Becoming Hitler

by Thomas Weber

  In the spring of 1919, he had left the city in the wake of the establishment of the Soviet Republic and joined the Second Marine Brigade (Wilhelmshaven), Division Lettow-Vorbeck, where he had been in charge of propaganda. In early May, he had been among the troops that had put an end to the Soviet Republic. It had been during that time that Koerber had started to see Bolshevism as a global danger, which would continue to be his primary concern for many years to come.23

  Even though he had left the armed forces in July 1919, he had participated in the ill-fated Kapp Putsch the following spring. All the while, Koerber’s anti-Semitism had intensified, as a letter he wrote to his brother in the spring of 1922 testifies: “Today racial research has advanced far enough to recognize and prove how international Jewry through its people has purposefully spurred the decay of the Germans.” Koerber had been eager to turn his anti-Semitism into a living: “I’ve been trying for weeks to find employment,” he told his brother. “Everywhere people prefer to fire than hire. Besides it is in and of itself very difficult to find something suitable. Propaganda work for the national party, anti-Semitism which is blossoming here greatly, would be suitable. But these positions are rare and lousily paid at that.”24

  Yet later in the year, his fortunes had been starting to improve. He had traveled for several months to Finland on an anti-Bolshevik mission to study how the Finns had defeated the Russians in the winter of 1918/1919 and gained national independence. After his return from Scandinavia to Bavaria’s capital in mid-October 1922, he had started to work as a correspondent for three Finnish newspapers. However, as he had complained to his brother, things still looked dire, and not just because the Finnish newspapers for which he had been writing had been unreliable in paying him: “We are simply physically collapsing here. What is the point of all the hard work, all the status, honor and fame. Jewry wants to destroy all intelligence and the middle class like in Russia. [The people] is running into its own ruin! We are working with all our might to rip the mask off Jewry.”25

  Even though he had not been paid for several of his articles, his new job had paid off politically for him. As a result of his work as a foreign correspondent, he had made contact with Ludendorff, whom he had previously met during the war and whom he admired with youthful optimism. Just like Ulrich von Hassell—the conservative who had written a manifesto about the future of conservatism in the wake of the First World War—Koerber believed that there was no going back to the conservatism of old. He held that the social question needed to be addressed. And he was of the opinion that the working and middle classes could plant the seed from which a new and rejuvenated Germany would grow. Koerber thus saw in Ludendorff’s evolving collaboration with Hitler the realization of the dream of a new kind of conservatism that would reinvigorate Germany.26 It was difficult to imagine a better conservative writer than Koerber as the face of Hitler’s book.

  After Ludendorff introduced Hitler to Koerber at his house and the deal between the two men regarding Hitler’s book was sealed, the young aristocrat and the leader of the NSDAP only met twice more face-to-face. The book appeared that autumn under the title Adolf Hitler, sein Leben, seine Reden (Adolf Hitler: His Life and His Speeches).27 As the book was on sale for only a few weeks before it was banned and confiscated, its impact was far more limited than Hitler had hoped and intended, even though it had had a print run of seventy thousand copies. Yet the book matters less for its actual impact on conservatives across Germany than for the light it sheds on how Hitler saw himself by the autumn of 1923 and on how he tried to recast himself at the time so as to become a national right-wing leader rather than a stateless political activist who had to live with the threat of deportation, as he had been earlier in the year.

