Hitler’s intellectual starting point was apocalyptic: Western civilization, and especially Germany, he believed, faced downfall. In an atmosphere shaped by the pessimistic thesis of Oswald Spengler’s 1918 runaway bestseller, The Decline of the West, Hitler was playing the “politics of cultural despair,” as historian Fritz Stern described the prevailing mood. Fueled by writer Arthur Moeller van den Bruck’s proposals for a German “special path” between eastern Communism and western capitalism under a newly invented label—the “Third Reich”—this unsettled political climate was ideal for Hitler’s portentous predictions and offers of salvation. He proferred an instant “leap from despair to utopia,” wrote Stern.21 In this Hitlerian vision, only radical measures could halt the collapse. World War I had left Europe reeling and the entire existing order threatened by the sole winner of the horrible conflagration: Marxism. The Russian revolution had exposed itself as a murderous perversion and declared itself a world revolution. Germany was its next target. Both Lenin and Trotsky had spoken openly of Germany as the coming prize: “Without the victory of the revolution in Germany we are doomed,” Trotsky quoted Lenin as having said in 1918.22 This Marxist threat, Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf, was controlled by Bolsheviks who were “a band of Jewish writers and stock market thieves.”23 The Marxist virus had already infected Germany in the form of Social Democrats, the largest political party, and by Communists as well (much smaller but still able to poll 10 percent in national elections). The enemy was inside the gates.
The only antidote to these destructive forces, in Hitler’s eyes and in his book, was the nation—united, pure-blooded, ready to fight. Fighting, in fact, was nature’s imperative for cleansing, growth, and survival. “Struggle is always a means for improving a species’ health and power of resistance and, therefore, a cause of its higher development,” he wrote in Mein Kampf.24 The strength of the nation lay in the concept of race; only a pure race, not degraded by outside elements, could fight and win. Thus, one must raise national (racial) consciousness and expel any impure elements, which meant Jews. No matter how hard they tried, claimed Hitler, Jews could never be Germans (or any other nationality). Their claim to be only a “religious community,” he wrote, was “the first great lie.” They were, instead, a separate race—a condition that could not be overcome by geography (living for generations in Germany), language (speaking only German), or even religious affiliation (converting to Christianity). As a race, a Jew was always a Jew (and a German was always a German). And fighting the Jews, for Hitler, was a veritable religious calling. “In resisting the Jew, I am doing the work of the Lord,” he wrote.25
Much of this analysis in Mein Kampf was based on simplistic interpretations of serious science—as when Hitler equated human races to animal species and their undiluted mating habits. He also created specious categories of races that are “culture-creating” (Aryans), “culture-bearing” (Japanese), or “culture-destroying” (Jews). This typology provided a handy ranking system with no serious grounding in science but with a convincing pseudo-scientific sound to a mass audience. Still, the basics of Hitler’s worldview added up to a political system that would justify three massive undertakings: war on the West, war on Russia, and the Holocaust. He stuck with this scheme until the very end.
For his worldview to have credibility, wrote Zehnpfennig, Hitler felt he had to make it an ideological antipode to Marxism that was just as complex and detailed as Marx’s. Against Marx’s emphasis on man’s ability to overcome nature for his own purposes, for instance, Hitler offers the power of natural law, which dictates racial division and, ultimately, race war. Against the Marxian goal of perpetual peace, National Socialism dictates eternal struggle. Marxism rests on the concept of class warfare, Hitlerism on eliminating class divisions through a single-minded “national community.” Marxists believe that turning from community to the creation of private property was the original sin; Hitler claims that turning from the naturally dictated racial separation was the original sin, leading to race mixing and degeneration. Marx posits economic determinism; Mein Kampf elevates der Wille—human willpower—to determinative power.26
This swirl of ideas animated Hitler’s long periods of seclusion in the relative quiet of the fortress building’s second floor. During what became a very warm summer, he began spending less time in the garden and with the other inmates. He also stopped reading to his followers from his book drafts after the evening meal. Kriebel and Weber complained, but Hitler gave them the excuse that “the link to the previous chapters had been broken.” Hess offered a more mundane explanation: “He just doesn’t feel like reading in the evening because he wants to go to bed at nine o’clock [and] reading aloud will cost him several hours of not being able to get to sleep.”27
Contrary to legend, Hess did not take dictation; Hitler wrote the book himself “with two fingers” on his little typewriter, noted Ilse Pröhl Hess years later (she had married Hess).28 But having Hess as his tea-bringer and sounding board was a huge advantage for Hitler. Hess became Hitler’s first reader or, more frequently, first listener, as Hitler worked his way through his ideas. Hitler always wrote like he spoke, say the critics of his prose, so it must have helped the writer to hear himself delivering his text to Hess’s willing ears. That may not have made for graceful writing, as his literary detractors are quick to note, but it gave Hitler his rhythm, balance, and perspective. And it was a long perspective. With his little Remington, Hitler was cranking out the pages. Always verbose, he could hold audiences in mass gatherings for an uncommonly long time; he must have thought the same principle applied to his writing. People, he thought, could take Hitler in large doses.
