Becoming Hitler

by Thomas Weber

  The Freikorps Oberland, for instance, included several Jewish members. Oberland was not just any Freikorps. It also included one of Hitler’s fellow dispatch runners from the war, Arthur Rödl, a future concentration camp commander, as well as none other than the future head of the SS, Heinrich Himmler. At the end of the war, when volunteers had been sought for service in Freikorps, very few soldiers had volunteered, as most men had just wanted to go home. For instance, only eight members of Hitler’s regiment had volunteered in early December, when a call for volunteers had been issued in the List Regiment. Yet when in the spring of 1919 men had been asked by their democratically elected government to defend their homes against a Communist takeover, this was perceived as an entirely different matter. Men were urged to join up temporarily, as the regular army and law-enforcement authorities were no longer numerically strong enough to respond to the radical left-wing challenge to the new political order.43

  Large numbers of men had come forward to enlist. Thus, neither the experience of a long and brutal war, nor the longing for violence of a supposedly proto-fascist, nihilist generation that despised culture and civilization, but the dynamic and logic of the postwar conflict explains why a large number—yet still a minority—of Bavarians joined paramilitary units in 1919. For instance, his membership in the liberal German Democratic Party had not stopped Fridolin Solleder, an officer from Hitler’s regiment, from joining a Freikorps.44

  The Freikorps movement was surprisingly heterogeneous. At least 158 Jews served in Bavarian Freikorps after the First World War. It also needs to be stressed that Jews continued to join Freikorps in the days and weeks after the end of the Munich Soviet Republic, which, to state the obvious, should be seen as an endorsement of the actions of the “white” troops against the Munich Soviet Republic. For instance, on May 6, 1919, Alfred Heilbronner, a Jewish merchant from Memmingen, had joined the Freikorps Schwaben, in which Fritz Wiedemann, Hitler’s commanding officer during the war, had served as a company commander. Wiedemann and Heilbronner’s Freikorps was engaged in operations in Munich between May 2 and 12, and subsequently fought in Swabia.45

  The 158 Jewish members of Bavarian Freikorps amounted to about 0.5 percent of members of the Bavarian Freikorps movement. This was a figure not out of proportion with the overall ratio of Jews among the Bavarian population, which by 1919 stood somewhere between 0.7 and 0.8 percent. The actual number of Jewish members of Freikorps who described themselves being of the Jewish faith was even much higher than 158, as the surviving membership records are incomplete. For instance, Robert Löwensohn, from Fürth in Franconia, does not appear in the surviving Freikorps muster rolls. This Jewish officer and commander of a wartime machine gun unit joined a militia or Freikorps in the spring of 1919. As his own moderately left-wing leanings were incompatible with the ideas of the Munich Soviet Republic, he helped crush it. When he was rearrested in 1942, his past service in the First World War and in 1919 would not count for anything anymore. The veteran of the Freikorps campaign against the Munich Soviet Republic would spend the rest of the war in camps in the east, dying in February 1945 on a death march. Due to the absence of Jews like Löwensohn in the surviving membership records of Bavarian militias, it is highly likely that the share of Jews among Freikorps members did, in fact, equal or exceed that of Jews in the overall Bavarian population.46

  Furthermore, logic dictates that a considerable number of secular Jews—that is, Jews who did not define themselves as of the Jewish faith and who did not belong to any religious community or had converted to one of the Christian churches—also served in Freikorps.47 In short, if anything, the conventional view about the Freikorps, according to which they were more anti-Semitic than they were anti-Communist, and according to which they formed the nucleus of the National Socialist movement, needs to be turned on its head. After all, the Freikorps of Bavaria included at least 158 Jews, but not Hitler.

