by Thomas Weber
The anti-Semitism of Chamberlain, Bruckmann, and many others was thus directed first and foremost at ideas that they considered Jewish, rather than at Jews. The question that naturally follows is, given the echoes of Chamberlain in Hitler’s writings and speeches, and Hitler’s own identification of him as a source of inspiration, did people perceive Hitler’s anti-Semitism in the same way they saw Chamberlain’s? In other words, did they perceive it to be essentially metaphorical in character? And how did Hitler view his own anti-Semitism?
The metaphorical anti-Semitism of Chamberlain and such people as Elsa Bruckmann, as well as two and a half thousand years of intermittently anti-Jewish thought, provided frames of reference against which those in postwar Munich measured Hitler’s anti-Semitism. Unsurprisingly, many at that time, as well as in the years to come, thus often viewed Hitler’s exterminatory, biologized, all-or-nothing anti-Semitic language as not being literal in character.
In a way, precisely because of his objection to the anti-Semitism of emotional outbursts and pogroms and his insistence that he was fighting Judaism as a whole so as both to save Germany and to improve the world, Hitler, at least seemingly, put himself in the tradition of Chamberlain’s anti-Semitism as well as of anti-Jewish thought of the previous two and a half thousand years. During the Holocaust, of course, Hitler’s exterminatory, biologized, all-or-nothing anti-Semitism was anything but metaphorical in character. Yet from the perspective of 1920, it is not clear whether, during that year, he had yet crossed the line.
It is perfectly plausible that Hitler took his exterminatory and biologized anti-Semitism literally from the beginning; that is, the second half of 1919. In other words, it is impossible to disprove that, unlike many others, he really did believe Jewish blood transported parasites into German society. In that case, he may or may not already have had a genocidal Jewish endgame in mind. Whatever the case, the developmental logic of Hitler’s early postwar anti-Semitism, irrespective of whether he had yet realized it, arguably already pointed toward genocide.42
However, it is equally and maybe more plausible to argue that Hitler initially spoke metaphorically, or, more likely, that he himself had not quite made up his mind as to whether his anti-Semitism was literal or metaphorical. In his speeches, he sometimes seemed to agree with Chamberlain’s belief that one can be a Jew without being a Jew and that the ultimate anti-Semitic goal was to fight the Jewish spirit. For instance, as a guest speaker at an event of the German Völkisch Protection and Defiance Federation, he said on January 7, 1920, to the applause of his audience, “The greatest villain is not the Jew, but he who makes himself available to the Jew,” adding, “We fight the Jew because he impedes the fight against capitalism. We have inflicted our great misery for the most part on ourselves.”43
It is ultimately impossible to know whether Hitler understood his own racial, biologized, all-or-nothing anti-Semitism to be of a literal or metaphorical kind in 1920 because no one can look into Hitler’s head. No degree of ingenuity can possibly fully overcome this obstacle. Even if new documents came to light that were produced by Hitler himself or that had recorded his words, the dilemma is this: because he constantly reinvented himself and was a notorious liar who said whatever he believed people wanted to hear, we can never know beyond reasonable doubt when he told the truth and when he lied. Hence, all we can do is explain why some propositions about his intentions and inner thoughts are more plausible than others, as well as examine his patterns of actual behavior and extrapolate conclusions as to how his mind worked and as to what his intentions were.
One possible way to test whether Hitler took his own biologized, racial, all-or-nothing anti-Semitism literally is to look at how he dealt with Jews whom he knew personally. More likely than not, he would have acted uncompromisingly toward them had he taken his own brand of biologized, racial anti-Semitism literally.
In his speech of August 13, 1920, Hitler argued that one should not attempt to distinguish between individual Jews as being either good or bad. He said that even Jews who would have the appearance of being good people would with their actions nevertheless destroy the state, as it lay in their nature to do so, irrespective of their intentions.44 Similarly, in the early 1940s, he would declare categorically that, in persecuting Jews, no exceptions should be made, however harsh that might in some cases be. On the night of December 1/2, 1941, as the industrialized killing process of Jews was getting under way, he would state at his military HQ: “Our race legislation causes great hardship to individuals, it is true, but one must not base its evaluation on the fate of individuals.”45 Yet this is precisely what Hitler himself had done on a number of occasions.
