Explaining Hitler

by Ron Rosenbaum

  But there was another reason, I believe, I’d been putting off getting to the bottom of the box. A variation on the lost-safe-deposit-box syndrome that has haunted the search for Hitler: the temptation to believe that Hitler could be explained if only we could get our hands on some lost or locked-away cache of documents, the location of or key to which is forever beyond our reach. It’s a vision that, while despairing on the surface, represents, I’d come to believe, in folkloric form, a kind of epistemological optimism: Hitler at least might have been explicable at one time if we had that lost document, that missing piece of the puzzle now just beyond our reach.

  My reluctance to reach to the bottom of that carton of OSS microfilm printouts could be attributed to the same dynamic: By refraining from reaching the bottom, some primitive prerational part of me could preserve the illusion that there might still be some previously overlooked clue, some fragmentary piece of testimony in there whose potential significance had gone unnoticed by others, some observation, conversation, some intimation that might make sense of the Geli Raubal riddle—the answer to the questions that surround the circumstances of Geli Raubal’s death—or to the larger questions that surround the nature of Adolf Hitler’s life. On some level, I think I knew that by actually plunging into the unread material, that illusion would probably be dispelled, and I might be compelled to confront an even more chilling inexplicability.

  But, finally, I knew I’d have to complete that task. And so, I retrieved those 350 pages and began dutifully searching through them.

  There was, in fact, some Geli Raubal material I hadn’t seen before. For one thing, there was another nominee for the role of spectral seducer, the shadowy fiancé boyfriend or putative impregnator of Geli, a figure said to be the source of Hitler’s final fatal jealous quarrel with her. In most other accounts, the man who purportedly cuckolded Hitler tends to be an unnamed “drawing master from Linz,” a “Jewish music teacher from Vienna,” a Viennese voice coach, or a “Jewish art student.” Here, however, for the first time I’m aware of in the literature we are given a name: Emil Baumann, described as “a Munich student who’d become Geli’s fiancé until Hitler heard about it and broke up the relationship.” And broke up her plans to run away with him—at least according to the fairly suspect-sounding tabloid-tinged 1940 book by one Felix Gross entitled Hitler’s Guns, Girls and Gangsters, which the OSS analyst duly (and heavily) excerpts. Gross, of course, cites the usual suspect sources like Otto Strasser, and further appends the chilling (if true) detail that the “mutilated body” of the hapless Baumann was found dumped in the street, dead, just days after Hitler’s 1933 accession to the chancellorship.

  Another fairly useless rumor, it appeared. If you believed everything in the OSS Sourcebook, Geli Raubal’s time was so ceaselessly engaged in getting engaged, in planning elopements with multiple partners in Vienna and Munich, she could not have had a moment to spare to participate in the fairly time-consuming perversion she was also supposed to be engaged in after-hours with Adolf Hitler.

  But there was, of course, far more in the Sourcebook than Geli Raubal rumors. Much seemed unreliable on its face, but there were certain items that had acquired a kind of semilegendary stature in the life of Shadow Hitler intrigues. And so it was fascinating to see that some were quite real. There was, for instance, a copy of the extremely curious article that appeared in Hearst’s New York American on November 30, 1930, entitled simply “Adolf Hitler” and bylined “Alois Hitler.” It’s the manifest visible product of the Hitler family film noir, the product of the collaboration of Adolf Hitler and his half-brother Alois, who manufactured a distancing, counterfeit cover story about their relationship for the Hearst press.

  It’s an article the black-sheep nephew William Patrick Hitler had initially tried to peddle to Hearst before Hitler summoned him to Munich and demanded that he deny any blood relationship with his Uncle Adolf, demanded he even tell Hearst that he (the nephew) had mistakenly fingered the “wrong Hitler” for his relative.

  Once William Patrick was bought off—at least for a while—Alois Jr., the half brother of Adolf and father of William Patrick, was rushed into the breach to give Hearst something. What I hadn’t realized until I dug the clipping out of my carton was that Alois had further collaborated with Adolf in subtly but deftly downplaying their blood relationship.

