Becoming Hitler

by Thomas Weber

  The tail end of Hitler’s Austrian speaking tour also took him to Vienna, the city he would hate for the rest of his life as the place of his greatest humiliations.40 While there, he decided that he might as well use the occasion to visit someone whom he had not seen for years. He went to a small flat and rang the doorbell.

  When the apartment’s resident, a twenty-four-year-old unmarried woman with black hair pulled up in a bun who worked as a clerk for a public insurance institution, opened the door, she did not immediately recognize the man standing before her. She had not seen him for twelve long years, not since her mother had just died from breast cancer while she was still a child. It thus took her a while to realize that the stranger at her door was her brother, Adolf. “I was so surprised, I just stood there and looked at him,” Paula Hitler would later recall of the moment.41

  Just as for her brother, forming personal relationships with other people did not come easily to Paula. Brother and sister alike had spent many years as loners. Yet unlike Adolf, she had tried to keep up contact with him. Back in 1910 and 1911, she had written to him in Vienna several times but never received any response. By 1920, Paula did not even know whether he was still alive. She thus had mixed emotions at his sudden reappearance. “I told him that things would have been easier for me had I had a brother,” she later recalled of the occasion. Yet Adolf Hitler managed to charm his little sister, telling her, “but I had nothing myself. How could I have helped you,” and then took her on a shopping spree of Vienna, buying her a new outfit. Eventually, her bitter feelings were swept aside at the prospect of no longer being a lonely spinster: “My brother was almost a gift from heaven. I had got used to being all alone in the world.”42 During his visit to Vienna, Hitler also met up with his half sister Angela, who at the time was the manager of the cafeteria of the Jewish student community of Vienna University.

  Paula’s belief that she finally had regained her brother would only partially come true. Hitler would stay in touch with her in the years to come, but those contacts would be few and far between. Many years later, in 1957, Paula said this of Adolf’s relationship to her and their half sister during the years between 1920 and Hitler’s death in 1945: “In his eyes, we sisters were much too jealous of our brother. He preferred to surround himself with strangers whom he could pay for their services.”43

  Adolf Hitler had even less interest in his half brother Alois than he had in his sisters. Alois had emigrated to England before the war, marrying an Irish woman and fathering a child with her—the nephew, William, who threatened Hitler in the 1930s to reveal the secrets of their family—before abandoning them. He then moved to Germany and married again, technically polygamously. Hitler’s prisoner file from Landsberg fortress, where he would be taken in the wake of his failed putsch of November 1923, suggests that he did not even admit to the existence of his half brother, as the file refers only to his sisters in Vienna.44

  In 1921, the year after Adolf visited his sisters in Vienna, Alois, who had not seen him for more than twenty years, would read about him in the papers. Hete, his second wife, would urge him to contact his half brother. Finally, Alois gave in, writing to the city registrar’s office in Munich to ask for Adolf’s address and sending him a letter. Yet Adolf would not respond to him directly, instead asking his half sister Angela to reply to Alois on his behalf.45 He clearly had no interest in his half brother.

  Hitler’s relationship with his three siblings is revealing of who he was. It exposes both his personality and the genesis of his political ideas. The only family members in whom he would display genuine interest for a while would be Angela and, in a rather unhealthy fashion, her daughter Geli.

  The reasons behind Hitler’s lack of interest in most of his family and his inability to form long-term relationships are to be found in the world of psychology and in his mental makeup. Whatever their origin, they point to the core of his personality. Yet despite his inability to form lasting genuine relationships with other people, he was a social animal. Even though he had been a loner at various times in his life, he never had been a hermit. His pattern of behavior over the years reveals a man who needed people around him as well as the approval of others.

