Look to Germany – Heart of Europe
£60.00
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Description
“Look to Germany” was written by American Stanley McClatchie in 1936 and published in Germany by Adolf Hitler’s photographer, Heinrich Hoffmann in 1937. The youthful McClatchie, a member of a wealthy and well-known southern California family, had lived for some years in Germany prior to the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (Nazi Party) ascent to power following victory in the Reichstag elections of January 1933. Clearly, McClatchie was impressed by the consolidation of political power that Hitler had engineered, but he was also very impressed by the industrial, technical and social revolution that had taken place in Germany under the Nazis, which had altered every aspect of the land and people he thought he knew.
By any measure, the first four years of National Socialist government in Germany had been an overwhelming success. It was difficult for Nazis, as well as those who were not Nazis, to avoid boasting about their near-miraculous recovery from the economic and social hell imposed upon their country in the wake of its military defeat in World War I. The recovery in Allied countries like Britain and France – even in America – lagged far behind the German rate of recovery. McClatchie wrote Look to Germany in an effort to explain how strongly he felt about the changes he witnessed in Germany under National Socialism.
In spite of the achievements of the Nazis who were so popular at home in Germany, their economic, social and military competitors around the world could find nothing good to say about them or their country. Quite the contrary, the press in the British Empire, France and in America assumed an entirely anti-German stance. Tourism to Germany and German manufactured goods were boycotted and embargoes were placed on strategic goods and raw materials needed for manufacturing in Germany.
The disastrous effects of the boycotts and embargoes on the German economy convinced Hitler to redouble scientific research efforts in the hope of making Germany far less dependent on imported raw materials and foreign export markets. The research yielded amazing results in areas like synthetic gasoline and rubber from coal, television, pharmaceuticals, electronics, chemicals, etc. German-bashing in England, France and America continued unabated, as millions of people in the Soviet Union were being killed in Stalin’s political purges. Somehow, impressed foreigners and the western media continued to hail a “communist victory” over Soviet social and economic ills in almost religious terms, while condemning Hitler and the Nazis.
By the autumn of 1939 the powerful armies of Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler had overrun and divided the country of Poland, three-fifths of it going to the Soviet Union and two-fifths to Germany. Britain and France immediately declared war on Germany (but oddly, they did not declare war on the Soviet Union) and World War II had begun.
Less than six years later the war was over, tens-of-millions of people had been killed and Hitler had shot himself in his bunker beneath the streets of central Berlin. Germany was in ruins and for the second time in less than 30 years her industry, research facilities, maritime fleet, foreign holdings and even her population were disbursed among the victors as war reparations.
Stanley McClatchie knew and wrote that Look to Germany would be seen as Nazi propaganda by many, and in the narrowest sense of the word it certainly was. When World War II began American owners of the English language edition of Look to Germany discarded the book in an effort to avoid the appearance of being Nazi sympathizers and thus, unpatriotic. After the war all editions of the book were considered so dangerous by the victorious Allies that de-Nazification commissions sought them out for destruction. Seventy-five years after it was written Look to Germany is, like Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf, still considered “too dangerous” to be sold or read in Germany and other European Union (EU) countries.
Look to Germany is in fact absolutely indispensable to any genuine understanding of the origins of World War II in Europe. No intelligent person would undertake an examination of the origins of the American Revolution without reading everything in print that could shed light on either British or American points of view. The “British War Blue Book” and the “French Yellow Book” are regularly cited references by those who attempt to explain prewar European events although both would qualify as propaganda in exactly the same sense that Look to Germany would. Look to Germany, is virtually never cited as a research source despite its obvious historical value. This may indicate the superiority of Allied propaganda before and after World War II, but it is much more likely that it indicates that nearly all copies of Look to Germany were destroyed by the Allies. It became obscure and generally unavailable to researchers. The American Federal Bureau of Investigation spent years chasing the hapless author McClatchie, throughout Mexico and Central America.
Original examples of this book are very scarce and if they can be located they are extremely expensive, easily fetching prices in the hundreds of dollars. While it is not our position that every American library must have a copy of Look to Germany, publication of this replica of the rare original English language edition will assure that those who wish to read it will be able to obtain a high quality copy at a reasonable price.
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