Hitler

by Volker Ullrich

  —

  The sarcastic nickname coined by his enemies, the “King of Munich,” was becoming an ever more accurate description of Hitler’s status. But his private life remained carefully concealed from inquisitive eyes. Since May 1920, Hitler had lived in a room on Thierschstrasse 41, which had been allocated to him by the Munich housing authority. For the woman who sub-let him the room, he was an ideal tenant. He always paid his rent and telephone bills on time, seldom had female visitors and did not draw much attention to himself.128 The gaunt young man also seemed not to attach much importance to his appearance. Mostly he wore a threadbare blue suit, a beige trench coat and an old grey felt hat. His only unusual fashion accessory was a sjambok—a type of riding crop—with a silver handle and loop that he always carried with him.129

  One of the few people who were allowed to visit Hitler at home was Ernst Hanfstaengl. Born in 1887 into an established Munich publishing family, Hanfstaengl had studied at Harvard and directed the New York branch of his father’s art publishing house, before returning to Munich in 1921 with his wife Helene, the daughter of a German-American businessman. In November 1922 he attended a Hitler speech in the Kindlkeller and was immediately fascinated by Hitler’s “phenomenal personality as a speaker.” He was keen to make Hitler’s acquaintance, and before long the privileged son of an upper-class family was part of the rabble-rouser’s entourage.130

  In his memoirs, Hanfstaengl recorded his impressions of Hitler’s spartan domicile: “The room…was clean and pleasant, if somewhat narrow and not exactly luxuriously furnished. The floor was covered by cheap, scuffed linoleum and a few small, worn-out rugs. On the wall across from his bed…were a chair, a table and a crudely built shelf holding Hitler’s treasured books.”131 They included Hermann Stegemann’s History of the First World War, Erich Ludendorff’s Politics and the Waging of War, Heinrich von Treitschke’s German History of the Nineteenth Century, Carl von Clausewitz’s On War, Franz Kugler’s biography of Friedrich the Great, Houston Stewart Chamberlain’s Wagner biography, Gustav Schwab’s Most Beautiful Sagas of Classical Antiquity and Sven Hedin’s wartime memoirs as well as a number of popular novels, detective stories and—slightly concealed according to Hanfstaengl—The Illustrated History of Morals and The History of Erotic Art by the Jewish author Eduard Fuchs.132

  Hanfstaengl shared Hitler’s interest in history, art and music. He was a fine pianist himself and soon discovered how to put the often irritable Wagner enthusiast Hitler in a good mood. Whenever Hanfstaengl played the first bars of the overture to Wagner’s Meistersänger on the piano in the landlady’s parlour, it was as if Hitler were transformed. “He would immediately stand up and pace up and down in the room, swinging his arms like a conductor and whistling along with every note in a strangely penetrating, but absolutely on-key vibrato,” Hanfstaengl recalled. “He knew the entire prelude by heart, and since he had an excellent ear for the spirit of the music, I gradually began to have fun with our duets.”133

  What did Hitler live off? The authors of the anonymous anti-Hitler pamphlet in July 1921 had asked this question, and it continues to occupy historians. Hitler’s early sources of income remain unclear. He himself testified in front of a court in January 1921 that he had never received “a penny” for his work for the NSDAP, but that he did get paid for speeches he gave outside the party, for instance to the German-Nationalist Protection and Defiance Federation.134 It’s highly doubtful whether Hitler could live from those lecture fees alone. There is clear evidence that he was supported by sympathisers.135 Moreover, even early on in his career, Hitler charmed well-heeled elderly ladies. Most prominent among them was Hermine Hoffmann, the widow of a school principal, who mothered Hitler in her house in Solln on the periphery of Munich. “You simply must come to lunch on Sunday,” she wrote to her “respected and dear friend” Hitler on one presumably typical occasion in February 1923. Hitler was also invited to stay the night: “Recent times have brought so much commotion that you owe it to our holy cause to rest and recover for a couple of hours out here in the peace and quiet.”136

  Hitler also got the occasional meal from Dora Lauböck, the wife of Government Counsel Theodor Lauböck, who founded the Nazi chapter in the town of Rosenheim. Whenever Hitler travelled, he always made sure to send the Lauböcks a postcard, and when Theodor was transferred to Munich, their relationship became even closer. Hitler spent Christmas with the couple in 1922, and the Lauböcks’ son Fritz served as Hitler’s private secretary in 1923.137