  None of this is to question that for a subsection of members of the Freikorps movement, there was a clear continuity from their actions in 1919 to the National Socialist rise to power. The important point here is that they constitute only a subsection of the movement. Presenting the Freikorps movement of the spring of 1919 as the vanguard of National Socialism would mean inadvertently to buy into the story Nazi propaganda would tell. For instance, in 1933, Hermann Goering would refer to the members of Freikorps as “the first soldiers of the Third Reich” in an attempt to recast the rise of National Socialism between 1919 and 1933 as a heroic epic. Similarly, Hitler himself would claim in 1941 that although some Jews might for tactical reasons have been willing to oppose Eisner, “none of them took up arms in defense of Germandom against their fellow Jews!”48

  Whatever “white”’ troops might have seen in the deputy battalion councilor of the Second Demobilization Company as they moved into Bavaria’s capital on May 1, one thing is clear enough, a century on: Hitler had not opposed moderate Social Democratic revolutionaries in revolutionary Munich, nor had he backed the ideals of the second Soviet Republic.

  However, even if he did not openly express certain political and anti-Semitic ideas throughout the more than five months of revolution that he experienced in Munich and Traunstein, at least in theory it is possible that Hitler nevertheless might have already harbored them deep in his heart. That is, though he might have appeared outwardly aimless during the revolution, his political ideas already may have been developed and firmly in place. In other words, it is possible to argue that he may have thoroughly detested the sight of revolution as he traveled back to Munich on his return from Pasewalk and, in truth, he may never have held any left-leaning sympathies.49

  One may argue that Hitler’s experience of revolution and of the Soviet Republic in Munich evoked in him a deep hatred toward anything that was foreign, international, Bolshevist, and Jewish to the fore that latently had already existed during his years in Vienna.50 Yet the evidence that would support claims of this kind tends to be after the fact, such as a statement Hitler is supposed to have made in his military HQ in 1942, at a time when his anti-Jewish exterminatory policies were gathering speed. He would tell his guests in 1942 that in “1919 a Jewess wrote in the Bayerischer Kurier: ‘What Eisner is doing now will one day fall back on us Jews!’ This is a strange case of clairvoyance.”51

  Hitler’s quote is indeed revealing, but not for shedding light on his emerging worldview in the aftermath of the Munich Soviet Republic. Rather, it demonstrates how prominently he would use the revolution as post facto inspiration for his policies while in power, in the same way that he would evoke his experiences from the First World War, mediated by postwar experiences, as being an inspiration for his conduct of Germany’s efforts in the Second World War. To argue that Hitler had been disposed negatively toward the revolution from the beginning and that he never had displayed any sympathy toward Social Democrats inadvertently buys into Nazi propaganda. It is important to point out that cooperating with the new regime did not even distance Hitler from many of his former superiors. After all, some of the latter, such as General Max von Speidel, cooperated and supported the new regime. If even his former divisional commander accepted the revolutionary regime, it should not be surprising that Hitler, who throughout the war had looked up to his superiors, would do so, too.52

  Although Hitler’s likely attendance at Eisner’s funeral suggests the existence of left-leaning sympathies, it does not necessarily make him a supporter of Eisner’s Independent Social Democrats, as Eisner was widely respected across both the radical and moderate left in the wake of his assassination, as well as among soldiers serving in Munich.53 The question is not whether Hitler supported the left during the revolution, which clearly he did, but what kind of left-wing ideas and groups he supported or at least accepted. As Hitler served all left-wing regimes during all phases of the revolution until the end, he obviously accepted all of them or at least acquiesced to them for reasons of expediency. Yet his previous political statements from the war as well as hi
s patterns of behavior during both the war and the revolution indicate that the number of political ideas he actively agreed with was much smaller than that of those he was willing to serve.

  Being that soldiers, who overwhelmingly had voted for the SPD in the Bavarian elections in January 1919, had elected Hitler as their representative; that Hitler’s closest companion during the revolution had been a member of an SPD-affiliated union; and that the SPD under Erhard Auer had stood against international socialism and cooperated on many an occasion with conservative and centrist groups, one thing is quite clear: Hitler had stood close to the SPD but either had missed the opportunity or lacked the willpower to jump ship after the establishment of the second Soviet Republic.

