Becoming Hitler

by Thomas Weber

  34. Weber, HFW.

  35. For views of this kind, see Joachimsthaler, Weg, 198; Kershaw, Hitler, vol. 1, 120; Herbst, Charisma, loc. 1335; Plöckinger, Soldaten, 44.

  36. Anonymous, “Sonderzusammenstellung”; Stadtarchiv München, Wahlamtsunterlagen, Landtagswahl 1919, Verzeichnis der militärischen Stimmbezirke.

  37. Joachimsthaler, Weg, 198–218.

  38. Heiden, Hitler: A Biography, 54.

  Chapter 3: Arrested

  1. Joachimsthaler, Weg, 194.

  2. BHStA/IV, NL Adalbert von Bayern/1, diary, copy of announcement pasted next to entry of April 7, 1919.

  3. Ibid., 1, diary, April 7, 1919 (quote); Kraus, Geschichte, 642.

  4. Joachimsthaler, Weg, 194, 207.

  5. SAM, StAM/1939, Axelrod, Towia.

  6. Sepp, “Palmsonntagsputsch”; Korzetz, Freikorps, 24; Schwarzenbach, Geborene, 161 (quote).

  7. SBA, NL Heß, Heß to his parents, April 23, 1919.

  8. Hofmiller, Revolutionstagebuch, 187.

  9. TNA, War Office/32/5375, report by Winston Churchill, February, 1919.

  10. TNA, FO/608/126, report, March 30 to April 22, 1919.

  11. TNA, CAB/24/79, Report on Conditions in Bavaria, March 31 to April 8, 1919 (quotes); White, “Perceptions,” 7.

  12. Quoted in Reuth, Judenhass, 93.

  13. Hofmiller, Revolutionstagebuch, 179–181, 184 (quote).

  14. Joachimsthaler, Weg, 187, 203–211.

  15. Reuth, Judenhass, 94.

  16. Jones, Birth, 147–151; Korzetz, Freikorps, 41; Hofmiller, Revolutionstagebuch, 185, 191 (quote), 197.

  17. Hetzer, “Revolution,” 28–29.

  18. Joachimsthaler, Weg, 201–202, 207.

  19. Jones, Birth, 152; Korzetz, Freikorps, 42–43, 118 (quote).

  20. FLPP, diary, April 26, 1919 (quote); Hofmiller, Revolutionstagebuch, 193.

  21. Joachimsthaler, Weg, 212.

  22. Ibid., 212–213.

  23. EPE, report, Pacelli to Pietro Gasparri, April 30, 1919, http://www.pacelli-edition.de/Dokument/258, accessed July 15, 2015; Kühlwein, Warum, 79–80; Cornwell, Pope, 77–78.

  24. Hitler, MK, 279 (first quote); Heinz, Hitler, 92–93 (second quote).

  25. Hitler biographers have tended to present Hitler’s and Schmidt’s claims as implausible; see Joachimsthaler, Weg, 209; Kershaw, Hitler, vol. 1, 110; Large, Ghosts, 121; Plöckinger; Soldaten, 64.

  The argument put forward to question Hitler’s account tends to be threefold: first, that the Central Council could not possibly have ordered his arrest as the council had really only been an institution of the interregnum between the time of Eisner’s assassination and the proclamation of the second Soviet Republic in mid-April; second, that by April 27 the Soviet regime had already been weakened and was fast approaching its breaking point and therefore would hardly have been in a position to arrest an official like Hitler; and third, that Red Guardists could not possibly have entered the barracks of Hitler’s regiment and located him. Some aspects of these arguments are persuasive. Yet they do not necessarily contradict Hitler’s claim. As Bavaria had witnessed a confusing succession of at least four revolutionary regimes featuring many institutions and groups, people were subsequently not always referring to the correct name for each and every one of the groups and institutions involved. Hitler’s reference to the Soviet Republic’s “Central Council” thus does not contradict his account. He would have hardly been so dumb as to refer deliberately to an institution that he knew no longer existed. It is quite clear that, in Mein Kampf, Hitler simply referred to the Soviet rulers of Munich that were in power in late April.