  Even if the ascetic Hitler did not require much personally, the party coffers were perennially empty because membership fees and revenues from events were not enough to cover the running costs; the Völkischer Beobachter also had to be heavily subsidised.138 Thus Hitler had no choice but to scrounge around for people to help finance the NSDAP’s endeavours. One of the earliest patrons was the Augsburg manufacturer Gottfried Grandel, who also supported Eckart’s publication Auf gut deutsch.139 Another supporter was the chemist Emil Gansser, who worked for Siemens in Berlin and was friends with Eckart. As Karl Burhenne, the director of Siemens’s social-political department, wrote in March 1922, Gansser had followed the development of “the Hitlerian movement” for two years and was convinced that “generous, if discreet support for this healthy initiative, which arose from the people, would relatively quickly influence the political circumstances in Germany…in the most favourable sense possible.”140 On 29 May 1922, after Gansser’s encouragement, Hitler held a talk at the “National Club of 1919,” whose membership included not only officers and civil servants, but entrepreneurs. Hitler knew how to adapt to his audiences so that his lectures were usually received well.141 After that speech, the NSDAP appears to have received donations from Berlin industrialists such as Ernst von Borsig and the coffee manufacturer Richard Franck.142 After mediation by Gansser and Hess, who was studying at Zurich Polytechnic in the winter term of 1922–3, Hitler also established contact with Germanophile circles in Switzerland in order to solicit funds. In late August 1923, he and Gansser visited Swiss army general Ulrich Wille and his family in their Zurich villa. As a family member noted in her diary: “Hittler [sic] very likeable. The man positively vibrates when he speaks. He speaks wonderfully.”143

  When Hitler did not have to appear at party events and travel around in search of money, he reverted to the haphazard daily routines of his pre-war existence. “You never quite knew where he was,” Hanfstaengl recalled. “Essentially he was a bohemian who had no roots anywhere.”144 Gottfried Feder even wrote to Hitler to express his worries “about our great work, the German liberation movement of national socialism, and you whom we acknowledge without envy to be its passionate leader.” Hitler was difficult to reach and devoted too little time to important party matters, Feder complained; he seemed to enjoy “relaxing in artistic circles and in the company of beautiful women.”145 Hitler was notorious for always being late and for having no sense of planning his working day. He preferred to spend his free time in Munich’s cafés and watering holes: in Café Neumayr, a beer bar on the edge of the Viktualienmarkt; in Café Heck in the Hofgarten; and in Osteria Bavaria, an artists’ tavern on Schellingstrasse. Hitler would spend hours there drinking coffee and eating cake with his intimates, his “sweet tooth” apparent in the fact that he could not get enough of gateau heaped with whipped cream.146

  Hitler’s circle of acquaintances was a motley crew. It included hooligans like Christian Weber, a former horse trader who also carried around a whip, Hitler’s bodyguard Ulrich Graf, and his chauffeur Emil Maurice, another feared brawler. With these three thugs at his side, the National Socialist leader could move through Munich with the cockiness of a minor mafioso.147 Also part of the clique were Hitler’s former sergeant Max Amann, whom Hitler made party secretary in July 1921 and also head of the party’s publishing house, the Eher Verlag; the young journalist Hermann Esser, who had served as Karl Mayr’s press spokesman and who was considered the second-best speaker in the party after Hitler; and
Johann Klintzsch, a former member of the Ehrhardt Brigade, who had been put in charge of building up the SA in August 1921. But Hitler’s circle also contained more genteel, intellectual members like Eckart, Hess, the “party philosopher” Rosenberg and Hanfstaengl. Hitler felt at home in what historian Martin Broszat has called a “bizarre mix of bohemians and condottieri.”148 In their company he was able to relax and hold his monologues while his true followers hung on his every word.

