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Our Battle: Being One Man's Answer to "My Battle" by Adolf Hitler

Hendrik Villem van Loon

Collection:

Notable marginalia:

Apart from a signature inside the front cover ("S. K. Broche"?) and a shiny gold sticker from "The Musson Book Company LTD Publishers, Toronto," there is little in the way of markings in this faded book.

However, I will put here the provocative blurb printed directly beneath the title on this browning paper-bound cover:

Adolf Hiter, in the book which he called My Battle (Mein Kampf), set forth his plan of action. Encouraged by his success in Central Europe, the Führer now turns his eyes toward world domination. Already his propaganda agents are at work in this hemisphere. Hendrik Willem van Loon, in a brilliant counterattack, shows how people who are still free must take up the struggle against Hitler's growing power. Our Battle is a call to action--a ringing defense of democracy faced by the threat of fascism everywhere.

Librarian's note:

A provocative title like that might suggest equally provocative content. Not in this case.

You, like me, might have been intrigued to read this book, written by an American, imploring the country to interfere with Nazi Germany a year before WWII officially began, and even a month before Kristallnacht. Not knowing necessarily what was to come, how would you take down Nazism in the marketplace of ideas?

If we put our heads together, I'm certain we could come up with better answers than Von Loom manages here in 1938. Which is highly unfortunate, since this man obviously despised Hitler, who he describes on the first page as an open and avowed enemy of all democratic forms of government (3).

There are obvious reasons for his hatred: Van Loom (a Dutch-American historian and journalist) is deathly scared of the real possibility of the Axis powers defeating their rivals in Europe and setting their sights on the U.S. He claims late in the book that it's not invasion he's worried about, but rather propaganda that allows Nazi German to invade without firing a single shot (122).

In spite of that, he later wrote an alternate history novel (that I kick myself for not buying) illustrating his vision of the future without U.S. interference -- I'm assuming it involves the UK moving its government to Ottawa, Canada, as he incorrectly predicts in this non-fiction book.

(That book's title, by the way, is "Invasion, being the personal recollections of what happened to our own family and to some of our friends during the first forty-eight hours of that terrible incident in our history which is now known as the great invasion and how we escaped with our lives".)

But the reasons are also deeply personal: a couple times, he mentions all too briefly that some of his friends had been killed by the Third Reich, lest we forget the government's enthusiastic purging of enemies of the state long before war.

You can see why he'd be provoked into writing this book after reading in the news how Americans were cheering for Hitler while hissing at the New York Mayor during a meeting in honor of the late Christopher Columbus (written with no irony in 1938) (3).

Who in Hell Cares? he imagines people saying in reaction to this event. Well, I do! (4-5).

But while he offers a lot of fascinating observations, his prime argument boils down to a character assassination of Hitler (and a disturbingly lukewarm criticism of Mussolini): 'The Third Riech is bad because while Hitler has done a lot of amazing things for his country, he is a narcissist with mental health problems,' is how he thinks he can convince his readers why fascism needs to be stopped.

It's frustrating, not to mention embarrassing. But the book still proves to be a fascinating peak into the mindset of an American academic who knows in his soul that something sinister is in their midst. He's just not always good at pinning down what it is.

Some of my notes while reading (in chronological order):

1. Let me give myself a few words of warning. I must never allow myself to fall into the usual temptation and treat the German dictator as some sort of a painful joke. In one respect at least we had better follow his example, and take him quite as seriously as he takes himself. (7)


2. His predictions of the war were mostly incorrect: the British government did not relocate to Canada, and Russia did in fact join the war (he did admit there was always a chance of this happening). However, he did correctly predict that Germany would conduct air raids on Britain and that air power would be a major force.


3. In spite of his poor takedown of the Nazis, he does bring up philosophical questions regarding politics that we still ask ourselves today: how do you keep to the ideals of free speech, when there are those who utilize free speech with the aims of denying it to others? He admits he doesn't know the answer.


4. Autocracy was always the result of bad democracy (9).


5. With that last point in mind, he argues that democracy's strongest trait is a generous willingness to discuss and inquire and examine and probe until a reasonable answer shall have been found which will satisfy the reasonable majority of all citizens, but that democracy's need for conversation and compromise is touted as a weakness by autocratic regimes, who instead promise to not waste time and get things done, which he translates as meaning to go after these doubters and debaters and hang them from the nearest lamppost (14).


6. And yet, though he is against autocracies, he does seem to want to employ autocratic tactics to his own ends. For example, when describing the truly despicable politics employed by Britain and France after WWI that put Germany and Italy on track to the fascist states they became, he places much of the blame on U.S. President Woodrow Wilson for not taking full control of the situation. I'm not a particular fan of Wilson, but I would think even less of him if he'd done what van Loon would've wanted and forced/threaten Europe into settling their affairs the way America would want. Surely something like that would've had it's own consequences (not to mention that he overestimates the U.S.'s level of control over the situation).


