Hitler

by Volker Ullrich

  On the evening of 10 October, directly after their meeting with Hindenburg, Hitler and Göring, with Goebbels in tow, drove to the central German town of Bad Harzburg, where the “national opposition” was set to stage a joint event the following day. The man behind it was Alfred Hugenberg, and Bad Harzburg had been selected because it was located within Braunschweig, which the National Socialists had governed with the DNVP since October 1930. The entire anti-republican German right wing had gathered there. Along with the leaders of the NSDAP, the DNVP, the Stahlhelm, the Reichslandbund and the Pan-Germanic League, there was Hohenzollern Prince Eitel Friedrich, former chief of the army command and now DVP deputy General von Seeckt, and Hjalmar Schacht, who went public with his political change of heart with a scathing speech about Brüning’s economic policies.155 Large-scale industry was barely represented. Aside from Thyssen and United Steelworks director Ernst Brandi, the representatives of big business were mostly second-rate figures like Ernst Middendorf, the director general of the petroleum company Deutsche Erdöl AG, or the Hamburg shipyard owner Rudolf Blohm. “It was a shame that industry failed to turn up in Harzburg,” Schacht complained in a letter a few days later.156

  Hitler had only reluctantly agreed to participate in the event, appearing hours late to a preparatory meeting on 10 October. “Hitler is enraged that people are trying to push us against a wall,” Goebbels noted. “I had to talk to him for another hour. More distance to the right.”157 The NSDAP chairman had not come to Bad Harzburg to show solidarity but to underline his predominance within the German far right and show his potential allies that he was not merely a “drummer boy” they could exploit for their own purposes. The only thing Hitler did on the morning of 11 October was to inspect a parade of SA and SS units; he left as soon as Stahlhelm formations appeared. He also skipped the communal lunch, disingenuously claiming that he could not dine at a table while his SA men’s stomachs were growling.158 After a lengthy and heated quarrel with Hugenberg, he appeared late to the afternoon rally at the local entertainment hall, and his speech and the manifesto he read out left no doubt as to who would have the say in the future. The National Socialists, Hitler proclaimed, “were prepared to take any and all responsibility for forming national governments at both the Reich and Land levels,” and in this spirit they were ready to “extend their hands in loyal cooperation to the other associations of the nationalist opposition.”159

  The “Harzburg Front,” as the alliance came to be known, was a fragile construct, characterised by mistrust between the putative partners. Everyone suspected everyone else of pursuing a hidden personal agenda. “Hitler and Hugenberg are in a clinch like two boxers trying to prevent the opponent from drawing back and landing a dangerous blow—that was clear well before the Harzburg conference,” wrote the Vossische Zeitung newspaper.160 The only things the principals truly agreed on were their rejection of the Weimar “system” and their desire to bring down the Brüning government. There was no joint programme for how to overcome Germany’s economic and political crises. Hugenberg, who frequently had himself praised in his newspapers as the leader (Führer) of the right-wing and conservative camp, was forced to acknowledge that Hitler would by no means be content with the role of junior partner. Yet conversely, no matter how brusquely he behaved in Bad Harzburg, Hitler did not want to cause a major rift on the right. He still needed the support of mainstream figures of respectability to pose a credible threat to the Brüning government.161 Nonetheless, he made no secret of his claim to a leading role for himself and his movement. One week after the Harzburg conference, he summoned 100,000 members of the SA, the SS and the Hitler Youth to Braunschweig, urging them to “hold their nerve in the final minute.”162 For Goebbels, this demonstration was “our answer to Harzburg and Brüning.”163

  Then, on 25 November 1931, ten days after the Nazis’ electoral triumph in Hesse, a bombshell went off that threatened to destroy all of Hitler’s plans. A Nazi deputy in the Hessian state parliament who had been forced to step down for using a fake doctoral title turned over sensitive documents to the police in Frankfurt. They were the minutes of a meeting held by Gauleiter in early August at the Boxheim vineyard near the town of Lampertsheim. The “Boxheim documents,” as they became known, included a series of proclamations and ordinances to be issued in the event that the National Socialists seized power in the wake of an alleged Communist uprising. In order to restore public security, the Gauleiter had decided, it would be necessary “to take drastic and ruthless measures using armed force.” Every order of the SA and local militias was to be obeyed, and any resistance would be punished by death. Anyone caught possessing a firearm would be “shot on the spot.” Civil servants, employees and workers who refused to go to work were also threatened with execution.164 The author of the documents was the court assessor Werner Best, the head of the Gau legal department and the chairman designate of the Landtag faction in Hesse—an ambitious young lawyer who apparently wanted to show his party comrades how semi-legal tricks could be used to disguise a seizure of power as an act of self-defence.