  Buried in the apparently innocuous prose of Alois’s loving evocation of Adolf’s rise from poverty in Vienna to popularity in German politics is the false assertion Alois makes that he is “the son of a cousin of Adolf’s father,” when in fact he is the son of Adolf’s father himself (by an earlier wife). Seeing the petty counterfeit in print was fascinating, the slippery small-time-crook aspect of Hitler at its most deviously detail oriented.

  What struck me more forcefully, however, were two longer documents deeper down in the carton: the OSS analyst’s memorandum of a debriefing session with a suspect adventuress who called herself Princess Stephanie von Hohenlohe, and extracts from the memoirs of an American correspondent in Berlin for United Press, one Frederick Oechsner. The anecdotes therein ranged from the trivial (Hitler’s alleged nose job) to the potentially profound (the “strange bond” of intimacy that may help explain the nature of Hitler’s “primitive hatred”).

  Consider first certain moments in the six-page single-spaced OSS “Interview with Princess Stephanie von Hohenlohe, June 28, 1943, at Alien Detention Camp Seagoville, Texas.” Although she comes across in her own account as a figure out of a fictional spy adventure, Princess Stephanie was, in fact, a figure of very real interest to American intelligence agencies in the three years before her detention. FBI and army intelligence files reflect heavy surveillance of her activities in the United States. J. Edgar Hoover himself was convinced, not without reason and evidence, that she and her paramour, Captain Fritz Wiedemann, the German consul in San Francisco, were high-level operatives of Nazi intelligence detailed to America to make contact with influential Hitler sympathizers among the American elite who were conspiring to keep the United States out of the war in Europe.

  Princess Stephanie appears to have been born a half-Jewish woman named Richter who insinuated herself first into the Austrian princely house of Hohenlohe, then into the grace and favor of British press baron Lord Rothermere. It was as his personal representative to Hitler’s court that she managed to become intimate with certain figures very close to Hitler—most particularly with a very significant figure in Hitler’s life, Captain Wiedemann. And, according to several observers within that court, with Hitler himself.

  Wiedemann had been close to Hitler longer than almost anyone else in Germany—as far back as 1914, in fact, when Hitler was then a twenty-five-year-old immigrant from Austria who’d enlisted in the German army as soon as the war broke out. Wiedemann was Private Hitler’s superior in the List regiment and apparently took a liking to the somewhat strange soldier with the Austrian accent and the air of a bohemian artist. Hitler, in turn, became attached to Wiedemann, according to fellow soldiers.

  In 1934, shortly after Hitler’s accession to power, he summoned Wiedemann to Berlin to serve as his personal adjutant. As such, he became part of the gossipy inner circle of Hitler aides and intimates. Wiedemann even seems to have been enlisted (with the connivance of Princess Stephanie and her British contacts) as a secret emissary from Hitler to Britain’s foreign secretary, Lord Halifax, at the height of the Czechoslovakian crisis.

  But according to Princess Stephanie, Hitler took a more-than-diplomatic interest in her, becoming so enamored, in fact, that in order to have her for himself alone he abruptly exiled Wiedemann to San Francisco. (She subsequently followed Wiedemann to America, and some intelligence analysts believed the Hitler-jealousy exile story was a cover for his spy mission to America.)

  But buried in the Princess’s somewhat defensive, somewhat self-promoting account to the OSS of her experience in the Hitler court are certain observations that struck me as worth rescuing from the Shadow Hitler realm.
She starts out by protesting a bit too much that her inside information on Hitler was gleaned in an official capacity, not as some glorified groupie. She goes on at length, the OSS analyst noted, declaring that “as Lord Rothermere’s personal representative in his dealings with many European statesmen, a position she held for a period of seven years, she was called upon to interview Hitler several times, as well as Göring, Ribbentrop and other leading Nazis.”