7. Clemenceau [the Prime Minister of France in WWI] was an old man, kept alive solely by onion soup and hate. (24)


8. Will democracy's never learn that there are people who are as insensitive to any sort of appeal to either reason or common decency as the most destructive forces of nature....? Talk to them all you want, reason with them for half a year, appeal to their sense of mercy, and you will get no more reaction than I would have got six weeks ago if I had gone out on the porch of my house in Old Greenwich to stop the wall of water that engulfed the whole of the Connecticut Coast by making it listen to Dickens' Christmas Carol. (25-26)


9. Van Loom's stance on fascist Italy is... very weird. When compared with Hitler, he actually seems to admire Mussolini's rise to power, and appreciates that, also unlike Hitler, he wasn't at the time trying to "export" fascism. 'Italy,' he seems to say, 'is not our problem. That problem belongs to the Mediterranean countries.' 'In fact,' he seems to say, 'Italy seems better off fascist, and the only problem with their setup is that Mussolini is surrounded by so many yes-men that they won't be able to keep it up.' A strange opinion to hold, considering all the criticisms of autocracies fifty pages before. (56)


10. What's sometimes frustrating about reading historical works is that the author will offhandedly reference some contemporary event, confident their readers will know of it, but those of us in the 21st century might be lost in the dark. For example, Van Loom refers to a Nazi spy ring that had been uncovered in the U.S. The problem is that there were multiple Nazi spy ring cases -- possibly it was the Rumrich Spy Case, since the Duquesne Spy Ring was caught after the book's publication?


11. He claims that by 1938, Mein Kamp's only English translation was horribly done (he's fluent in German), and believes there were selective, very intentional edits made that gave the wrong impression of the book.


12. By 'leaving out a few words' any clever editor can turn the Ten commandments into a direct appeal for sin and violence. (60). (To be clear, I don't think he intended for it to be read as him making a direct parallel between Mein Kamp and the Ten Commandments)


13. It is exceedingly dangerous for the safety of all of us when a man who now has the whole of Europe at his mercy is not merely ignorant but knows an awful lot of things which are not so. (62)


14. It's at this point in the book that we receive this historian's medical diagnosis of Hitler: that he's encircled the whole world around his worldview because he has... "hysteria." This is not a colorful description. He believes he has the same phony medical hysteria that women were often diagnosed with in lieu of more specific mental health issues. The layers that can be read into this are worth a book in itself, but the bottom line is that this explanation is wildly unhelpful, lazy, and robs Hitler (or any Nazi) of their agency to make moral decisions.

    What makes it doubly egregious is him spending a good deal of the book also diagnosing Robespierre Maximilian, of French Revolution fame, with this same ailment and comparing the two men as hostile forces that wanted to be dictators because they were slighted in their youth. This oversimplification of evil is so wholly stupid, I want to barf (within in an otherwise fascinating book); though it becomes more obvious why he believes this when admitting he's a proponent of the Great Man Theory.



15. Peace treaties, ever since the beginning of written history, have as a rule been pretty bad. This is undoubtedly very regrettable, but to a certain degree it also seems unavoidable, for peace treaties are rarely included in an atmosphere of calm and serenity. (91)


16. He writes that, at first, the early Nazis villainized "capitalists" alongside the Jewish people, but for purely practical reasons, the hostility toward the capitalist classes was quickly dropped. It took money to run an election (93).


17. On page 94, Van Loom makes the unfortunate clarification that, unlike "the foreign press," he's not accusing Nazi German of physical violence against the Jewish people. He's speaking of metaphorical violence that's been done to them.


18. In Adolf Hitler they found a champion who told them everything they wanted to hear, for he throve on hatred as a baby thrives on milk. (95)


19. Adolf Hitler and his ambitious plans were no joke. On the contrary, he was the long expected messiah. And if, in order to follow him, his disciples must swallow a great many ideas that hardly appealed to them, very well, they would do the swallowing. (101)


20. [Hitler] had very little to recommend himself except that he endlessly preached the one gospel to which every German was most eager to listen, a gospel of hate and revenge, based upon the commandment, "thou shalt get even." (101)


21. While he makes it clear he's not aligned with Marxists, van Loon often points out that communists during this period were used as scapegoats and red herrings, both in Europe and the U.S. And accuses Britain and France of allowing Hitler's rise to power because the Nazi's were anti-communist (115).


22. He has an obvious distaste for the lifestyle of the average German under Nazism, writing that their workers were not allowed to strike or organize, but were forced to give up 20% of their earnings to provide for the less fortunate. He also complains that while the workers get two weeks holiday a year with pay, they're only allowed to listen and watch German "aryan" art, which leaves him very little choice. Why have the German people allowed this?: Hitler has given his adopted fellow countryman a new religion, a new illusion; he has given them a renewed faith in the destiny of their own race (118).


23. On page 122-3 there is a reference to a holocaust known as the Great Purge when Hitler in June 30th 1934, ordered the extermination of over a thousand of his former friends and associates.


24. His final sentiments on the U.S. election system feel timeless, though wrapped in a overly sentimental patriotism best demonstrated in the book's last line: May the spirit of Washington, Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln guide our steps and enlighten us in our choice, for upon our decision rests the fate of the world to come. (139)


25. Actually, the final final last line is For further details see your daily newspapers! (139)