The Hitler Legacy

More than thirty years after his first investigation of the Nazi underground Peter Levenda has returned again and again to his quest for the truth about the true character of the Nazi cult and the people and political movements it has influenced in the decades since the end of World War II. The wide sweep of this investigation moves from a Ku Klux Klan headquarters in Reading, Pennsylvania to the New York City office of the Palestine Liberation Organization; from the apartment of a notorious neo-Nazi leader to an Islamic boarding school—headquarters of the man who ordered the Bali Bombings. When Levenda uncovered the existence of a Nazi underworld in Asia, the nexus of religion, politics, terrorism and occult beliefs was revealed to be the real domain of the threat to global security. Meticulously researched—from both archival material and declassified intelligence agency files, to personal interviews and investigations undertaken in Asia, Europe and Latin America—The Hitler Legacy is the story of how the mistakes of the 20th century have come home to roost in the 21st. This book will challenge the conventional thinking about such subjects as the Muslim Brotherhood and Islamist terrorism and even about the alleged death of one of history's most infamous killers—Adolf Hitler.

The author shares 40 years of soul searching in the aftermath of Germany's total defeat and destruction.

More than a half-century after Adolf Hitler committed suicide in a Berlin bunker, the dictator’s legacy and influence lives on, precisely as he predicted before putting the gun to his head. In the spring of 1945, as it became increasingly clear that the Nazi cause was lost, Hitler dictated his final political testament to his secretary: “Out of my personal commitment the seed will grow again one day, one way or another, for a radiant rebirth of the National Socialist movement in a truly united nation.” The next day, Hitler ended the Nazi regime by committing suicide. Respected author and publisher Peter Wyden, who himself escaped the Nazis, has returned to Germany many times over the years and, to his dismay, he has found evidence that Hitler’s last testament was startlingly accurate. Though the Nazi cause had been exposed and vilified worldwide, it is still clandestinely cherished by many. In the process of documenting manifestations of Hitler’s far-reaching influence, which he termed the “Hitler virus,” Wyden discovered that its carriers were not merely to be found among the older generation but an alarming number of outbreaks of the virus are among the young adults, who find in Hitler a moral and spiritual guide, aided and abetted by a new breed of right-wing academics who make the rewriting of history their mission and a new generation of politicians whose agendas are frighteningly close to those of young Hitler. In these often chilling pages, Wyden recounts the results of his research and points out that the Hitler virus is, indeed, still a cause for concern worldwide.

Hitler's Legacy is the first comprehensive look at the Nazi problem in Germany from 1945 until today. The work stresses the major personnel controversies that arose from the reappearance of Nazis in key positions and the payment of generous pensions to Third Reich officials by West German governments. The first comprehensive summary of Germany's own war-crime trials held since 1945, it also provides an overview of the allied postwar war crime trials at Nuremberg and elsewhere. Two case studies highlight the post-Nazi milieu of 1950s West Germany: Theodor Oberlaender and Hans Globke. Both men played significant roles in the Nazi regime and became more prominent in Adenauer's 1950s West German government.

A biography reassessing the man whose name became a synonym for appeasement: “An important read for anyone with an interest in the prelude to World War II.” —The NYMAS Review Neville Chamberlain has gone down in history as the architect of appeasement, the prime minister who by sacrificing Czechoslovakia at Munich in September 1938 put Britain on an inevitable path to war. In this radical new appraisal of one of the most vilified politicians of the twentieth century, historian Nicholas Milton claims that by placating Hitler, Chamberlain not only reflected public opinion but also embraced the zeitgeist of the time. Chamberlain also bought Britain vital time to rearm when Hitler’s military machine was at its zenith. It is with the hindsight of history that we understand Chamberlain’s failure to ultimately prevent a war from happening. Yet by placing him within the context of his time, this fascinating new history provides a unique perspective into the lives and mindset of the people of Britain during the lead up to the Second World War. Never before have Chamberlain’s letters been accessed to tell the story of his life and work. They shed new light on his complex character and enable us to consider Chamberlain the man, not just the statesman. His role as a pioneer of conservation is revealed, alongside his work in improving midwifery and championing the introduction of widows’ pensions. Neville Chamberlain’s Legacy is a reminder that there is often more to political figures than many a quick judgment allows.

A study of Hitler's antisemitic, apocalyptic worldview, how it was translated into Nazi ideology and the implementation of the destruction of European Jewry, and how it has been adopted and adapted in the postwar period by the Soviet Union and Arab and Muslim countries. Chs. 1-8 (p. 12-173) deal with Hitler and Nazism. States that Hitler always spoke of the destruction of Jewry in tones of apocalyptic fervor. It was the fusion of a modern, totalitarian political praxis with a gnostic-racist Manichean ideology of war against the forces of Darkness that provided the radical novelty in Hitler's movement. He used the tsarist Russian idea of an international Jewish conspiracy as his inspiration for a radical restructuring of the modern political world. The Soviet, Arab and Islamic antisemitism described in chs. 9-12 (p. 174-255) are part of a multi-layered continuum of blood-curdling rhetoric which postulates the existence of an international, shadowy occult conspiracy with its Jewish political center in Israel. This crusade goes today under the name of "anti-Zionism."

Whiteman, who escaped from Nazi-occupied Austria with her family, is now a clinical psychologist in New York. Her impassioned, riveting study of the Jews who managed to leave Germany and Austria before Hitler implemented mass executions and death camps is based partly on interviews with 190 escapees. She tells the incredible story of the Kindertransport operation, which took 10,000 Jewish children from Nazi-occupied countries to England by train and ferry. Adolf Eichmann, then an emigration official, disdainfully approved this mass exodus. We learn of the formidable barriers escapees faced in getting out, of horrid or supportive foster homes, of the trauma and pain of being forcibly uprooted. Many escapees endured years of poverty before re-establihsing themselves. Whiteman rejects Hannah Arendt's thesis that German Jews' cultural assimilation led to their political blindness in a "fool's paradise." This is a distinctive contribution to Holocaust literature.