Hitler

by Joachim C. Fest

  Now that he was attracting attention, women began to take an interest in him. Most of them were aging ladies who sensed problems behind the inhibitions and complexes of the magnetic young orator, tensions that knowledgeable ministrations could release. Hitler himself later commented on the jealousies among those women who thronged so eagerly and maternally around him. He knew one, he remarked, “whose voice grew hoarse from agitation whenever I exchanged so much as a few words with another woman.” One of them, Carola Hoffmann, widow of a secondary-school teacher, who lived in the Munich suburb of Solln, made a sort of home for him and earned herself the title of “Hitler-Mutti”—Hitler’s Mom. Frau Bruckmann, wife of the publisher of Houston Stewart Chamberlain and a lady descended from an ancient noble line, also took him under her wing. So did the wife of Bechstein, the piano manufacturer. “I wished he were my son,” she said, and later, in order to be allowed to visit him in prison, she alleged that she was his adoptive mother. All of them taken together, their houses, their parties, widened the area around him and helped to make his name known.

  Within the party, on the other hand, he continued to remain within a circle comprising middle-class philistines and semicriminal bullies who answered his need for aggression and physical violence. Among his rare close friends were Emil Maurice, a typical barroom and meeting-hall brawler, and Christian Weber, a hulking, paunchy former horse dealer who had worked as a bouncer in a notorious taproom and regularly carried a riding whip, as Hitler did. Ulrich Graf, a butcher’s apprentice, also belonged to his immediate following, which served as a kind of bodyguard. So also did Max Amann, Hitler’s former sergeant, a blunt, capable businessman, who became business manager for the party and the party’s publishing house. Noisy and sedulously attentive, these men surrounded Hitler all the time. Evenings after meetings the troop of them would drop in at the Osteria Bavaria or the Bratwurstglöckl near the Frauenkirche, or talk for hours over coffee and cake at the Cafe Heck on Galeriestrasse, where a table was permanently reserved for Hitler in the dusky back of the room, from which he could watch what went on in the restaurant without being observed himself. He was already beginning to find solitude painful; he constantly needed people around him—audience, guards, servants, drivers, but also entertainers, art lovers and storytellers like the photographer Heinrich Hoffmann or Ernst Hanfstaengl. These were the people who gave to his “court” its special coloration compounded of “the bohemian world and the condottiere style.” He was not averse to having himself referred to as the “King of Munich.” It would be the small hours of the morning before he would return to his furnished room on Thierschstrasse.

  The dominant figure in the entourage that formed so early around Hitler was young Hermann Esser. He had done some newspaper work and been a press secretary for the Reichswehr District Headquarters. Aside from Hitler, he was the only person in the party at that time with a talent for demagogy. He was “a noisemaker who is almost better at that business than Hitler… a demon speechmaker, though from a lower circle of hell.” He was intelligent, cunning, with a knack for vivid and popular phrases. As a yellow journalist he could invent endless stories about Jews and profiteers. The decent petty bourgeois members of the party were soon objecting to the “swineherd tone” of his publicity campaigns. But he clung to his simple-minded radicalism; while still a schoolboy in Kempten, he had demanded that the soldiers’ soviet there “string up” a number of citizens. Along with Dietrich Eckart, he was one of the earliest and most zealous authors of the Hitler myth. Hitler himself at times seemed worried about Esser; possibly Esser’s intellectual gangsterism rubbed him the wrong way. If the sources are accurate, he repeatedly declared that he knew Esser was “a scoundrel” and was keeping him only as long as he needed him.

  In a good many respects Esser resembled Julius Streicher, the Nuremberg schoolmaster, who was making a reputation as the spokesman for a scurrilous kind of pornographic anti-Semitism. Streicher seemed obsessed by wild fantasies of ritual murders, Jewish lust, world conspiracy, miscegenation, and lascivious black-haired devils panting after the innocent flesh of Aryan women. It is true that Streicher was more stupid and limited than Esser, but locally he could rival even Hitler, whom he had at first violently opposed.