  In fact, during the Second World War, Hitler would privately admit, at least indirectly, that he had once held sympathies for Erhard Auer. At his military HQ he would be recorded as saying on February 1, 1942, “But there is a difference where it concerns one of the 1918 crowd. Some of them just found themselves there, like Pontius: they never wanted to be part of a revolution, and these include Noske, as well as Ebert, Scheidemann, Severing, and Auer in Bavaria. I was unable to take that into account while the fight was on. [… ] It was only after we had won that I was in a position to say, ‘I understand your arguments.’” Hitler added, “The only problem for the Social Democrats at the time was that they did not have a leader.” Even when talking in private about the Versailles Treaty, the punitive peace treaty that brought the First World War to an end, he would blame the Catholic Center Party, rather than the Social Democrats, for having sold Germany down the river: “It would have been possible to achieve a very different peace settlement,” Hitler would say in private on January 27, 1942, at military HQ. “There were Social Democrats prepared to stand their ground to the utmost. [Yet] Wirth and Erzberger [from the Center Party] signed the deal.”54

  Auer, himself, also claimed that Hitler had held sympathies for the SPD during the winter and spring of 1919. In a 1923 article Auer wrote for the Münchener Post, he stated that Hitler “due to his beliefs was regarded as a Majority Socialist [Mehrheitssozialist] in the circles of the Propaganda Department and claimed to be one, like so many others; but he was never politically active or a member of a trade union.”55

  It is extremely unlikely that as astute and careful an operator as Auer would have made up such a claim in the politically charged atmosphere of the spring of 1923. A fabrication of that kind would have run the risk of easily being exposed as a fraud and thus backfiring. It can no longer be established with certainty who Auer’s source was on this occasion, but it is not difficult to guess. With a high degree of probability it was Karl Mayr, who was to become Hitler’s paternal mentor in the summer of 1919, when Mayr became the head of the propaganda department of the army in Munich. His task would be to carry out propaganda as well as to look into the earlier activities of the propaganda department during the revolution. Mayr would change political sides in 1921 and from that time onward would regularly feed Erhard Auer information for his articles.56

  Auer was not the only Social Democratic writer with access to men like Mayr who reported an SPD-affinity on Hitler’s part during the spring of 1919. Konrad Heiden, a Social Democrat with a Jewish mother who came to Munich as a student in 1920 and after graduation started to work as a Munich correspondent of the liberal Frankfurter Zeitung, would report in the 1930s that Hitler had supported the SPD and had even talked about joining the party. In Heiden’s words, Hitler “interceded with his comrades on behalf of the Social-Democratic Government and, in their heated discussions, espoused the cause of Social Democracy against that of the Communists.” The dramatist Ernst Toller, meanwhile, would claim that while he was incarcerated later in 1919 for his involvement with the revolution, one of his fellow prisoners had told him that he had encountered “Adolf Hitler in the first months of the republic in a military barracks in Munich.” According to Toller, the prisoner had told him that “at the time Hitler had declared that he was a Social Democrat.” Furthermore, Hitler himself would imply that he had had Social Democratic leanings in the past when he told some of his fellow National Socialists in 1921, “Everybody was a Social Democrat once.”57 Testimony of Friedrich Krohn—an early member and financial benefactor of the party who addressed Hitler with the familiar “Du” until they broke with each other in 1921 over Hitler’s growing megalomania—also supports that Hitler initially had Social Democratic leanings. When Krohn and Hitler first met around the time that Hitler first attended a meeting of what was to become the Nazi Party, Hitler told him that he favored a “socialism” that took the form of a “national Social Democracy” that was loyal to the state, not dissimilar to that of Scandinavia, England, and prewar Bavaria.58

  In making sense of Hitler’s time during the Munich Soviet Republic and its aftermath, it would be a mistake to present Hitler as having served in a regiment in which supporters of the left and the right had opposed each other. Hence, it would be wrong to describe him, while he was an elected representative of the soldiers of his unit, as a secret spokesperson for soldiers on the political right.59 As noted earlier, the dividing line in military units based in Munich during the time of the Soviet Republic ran not between the left and the right, but between the radical left and the moderate left, which puts Hitler on the moderate left.