  26. SAM, PDM/10014, “Geiselmord” report; Gilbhard, Thule, 109ff.; Kraus, Geschichte 647.

  27. SAM, PDM/10014, “Geiselmord” report; Gilbhard, Thule, 109ff.

  28. Jones, Birth, 53–54, 151–152.

  29. BHStA/IV, RwGrKdo/4.6, Ministerium für militärische Angelegenheiten, “Beurteilung der Lage,” April 29, 1919 (quote); Jones, Birth, 153–154.

  30. BSB, NL Bruckmann, Suppl./box 3, Elsa to Hugo, April 30, 1919.

  31. Hofmiller, Revolutionstagebuch, 207 (first quote); Schwarzenbach, Geborene, 161 (second quote); Hetzer, “Revolution,” 28n13.

  32. Feldmann, Wahrheit, 35; Schwarzenbach, Geborene, 161 (quote).

  33. Joachimsthaler, Weg, 216–217.

  34. Heinz, Hitler, 96; Schmidt gave a similar account to Werner Maser in 1964; see Maser, Legende, 162, 563n177. There is no evidence other than his own claim, which he makes without revealing his source, to support Konrad Heiden’s claim that every tenth soldier was put against the wall and shot, after “white” troops had taken the military barracks at which Hitler was staying. Neither is there independent evidence for Heiden’s claim that Hitler had worked as a counterrevolutionary spy; see Heiden, Fuehrer, 25.

  35. Recent scholarship has tended to dismiss Schmidt’s account as an invention; see Kershaw, Hitler, vol. 1, 110; Plöckinger, Soldaten, 68n9.

  36. Hillmayr, Terror, 124–126.

  37. Levy, “Leben,” 37 (quote); Riecker, November, 47.

  38. Kühlwein, Warum, 76–77; Besier, Holy See, 19–20 (English translation of quote); EPE, report, Pacelli to Pietro Gasparri, April 18, 1919, http://www.pacelli-edition.de/Dokument/257, accessed July 15, 2015 (original quote); Kornberg, Dilemma, 167. The idea that the report foreshadowed the genocidal anti-Semitism of the Holocaust, supposedly proving that Pius XII was “Hitler’s pope” (see Goldhagen, Reckoning, 46, and Cornwell, Hitler’s Pope, 74–75) does not add up, not least since the letter is the only extensive utterance by Pacelli on Jews from the time. Surely, if protofascist anti-Semitism had been so central to Pacelli, he would have spoken about Jews rather more often. There also is no evidence for the assertion that Pacelli and Schioppa were racial anti-Semites. Furthermore, Goldhagen and Cornwell use incendiary mistranslations of the report; see Kühlwein, Warum, 77–78; Dalin, Myth, 52–53.

  39. EPE, report, Pacelli to Gasparri, February 8, 1919, http://www.pacelli-edition.de/Dokument/2120, accessed July 15, 2015; Kühlwein, Warum, 72ff.; Hesemann, Völkermord, 297–300; Hesemann, “Pacelli”; Phayer, Pius XII, chap. 12; Dalin, Myth, 51; AEMF, NMF/8420, letters between Samuel Fuchs and Faulhaber, telegram 1918, and letters dated January 3 and 15, 1919 (quote); NMF/6281, Centralverein to Faulhaber, December 4, 1919. For Faulhaber’s help of the Jewish community, see also NMF/6281, letters, M. Vierfelder to Faulhaber, February 14 and 27 and March 23, 1920.

  40. Höller, Anfang, 77 (first quote); Klemperer, Revolutionstagebuch, loc. 637 (second quote).

  41. Quoted in Kardish, Bolsheviks, 136.

  42. See Waite, Vanguard, 40–41, 271; Evans, Coming, 75, 169, 220; Jones, Birth; Höhne, Order, 54, Schumann, “Einheitssehnsucht”; Weitz, Weimar, 97; Stephenson, Battle, 313; Weinhauer et al., Introduction, 26 (quote). Korzetz, Freikorps, 9, by contrast, argues that the Freikorps helped to defend parliamentary democracy, whereas Schulze’s Freikorps lays out the role of Freikorps in the rise of National Socialism without exaggerating that role.

