Bernd Weikl's Book Turns Out to be a Hoax – but is it a Good One?

During WWII allied war propaganda came up with a number of theories about the alleged cultural origins of National Socialism in an effort to make Hitler and the Party look ridiculous.

Amongst these speculations include the infamous missing testicle theory, alleging that Hitler went berserk after losing a testicle in combat during WWI. Freudian psychodynamic theory used to be popular in those days, and it was presumably thought missing a testicle would cause subconscious libido related psychodynamic instabilities.

Another related theory went that Hitler went berserk as a result of tertiary syphilis contracted from a young male prostitute in Vienna. A third related theory is that Hitler went berserk as a result of psychodynamic instabilities caused by his latent homosexuality. Amongst psychoanalytic practitioners of the day, being gay was widely regarded to be a psychopathology that lead to mental instability.

There were also other former associates of Hitler, who defected to the Allied side after falling out of favour. They concocted salacious stories about Hitler's "sexual perversions". These stories were eagerly lapped up by Freudians of the day attempting to analyse Hitler.

These crude reductionisms have been used as the basis of post-war speculative narratives attempting to explain Hitler and the whole of National Socialism with this type of monocausal ("one-shot") hypothesis. Such salacious monographs have largely been dismissed outright by mainstream historians for being complete fairy tales. Sir Ian Kershaw was to write:

The ‘Hitlerism’ argument will not go away. In fact, there are some signs, amid the current preoccupation with sexuality in history (as in everything else), that the old psycho-historical interpretations are making a comeback, and in equally reductionist fashion. Hence, we have recent attempts to reduce the disaster of nazism to Hitler’s alleged homosexuality, or supposed syphilis. In each case, one or two bits of dubious hearsay evidence are surrounded by much inference, speculation and guesswork to come up with a case for world history shaped fatefully and decisively by Hitler’s ‘dark secret’. Reduced to absurdity, a rent-boy in Munich or a prostitute in Vienna thereby carries ultimate responsibility for the evils of nazism. 

Kershaw in Hitler, the Germans and the Final Solution

As for the theory that Hitler was a "gay pervert", while that might have been considered socially acceptable in the fog of war during the 1940s, today it seems horrifically homophobic and totally unacceptable. Most of these crude theories were intended for low-brow mass consumption, and, as is typical of propaganda, designed to appeal to the lowest common denominator.

However, there were a few somewhat less implausible sounding hypotheses about National Socialism that were intended to appeal to a more quasi-educated audience, while remaining no less propagandist in intent.

The first of these is the so-called Luther hypothesis. According to this, Martin Luther taught Germans blind obedience to authority while preaching virulent anti-Semitism. Luther supposedly shaped "the German mind" so as to make it inevitable that Hitler would come along.

Journalist William Shirer was one of many allied propagandists who blamed Luther for the war.

Martin Luther: Concerning the Jews and their Lies.
Luther exhorts people to throw "hellfire" at the Jews and to "raze and destroy" their houses

The next version is the Social Darwinist hypothesis. According to this, Hitler and the National Socialists were Godless and un-Christian Darwinian monsters, whose movement was based entirely on Ernst Haeckel's theories of Social Darwinism. Their sole goal, it is alleged, was to replace the inferior races with a German blond haired, blue eyed Aryan Master Race.

Funded by a group supporting Intelligent Design, Richard Weikart wrote polemics blaming Darwinist humanism for Hitler

A closely related version is the Nietzschean Superman conspiracy theory in which it is alleged that Hitler held a "Secret Doctrine" in which he fancied himself as the Godless Überman (Overman, or in older translations, Superman), who was leading the destruction of Untermensch, subhumans, such as Jews.