  There was a considerable stir when these plans became public: they seemed to confirm every fear about the National Socialists’ violent intentions. “A Brutal Fascist Regime of Violence—Hesse to be German Fascism’s Experiment,” read the headline of the SPD-affiliated Hessische Volkszeitung.165 The Social Democratic and liberal press called for legal consequences, but the public prosecutor Karl August Werner tried to play down the incident. He was acting on orders from Brüning, who did not want the controversy to affect ongoing negotiations between the Centre Party and the NSDAP about forming a coalition government in Hesse. (Those negotiations would break down in December.) On 30 November, legal proceedings against Best began but the investigation was purposely drawn out, and in October 1932 the fourth senate of the Reich court declared that, owing to lack of evidence, Best could no longer be legally pursued.

  The conciliatory attitude of legal authorities towards the National Socialists stood in stark contrast to the rigour with which they went after the political Left. In late November 1931, the left-wing journalist Carl von Ossietzky was sentenced to a year and a half in prison for “betraying military secrets.” After a demonstration by the League for Human Rights, at which journalist Leopold Schwarzschild and author Arnold Zweig spoke, among others, Thea Sternheim noted: “The most horrible thing…is the fact that all the speakers assume that we are on the threshold of the Third Reich, that the grim fantasies of purveyors of violence laid out in the Hessian document will become reality.”166

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  For Hitler the revelations were extremely embarrassing because they cast a shadow on his pledges to keep the party within the bounds of legality. He immediately dispatched Göring to assure Hindenburg that the party had nothing “in the slightest” to do with the Boxheim documents and was standing by its “standpoint of the strictest legality, which has been expressed often enough in the past.”167 In early December, Ernst Hanfstaengl succeeded in convincing Hitler to hold an international press conference in the Hotel Kaiserhof and reassure the general public about his plans for the future. In front of the foreign correspondents in attendance, the NSDAP chairman dismissed as nonsense the idea that the party would jettison its commitment to legality at the last minute when poised to assume power. On the other hand, Hitler said, he could not forbid fellow party members from playing through the scenario of a Communist uprising. Once again, Hitler over-dramatised the threat posed by the Communists to divert attention away from the danger represented by the National Socialists. The decisive battle against Bolshevism would be fought in Germany, Hitler thundered, and the Nazis saw it as their mission to win this struggle.168 Hanfstaengl was very taken by Hitler’s debut in front of the foreign press. He had spoken “rationally, persuasively and in measured tones,” Hanfstaengl found, and had stuck to “cool irony” in his polemic asides “without seeming crude or overbearing.”169

  Hitler’s pose as a moderate politician who kept h
is emotions strictly in check convinced the sceptics at the press conference, but in interviews with the journalists and diplomats, he made mixed impressions. Hubert R. Knickerbocker, who talked to Hitler in the Brown House in late 1931, was impressed by his winning smile and the fact that Hitler himself had adjusted Knickerbocker’s chair for him. Still, the American journalist was subjected to a monologue in which Hitler seemed to forget the presence of his interlocutor. Knickerbocker described Hitler’s voice getting faster and louder, and his gaze was directed at some indeterminate point in the distance, as if he were speaking to an auditorium.170 To the U.S. ambassador to Germany, Frederick M. Sackett, too, who spoke with Hitler in December 1931, the Nazi chairman seemed “as if he were addressing a large audience.” “While he talked vigorously, he never looked me in the eye,” Sackett noted. When briefing U.S. Secretary of State Henry Stimson, the ambassador predicted that if Hitler came to power he would be unable to hold on to it for very long. “He is certainly not the type from which statesmen evolve,” Sackett sniffed.171

  American journalist Dorothy Thompson, the wife of Nobel Prize-winning author Sinclair Lewis, was even harsher in her opinion. Thompson was granted an interview by Hitler in his suite in the Hotel Kaiserhof in November 1931, and she published her account of that conversation in a short book entitled I Saw Hitler in 1932. “I was convinced I was meeting the future dictator of Germany,” Thompson wrote.

