Becoming Hitler

by Thomas Weber

  Even though, in 1920, those in charge of Bavaria had created the conditions that had allowed Hitler and the NSDAP to thrive, the social world of the rich and influential had for the time being remained inaccessible to Hitler.8 As Hitler’s behavior at Franckenstein’s house epitomizes, he was a misfit in Munich upper-class society who failed to connect with the members of the city’s establishment. Their reluctance to open their doors to Hitler created a huge financial challenge for him and the party. Although the NSDAP had managed to purchase the Völkischer Beobachter, the party’s financial problems had not gone away. When it came to securing generous donations, Munich continued to be forbidding terrain for Hitler and the NSDAP.

  If anything, the financial worries of the party had increased. Not only did it have to find funds to repay the loans it had received to buy the newspaper and the Eher Verlag, it was now also liable for the huge debts that the publishing house had accumulated prior to its sale. And it had to raise cash for the day-to-day running of the party as well as to keep Hitler afloat.

  In the months to come, the NSDAP would obtain most of its money in the form of donations of 10 marks each from its rank-and-file members. Yet to Gottfried Grandel’s annoyance, it would never raise sufficient funds to repay him. In the summer of 1921, Rudolf Heß would still have to tell his cousin Milly that, while party members with extremely limited funds were generous in giving money to the NSDAP, the party had totally failed to secure large donations. For some time to come, Hitler himself often had to rely financially and materially on the goodwill of people with limited means, such as Anna Schweyer, a neighbor of his who ran a greengrocer’s shop on Thierschstrasse, or his neighbor Otto Gahr and his wife, Karoline, who provided him regularly with eggs.9

  In the wake of the purchase of the Völkischer Beobachter, Hitler and Eckart certainly did solicit support from wealthy individuals. However, in Munich the two simply did not get very far. According to Hermann Esser, Adolf Dresler, who had joined the NSDAP in 1921, and a woman who worked in the headquarters of the party, the NSDAP received considerable financial support in southern Bavaria in its early years from only a small number of individuals, chiefly a physician, a publisher, a businessman, and a dentist. Presumably the physician was Wilhelm Gutberlet, the Protestant migrant from northern Hesse; the businessman is likely to have been Gottfried Grandel from Augsburg; the publisher almost certainly was Julius Friedrich Lehmann, while the dentist was Friedrich Krohn, who had previously lived in Alsace and Switzerland and had only moved to southern Bavaria in 1917. Subsequently, a Fräulein Doernberg, about whom is known only that she was a friend of a female Munich physician; a Baltic baroness living in Munich (most likely the widow of Friedrich Wilhelm von Seydlitz, who was one of the Thule members executed in the dying days of the Soviet Republic); and a cousin of Dietrich Eckart’s who lived outside Munich would also freely give money to the party. Hitler also had to rely on the goodwill of Johannes Dingfelder, the physician who had been the main speaker on the night that the party had announced its platform, and on a Herr Voll, the owner of a stationery store in Munich. The party was often so short of funds that Herr Voll went from house to house among his friends and acquaintances to ask for donations, while Hitler waited in the apartment of his benefactor until the early hours of the morning, hoping that Voll would return with enough money to bring out the next issue of the Völkischer Beobachter.10

  Due to the difficulty in raising money in Munich, Eckart and Hitler traveled back to Berlin shortly after purchasing the Völkischer Beobachter. From his time in German’s capital city before the war, Eckart was much better connected in Berlin than he was in Munich. There, unlike in Bavaria’s capital, he could open doors to the houses of some of the rich and powerful. In the months and years to come, he and Hitler would return to Berlin fairly frequently to continue to raise the kind of funds they were unable to obtain in Munich. The two seem to have been particularly successful in those efforts with senior figures of one of Germany’s leading ultranationalist organizations, the Pan-German League. Furthermore, in 1923 they would receive a large donation from Richard Franck, a Berlin-based coffee merchant.11