This time it is alleged that "secret doctrine" of the "Nazis" was
based on Nietzsche as the "Prophet" of "The Cult of the Superman"

The final variant of this is the Nazi opera conspiracy theory. According to this, Hitler allegedly decided to devote his life to "transforming the world" into a Wagnerian opera production after seeing Lohengrin when he was 12. Since Hitler never stated he was on such an operatic mission, it is claimed that he and his Party kept their true operatic mission a "dark secret" as part of a massive conspiracy:

Joachim Köhler's book Wagner's Hitler claimed that Hitler made it his life's mission "to transform the world into a Wagnerian drama" but that "all this took place without his ever revealing the secret of his mission".

Like the missing testicle theory, the opera conspiracy theory probably originated in Allied war propaganda that attempted to make the "Nazis" look ridiculous by portraying them as an operatic movement.

Other authors take the potpourri approach and grab themselves a smorgasbord of cultural figures to arraign. For example, since Wagner dedicated one of his books to proto-Marxist socialist thinker, Ludwig Feuerbach, it is claimed that National "Socialism" is a form of post-Darwinian operatic socialism:

Yvonne Sherratt claims that the entirety of the history of German philosophy can be seen as a continuous teleological development towards its apotheosis in Nazism, and alleges she has unveiled the "dark secret" of how Hitler considered himself to be the Philosopher-Führer:

Sherratt claims to reveal "a terrible secret: the story of how philosophy was implicated in genocide"

Notice, however, that all authors who dabble in speculative Nazi conspiracy genres are conspicuous for their keenness to sensationalise their fairy stories as being the spectacular revelation of some extraordinary "dark secret".

However, the most notorious of all cultural historians still remains Daniel Goldhagen who claimed that German culture had for centuries been consumed with bloodthirsty genocidal anti-Semitism:

Dismissed by the great Holocaust scholar Professor Raul Hilberg,
along with every other major historian from Cambridge to Tel Aviv, as "worthless"
Goldhagen's book still became a pop hit with the lay public reaching the top of the bestseller list.

Academic historians accept none of these theories. They are all gross exaggerations based on speculations generated by the Allied war propaganda machine, which were further elaborated on by post-war journalists and populist speculators. You will find no more find the Luther hypothesis or opera conspiracy theories entertained in mainstream academic studies by respected academic historians than you will find missing testicle theories being seriously entertained.

Part of the problem is that all of these dubious speculations represent forms of cultural historicism. In this paradigm, it is alleged that culture, psychology, and ideas are the sole driving conditions of history. The high musings of great poets, philosophers, theologians, and opera composers, and their psychological frailties, allegedly singlehandedly steer the course of history.  Structural determinants including socio-economic instability or geopolitical tensions, and power struggles for hegemony over resources, are treated as though they were irrelevant.

That means that modern historians will have no truck with debates about whether WWII was caused by Luther, Wagner, Darwin-Haeckel, or Nietzsche—or by a missing testicle. Nonetheless, these crude populist speculations continue to circle unabated today. Mostly, the malicious perpetuation of such myths is actively driven by contemporary culture wars. On the one side, the religious right wants to blame Darwinism for the calamity:

Bergman is also the author of a book on The Jehovah's Witnesses

On the other side, the anti-religious left wants to blame Luther and Christian anti-Semitism for the Holocaust.

"If the Jew gains victory over the people of this world with the help of his Marxist Confession of Faith, then his crown will become the Dance of Death over the human race ... That is why I believe that I am acting as the agent of the Almighty Creator. In that I am warding off the Jews, I am fighting to do the Lord’s work."
Hitler: Mein Kampf

Along with Luther and Protestantism, Catholics are equally indicted:

Another book claiming to unveil a "secret history" of a conspiracy between Hitler and the Pope.
Written by John Cornwell, and not by Dan Brown

In short, both sides of the political fence are accusing one another of being 'Nazis'. This, however, does nothing to give us even a shred historically meaningful insights into what National Socialism really was all about. Such debates have nothing to do with the study of history. 

It is particularly noteworthy that right-wing authors dominate as the authors of cultural historicist polemics. That is because the idea that great poets and philosophers are alone responsible for scripting the Destiny of History is a highly Romantic right-wing and reactionary Great Man view of history. Most left-wing authors tend to be content with more mainstream academic studies focussing on socio-economic and geopolitical foundations driving struggle over power and resources. What the right is particular paranoid about is that this easily leads onto an analysis of class struggle.

