Alt-Hype Goes Full "Per Capita"

Destiny-tier and Kraut-tier errors.

I first encountered AltHype’s World War II revisionism in 2010. It has been 14 years since he began this research. My critique of AltHype has to do with his illiteracy in German and his flawed “quantitative” analysis. AltHype is the most intelligent and prominent member of the Dissident Right who attempts to engage in historical revisionism of the Second World War. Addressing these flaws will serve as a cautionary tale for the entire Dissident Right.

The stream to which I will refer can be found here. I will not bother providing timestamps since this livestream will likely be taken down. Part of AltHype’s preemptive defense is that the livestream was “thrown together.” However, it is clear from the book he flips through that he has spent more than ten hours “throwing together” these theories, in addition to hundreds of more hours over the last 14 years. This “thrown together”-ness is not a good excuse for these errors, which are serious and basic:

1. A basic unfamiliarity with the German language and with Mein Kampf. This is despite AltHype’s claim that he hates “hearsay” and wants to consider only “verifiable documents.” A few hours in Duolingo would be a good first start for someone seriously interested in “going back to the sources.”

   1. He claims that the term “liquidation” and “annihilation” (he does not cite the original German, ausrotten or Vernichtung) does not refer to killing, but rather to political defeat.

   2. He claims that Hindenburg was so demented at the end of his life that he referred to Hitler as “my lord.”

2. An exhaustive “quantification” of Hitler’s use of the term Lebensraum. The implication is that if Hitler did not use this specific term often, then the broader concept must not have played a role in his true intentions.

   1. Because the term Lebensraum does not appear at a higher frequency than other terms in Hitler’s speeches, it cannot have played a role in Hitler’s intentions. Thus, Hitler had no intention to invade Poland or Russia, he was not an imperialist, and he was a nationalist who merely wanted to defend Germany’s 1938 borders and preserve peace in Europe.¹

3. Slavs were considered Aryan by Nazi anthropologists, and therefore Hitler did not want to mistreat them.

Linguistic Errors

AltHype’s attempt to ascertain the meaning of the terms “liquidation” and “annihilation” is not original. Historical revisionists have used this tactic before. However, the terms in question can, like many words, mean different things in different contexts. For example, if I say that, “America destroyed Germany in WWII,” this does not mean that America killed every single German. But if I say, “America destroyed 4 million Germans,” this has the obvious implication that American actions led specifically to the homicide of a particular number of individual Germans.

Similarly, when Germans use similar words, they can also say things like “Germany exterminated Czechoslovakia” without meaning the physical death of every Czech and Slovak, while “The special command unit exterminated 5,000 Jews in Kiev on August 27th” has a very different and much more literal meaning. Typically, when historical revisionists attempt to introduce linguistic ambiguity into the historical record of the Holocaust, they make some attempt to go back to the original German. AltHype, however, is incapable of doing this, because he lacks a basic understanding of German.

Despite 14 years of research, AltHype shows a basic lack of understanding of the words which you would learn in any introductory college course on WWII from the German perspective. AltHype, throughout the stream, audibly wonders aloud, “What is Herr? What is Volksgenossen? What is Volksgemeinshaft?” He honestly, to his credit, admits that he has made not the slightest investigation into basic German.

His historical anecdote, that Hindenburg referred to Hitler as “my lord” on his deathbed is another example of not understanding that words have multiple meanings, depending on context. The German word Herr is used in the Bible as “lord,” as in, der Herr, mein Gott (the lord, my God). However, the term Herr is also used in other contexts to simply mean “sir,” or “Mr.” For example, opponents of Hitler referred to him as Herr Hitler, in the same way that we could refer to him in English as “Mr. Hitler.” The German phrase mein Herr is a polite term, which is also integrated in the phrase Meine Damen und Herren, which is translated literally into “my ladies and gentlemen.” However, the German word mein does not imply that “you are the lord of my life,” but rather, it is simply emphasizing the politeness of the phrase. Any German who receives a letter from the government will be addressed as Herr, but this does not imply that the government office believes the recipient to be a “lord.”