One of the exceptions that Hitler made was for Emil Maurice, when in the mid-1930s Heinrich Himmler tried to elbow Maurice out of the SS and out of the party, due to Maurice’s Jewish heritage. Hitler not only overruled Himmler but made a point of offering the use of his apartment for Maurice’s wedding reception in 1935, giving him a largish amount of money as a wedding present, as well as granting him special dispensation to remain in the party and the SS.
The two had grown close soon after Maurice had joined the DAP in late 1919. Maurice was one of the few people allowed to address Hitler with the informal “Du.” In countless brawls in the beer halls and streets of Munich, he was one of the most brutal among the early National Socialists. In recognition of those talents, in 1921 Hitler would make him head of the SA; Maurice would serve as adjutant of his personal guard—the “Stoßtrupp Hitler”—in 1923 and would go on to become one of the founders of the SS. For a while he would serve Hitler as his driver, and when both men were incarcerated in Landsberg after the failed putsch of 1923, Maurice served as Hitler’s aide.
It is not entirely clear when Maurice and Hitler became aware of Maurice’s Jewish great-grandfather. According to some claims, rumors about his Jewish heritage had been floating around since 1919, while according to other claims that realization had come much later. Given Maurice’s long service to Hitler and the party, on one level it was not particularly surprising that Hitler would protect Maurice, even if the SS’s number-two member was, according to the logic of Hitler’s regime, one-eighth Jewish.
Yet, on another level, Hitler’s decision was surprising, for his interceding for Maurice would come after a long-lasting, deep, and bitter fallout between the two friends, stemming from Hitler’s being unable to cope with the fact that his niece Geli Raubal and Maurice had fallen in love. By the time he would help Maurice against Himmler, it would have been easier for Hitler not to reconnect with and protect him than to do so. And yet he would not only grant Maurice special dispensation and challenge Himmler but also visit Maurice and his wife in their apartment.
Hitler’s support of Maurice is revealing about the nature of his anti-Semitism for another reason: In 1939, with the outbreak of war, Hitler suddenly broke off all contact with Maurice. He also refused to see him when Maurice requested he do so in late 1941.46 That sudden change of heart on Hitler’s part is just as significant as his earlier support of Maurice. Had he continued to interact and support Maurice throughout the Second World War, it would be forgivable to underestimate the importance of the fact that Hitler had previously supported a close associate who had one Jewish great-grandparent. Yet Hitler’s reversal when the war began suggests that Maurice’s Jewish heritage had been important to Hitler ever since he had known about it. Hitler’s realignment toward Maurice during the mid-1930s suggests that it was part of a wider change of heart on Hitler’s part. It raises the question of whether Hitler’s radical biologically based anti-Semitism might have been metaphorical initially and then become literal only on the eve of the Second World War. However, from approximately 1922 onward, Hitler’s behavior strongly suggests that genocide was already his preferred “final solution” to the challenge as what to do with Europe’s Jews. His interaction with such individuals as Maurice suggests that—as long as he believed that it was impractical to implement a genocidal “final s
olution”—he would be prepared to help Jews whom he liked personally. Believing for many years that he had no choice but to settle for alternative nongenocidal solutions to purge Germany of Jewish influence, it would make sense to protect some Jews to whom he or his associates were close.
Hitler also went out of his way to help Eduard Bloch, the Jewish doctor of Hitler’s late mother and his own family doctor from childhood, who lived in Linz in Austria. After the German invasion of Austria in 1938, Hitler would bestow a Sonderstatus, a special status, on Bloch, which would allow the doctor to continue living in Linz, more or less unharmed.47 As in the case of Maurice, not having seen Bloch for many years, it would have been easier not to step rather than to protect him.