  Hitler, on the other hand, went to considerable trouble to win over Streicher. He wanted, of course, to make use of Streicher’s popularity for his own ends. But he probably also felt a common bond with the man, for did they not share the same complexes and obsessions? Up to the last, Hitler remained loyal to Julius Streicher, despite the revulsion the man aroused. During the war he once remarked that Dietrich Eckart had called Streicher a fool, but that he himself could not share the objections to Streicher’s paper, Der Stürmer. Actually, he said, “Streicher idealized the Jews.”21

  Cohorts such as these gave the party a narrow character, in spite of all its mass activities, and locked it within a shallow and philistine sphere. By contrast, Air Captain Hermann Göring, the last commander of the legendary Richthofen fighter squadron, gave a gentlemanly tone to Hitler’s entourage. A sturdy, jovial man with a booming voice, he was free of those twisted psychopathic traits that characterized the average member of Hitler’s following. Göring had joined the party because it promised to satisfy his need for action and comradeship, not, as he stressed, because of the “ideological junk.” He was traveled, widely connected, and, when he appeared with his attractive Swedish wife, he seemed to awaken the astonished party members to the fact that human beings also existed outside of Bavaria.

  Göring shared certain larcenous tendencies with Max Erwin von Scheubner-Richter, an adventurer with a checkered past and a knack for lucrative undercover political deals. Especially in the early years Hitler owed to Scheubner-Richter’s talent for raising funds much of the financial basis for his activities. According to a note in an official file, Scheubner-Richter succeeded in digging up “enormous sums of money.” He hovered in the background, surrounded by mystery; but at the same time he had vast social assurance, was a great talker, and maintained connections with many industrialists, with the House of Wittelsbach, with Grand Duke Kyrill, and with high prelates. His influence on Hitler was considerable; he was the only one of those killed at the Feldherrnhalle on November 9, 1923, whom Hitler held to be irreplaceable.

  Scheubner-Richter was another of the many Baltic Germans who, together with a group of radical rightist Russian emigrants, played a large part in the early history of the NSDAP. Later, Hitler jokingly remarked that the Völkische Beobachter in those years should have been subheaded “Baltic Edition.” Alfred Rosenberg had originally met Scheubner-Richter in Riga. At that time Rosenberg was an unpolitical student deeply concerned with Schopenhauer, Richard Wagner, architectural matters and the philosophical doctrines of India. It took the Russian Revolution to shape his ideology, a mixture of anti-Bolshevist and anti-Semitic elements in about equal proportions. The picture of the horrors of Judaism and Bolshevism that Hitler painted derived partly from Rosenberg, even down to its metaphors, and Rosenberg was always considered the party’s expert on Russia. Generally speaking, however, too much has been made of his being “chief ideologist of the NSDAP.” His principal contribution was the thesis that Communism and world Judaism were identical. He may also have led Hitler to abandon his initial demand for a return of the German colonies and to look instead to the expanses of Russia for Lebensraum. But then their ways parted. For Hitler remained a pragmatist, for whom ideology was only a tool. Rosenberg, on the other hand, was a monomaniac who held these doctrines with almost religious fervor and continued to build them into intellectual systems of majestic absurdity.

  Within a year after proclamation of the program the party could look back upon some impressive success. It had held more than forty meetings in Munich and almost as many again in the surrounding countryside. Local party groups had been founded in Starnberg, Rosenheim, Landshut, Pforzheim and Stuttgart. The membership had multiplied more than tenfold. What an impression this made on the na
tionalist-racist movement as a whole is evident from a letter written by a “Brother Dietrich” of the Munich Order of Teutons to a likeminded friend in Kiel in February, 1921. “Show me a place,” he wrote, “in which your party has held 45 mass meetings in the course of a year. The Munich Local Group now counts more than 2,500 members and some 45,000 followers. Can any of your local groups boast of nearly as many?” He added that he had corresponded with brothers of the order in Cologne, Wilhelmshaven, and Bremen, and “all took the view… that the Hitler party is the party of the future.”