  The book belies the idea, to which Hitler occasionally paid lip service,28 that until the writing of Mein Kampf he saw himself only as a “drummer” who was doing the bidding of others and had no ambitions to lead Germany into the future.29 In his autobiographical sketch, he put into the mouth of Koerber his own determination that he was “the leader of the most radically honest national movement.” Further, the autobiographical sketch described him as the “architect” (Baumeister) who “is building the mighty German cathedral.” And it urged the people to hand power over to him as the man “who is ready as well as prepared to lead the German struggle for liberation.”30

  As Hitler’s earlier call for a genius to become Germany’s new leader indicates, it would be odd to argue that he merely wanted to play the role of “drummer” to some other, new genius. As, according to the thinking of the time, geniuses were not established figures but people of backgrounds and life stories very much like his own, why would he have wanted to be “drummer” to a person like himself, rather than be that person himself? Furthermore, the very fact that in 1921 Hitler had only accepted the position of leader of the NSDAP on the condition that he was given dictatorial powers points to a man who did not want to be just a propagandist for somebody else.31

  Hitler’s 1923 book demonstrates that not only did other people see a “messiah” in him,32 but—as his spat with Dietrich Eckart over the summer had already indicated—he did so himself. His autobiographical sketch repeatedly uses biblical language, arguing that the book brought out under Koerber’s name should “become the new bible of today as well as the ‘Book of the German People’!” It also uses terms such as holy and deliverance.33 Most important, it directly compares Hitler to Jesus, likening the purported moment of his politicization in Pasewalk to Jesus’s resurrection:

  This man, destined to eternal night, who during this hour endured crucifixion on pitiless Calvary, who suffered in body and soul; one of the most wretched from among this crowd of broken heroes: this man’s eyes shall be opened! Calm shall be restored to his convulsed features. In the ecstasy that is only granted to the dying seer, his dead eyes shall be filled with new light, new splendor, new life!34

  Occasionally, Hitler previously had compared both himself and his party to Jesus or described Jesus as his role model.35 Elsewhere, too, Hitler left no doubt that he already saw himself as Germany’s savior. It would not be just in the run-up to the Second World War and during the conflict, when he would survive several assassination attempts, that Hitler would believe himself to have been protected by “providence.” But he already considered himself to have been chosen by “providence” in 1923, as became apparent during one of the weekends in September and October that he and Alfred Rosenberg spent with Helene Hanfstaengl in the summer house of the Hanfstaengls in Uffing am Staffelsee, a small, picturesque village in the foothills of the Alps. During those weekends, with their hostess, Rosenberg and Hitler pursued the latter’s favorite pastime: in his red Mercedes, they explored the castles and villages lying in the foothills of the Alps, even though Hitler never learned to drive himself.36 If we can trust Helene’s testimony, he told her on one occasion when his car ended up in a ditch but they were not injured, “This will not be the only accident which will leave me unharmed. I shall come through them all and succeed in my plans.”37

  The reason that Hitler, despite seeing himself as Germany’s messiah and savior, nevertheless occasionally pretended to be merely the “drummer” for somebody else is quite simple.38 He had to square the circle: On the one hand, he desired to boost his own national profile through the publication of his book and the release of photos depicting him and thus to put himself in a position by which to head a national revolution. On the other hand, he was dependent on the support of both the conservative Bavarian political establishment and Ludendorff as well as conservatives in the north, and he wanted to be piggybacked to power by them. In short, he was trying to make a direct pitch to Germany’s conservatives and attempting to create the impression that his support among them was already larger than it really was, all while trying to avoid antagonizing their leaders.

  As Ludendorff as well as other conservative leaders in Bavaria and the north had political ambitions of their own and saw in Hitler a t
ool they could use for their own ends, Hitler had to pretend that he was willing to play that role throughout the summer and autumn of 1923. The several surviving letters that Ludendorff wrote to Koerber both before and after the upcoming putsch extensively ponder about the differences between a “national” and “völkisch” vision of Germany. The letters also discuss at length the legacy of Bismarck. Yet the leader of the NSDAP does not feature in them. By not mentioning Hitler, the letters reveal how much Ludendorff saw him as just a tool to further his own plans.39