  During one of their early visits to Berlin, Eckart introduced Hitler to Helene and Edwin Bechstein, the owners of the piano maker of the same name. The Pan-German sympathizers would become two of Hitler’s most loyal supporters in the years to come. It was through them that he received his first entrée into upper-class society. Every time he would travel to Berlin, he would visit the Bechsteins in their elegant eighteenth-century villa in Berlin-Mitte. With them, and with Helene in particular, he spoke of more than politics. Over tea, they would talk about their shared love for Wagner and about life in general. Over time, Helene would start to treat Hitler like a son rather than a political visitor. In 1924, she would indeed tell the police, “I wished Hitler was my son.” Even though politics were seldom at the center of their conversations, the Bechsteins would open their coffers time and again to give money to the party and to Hitler personally.12

  Back in Munich, Eckart continued to introduce Hitler to people he thought would be of interest to him. Yet unlike in Berlin, those to whom Eckart introduced Hitler in Munich were predominantly from the city’s conservative arts scene. For instance, Eckart brought together Hitler and photographer Heinrich Hoffmann, who had taken the photo at Eisner’s funeral march that may depict Hitler. It cannot be established whether Eckart had already introduced Hoffmann and Hitler early on, or only in 1923. Whatever the case, in 1923 the two would start to grow very close, so much so that it would be in Hoffmann’s atelier that Hitler first met Eva Braun, his lover and future wife, who worked for Hoffmann. One of the many things the two men had in common was that each had been willing to serve masters on both sides of the political divide. Many of the photographs Hoffmann had taken of Eisner and other revolutionary leaders had made it into a book entitled Ein Jahr bayerische Revolution im Bilde (A Year of Revolution in Bavaria in Pictures), with a print run of 120,000 copies, published in 1919.13

  As Hitler had not managed by 1921 to charm his way into the houses of the rich and influential of Bavaria’s capital city, his route to success would bypass the salons of Munich’s upper-class society, running instead through the smoked-filled beer halls and restaurants of the city. And with the Völkischer Beobachter, the NSDAP now could carry its message directly into the homes of its sympathizers.

  One of the immediate changes visible in the line taken by the Völkischer Beobachter after becoming the official biweekly newspaper of the NSDAP was its approach to Turkish affairs. Previously, it had not taken much of an interest in Asia Minor. If anything, it had reported negatively about the state of affairs in Anatolia, even though, or because, its previous owner, Rudolf von Sebottendorff, was an Ottoman citizen.14 With the purchase of the paper by the NSDAP, all this changed overnight and Turkey became as prominent a topic as it already had been in newspapers and magazines elsewhere across the German political spectrum.

  Turkish affairs were much on the mind of Germans in the aftermath of the First World War. Although liberal and left-wing public opinion hotly debated the fate of the Armenians at the hands of Ottoman authorities during the war, which had resulted in up to 1.5 million deaths, Turkey was of high importance to right-wingers for a different reason: they admired and took inspiration from the refusal of Turkey to accept the punitive terms of the Treaty of Sèvres—the peace treaty between the victor powers of the First World War and the Ottoman Empire—as they viewed it to be of the same character as the Versailles Treaty. They also admired the defiance displayed by Turkey’s new leader, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, and his emerging political movement toward the allied occupation of Turkey, and advocated that Germans take inspiration from Atatürk as to how best to respond to the victor powers of the First World War.15

  Now that the NSDAP owned the Völkischer Beobachter, the paper started to celebrate Turkey’s “heroism” and presented the country as a role model both for defying the victor powers of the
First World War and for setting up a state from which Germans had much to learn. For instance, on February 6, 1921, the newspaper stated, “Today the Turks are the most youthful nation. The German nation will one day have no other choice but to resort to Turkish methods as well.”16

  Turkey interested early National Socialists not just because of Kemalist actions in the wake of the war, but also because a surprising number of people who moved within the party’s orbit—including Hitler’s erstwhile paternal mentor, Karl Mayr, and Rudolf von Sebottendorff—had recently had firsthand exposure to Turkey. The seniormost early National Socialist with firsthand experience of Asia Minor was Max Erwin von Scheubner-Richter, who had served as German vice consul in Erzurum in eastern Anatolia during the war. While serving in Erzurum, he had witnessed the ethnic cleansing, with genocidal consequences, of Armenians. He had been so shocked by what he had witnessed that he had sent urgent cables to the German embassy in Constantinople in the hope of reversing anti-Armenian policies.17

  Five years after witnessing the plight of the Armenians, Scheubner-Richter was introduced to Hitler. Soon after their first encounter in late 1920, the two men became close. Eventually, Scheubner-Richter would become Hitler’s possibly most important foreign policy adviser. Even though he had entered the scene around the same time as the party purchased the Völkischer Beoebachter and started to present Turkey as a source of inspiration for Germany, Scheubner-Richter’s own negative experiences in Erzurum make him an unlikely source for the admiration displayed by early National Socialists toward Turkey. Instead, he was far more important for advising Hitler on Russian affairs once Hitler’s gaze had shifted toward the East in 1920 and 1921.

