Thus Lebensraum became a powerful new concept in Hitler’s book, and later became a central pillar of Nazi territorial ambitions and justification for war. Thanks to Hess and Haushofer, Hitler now had an easily digestible term with scientific gloss and positive overtones to add to his expansionist arsenal. Having appeared nowhere in Hitler’s eighteen-page outline or in the previously written sections of his book, Lebensraum now sprang up repeatedly in Hitler’s manuscript, beginning in July.46 That marked a turning point in the writing of Mein Kampf and in the framing of Hitler’s future policies.
The Lebensraum formulation was also a handy fulcrum for Hitler’s corollary argument: that a nation without Lebensraum was not a true “culture-creating people,” as Hitler liked to call the nations he approved of. The Aryans, of course, and especially the Germans, were culture-creating. The Jews, of course, were not; they were parasites “on the body of other nations.” Part of their problem was that they had no Lebensraum, he argued. Alleging ahistorically that Jews had never had a country of their own, he dismissed Jews as a wandering band “always searching for new nourishment for [their] race.”47 When Jews settled, they created a state within a state. Since they lived everywhere, they had no well-defined Lebensraum anywhere. Even nomads, wrote Hitler in his book, “have a clearly delimited Lebensraum which they cultivate with their herds, just not as settled farmers.” The Aryans, Hitler claimed, “probably started as nomads.”48
By August, Hitler was in the midst of a writing marathon. Trying to stave off interruptions, he sent another statement to the Völkischer Kurier: “In spite of my previous plea in the press to refrain from visiting me in Landsberg-on-Lech, I still receive numerous outside visitors.… I must emphatically repeat my request and will only accept visits that are agreed to in advance.”49 Maurice wrote to a contact asking for understanding that Hitler was not answering his mail; he was under a “colossal mountain of work.”50 In early August, Hess wrote that “the Tribune thinks he’ll have his book finished by next week—I don’t believe it.”51 Two weeks later, Fobke—who by now was acting as Hitler’s link to the North German Nazis and the liaison between the Field Marshal’s Hill and the foot soldiers—noted in a letter to a friend in his hometown of Stettin that “it’s hard to catch H. now for a conversation, he’s working non-stop on his book and doesn’t like to be disturbed.”52
Yet during this August writing rush, Hitler did find time for a detailed conversation with Fobke about a key topic that he was almost certainly just then writing into the book: the melding of the “programmatist” (Programmatiker) with the “politician” (Politiker).53 The words can better be translated, without the convenient alliteration, as theorist (or political philosopher) and practical politician. The terms are more or less self-explanatory, but as usual Hitler took several pages to explain them. “The theorist must set the goals for a movement, the politician must implement them,” he wrote. “One is guided by eternal truths, the other by current practical realities.” The theorist should be the “polar star of curious humanity,” insists Hitler.54 As examples of such great men, Hitler mentions Frederick the Great, Martin Luther, Richard Wagner, and the “founders of religions,” which could include Jesus Christ and Muhammad. Without saying it, of course, Hitler was elevating himself into their company.
More important, Hitler saw his appearance on the world stage as something like a millennial coming. “At long intervals of human history,” he wrote, “it may occasionally happen that the practical politician and the political philosopher are one. The more intimate the union, the greater are the political difficulties. Such a man does not labor to satisfy demands that are obvious to every small-minded person; he reaches for goals that only a few can see.” Such a moment, Hitler implied, had now arrived.
Fobke could not know it—maybe even Hitler did not know it in mid-August—but one of the most revealing sections of Mein Kampf had just been composed and discussed. Nowhere else in the book does Hitler more blatantly display his exponentially growing “self-belief,” sense of divine calling, and hardening infallibility. His gifts as a politician are manifest, he believes. Nobody else has his combination of practical and philosophical talents.
If there were a single month, a critical pivot point, a precise moment that can be said to be the one that made Hitler in 1924, this was it. It was from this point forward that Hitler “acquired that fearless faith, that optimism and confidence in our destiny that absolutely nothing could shake afterwards,” as he put it.55
With his claim to the mantle of philosopher-politician—a latter-day “philosopher-king”—Hitler had inserted the keystone into the psychological arch he was building. Like one of his heroes, Napoleon, crowning himself emperor in 1804, Hitler had effectively anointed himself as the great man of his age. Having touched the sword to his own shoulders, Hitler could now make himself the undisputed and unchallengeable leader of his movement—a one-man show uniquely unfettered by advisers’ inputs and restraints. From that model grew the Führer myth, the unique form of non-collegial dictatorship with which he later ruled and ruined Germany.