  As Karl Mayr stated in an account published in America in 1941 when he was incarcerated in one of Hitler’s concentration camps, Hitler had been an aimless “stray dog” after the war. “After the First World War,” Mayr would write, “[Hitler] was just one of the many thousands of ex-soldiers who walked the streets looking for work. [… ] At this time Hitler was ready to throw in his lot with anyone who would show him kindness. [… ] He would have worked for a Jewish or a French employer just as readily as for an Aryan. When I first met him he was like a tired stray dog looking for a master.”60

  Of course, Mayr might have exaggerated the degree to which Hitler’s mind was a blank slate in the half year or so following the end of the war. It is certainly true that Hitler returned from the war as a man without a compass and embarked on a path of self-discovery. Yet opportunism and expediency and vague political ideas coexisted, and at times competed with each other, within Hitler. His political and personal future was indeterminate. Hitler had stayed in the army because he had nowhere else to go. And indeed he was often driven by opportunism fueled by an urge to escape loneliness, and at times was a man adrift. Nevertheless, it would overstate the argument to suggest that he was impassive, with no political interest, and merely driven by the will to survive.61

  Hitler’s pattern of behavior and his actions, as well as a critical reading of earlier and later statements by him and by others, reveal a man with an initial sympathy for the revolution and the SPD who at the same time rejected internationalist ideas.62 Over the course of a few months, through a combination of expediency, opportunism, and mild left-wing leanings, Hitler metamorphosed from an awkward loner and follower of orders into somebody willing and able to fill a leadership position. This change occurred at exactly the moment when most people would have preferred to keep their heads down to weather the storm. With the fall of the Soviet Republic, however, Hitler had to figure out whether and how he would extricate himself from the corner in which he had ended up through his actions in previous weeks.

  CHAPTER 4

  Turncoat

  (Early May to Mid-July 1919)

  The way in which “white” forces put down the Soviet Republic and restored order in Munich reveals why the situation was so precarious for anyone suspected of having leanings toward the Soviet Republic.

  While loud cheers of “Hoch!” and “Bravo!” welcomed progovernment units in upper-middle-class streets, the arrival of “white” troops frequently brought with it summary executions of suspected members of the Red Army. These took place everywhere, even in schoolyards. As Klaus Mann, the son of novelist Thomas Mann, noted in his diary on May 8, 1919: “In our schoo
lyard, two Spartacists have been shot dead. One of them, a seventeen-year-old boy, even refused a blindfold. Poschenriederer said that that was fanatical. I find it heroic. School was already over by noon.”1

  Many who served in the “white” forces suspected resistance everywhere. For instance, on May 3, “white” forces had sprayed the mansion housing the papal nunciature with gunfire after papal nuncio Pacelli’s aide Lorenzo Schioppa turned on the light in his bedroom late that night. Schioppa had no choice but to flee the room crawling on his hands and knees. The “white” troops responsible for the action had assumed that they were about to be fired upon when they saw the light go on.2

  To a large degree, the violence aimed at genuine and imagined supporters of the Soviet Republic had its origin in the trigger-happy mentality of some, but by no means all, of the Freikorps. What had made things worse was the chaotic and confusing scene that awaited troops who often were unfamiliar with Munich’s geography. For instance, one of the “white” commanders received a map of Munich only well after his arrival in the city. Furthermore, the news of the killing of hostages drove even members of the “white” forces who considered themselves left-wing and were reluctant to fight, to employ force. In the words of publisher Julius Friedrich Lehmann, who had fled Munich and returned to the city as the commander of a militia from the southwest German state of Württemberg, “I only managed to get my own company of men from Württemberg, whom I led into Munich at the time and who were true Red believers, to move forward when I told them about the disgraceful deed of murdering hostages.” According to Lehmann, five minutes before fighting started, his men still refused to shoot.3