  Scheubner-Richter’s preoccupation with Russian affairs was personal. Born as Max Erwin Richter in Riga five years prior to Hitler’s birth, he had grown up among Baltic Germans at a time when ethnic Germans had dominated the upper echelons of the Russian imperial military and civil service. His experience of coming of age as a Baltic German in the tsarist empire at a time of increasing social and political unrest would dominate his life and actions to his dying day. In that, Hitler’s future foreign policy adviser was a typical product of the Baltic provinces of the late tsarist empire. Yet beyond that, there was little that was typical about Max Richter. In fact, beyond his looks—he was nearly bald and had a moustache—there was nothing ordinary about Hitler’s foreign policy adviser. He was a daring adventurer full of willpower and ambition.

  In 1905, Richter had fought in a Cossack unit against revolutionaries during the Russian revolution of that year. Soon thereafter, he had immigrated to Germany, settling in Munich in 1910. One year later, in 1911, Max Erwin Richter had turned into Max Erwin von Scheubner-Richter when he married an aristocrat more than twice his age, Mathilde von Scheubner. In order for him to acquire her name and to become an aristocrat himself, he had his wife’s aunt legally adopt him in 1912. During the First World War, Scheubner-Richter had volunteered for the Bavarian Army, just as Hitler had. After a stint on the western front, he had been transferred to the Ottoman Empire, where even though not a diplomat he had been deployed as vice consul to Erzurum.

  Subsequently, following a secret mission on horseback to Mesopotamia and Persia and a short stint as an intelligence officer on the western front, Scheubner-Richter had been sent by the political section of the Army Chief of Staff on a special mission to Stockholm to initiate contacts with anti-Bolshevik groups in the tsarist empire. His work for the Army Chief of Staff had brought him together with arguably the most powerful man in Germany after Kaiser Wilhelm, General Erich Ludendorff, who made Scheubner-Richter his protégé. Toward the end of the war, Scheubner-Richter had been tasked with setting up an anti-Bolshevik secret service in the German-occupied Baltic. In early 1919, his life had almost come to a premature end when Bolshevik forces arrested him in Latvia during the civil war that had ensued in the region and a revolutionary tribunal condemned him to death. It was only through the pressure that the German Foreign Office exerted on Latvian Bolshevik leaders that the death penalty was not carried out and that he was allowed to return to Germany. Scheubner-Richter had then settled in Berlin, moving in völkisch as well as Baltic German and “white” Russian émigré circles and participating in the Kapp Putsch.18

  After the putsch had failed, Scheubner-Richter, as well as many other Baltic Germans and “white” Russian émigrés, many of whom were aristocrats, former high-level officials, and officers, had joined the exodus to Bavaria, where the Bavarian government under Gustav von Kahr provided them refuge. Munich now became the center for monarchist émigrés in Germany. At its peak in 1921, the “white” émigré population in Munich stood at 1,105 members. The number of Scheubner-Richter’s fellow Baltic German émigrés also swelled rapidly. By 1923, approximately 530 Baltic Germans would have made Munich their adopted home.

  In Bavaria’s capital, Scheubner-Richter had stepped up his activities aimed at restoring the monarchy in Russia and Germany. From mid-June to late October 1920, he headed a mission to the Crimean Peninsula in the mistaken belief that “‘white” troops were still in the ascendancy in the region. By late October he was back in Munich. There, he grew close to fellow members of his student fraternity in Riga, the Rubenia, who, like him, had immigrated to Bavaria’s capital city. One of them was Alfred Rosenberg, who by that time had joined and risen to prominence in the NSDAP and who was to become one of the party’s leading ideologues. It was Rosenberg who introduced Scheubner-Richter to Hitler in November 1920.19

