The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany

by William L. Shirer

  Like Rudolf Hess, Hermann Goering had also come to Munich some time after the war ostensibly to study economics at the university, and he too had come under the personal spell of Adolf Hitler. One of the nation’s great war heroes, the last commander of the famed Richthofen Fighter Squadron, holder of the Pour le Mérite, the highest war decoration in Germany, he found it even more difficult than most war veterans to return to the humdrum existence of peacetime civilian life. He became a transport pilot in Denmark for a time and later in Sweden. One day he flew Count Eric von Rosen to the latter’s estate some distance from Stockholm and while stopping over as a guest fell in love with Countess Rosen’s sister, Carin von Kantzow, née Baroness Fock, one of Sweden’s beauties. Some difficulties arose. Carin von Kantzow was epileptic and was married and the mother of an eight-year-old son. But she was able to have the marriage dissolved and marry the gallant young flyer. Possessed of considerable means, she went with her new husband to Munich, where they lived in some splendor and he dabbled in studies at the university.

  But not for long. He met Hitler in 1921, joined the party, contributed generously to its treasury (and to Hitler personally), threw his restless energy into helping Roehm organize the storm troopers and a year later, in 1922, was made commander of the S.A.

  A swarm of lesser-known and, for the most part, more unsavory individuals joined the circle around the party dictator. Max Amann, Hitler’s first sergeant in the List Regiment, a tough, uncouth character but an able organizer, was named business manager of the party and the Voelkischer Beobachter and quickly brought order into the finances of both. As his personal bodyguard Hitler chose Ulrich Graf, an amateur wrestler, a butcher’s apprentice and a renowned brawler. As his “court photographer,” the only man who for years was permitted to photograph him, Hitler had the lame Heinrich Hoffmann, whose loyalty was doglike and profitable, making him in the end a millionaire. Another favorite brawler was Christian Weber, a horse dealer, a former bouncer in a Munich dive and a lusty beer drinker. Close to Hitler in these days was Hermann Esser, whose oratory rivaled the leader’s and whose Jew-baiting articles in the Voelkischer Beobachter were a leading feature of the party newspaper. He made no secret that for a time he lived well off the generosity of some of his mistresses. A notorious blackmailer, resorting to threats to “expose” even his own party comrades who crossed him, Esser became so repulsive to some of the older and more decent men in the movement that they demanded his expulsion. “I know Esser is a scoundrel,” Hitler retorted in public, “but I shall hold on to him as long as he can be of use to me.”23 This was to be his attitude toward almost all of his close collaborators, no matter how murky their past—or indeed their present. Murderers, pimps, homosexual perverts, drug addicts or just plain rowdies were all the same to him if they served his purposes.

  He stood Julius Streicher, for example, almost to the end. This depraved sadist, who started life as an elementary-school teacher, was one of the most disreputable men around Hitler from 1922 until 1939, when his star finally faded. A famous fornicator, as he boasted, who blackmailed even the husbands of women who were his mistresses, he made his fame and fortune as a blindly fanatical anti-Semite. His notorious weekly, Der Stuermer, thrived on lurid tales of Jewish sexual crimes and Jewish “ritual murders”; its obscenity was nauseating, even to many Nazis. Streicher was also a noted pornographist. He became known as the “uncrowned King of Franconia” with the center of his power in Nuremberg, where his word was law and where no one who crossed him or displeased him was safe from prison and torture. Until I faced him slumped in the dock at Nuremberg, on trial for his life as a war criminal, I never saw him without a whip in his hand or in his belt, and he laughingly boasted of the countless lashings he had meted out.

  Such were the men whom Hitler gathered around him in the early years for his drive to become dictator of a nation which had given the world a Luther, a Kant, a Goethe and a Schiller, a Bach, a Beethoven and a Brahms.

  On April 1, 1920, the day the German Workers’ Party became the National Socialist German Workers’ Party—from which the abbreviated name “Nazi” emerged—Hitler left the Army for good. Henceforth he would devote all of his time to the Nazi Party, from which neither then nor later did he accept any salary.