  43. Weber, HFW, 233–245; Korzetz, Freikorps, 95.

  44. Weber, HFW, chap. 10; BHStA/I, Generaldirektion der Bayerischen Archive/3152, information regarding Solleder’s time during the revolution.

  45. Stegenga, “First Soldiers,” 23–35 and attachment 1, list of Jewish soldiers in Freikorps. About half of them served in two Freikorps from Würzburg in Lower Franconia, the overwhelmingly Catholic part of Franconia: the Battalion Scheuring of the Freikorps Würzburg and the Marschgruppe Würzburg. Yet the other half served in a wide array of Freikorps. These included the Freikorps Engelhardt from Erlangen in Franconia, headed by one of Hitler’s former regimental commanders, Philipp Engelhardt. For Engelhardt, see Weber, HFW, 54, 244.

  For Heilbronner, see BHStA/IV, KSR/22712; NARA, M1270-Roll 22, Wiedemann’s testimony; Wiedemann, Feldherr, 53; Korzetz, Freikorps, 88; BHStA/IV, KSR 22646, Nos. 168 and 204; see also Stadtarchiv München, Gedenkbuch, 20, 182, 184–185; Angermair, “Minder
heit,” 145.

  46. Stegenga, “First Soldiers,” 23–35; Haering, “Konfessionsstruktur.” If Ingo Korzetz’s lower estimate of the overall membership of Freikorps, which he puts at approximately twenty thousand (see Korzetz, Freikorps, 48) is correct, the Jewish membership rate of Freikorps based solely on the Jews identified by Stegenga would be even higher than Stegenga’s figures suggest. It would stand at 0.8 percent.

  Robert Löwensohn papers, autobiography of Robert Löwensohn’s daughter Anne-Marie; Hilde Haas to her friend Ernst, March 10, 1947, account of Löwensohn’s son, Gérard Langlois. BHStA/IV, KSR 1198, 1233, 1235, 1246, 1249, 7340, 12167, 12188, 12220, 12224, 12284, 14752. Yad Vashem, the Central Database of Shoah Victims’ Names, pages of testimony of Löwensohn’s son and daughter, item IDs 650798; see also item number 3199771; Institut National Audiovisuel, interview with Anne-Marie Vitkine, transcript, http://grands-entretiens.ina.fr/imprimer/Shoah/Vitkine (accessed July 15, 2015). See also Vitkine, Mein Kampf, 13–14.

  The study of my former student Reinout Stegenga is based on the inspection of two hundred membership books in the Bayerisches Hauptstaatsarchiv Kriegsarchiv that contain the muster rolls of Bavaria’s postwar Freikorps. No membership records have survived for about 15 percent of Freikorps. Of the sixty-one Freikorps for which muster rolls have survived, six do not record the religious affiliations of its members at all. Furthermore, the membership records of some of the other remaining fifty-five Freikorps are incomplete: sometimes pages are missing; other times only some of the membership records of a Freikorps record religious affiliations. For instance, Hugo Gutmann, the Jewish officer from Nuremberg who had proposed Hitler for his Iron Cross First Class in 1918, as well as Ernst Kantorowicz, who subsequently would become one of the twentieth century’s most eminent medievalists, were Freikorps members, yet their names do not appear in the surviving Freikorps muster rolls in the Bavarian State Archive; see Hugo Gutmann Papers for an undated account of Gutmann’s life in Nazi Germany, written by him shortly after his emigration to Belgium; LBI New York, Ernst Kantorowicz Collection, I/1/2, Kantorowicz’s curriculum vitae. In short, logic dictates that the actual number of members of Freikorps who identified themselves as being of the Jewish faith considerably exceeded 158.

