by Thomas Weber
Hitler also developed a superior sense of timing in politics. Instinctively, he knew that if you plan everything and act too early and too inflexibly, you fail; also, that if you wait too long and do not respond swiftly to events, you become the prisoner of the events. His approach to politics, and the key to his success as a politician and subsequently as a statesman, is perhaps best expressed in the answer that he would give to Grand Admiral Erich Raeder on May 23, 1939, when asked about his plans: that there were three kinds of secrets about his future plans. The first were the secrets that he would tell him if no one else was around; the second were secrets he would keep to himself; while “the third ones are the problems of the future, which I don’t think through to the end.” Hitler also had a habit of telling members of his entourage that many problems did not need to be solved ahead of time, stating, “When the time is ripe, the matter will be settled one way or another.”21
The significance of Hitler’s conversations with Raeder and members of his entourage is that they reveal that he defined problems and their solutions only in broad terms and left their solutions to the future, whether the problem was how to take over the party or, for instance, how to solve big policy questions. Here we have in a nutshell why it is impossible to draw a direct line between Hitler’s broad policy goals as defined in the early 1920s and the realization of many of those goals in the early 1940s. The latter represent precisely the kind of “problems of the future” that Hitler had set aside to think through only when and if it became necessary for him to face them.
Was the “Jewish question” then a “problem of the future” that he would not solve yet? One possibility is that world war and genocide were “only” among a variety of potential futures that could follow from Hitler’s emerging ideas as he defined them in the early 1920s. Based on this possibility, what Hitler would do about the “Jewish question,” and when, would depend on the chaotic structure of the Third Reich, the cumulative radicalization of National Socialist policies in the 1930s and 1940s,22 the emerging international situation, and the initiatives taken by second- and third-tier decision makers who would take inspiration from Hitler’s broad policy goals as defined in the early 1920s. Another possibility, however, is that the Jewish question was of such importance to Hitler as to constitute a question of a different kind—one that he would not postpone until the 1930s and 1940s to figure out his preferred “final solution” to it.23
That issue aside, there can be no doubt that in most policy areas Hitler did not engage in much forward planning. Indeed, in one of his monologues at military HQ during the Second World War, he acknowledged that things often evolved in a way that he approved of but that he had not consciously planned ahead of time. On January 31, 1942, for example, he explained that he had set up the SA and the SS in a piecemeal fashion, without knowledge of Italian fascist paramilitary groups, and was surprised to see that they had evolved in a similar way:
None of these things was born from a long-term vision! The SS has evolved from little groups of seven or eight men: The most swashbuckling were joined into a squadron! That all came about actually quite unintentionally, and has taken a path that corresponds exactly to what has happened in Italy.
Hitler added that Mussolini himself acted in a similar fashion: “Il Duce told me once: Führer, when I began the fight against Bolshevism, I had no idea how all this would take place.”24
In the NSDAP, Hitler used his new dictatorial powers to curtail the influence of any group of people that had ever tried to use him merely as a tool to further their own interests. He would hold a grudge against them to his dying day. And he would continue to view them as potential future challengers to his authority. However, he only kicked people out of the party, as he had done in the case of Dickel, when there was no prospect that he would be able to transform them into a tool of his own. More typically, as he had done in the case of Drexler, Hitler would move people into positions with little or no real power, which would allow them to save face.
More often than not, he would continue to treat with politeness anyone with whom he had broken relations or against whom he held a grudge, as he disliked openly confronting people with whom he had been familiar. For instance, in March 1935, publisher Julius Friedrich Lehmann, not realizing how much he himself had been cut out by Hitler, would fault the leader of the NSDAP in a letter written on his deathbed yet apparently never delivered to its intended recipient, for the fact that “your own heart is too soft and good toward old comrades, even when they have been lacking.” Similarly, Franz Pfeffer von Salomon, who would head the SA in the second half of the 1920s, remarked that “Hitler didn’t separate himself from anyone in chucking them out. He ‘couldn’t,’ he said, and left it to others to take charge of these things when they were unavoidable—he had a certain ‘loyalty complex.’”25
In a number of cases, Hitler’s reluctance to purge his entourage Stalin style would cost him. For instance, Fritz Wiedemann, his commanding officer from the First World War who would serve Hitler as one of his adjutants during the peacetime years of the Third Reich, would offer his services to British intelligence and to US authorities after Hitler had broken with him. It was not for a lack of trying on Wiedemann’s part that his treason at the height of Germany’s triumphs in 1940 and 1941 would not bring down Hitler; rather, it was because the British and Americans would fail to take up Wiedemann on his offer.26
In the majority of cases, keeping the door open helped Hitler. It allowed him to approach people when he needed their help. This was particularly the case with Pan-Germans and members of the Thule Society—in other words, with those who had supported Karl Harrer’s vision of the party as a secret society over Hitler’s own competing vision.