That helps to explain why there are endless books written by right-wing authors demonising liberal thinkers such as Wagner, Nietzsche, and Haeckel, or German philosophy in general, as well as why there are extremely few left-wing authors demonising Luther, the Pope, the Churches, and Christianity in general for the calamity of National Socialism. Liberal thinkers are simply less prone to lapsing into Romantic Great Man narratives of history, even where the Great Man is a demonic anti-hero of some kind. 

As for Bernd Weikl's latest Nazi opera conspiracy book on Wagner, it turns out to be a hoax. In it, Weikl repeats the usual claims that Hitler was the reincarnation of Wagner, a madman on a deranged mission to transform the world into an opera. The only problem with Weikl's book is that it has caused much confusion. Only when Weikl himself contacted The Wagnerian to explain that his book is actually a spoof satirising opera conspiracy theories did it become apparent what his intentions were. 

Weikl makes the statement that this represents Hitler as Lohengrin.
It ought to be funny, but it is well within the sort of thing found in Nazi conspiracy theory books  

The problem is that many serious opera conspiracy theory books contain statements that are far more ridiculous than most of those found in Weikl's book—only they were intended to be taken deadly seriously. So if Weikl were to outdo them, he would have had to ham it up a great deal more. 

If I were to write something satirical along similar lines it would have gone something like this:

Seeing Lohengrin at age 12 was the greatest transformative experience of Adolf's young life [insert picture of Hitler allegedly depicted as Lohengrin]. The young Adolf was instantly captivated by how Wagner turned Jew hatred into an aesthetic experience—it was an experience that would change the world forever. This was the moment that set Adolf along the path of transformation into the future Führer, and the Hitler that history remembers him for today. This was the moment that the seeds of the thought of transforming the world into a Wagnerian opera production were first sown in Adolf's mind. 

From then on Wagner's operas were the sole source of emotion throughout Hitler's life. It was an emotion Hitler was forced to repress, as he dared not show the world his dark secret: he was gay and overtaken by his all-consuming obsession with opera. Hitler memorised every word that Wagner—his Meister—wrote, and conconcted the terrible fantasy of realising his master's ideas on the world's stage.  

All of this remain hidden inside the young Adolf until a decisive event brought this latent turmoil of inner psychological conflict out to the surface—he lost a testicle in combat during WWI. This was the final narcissistic injury that was to provide the fatal blow that was to engender the cataclysmic destabilisation that was irreversibly push the world down the path to the madness of mass war and genocide.

Driven outward out of his shell by this life transforming change, the repressed psychosexual rage exploded from inside of Hitler, as he set forth on his life mission of realising his childhood fantasy of transforming the world into a Wagnerian opera.  

In this way, Hitler wrote Mein Kampf under the Wagnerian spell. Through the entirety of Mein Kampf Hitler talks about nothing but Wagnerian ideas from start to end, and it contains nothing in it that his Meister did not direct him to say. Even in prison, though Hitler lacked access to Wagner's writings, he did not need to have read the Meister's works, since he knew every single word.  

'When I hear Wagner' said Hitler, 'it seems to me that I hear rhythms of a bygone world. I imagine to myself that one day science will discover in the waves set in motion by the Rheingold secret mutual relations connected with the order of the world.'   

Not only was Wagner his sole source of emotion, on losing his testicle, opera soon became Hitler's sole source of sexual gratification. Both Theodor Reuss, a practitioner of Tantric sex magick, and Sar Peladan, the French writer on the occult, have proven that Wagner was an intuitive sex magician. 

Hitler knew that Wagner had described the Jews as 'the devil incarnate of human decadence' and called for 'a Final Solution' to 'the Jewish problem'. Hitler was to succeed in fulfilling vision that Wagner had given him. Hitler would constantly repeat to those around him: “Whoever wants to understand National Socialist Germany must know Wagner”. The Party unquestioningly took the Führer's teachings to heart.

