Explaining Hitler

by Ron Rosenbaum

  The peasant girl who changed Fritz Gerlich’s life began having visitations from Jesus and Mary about the same time Geli Raubal began getting visits from her Uncle Adolf. Therese Neumann was a twenty-seven-year-old farm girl living in Konnersreuth, north of Munich, when in 1925 she took to her bed, claiming to be paralyzed by mysterious spasms, spinal injuries, and—the story goes—the trauma she suffered when she tried and failed to rescue farm animals from a burning barn.

  After a year of bedridden paralysis that mystified doctors, she suddenly began having visions: She went into an ecstatic trance and, when she awoke from it, claimed she’d been transported back to Jerusalem during the final twenty-four hours of Jesus’ Passion. She’d seen him praying on the Mount of Olives; she’d witnessed the stations of the cross. He’d actually spoken to her from the cross even as he bled from the nails in his hands and his feet, and the spear through his side.

  It was on Good Friday 1926 that a new element was added to these visions: stigmata. Blood suddenly appeared on the palms of her hands and the soles of her feet, and blood seemed to ooze from her side—bloody wounds imitating the pattern of Christ’s wounds on the cross. With one idiosyncratic addition: blood seemed to ooze from her eyes as well.

  Her local Catholic priest became convinced a true miracle, a visitation from the Savior, was occurring. Excitable priests and peasants spread the word. Soon, devout Catholics from all over came to her bedside to witness the stigmata that had begun to appear not just on Good Friday but every Friday. Along with the stigmata, her conversations with Jesus became more urgent: Some claimed she tried to warn Jesus of the bloody end he was facing, to help him escape the Crucifixion.

  In return, Jesus and Mary would issue warnings through Neumann about the condition of Germany. It was this quasi-political dimension of her visions that began to attract sophisticated and otherwise skeptical visitors from Munich, some of whom were journalistic colleagues of Fritz Gerlich. They came to see the bloody wounds and came back with her bloody prophecies ringing in their ears, prophecies that captured the preapocalyptic mood of late Weimar Germany.

  One of the visitors—an aristocratic Catholic conservative, Count Erwin von Aretin, who survived to become Gerlich’s postwar biographer—became a believer. Von Aretin wrote a breathless two-part feature on the Konnersreuth stigmatic in August 1927 for Gerlich’s Münchener Neueste Nachrichten—a series that created a nationwide, then international sensation over the peasant-girl visionary. Translated into thirty-two languages, it made the bed of the bedridden stigmatic the focus of an international cult of followers who fervently wanted to believe that at last God was trying to make his presence, his advice felt in the historical travail they were experiencing, choosing this innocent soul as a medium.

  Finally, after repeated urgings from his colleagues, the skeptical Protestant Gerlich decided to pay a visit to the stigmatic. To the surprise of just about everyone, he came back deeply impressed. More than that; he returned, returned repeatedly, found himself drawn deeper and deeper into the peasant girl’s circle, would transcribe her visionary utterances, and try to translate them into warnings and prophecies about the growing crisis in Germany.

  In November 1927, he wrote his own enthusiastic account of the Konnersreuth phenomenon in his newspaper, which was surprising enough. But then, three months later, he shocked everyone by quitting his influential and prestigious position as editor of the Nachrichten and devoting himself for the next two years to writing a two-volume biography of the Bavarian stigmatic and her prophecies. He climaxed that period by formally converting to Catholicism in 1930.

  At first I found myself puzzled by Gerlich’s apparently wild swerve from engagement in the ongoing crisis of the German polity, the ongoing struggle against Bolshevism and Hitlerism he’d been so deeply committed to. My puzzlement grew deeper when I looked a little further into the actual nature of the stigmatic phenomena that had so mesmerized the hard-nosed newspaperman Gerlich.

  In his reverent biography of Therese Neumann, Dr. Johannes Steiner, Gerlich’s colleague, portrays Gerlich first going to Konnersreuth “determined to unmask every fraud he encountered . . . if there were any to be found.” Instead, “he was favored with a very special grace. He immediately recognized the events at Konnersreuth as unexplainable in the natural order of things and went back to Munich like a second Saint Paul.”