AltHype’s confusion is equivalent to a learner of English who heard the term “landlord” and thought this implied some great honor or aristocratic privilege, when in fact it only refers to an economic position of owning property and renting it out. In both cases, the term Herr and landlord both originally meant something much more special than they do today. Originally, only the aristocracy could be landlords, or Herren, or sirs. However, with the decline of serfdom in the 16th and 17th century, anyone who was middle class could be considered a “sir.”

If this sounds pedantic and patronizing, it is. However, such a response is warranted if 14 years of research have resulted in “linguistic scrutiny” as a means to deny the Holocaust, without any elementary knowledge in question. Not knowing what Herr means in German and opining about the term “liquidation” is like Destiny professing to know about Israel and not knowing where it is on the map. To finish this lesson, Volksgenosse roughly translates as “racial comrade” and Volksgemeinshaft as “racial community.”

The Quantization of Motives

AltHype claims that Germany did not wage a war of aggression against Poland. He attempts to defuse the argument that Hitler wanted Lebensraum by showing that the term in question does not appear very frequently in Hitler’s speeches. This would be equivalent to saying that Obama cannot desire “white demographic decline,” since he never uses the phrase in public speeches. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. In this case, Mein Kampf gives us the evidence we need, in addition to Hitler’s Zweites Buch. Both of these books were written before the Second World War, and are not forgeries.

In my quotation of Mein Kampf I will use the Murphy translation, which was authorized by the German government prior to the war:

“Vast spaces still lie uncultivated all over the surface of the globe. Those spaces are only waiting for the ploughshare. And it is quite certain that Nature did not set those territories apart as the exclusive pastures of any one nation or race to be held unutilized in reserve for the future. Such land awaits the people who have the strength to acquire it and the diligence to cultivate it. Nature knows no political frontiers. [..] Those who show the greatest courage and industry are the children nearest to her heart and they will be granted the sovereign right of existence. [..] Now it is unfortunately true that only too often the best nations [..] have decided, in their blind pacifism, to refrain from the acquisition of new territory [..] But at the same time nations of inferior quality succeed in getting hold of large spaces for colonization all over the globe. [..] Races which are culturally superior but less ruthless would be forced to restrict their increase, [..] while less civilized races could increase indefinitely, owing to the vast territories at their disposal. [..] In the end the instinct of self-preservation alone will triumph. Before its consuming fire this so-called humanitarianism, which connotes only a mixture of fatuous timidity and self-conceit, will melt away as under the March sunshine. Man has become great through perpetual struggle. In perpetual peace his greatness must decline.”²

When Hitler speaks of “nations of inferior quality” who “succeed in getting hold of large spaces,” who is he speaking of? He is not speaking of western European colonial nations, since he praises those in his Zweites Buch. Rather, he is speaking of two nations primarily: the nation of Poland and the nation of Russia. Between 1600 and 1914, the territory of German speaking lands had barely increased. However, in the same time period, the territory of Russia had more than doubled. Poland, which had not existed as a country since 1795, was resurrected by the German government in exchange for a promise of Polish volunteers for the war effort. Instead of fighting for Germany, the Poles, once established, fought against Germany and conquered German speaking areas.

Hitler spoke about living space in public speeches as well, such as the Berlin speech of January 30th, 1941. In this speech, he talks about the significance of the “population per square kilometer.” He placed such a significance on this statistics, that on his January 30th speech exactly two years earlier, he said the following:

"There are countries in the world where instead of 135 people to the square kilometre, as there are in Germany, there are only between 5 and 11, where vast stretches of fertile land lie fallow, where all imaginable minerals are available."³

If you search every Hitler speech for Kilometer, you will find that his anxiety over the overpopulation of Germany relates exactly to his desire, spelled out in Mein Kampf, to seize living space through strength, courage, ruthlessness, and a consuming fire.

January 30th was the day in 1933 when Hitler was first appointed chancellor, and so he chose this day to make some of his most important speeches. The speech made on January 30th, 1940 is predictably boring and repetitive in its exposition of the need for living space:

“Germany with its eighty million men possesses barely 600,000 square kilometers. This is the problem which must be solved, and it will be solved just as other social questions will be solved.”