While he was no longer reading to the after-dinner assemblage, Hitler was now reading often to Hess. “When he finishes a chapter, he comes directly to me,” Hess wrote. A relatively educated man with an upper-bourgeois background, Hess was the best Boswell Hitler could have wanted. Slim, tallish, with wavy dark hair and deep-set eyes, Hess was both handsome and thoughtful, though some found him to be oddly silent, obsessively neat, and jealously protective of his closeness to Hitler. Hess was one of the very few of Hitler’s inner circle to share in private the familiar Du greeting, the intimate form of “you” then reserved in German for family, children, and very close friends.29 As Hitler’s Praetorian guard, Hess helped to keep the curious away, a role that would only grow in coming years, leading to Hess’s appointment in 1933 as deputy Führer of the Nazi Party and Hitler’s right-hand man. Hess’s self-appointed role in prison naturally led to frictions with other prisoners who found him neurotic and distant. When Hanfstaengl visited Landsberg, he noticed that Hess “only grudgingly left Hitler’s side while I was talking with him.… He could not bear to see Hitler exposed to any views other than his own and was always trying to distract attention.”30
As a Hitler devotee, Hess was occasionally swept away by Hitler’s drafts. After one reading, Hess wrote to Pröhl that he was so taken by the “logic, liveliness, colorful and beautiful language” that he had to “exhale when the tension was released at the end, just like after one of his best speeches.” Hitler apparently heightened the effect of his words with his typically energetic presentation—“his constant facial expressions and hand gestures underline it,” recalled Hess, who considered such verbal playacting one of Hitler’s charms. “No matter what he does or says, he remains completely himself—he can’t escape it!” Even Hitler was quite pleased with himself, “beaming like a little boy, sitting in the wicker chair in [Hess’s] room.” Hess called it an odd “mixture of cold-blooded, mature superiority and uninhibited childishness!”31
Hitler’s writing reflected the dramatic role World War I had played in his life. His emotional core still rested to a large degree on the brutal and disillusioning experience of World War I. He and many of his followers—especially those in prison with him—were, after all, the lost soldiers of a lost war. Bound together by their grim frontline years, they took political energy from their belie
f that the left-wing traitors at home had stabbed the soldiery in the back; their common training in combat and arms gave their politics its militaristic and violent cast. With World War I as his formative period, Hitler’s fundamental experience of the public arena was the battlefield. This can only have fed his later view of politics as a theater of war, not as an arena of compromise and parliamentary debate, which he scorned.32
To Hitler, politics was the continuation of war by other means. Struggle and warfare were to him the natural, not the exceptional, state. “Man has grown great in eternal struggle and will go under in eternal peace,” he wrote in Mein Kampf.33 If he had a wish for the German people, Hitler later said, it was that they would “experience a war every fifteen to twenty years.”34
As he typed away, Hitler was often reliving his battlefield experience. He recaptured the intensity of conflict with a vivid recollection of marching off to battle in 1914. Reading from his draft to Hess, he evoked the euphoria experienced by many German soldiers during the first heady days of the conflict. In Hitler’s case, the passage into war took place on a train that was carrying the Sixteenth Bavarian Reserve Infantry Regiment up the Rhine River and westward into the already blood-soaked fields of Flanders. Hitler had written and then rewritten all or parts of the chapter when he asked Hess to listen to what he had drafted. Hess recalled the moment in a letter to Pröhl:
