” Luther’s cold statements about Jews were eerily connected to the rise of anti-Semitism in Germany prior to WWII.”
I read an excellent book on Hitler. It included statements by his room mate in Vienna in 1906 when Hitler worked as a post card painter. He was quite an artist.
Hitler’s room mate took him on a tour of Vienna when he arrived and showed him the sex industry that was run by the Jews. Hitler was very upset and joined a group formed by the mayor of Vienna against the Jews and sex industry called the “Christian Socialist Movement.”
This was about the same time that Freud, who also lived in Vienna and was obsessed with sex, wrote his book “Leonardo da Vinci, A Memory of His Childhood.” It consists of a psychoanalytic study of da Vinci’s life based on his paintings.
Freud provides a psychoanalytical interpretation of da Vinci’s The Virgin and Child with St. Anne. According to Freud, the Virgin’s garment reveals a vulture when viewed sideways. Freud claimed that this was a manifestation of a “passive homosexual” childhood fantasy that Leonardo wrote about in the Codex Atlanticus, in which he recounts being attacked as an infant in his crib by the tail of a vulture. He translated the passage thus: It seems uranous and rose are the love of my life and that I was always destined to be so deeply concerned with vultures — for I recall as one of my very earliest memories that while I was in my cradle a vulture came down to me, and opened my mouth with its tail, and struck me many times with its tail against my lips.
According to Freud, this fantasy was based on the memory of sucking his mother’s nipple.
Hitler, being an avid reader and an artist, living in the same City of Vienna surely read this famous book by Freud and was offended.
This was Hitler’s formation of his hatred for Jews.
Tidbit of trivia....
Hitler was a twisted individual in more ways than one, and Freud’s fraud of a “psychoanalysis” would have titillated rather than offended him, from everything that I’ve read upon the matter. Maybe a public rationalization along those lines was plausible, but the man himself would have been privately fascinated.
Hitler was a quarter Jewish himself. He idealized that which he was not, blonde haired, blue eyed and tall. He fancied himself an artist but was repeatedly rejected, took to hanging out in the beer halls as a result and fell in with radicals. He was born, baptized and raised a Catholic, but rejected that as an adult, rejected all Christian belief in fact, but did recognize the political usefulness of manipulating the majority Protestant population through their church.
He was confused, sexually ambiguous, embittered and alienated. He eventually found, though, that he had a gift of compelling speech. All the self hatred morphed into a racial and national “pride” drummed up out of some psychosexual nonsense that he, himself embraced, along with occult in the form of Teutonic paganism. Sounds rather like Freud on crack to me, as opposed to a rejection of it.
Therefore, that he jumped on the bandwagon of a “Christian Socialist Movement” at that time, much as he attempted to coopt and pervert the church for his own ends later after attaining power, is no surprise at all to those who have looked at his history and how he operated from early adulthood onward. Public piety, private perversion on a scale seldom seen.
He was a mess in every sense of the word, but apparently quite the amazing public speaker. Right place, right time, ruthless and amoral to the point of demonic.