In August, Hitler was rushing to finish his book. Chapter eleven, Hitler’s long disquisition on race and Jews—entitled “Nation and Race”—may have been put together out of three different pieces produced at different times.56 His high-handed description of the “Path of the Jews,” for example, had appeared in earlier speeches—but now it went from three basic steps (“court Jew,” “people’s Jew,” “blood Jew”) to eleven developmental stages covering eighteen printed pages. This chapter was a critical one in Mein Kampf, forming a cornerstone of Hitler’s race theories and what eventually led to the Holocaust. With this chapter, Hitler was trying to pull off a massive subterfuge, according to analysts Beierl and Plöckinger. Having first come to rabid anti-Semitism, Hitler was now inventing an elaborate race theory in which to embed his hatred of Jews. Even though the anti-Semitism preceded the generalized theories, “he tried in Mein Kampf to make it look the other way around,” they write.57
In “Nation and Race,” Hitler bared for all to see his conviction that “the stronger must dominate and not blend with the weaker.” Combined with his belief in perpetual struggle as the route to national and racial health, Hitler had his fundamental justifications for war, a renewing and cleansing force that sorted the wheat from the chaff. “Those who want to live, let them fight, and those who do not want to fight in this world of eternal struggle do not deserve to live,” he wrote.58 Foreshadowing his future eliminationist eugenics policies, Hitler added: “All who are not of good race in this world are chaff.”59
Such brutal racial judgments—and worse—can be found all over Mein Kampf. At least six hundred words, lines, or sections of the book are driven by hatred of Jews.60 Yet Hitler also claimed, in his Vienna chapter, that he arrived at his anti-Semitism only after long “inner soul struggles.” He even talked about it with Hess, who described the conversation in a letter to his friend, Professor Haushofer. “I had no idea that [Hitler] wrestled his way to his present position on the Jewish question only after a hard inner battle,” wrote Hess. “He kept having doubts about whether or not he was doing the right thing, and he said that even today he expresses himself differently in small groups of educated people than in front of a mass audience, where he has to take the most radical position.”
If Hitler at this point was still willing to moderate his anti-Semitism “in small groups of educated people,” that would certainly change soon. When a Czech Nazi named Kugler came to visit Hitler a few weeks later, the Czech asked the leader if being in prison and writing a book had in any way affected his position on fighting the Jewish threat. “Oh, yes,” replied Hitler. “I have in fact changed my view on how to combat Jews. I’ve seen that so far I’ve been too mild!” Working on his book, he said, had shown him that in future “the harshest weapons” must be used to fight the Jews, because, after all, “Judaism is the pestilence of the world!”61
Hitler’s transformation fro
m hotheaded revolutionary to long-view political player was a work in progress. Earlier that spring he had told Kurt Ludecke, a Nazi supporter and world-traveled fund-raiser who visited Hitler in Landsberg, “We must follow a new line of action.… Instead of working to achieve power by an armed coup, we shall have to hold our noses and enter the Reichstag against the Catholics and Marxist deputies. If out-voting them takes longer than out-shooting them, at least the results will be guaranteed by their own constitution.”62 Ludecke called Hitler’s change of direction a shifting “from the true north of idealism to the magnetic north of realism.”63 This moment “truly marked the turning point for the Party,” wrote Ludecke in 1938.64
These developments were a toxic shift to some of Hitler’s followers. Hitler soon assured Hermie Fobke that he was “still fighting against participation in elections but that he had learned a lot from events.”65 The dutiful Fobke communicated this muddled and ambiguous sentiment to his contacts among the North German Nazis. By the autumn, Hitler was becoming more explicit, writing into the final pages of the first volume of Mein Kampf his new dictum: parliament is a terrible thing, but we must join it to kill it. “Our movement is antiparliamentary, and even our participation in a parliamentary institution can only serve the purpose of destroying and removing it.”66 In the 1930s, Hitler was true to his word.