Hitler also personally allowed a number of Jewish veterans from his First World War regiment to emigrate.48 Furthermore, the wife of the scholar of geopolitics Karl Haushofer had a Jewish father, which does not seem to have bothered Hitler when he turned to Haushofer for help in developing his ideas of geopolitics and “living space.” Nor does it seem to have bothered him that Rudolf Heß, his closest aide from the mid-1920s, was close to Haushofer senior—whom he saw as almost a father figure—and was a friend of Haushofer’s son. In fact, Hitler would admit to Heß that he had doubts about his anti-Semitism. As Heß would write to Karl Haushofer on June 11, 1924, when Hitler and he both were incarcerated at Landsberg fortress, he realized that Hitler’s beliefs were far less straightforward than he had previously imagined: “I should not have thought, for instance, that he had arrived at his current stance on the Jewish question only after severe inner struggles. He was repeatedly assailed by doubts that he might, after all, be wrong.”49 Heß’s letter suggests that Hitler initially had been unsure as to the nature of his biologized, racial, all-or-nothing anti-Semitism, which may have metamorphosed only gradually from the metaphysical into a literal, potentially genocidal anti-Semitism between 1919 and the mid-1920s.
It is also difficult to know what to make of an episode that would occur in the 1930s, after Hitler’s half-Irish nephew William Patrick moved to Berlin. Frustrated by what he saw as a cold-shoulder treatment by his uncle toward him, William threatened to disclose family secrets to the press unless he were given a better job and received more privileges. This event led Hitler quietly to ask his lawyer Hans Frank to look into claims that he had Jewish ancestry.50 Today it is clear that rumors of Hitler’s paternal grandfather’s being Jewish, as well as of his family’s having descended from Bohemian or Hungarian Jews, are unfounded. Yet the important point here is not whether Hitler was of Jewish stock. Rather, it is that Hitler would feel compelled to ask Hans Frank to look into the rumors, which suggests that for a while he was unsure as to whether they were true.
By the summer of 1920 there was little indication that Hitler had fully made up his mind about the nature of his anti-Semitism or formulated his preferred anti-Jewish endgame. At this time he was using anti-Semitism as a tool to make sense of the ills of the world, in a tradition that had been invented 2,500 years earlier on the banks of the river Nile.
The extreme rhetoric of his nascent anti-Semitism has to be seen in the context of the difficulties that Hitler and the NSDAP faced in the spring of 1920. At a time when the party simply failed to make itself adequately heard, Hitler had to find a way to make himself and his party stand out in the busy marketplace of right-wing politics in Bavaria. His brand of anti-Semitism thus became his instrument for distinguishing himself from the many other anti-Semitic speakers and politicians in Munich.
Hitler managed to make a splash in the city by offering a more radical and cohesive variant of familiar extremist anti-Semitism. The more he presented his stance as an all-or-nothing proposition, the more he insisted that every compromise was a rotten one, the more extremely his anti-Semitism was expressed, the more he increased his chance of getting heard and branding his version of anti-Semitism amid the busy marketplace of right-wing politics in Munich. It was thus a desire to get heard and to be distinctive that fanned the radicalization of his anti-Semitism. At the time, his goal for the NSDAR was not to get majority support; it was simply for the party to be more distinctive than its competitors on the extreme right. To that end, he seems to have adjusted his anti-Semitic rhetoric in a trial-and-error fashion, developing further those ideas and slogans that received the most cheering from receptive audiences—and the most booing from the left, thereby setting off a self-reinforcing cycle of radicalization of his anti-Semitic rhetoric.
Soon Hitler would find a way of staging himself even more effectively to broaden his appeal.
