Hitler the Jewish Zionist (Part II)

So we were talking about Jim Condit's Jr's film The Final Solution to Adolf Hitler, particularly his sources. We'll pick up from where we left off, about forty-five minutes into the film.

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One thing I forgot to mention is that for all the attempts that Hitler purportedly made to destroy evidence of his ancestry, his parents' headstone is still right there outside of Linz for all to see: Looky!

Hitler did destroy his father's home town, but Condit never entertains the notion that Hitler despised his petty bourgeois, civil-servant, abusive father.

In this section of the film, Condit also returns to the idea of a Jewish Hitler by returning to Hitler's Vienna (despite the author's notation from our last post that Hans Frank is the only person seriously alleging Jewish ancestry on Hitler's part) and noting that some Jews in outlying areas of Austria-Hungary had the last name "Hitler." The name means "smallholder" in German, so it isn't surprising that some Jewish people, most of whom have German or Yiddish names, would have the name also.

• Condit returns to Hamann's Hitler's Vienna, never once noting that Hans Frank was the sole source for the story of Hitler's alleged Jewish ancestry.
  
  Let's hit on sources again:
  
  
• Star Wars by Nord Davis. Condit mentions this book for the first time in this segment, but he doesn't mention that Nord Davis was a Christian Identity preacher and a profound racist. We're promised "more later."
  
  
• The Last of the Hitlers by David Gardner. Condit's claim to the believability of this book is that Gardner wrote a biography of Tom Hanks. Right: So being the biographer of a Hollywood star qualifies you as an historian? Does it matter to Condit that Gardner's account of Hitler's interaction with his half-nephew William Patrick is at direct odds with the interaction as described by Hamann? Hamann says nothing about a payoff to William Patrick to keep quiet about "Jewish ancestry."
  
  Just for shits and giggles, I checked out how many academic libraries carried each book. Hundreds carry the Hamann book; about sixty carry the Gardner book. My own book was published in 2002 -- the same year as Gardner's book -- is carried by 400 libraries.
  
  Another bit that Gardner apparently writes is that the Austrian government led by Engelbert Dollfuss investigated Hitler's background and found he was the grandson of a "Rothschild banker." I can buy that there may have been Rothschilds in Vienna in the early to mid-1930s, but in Linz or Graz or Braunau?
  
  
• Adolf Hitler: Founder of Germany by Heinnecke Kardel. Condit tells us that Kardel is a "socialist Jew from Germany." In fact, Kardel was a decorated WWII Wehrmacht veteran. The book is generally regarded as worthless by historians; even Condit submits it is poorly sourced.
  
  This anecdote that Kardel tells about the Viennese Jew who served in the Wehrmacht is ridiculous given that Hitler couldn't have been a "Vienna Jew," as he came from Linz.
  
  
• At 59 minutes into the film, Condit produces a source -- a photograph of Hitler and Hindenburg taken the day that the Reichstag was sworn in with Hitler as Chancellor. Here we get a good view of what Condit really thinks about Jews. First, there is the issue of Condit's stupid mistakes: The photograph was taken two months after Hitler became Chancellor, not before. Second, Hitler didn't succeed Hindenburg as Chancellor. He succeeded him as President a year later when Hindenburg died. For a full year, Hitler served as Chancellor with Hindenburg as President. In fact, Hitler ran against Hindenburg for President a year earlier and lost.
  
  Shouldn't a man making a film about Hitler know a little more about German history and government?
  
  Back to the photo. Condit says that Hitler's body type is "a little Sephardic Jew-type of a person." Of course, were Hitler even a Jew at all, he would be an Ashkenazi Jew, but I digress. This whole body type argument is classical racial anti-Semitism.
  
  
• Condit brings up Frank Collin's march of the Nazi Party through Skokie, Illinois, and points out that Collin was Jewish. Then leaping to conclusions, he seems to induce that all Nazis must be Jews. At least that's the best I can pick up from Condit here.
  
  
• Condit returns to Hamann again, hammering Hitler's desire to hide his family history. Perhaps what Hitler wanted to hide was not that he was Jewish, but rather that (1) his father was illegitimate, (2) his half-brother Alois was a petty criminal, (3) his father never divorced his first wife and thus was a bigamist. Again, note: Hamann never links the "Hitler was Jewish" rumor to William Patrick Hitler.
  