Thus, after becoming leader of the NSDAP, Hitler continued going to Berlin to raise funds from Pan-German supporters there. He was also more than happy to accept money from Lehmann. Beyond that, he kept a distance from him, even though, time and time again, the publisher went out of his way to support him. Hitler was far less interested in Lehmann than the latter was in him; however, due to his continued politeness toward Lehmann, it is easy to overestimate the importance of such people as Lehmann for Hitler.27 It was the same kind of deceptive politeness that Hitler would display toward Baroness Lily von Abegg, which would result in the aristocrat donating her house in Munich to the NSDAP, even though behind her back Hitler would talk scathingly about her: “Her husband jumped into Lake Königssee, which is not surprising,” Hitler would tell his associates in military HQ on February 5, 1942. “I would have done the same! She has only had two admirers, one of them died, and the other went mad!”28
Julius Friedrich Lehmann was the most important driving force of the Pan-German League in Munich, and he also had been one of the most important members of the Thule Society during its heyday. Born in Zurich in 1864 to German parents and holding Swiss citizenship while growing up, Lehmann was one of the many Protestant non-Bavarians who had made Munich his home and who came to support the nascent DAP/NSDAP. He had set up his own publishing house in Bavaria’s capital, and then in March 1920, he had joined the party, while also remaining a member of the conservative German National People’s Party.29
Hitler’s lukewarm response to Lehmann was certainly not a result of their differing views on anti-Semitism, as in its ferocity the publisher’s attitude toward Jews easily matched Hitler’s Judeophobia. Even Lehmann’s wife, Melanie, despite her own nationalist views, was dismayed by her husband’s obsession with anti-Semitism. On September 11, 1919, she wrote in her diary that she just had read “out of duty, a book against the Jews—Judas Schuldbuch [The Guilt and Debt Book of Juda],” adding, “Julius just works so much in the anti-Semitic area. I find these one-sided diatribes appalling. I see that, yes, the excessive power of Judaism must be curbed, so that their dominance in the press doesn’t ruin our people, but I simply cannot bear it, and it contradicts my innermost sense of justice to make the Jews responsible for our current misery and f
or everything that has been brought about by our German weakness and lack of patriotism and national pride. [… ] It is difficult for Julius and me that in respect to this question, we are not in complete agreement. He storms with all the one-sidedness and indifference of the vanguard against the enemy.”30
Lehmann—whose publishing house specialized in medicine, racial hygiene, racial theory, anti-Semitism, as well as naval and military affairs—certainly thought that the books he published would be of great interest to Hitler. The approximately 1,200 surviving books held today at the Library of Congress in Washington, DC, from Hitler’s private library, which by 1945 totaled approximately 16,000 titles, include four books Lehmann published prior to 1924 that bear handwritten dedications to Hitler. It is impossible to tell the total number of books that Lehmann sent to Hitler prior to that year. Yet the surviving copies of books that Lehmann gave him, as well as others that Hitler either bought himself or that were given to him by other people, reveal Hitler’s reading preferences between the end of the First World War and his attempted coup of November 1923, and thus shed light on his evolving political ideas.31
Hitler sent regular polite but perfunctory notes to Lehmann, thanking him for the books he had sent, but kept his distance. In the mid-1920s, he still addressed him in a formal way as “Sehr verehrter Herr Lehmann!”32 It seems that Hitler shelved in his room on Thierschstraße most of the books that Lehmann sent to him without reading them. In fact, most of the books that Lehmann or other people gave him prior to 1923 neither have markings nor look as if they have been read extensively. Of the four surviving books sent by Lehmann, only the first thirty pages of Hugo Kerchnawe’s compendium of war memoirs by Austrian First World War veterans bear visible traces of having been read, even though the three other books were of a more political nature and include the most famous book on racial theory published in German in the twentieth century, Hans Günther’s Rassenkunde des deutschen Volkes (Racial Science of the German People). When Hitler did read items sent by Lehmann, they were far more likely to be war memoirs and naval calendars than books on radical theory. For instance, Hitler wrote to him in 1931, “My heartfelt thanks to you for sending me the latest releases from your publishing house, some of which I read with great interest. The statistical compilations are always of particular value for me, as in this case the ‘Handbook of the Air Force.’”33
The only time that Hitler seems to have written a long letter to Lehmann was when, on April 13, 1931, believing he was under attack by the Pan-German League, he was hoping that the publisher might intervene on his behalf. “If I turn against the activities of the Pan-German League or its press, then it is done simply for the reason that I am not willing to sit down at a table with those forces in the future, that at the first convenient and favorable opportunity, would betray me in such a dishonorable manner.” He would add: “But I still have a slight hope that even in the Pan-German League, that maybe there’s still a few men who might doubt the accuracy, usefulness, and the decency of the Deutsche Zeitung [the newspaper of the Pan-German League].”34
During the 1930s, though Lehmann and he lived in the same city, and despite his party’s almost always being short of money at that time, Hitler had no interest in socializing with the man who was possibly his biggest financial backer in Munich in the early years of the NSDAP. When Lehmann wrote Hitler a letter from his deathbed on March 12, 1935, he referred back to a personal encounter the two had had in 1923, in terms that indicate personal interactions between Hitler and him had been unusual events: “12 years ago you paid me a visit in my publishing house, and I used this opportunity then to appeal to you myself.”35 The failure of Hitler and Munich’s most important publisher of books on right-wing racial theory to meet regularly would be most odd had it not been for Hitler’s disdain for people he associated, rightly or wrongly, with Harrer’s vision of the party. Yet his attempt to keep Lehmann at arm’s length might also have had a different reason.
