The first ever biography of Hitler's Nemesis, the 'unknown' Moeller van den Bruck
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A prolific writer, historian, critic, translator and publisher, Arthur Moeller van den Bruck was the quintessential Bohemian fin-de-siecle artist.
In the turbulent years which followed the end of World War I, he became politically active and was soon considered to be the leader of the young conservative revolutionaries in Weimar Germany.|Van den Bruck expressed his ideas for a German authoritarian state in his major work "Das Dritte Reich" (The Third Reich), first published in 1923. Adolf Hitler, the charismatic leader of the then litle-known National Socialist German Workers' Party, whom van den Bruck had met the same year, was profoundly influenced by these ideas and regarded himself as the activist who could implement them. When Hitler and the Nazis swept to power in 1933, van den Bruck realized Hitler had become the personification of the violent dynamism recommended in "Das Dritte Reich" and he foresaw the horrors to come. Van den Bruck saw no way out other than suicide.
In this biography, the author offers an insight into the life of van den Bruck and of the political and artistic whirlpools of Weimar Germany in which he lived.
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"Brilliantly tantalizing, puzzling and revealing, yet dangerous." ---Amazon.com
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Foreign rights sold to France, Poland, Italy, the Netherlands and Japan.
Historical Notes: Hitler's theft of the Third Reich
As published in The Independent (London), Mar 29, 1999 by Stan Lauryssens
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A PRE-WAR German school text advertises Hitler's Mein Kampf as "a classic masterpiece" and "the new Bible of the People". Booksellers were only allowed to deal in new copies since the literary work of the Führer could not be described as "second-hand".
Already in 1925, the literary agency of Curtis Brown in London, with offices in Berlin, entered into copyright negotiations. Hitler's text - 560 pages of close print - was set up in type and printed in four working days. The translator worked night and day during that period, sending proofs back and forth in batches by taxi. The English edition, rendered as My Struggle, included the unabridged text of the Nazi Party programme. Copies of My Struggle (as well as of Karl Marx's Das Kapital) were among the books officially recommended as gifts to British troops at the Second World War front.
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In 1974, in a small apartment in Munich, I interviewed Otto Strasser who by then was the last surviving member of the original band of Nazi Party leaders. When Hitler became German Chancellor, Otto Strasser fled the country and escaped into exile. Under an assumed name he first lived in Prague, then in Switzerland and Canada where he became an informant to the Intelligence Service. Goebbels proclaimed that Strasser was "Hitler's enemy No 1". Strasser alleged that Hitler killed his brother, and stole the "revolutionary idea equal to Das Kapital and On the Origin of Species from under the nose of one of his best friends: Arthur Moeller van den Bruck. According to Strasser, without Hitler, Moeller van den
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Bruck would have became a household name, on a par with Marx and Charles Darwin. But Moeller van den Bruck took his life on the day he realised that Hitler was betraying his ideals.
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Arthur Moeller van den Bruck was an enigmatic figure. As a young poet in Berlin and a quintessential Bohemian fin-de-siecle artist in Paris, he befriended Munch, Strindberg and Max Beckmann; he translated Thomas de Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium-eater, Daniel Defoe's Moll Flanders, E.A. Poe and Guy de Maupassant into German. Then the Great War came. Against the advice of his doctors Moeller van den Bruck, who had entered a private clinic to cure his alcoholic hallucinations and nervous breakdowns, enlisted as a war volunteer and was sent to the Eastern Front. Immediately he collapsed. To relieve his distress and mental pain, he was administered large quantities of opium. Trying to cope with life in post-war Berlin, he set out to write his magnum opus in praise of a Thousand Year Reich. On 24 August 1923 that book, entitled The Third Reich was published by Ring-Verlag in Berlin with a first printing of 20,000 copies. But like his literary precursors Nietzsche, Guy de Maupassant and E.A. Poe befor e him, Moeller van den Bruck succumbed to the horrors of syphilis and was admitted to a mental asylum, where he took his own life. He was laid to rest in the Parkfriedhof Lichterfelde cemetery in Berlin, among a long row of ordinary graves. None of the Berlin newspapers published the customary obituary.
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Otto Strasser was adamant that Hitler borrowed the title of Moeller van den Bruck's book for his own use and copied his ideas in Mein Kampf, written in 1924, a year after The Third Reich was published. He went on to claim that up to 1930 The Third Reich was widely read and discussed in Germany, much more so than Mein Kampf, and that in reality The Third Reich, not Mein Kampf, was the original Bible of Nazi ideology.
Apparently this got on Hitler's nerves. Storm Troopers stepped in, raided Moeller van den Bruck's home and plundered his library. His private papers and all of his letters and manuscripts were confiscated and stored in the Nazi Archive. With The Third Reich out of the way, Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf was promoted as the highest form of literary art.
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Hitler Used Rothschild Banker’s Typewriter
Sometimes the symbolic details speak volumes.
Emil Georg von Stauss, the president of Germany’s largest bank, the Deutsche Bank, lent Hitler a portable Remington so he could write his infamous anti-Jewish banker manifesto “Mein Kampf.”
Von Stauss, a principal Nazi Party fundraiser, also was a longtime business associate of the Rothschilds.
Hitler dictated “Mein Kampf” to typists Rudolf Hess and Emil Maurice during his cushy eight-months stay at Landsberg Prison in April-December 1924. (His five-year sentence was commuted. He had a two-room suite with a view and was allowed to receive gifts and visitors.)
Von Stauss was part of a “Hitler support group” consisting of wealthy Illuminati. Helene Bechstein, the wife of the piano manufacturer pretended to be Hitler’s adopted mother and smuggled out sections of the manuscript. She took care of all Hitler’s expenses and hoped he would marry her daughter Lotte. Franz Thyssen, the chairman of United Steelworks sent Hitler a birthday gift of 100,000 gold marks.
This account is taken from Rudolf Hess’ letters by Belgian author Stan Lauryssens, (”The Man Who Invented the Third Reich” 1999, pp.130-135.)
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