  
• The Jewish Connection by M. Hirsh Goldberg. Condit pulls out this book to make several points. Notably, this book (published over thirty years ago) cites several sources but has no footnotes or endnotes. Thus the claims made by Goldberg, unless his source is explicitly stated in the text proper, must be researched on one's own. There are not only glaring omissions in the book (e.g., Stalin is mentioned as one of the people that helped found the State of Israel, but Stalin's anti-Semitic purge of the late 1940s and early 1950s, thinly veiled as "anti-Zionism" is excluded). And some of the information offered is just plain wrong. E.g., Goldberg claims the term "sour grapes" comes from Jeremiah 31:29, but if we look at Young's Literal Translation of the verse, not to mention the original Hebrew (where the word is boser), we don't find the word for "grape" in Hebrew (gefen or kedem). Jeremiah and Aesop (the latter from whom the term comes), if they lived, would have been contemporaries, but the likelihood is that a translator got clever and changed the Hebrew original to the English "grapes."
  
  So it's not surprising that points that Condit takes out of Goldberg's book are wrong. For instance, there is the allegation on p. 27 that Hitler was not a struggling student in Vienna who was rejected as an artist but rather than he had Jewish patrons. The author of the report cited is Walter C. Langer of the O.S.S. (precursor to the CIA). The problem is that Langer's report has never been considered reliable (he never interviewed Hitler's Vienna roommate, August Kubisczek, for one person), and the book version says Hitler's grandmother worked in Vienna for the Rothschilds -- what about Graz and the Frankenbergers?
  
  Goldberg's errors don't end here. His next reference is to William Shirer's canonical Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. Shirer writes, on p. 20 of the Bantam paperback edition, that a Hungarian-Jewish clothes dealer gave a coat that looked like a caftan, i.e., a robe-like coat like those worn by Chasidic Jews.
  
  What's truly astounding is that at the top of the very same page in Rise and Fall, Shirer concludes a section about Hitler's alleged art career in Vienna, writing, "This was the extent of Hitler's 'artistic' achievement, yet to the end of his life he considered himself an 'artist.'"
  
  The next whooper is that Hitler employed a Jewish cook, a Fräulein Kunde, on loan to him from Romanian leader Antonescu during the war. Surprisingly, the exact same story, told in almost exactly the same words, appears in Gerald Fleming's book Hitler and the Final Solution. One of the only references to this woman I could find was in a 1939 article in American Imago, a psychoanalytic journal. A shared source between Fleming and Goldberg is The Psychoanalytic Interpretation of History (1971), edited by Benjamin B. Wolman, which is almost assuredly the source that both Fleming and Goldberg used -- unless Fleming, who published a decade after Goldberg, used Goldberg's book, which is extremely doubtful.
  
  The problem is not only that, as with the O.S.S. report, the psychoanalytic views of Hitler have been shown to be unreliable, but the majority of Hitler scholars idenity Hitler's cook not as a "Fräulein Kunde" but as Marlene von Exner, who, according to Martin Gilbert, was not Jewish but, instead, had a Jewish great-grandparent. Upon disclosing this to Hitler, she was fired (Gilbert, The Second World War: A Complete History [2004], p. 504).
  
  Another source to mention the cook as Exner and not Kunde is none other than Brigitte Hamann (p. 412), whose book is sitting right on Condit's desk as he reads from what appears to be a xerox of Goldberg's pages. Clearly Condit never read all of Hamann's book and was simply pointed to the "incriminating" portions by his shady "mentor," whom he calls only "Ratisbone."
  
  The revelations about Hitler's Jewish superior officer during World War I and Dr. Bloch are not anything to anyone who knows anything about Hitler at all. (As an aside, I'm personally of the opinion that Hitler deserved his war decorations, one of which was awarded for carrying a message between platoons under fire.)
  
  The allegations about Angela Hitler having worked for a Jewish Mensa organization. I was able to track this down to a Czech publication of 1933. It's poorly sourced at best but, as Condit concedes, proves nothing about Hitler being Jewish. Nor, for that matter, does Hitler's personal modesty, mentioned by Condit while referencing David Irving's Hitler's War. Condit implies that Hitler would not allow people, even physicians, to see him naked because he was probably circumcised, and only Jews were circumcised before World War II Europe.
  
  So here we go from Hitler being one-quarter Jewish to having undergone ritual circumcision, presumably in 1889, the year of his birth. Really? Are we to assume that the small town of Braunau had a mohel to perform such a circumcision? And what of Hitler's parents' Catholic upbringings?
  
