Lukacs called the evidence of unnatural sexuality “rare, inauthentic and difficult to judge.” Lukacs’s view is a useful corrective in its argument that Hitler’s sexuality does not necessarily have to be the linchpin of a theory of his personality, however normal or abnormal that sexuality was. It reminds us that Hitler’s monstrousness is no less frightening—in fact, in certain ways, far more frightening—if we don’t regard him as sexually deformed or monstrous as well.
To deny or doubt there was some shameful sexual secret at the core of Hitler’s psyche does not diminish the mystery of Hitler’s soul. For many years, those who have investigated the Geli Raubal affair have looked to Dr. Fritz Gerlich, a nearly forgotten figure from the world of opposition journalists in Munich, as perhaps the only person who had gotten to the bottom of the Geli Raubal mystery (and perhaps that of Hitler’s psyche as well). Some believe Gerlich had discovered a secret about Hitler so dangerous he was murdered for it before he could publish what he’d learned. I’d come to doubt, finally, that Gerlich did find proof that Hitler murdered Geli Raubal. But in searching for Gerlich’s apocryphal secret, I came upon what I felt was one of the earliest, most powerful attempts to explain the secret dynamic of Hitler’s soul.
PART FOUR
HATRED: COMPLEX AND PRIMITIVE
Suggestive conjectures retrieved from the work of Fritz Gerlich and the raw files of the OSS
CHAPTER 9
Fritz Gerlich and the Trial of Hitler’s Nose
In which we unearth a lost classic of Hitler explanation by a murdered explainer
It still has the power to shock: Adolf Hitler married to a black bride. More than six decades after this extraordinary photocomposite image of Hitler in top hat and wedding tails, arm in arm with a black bride in a scene of wedding-day bliss, appeared on the front page of one of Munich’s leading newspapers, this mocking representation of Hitler—in a context of decapitation, miscegenation, transgressive sex, and violent defacement—still gives off an aura of recklessness, of danger.
And, in fact, there can be little doubt that this sensational visual and verbal attack on Hitler did turn out to be dangerous, fatally so, to its creator, the courageous, possessed anti-Hitler journalist, Dr. Fritz Gerlich. The mocking headline over the Hitler “wedding” photo—“DOES HITLER HAVE MONGOLIAN BLOOD?”—was published in July 1932, a scant six months before Hitler came to power, and may well have ensured Gerlich’s later death in Dachau. Although Gerlich went even further some five weeks after Hitler came to power and attempted to publish something perhaps even more dangerous: a story that would have—by some accounts—linked the newly installed Reichschancellor in a scandalous way to the death of Geli Raubal. That March 1933 story, which was confiscated by the Gestapo before it could be printed, was the immediate cause of Gerlich’s arrest and later murder. But the way he wounded Hitler with the “Mongolian-blood” front page in July 1932 probably sealed his fate, regardless of what was in the Geli Raubal story. The unpublished story may have had greater potential to damage Hitler, but the one Gerlich did publish had already succeeded in wounding him, in surgically exposing his psyche with a well-honed scalpel. It was a brilliant piece of character assassination as well as an unmatched work of character analysis that captures as well as or better than any subsequent one a powerful truth about Hitler and Hitler’s racial psychology.
Yes, caricatured images of Hitler had appeared in opposition papers and on posters for years, but this was different. Prewar Hitler caricatures tended to focus on the mustache and the forelock, to exaggerate the contorted face in paroxysmal oratorical fury. But this image struck closer to home; it struck at Hitler’s deepest, most obsessive anxiety: his blood.
The depiction of the champion of racial purity, of pure blood, in a wedding photo with a bride of an “inferior race,” the combination of that scandalous image with the sensational question raised about his own racial purity was designed not merely to shock the paper’s tens of thousands of casual readers but to wound, to draw blood from one reader in particular: Adolf Hitler. To draw blood by conjuring up the seamy congeries of sexual and racial rumors that had arisen around Hitler, rumors that arose from his persistent unmarried state, the rumors about his racial heritage that arose from the emphatically non-Aryan appearance of this champion of Aryan purity. And there can be little doubt it was designed as well to raise the specter of the most deeply inflammatory rumor, for which the allegation of Mongolian blood would be, in the minds of many readers, a euphemistic stand-in: the rumor that Hitler had in his ancestry another variation of “oriental” racial origin—“Jewish blood.”