  Therefore, Hitler could not state openly that he saw himself as a genius and messiah, even though he had told his confidants as early as 1922 that he himself wanted to lead Germany.40 Publicly, he had to pay lip service to being a drummer. And yet, Hitler’s unknown first book, published under Victor von Koerber’s name, presented Hitler and Ludendorff as leaders of equal stature. Its biographical sketch stated that as Germany was awakening politically: “General Ludendorff and Hitler would stand side by side! The two great leaders [Kampfführer] from the past and the present! A military leader [Feldherr] and a man of the people [Volksmann]! [… ] Leadership of an invincible kind from which the German people rightly expect a better future!”41 This was as far as Hitler could go at the time in presenting himself as Germany’s savior and messiah, because Ludendorff “saw in Hitler, whom he did not take seriously,” as Victor von Koerber was to recall, “a popular drummer for the mass movement against communism.”42

  The way Hitler wrote and launched his first book under another writer’s name, as well as many of his other actions between the joining of the DAP and the autumn of 1923, reveal a canny, knowing, and conniving political operator in the making. The Hitler that comes to the fore belies that he was a primitive, raging, and nihilistic dark elemental force. Rather, he was a man with an emerging deep understanding of how political processes, systems, and the public sphere worked. His wartime study of propaganda techniques had provided him with an appreciation of the importance of constructing politically useful and effective narratives that would help him plot his way to power.

  His occasional insistence merely to be the “drummer” for somebody else, as well as his earlier ostensible reluctance to accept becoming the leader of the NSDAP, has to be seen in the Western tradition and expectation, dating back to Roman times, according to which future leaders pretend to be disinterested in power, even while spending all their time seeking to acquire it. They do so both for tactical reasons and to adhere to the popular belief that somebody pushing too hard for power is not to be trusted. Julius Caesar had famously turned down the Roman crown three times. William Shakespeare, who in early twentieth-century Germany was just as popular as in his native England, has one of Caesar’s assassins say in Julius Caesar, when being asked to confirm that, “Ay, marry, was’t, and he put it by thrice, every time gentler than other; and at every putting-by mind honest neighbours shouted.”

  The assassin makes it perfectly clear that Caesar’s rejection was the opposite of what he attempted to achieve:

  I saw Mark Antony offer him a crown; yet ’twas not a crown neither, ’twas one of these coronets; and, as I told you, he put it by once; but, for all that, to my thinking, he would fain have had it. Then he offered it to him again; then he put it by again; but, to my thinking, he was very loath to lay his fingers off it. And then he offered it the third time; he put it the third time by; and still as he refused it the rabblement shouted and clapped their chopped hands, and threw up their sweaty night-caps, and uttered such a deal of stinking breath because Caesar refused the crown, that it had almost choked Caesar; for he swounded and fell down at it: and for mine own part, I durst not laugh, for fear of opening my lips and receiving the bad air.43

  Writing an autobiography and then releasing it as a biography under somebody else’s name, in combination with the speeches he gave under his own name, helped Hitler in his endeavor to create a politically useful narrative. It made the case for a new kind of leader. While not explicitly naming him as that leader, it insidiously created the public perception of a gap that only he could fill, because the call for a “genius” ruled out anyone with a long-established public profile. In short, Hitler, as a conniving political operator, used his 1923 book to exploit the way the German political system and the public sphere worked, so as systematically to build a place for himself. However, his emerging talents as a scheming political operator fed his megalomania, resulting in a premature grab for power. As he would soon learn the hard way, he was still a political operator in training rather than the master that he thought he was.

  Victor von Koerber’s subsequent life, meanwhile, would run parallel to that of Karl Mayr, Hitler’s erstwhile political mentor, who would become Koerber’s close friend. Both men had been intimately linked to—and were to some extent responsible for—Hitler’s rise, yet they would both turn against him. They would both fight a losing battle in their attempt to close the Pandora’s box they had opened when aiding Hitler, ending their lives in Nazi concentration camps.