There is no ambiguity. But for final emphasis, I will issue a fifth example from Mein Kampf:

The foreign policy of a People's [volkisch, racial] State must first of all bear in mind the duty of securing the existence of the race [..] this must be done by establishing a healthy and natural proportion between the number and growth of the population on the one hand and the extent and resources of the territory they inhabit, on the other. [..] Sooner or later, this lack of proportion must of necessity lead to the decline or even annihilation of the people concerned.⁴

For Hitler, the ratio or proportion of population per square kilometers was the first and foremost concern for all matters of foreign policy, including and especially his policy toward Poland and Russia. Hitler emphasizes that this was a matter of life and death, and hence, better to risk annihilation in a war than to face certain annihilation by a poverty of land. Had AltHype spent less time trying to “quantify” Hitler’s mention of Lebensraum, and more time simply reading the verifiable sources, this error would not have been made.

The Status of Slavs

AltHype asserts, based on certain Nazi racial classifications, that Slavs were Aryan, and therefore, Hitler did not intend to exterminate or enslave them. What AltHype fails to distinguish is between popular anthropology of the time, which was an internationally recognized “science,” and Hitler’s personal beliefs.

It is true that racial maps of Europe, produced in America, England, and in Germany all showed Slavs as belonging to the supposed Aryan race. However, these maps, which were not censored or prohibited in Germany, did not determine Nazi racial policy. The first laws which governed Nazi racial policy toward Slavs came in March 8th, 1940, the Polish Decrees, Polenerlasse.

Propaganda posters from the “Association for German Cultural Relations Abroad” read as follows:

“German! The Pole is never your comrade ! He stands below every German comrade on your farm or in your factory. As always, be fair as a German, but never forget that you are a member of the master race [Herrenvolkes].”

This attitude informed the text of the Polenerlasse:

The following special regulations apply to all workers of Polish ethnicity in the Greater German Reich:

[..]

4. All workers of Polish ethnicity must always wear the badges given to them visibly on the right side of the chest of every piece of clothing. The badge must be firmly sewn onto the garment.

[..]

6. Any social interaction with the German population, in particular visiting theaters, cinemas, dance venues, restaurants and churches together with the German population, is prohibited. Dancing and drinking alcohol are only permitted in the restaurants specially designated for Polish workers.

7. Anyone who has sexual intercourse with a German woman or a German man or otherwise approaches them immorally will be punished with death.

The attitude of German superiority to Poles and Russians is already spelled out in Mein Kampf: “it was very questionable if and how far the Slavs possessed the necessary capacity for constructive politics.”⁵ Hitler developed this prejudice against Slavs from a young age:

“When the Russo-Japanese War came [..] I then took the side of the Japanese in our discussions. I looked upon the defeat of the Russians as a blow to Austrian Slavism.”⁶

Hitler states, without any room for confusion, that Poles are inferior not because of their history or culture or language or religion, but specifically because of their racial type and their blood:

“Unfortunately, a policy towards Poland, whereby the East was to be Germanized, was demanded by many and was based on the same false reasoning. Here again it was believed that the Polish people could be Germanized by being compelled to use the German language. The result would have been fatal. A people of foreign race would have had to use the German language to express modes of thought that were foreign to the German, thus compromising by its own inferiority the dignity and nobility of our nation.”⁷

It was a consensus among the leading American, British, and German anthropologists of the 19th and early 20th century that Slavs were Aryan. These anthropologists were not censored in Germany, and were allowed to spread their maps and doctrines throughout German schools. Alfred Rosenberg, for example, held the opinion that Slavs were Aryan, and recommended that Germany take a conciliatory position toward Slavic populations. Unfortunately, despite this diversity of opinion among German academics and philosophy, the position of Hitler was clear, and this is ultimately what caused the unnecessary deaths of millions of Slavs. Arguments to the contrary cannot be made using the words of Hitler.

1. AltHype uses terms like “France,” “England,” and “socialism” as comparisons, to show that these were Hitler’s concerns, and not Lebensraum.

2. Pages 118-119, Mein Kampf, Murphy translation. All bold lettering added later for emphasis.

3. Page 24 of the transcription.

4. Page 552, Mein Kampf, Murphy translation.

5. Page 38, Mein Kampf, Murphy translation.

6. Page 139, Mein Kampf, Murphy translation.

7. Page 323, Mein Kampf, Murphy translation.