  Shortly following their first encounter, Scheubner-Richter attended a talk by Hitler. Impressed by both the speech and their meeting, the Baltic German adventurer joined the party soon thereafter and started advising Hitler at the very time when, increasingly often, Hitler was speaking about Russia. Yet Scheubner-Richter’s influence on him still lay in the future, as he was not responsible for Hitler’s initial turn toward the East. In fact, Hitler’s speeches had already been full of references to Russia by the time Scheubner-Richter first attended any of them. For instance, on November 19, 1920, Hitler had declared that the Soviet Union was unable to feed even its own people, despite being an agrarian state, “as long as the Bolsheviks govern under Jewish rule.” He had told his audience that Moscow, Vienna, and Berlin were all under Jewish control, concluding that reconstruction would occur in none of these places as Jews were the servants of international capital.20

  Hitler’s growing interest in the East had been under way for a while at that point. For instance, according to a police report, in his talk of April 27, 1920, in the Hofbräuhaus, he had “reported about Russia, which has been destroyed economically, the 12-hour workday there, the Jewish whip, the mass murder of the intelligentsia etc. which earned him rich applause.” By mid-1920, Hitler had started to see Russia as Germany’s natural ally against the power of the Anglo-American world. Being deeply anti-Western but not yet anti-Eastern, he had told his audience on July 21, 1920: “Our salvation will never come from the West. We must pursue an alliance [the German term Allianz denotes, in fact, something even stronger than an alliance] with nationalist, anti-Semitic Russia. Not with the Soviet [… ] that is where the Jew rules [… ] A Moscow International will not support us. Rather it would enslave us eternally.” A week later, he raised the possibility of an alliance with Russia, “if Judaism will be deposed of [there].”21

  Hitler’s speeches now displayed a growing interest not only in the East but also in anti-Bolshevik anti-Semitism. Yet, unlike, for instance, Prince Georg von Bayern and Munich’s archbishop Michael von Faulhaber, he was not driven primarily by fear of a Bolshevik invasion. His growing interest in Russia was of an entirely different nature. It was fueled by geopolitical considerations dating back to Hitler’s initial politicization and radicalization, as well as by his goal of creating a Germany that would be strong enough internally and externally to survive sustainably in a rapidly changing world. The shift of his interests was not from a preoccupation with an anticapitalist to
an anti-Bolshevik anti-Semitism. Rather it was from a focus on national economics as the key to reforming Germany to one on geopolitical considerations.

  According to his thinking, there had to be a “unification” (Anschluss) with Russia because Hitler thought at the time that Germany could not survive on its own. He concluded that to be strong enough to be on equal footing with Britain and America—i.e., Germany’s “absolute” enemies—Germany and Russia had to become allies and partners. Hitler’s ultimate preoccupation was with Anglo-American, not Bolshevik, power. Yet, for the time being, Hitler’s solution for creating a Germany that would be as strong as the most powerful empires in the world was not to grab new territory. His goal was not to acquire Lebensraum, “living space,” but to join forces with Russia.

  The implication of Hitler’s statement in his speech of July 21, 1920, was that with a permanent and lasting alliance with Russia, Germany would gain secure eastern borders; it would have access to food and natural resources from the Rhine to the Pacific Ocean; and the combined military, political, and economic power of a united Russia and Germany was such that it would be on equal footing with the British Empire and the United States.

  Russia’s supposedly Bolshevik Jews were a concern to him not because he feared an imminent Bolshevik invasion, but because, in his mind, they stood in the way of a German-Russian alliance. And even though his anti-Semitism was anti-Bolshevik in the sense that he equated Judaism with Bolshevism, the hierarchy within Hitler’s anti-Semitism remained intact: its anti-Bolshevism of secondary importance to its anticapitalism. The focus of his anti-Semitism now lay on presenting Bolshevism as a conspiracy of Jewish financiers, rather than on a Gottfried Feder–style warning against interest slavery. As Hitler made clear in his speech of November 19, 1920, he believed that Bolshevik Jews were nothing but the servants of international capital. For Hitler, anti-Bolshevik anti-Semitism continued to be a function of his anticapitalist anti-Semitism, even though he now invoked Bolshevism more often than he had in the past. Unlike in the past, he now concentrated more on how Jewish bankers used Bolshevism as a tool to control and neutralize the working classes, rather than on how they exploited people through charging interest.