We all have skeletons in our closet that we do not want anybody to know about. It is one thing to leave them out in a biography, and it is another to broach them and lie about it. Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf, ‘In the years 1909-10 I had so far improved my, position that I no longer had to earn my daily bread as a manual labourer. I was now working independently as draughtsman, and painter in water colours.’[Page 35] He wrote that he was a draughtsman to improve his image as having knowledge of technical drawing, but according those who knew him this was complete fabrication without an iota of truth. He was just a common painter who could not even draw from nature, but copy from older work of others. Yet, he wrote that instead of just keeping his secret as small time tracer.

Writing about his mortal enemies – the Jews, he wrote, ‘I do not remember even having heard the word at home during my father's lifetime.’ He went further to say that, ‘At the Realschule I knew one Jewish boy.... Beyond that my companions and myself formed no particular opinions in regard to him.... In the course of centuries the Jews who lived there had become Europeanized in external appearance and were so much like other human beings that I even looked upon them as Germans.’ By the accounts of his boyhood friend, August Kubizek, this is completely false. In his book ‘The Young Hitler I Knew’ he wrote, ‘his anti-Semitism was already pronounced..... Hitler was already a confirmed anti-Semitic when he went to Vienna. And although his experiences in Vienna might have deepened this feeling, they certainly did not give birth to it.’ This is a typical example of my description of Mein Kampf being full of lies. Of course, Mr Kwarteng will read that and not cross check anything and start making hullabaloo about the nonsense he has read.

Again, according to Hitler’s own account, that is, if I have to believe his word for it, before he became anti Semitic he buried himself in books. It wasn’t by experience that he came to hate the Jews, but through the evil books he stuffed his head. So if Mr Kwarteng had really read Mein Kampf he would have realised how dangerous some books can be. Yet, Mr Kwarteng will not stop requesting me to read the silly and childish books he devours prodigiously. My preoccupation is not to prove the lies of Hitler, but mainly to counter the shoddiness of Mr Kwarteng’s thinking.

Writing in his piece he said, ‘The question is: Why did Hitler’s National Socialism make room for private property but, rather strangely, reject capitalism? How do we account for the source of this glaring contradiction?’ With Mr Kwarteng’s shallow thoughts and his inability to compare and contrast he thinks there is contradiction. There is nothing like contradiction, it is called fascism, which was pioneered by Mussolini. If he had read any good book on Hitler and Nazi Germany he wouldn’t have missed that. Hitler first copied Mussolini’s trajectory to power, which failed in his famous Beer Hall Putsch. There is nothing like biographical nature in Mein Kampf, as a result, one of the most important events in his life was not even discussed in the book. If you want his personal account of that fiasco, you will not get it in that book; So much for honesty.

Mr Kwarteng further exhibited his stupidity by writing, ‘Nazi Germany also applied eugenics, human experiment, forced starvation to Namibia’s Namaqua and Hereros way before they appeared in Nazi Germany’. Nazification of Germany did not start until Adolf Hitler came to power in January 1933, and lasted for 12 years 4 months. The concentration camp of German Namibia and all the rubbish he wrote about the Hereros and the Nama people happened between 1904 and 1907. Get your facts right Mr Kwarteng before you put any rubbish on ghanaweb and other websites. Don’t make a fool of yourself and disgrace Ghanaians if you are really a scholar.

Writing again, he said, ‘But Hitler did not invent Nazism. Neither is South Africa’s Apartheid nor America’s Jim Crow substantially different from Nazism. They share many things in common.’ That is classic Chomskyite stupidity. If Hitler did not invent Nazism who did? When he joined the group it was only six people and he became the seventh member. The name of the party then was: The German Workers Party. It was later on that Hitler suggested National Socialist German Workers Party (NSDAP), which was eventually nicked named The Nazi Party. Now, how can anyone compared Jim Crow laws in the Deep American South to what happened in Nazi Germany? Did the blacks in the South end up in gas chambers and cremation ovens, that is to say, did the Jim Crow laws systematically exterminate their victims? Were eugenics performed on them, and Mr Kwarteng shouldn’t stupidly cite me the Tuskegee syphilis experiment, which after the abominable act came to light the survivors and their related families and descendants who suffered were compensated to the tune of $9 million at the time. It is very difficult to comprehend why Mr Kwarteng spends time to defend such an evil system that he, as a black man, will not be counted as a human being. I can tell you why he is engaged in this self immolation, because he is against capitalism.

Somewhere in page 7 of Mr Kwarteng’s article he wrote about ‘The Consequences of Peace’ being proven right. I have actually discussed this in detail, but it is just to emphasise here again that it is a silly piece of work, which, to me, rewards aggression. And, of course, it shows how short a memory Keynes had regarding the one imposed on Russia by the Germans after they redrew from WWI. In March 3, 1918 at Brest-Litovsk the Russians signed away to the Germans the Baltic States, Finland, Poland, the East Anatolia provinces, and the districts of Erdehan, Kars and Batum. In addition, the Russians were obliged to pay indemnity of six billion Marks to the Germans. This was described by one British historian – as a humiliation without precedent or equal in history. It is normal for the vanquished to be resentful to any terms of the peace, and Hitler was no exception. Of course, he was not the only one; almost all the leaders of the German military caste, especially Erich Ludendorff, who participated in the meeting leading to Brest-Litovsk, categorically said the ‘November criminals’, which is what they described the leaders who signed the armistice at Compiègne, were stupid to let them live. For when they get to power he will see them dangle on a rope. This bitterness is what led to the WWII, because of the spinelessness of the Western leaders.

Hitler himself alluded in Mein Kampf the barbarity of the treaty the Germans imposed on Russia by comparing it to what was imposed on them in Versailles with the aim of showing how bad Versailles was. He wrote, ‘For after the discussion which followed my first lecture I quickly ascertained that in reality people knew nothing about the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk and that able party propaganda had succeeded in presenting that Treaty as one of the most scandalous acts of violence in the history of the world. As a result of the persistency with which this falsehood was repeated again and again before the masses of the people, millions of Germans saw in the Treaty of Versailles a just castigation for the crime we had committed at Brest-Litovsk. Thus they considered all opposition to Versailles as unjust and in many cases there was an honest moral dislike to such a proceeding.’[Page 384] The Germans knew the Treaty was justified, but for a hothead like Hitler it was an insult, because he felt Germany did not lose the war. And he set out with all the crudity and barbarity to right the wrongs of history. Obviously, after more than 90 years a numskull like Mr Kwarteng believes the nonsense. Thank you.
Philip Kobina Baidoo Jnr
London
baidoo_philip@yahoo.co.uk