Consider the political circumstances in which this assault appeared. In July 1932, ten months after Geli Raubal’s death in September 1931, Hitler had made the transition from much-ridiculed Bavarian crank to a national political figure campaigning on equal terms for the presidency of the German Republic with the venerable Reichspresident Hindenburg. He was now not merely a local or a national figure, but one who attracted worldwide attention, commanded a huge private army (the SA, which was terrorizing and murdering his political and journalistic opponents), and seemed to embody the future.
To publish an attack as vicious as this one, an attack that was more far reaching and deeply wounding in the body of the text than even the sensational photo and headline would indicate, was an act of great personal courage by a desperate and doomed prophet.
What Gerlich does in “Does Hitler Have Mongolian Blood?” is adopt the unctuously concerned tone and mock-scholarly rhetoric of Swift’s Modest Proposal. He modestly proposes first that we apply the “racial science” of one of Hitler’s favorite quack racial theorists, Dr. Hans Günther—who had prescribed the precise shape and dimension of each and every head and facial feature of “the Nordic type”—to Hitler’s own head and face, especially to his nose. Gerlich proceeds to demonstrate in excruciating detail, with the accompaniment of photographic close-ups and comparisons, just how abysmally Hitler failed to live up to the standard of his own racial criteria.
But even more wounding was the way Gerlich proceeded from the analysis of Hitler’s facial features—the highlight of which is a hilarious Swiftian Trial of Hitler’s Nose—to a brilliant critique of the essential features of Hitler’s personal and political identity. A critique which resulted in the devastating conclusion that Hitler—by his own lights—not only lacked Aryan physiognomy, he lacked an Aryan soul.
Before getting deeper into the vision of Hitler beneath the mockery of the Mongolian-blood lampoon, a vision that represents one of the most sophisticated attempts to explain Hitler by one of his Munich-period contemporaries, it might be valuable to see it in the context of the time when it was published, in the context of the fatal trajectory of the brave man who wrote it.
While the black-bridal image and the Mongolian-blood headline seemed shocking when I came upon them, it was difficult to gauge how transgressive it would have seemed in mid-1932, in the final few months of Hitler’s ascent to power. It certainly seemed to me a quantum leap beyond what I’d seen in the other Munich opposition papers I’d seen for that period. The courageous anti-Hitler Munich Post tended to rely more on reason, on ideology and investigation; there was pointed satiric commentary and, yes, the occasional pointed visual image, usually a caricature of Hitler, but nothing like the brutal mockery of Hitler’s racism in the bridal photomontage. Elsewhere, there were whispers and insinuations about Hitler’s appearance; there was underground humor (in which the Nordic ideal was mocked as “thin like Göring, tall like Goebbels, blond like Hitler”). But I’d never seen anything so openly, so sensationally, so contemptuously ridicule the physical body of Hitler and the political/metaphysical fraudulence it symbolically betrayed.
I decided to test this impression with one of the few people who could put Gerlich’s assault in the context of its moment, one of the last living veterans of the anti-Hitler opposition press in Weimar Germany. His name is Walter Schaber. He was in his nineties and a re
sident of Washington Heights in New York City, where he continues to write for the Aufbau, the venerable German-Jewish émigré weekly. He’d edited socialist newspapers in Thuringia and Saarfeld, directed the Socialist Worker Press Association in the late 1920s, and ended up in a Munich jail in March 1933 after the Hitler takeover. Schaber managed to escape to Czechoslovakia and then to America, where he went on to become an editor of the Aufbau. I brought my photographic reproduction of Gerlich’s Mongolian-blood lampoon to Washington Heights to get Schaber’s perspective on it in the context of the anti-Hitler journalism he knew.
Schaber takes a lively if also melancholy interest in the work of the opposition press in the years before the 1933 takeover. Outside Munich, he told me, with few exceptions (most notably the editor of the Berlin weekly Weltbühne, Carl von Ossietzky), the socialist opposition press was so distracted by internal factional fighting (primarily between the pacifist and pro-rearmament wings of the party) that they failed to focus the attention they should have on the struggle against Hitler. (Alfred Kazin told me of his disappointment in learning from émigré German socialists in the thirties how certain leaders of the party—unlike its reporters—had been pensioned off by Hitler. Kazin added that he believes the ideological roots of Hitler’s success in the struggle between a divided left and a militant fascist right have been neglected.)