As he completed volume one of Mein Kampf, Hitler’s confidence was soaring. He extolled the power of the skilled propagandist to sway both the intelligentsia and the “lower strata” with “primitiveness of expression.” “Among a thousand speakers there is perhaps only a single one who can manage to speak to locksmiths and university professors at the same time in a form which… actually lashes them into a wild storm of applause.”67 It is obvious whom Hitler had in mind.
His belief in himself as the one and only person capable of reviving Germany was catching—at least in Landsberg Prison. The men, some of them young, were caught up in his persuasive power on the occasions when Hitler joined in group dinners and garden walks. “You can’t believe what huge strength and thrilling passion emanates from Adolf Hitler, and the glowing love and respect we all have for him,”68 wrote prisoner Paul Hirschberg after spending two hours over tea and conversation with Hitler on the young man’s twenty-third birthday. Even Hess, who had worked closely with Hitler long before the putsch, admitted that “I’ve only really gotten to know him here” in prison. “I now have the unique feeling that I’m walking side by side with Germany’s ‘coming man,’” he wrote.69 Not everyone, of course, thought Hitler’s messianic style and influence on the young men was such a great thing. Prisoner Hans Krüger received an admonishing letter from his father, warning him against the Hitlerian gospel. “You’ll see things differently, once you get out and can listen to some other people. It’s unbelievable that the court incarcerates you guys with a type like Hitler. He ought to be cooped up somewhere all by himself.”70
By the end of August, Hitler thought he was moving into the final stages of his book. “He formally asked me to help him with proofing and corrections,” Hess wrote at the beginning of the month.71 As Hitler was becoming excited about the look of a book with his name on it, he told Hess the pages would have gilt edges and he even asked Hess to help him examine leather samples for the book’s spine and colors for its covers. Hitler was seeing the finished product before his eyes.
In early September, Hitler was looking a month ahead. On October 1, he would be eligible for parole. He was hoping for release from prison and worried about legal complications, especially the danger that he might be deported to Austria. For his book, he wanted immediate publication. Hitler knew he would need money right away, and not just for his lawyer. He already had his heart set on something else.
CHAPTER TWELVE
A Second Chance
“It is essential that Hitler, as the soul of the völkisch movement, be deported.”
—MUNICH DEPUTY POLICE CHIEF
If Adolf Hitler had a personal weakness for worldly pleasures—besides his Austrian sweet tooth—it was his love of luxury cars. From his earliest days in politics, he had craved fine automobiles to drive him around Munich, giving him comfort and prestige at a time when both were in short supply. Status derived from the newly arrived monster machines with their bulging headlights and fold-back cabriolet roofs. For all of his sometimes backward-looking politics and anti-modernist attitudes—Hitler denounced the “financial tyranny” of big cities and loathed contemporary art—the Nazi leader was a high-tech junkie who loved the smooth calibration of a sumptuous touring car.1 His fascination with automobiles inspired his interest in building grand Autobahnen and, someday, a “people’s car” that would be called a Volkswagen.
Hitler did not drive. He said he had learned but never put the skill into practice for fear that his enemies would stage a street accident to embarrass him. But Hitler was a happy passenger who loved being chauffeured around the city or into his beloved Alps. He was, by his own accounts, a pesky backseat driver, constantly telling his drivers to speed up or slow down, constantly showing off his knowledge of technical details. Hitler was especially fond of well-engineered machines produced by entrepreneurs like Karl Benz, who called his cars Benz, and Gottlieb Daimler, who named his cars after a rich customer’s daughter—Mercedes. (In 1927, Benz and Daimler would join forces to build Mercedes-Benz.) On the biggest night of his political career—the 1923 putsch—Hitler had arrived in a big red Mercedes at the Bürgerbräukeller. But since the day the putsch failed, and he was driven to Putzi Hanfstaengl’s villa outside Munich in a doctor’s car, Hitler had not even sat in an automobile—only in police vans.
In mid-September 1924 Hitler was still languishing in Landsberg Prison, hoping for parole on October 1. But his release was by no means certain. Pressures were building to hold him behind bars—or to deport him to Austria. Both police and prosecutors were keenly aware of Hitler’s potential for repeat mischief, and wanted to keep him off the streets and out of the beer halls. They would soon mount a campaign to annul his parole chances. Knowing his situation could be precarious, Hitler had for months fastidiously maintained good relations with Warden Leybold and his guards, hoping for a perfect “good behavior” report. Yet his lust for a new car led him to a rare lapse that could derail his hopes and plans.