  This growth took place against the backdrop of the Versailles Treaty, whose provisions came into force step by step, each new step striking the Germans as a fresh insult. Along with this came the wild inflation and growing economic distress. In January, 1921, an Allied reparations conference decided to exact a total of 216 billion gold marks from Germany, to be paid over a period of forty-two years. During that period Germany would also be required to turn over to the Allies 12 per cent of her exports. In Munich a crowd of 20,000 assembled on the Odeonsplatz for a protest demonstration, under the sponsorship of the patriotic associations, the Free Corps and the NSDAP. When the organizers refused to let Hitler speak, he promptly announced a mass demonstration of his own for the following night. To the cautious-minded Drexler and Feder this seemed almost insane. But Hitler sent beflagged trucks through the city carrying groups bellowing slogans, and had posters drawn up advertising a mass meeting at the Krone Circus on February 30. “Herr Adolf Hitler,” the announcement read, “will speak on ‘Future or Doom!’ ” These were the very terms in which he had cast the problem at the time he decided he must enter politics. When he entered the huge tent, it was jammed with 6,500 persons who cheered him wildly and after his speech broke into the national anthem.

  Since that occasion Hitler had been waiting for the opportunity to make himself master of the party, which owed so much to him. The party leadership, to be sure, was not too pleased with its propaganda chief’s impetuosity, and an entry in the party log dated February 22, 1921, noted: “Request Herr Hitler to restrain his activity.” But when Gottfried Feder grumbled at Hitler’s increasing arrogance, Anton Drexler told him that “every revolutionary movement must have a dictatorial head and I consider our Hitler to be the one person most suitable for that post in our movement, though I myself would not be prepared for that reason to be pushed into the background.” Five months later that very thing was to happen. Both circumstances and his opponents played into Hitler’s hands, for throughout his career enemies would be Hitler’s most effective allies. With a mixture of coldbloodedness, cunning, and resolution, with that readiness to take great risks even for small goals, which he was to exhibit time and again in critical situations, he succeeded in gaining control of the NSDAP while strengthening his, claim to leadership of the entire nationalist-racist movement.

  The summer crisis of 1921 started with negotiations between the NSDAP and rival völkisch parties, especially the German Socialist Party. These negotiations, aiming at closer co-operation, had been going on for months. But Hitler’s intransigence blocked all efforts at alliance. He demanded nothing less than the total submission of the other parties and would not even concede them the right of corporate entry into the National Socialist Party. He insisted instead that the other groups must dissolve and their members enter his party on an individual basis. Drexler could not understand Hitler’s obstinacy; therein lay the whole difference between the instinct for unconditional power and the conciliatory temperament of a club founder. Hitler must have counted on his enemies in the party leadership using his absence for an ill-considered step when, in the early part of the summer, he went to Berlin for six weeks. Hermann Esser and Dietrich Eckart remained behind as his accomplices and kept him continually informed. Urged on by certain members of the party who wanted to cut the “fanatical would-be big shot” down to size, well-meaning Drexler used this period of Hitler’s absence to resume negotiations on the union, or at least the collaboration, of all the socialist rightist parties.

  In Berlin, meanwhile, Hitler spoke at the Nationalist Club and established ties with conservative and radical rightists. He met Ludendorff and Count Reventlow, whose French wife, the former Baroness d’Allemont, introduced him to the former Free Corps leader Walter Stennes—describing Hitler as the “coming Messiah.” The hectic madness of Berlin, which was then entering its famous, or notorious, twenties, only heightened Hitler’s dislike for the city. He despised its greed and its frivolity, comparing conditions there with those of declining Rome in the Late Empire. There, too, he said, “racially alien Christianity” had taken advantage of the city’s weakness, as Bolshevism today was battening on the moral decay of Germany. The speeches of those early years are full of attacks upon metropolitan vice, corruption, and excess, as he had observed them on the glittering pavements of Friedrichstrasse or the Kurfürstendamm. “They amuse themselves and dance to make us forget our misery,” he cried on one occasion. “It is no accident that new amusements are constantly being invented. They want to artificially enervate us.” As if he were once again seventeen years old and arriving in Vienna, he stood baffled and alienated by the phenomenon of the big city, lost in so much noise, turbulence, and miscegenation. He really felt at home only in provincial circumstances and was, despite all his sense of being an outsider, permanently fixated upon provincial moral rectitude. Urban night life could only be an invention of the racial archfoe, a systematic attempt “to turn upside down the most natural hygienic rules of a race. The Jew makes night into day; he stages the notorious night life and knows quite well that it will slowly but surely… destroy one man physically, another mentally, and place hatred in the heart of a third because he must look on while others revel.” The theaters, he continued, “those halls which a Richard Wagner once wanted darkened in order to call forth the ultimate degree of sanctitude and solemnity” and “liberate the individual from grief and misery”—those theaters had become “hotbeds of vice and shamelessness.” He saw the city populated by white slavers, and love, “which for millions of others means supreme happiness or the greatest unhappiness,” perverted to a commodity, “nothing more than a deal.” In the city everything w.as being undermined and debased; he deplored the mockery of family life, the decay of religion. “One who has lost both these in this age of basest treachery and fraud has only two remaining possibilities: either he despairs and hangs himself, or he becomes a scoundrel.”22