Perhaps this retrospective regret was why Schaber’s face lit up with such evident pleasure when I showed him Gerlich’s “Mongolian Blood” screed. He laughed out loud as he devoured the acidulous headlines, the mocking captions, interrupting his reading with exclamations such as, “This is amazing! . . . July 1932! . . . This is wonderful! How did you find it?” (It was a tip from photojournalist Tim Gidal, who’d known Gerlich and recalled the satire, which I found in the Monacensia library in Munich.)
It seemed to give him great satisfaction that at least here, one anti-Hitler journalist had gone all out, had gone for the jugular, had given vent to the anger and contempt they all felt before they were all silenced. I suspect this no-holds-barred fatal recklessness has something to do with my own fascination with Gerlich. It’s surprising to discover, when you look at the literature on Hitler and the Nazi leadership before and after the war, inside and outside Germany, how little outright, heartfelt hatred and loathing is expressed in print.
The tone and tendency of prewar explainers was to condescend to Hitler, to treat him as a phenomenon beneath contempt, much less serious consideration. Rather than urge the necessity of combating Hitler, prewar explainers acted as if he could be wished away with words, belittled into oblivion. They diminished him to the point where he was not even a worthy target for antagonism. Postwar literature tends to diminish Hitler in a different way; knowing well what he wrought, the tendency is to argue it wasn’t really him, it was the deeper and more profound forces behind and beneath him, the wave on which he rode. He is, once again, then, barely an agent himself worthy of being blamed and loathed and held responsible so much as an instrument of abstract forces, hatred of whom is virtually irrelevant.
This is particularly true of German literature on the subject, and the rare exception to it like Gerlich throws the absence of passion elsewhere into stark relief. Is hatred a legitimate response? I’m not sure it’s always helpful analytically, but the reckless yet exquisitely well-honed hatred beneath the surface of Gerlich’s satire gave me the kind of satisfaction I’d found in one of the few genuinely hate-filled postwar accounts of the period, In the Shadow of the Reich by Niklas Frank, the son of Hitler lawyer and mass murderer Hans Frank. Niklas’s “biography” of his father is filled with a kind of joyful cleansing hatred and contempt. The son grew up in the castle in Kraków, Poland, that his father used as governor-general of occupied Poland—the place of evil from which Frank presided over and profited from the Final Solution.
The son portrays his father in acid, scathing tones as a conniving, vain, priggish, and piggish predator, squeezing the Jews for their valuables before sending them off to be incinerated. The drama of the Niklas Frank book is in the conflicted tone, the way the son’s effort to keep a distance between himself and his loathing for his father (by portraying him as a comic monster) recurrently collapses into pure hatred, drives him to devise new heights of obloquy and abuse—the prose can barely contain his rage and contempt. But for all its venom, it felt to me a cleansing rage, one that burned the accretions of pity and “understanding” away from the doors of perception. Certainly a healthy emotion when set against the torturous temporizing of Albert Speer, pitilessly captured by Gitta Sereny, wrestling with his conscience and the truth to account for Hitler’s hold over him; or compared with the ritualistic rationalizations the postwar German historians perform to “historicize” and distance themselves from Hitler, the wrestling with the notion of Hitler’s “greatness” in a way that trivializes his crimes. Niklas Frank’s work meant more to me than all of this ratiocination—a pure howl of hatred.
Gerlich’s hatred of Hitler was more than a howl, it was a razor-edged analytic tool that cut to the heart of Hitler’s pathology before anyone else did, before it was too late—if anyone had listened. Which is why I feel it’s important to rescue Gerlich, his life and work, from archival oblivion, to begin to restore him from footnotes to full-blooded memory.
Just who was this man, Dr. Fritz Gerlich? Restoring him to history is a particularly complicated task, because in the rare cases he does get mentioned, he’s often used to serve the agenda of fictionalists or factionalists. To put the mystery of Gerlich’s last scoop into better perspective, it’s helpful to look more closely at Gerlich’s path toward that final moment when the Gestapo ripped his last story off the presses. It is the story of a man who was driven by his obsession with Hitler from the rational to the irrational—but not without reason. What makes his trajectory in the Munich years so unusual is that Gerlich was an early, credulous supporter of the extreme nationalist politics Hitler represented.