  47. For instance, Rudolf Vogel, a Jewish convert to Catholicism and highly decorated war veteran who was the son of a judge in Munich, served in the Freikorps Epp during the crushing of the Munich Soviet Republic, whereas Lieutenant Paul Oestreicher, a Jewish convert to Protestantism and pediatrician, served in the Freikorps Bamberg; Selig, Rassenwahn, 315–316; Paul Oestreicher papers, “Urkunde des Deutschen Reichskriegerbundes Nr. 67685”; Heeresarchiv München, confirmation of service in Freikorps, December 5, 1937; Zeugnis (reference) by Edgar Konitzky, February 12, 1938; Lebenslauf; Oertzen, Freikorps, 162, 165, 173.

  48. Waite, Vanguard, 264 (first quote); Hitler, Monologe, 148, monologue of December 1/2, 1941 (second quote).

  49. For arguments of this kind, see Ullrich, Hitler, chap. 4; Eberle, Weltkriege, chap. 3; Joachimsthaler, Weg, 177; Herbst, Charisma, loc. 1373; Kershaw, Hitler, vol. 1, 101ff., 116; Fest, Hitler; Bullock, Hitler and Stalin, 69; Haffner, Anmerkungen, loc. 271; Pätzold/Weißbecker, Hitler, chap. 3.

  50. Joachimsthaler, Weg, 177.

  51. Hitler, Monologe, 245, monologue of January 31, 1942.

  52. See Plöckinger, Soldaten, 65. Similarly, Kershaw, Hitler, vol. 1, 119–120, argues that Hitler never had been “inwardly sympathetic to Social Democracy.” For the First World War as post facto inspiration, see Weber, HFW; for claims that Hitler had always held negative views toward the SPD and the revolution, see, for example, Kershaw, Hitler, vol. 1, 119–120; Ullrich, Hitler, loc. 1710ff. and loc. 19101 FN 363; Plöckinger, Soldaten, 65; Eberle, Weltkriege, chap. 3.

  It has also been said (Herbst, Charisma, loc. 1375) that “the fact that in May 1919 Hitler could become a member of a political cleansing committee of the armed forces [Säuberungsauschuss] suggests that he cannot have compromised himself to a very large degree, and that his entanglement with the Soviet system or with Social Democracy thus cannot have been very deep.” The problem with this statement is that the Soviet Republic had not been run by the SPD. In fact, the SPD had spearheaded the fight against the Soviet Republic. The goal of the committee mentioned here was to identify those who had stood on the side of the Soviet Republic, not of the SPD. Hitler’s subsequent activities in the late spring of 1919 thus in no way contradict the possibility that he had had earlier SPD sympathies.

  53. Reuth, Judenhass, 82.

  54. Hitler, Monologe, 240 (second quote), 248 (first quote).

  55. Münchener Post, March 24/25, 1923, 3, quoted in Joachimsthaler, Weg, 199–200 (quote).

  56. See Ziemann, Commemorations, 217.

  57. Heiden, Hitler: A Biography, 54 (first quote); Deuerlein, Aufstieg, 132 (second quote), Reuth, Judenhass, 84, 87 (third quote). Heiden’s claim is supported, at least indirectly, also by a statement Hitler made in private in his military HQ during the night of September 27/28, 1941. In it, Hitler laid out why, when he was young, the only way to make a political career for a man of his background was to join the SPD; see Hitler, Monologe, 72. On Heiden, see Aust, Feind.

  58. IFZ, ZS89/2, Friedrich Krohn, “Fragebogen über Adolf Hitler,” 1952.

  59. See, for example, Kershaw, Hitler, 120.

  60. Anonymous, “Hitler’s Boss,” 193.

  61. For suggestions of this kind, see Fest, Hitler, 116–123; Joachimsthaler, Weg.

  62. See also Riecker, November, 47; and Pyta, Hitler, 132. Arguments positing Hitler never had supported the revolution and the SPD are ultimately based on a selective deconstruction of individual aspects of the surviving evidence and on the subsequent sequencing of the remaining evidence in a way that defies Ockham’s razor—the law of parsimony.

  Chapter 4: Turncoat

  1. Hofmiller, Revolutionstagebuch, 211; Hetzer, “Revolution,” 28; Schaenzler, Mann, 21 (quote).

  2. EPE, report, Eugenio Pacelli to Pietro Gasparri, May 5, 1919, http://www.pacelli-edition.de/Dokument/259 (accessed July 15, 2015).