Faced with crushing defeat, in the final radio address Hitler gave to the country, in January 1945, he finally announced to the world that he was little more than Wagner's humble slave and that 'only he who gave this task can release me from it'. There was only one reality that Hitler knew, not that of the political reality of the nation, but that of the reality of the task of transforming the world into a Wagnerian drama.

From beginning to end, Hitler sacrificed his life to realising Wagner's vision on the world's stage. 

  

You can see how you could continue along those lines until it became a best-selling book. You could make a lot of money writing utter drivel like this. Books on the "Nazis" that take this sort of populist approach have proven immensely with the lay public. The credulous masses unfailingly lap this rot up and you can line your pockets well after you have the mindless masses eating out of your hand. Your publisher will be demanding that you write endless sequels. 

Most of this speculation really is hardly much different to Occult Reich conspiracies in which it is alleged that the "secret doctrine" of the "Nazis" was that of a dark "compact with the forces of evil":

In fact, some of the lines in my own satirical parody of Nazi opera conspiracies were culled wholesale from Occult Reich books. Sadly, the gross and unfounded speculation found in such Nazi satanist literature is hardly more credible than those found in Nazi UFO conspiracy theories:

In the most bizarre cases, it is alleged that Hitler escaped the bunker by being transported up to a UFO where he is being held in suspended animation, awaiting imminent reactivation for the Nazi UFO invasion of the world.

In every case, we are told by the author that this represents the sensational revelation of some sort of extraordinary "dark secret". The secret UFOs, the secret files of Pope Pius XII, the dark secret of the Philosopher-Führer, the "secret doctrine" of the Nazi Superman, the dark secret of syphilis or latent homosexuality etc etc. If ever you hear the promise of the revelation of spectacular Nazi "secrets", you can be guaranteed that what is being fed to you is little more than a hoax.

The main problem is that in every case if you critically examine the supportive evidence you find that the tendentious speculations are based on little more than:

... one or two bits of dubious hearsay evidence ... surrounded by much inference, speculation and guesswork to come up with a case for world history shaped fatefully and decisively by Hitler’s ‘dark secret’.

Kershaw's words universally apply to all of this genre of literature alleging to unveil grand Nazi conspiracies.

The fact is, whether it be the revelation of missing testicles, Nazi satanism, or Luther theories, it all remains as equally dubious as Nazi UFO conspiracies. The question is, when there is a very large literature of quality serious literature on National Socialism, why anybody would waste their time reading these ridiculous books. Even wilfully rewriting history to turn it into a witch hunt against Christianity or Darwinism is not much better since it is just about accusing your political opponents of being "Nazis". It is all puerile behaviour, something thoroughly deserving of ridicule. Yet despite this, people never seem to learn how pointless it is hurling the Nazi accusation at political opponents so that it ends up just another four-letter insult:

"Astonishing ... although the mouse knows it's going to get
an electric shock, it keeps pushing the button over and over again"
"We will, therefore, call this the 'Hitler comparison paradox'"

In case readers are wondering what they should be reading, I do have some high-quality recommendations. In place of William Shirer's dreadfully dated and crudely populist Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (he is not a historian but a journalist), you should be reading Cambridge historian, Sir Richard J. Evans's three-volume series on the Dritte Reich:

The most important series on the Holocaust is arguably still the three-volume series, The Destruction of the European Jews by Raul Hilberg.

For the impatient, who find these weighty tomes off-putting, I can suggest the one-volume version of Hilberg's book. There is also the one-volume version of Saul Friedländer's two-volume book, Nazi Germany and the Jews.

The concise, one volume, Origins of the Final Solution by the much respected Christopher Browning is also extremely readable, but arguably not quite as up to date as the less readable Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews by Peter Longerich (it has been rather poorly translated into English). 