  Hitler was a man in constant search for a new surrogate family and for human company. People who knew him well would tell US intelligence in the 1940s, “He goes to bed as late as possible and when his last friends leave him exhausted at two or three in the morning or even later it is almost as though he is afraid to be alone.”46 Yet Hitler’s tragedy was that he could only function in vertical, hierarchical relationships—as a follower, as he did in the regimental HQ of his military unit during the war, or at the top of a hierarchy. He was incapable of horizontal human interactions, that is, among peers. Likewise, he was unable to sustain interpersonal close relationships over long periods of time.

  His inability to form horizontal relationships and to sustain close human relationships, coupled with his need for approval and social contact, had a direct impact on his leadership style. It made impossible any collaborative deliberation aimed at addressing political challenges and at solving problems of statecraft. Just as Hitler did not want to engage with his audience in discussion after the end of his speeches, he would be unwilling to engage in, and incapable of accepting, politics as the art of compromise and deal making. The only kind of politics that he was capable of was a politics of performance, with him as the main act.

  Hitler’s categorical unwillingness and inability to compromise were not just expressed in his personal behavior but also became a mantra of his speeches. For instance, on April 27, he said amid “loud applause” at an NSDAP meeting of that night at the Hofbräuhaus: “It is time finally to take up the fight against this race. There is to be no more compromise, because that would be fatal to ourselves.”47

  Hitler’s sectarian style of politics, according to which every genuine compromise was a rotten one, was not just an expression of his radical political views. It was also a reflection of his personality, for any compromise that is not merely tactical in nature must be based in accepting the opposing party as an equal, which Hitler was incapable of doing. Thus, in the political arena, he would only be able to function as the leader of a sectarian group standing outside the constitutional political process or as a dictator within a formal framework.48

  The reason that Hitler’s family background sheds light on the genesis of his political ideas is that the four Hitler siblings displayed vastly different preferences, political and otherwise. This being the case, Hitler’s politicization and radicalization cannot possibly have been an almost inevitable result of his upbringing in the Hitler household. For one thing, his two sisters embraced Vienna, whereas his dislike for the cosmopolitan Habsburg city was both personal and political. Paula, in particular, would love Vienna all her life. More important, Paula was devotedly Catholic and would be deeply religious until her dying day, whereas Adolf arguably had broken with religion by the time he entered politics. Furthermore, in 1920, unlike his half sister Angela, he would have been the most unlikely person to run a Jewish student restaurant. In addition, his half brother Alois had been a supporter of the Habsburg monarchy, whereas the starting point of Adolf’s political development had been a passionate rejection of the Habsburg Empire.49

  Thus, the Hitler siblings had not led parallel lives in developing their political convictions. There had only been a very indirect path from Hitler’s upbringing to the politician-in-the-making of 1920. What his relationship with his siblings does make clear is that, unlike so many other rises to power or dictatorships, in Hitler’s case nepotism would not play a prominent role.

  In December 1920, Hitler could look back on twelve months that had taken him and the DAP/NSDAP out of obscurity and catapulted him to local fame. At the beginning of the year, he had been someone who already had been strong enough to push the chairman of the party out. Yet he had still been very much Anton Drexler’s junior. Now, by the end of the year, he, not Drexler,
was the star of the party. The NSDAP increasingly looked like his rather than Drexler’s party.

  Even though Hitler kept on insisting that he was only the propagandist of the party,50 his sidelining of Karl Mayr and, more important, his call for a genius and dictator to rescue Germany suggest that he was insincere in claiming that he was only doing the bidding of someone else. As he certainly was not doing the bidding of or promoting any established figure, the options open are that he either already saw himself as that genius or would soon come to the conclusion that he fit the bill.

  It has been said that by late 1920, Drexler had already offered Hitler the chairmanship of the party, which the latter had turned down. If true, his refusal should not be seen as support for the idea that Hitler saw himself as only a propagandist for somebody else and had no ambition of his own.51 Had he accepted the chairmanship of the party at that time, he would have been on the short leash of the executive committee of the party. Neither the leadership style of a genius nor Hitler’s personality allowed for a leadership by teamwork, particularly not in the case of a committee in which some members harbored—as was to become apparent in 1921—serious misgivings about his personality and ideas of leadership. If the party’s chairmanship really was offered to him, it must have appeared to Hitler as a poisoned chalice. To become the kind of leader that a genius was and that his personality allowed him to be, he had to wait for a situation to arise that would let him become a leader on his own terms.