On Friday, September 12, Hitler summoned to the prison Jakob Werlin, the Benz dealer in Munich. Werlin’s Benz Garages, as his dealership was called, was conveniently situated near the Völkischer Beobachter office in the Schellingstrasse. One can only imagine the sight of Hitler and Werlin in the Landsberg Prison visitors’ room, the slick Benz car brochure spread out before them. It is a scene straight out of all the car showrooms in the modern world—with the slight difference that the windows had bars and the customer had no money. What Hitler did have was a book manuscript, a reservoir of hope, and a lot of chutzpah. His only problem, he told car salesman Werlin, was deciding between the forty-horsepower and the fifty-horsepower models. In his wavering, Hitler made a decision that would soon come to haunt him.
Werlin was barely out of the prison when Hitler sat down and banged out a letter to him. The typewriter that wrote Mein Kampf now wrote a customer’s plea for a better deal on a luxury car. Hitler was haggling by mail with a car salesman. The Benz that had become the car of Hitler’s dreams was priced at twenty-six thousand marks.2 Hitler began by mulling the choices: “Actually I think the 11/40 would meet my needs at the moment. The only thing that concerns me… is the fact that it runs 300 rpm’s faster than the 16/50.” Hitler feared that the lower-powered vehicle might run hot and need replacing too often. “I won’t be able to afford a new car every two or three years,” he whined. Like car buyers everywhere, Hitler tried to poor-mouth his way into a lower price: “Even if I am released on October 1, I can’t expect significant income from my work [book] until the middle of December. I’ll be forced to get a loan or an advance from somewhere. That’s why a couple thousand marks make a big difference. In
addition I have to pay my court and trial expenses which already make my hair stand on end.… I would be grateful if… you could inquire as to whether I could get a discount.”
Hitler wanted Werlin to go to the top—the Benz headquarters in Mannheim, an industrial city on the Rhine. Hitler knew that Werlin had plans to call or to travel there on Monday. A cut rate for Hitler, the famous Nazi, could be granted or denied only by the main office. Hitler wanted to get his supplicating plea into Werlin’s hands before that Monday meeting. In his mad rush to procure a car, he took an expedient step: he passed his letter to a prison visitor, Wolfram Kriebel, the young son of Colonel Kriebel. If mailed in Munich on Monday morning, Hitler’s letter would reach Werlin on the same day.
It was a reckless error. Giving a letter to a departing prison visitor was blatant smuggling. The act violated censorship rules that required every piece of mail entering or leaving the prison to be examined and read (many letters to Hitler had already been confiscated by the censors, including one that contained a poem with the line, “We will break down the slammer’s bars”). By skirting the rules, Hitler was jeopardizing a year’s worth of model behavior and months of hard labor at his typewriter. If forced to stay at Landsberg and serve his full five-year sentence, Hitler as a political force could dissipate, remembered only as a spasm of extremism in a country still finding its way out of the disaster of world war. With the Nazi movement outside the prison already in a whorl of self-destruction, Hitler’s continued absence would almost certainly have doomed his party’s players to walk-on, walk-off roles in a Germany that, at that very moment, was beginning to halt inflation and find its political legs.
At first, Hitler’s letter traveled under the radar. On the very day that it was mailed—September 15—Warden Leybold was sending the Bavarian court a status report on his star inmate’s time in Landsberg Prison. “He is a man of order and discipline,” Leybold wrote, who “makes every effort to adhere to the rules of the institution.” With Hitler’s earlier hunger strike and shouting matches in mind, Leybold noted that Hitler had “without doubt become more mature and calm than he was.” And not only that: Hitler could be expected to behave peaceably upon his release because he had no “ideas of revenge towards officials from the opposite [political] camp who foiled his plans in November 1923.” Hitler’s face-to-face meetings with the warden over the months had obviously paid off; Leybold, like so many others before him, had been swept off his feet by the Hitlerian force field.
1924: The Year that Made Hitler Page 23