CHAPTER 8
Genius
(August to December 1920)
By the beginning of the autumn of 1920, Wolfgang Kapp was a relic, yet Karl Mayr still clung to him. Hitler’s former army superior sat down on September 24, 1920, to write to the failed putschist: “We shall continue our work. We will create an organization of national radicalism—a principle, incidentally, that has nothing to do with national bolshevism.” Mayr also wanted to ensure that Kapp would know the identity of the man whom he had tried in vain to send to him in March: “A certain Herr Hitler for instance has become a driving force.” Mayr stressed that he had been “in touch daily” with him “for more than 15 months.”1
Mayr, of course, grossly exaggerated the frequency of his contact with Hitler, which was self-serving. It functioned to present himself as being more important than he really was in the new role that he had assumed the previous month. By the time he composed his letter to Kapp, Mayr was no longer in the military, for in early July he had left the Reichswehr. It is likely that this had not been voluntary, but that he had been pushed out as a result of the defiance he had displayed toward General Arnold von Möhl.2 In fact, the pressure for him to go is likely not just to have come from Möhl.
Mayr’s star had started to shine less brightly at least as early as March—whether because his propaganda work was seen as ineffectual3 or due to political disagreements between Mayr and others remains unclear. Whatever the reason, opposition to him had grown enormously in the wake of the failed Kapp Putsch. On March 25, 1920, one of his adversaries in the military in Munich had written to the Reich minister of defense, Otto Geßler, to complain about Mayr. The letter writer was Georg Dehn, who previously had run the Civil Division of the Reichswehr Recruitment Headquarters (HQ) in Munich and who now was secretary-general of the Bavarian section of the liberal German Democratic Party (DDP), one of the parties that then formed the Bavarian government. Dehn had warned the minister about officers in Munich who were unreliable and ready to undermine the Constitution. The worst of those officers, Dehn had argued, were those deployed in “military propaganda,” chiefly Karl Mayr and Count Karl von Bothmer.4
Dehn’s letter is instructive not only in shedding light on Mayr’s departure from the army but also for understanding the character of the men of the Military District Command 4 in Munich. It gives further testimony to the political heterogeneity of the army in Munich: Dehn had informed Geßler that the officer corps had been divided between two groups: those who, like Mayr, had supported the putsch, and others who might not be republicans with all their hearts but would accept serving the Weimar Republic.5 Dehn himself was living proof of the heterogeneity of the Reichswehr in Munich: an officer who was Jewish by birth but who had converted to Protestantism. During the war, the Jewish-born officer and archaeologist had served in Hitler’s regiment, where he had befriended Fritz Wiedemann, Hitler’s commanding officer. Toward the end of the war, he had served, as Mayr had, in the Ottoman Empire. Interned at war’s end in Turkey and infected with malaria, Dehn had returned to Germany in the spring of 1919. In the wake of the fall of the Munich Soviet Republic, he then had started heading the Civil Division of the Reichswehr Recruitment HQ in that city.
Dehn had continued to be respected in the officer corps in Munich despite his prominent position in the DDP and his Jewish heritage, as evident in the fact that he was one of eight authors from H
itler’s First World War regiment whose war memories were published in November 1920 by the biweekly magazine Das Bayerland. Dehn also would be one of the authors of the official history of Hitler’s regiment, published in 1932. He would survive the Holocaust by getting out of Germany when it was still possible and settling in Quito, the capital of Ecuador.6 The fact that a Jewish-born officer and official of the liberal German Democratic Party had been entrusted with heading the army recruitment office in Munich at the same time that Hitler had served under Mayr is a reminder of the relative heterogeneity of the postrevolutionary Reichswehr in Bavaria’s capital and hence of the impossibility of Hitler having merely been a sum of the individual parts of the postrevolutionary Reichswehr in Munich.
Since Mayr had fallen out of favor in the army in Munich and hence had left the Reichswehr, Mayr had been looking for a new home. Yet he had not just been searching for a group that would take him in. He was looking for an organization that he believed he could take over. It was not in his personality to be a follower. As revealed in the manner in which he had recruited and taught his propaganda men, he did not want to be orchestrated; rather, he himself wanted to be the conductor. On leaving the army, he thus cut all his remaining ties with the Bavarian People’s Party (BVP), and shortly thereafter joined the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP). Mayr’s exaggeration in his letter to Kahr about the frequency of his interactions with Hitler has to be seen in this context. In that letter, Mayr tried to convey the message that since joining the NSDAP he had been running the show, writing, “I have been busy since July in trying to make the movement stronger. I organized some very able young people.”7