  In 1924, Koerber would start to grow disillusioned with National Socialism and ultimately broke with both Hitler and his party. As Koerber would write to Crown Prince Wilhelm, the eldest son of Kaiser Wilhelm II, in 1926, with whom he was friendly: “The Hitler movement is in such dire and disgraceful straits that there can be no doubt that it is practically finished. It is a pity in many respects. It is a pity for the people whose faith has been betrayed.”44

  In the same year, the paramilitary Jungdeutscher Orden (Young German Order), of which he was not a member, would send Koerber for nine months to France to make contact with French veteran associations and sound out the possibility of a Franco-German rapprochement. In the late 1920s, he would advocate Franco-German political and economic integration as the nucleus of a unification of Europe, which he would deem as the only way for Europe to be able to be on equal footing with the United States and thus to survive. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, he would write regularly for the Viennese daily Neues Wiener Journal as well as for the newspapers of the liberal Jewish Ullstein publishing house, in which he would warn against Bolshevism and German collaboration with Russian Bolshevism as well as against National Socialists, in whom he discerned “Hitler Bolsheviks.” For him, Bolshevism and Hitler’s National Socialism would be two sides of the same coin. As early as the spring of 1931, he would deem “today’s Hitler movement the greatest danger that our Fatherland ever had to face.” The following year, he would argue that if Hitler came to power, Germany’s ultimate downfall would be inevitable.45

  From 1927 onward until Mayr’s flight to France in 1933, Mayr would visit Koerber every week in Berlin. The two men who had both played such important roles in Hitler’s life would sit at the round table in Koerber’s apartment and exchange intelligence, work on political articles together, and collaborate on initiatives aimed at bringing about a Franco-German rapprochement.46

  After 1933, Koerber would pass secrets about Hitler’s plans to successive British military attachés, warning the British in 1938 that war was imminent. He would urge the British government to support the conservative German resistance movement, which, according to him, had grown due to, among other reasons, the inhuman treatment of Jews and the threat of war. Like Fritz Wiedemann—Hitler’s commanding officer from the First World War who would serve as one of his personal adjutants until 1938, when he would turn against Hitler and offer his services to the British and the Americans—Koerber would advocate the restoration of the monarchy under Crown Prince Wilhelm.47

  After Kristallnacht, Koerber, who had repented of his rabid anti-Semitism, hid Jewish newspaper tycoon and publisher Hermann Ullstein in his apartment and helped him immigrate to England. Koerber would be arrested the day following the failed attempt on Hitler’s life of July 20, 1944, and spend the rest of the war in a Gestapo prison and in Sachsenhausen concentration camp. At the end of the war, he would return to the island of Rügen but ultimately flee the Soviet-occupied zone of Germany for
the West, becoming the editor in chief of the Europäische Illustrierte as well as the press chief of the Marshall Plan administration in the French-occupied zone of Germany. In the early 1950s, he would be involved in high-level initiatives aimed at European integration before relocating to the Côte d’Azur in 1957 and then to Lugano in Switzerland in the mid-1960s because of his wife’s ill health. Disillusioned with the “general cultural decay” of Europe, Koerber immigrated with his wife, Yvonne, to Johannesburg in South Africa, where he lived next door to his best friend, a British officer with a German wife, before dying in the late 1960s.48

  CHAPTER 13

  The Ludendorff Putsch

  (Autumn 1923 to Spring 1924)

  Hitler’s dramatic and subversive push to boost his national profile in anticipation of an imminent radical political transformation of Germany had occurred only at the eleventh hour, as by October 1923 concrete steps were under way to carry out a putsch around November 9. Yet the decision to overthrow the German government was not made in Munich, in Uffing am Staffelsee, or in any other place frequented by Hitler. It was made in Moscow. On October 4, the Politbureau of the Communist Party of Russia determined that Germany was ripe for revolution. Even though the leaders of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) were not quite as sure about that, they did not challenge Moscow. For instance, Heinrich Brandler, the leader of the KPD, had published an article in Pravda, the official organ of the Communist Party of Russia, stating, “The older leaders among us believe that it won’t be a difficult but an entirely doable task to seize power.”1