  The anonymous OSS interviewer notes, “This differs markedly from the Hanfstaengl account of the relationship,” according to which the Princess “was one of Hitler’s favorites—in fact so much so that Hanfstaengl had to caution him about his association with her on the grounds that . . . the Princess was half Jewish.” Hanfstaengl also appears to believe the claim that Hitler “became insanely jealous” of the Princess’s relationship to Wiedemann and sent him to San Francisco in order to get him out of the way. The OSS analyst notes that it seems “reasonable to suppose that her contact with Hitler had a social as well as an official side. How far the social went it is difficult to say.” The analyst says her information about Hitler “corroborates much of the material obtained from numerous other sources,” but a few incidents in particular deserve attention because they “throw further light on [Hitler’s character].”

  Some of the stories the OSS analyst singles out are less than illuminating. I’ll mention one as an example of the curious tenor of Princess Hohenlohe’s intimacy with the Hitler inner circle, her value-neutral way of characterizing Hitler and Göring as two men who Can’t Express Their Feelings to Another Man.

  Hitler at one point confesses to her, the Princess says, his profound and deep devotion to Göring, a devotion that extends to him worrying that Göring drives too fast because “It would be too dreadful to think . . .” he begins, but can’t go on, so choked is he with emotion at the idea of a Göring car crash. It turns out, she says, the two men “are probably tongue-tied when they try to say to each other what they think of each other”—afraid to share their feelings. Because when she reports the Führer’s sentiments to Göring, it causes “a veritable explosion of joy” in Göring; he’s “thrilled to the core. . . . His radiance and delight shows such words from Hitler mean more to him than even uniforms and jewels”—which means they meant a lot to the uniform- and jewel-obsessed Göring. “The Bavarian braggart and brute disappeared and a proud little boy came to the surface.”

  However touched we might be by this display of shy mutual hero worship that daren’t speak its name, it is an observation of another relationship the Princess’s OSS debriefing sheds light on—a relationship in some ways more intense and sinister than Hitler’s relationship with Göring, one that precedes it in time and intensity—that struck me as far more significant:

  “In spite of all this”—she says, meaning in spite of Göring and Hitler’s shy mutual hero worship, they “have never reached the intimate stage of brüderschaft where they address each other with the familiar ‘du’”—the second-person singular German pronoun for “you”; an intimate form of address reserved for only the most intimate of friends, the equivalent in English of the archaic “thou.”

  “Göring was always very jealous because [Rudolf] Hess had this privilege,” the Princess goes on. “There is only one Nazi besides Hess who has been granted that privilege and that, of all people, is Julius Streicher, editor of Der Stürmer. This, too, is a most peculiar relationship about which we know very little. It is quite certain that Streicher is one of the most hated of all the Nazis by all the other Nazis and yet Hitler has steadfastly resisted all pressure to remove or demote him. A strange bond seems to hold these two together” (emphasis added).

  The strange bond with Streicher: It’s referred to with the same mixture of wonder and dread that Hitler’s strange bond with Geli Raubal evoked in some observers. But here, in the strange bond of brüderschaft, might be a far more significant locus of Hitler’s nicht natürlich nature. I might perhaps have been less inclined to make too much of the report, buried as it is in the debriefing of a suspect adventuress (despite the OSS analyst’s belief that her closeness to Captain Wiedemann gave her account credibility), had I not come upon another reference to the strange bond between Hitler and Streicher in another document in the Sourcebook.

  The second reference appears in a passage excerpted from a memoir by Frederick Oechsner. Oechsner arrived in Germany in 1929 as Berlin correspondent for the New York Sun. He became Berlin bureau chief of United Press in 1933 and stayed on until 1942, condemned to spend the last six months of his stay in Gestapo-supervised detention with a number of other American journalists and diplomats who’d been interned shortly after Hitler’s December 1941 declaration of war against the United States.