  In something less than fifty seconds I was quite sure that I was not. It took just about that time to measure the startling insignificance of this man who has set the world agog. He is formless, almost faceless, a man whose countenance is a caricature, a man whose framework seems cartilaginous, without bones. He is inconsequent and voluble, ill-poised, insecure. He is the very prototype of the Little Man. A lock of lank hair falls over an insignificant and slightly retreating forehead. The back head is shallow. The face is broad in the cheek bones. The nose is large but badly shaped and without character. His movements are awkward, almost undignified and most un-martial.

  Nonetheless, even Thompson found things to like about the Nazi leader: “And yet, he is not without a certain charm…the soft, almost feminine charm of the Austrian!…The eyes alone are notable. Dark grey and hyperthyroid—they have the peculiar shine which often distinguishes geniuses, alcoholics and hysterics.” Thompson, too, was subjected to a monologue:

  The interview was difficult, because one cannot carry on a conversation with Adolf Hitler. He speaks always, as though he was addressing a mass meeting. In personal intercourse he is shy, almost embarrassed. In every question he seeks for a theme that will set him off. Then his eyes focus in [sic] some far corner of the room; a hysterical note creeps into his voice which rises sometimes almost to a scream. He gives the impression of a man in a trance.172

  In many respects Thompson’s observations mirror those of the writer Klaus Mann, who witnessed several months later how Hitler ate one strawberry tart after another “with half-infantile, half-predatory greed” in Munich’s Carlton tearoom. Thomas Mann’s eldest son had numerous opportunities to study Hitler, whom he called “an evil philistine with a hysterically opaque gaze in his pale, swollen visage.” In his autobiography, The Turning Point, Klaus Mann wrote:

  It was certainly not very pleasant to sit that close to such a creature; but still I could not keep my eyes off this vile mug. I had never found him particularly attractive, neither in pictures nor in person on the illuminated grandstand; but the ugliness I encountered now exceeded all my expectations. The vulgarity of his features was soothing and made me feel better. I looked at him and thought: “You will never win, Schicklhuber, even if you scream your head off. You want to rule Germany? You want to become its dictator—with a nose like that? You must be joking…You will never win power!”173

  Mann’s account is an excellent example of how a purely aesthetic reaction to Hitler—in this case, revulsion at his physical appearance—could lead observers to underestimate the man and his political tenacity.

  These impressionist observations were not the only efforts to come to terms with Hitler. Various attempts were made in 1931 and 1932 to analyse the phenomenon of Hitler and National Socialism. One of the most impressive was Theodor Heuss’s Hitler’s Way, which the author finished in December 1931 and which quickly ran through eight editions. The future president of the post-war Federal Republic of Germany captured the dual nature of the Nazi movement. On the one hand, Heuss found, it inhabited a world of strong emotions and passions. These were evident in the Führer cult, the pseudo-religious faith followers invested in one man and his world view, and the mass psychosis triggered by his public appearances. On the other hand, though, there was the bureaucratic apparatus, the strongly organised, highly efficient party machinery aimed solely at acquiring political power. “Rationalistic power calculations coexist side by side with unbridled emotions,” wrote Heuss, who identified the same contradiction in Hitler himself. Hitler was, on the one hand, a “master of emotional ecstasy combining the techniques of the trained mass psychologist and someone inspired by the primeval passion that comes from the exuberance of mass emotion.” On the other hand, Heuss regarded Hitler simply as “a politician who wants power.” Heuss saw Hitler’s pledges to respect the law for what they were—tactical manoeuvres to achieve that goal:

  Today legality means being formed or confirmed by the will of the majority. The man who mocks democracy subjects himself, vowing legality, to its methods and its very idea. In so doing, he suggests to his followers that this is not the result of a change of heart, but the manifestation of a period of adjustment, an attempt to win time that requires patience. The goal is to gain the majority of votes tomorrow or the day after tomorrow—and the majority means power.