  CHAPTER 9

  Hitler’s Pivot to the East

  (December 1920 to July 1921)

  On December 16, 1920, Hitler had more immediate problems to face than figuring out how best to deal with his siblings or to plot the long-term future of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP). Late that night, word reached Hitler, Hermann Esser, and Oskar Körner, the future deputy chairman of the party, that a sale was imminent of the Völkischer Beobachter, as Rudolf von Sebottendorff’s Münchener Beobachter was by then called, to Count Karl von Bothmer and his associates.1 This was very bad news indeed for the NSDAP.

  Sebottendorff, the former chairman of the Thule Society, had desperately tried for a while to sell the newspaper and its publishing house, the Eher Verlag, which was deep in the red. By the summer of 1920, things had reached the point where the former chairman of the deeply anti-Semitic society had even tried to sell the paper to the Central Association of German Citizens of Jewish Faith.2

  As long as the paper was still in the hands of Sebottendorff and his associates, it was a de facto organ of the German Socialist Party (DSP) but also was favorably predisposed to other völkisch parties.3 That situation was not ideal for the NSDAP, as the party was then concentrating its efforts on winning over Munich’s radical right-wingers, but at least the newspaper provided it with positive coverage. If, however, the Völkischer Beobachter was taken over by Bothmer, who had co-run Hitler’s propaganda course in 1919, it would become an organ of Bavarian separatist goals. It would therefore no longer support the NSDAP and, more likely than not, would attack it.

  The next twenty-four hours demonstrated Hitler’s extraordinary talent to turn on its head a crisis that he had not foreseen and emerge strengthened and victorious. On the evening of December 16, the NSDAP did not own a newspaper; it faced the risk that the city’s paper most sympathetic toward the party would turn against it; and it certainly had no funds with which to purchase a paper. By the following evening, Hitler’s party would own its own biweekly and thus would have its own mouthpiece, which would make it much easier for the NSDAP to make itself heard and thus to benefit from any future consolidation on the radical right in Munich.

  In the early hours of December 17, Hitler, Esser, and Körner rushed across town to western Munich to see Anton Drexler, the chairman of the NSDAP, arriving at his apartment at 2:00 a.m. Over the next several hours, they plotted how to take over the Völkischer Beobachter. Then, while it was still dark outside, the four headed northward through the narrow streets of Drexler’s working-class neighborhood to the elegant streets of Nymphenburg, where they rang an annoyed Dietrich Eckart out of his bed at 7:00 a.m.

  Once Eckart realized why Drexler, Hitler, Esser, and Körner stood on his doormat, he sprang into action. The party had to raise 120,000 marks by the afternoon to be able to beat Bothmer out of purchasing the Völkischer Beobachter. But the party did not have wealthy donors to whom to turn. The only Munich-based person willing to donate money to the NSDAP to purchase the newspaper was Wilhelm Gutberlet, a physician and Protestant migrant from rural northern Hesse who had joined the party the previous month. He held a 10,000-mark stake in the paper and in October had offered Drexler half of the stake he owned for free.4

  The only way for the NSDAP swiftly to raise necessary funds was for Eckart to put a mortgage on his property and possessions, which would take care of half of the amount, and to turn to his friend Gottfried Grandel in Augsburg to provide a loan for the remainder. Turning to a bank to secure a loan seems not to have been pursued as a viable option, probably because no bank loan could have been secured that quickly. Furthermore, for a group of men obsessed with an opposition to interest slavery, becoming indebted to a bank would not be the most desirable of choices. Drexler and Eckart next went to see General Franz Ritter von Epp. The general had set up his own militia, the Freikorps Epp, in the spring of 1919, which had been one of the most brutal militias when “white” forces put an end to the Munich Soviet Republic. Subsequently, Epp’s unit had been incorporated into the Reichswehr in Munich, where he had represented the reactionary end of the political spectrum.