Curiously, prior to the writing of Mein Kampf, Hitler never displayed any real interest in racial theory. For him, race was only of interest as a tool with which to create an antithesis between Jews and “Aryans.” This allowed him to talk about the harmful influence of Jews in spreading finance capitalism and Bolshevism much in the same way that Chamberlain had talked about race. Hitler did not display much of an interest in “black” or “yellow” races.36
Unlike later editions of Hans Günther’s Rassenkunde des deutschen Volkes that are among Hitler’s surviving books in the Library of Congress, the 1923 edition of Günther’s book given by Lehmann to Hitler does not bear visible marks of having been read extensively.37 Günther, a literary scholar turned social anthropologist from Freiburg in southwest Germany, had originally published Rassenkunde in the previous year. The book, which includes more than five hundred illustrations, lays out in graphic detail a racial hierarchy topped by a Nordic race and attributes characteristics as well as bodily features to each race. In the future, Günther’s ideas would leave a deep imprint both on Hitler and on the policies relating to “racial purity” implemented by the Third Reich, including those resulting in the Holocaust. Yet for now, and even though, in a nod to those in the party obsessed with racial ideas, Günther’s book made it onto a list of forty-one books that were listed as reading recommendations on the back of NSDAP membership cards issued in 1923,38 his impact on Hitler was limited. At a time when Hitler advocated an alliance with Russian monarchists and subscribed to a belief in an Aryan tradition that left room for Greek and Roman traditions, Günther’s ideas had a limited appeal to him.
Hitler displayed even less interest in works on Nordic occultism and mysticism. Sometimes supporters gave him occultist books or other titles into which they scribbled dedications that contained references to occultism. For instance, for his birthday in 1921, Babette Steininger, a doctor specializing in lung disease and an early member of the NSDAP, gave him a copy of Nationalismus (Nationalism) by Bengali writer Rabindranath Tagore, into which she had inscribed “logare, wodan wigiponar. To Herr Adolf Hitler, my dear Armanen brother.” By referring to Hitler as her “Armanen brother,” she aligned herself with the Austrian occultist Guido von List.39
We cannot know how much of Tagore’s book Hitler read. However, the page in the book that discusses “the problem of race” clearly was read, as it features a small hole that was repaired and covered up again. Whatever Hitler might have made of the discussion of race by the Bengali writer, the fact that Steininger gave the book to Hitler suggests that people who knew Hitler personally in 1921 did not associate Günther’s kind of racism with him at the time. “But since the beginning of our history, India has always clearly seen its problem—the racial problem,” wrote Rabindranath Tagore. Tagore believed that different races had to find a way to live with one another. “[India] has sought for different races to coexist, to retain the real differences where they exist and nevertheless find a common ground. This common ground has been discovered by our revered holy men, like Nanak, Kabir, Chaitanya, and others—who preached the oneness of God to all races of India.”40
In addition to a book that was published in 1921 as part of a series about alchemy, the Kabbalah (Jewish esoteric thought), freemasonry, witches, and devils, Hitler was given a fair number of titles about occultist and other ideas by enthusiasts of the prehistoric Germanic past.41 However, he did not care about the study of runes and prehistoric pagan cults and did not yearn for a revival of an ancient Germanic past. Hitler believed, at least initially, in Aryanism rather than in a specifically Nordic tradition. His Aryanism entailed a belief in a European superiority that, as alluded to earlier, was built on Hellenic and Roman traditions. His rejection of Nordic cults was also aesthetic, as artistically, too, he saw himself in the traditions of Greece and Rome.42 Hitler loved Renaissance art, and he loved Verdi’s operas almost as much as he adored Wagner’s.43
In Mein Kampf, Hitler would lash out at people interested in occultism and mysticism: “On the whole
, even then and also in the time following I had to warn again and again against those wandering German folkish scholars whose positive achievement is always equal to naught, but whose conceit can hardly be excelled.” His assault against those obsessed with prehistoric Germany has to be read as a full-out attack on the Thule Society and those who had tried to implement a Thule vision when building up the DAP/NSDAP: “As little as a businessman, who in forty years’ activity has methodically ruined a big business, is suited to become the founder of a new one, just as little is such a folk Methuselah (who in the same time messed up a great idea and brought it to calcification) suitable for the leadership of a new and young movement!” Hitler continued,
The characteristic of most of these natures is that they abound in old Germanic heroism, that they revel in the dim past, stone axes, spear and shield, but that in nature they are the greatest cowards imaginable. For the same people who wave about old Germanic tin swords carefully imitated, and wear a prepared bearskin with bull’s horns covering their bearded heads always preach for the present only the fight with spiritual weapons and flee quickly in sight of every communist blackjack. Posterity will have little cause for glorifying their heroic existence in a new epic.44
