Hans-Ulrich Rudel: We Grasp the Pulse of our Era! [Der Weg 1950-08]
An original translation of "Wir verstehen die Leichen der Zeit!"
Source Documents: German Scan
Note(s): This article appears in “Der Weg”, a German-language magazine founded in Buenos Aires, Argentina in the years immediately following the destruction of the Third Reich. See the links above for more information on the magazine and its contents.
Selectively quoting Wikipedia:
Hans-Ulrich Rudel was a German ground-attack pilot during World War II and a post-war neo-Nazi activist.
The most decorated German pilot of the war and the only recipient of the Knight's Cross with Golden Oak Leaves, Swords, and Diamonds, Rudel was credited with the destruction of 519 tanks, one battleship, one cruiser, 70 landing craft and 150 artillery emplacements. He claimed nine aerial victories and the destruction of more than 800 vehicles. He flew 2,530 ground-attack missions exclusively on the Eastern Front, usually flying the Junkers Ju 87 "Stuka" dive bomber.
Rudel surrendered to US forces in 1945 and immigrated to Argentina. An unrepentant Nazi, he helped fugitives escape to Latin America and the Middle East. He worked as an arms dealer to several right-wing regimes in South America, for which he was placed under observation by the US Central Intelligence Agency.
Title: We Grasp the Pulse of our Era! [de: Wir verstehen die Leichen der Zeit!]
Author(s): Hans-Ulrich Rudel
“Der Weg” Issue: Year 4, Issue 8 (August 1950)
Page(s): 758-760
Referenced Documents:
[LINK] POLAND - HC Deb 15 December 1944 vol 406 cc1478-578
We Grasp the Pulse of our Era!
Hans-Ulrich Rudel
The people of our age find themselves ensnared by a mass suggestion, orchestrated by a handful of cunningly masked warmongers. Scarcely a day passes without fresh examples laid before us by the unfolding events: yesterday it was the "Klaus Fuchs Affair" or the "flying saucers," and today—since the hypnotic grip of a perpetual state of alarm must be upheld—it is Korea. There, the masses are persuaded, the struggle between utter good and utter evil is being decided. Yet in truth, live ammunition now flies there as a consequence of a decree from August 1945, through which the Allies once summarily erased Korea’s unity by imposing the 38th Parallel. Those same Allies, with equal recklessness, obliterated Germany’s unity by drawing the Oder-Neisse Line. Though only political salvos have been fired here thus far, any misstep or irresponsible stance could ignite the first real shot. We Europeans possess a keen instinct for Korea’s plight, sharper than that of the mass suggestion’s victims on other continents. We former soldiers, in particular, sense the dangers intuitively, which is why—despite the so-called "militarism" they claim is bred in our bones—we have no intention of selling our lives to the very powers that birthed both the 38th Parallel and the Oder-Neisse Line!
The finest among us ask again and again, aghast, how every truth and every insight can be swept aside by mass suggestion. The victors of the last war crowed that they had shattered totalitarianism for good. In reality, the forms of dominion have never been so cruelly absolute as they are today. This new totality bears the name "massification," its strategy the annihilation of all individuality, the debasement of every personality. Here, a childish rapture for humanity; there, a sickly retreat into the facelessness of the crowd—these are the hallmarks of a trend whose crowning achievement shall be the robot-human. The soullessness of the robot, the anonymity of a universal regime, and the herd-like dread of the mass abattoir stand as emblems of a future dawning by the unwavering will of a minority.