  3. FLPP, diary, May 5, 1919; BHStA/V, NL Lehmann, 4.5, Lehmann to Professor Gruber, February 1, 1923, and Lehmann to his daughter Irmgard, November 10, 1923 (quote). It clearly overstates the case to attribute the violence of “white” forces to “an atavistic love of butchery,” as Large, Ghosts, 118, does.

  4. Schulze, Freikorps, 99; FLPP, diary, entries for early May.

  5. Heinz, Hitler, 109–110.

  6. For the problem of conjecture in politics, see Ferguson, Kissinger, 559–561, 871–872.

  7. On how the SPD was being viewed, see, for example, Hofmiller, Revolutionstagebuch, 190.

  8. Rilke, Heydt, 230–231, Rilke to Karl von der Heydt, May 20, 1919.

  9. Joachimsthaler, Weg, 218–221.

  10. Ibid., 198–219.

  11. Ibid., 219; Weber, HFW, chaps. 1–8. Othmar Plöckinger’s assertion, see his Soldaten, 88–89, that Anton Joachimsthaler did not provide any evidence that Buchner and Hitler had known each other and thus that Buchner had not proposed Hitler is incorrect; see Joachimsthaler, Weg, 203, 351.

  12. BHStA/IV, KSR 4421/204l, 4470/7111.

  13. Joachimsthaler, Weg, 199, 212 (quote).

  14. See, for example, the case of Josef Angerer, who following his service in the Red Army joined the Freikorps Wolf; SAM, StAM/I, Standgericht München, Nr. 1934.

  15. Anonymous, “Hitler’s Boss.”

  16. Deuerlein, Aufstieg, 55; Deuerlein, Hitler, 43; Plöckinger, Soldaten, 66ff.

  17. Joachimsthaler, Weg, 183, 218 (quote), 350n569. Plöckinger, Soldaten, 89, challenges the idea that Staubwasser was positively predisposed toward moderate Social Democrats. Yet in doing so, Othmar Plöckinger ignores Staubwasser’s support for the creation of a “Volksheer.” Plöckinger does provide evidence that Staubwasser never was a member of the SPD and never had close links to radical left-wing parties. But nowhere did Joachimsthaler
claim that that had been the case. More important, one does not have to be a member of a political party to be positively predisposed to that party.

  For claims that no space was left for moderate Social Democrats in the army in Munich, see Kershaw, Hitler, vol. 1, 115; Ullrich, Hitler; Plöckinger, Soldaten, passim.

  18. See Piper, Rosenberg, 33.

  19. Quoted in Joachimsthaler, Weg, 203. Othmar Plöckinger claims that the article cannot be trusted as it supposedly is full of factual mistakes; see Plöckinger, Soldaten, 42. Yet in reality Plöckinger only identifies minor, inconsequential mistakes of the kind that one would expect to occur in an article that was written eleven years after the event and that was based most likely on oral testimony passed on to the author of the article. Furthermore, Plöckinger’s claim that there never was a change in the leadership of the Second Infantry Regiment is incorrect, as within days the regiment did get a new commander.

  20. Quoted in Riecker, November, 52.

  21. Macmillan, Peacemakers.

  22. Gantner, Wölfflin, 325, Wölfflin to his sister, May 18, 1919 (first quote); Volk, Faulhaber, 72 (second quote).

  23. Quoted in Schwarzenbach, Geborene, 163.

  24. Klemperer, Revolutionstagebuch, loc. 383.

  25. BHStA/IV, RWGrKdo4, Nr. 309, report by Hans Gerl, August 25, 1919.

  26. Gerwarth, “Counter-Revolution,” 185.

  27. See also, Riecker, November, chap. 4; Reuth, Judenhass, chap. 7.

  28. BHStA/IV, RWGrKdo4, Nr. 313, letters, Hans Wolfgang Bayerl to Karl Mayr, July 4 and 10, 1919.