  How, then, it might be asked, did Hitler live? His fellow party workers themselves sometimes wondered. In the indictment which the rebel members of the party committee drew up in July 1921, the question was bluntly posed: “If any member asks him how he lives and what was his former profession, he always becomes angry and excited. Up to now no answer has been supplied to these questions. So his conscience cannot be clean, especially as his excessive intercourse with ladies, to whom he often describes himself as ‘King of Munich,’ costs a great deal of money.”

  Hitler answered the question during the subsequent libel action which he brought against the authors of the pamphlet. To the question of the court as to exactly how he lived, he replied, “If I speak for the National Socialist Party I take no money for myself. But I also speak for other organizations … and then of course 1 accept a fee. 1 also have my midday meal with various party comrades in turn. I am further assisted to a modest extent by a few party comrades.”24

  Probably this was very close to the truth. Such well-heeled friends as Dietrich Eckart, Goering and Hanfstaengl undoubtedly “lent” him money to pay his rent, purchase clothes and buy a meal. His wants were certainly modest. Until 1929 he occupied a two-room flat in a lower-middle-class district in the Thierschstrasse near the River Isar. In the winter he wore an old trench coat—it later became familiar to everyone in Germany from numerous photographs. In the summer he often appeared in shorts, the Lederhosen which most Bavarians donned in seasonable weather. In 1923 Eckart and Esser stumbled upon the Platterhof, an inn near Berchtesgaden, as a summer retreat for Hitler and his friends. Hitler fell in love with the lovely mountain country; it was here that he later built the spacious villa, Berghof, which would be his home and where he would spend much of his time until the war years.

  There was, however, little time for rest and recreation in the stormy years between 1921 and 1923. There was a party to build and to keep control of in the face of jealous rivals as unscrupulous as himself. The N.S.D.A.P. was but one of several right-wing movements in Bavaria struggling for public attention and support, and beyond, in the rest of Germany, there were many others.

  There was a dizzy succession of events and of constantly changing situations for a politician to watch, to evaluate and to take advantage of. In April 1921 the Allies had presented Germany the bill for reparations, a whopping 132 billion gold marks—33 billion dollars—which the Germans howled they could not possibly pay. The mark, normally valued at four to the dollar, had begun to fall; by the summer of 1921 it had dropped to seventy-five, a year later to four hundred, to the dollar Erzberger had been murdered in August 1921. In June 1922, there was an attempt to assassinate Philipp Scheidemann, the Socialist who had proclaimed the Republic. The same month, June 24, Foreign Minister Rathenau was shot dead in the street. In all three cases the assassins had been men of the extreme Right. The shaky national government in Berlin finally answered the challenge with a special Law for the Protection of the Republic, which imposed severe penalties for political terrorism. Berlin demanded the dissolution of the innumerable armed leagues and the end of political gangsterism. The Bavarian government, even under the moderate Count Lerchenfeld, who had replaced the extremist Kahr in 1921, was finding it difficult to go along with the national regime in Berlin. When it attempted to enforce the law against terrorism, the Bavarian Rightists, of whom Hitler was now one of the acknowledged young leaders, organized a conspiracy to overthrow Lerchenfeld and march on Berlin to bring down the Republic.

  The fledgling democratic Weimar Republic was in deep trouble, its very existence constantly threatened not only from the extreme Right but from the extreme Left.

  *The expression appeared in the first German edition of Mein Ka
mpf, but was changed to “revolution” in all subsequent editions.