Not long ago, mass suggestion pounded into people’s minds that Germany was the world’s archenemy, its destruction a deed pleasing to God, and that only after its downfall could the new, universally yearned-for era of peace dawn. Soon after, a fresh maxim arose: that the world Bolshevism—so long damned as a mortal sin—was in fact the true and destined champion of Christian ideals, demanding our unconditional alliance. A few years later, the Casablanca Conference, Tehran Conference, Yalta Conference, and Potsdam Conference were hailed as milestones on the road to peace, prosperity, and rebuilding, with the proclamation that—since "evil Nazi Germany" now lay defeated—no cause for a new war remained. Barely five years on, the world hears—and believes—that at the 38th Parallel in Korea, two worlds clash: one of freedom and culture, the other of enslavement and barbarism. As though the Communist International sprang into being only after the Second World War’s end! Most loathsome of all is that Korea could happen at all—despite the fight waged by German soldiers and European volunteers, despite our lucid understanding and unmistakable warnings to the world, despite the monstrous crimes in Eastern Europe, witnessed by millions among our eastern fighters and civilians. It wounds us that, so soon after, we face our rehabilitation in such tragic terms, yet we feel not the slightest guilt for this course of events. None among our people can be held accountable for the political shortsightedness of our former foes. Who, then, consorted with Bolshevism? Was it we, who in August 1939, driven by political and military necessity, signed a non-aggression pact with Russia—only to defy Molotov’s tempting promises and dire threats in June 1941, rejecting the Kremlin’s demands to surrender European lands and risking war for Europe’s integrity? Or was it the other side, which coquetted with "peaceful Russia" and "salon-worthy" Bolshevism, armed it, handed over all of Central and Eastern Europe, and then devised such ingenious barriers as the Oder-Neisse Line and the 38th Parallel as supposed bulwarks against contagion? Even into the final days of May 1945, that fateful year, German proposals for joint action against the East and the continent’s salvation were offered to the Western Allies. From the Polish Campaign through Compiègne to the ultimate collapse, a long and tragic thread of alliance offers to the West unravels.
Given the state of things, it matters little whether the watchword today is Korea, tomorrow perhaps Indochina, the day after Egypt, and finally Europe itself; nor does it matter whether those fighting on South Korea’s front appear more cultured and less barbaric than their northern foes; nor even whether the British arm Red China for use in North Korea (just as Bolshevik armies stormed Europe in the last war with "American weapons"!). What matters is that all this is possible at all! These events, and the mass hypnosis under which they unfold and are judged, lay bare a horrifying decay of our human order and civility. That a small cadre of "people"—aptly termed the "invisible front"—can drag millions, even entire continents, into this maelstrom of madness, bleeding them dry for their interests with ever-new slogans, with Europe likely as the capstone of their scheme, reveals how perilously close we teeter to the totality of massification. If we shun the lessons of antiquity’s history, let us at least heed the moral of its fall, enacted in three acts: the eradication of the best, depopulation, and the onslaught of the more primal. Need it be spelled out? Phrases like de Gaulle’s call for "restoring Charlemagne’s empire" or the claim that "the Occident cannot stand without Germany" serve once more as hypnotic lures. With ever mightier tools of mass suggestion, the West trumpets its demand for Germany’s remilitarization to defend the continent. We German dreamers clung to our vision until May 1945, hoping against hope that the West would, at the eleventh hour, recall its European duty. We were utterly deceived and betrayed. Those same powers now scheme to draw us back into their game, tasking us with Western Europe’s military defense—a purpose they signal starkly with fortifications along the Rhine (for what lies east of the Rhine counts as little in their reckoning as what lies east of the Oder-Neisse). In practical terms, our role would be to shield Paris’s mannequins from the grasp of lecherous Bolsheviks and Britain’s feudal lords’ whiskey bottles from being smashed. When we Germans cry "No!"—clearly, resolutely "No!"—let none think it stems from bitterness. That we felt when marched into captivity, when we watched Americans drive our comrades back across the demarcation line to the Russians, when…—but let us speak no more of it! Since then, we’ve had a moment to reflect, and we have done so earnestly, as has ever been the German way, in the words of Nietzsche: "A vast reckoning after the most terrible quake, with ever new questions." Too long we Germans were mere idealists; now we tread the path to realism, bearing idealism as a quiet undertone in our thoughts and will. Yet as realists we must declare: the West—which abandoned us in the fight for Europe’s freedom and betrayed us, which sundered our Reich and cast millions upon millions into direst misery, which willfully razed every foundation for rebuilding state, economy, politics, culture, and national life time and again, which devised not just the material but the spiritual dismantling of our existence as the emblem of its rule, which even now lets our comrades, martyrs for a free Europe, perish in the prison walls of Spandau, Landsberg, Fresnes, Oslo, Vught, Paris, Lille, and Beverloo, while seeking in us pawns for a European Korea—this West is as alien to us as the menace rising from the East, with this sole difference: the latter we grasp, having foreseen it decades ago, while the former we shall never fathom!