  Approaching Epp proved successful: Drexler and Eckart obtained a 60,000-mark loan from Reichswehr funds available to Epp, secured by Eckart’s property and earthly possessions as collateral.5 No record of their conversation has survived, but Drexler and Eckart’s pitch is likely to have focused on keeping the Völkischer Beobachter from falling into the hands of separatists, rather than on making a positive case for the NSDAP.

  Hitler, meanwhile, rushed by train to Swabia to seek out Grandel, who owned a chemical plant in Augsburg and who had founded a NSDAP chapter in the city in August. Hitler quickly returned with a loan guarantee in his pocket for the remaining money needed to buy the paper.

  With Hitler back in Munich, everything was in place to purchase the Völkischer Beobachter. In the office of a notary, the deal was then sealed.6 As a result of Hitler’s ability to think on his feet the previous evening and respond quickly to new situations, the NSDAP, or to be more precise the National Socialist Workers’ Association, now owned its own newspaper and was in the pole position to become the leading group on the radical right in Munich.

  As the difficulty that the senior members of the NSDAP had encountered in quickly raising funds reveals, the doors to Munich’s upper crust still remained closed to Hitler. Only once in 1920 had he managed to gain access to the city’s establishment, thanks to his interest in the arts, not politics. His interest in opera scenic design had earned him an invitation to the villa of Clemens von Franckenstein, the former general intendant of Munich’s Royal Theatre. Yet as his friend Friedrich Reck recalled, Franckenstein came to regret his invitation to Hitler.

  When Reck, the son of a Prussian Conservative politician who had made Munich his home, arrived at Franckenstein’s villa, the butler informed him that somebody had forced himself in an hour earlier. As Reck entered the marble-walled room full of tapestries where people had assembled, he encountered that somebody—Adolf Hitler. “He had come to a house, where he had never been before, wearing gaiters, a floppy, wide-brimmed hat, and carrying a riding whip,” Reck recorded in his diary of the occasion. “There was a collie too.” Hitler looked totally out of place. He was reminded of “a cowboy’s sitting down on the steps of a baroque altar in leather breeches, spurs, and with a Colt at his side.” According to Reck, “Hitler sat there, the stereotype of a headwaiter—at that time he was thinner, and looked somewhat starved—both impressed and restr
icted by the presence of a real, live Herr Baron; awed, not quite daring to sit fully in his chair, but perched on half, more or less, of his thin loins; not caring at all that there was a great deal of cool and elegant irony in the things his host said to him, but snatching hungrily at the words, like a dog at pieces of raw meat.” All the while, Hitler kept on smacking “his boots continually with his riding whip.”

  Then Hitler sprang into action. He launched “into a speech. He talked on and on, endlessly. He preached. He went on at us like a division chaplain in the Army. We did not in the least contradict him, or venture to differ in any way, but he began to bellow at us. The servants thought we were being attacked, and rushed in to defend us.”

  It is hardly surprising that the diarist had not been taken with Hitler, as Reck and his Jewish lover were then living together. Everybody else at the gathering also felt underwhelmed by Hitler’s presence. “When he had gone,” Reck wrote, “we sat silently confused and not at all amused. There was a feeling of dismay, as when on a train you suddenly find you are sharing a compartment with a psychotic. We sat a long time and no one spoke. Finally, Clé [i.e., Clemens von Franckenstein] stood up, opened one of the huge windows, and let the spring air, warm with the föhn [as the southerly wind in southern Bavaria is called], into the room. It was not that our grim guest had been unclean, and had fouled the room in the way that so often happens in a Bavarian village. But the fresh air helped to dispel the feeling of oppression. It was not that an unclean body had been in the room, but something else: the unclean essence of a monstrosity.”7