  * The attribution of the myth to an English general was hardly factual. Wheeler-Bennett, in Wooden Titan: Hindenburg, has explained that, ironically, two British generals did have something to do—inadvertently—with the perpetration of the false legend. “The first was Maj.-Gen. Sir Frederick Maurice, whose book The Last Four Months, published in 1919, was grossly misrepresented by reviewers in the German press as proving that the German Army had been betrayed by the Socialists on the Home Front and not been defeated in the field.” The General denied this interpretation in the German press, but to no avail. Ludendorff made use of the reviews to convince Hindenburg. “The other officer,” says Wheeler-Bennett, “was Maj.-Gen. Malcolm, head of the British Military Mission in Berlin. Ludendorff was dining with the General one evening, and with his usual turgid eloquence was expatiating on how the High Command had always suffered lack of support from the Civilian Government and how the Revolution had betrayed the Army. In an effort to crystallize the meaning of Ludendorff’s verbosity into a single sentence, General Malcolm asked him: ‘Do you mean, General, that you were stabbed in the back?’ Ludendorff’s eyes lit up and he leapt upon the phrase like a dog on a bone. ‘Stabbed in the back?’ he repeated. ‘Yes, that’s it exactly. We were stabbed in the back.’”

  *A few generals were courageous enough to say so. On August 23, 1924, the Frankfurter Zeitung published an article by General Freiherr von Schoenaich analyzing the reasons for Germany’s defeat. He came to “the irresistible conclusion that we owe our ruin to the supremacy of our military authorities over civilian authorities … In fact, German militarism simply committed suicide.” (Quoted by Telford Taylor in Sword and Swastika, p. 16.)

  * Kapp was born in New York on July 24, 1868.

  *At the war’s end Ludendorff fled to Sweden disguised in false whiskers and blue spectacles. He returned to Germany in February 1919, writing his wife: “It would be the greatest stupidity for the revolutionaries to allow us all to remain alive. Why, if ever I come to power again there will be no pardon. Then with an easy conscience, I would have Ebert, Scheidemann and Co. hanged, and watch them dangle.” (Margarine Ludendorff, Als ich Ludendorffs Frau war, p. 229.) Ebert was the first President and Scheidemann the first Chancellor of the Weimar Republic. Ludendorff, though second-in-command to Hindenburg, had been the virtual dictator of Germany for the last two years of the war.

  * Eckart died of overdrinking in December 1923.

  * Harrer also was opposed to Hitler’s violent anti-Semitism and believed that Hitler was alienating the working-class masses. These were the real reasons why he resigned.

  * See above, pp. 22–23.

  * He left the party in 1923 but served as Vice-President of the Bavarian Diet from 1924 to 1928. In 1930 he became reconciled with Hitler, but he never returned to active politics. The fate of all discoverers, as Heiden observed, overtook Drexler.

  * In his memoirs, Unheard Witness, Hanfstaengl says that he was first steered to Hitler by an American. This was Captain Truman Smith, then an assistant military attaché at the American Embassy in Berlin. In November 1922 Smith was sent by the embassy to Munich to check on an obscure political agitator by the name of Adolf Hitler and his newly founded National Socialist Labor Party. For a young professional American Army officer, Captain Smith had a remarkable bent for political analysis. In one week in Munich, November 15–22, he managed to see Ludendorff, Crown Prince Rupprecht and a dozen political leaders in Bavaria, most of whom told him that Hitler was a rising star and his movement a rapidly growing political force. Smith lost no time in attending an outdoor Nazi rally at which Hitler spoke. “Never saw such a sight in my life!” he scribbled in his diary immediately afterward. “Met Hitler,” he wrote, “and he promises to talk to me Monday and explain his aims.” On the Monday, Smith made his way to Hitler’s residence—“a little bare bedroom on the second floor of a run-down house,” as he described it—and had a long talk with the future dictator, who was scarcely known outside Munich. “A marvelous demagogue!” the assistant U.S. military attaché began his diary that evening. “Have rarely listened to such a logical and fanatical man.” The date was November 22, 1922.

  Just before leaving for Berlin that evening Smith saw Hanfstaengl, told him of his meeting with Hitler and advised him to take a look at the man. The Nazi leader was to address a rally that evening and Captain Smith turned over his press ticket to Hanfstaengl. The latter, like so many others, was overwhelmed by Hitler’s oratory, sought him out after the meeting and quickly became a convert to Nazism.