We are no mercenaries, nor will we fight for scraps: we demand justice for our land, so grievously wronged. We are not cheap cannon fodder, to be deployed safeguarding the world while condemned to slavery ourselves. A colonial yoke is no life for us, and we know too well the perils awaiting if we’re dragged into service with bound hands. None understand the East’s true might better than we, and thus we hold, from this knowledge, that any effective American aid—necessitated by the present state and the mad policy toward Germany for Europe’s defense—would come too late, finding only a Soviet-occupied Europe. Do they truly expect us, knowing this, to squander our last strength not for our own freedom but for foreign interests and others’ safety? Having stripped us of personal, political, and national freedom—let alone martial strength—we refuse to gamble our very existence rashly and pointlessly through alliances and pacts. No German may rightfully beg American aid against the East, nor sign military pacts that provoke it, for such acts defy our people’s true interests. Never can it be the duty of our drained, fragmented Germany to taunt the Russian bear or serve as its easy prey. By their Casablanca doctrine of unconditional surrender, the Allies hollowed us into a political and martial void. We cannot fill this void without political independence and national unity, nor will we play a part on another’s stage.
One truth more we’ve gleaned in these years: the defiance of the will to live. Let one example stand for thousands: Churchill’s words of December 15, 1944:
The transference of several millions of people would have to be effected from the East to the West or North, as well as the expulsion of the Germans—because that is what is proposed: the total expulsion of the Germans—from the area to be acquired by Poland in the West and the North. For expulsion is the method which, so far as we have been able to see, will be the most satisfactory and lasting. There will be no mixture of populations to cause endless trouble, as has been the case in Alsace-Lorraine. A clean sweep will be made. I am not alarmed by the prospect of the disentanglement of populations, nor even by these large transferences, which are more possible in modern conditions than they ever were before.
For this, hundreds of thousands—dead, raped, crippled—paid the price. Yet the millions it targeted not only endure but have wrought marvels anew, displaying a will to rebuild unmatched in history. Thus we grasped the bitterest lesson war and its aftermath have taught: a life worth living and the restoration of a lasting order are possible only in defiance of this West!
This East and this West are not Europe’s offspring, nor Asia’s, nor America’s—they are the fruit of a rot spanning all continents, in whose direst throes we stand. These tremors may shake the roots of our being, yet they also rouse us awake! Danger and the chance of triumph have ever been tightly entwined, never inversely matched. East and West, as we now know them through their emissaries and between whom fate has placed us, both embody a system bent on crushing personality, leveling all, proletarianizing, and raising mass armies of robots—a system of uniform templates, blind to distinction, a mental straitjacket of rigid design. Yet we will not forsake the Occident, and so within us has grown the vision of a third order, to which all our thought is now pledged, ready to find us vigilant, wise, and willing when it calls. In "our Europe," the Slavic East belongs as surely as the Asian does not; the continental and insular West belongs as surely as the Americanized does not. Herein lies the synthesis of our present, leaving Korea far behind. In plain terms: this third order is not our seat of power—for we lack every means in the coming tide—but it is the substance of our lives, and that, in history’s eyes, is what ever endures. The dealings of today’s world, the fates so carelessly diced over, are not ours. We wield neither power nor freedom, command neither the conditions nor the course: so let us extricate ourselves from these affairs!
Endless, urgent tasks await us: at home, beyond rebuilding, vast problems loom—the refugee crisis, care for the bereaved, the scourge of unemployment, and a hundred more. Each alone could consume a state and its leaders. These must now take precedence; they define our mission, and we cannot spare time or strength on lesser things. Nor should we brook long, empty talks: negotiations over war veterans’ pensions drag on for months, while parliamentary stipends are settled in a day. If they prize us, the young generation, they must prove it through deeds that show they read the times aright. Truly, we have no time to waste, and we will not let further grave blunders snuff out the last hopes of our day.