  I realize that this is anecdotal evidence, so take it with a grain of salt, but I myself had a single Jewish grandparent. However, that grandparent's son, my father, was raised Catholic, as was my mother, and as was I.
  
  
• The Rakovsky Interrogation by Anonymous. This book Condit refers to as one of "our" publications, then in process. Before he gets into that, however, he shows us a copy of the newspaper he used to publish, All These Things -- particularly an article entitled "The Rakovsky Interview and the Beginning of World War II." Condit wrote this article himself. He says we'll get back to this also.
  
  Next he pulls out Red Symphony by J. Landowsky, who was purported part of the interrogation of Christian G. Rakovsky. The next book is Alan Bullock's Hitler and Stalin and a reference by Condit to Trotsky's autobiography on the topic of Rakovsky. Condit calls Rakovsky a Jew and a "gentleman banker."
  
  Condit next references "Ratisbone" again and then pulls out The Rules of Russia by Fr. Denis Fahey, the famous anti-Semitic Catholic priest and schismatic. Fahey quotes Douglas Reed, who, we're told "once worked for The London Times. Did you know that many of the Bolsheviks who overthrew the provisional government in Russia were Jews from New York who couldn't speak Russia?
  
  I can think of one American who went to Russia during the Bolshevik take over -- John Reed, author of Ten Days That Shook the World. But I disgress.
  
  Next Condit talks about communist takeovers of Hungary by Bela Kun and Bavaria by communists, etc., after World War I. Condit references the Polish-Soviet War, which the Poles won in August 1920. Condit links this Soviet loss to the overthrow of Kun and the Bavarian communists. The problem is that both Kun and the Bavarian group were overthrown before the Battle of Warsaw (the battle Condit repeatedly refers to), and it was by no means clear that Poland would win the war until this battle was over.
  
  While discussing Stalin's succession to the rulership of the USSR from Lenin, he mentions that Trotsky was married into the Rothschild family. Before we address that idiocy, Condit wraps up his intro by stating that Trotsky was the bankers' man in Russia and by Stalin pushing Trotsky out, the bankers and communists (who, as we all know, always work as a team) tried to get rid of Stalin. Finding this out, Stalin made massive arrests and began the show trials of the 1930s -- also known as the Great Terror.
  
  Interestingly, Condit doesn't mention the Kirov murder, which is the key event that set off the Great Terror. Does he know who Kirov was? Does he know who killed him and why?
  
  Condit also seems not to know (he never mentions it) that between Lenin's death and Stalin's consolidation of singular power (1924 to 1929), Stalin ruled the USSR part of the time with two Jews -- Lev Kamenev and Grigori Zinoviev, the former of whom was Trotsky's brother-in-law. Why wouldn't Stalin distance himself from these men?
  
  As for Trotsky's marriage -- or should we say marriages -- he married Aleksandra Sokolovskaya in Siberia 1899. He married his second wife, Aleksandra Sokolovskaya, in Paris in 1903. Condit mentions neither woman nor any connection between them and the Rothschild family.
  
  Eventually we get to the often-repeated allegationi that New York Jewish banker Jacob Schiff funded the Bolsheviks, he (rather than Kaiser Wilhelm II, as history records) finding Lenin in Zurich and shipping him to Petrograd and Schiff, via Bernard Baruch and their puppet, Woodrow Wilson, getting Trotsky released from jail in Newfoundland, where he was in fact held by the British en route from New York to Petrograd in March 1917.
  
  The point is this: Schiff did help fund the March Revolution in Russia that put a democratic provisional government in place under Alexander Kerensky. (Most conspiracy theorists like Condit seem not to know that there were two revolutions in 1917 in Russia.) However, because he felt communism was detrimental to capitalism (which it was), he withdrew his funding when the Bolsheviks took over eight months later.
  
  If Schiff had been funding Trotsky, by the way, don't you think Trotsky would have mentioned it in his autobiography, published ten years after Schiff had died? What did Trotsky have to lose at that point? He had been forcibly exiled from the USSR and Stalin was plotting against his life.
  
  Condit is called a "half-Jewish gangster"; Stalin wasn't Jewish. His father and mother were both Georgian Orthodox Christians. Jughashvili does not mean "son of the Jew."

That pretty much wraps up the second third of Condit's film. We'll do the third part last, when time allows.