  Back in Berlin, which at that time took little notice of Hitler, Captain Smith wrote a lengthy report which the embassy dispatched to Washington on November 25, 1922. Considering when it was written, it is a remarkable document.

  The most active political force in Bavaria at the present time [Smith wrote] is the National Socialist Labor Party. Less a political party than a popular movement, it must be considered as the Bavarian counterpart to the Italian fascisti … It has recently acquired a political influence quite disproportionate to its actual numerical strength….

  Adolf Hitler from the very first has been the dominating force in the movement, and the personality of this man has undoubtedly been one of the most important factors contributing to its success … His ability to influence a popular assembly is uncanny. In private conversation he disclosed himself as a forceful and logical speaker, which, when tempered with a fanatical earnestness, made a very deep impression on a neutral listener.

  Colonel Smith, who later served as American military attaché in Berlin during the early years of the Nazi regime, kindly placed his diary and notes of his trip to Munich at the disposal of this writer. They have been invaluable in the preparation of this chapter.

  * Hanfstaengl spent part of World War II in Washington, ostensibly as an interned enemy alien but actually as an “adviser” to the United States government on Nazi Germany. This final role of his life, which seemed so ludicrous to Americans who knew him and Nazi Germany, must have amused him.

  3

  VERSAILLES, WEIMAR AND THE BEER HALL PUTSCH

  To MOST MEN in the victorious Allied lands of the West, the proclamation of the Republic in Berlin on November 9, 1918, had appeared to mark the dawn of a new day for the German people and their nation. Woodrow Wilson, in the exchange of notes which led to the armistice, had pressed for the abolition of the Hohenzollern militarist autocracy, and the Germans had seemingly obliged him, although reluctantly. The Kaiser had been forced to abdicate and to flee; the monarchy was dissolved, all the dynasties in Germany were quickly done away with, and republican government was proclaimed.

  But proclaimed by accident! On the afternoon of November 9, the so-called Majority Social Democrats under the leadership of Friedrich Ebert and Philipp Scheidemann met in the Reichstag in Berlin following the resignation of the Chancellor, Prince Max of Baden. They were sorely puzzled as to what to do. Prince Max had just announced the abdication of the Kaiser. Ebert, a saddler by trade, thought that one of Wilhelm’s sons—anyone except the dissolute Crown Prince—might succeed him, for he favored a constitutional monarchy on the British pattern. Ebert, though he led the Socialists, abhorred social revolution. “I hate it like sin,” he had once declared.

  But revolution was in the air in Berlin. The capital was paralyzed by a general strike. Down the broad Unter den Linden, a few blocks from the Reichstag, the Spartacists, led by the Left Socialists Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, were preparing from their citadel in the Kaiser’s palace to proclaim a soviet republic. When word of this reached the Socialists in the Reichstag they were consternated. Something had to be done at once to forestall the Spartacists. Scheidemann thought of something. Without consulting his comrades he dashed to the window overlooking the Koenigsplatz, where a great throng had gathered, stuck his head out and on his own, as if the idea had just popped into his head, proclaimed the Republic! The saddle maker Ebert wa
s furious. He had hoped, somehow, to save the Hohenzollern monarchy.

  Thus was the German Republic born, as if by a fluke. If the Socialists themselves were not staunch republicans it could hardly be expected that the conservatives would be. But the latter had abdicated their responsibility. They and the Army leaders, Ludendorff and Hindenburg, had pushed political power into the hands of the reluctant Social Democrats. In doing so they managed also to place on the shoulders of these democratic working-class leaders apparent responsibility for signing the surrender and ultimately the peace treaty, thus laying on them the blame for Germany’s defeat and for whatever suffering a lost war and a dictated peace might bring upon the German people. This was a shabby trick, one which the merest child would be expected to see through, but in Germany it worked. It doomed the Republic from the start.