He tells about… the journey along the Rhine… the train filled with a regiment of young volunteers passing the Niederwald German Reich Memorial lit up by the sun rising over a gentle fog, the guys beginning to sing “The Watch on the Rhine”—not long afterwards the first greetings of death sing and whistle at them. Regiment after regiment of young Germans storms ahead. Suddenly far down the right flank come the distant sounds of “Deutschland, Deutschland über alles,” growing stronger and stronger. More and more men pick up the song and pass it on until the entire front is lustily singing it. But the first pellets begin whipping through the singing men, mowing down the flower of Germany. Still, the singing does not stop. The young soldiers perhaps did not know how to fight as well as the others, but they certainly knew how to die. The Tribune [Hess’s nickname for Hitler] had begun reading slower, more haltingly.… he was pausing longer and longer until finally he just lowered the page, put his head in his hand and sobbed—
“I hardly need tell you that at that point I had also lost my composure!” wrote Hess.35
In almost exactly the same words and tone as it appears in Hess’s letter, and with the same emotional impact, Hitler’s story of going to war appeared in Mein Kampf. Clearly the ex-soldier was willing to risk being maudlin in order to capture a mood and a moment that, he rightly believed, would strike a chord with readers—even if he had to butcher the truth, combining events that stretched over nine days and included no singing of “Deutschland, Deutschland über alles.”36 Nor was Hitler afraid, in this part of his increasingly autobiographical draft, to be self-revealing. Shortly after the scene on the battlefield, Hitler admitted to fears of injury or death that almost broke his will to run messages to the battlefront. “It was all just cowardice,” he confessed, according to Hess. “I admit openly and with no shame that I have more sensitive nerves than some people.” The man of extremes also transitioned easily from the vulnerable to the vicious. In the same conversation with Hess, Hitler suddenly began speaking bitterly of war wounds and “treason on the home front.” He then lashed out: “Oh, I will take merciless and frightful revenge on the first day that I can.”*
Sometimes Hitler used Hess’s seemingly endless patience just to ramble on about the broad variety of topics that interested him—cars, road-building, mass construction of row houses, the technology of skyscrapers, even the details of armoring warships and the World War I mistakes of the former German navy commander, Grand Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz. “You can always tell that he has studied these things in detail,” noted Hess,37 who said he was convinced that Hitler still had another political life coming. “My conviction comes from daily contact with his teeming brain,”38 he told Pröhl.
Hitler’s concentration could easily have been broken by the constant stream of visitors (150 in April, 154 in May, and 94 in June) and the well-wishers’ gifts, not to mention the comradeship and comforts of his special imprisonment. Among those who came to give Hitler succor were Hitler’s brother-in-law, Leo Raubal, and Leo’s beautiful daughter, Geli. The sixteen-year-old Geli was the daughter of Hitler’s half-sister, Angela, and thus his half-niece. Yet when she arrived for a July visit, Hemmrich claims to have seen Hitler kiss her “heartily” on the mouth—she was the only woman to whom he had shown the slightest attraction, wrote Hemmrich.39 Hitler was years later said to be in love with Geli, who died under mysterious circumstances by a shot from Hitler’s pistol in his apartment, where she lived. It was ruled suicide.
Intellectually, Hess sometimes served as more than just Hitler’s obedient servant. He was a close disciple of Haushofer, the quirky former Bavarian army general who as a University of Munich professor had developed an elaborate construct of nationalism and geopolitics that few could understand—“clothing simple geography with political mysticism,” an American geography professor wrote.40 But Haushofer’s simplest and best-known concept was, at its core, easily grasped: Lebensraum, or “living space.” Used earlier by another German political geographer, Friedrich Ratzel, and batted around by various nineteenth-century theorists, Lebensraum had not yet been widely popularized.