A one-volume account that starts with an outstanding summary of the current mainstream academic view on the genesis of the Final Solution is Hitler's Hangman, a biography of Heydrich. The biography format helps you to see the development of the Party through the eyes of a key architect of the Final Solution:

A slightly dated introductory overview of the Holocaust literature that is imminently readable is also Explaining Hitler. It does need to be updated a bit, and I also do not entirely agree with the moderate intentionalist views of the author, but he gives both the intentionalist and functionalist arguments a well-balanced airing, as a good journalist should. Rosenbaum dispatches populist missing testicle type literature with short shrift, along with speculative psychohistory, which is a good thing since mainstream academic books fail to devote adequate time and space to debunking the populist literature.

I also recommend watching the following video of a talk given by Sir Richard J. Evans on German national identity:

Evans only has time to debunk the Luther hypothesis, but elsewhere he has written:

It has been all too easy for historians to look back at the course of German history from the vantage-point of 1933 and interpret almost anything that happened in it as contributing to the rise and triumph of Nazism.

This has led to all kinds of distortions, with some historians picking choice quotations from German thinkers such as Herder, the late eighteenth-century apostle of nationalism, or Martin Luther, the sixteenth-century founder of Protestantism, to illustrate what they argue are ingrained German traits of contempt for other nationalities and blind obedience to authority within their own borders. 

Yet when we look more closely at the work of thinkers such as these, we discover that Herder preached tolerance and sympathy for other nationalities, while Luther famously insisted on the right of the individual conscience to rebel against spiritual and intellectual authority. 

Evans: The Coming of the Third Reich

The most important point is that just about anything can be blamed for the rise of National Socialism, with the choice target picked according to the author's personal prejudice. I cringed when I saw an article asserting that because Haeckel coined the word "ecology", and since he was allegedly undoubtedly history's original Nazi, that therefore the green environmentalism movement had Nazi roots. It was just more Nazi UFO-ology as far I was concerned.

All of the speculative forms of cultural historicism, blaming this or that German poet, philosopher, opera composer etc relies on plucking "choice quotations" and then frequently elaborating them with shameless lies or distortions. If Herder preached tolerance, while Luther the right of the conscience to rebel against authority, then Wagner actually said that Jew and Gentile should become "united and without difference" through assimilation. Like Wagner, Ernst Haeckel was a pacifist, and his writings were removed from libraries during the National Socialist era. There is a good summary of the controversy around the link between Social Darwinism and National Socialism in Re-Reading German History, by Sir Richard J. Evans, which I quote draw from in my critical review of Sherratt. A more balanced view of Haeckel can be found in the book by Robert R. Richards.

As for Nietzsche, Leni Riefenstahl simply asked Hitler straight up what he thought of him. Hitler replied:

No, I can’t really do much with Nietzsche ... He is more an artist than a philosopher .... Of course, I value Nietzsche as a genius. He writes possibly the most beautiful language that German literature has to offer us today, but he is not my guide. 

Riefenstahl: Memoiren 

Yet, speculative authors seem never to be deterred by the fact that neither Hitler nor other leading Party members left not a trace of evidence suggesting that there was some sort of secret Superman conspiracy or Wagnerian opera conspiracy, any more than they left evidence that they secretly held Hitler to be the New Messiah fulfilling the vengeance prophesied by Luther against the spawn of Judah for murdering Christ. But, as with the Nazi UFOs, it seems we are to be lead to believe that the evidence has been destroyed, thus allowing fools to speculate as wildly as they wish.

However, just because mainstream academic historians fail to spend much time debunking Nazi UFO or opera conspiracy type of speculation, it hardly means that they are unaware of these things, or that they are naive about them. On the contrary, they are all too perfectly aware of them. They just lack the inclination to spend time taking on the endless ridiculous speculations that fly about whenever the word "Nazi" is so much mentioned. Nobody should think that just because missing testicle, opera, superman, or UFO theories are dismissed by mainstream historians that these endlessly speculative writings constitute some spectacular revelation of the true "secret doctrines" concealed by the "Nazis", revelations completely overlooked by incompetent historians.