  As soon as word came of Drexler’s independent action, Hitler returned to Munich. And when the party executive committee, which had gained some self-assurance in the interval, called upon him to justify his behavior, Hitler responded with a sweeping gesture. On July 11 he declared his resignation from the party. In a lengthy statement three days later he heaped violent reproaches upon the other members of the committee, then stated as an ultimatum his conditions for returning to the party. Among other things he demanded the immediate resignation of the executive committee, the “post of First Chairman with dictatorial powers” for himself, and “the party to be purged of the alien elements that have lately intruded into it.” He also insisted that neither the name nor the program of the party could be changed; the absolute precedence of the Munich branch of the party must be preserved; there could be no union with other parties, only the annexation of other parties. And with that stubbornness which presaged the later Hitler he stated: “Concessions on our part are totally out of the question.”23

  The degree of prestige and power that Hitler had already attained is evident from the immediate reply of the party executive committee, which was dated the following day. Instead of risking a showdown, it pleaded guilty to Hitler’s charges with timid reminders of its former services, bowed completely, and was even ready to sacrifice the incumbent First Chairman, Anton Drexler, to Hitler’s wrath. The key passage in the document, in which for the first time the Byzantine tones of subsequent homage sounded, read: “The committee is prepared, in acknowledgment of your
tremendous knowledge, your singular dedication and selfless service to the Movement, and your rare oratorical gift, to concede to you dictatorial powers, and will be most delighted if after your re-entry you will take over the position of First Chairman, which Drexler long ago and repeatedly offered to you. Drexler will then remain as your coadjutor in the executive committee and, if you approve, in the same position in the action committee. If you should consider it desirable to have him completely excluded from the Movement, the next annual meeting would have to be consulted on that matter.”

  The affair is a good illustration of Hitler’s skill at guiding and mastering crises. Its conclusion also shows his characteristic tendency to ruin a triumph by going a step too far. As soon as the party committee had submitted, he called an extraordinary membership meeting on his own initiative, in order to savor his victory to the full. At this point the good-natured Drexler would take no more. On July 25 he went to the Munich police and stated that the signers of the call for the meeting did not belong to the party and therefore had no right to convoke a membership meeting. He also pointed out that Hitler was aiming at revolution and violence, whereas he himself strove to carry out the party aims by legal, parliamentary procedures. The police, however, said they had no authority to intervene. Meanwhile, Hitler found himself under attack from other quarters. An anonymous leaflet appeared, accusing him of having brought “disunion and dissension into our ranks through power madness and personal ambition.” He was thus “doing the business of the Jews and their henchmen.” His aim was “to use the party as a springboard for dirty ends”; undoubtedly he was acting as the tool of obscure backers. There must be a reason why he was so anxious to keep his private life as well as his origins a mystery. “When asked by members what he lives on and what his former occupation was, he always became agitated and flew into a rage… so his conscience cannot be clear, especially since his excess in relations with women, to whom he has often referred to himself as ‘King of Munich,’ costs a great deal of money.” A poster that the police would not allow to be displayed repeated these accusations and ended with the battle cry: “The tyrant must be overthrown.”