  Not in the natural order of things, nicht natürlich, yes, but in a very different sense from the sinister unnatural aura around Hitler. And yet other investigations of the phenomena suggest other explanations than the supernatural. Consider the fascinating 1949 report by an Oxford-educated Catholic writer, Hilda Graef, The Case of Therese Neumann. Aside from Neumann’s local parish priest and bishops who became caught up in the worldwide celebrity of their parishioner, many Church authorities were resolutely skeptical about these “miraculous manifestations,” and Graef exhumed some of the early investigations by physicians dispatched by the Church to look into the Konnersreuth claims.

  What their reports and Graef’s summation of the evidence amounts to—however indirectly and politely phrased (out of a tenderness of feeling for the genuinely reverent sentiment of the believers)—is that the little peasant girl was a complete fraud, a con artist. Her stigmata were produced, most probably, by concealing little vials of blood under her bedclothes and applying them to her stigmatic “wounds” surreptitiously or when her parents ushered visitors out during a “coughing fit” or with the excuse that the chronically bedridden Therese needed to relieve herself in a bedpan. When the visitors returned they found the charismatic peasant girl’s visage suddenly smeared with blood; she’d dramatically throw off the bedcovers to display wounds on her hands, feet, and side that mimicked the pattern of the bloody holes in Christ’s body.

  To read the results of Graef’s inquiry is to encounter a mystery more perplexing than the shabby conjurer’s tricks used to perpetuate the illusion of stigmata: the mystery of how a hard-bitten, embattled newspaperman such as Gerlich could have been taken in by such an unsophisticated, homespun hoax. (It’s a question not dissimilar to the one asked about Hitler: How could a sophisticated culture such as Germany fall for a shameless counterfeit such as Hitler?) There is a cynical explanation for Gerlich’s conversion for those so inclined in Steiner’s worshipful account of Gerlich’s Saint Paul experience at Konnersreuth. “In Konnersreuth,” Steiner writes, Gerlich

  became acquainted with Prince Erich von Waldburg zu Zeil. He later discussed with him the foundation of a newspaper that would be independent of any control by financial powers, with himself as editor and the prince as financial backer. The prince was moved by Gerlich’s words that “Hundreds of souls are hanging in the balance” . . . and in the course of the years 1930–1933 he [the prince] sacrificed some half million marks for the newspaper that they then published: “The Straight Way.” The publishers were known as the “Natural Law Publishing House” because their chief program was an expression of the fight for recognition of human rights.

  A cynic might rush to assert that Gerlich’s “conversion” to belief in the peasant-girl stigmatic was a convenient way of ingratiating himself into the circle of wealthy aristocrats conned by her, a way of conning them (for a good cause) into financing his anti-Hitler paper. But I’m inclined to credit Steiner’s depiction of the relation between Gerlich and the stigmatic prophet: “As publishing adviser” to Der Gerade Weg, Steiner says, he was

  once or twice directed by Gerlich to travel to Konnersreuth and ask Therese questions when she was in a state of ecstasy. . . . The answers that Therese gave in her state of ecstasy always renewed [Gerlich’s] courage in his battle against National Socialism and also Bolshevism. There were never any definite orders. . . . But there were insights and hints that put him in a better position to hit upon the correct decisions himself. Words like, “Look, in the last analysis this [meaning Hitlerism and Bolshevism] is all directed against our Savior,” were enough for him. . . . Clear statements of
the justice of the stand he was taking.

  Why, though, would a man such as Gerlich, who prided himself as a rationalist, scholar, and skeptic, need to have his courage sustained by such a suspect source of reassurance? Some further perspective on the nature of the relationship between the crusading anti-Hitler journalist, the local stigmatic, and the meaning of Hitler for Germans was provided in the course of my conversation with Walter Schaber, one of the last living survivors of the Weimar press wars.

  “What you have to remember,” he said, in his Washington Heights apartment as his wife served us coffee and cake, “what people forget about that time, is that everyone was searching for a Heiland.”

  “A Heiland?”