For years, Hitler had been promoting the idea that Germany needed “land and soil” for its future survival. The demand was even part of the little-noticed twenty-five-point Nazi Party program that Hitler had announced in his first Hofbräuhaus speech in 1920. That Germany’s new geographic acquisitions would almost certainly come “at the expense of Russia,” as Hitler soon wrote in Mein Kampf, was hardly a secret. The idea of a Drang nach Osten—a push to the east—was an old German refrain, partly a nostalgic revival of historic German expansions six hundred years earlier by the Teutonic knights. But Hitler had never used so elegant and simple a concept as Lebensraum.
Through Hess, Hitler had met Haushofer before, but the men had never really trusted each other. Since his teenaged days of rejecting formal education, and his soldier’s belief that hard knocks and a few years on a battlefield were “worth thirty years of university education,”41 Hitler had made no secret of his disdain for “the university parsons,” as he liked to call the professoriate. Haushofer, in turn, regarded Hitler as a “half-educated man” and wanted little to do with him directly. “I think he [Haushofer] hates the Tribune,” Hess had once written to Ilse Pröhl.42 When Hess brought the two together in Landsberg, they met only briefly, always in the presence of Hess.43 Later, however, Haushofer would lend scientific legitimacy to Hitler’s expansionist policies during the Third Reich and World War II. (After the war, he came within a hair of being prosecuted as a major war criminal and later committed suicide.)
In early July 1924 Haushofer’s intriguing phrase—“living space” (also translatable as “habitat”)—was suddenly much talked about at Landsberg, but not fully understood. Heated discussions had broken out among the Hitler crew. “Kriebel and a few others teased me in the garden about the geopolitical Lebensraum,” wrote Hess to Ilse Pröhl. “I said, ‘Living space is a more or less well-defined piece of the earth with all its life forms and influences.’ But Kriebel claimed to be too dumb to understand that.… When the general [Haushofer] was here on Tuesday, I asked him to write for us a more precise definition.”44 The result that Haushofer delivered was—according to Hess’s letter—almost exactly the same thing Hess had said, dressed up in more opaque language.
But that did not matter. What mattered was that, through Hess, the term Lebensraum had now gotten into Hitler’s slogan-minded brain, where it must have gone off like a flashbulb. This single and singular word encompassed all he had been thinking about German overpopulation, German expansion, and Russian land. The word was
a propagandist’s dream: positive, clear, self-explanatory, goal-oriented, and tilted toward the future—much more appealing than the inanimate phrase “land and soil” (Grund und Boden). Who, in densely populated Germany, would not want more Lebensraum? And “living space” was a much nicer way to describe future landholdings than to call them what they were—targets of conquest. Military invasion was now elevated to a law of nature, and Hitler had a shiny new name for one of his fundamental principles.
Hitler began using Lebensraum right away. In July, drafting a chapter called “Munich,” he laid out “four paths” by which German foreign policy could solve the country’s problem of an alleged net population growth of nine hundred thousand per year without enough land to feed such a rapidly expanding nation. Veiling his intentions in a hypothetical discussion of what German colonial policy should have been before World War I, Hitler clearly chose the same solution he had hinted at in many speeches and in his earlier journal article: a massive land grab in the East. A great deal of land was available only in western Russia, he claimed, which was underpopulated (Hitler asserted that Russia had eighteen times more land per capita than did Germany).45 The region was later called by the Nazis a Raum ohne Volk, a space without people. This was a dubious claim but it paired perfectly with the other side of their coin—that the Germans were a Volk ohne Raum, a people without space. Thus, the obvious answer: Lebensraum for the Germans. It was a classic Hitlerian oversimplification of the facts to fit the theory. But there it was: Germany would conquer and settle the vast semi-empty spaces between the Russian border and the Ural Mountains, filling them with German agricultural settlers. The hapless and hopeless Russians—incapable of turning their land into highly productive modern agriculture—would become an underclass or die out, helped into serfdom or extinction by the merciless German rulers, the new Herrenvolk, or master race.
1924: The Year that Made Hitler Page 22
