One could be a Nazi without ever seeing or thinking about Jews

It irked me that nobody in England seemed to grasp that Nazism had been about building a new world order based on the noble ideals I still found so satisfying. For it had not taken me many weeks in the country to discover that the English definition of Nazi could be summed up in a single word, ‘Jew-gasser’. That was so misguided, such a mistake. Yes, we were taught to despise Jews, but what English people didn’t seem to appreciate was that for Nazis like me everything to do with Jews had been a minor issue, that one could be a Nazi without ever seeing or thinking about Jews.

K. Fitzherbert, True to both my selves (1997), loc. 3630

I think about these kind of things a lot. The ability to see things selectively without even trying is underappreciated in historical (and political) analysis.

Yet the deepest longing of Germans at the time ... was for the restoration of their national pride and recognition in the eyes of the world.

My family’s involvement with Nazism – their first excursion into any kind of politics – was not inspired by hatred of Jews, but by the vision of national revival that Hitler held out to them. ‘You have no idea what a terrible mood of disillusion and defeat there was in Germany before Hitler appeared on the scene and how he turned that round to one of optimism and hope,’ was my mother’s overriding memory of those days. Hitler had an uncanny instinct for touching the button of the innermost yearnings of the German heart. He promised most groups in society – an unhappy society, with a suicide rate three times that of Britain’s at the time – the things they craved: jobs, prosperity, security. Yet the deepest longing of Germans at the time, one that was apparently shared by most of the population, including my mother, was for the restoration of their national pride and recognition in the eyes of the world.

K. Fitzherbert, True to both my selves (1997), loc. 595

The moral test with which Wodehouse was confronted in June 1941 was one that was beyond him

The moral test with which Wodehouse was confronted in June 1941 was one that was beyond him. In addition to his upbringing, there was his temperamental preference for finding the easiest way out of a tricky situation – and his obsessive commitment to his writing. It is these two factors that colour his actions with the taint of irresponsibility. Combined with his failure to understand the nature of Nazism, they proved fatal to his reputation.

R. McCrum, Wodehouse: a life (2004), 305

The Kindly Ones is simply “Houellebecq does Nazism.”

Well-intentioned friends send me everything they can find about Jonathan Littell, and I am yet again forced to return to the subject. Things are not going well at all. I have just read the account of a speech he gave at a Normale Supérieure school, where he said: “Evil is committed by people like us, people who sleep, who shit, who fuck, and who have the same relationship as we do to the body and to the fear of death, with thought coming afterwards. All killers are like us.”

Fair enough. In fact, I agree completely. Here again is Hannah Arendt’s thesis, and here, again, I cannot deny its truth. But it is a very strange speech to justify his book, precisely because Littell seems to have done his utmost to invent the most singular character possible. Let us recall, for those few unfortunates who have not been able to read The Kindly Ones, that the SS veteran Aue is an intellectual who sleeps with his sister, kills his parents, actively participates in genocide, sucks off Robert Brasillach, survives a bullet in the head, is never separated from his Flaubert, and enjoys rolling in his shit from time to time. For a guy who is just like you and me, that is quite a list!

...

A poster on an Internet forum expresses the opinion that Max Aue [the protagonist in Jonathan Littel's The Kindly ones] “rings true because he is the mirror of his age.” What? No! He rings true (for certain, easily duped readers) because he is the mirror of our age: a postmodern nihilist, essentially. At no moment in the novel is it suggested that this character believes in Nazism. On the contrary, he is often critically detached from National Socialist doctrine — and in that sense, he can hardly be said to reflect the delirious fanaticism prevalent in his time. On the other hand, this detachment, this blasé attitude toward everything, this permanent malaise, this taste for philosophizing, this unspoken amorality, this morose sadism, and this terrible sexual frustration that constantly twists his guts… but of course! How did I not see it before? Suddenly, everything is clear. The Kindly Ones is simply “Houellebecq does Nazism.”

L. Binet, HhhH (2009), tr. S. Taylor (2012), unknown & 204

These both from the pages originally missing from Binet's text - and then put back in. They're here. I couldn't be bothered to re-find the first one, but it accurately reflects my view at the time of Littell's novel - i.e., it completely fails in it's stated purpose by making the protagonist so weird. 

Sport? What a load of fascist rubbish it is

Reading Heydrich's speech, I have three comments:

1. In the Czech state, as elsewhere, the feeblest defender of the values of the national education is the responsible minister . Having been a virulent anti-Nazi, Emmanuel Moravec became, after Munich, the most active collaborator in Hedrich's Czech government an the Germans' preferred Czech representative - much more so than senile old President Hácha. Local history books tend to call him 'the Czech Quisling'.
2. The staunchest defenders of the values of national education are teachers because, whatever we might otherwise think of them, they have the authority and the will be subversive. And they deserve praise for that.
3. Sport? What a load of fascist rubbish it is.

L. Binet, HhhH (2009), tr. S. Taylor (2012), 168

This is a terrible analysis. Sport and Education are potent, that's why they come under pressure. It's particularly weird though to look at sport in a Nazi context that way when the most famous sporting incident in Nazi Germany is the failure of ideological outcomes in the 1936 Olympics. One presumes that Binet, like me, was very bad at sport at school.