  Heuss noted Hitler’s new moderate tone in his speeches: “He curses far less. He does not rip the Jews to shreds any more. He can talk for hours without even using the word Jew.” But Heuss was under no illusions that Hitler had truly reined in his anti-Semitism. On the contrary, moderation was simply a response “to the tactical need not to appear monomaniacal.” Heuss also presciently recognised that “the taking of territory in the European east is the core principle of Hitler’s foreign policy.” The achievement of this end would require war, no matter what Hitler occasionally said to the contrary: “He rejects the notion that he is promoting a new war, but he assumes that there has to be a new war and consequently that the point of German foreign policy is to ensure that the new war ends in victory for Germany.”174 Those who read Heuss’s analysis were well informed not just about the road Hitler had travelled to get to where he was by 1931, but what lay in store should he ever come to power.

  Unfortunately, most of Heuss’s contemporaries were a long way from seeing the situation that clearly. Victor Klemperer described the predominant mood at the end of 1931 as one of desperation: “People simply want to keep on living without comprehending how and why. They’re completely numb.” And Count Harry Kessler noted laconically: “It’s a sad New Year, the end of a catastrophic year and the beginning of what looks to be an even more catastrophic one.”175

  10

  Hitler and Women

  “The days are sad right now,” wrote Hitler, pouring out his sorrows in a letter to Winifred Wagner on 30 December 1931. “I can’t seem to get over this great loneliness.” He had passed through Bayreuth on Christmas Eve, but had not had the heart to visit her. “How can a person take pleasure in anything if he is sad inside?” he added.1 Hitler’s unhappiness had a concrete personal cause. On the morning of 19 September 1931, his niece Geli Raubal had been found dead in his apartment on Munich’s Prinz​regen​tenst​rasse. Next to her lay the pistol that Hitler kept in his desk drawer for protection.

  It is not surprising that this incident attracted widespread attention, since at the time the rising new star of German politics was being courted from many sides as a potential coalition partner. For a brief period, Hitler’s private life came into public focus, only to quic
kly disappear once more. For historians, Raubal’s death provides an occasion to pose one of the central biographical questions: what sort of relationship did Hitler have with the female sex?

  The question is difficult to address and will probably never be answered definitively. Hitler’s first biographer, Konrad Heiden, wrote of his “opaque erotic life,” and little evidence has emerged since the 1930s to alter that verdict.2 Hitler always played a game of hide-and-seek with his private life—even towards those closest to him. Authentic personal documents are a rarity: most of the material that existed was probably destroyed by Julius Schaub at the end of the war. It is hardly surprising, then, that no chapter of Hitler’s biography contains more rumours and legends than his relations with women. The most bizarre among them is the perpetual canard about his abnormal genitalia. This myth is based on a former classmate’s story that a goat bit off half his penis as a young man and the assertion made by a Soviet army doctor who performed a post-mortem on Hitler in 1945 that he was missing his left testicle. According to everything we know from his personal doctor Theodor Morell, Hitler’s sexual organs were perfectly normal. Speculation that he was physically unable to have sex is completely unfounded.3

  Attempts to discover something pathological in Hitler’s sex life also lead us astray. The only real ammunition for this argument comes from Hanfstaengl’s 1970 memoirs, which include an anecdote designed to appeal to readers’ prurience. One evening when he had left the room to order a taxi, Hanfstaengl wrote, Hitler used the opportunity to “kneel down” in front of Helene Hanfstaengl, declare himself as “her slave” and “lament his pitiful destiny, which had condemned him to the bittersweet experience of making her acquaintance too late.” Helene only just succeeded in getting the grovelling Hitler back on his feet before her husband returned to the room to witness this ambiguous situation.4 It is all too easy to conclude that a man who would later order monstrous crimes to be committed must have been sexually perverse, which is why historians have been so eager to credit this idea.5