  Hermann Göring once mocked Hitler’s entourage as a “club of provincial skittle enthusiasts with extremely limited horizons”149—although this did not prevent Göring from joining it. Born in 1893 as the son of a high-ranking colonial administrator, he had made a name for himself as a fighter ace in the First World War. He was the final commander of the famous Richthofen Squadron and was awarded Germany’s highest military medal, the Pour le Mérite, in June 1918. After the war, he had made his way doing various jobs in Sweden and Denmark. In early February 1922, he married Carin von Kantzow, born the Swedish Baroness von Fock, and moved with her to Munich. Göring met Hitler in October or November 1922 at a Nazi event and soon joined the party. Less than half a year later, Hitler put him in charge of the SA. “A famous combat pilot and a bearer of the Pour le Mérite—what a propaganda coup!” Hitler is said to have gushed. “What’s more, he has money and doesn’t cost me a penny. That’s very important.”150

  Hanfstaengl and Göring were not the only ones who lent the provincial NSDAP a bit of cosmopolitan flair. Thanks to the help he received from influential patrons, Hitler gained entry into elevated social circles early on. In June 1921, Eckart introduced him to the salon of Helene Bechstein, the wife of a wealthy Berlin piano-maker. The elegant lady of the house developed a maternal affection for the ambitious politician thirteen years her junior and did everything she could to help him fit in with polite society. She bought him new outfits, taught him etiquette and repeatedly gave him money. Hitler was also a regular guest at the dinners the Bechsteins hosted at the Four Seasons Hotel in Munich.151

  Hitler was frequently invited to Hanfstaengl’s apartment on Gentzstrasse on the fringe of the Schwabing district. It was here that the historian Karl Alexander von Müller met him again and insightfully described Hitler’s appearance:

  Through the open door, you could see him greeting the hostess, almost subserviently, in the narrow hallway. He put away his riding crop and took off his velour hat and trench coat, then took off a belt with a revolver and hung that up as well on a coat hook. That was strange, like something out of [the Westerns of] Karl May…The man who entered was no longer the clumsy, sheepish instructor in a badly fitting uniform whom I had met in 1919. You could see the confidence he’d gained from his public appearances in his eyes. Nonetheless, there was still something gauche about him, and you had the unpleasant feeling that he could sense you had noticed it and held that against you.152

  Hitler’s insecurity revealed the fear of the parvenu that he would never be taken entirely seriously in the upper-class circles to which he was now granted access.

  The Hanfstaengls introduced Hitler to Elsa Bruckmann, the wife of the publisher Hugo Bruckmann, whose authors included Houston Stewart Chamberlain. Their salon, which prior to 1914 had offered a wide circle of renowned artists and men of letters the chance to exchange ideas, was increasingly becoming a meeting place for chauvinist and anti-Semitic authors and politicians.153 Elsa Bruckmann heard Hitler speak for the first time in Zirkus Krone in February 1921, and as she later recalled, she felt “reawakened” by his voice. Yet she first seems to have sought contact with him during his imprisonment at Landsberg, and it was not until December 1924 that Hitler participated for the first time in the Bruckmanns’ salon in their villa on Karolinenplatz 5.154 When Hugo Bruckmann died in September 1941, Hitler praised his “services to the early NSDAP.” At the Bruckmanns’ house, Hitler recalled, he had met all the important men in the nationalist scene in Munich.155

  Munich social elites were probably less captivated by the aggressive anti-Semitism with which Hitler regularly enraptured his beer-hall audiences than by his bizarre appearance and eccentric behaviour. “He had the aura of a magician, a whiff of the circus and of tragic embitterment, and the harsh shine of the ‘famous beast,’ ” was how Joachim Fest put it.156 Members of good society simply had to see the man all of Munich was talking about, and even those who found his political radicalism repellent regarded him a fascinating object of study, whose mere presence guaranteed an evening’s entertainment. Thus he was passed from one salon to another, where he elicited a mixture of spine-tingling excitement and half-concealed amusement.157

  In the autumn of 1923, Hitler gained access via the Bechsteins to the Wagner family in Bayreuth. “Full of reverence,” wrote Winifred Wagner, the composer’s daughter-in-law, after Hitler visited the family’s Villa Wahnfried for the first time on 1 October. “Deeply moved, he examined everything that was directly connected with R[ichard] W[agner]—the downstairs rooms with his desk, the grand piano, his pictures and books, etc.”158 Hitler talked about his days as a young man in Linz and the huge impression Wagner’s operas had made on him. By the time he left, he had won over not just Winifred but Wagner’s son Siegfried as well. “Thank God that there are still German men!” Siegfried exclaimed. “Hitler is a splendid fellow, a true slice of the German soul.”159 On 28 September 1923, Hitler held his first public speech in Bayreuth, after which he paid a visit to the ageing and frail Houston Stewart Chamberlain. In a letter to Hitler on 7 October, Chamberlain also praised him as “an awakener of souls from sleep and idleness.” In Chamberlain’s opinion, Hitler was not at all the fanatic he had been depicted as: “The fanatic heats up people’s heads, but you warm their hearts. The fanatic wants to drown people out, while you seek only to convince them, which is why you succeed.” Hitler’s visit, Chamberlain added, had renewed his faith: “The fact that Germany has given birth to a Hitler in the hour of its greatest need shows that it is still alive and well.”160