  “Yes—healer, holy man. It was a time when you had healers, seers, prophets emerging all over the countryside. There were seers here, prophets there, all over.” He spoke of a certain Louis Hausser, a former champagne maker who set himself up as a prophet and called upon Germans to do penance for their sins, to heal themselves, to avert apocalyptic retribution. He spoke of a Joseph Wiesenberg in Berlin. “He claimed to heal people by laying hard white cheese on them,” and despite such dubious claims attracted a fanatic following of believers. “And then there was Hanussen the mystic and astrologer, who was in Munich with Hitler. They were all around, these people promising the messiah, all of them together created a mood from which Hitler could arise. An apocalyptic mood all over Germany.”

  He told me that he was only vaguely familiar with Therese Neumann but that she fit the pattern: “One Heiland after another, and after all the small Heilands came the big Heiland, Hitler.”

  “You’re saying, then, that there was a pervasive appetite for some kind of apocalyptic figure, some kind of healer/messiah/savior, a longing that paved the way for them to accept Hitler, however strange and outlandish he seemed—in fact, because he was as strange as he was?”

  Yes, Schaber said, the very things that led conventional politicians and statesmen to underestimate and dismiss Hitler as outlandish and unsuitable, a hopeless outsider—that nicht natürlich strangeness, that alienness—were the very things that constituted the subterranean power of his appeal. Hitler’s other stigmata of strangeness, the apocalyptic fits, the trances, the occult, somnambulistic, mystic ravings, then—while they may have alienated some rational citizens—were perfectly attuned for the wider, deeper longing for a figure of higher irrationality, a Heiland, to rescue Germany. People who’d lost faith in conventional politics were looking for a political faith healer.

  Something about this aspect of my conversation with Walter Schaber stayed with me for some time after I’d left Washington Heights. Something about the way he spoke of the longing for a Heiland led me to consider further the root in German of the word “Heiland,” holy man, healer: Heil. To consider further the deeper purpose behind the ritualized incantation of “Heil Hitler,” the all-purpose greeting, bond of solidarity, mass chant in the Hitler movement. To consider whether it might not have been designed deliberately to evoke the longing for a Heiland, for a healer, a holy man. Was that effect a deliberate creation, an example of Hitler’s conscious genius for manipulating mass psychology, or a fortuitous reflection of the preexistent unconscious longing for a Heiland it tapped into—or both? Was there always a deeper level than mere salutation, mere hailing, in the incantation “Heil Hitler”? A sense in which the speaker, the chanter, was imploring, urging the Führer: Heal Hitler, Heal Us Hitler, Heal Germany, Hitler. Less a salutation than a prayer.

  When I asked Schaber for his reaction, as someone who lived through the awful period when “Heil Hitler” grew from the tribute of misfit sociopathic sycophants of a barbaric crank to a massive roar of near-religious national assent, he was skeptical at first. It struck him as a novel idea, “Heil Hitler” as “Heal, Hitler,” but after considering it, he told me, “I think there may be something to it.”

  If the longing for a Heiland helps explain the perverse attraction of Hitler’s strangeness, the way its very irrationality worked in his favor, might an analogue of that attraction help explain why Gerlich, the secular, rationalist doctor of history, found himself drawn to the irrational, supernatural pronouncements of a stigmatic peasant girl? Perhaps for someone like Gerlich—witness to the failure of reason, argument, and polemic to stop the rise of an evil Heiland such as Hitler—a figure such as Therese Neumann, a kind of anti-Hitler Heiland, might be both a counterforce and a comfort in a struggle that was causing him to doubt the efficacy of the weapons of rationality.

  The irony of Therese Neumann is that even if she was a fraud, she was a fraud who helped galvanize a group of courageous men to risk their lives in opposition to Hitler, both before and after his takeover. Even after Gerlich’s 1934 murder in Dachau, the Gerlich–Therese Neumann circle continued their sub rosa participation in the loose and ineffectual but nonetheless morally significant activities of the anti-Hitler opposition—until many of them were executed in 1944. The Gestapo made efforts to close down the circle, but Therese and her cult survived to flourish again after the Hitler defeat, even among American GIs of the occupation force.