Born to a staunchly Protestant family in 1883, six years before Hitler, Gerlich was something of an outsider when his family moved to heavily Catholic Bavaria. A naturally studious type, at university in Munich he began studying natural sciences but shifted to history, receiving a doctorate for a dissertation on an eleventh-century Germanic emperor. When his age and eyesight prevented him from serving in the German army during the war, Gerlich began a career in the state archives and sought an outlet for his nationalist fervor in patriotic newspapers. In the aftermath of the German defeat, he abandoned the archives for the front lines of polemical combat as editor of nationalist newspapers, rising quickly to become editor in chief of one of the most conservative Munich papers, the Münchener Neueste Nachrichten, in the early twenties.
By 1923, he’d become such a respected and influential figure in the nationalist movement that, in the spring of that year—as destructive inflation and strife over war reparations led to the French reoccupation of the Rhineland—Gerlich received a special visit in his apartment from the controversial rising star of the right-wing nationalist forces: Adolf Hitler. Something happened at that spring 1923 meeting between Gerlich and Hitler, something that, in conjunction with Hitler’s actions six months later during the beer-hall putsch, turned Gerlich—who might have become an ally of Hitler—into a bitter, implacable, lifelong enemy.
The way I’ve been able to reconstruct it from fragmentary sources is that, for Gerlich, it became a matter of faith and faithlessness. What seems to have happened is that at some point in the run-up to the putsch, perhaps in that face-to-face meeting, Hitler gave his word of honor to Gerlich that, while he would support the national aspirations of Gerlich’s man, the right-wing Bavarian prime minister Von Kahr, he would not resort to illegal, putschist methods to push his agenda. After that, however, Gerlich personally witnessed the beer-hall putsch at the Bürgerbräukeller and saw Hitler publicly place Von Kahr under arrest and extort an oath of support from him at gunpoint. Gerlich never forgave this betrayal. In his new
spapers, he called it “one of the greatest betrayals in German history.” Forever after, of the many epithets he hurled at the Nazis, among them “criminals” and “sexual degenerates,” the one that was for Gerlich the first among all sins was “oath breakers.” In pronouncing them oath breakers, it was as if he were a medieval pope casting their souls into eternal torment.
And eternally torment them he would. Gerlich and a close-knit group of colleagues, first at the Münchener Neueste Nachrichten and later at Gerlich’s own breakaway anti-Hitler paper, Der Gerade Weg, became in the decade from the 1923 putsch until the 1933 Hitler takeover the most outspoken center of anti-Hitler journalism on the conservative side of the political spectrum.
The importance of the Gerlich group was brought home to me during a visit to Dachau where, in an exhibit devoted to the first months of the Hitler takeover in neighboring Munich, the Dachau Museum had blown up reproductions of Munich newspaper stories about the manhunt for the Gerlich-group members who’d escaped arrest in the raid on Gerlich’s office in March 1933. They were hunted relentlessly because they had been genuinely dangerous. Some, like Gerlich, were murdered, some arrested; others, when released, went on to become the nucleus of the aristocratic anti-Hitler movement that culminated in Claus von Stauffenberg’s failed assassination attempt in July 1944, after which they were all brutally executed.
But something strange happened to Gerlich and this little group in the late twenties: They forged a highly improbable alliance, one that became a source of the faith that fueled their courageous anti-Hitler campaign. Gerlich and his friends became deeply involved with a holy stigmatic—a highly controversial, probably fraudulent, yet widely worshiped Bavarian peasant woman.
Her name was Therese Neumann, and it still seems remarkable to me that a skeptical, Protestant, rationalist historian such as Gerlich, the no-nonsense newspaper editor with the gimlet eye behind the steel-rimmed glasses, would be taken in by this primitive, bedridden, Catholic mystic whose own church was skeptical, who claimed she lived for years on no food but Eucharist wafers, who produced great gouts of blood in the pattern of Christ’s wounds on Good Fridays, claimed to have been transported back in time to the scene of the Crucifixion and to have received visitations on a regular basis from the Virgin Mary, who issued dire apocalyptic warnings about the dark fate that awaited contemporary Germany. But the strange affinity between the skeptical newspaper editor and the possessed or perhaps counterfeit stigmatic had its roots in the peculiar apocalyptic temper of the time.
Explaining Hitler Page 29
