Page 43 - The Chief Culprit

20 y e Chief Culprit

Stalin was not the only leader—there was a whole crowd of leaders in the Kremlin. Not all
of them understood the meaning of Hitler’s creation. Comrade Stalin, however, immediately
grasped, weighed, and evaluated everything. After having strangled his competition, Stalin
paid his due to the author of Mein Kampf.
e number of copies printed in Russian at that time is unknown to me. One thing
is clear: the circulation was minimal. For those few copies of the precious book, Stalin paid
generously. How much did he pay? Stalin gave Hitler power over Germany. “Without Stalin,
there would have been no Hitler, there would have been no Gestapo”— so said Trotsky in
October 1936 as he evaluated Stalin’s aid to Hitler. Without Stalin’s help, Hitler could not
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have come to power. Yet even such an incredible fee seemed too little to the generous Stalin.
On August 23, 1939, he presented Hitler with Poland, and the rest of Europe. If Stalin had
not appreciated Mein Kampf, the political career of Adolf Hitler would have ended in 1933
with a crushing defeat in the elections.
Let us clarify the situation in the mid-1920s when Hitler’s book first came to light.
Stalin sat in the Kremlin; Adolf Hitler sat in the Munich brewery Hoffbrauhaus. Stalin was
one of the leaders of the Soviet Union, he was first among equals. But already many people
had experienced the stranglehold of Stalin’s grasping hands.
Who was Hitler in 1925? He was a failed artist, a wounded soldier returned from the
front. Hitler joined a small proletarian party, which marched under the slogan of Gottfried
Feder, calling for world revolution with the words “Proletariat of all nations, unite!” is
program was adopted by Hitler as the foundation for a movement that he soon came to lead.
Hitler’s party set before itself Communist goals: banning private ownership of land, putting
workers in control of administration in factories, and nationalizing industry.
On November 8, 1923, a socialist revolution hit Germany. e revolution was orga-
nized by the Comintern, and carefully directed behind the scenes by Soviet intelligence offi-
cers and envoys from Moscow. Although the revolution failed, Hitler’s socialist workers’ party
showed itself as a unified, though small, formation of German workers. Hitler personally led
his comrades into police fire. Some of his followers perished; Hitler himself was wounded
and landed in jail.
at is where he fell into heresy. Hitler wrote a book, in which he uttered those famous
words about lands in the east. Lenin and Trotsky decided that for the sake of the happiness
of people everywhere they needed to sacrifice the people of their own country, whereas Hitler
decided that the opposite had to be done: for the sake of the happiness of his people, he
was willing to sacrifice people of other nations. For example, conquer lands to the east for
Germany, regardless of the consequences for the people inhabiting those lands.
Hitlerism could have been eliminated from the moment of its conception. Sending an
idealistic murderer to Munich would not have been a difficult feat for Stalin. Nobody would
have paid any attention to one socialist breaking the skull of another, a very common occur-
rence. How many people did Stalin eradicate? Why did he not touch Hitler? He could have
easily broken Hitler’s neck and burned down his brewery with all his followers inside. Stalin
could also have simply not paid any attention to Hitler, and without Stalin’s help, Hitlerism
would have never blossomed. It would not have yielded bloody fruit. But Stalin chose a third
path: multi-faceted aid to Hitler. Stalin paved the way for Hitler to come to power. Hitler’s
dreams about lands in the east would have remained the pipe-dreams of a Munich dreamer,
if not for Stalin’s gigantic help.