  It could be argued, then, on the basis of admittedly fragmentary evidence, that what made Gerlich and his group unique, what inspired the exceptional courage they exhibited, was the sense of a divine sanction, an apocalyptic role the prophecies of Therese Neumann gave them. One could even speculate that in Gerlich’s mind there was a kind of relationship between Hitler and Therese Neumann: Although he was the demonic obverse of her, they shared certain characteristics. Both Therese Neumann and Hitler presented themselves as prophets who heard voices, voices which enjoined them to embark on divine missions (Hitler’s bedridden vision at Pasewalk and Neumann’s bedridden vision at Konnersreuth). Both exhibited their afflatus in ecstatic, histrionic trance-state fits of prophesying. Both were Heilands, and both were obsessed with blood. For Hitler, it was blood in the sense of the racial essence that was the true defining force in human destiny—blood as the sign and stigma of superiority and inferiority. For Therese Neumann, blood was the visible stigma of her invisible link to the holy family. It’s easy to see how to Gerlich Therese Neumann could be seen as a kind of divinely sanctioned anti-Hitler. And how for Gerlich and Neumann, Hitler had become a kind of Antichrist.

  The metaphoric blood relationship might go some way to explain Gerlich’s reported preoccupation with the bloody fate of Geli Raubal. A young woman close to Therese Neumann’s age, not an innocent, but still not much older than a schoolgirl. A woman whose bloody stigmata Gerlich apparently sought to trace to Hitler. And there is something haunting about that final image of Gerlich, the one related to me by his colleague Dr. Steiner, about the way the Gestapo “sent to his widow, Sophie, Gerlich’s spectacles, all spattered with blood”: the way the final bloody stigmata of his vision of Hitler, the blood that burst from his eyes when the Gestapo beat him, morbidly mimics the stigmata of Therese Neumann when she had her Good Friday visions of the bloody spectacle of the Crucifixion.

  But the mystical sources of Gerlich’s vision of Hitler should not distract from the incisive surgical dissection of Hitler’s mentality he left behind. Initially, I feared that his vision of Hitler had been lost with the lost Hitler exposé of 1933, but it’s there, in his long-forgotten, brilliant, Swiftian summa, perhaps the most penetrating and insightful explanation of Hitler’s racial pathology in the Weimar era, it’s there in the vicious and hilarious 1932 satire, “Does Hitler Have Mongolian Blood?”

  The more I read and think about it the more impressed I am, not just with its passion, but with its dispassionate analytic vision, the way it managed in mid-1932 to anticipate two of the most sophisticated postwar explanatory tendencies: the aesthetic and the Asiatic. All this in a mock-scholarly lampoon that offers a hilarious, deadpan set piece that might be called “The Trial of Hitler’s Nose.”

  The tone Gerlich adopts in his prose is crucial. Assuming the mantle of scholarship and a pedantic tone that mimick
ed the magisterial German tradition of critical scholarship, he directs his readers’ attention to the peculiar phenomenon he proposes to explicate: the picture of the Hitler-headed black bridal couple.

  He did not create this outlandish photocomposite image himself, he assured us, I suspect disingenuously. Rather, it was sent to him by a reader who had noticed some compelling connection between two separate photographs—one of a snarling Hitler, the other of a grinning black bridal couple—in a recent issue of Gerlich’s paper and had ingeniously combined them.

  “The resultant composite perplexed me greatly,” Gerlich avers with deadpan formality. Not because of any black and white disharmony, the photo miscegenation, but rather, surprisingly, because of what seemed to him an undeniable “inner harmony” between the bride and the Hitler-headed groom, between the noggin of the purported avatar of the master race and that of his Negro marital partner, representing a purportedly inferior race.

  This unexpected “inner harmony” haunts him, Gerlich says; he finds himself driven to apply scientific techniques to search for its source. It’s a quest he’s particularly qualified for, he tells us, because in his university days he studied anthropology and ethnography. But before setting out on this scientific quest, he wishes, as the cautious, unprejudiced observer he is, to eliminate the possibility that the impression of inner harmony was the accidental result of that one particular Hitler pose.