Tacitus to Nazi ideology said this:

“He [Tacitus] depicted the tribes as descending from an ‘earth-born god,’ and thus deeply rooted to the Germania territory,” said Krebs. “The Nazis employed that rhetoric to advance their theory that the culture of the German volk was inherently tied to the soil on which they were born.”

For Nazi ideology, the text proved an excellent propaganda tool.

In 1936, for example, the Nazi party convention in Nuremberg featured a historic “Germanic” room with walls covered in quotes by Tacitus.

And the leader of the Nazi party? Though Hitler doesn’t mention the Germania specifically in any of his writings, Krebs is “certain that he must have known about it.”

“Hitler was not extremely literate,” said Krebs, “but two books that he is known to have read made ample use of Tacitus.”

Moreover, Krebs said, Hitler’s preferred “authority” on questions of race — adviser Hans F.K. Günther — was “intimately familiar” with the text.

Another of the few books we know Hitler read and incorporated into his Nazi theory was "Menschliche Erblichkeitslehre und Rassenhygiene" by the distinguished scientists,  Erwin Baur, Eugen Fischer (who was already guilty of crimes against humanity)  and Fritz Lenz (who should have been prosecuted for crimes against humanity), which was vital to his Mein Kampf.  That book is based solidly on the theory of natural selection.    We know that because he was given the two volumes of that work by the publisher Julius Lehmann while he was in prison, specifically to help him formulate his Nazi theory.   It went on to be one of the main references in the further development of Nazism.  Lehmann was also Günther's publisher, and also gave Hitler some of his writings.   Lehmann has been said to have given Hitler more of what he read than anyone else, so he's sort of the, um, "intellectual" padrone of Nazi theory.

Hitler's intellectual basis wasn't very wide but it is now largely known and documented.  He got a lot of his ideas second hand but the origin of the ideas is clear and it's not my fault if you're too ignorant to do anything but spout the common received propaganda of the 1950s-60s that didn't get that right.  You can no more separate Hitler from that than you can the overt citations of William Luther Pierce, the author of The Turner Diaries and probably the most dangerous figure in the renewal of Nazism in the United States.  I've written about these things over and over again, with quotes and citations and even links that I'd rather not have stunk up this blog with.

One thing we know he didn't rely on,  The Jews recorded in The Bible.

Update:   Just as a point of information, I've not posted 62 comments from those who troll me since the beginning of Lent.  I've got a spam file with hundreds and hundreds of such comments, most of them from one jackass.