And it would be amusing if, after all the fuss and heiling, all the marching and indoctrination, the only contribution to the world by the Nazis was “Lilli Marlene.”

This is the story of a song. Its name is “Lilli Marlene” and it was written in Germany in 1938 by Norbert Schultze and Hans Leit. In due course they tried to publish it and it was rejected by about two dozen publishers. Finally it was taken up by a singer, Lala Anderson, a Swedish girl, who used it for her signature song. Lala Anderson has a husky voice and is what you might call the Hildegarde type.

...

Eventually Lala made a record of the song and even it was not very popular. But one night the German station in Belgrade, which sent out programs to Rommel’s Afrika Korps, found that, due to a little bombing, it did not have many records left, but among a few uninjured disks was the song “Lilli Marlene.” It was put on the air to Africa and by the next morning it was being hummed by the Afrika Korps and letters were going in demanding that it be played again.

The story of its popularity in Africa got back to Berlin, and Madame Goering, who used to be an opera singer, sang the song of the inconstant “Lilli Marlene” to a very select group of Nazis, if there is such a thing. Instantly the song was popular and it was played constantly over the German radio until Goering himself grew a little sick of it, and it is said that, since inconstancy is a subject which is not pleasant to certain high Nazi ears, it was suggested that the song be quietly assassinated. But mean­while “Lilli Marlene” had got out of hand. Lala Ander­son was by now known as the “Soldiers’ Sweetheart.” She was a pin-up girl. Her husky voice ground out of portable phonographs in the desert.

So far, “Lilli” had been solely a German problem, but now the British Eighth Army began to take prisoners and among the spoils they got “Lilli Marlene.” And the song swept through the Eighth Army. Australians hummed it and fastened new words to it. The powers hesitated, con­sidering whether it was a good idea to let a German song about a girl who did not have all the sterling virtues be­come the favorite song of the British Army, for by now the thing had crept into the First Army and the Americans were beginning to experiment with close harmony and were putting an off-beat into it. It wouldn’t have done the powers a bit of good if they had decided against the song.

It was out of hand. The Eighth Army was doing all right in the field and it was decided to consider “Lilli Marlene” a prisoner of war, which would have happened anyway, no matter what the powers thought about it. Now “Lilli” is getting deeply into the American Forces in Africa. The Office of War Information took up the problem and decided to keep the melody, but to turn new words against the Germans. Whether this will work or not remains to be seen. “Lilli Marlene” is international. It is to be suspected that she will emerge beside the barrack walls—young and fair and incorruptly inconsistent.

There is nothing you can do about a song like this ex­cept to let it go. War songs need not be about the war at all. Indeed, they rarely are. In the last war, “Madelon” and “Tipperary” had nothing to do with war. The great Australian song of this war, “Waltzing Matilda,” con­cerns itself with sheep-stealing. It is to be expected that some groups in America will attack “Lilli,” first, on the ground that she is an enemy alien, and, second, because she is no better than she should be. Such attacks will have little effect. “Lilli” is immortal. Her simple desire to meet a brigadier is hardly a German copyright. Politics may be dominated and nationalized, but songs have a way of leaping boundaries.

And it would be amusing if, after all the fuss and heiling, all the marching and indoctrination, the only contribution to the world by the Nazis was “Lilli Marlene.”

J. Steinbeck [12 July 1943], Once there was a war (1959), 61-3

We see the elite of the Thousand-Year Reich a set of flatulent clowns swayed by purely random influences

This scene, as it is described to us, is perhaps overdrawn; but not improbably. Absolute power corrupts absolutely, and we have too many accounts of life in that exotic court to doubt the authenticity, in its main lines, even of this. When a staid German general compared Goering to Elagabalus, he. was not exaggerating. In the absolutism, the opulence, and the degeneracy of the middle Roman Empire we can perhaps find the best parallel to the high noonday of the Nazi Reich. There, in the severe pages of Gibbon, we read of characters apparently wielding gigantic authority who, on closer examination, are found to be the pliant creatures of concubines and catamites, of eunuchs and freedmen; and here too we see the elite of the Thousand-Year Reich a set of flatulent clowns swayed by purely random influences. Even Mussolini was embarrassed; but then Mussolini had after all, like Goebbels, a Latin mind; he could never be at home among these cavorting Nibelungs. Goebbels, incidentally, was not present at this Mad Hatter’s tea-party; he was in Berlin, giving orders for the suppression of the revolt.

H. Trevor-Roper, The last days of Hitler (1947, 7th edn. 1995), 29

The offence of Russia was the existence of Russia

This Eastern policy was essential to Nazism; all other positive aims — the conquest of France or Britain — were subsidiary and incidental to it. The offence of France was its traditional policy of Eastern alliances, which had enabled it, for three centuries, to intervene in Germany. The offence of Britain was its refusal to be content with a maritime supremacy, its insistent tradition of preventing the domination of Europe by a single continental power. But the offence of Russia was the existence of Russia.

H. Trevor-Roper, The last days of Hitler (1947, 7th edn. 1995), 4-5