  Just as Hitler absorbed chauvinist and anti-Semitic ideas like a sponge during the early years of his phenomenal rise from obscurity to political prominence, he now learned how to move in various social circles and play changing roles. The tone Hitler used in his public speeches might not be to everyone’s taste, Hess wrote in June 1921, but he could also speak in different modes.161 The ability to adapt his behaviour and speech to almost any given audience demonstrated his second greatest talent after his rhetorical skills: his acting ability. Ernst Hanfstaengl had immediately noted the startling accuracy with which Hitler could imitate people’s voices and personality quirks. His parodies were “masterly, good enough for cabaret.”162 Hitler was also able to use this skill as a mimic to conform to the image people had of him. “He had become a versatile actor on the political stage, calculating and with many different faces,” writes historian Lothar Machtan.163 A cunning mastery of the art of disguise was one of Hitler’s most prominent traits as a politician.

  —

  By 1923 Hitler was known well beyond Bavaria’s borders, but there is not a single photograph of him from this time. For four years he succeeded in preventing any picture of himself from being published, the dictator bragged years later, in April 1942, in a lunchtime monologue at the Wolfsschanze.164 Hitler’s refusal to allow himself to be photographed was apparently part of his public image: it only increased people’s interest in him. “What does Hitler look like?” asked illustrator Thomas Theodor Heine in the May 1923 edition of Simplicissimus magazine, only to conclude after twelve satiric attempts: “These questions must remain unanswered. Hitler is not an individual at all. He’s a condition.”165 Yet Hitler’s shyness in front of the camera also caused conflicts. In April 1923, on a visit to Berlin with Hanfstaengl, Hitler was recognised in an amusement park by press photographer Georg Pahl, who took his picture. Hitler immediately attacked Pahl, hitting at the camera with his walking stick. Only after a lengthy back and forth did Pahl agree to hand over the negative.16
6 Hitler’s drastic reaction may have been caused by the fact that the NSDAP was officially banned in Prussia under the Law on Protecting the Republic. The party leader, who was wanted by the Prussian authorities, would have wanted to remain incognito.

  In early September 1923, a press photographer finally succeeded in getting a shot of Hitler at the “Germany Day” in Nuremberg. After that, Hitler stopped hiding from the camera and commissioned Heinrich Hoffmann to take his portrait. The Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung newspaper of 16 September 1923 published the first-ever Hitler portrait with the caption: “Adolf Hitler, the leader of the Bavarian National Socialists, who thus far refused to let himself be photographed has now been unfaithful to that principle.”167

  Hoffmann would soon become Hitler’s court photographer. In 1909, at the age of 24, Hoffmann had established his own studio on Schellingstrasse and made a name for himself within the art scene for his pictures of artworks and artists. In 1918 and 1919 he was the most important chronicler of the revolution in Munich, although he did not sympathise with the Left. After the demise of the soviets, he supported counter-revolutionary propaganda, joined a militia and became a member of the NSDAP in April 1920. We do not know when he first met Hitler, but after Hitler’s first sitting for him, Hoffmann became part of the party leader’s entourage—not just as photographer, but as a witty entertainer who, like Hanfstaengl, knew how to keep everyone in a good mood.168

  “The Fascists have grabbed power in Italy with a coup d’état. If they can hold on to it, this will be a historic event with unpredictable consequences not just for Italy, but for all of Europe,” Count Harry Kessler presciently commented on 29 October 1922 after Mussolini’s “March on Rome.”169 The Italian Fascists’ seizure of power was wind in the National Socialist sails. “Mussolini has shown what a minority can accomplish, if the holy national will lives inside it,” Hitler declared at a public event in November 1922, demanding “the formation of a national government along Fascist lines in Germany.”170 Impressed by the events in Italy, a small group of Hitler followers began to propagate an image of the Führer that drew heavily from Il Duce. In early November in the Hofbräuhaus, Hermann Esser explicitly proposed that “Germany’s Mussolini is named Adolf Hitler.”171