  In any case, after a kind of hostage exchange in 1942, which permitted Oechsner and his colleagues to return to the United States (where he went to work for the OSS psychological-warfare division), he began preparing a memoir of Hitler and his cronies that he’d begun in Nazi detention. Oechsner had had several personal encounters with Hitler in the thirties, when the Führer was still courting American public opinion through correspondents for American papers; he was also tuned in to the rumor mill of the Shadow Hitler.

  Oechsner’s memoir is notable for its sober, no-nonsense, unsensational tone, for his wide range of German sources, and for the unexpected details that caught his eye and ear. Among the apparently trivial ones that show up in the OSS Sourcebook is Oechsner’s report on Hitler’s alleged nose job.

  He introduces the subject by remarking that

  Hitler is indeed vain, perhaps this is the reason why, shortly after he became Reichschancellor he had the shape of his nose corrected by a well-known plastic surgeon. The nose had been a little bulbous at the end and fatty on the bridge, so Hitler got a Berlin medical man to recommend a colleague in Munich, and the operation was performed, the superficial flesh removed. Thereafter, he was always posed by his official photographer Professor Hoffmann to bring out the best points of his remodelled nose.

  Such are the snares of the Shadow Hitler that I was almost tempted to believe the nose-job report, to believe even that Fritz Gerlich’s brilliant and caustic “Trial of Hitler’s Nose” had exacerbated Hitler’s self-consciousness enough to prompt him to have his nose done over. Oechsner is a good reporter, but unfortunately there appears to be no other corroboration in the literature for the nose-job story, and I’d suggest it’s more likely that the appearance of remodeling Oechsner perceives was a matter of mustache-contour design or redesign. As we’ve seen from Heinrich Hoffmann’s photographic outtakes over the years, that was Hitler’s way of creating the illusion of a new nose.

  More to the point is a story Oechsner relays from another medical doctor, an observation about the nature of Hitler’s hatred. According to “a well-known German physician,” Oechsner tells us, Hitler’s attitude toward the Jews is “a primitive hate typical of half civilized or even uncivilized persons.” Oechsner himself then goes on to evoke the nature of Hitler’s relationship with the most inflammatory of primitive anti-Semites, Julius Streicher: “Der Führer is always greatly quickened in his anti-Jewish feelings by his contact with the notorious Julius Streicher. It is often noticeable that after he has been with Dr. Streicher for a time he is apt to come out with some new anti-Jewish measure or speech.”

  What we have here is a reversal of the famous Führerkontakt effect—the often-reported experience that personal exposure to Hitler’s charismatic presence had a profound transformative effect on those so exposed. Here the Führer himself is depicted as vulnerable to what might be called Streicherkontakt. But what struck me as most significant in that paragraph was the notion of primitive hatred in itself and the linkage of primitive hatred to the Hitler-Streicher relationship.

  The question of the nature and origin of Hitler’s hatred is perhaps the crucial one at the heart of the heart of the search for Hitler. And primitive hatred is a notion that the most sophisticated recent literature
has shied away from. Note how the “well-known German physician” makes an effort to distance himself and presumably civilized German culture from the “half civilized” and “uncivilized persons” in whom primitive hatred is to be found. He portrays Adolf Hitler as a kind of anthropological aberration in German society. Would it were true that fully civilized people were incapable of manifesting primitive hatred: One of the things that made the Holocaust so unique and uniquely horrifying was precisely that it arose from a society widely regarded as the most civilized, in the sense of “learned” or “cultured,” and philosophically sophisticated—convinced of its own rectitude—in the world.

  “Convinced of his own rectitude,” of course, was the phrase Hugh Trevor-Roper used to characterize Hitler’s hatred as “sincere,” based on rational belief. The notion of primitive hatred intrigued me as a way of embodying a missing term in the debate between Bullock and Trevor-Roper over the nature and sincerity of Hitler’s hatred.

  Alan Bullock initially argued that Hitler’s hatred, his convictions about Jews, about anything, were counterfeit, or at least far less important than his ambitions: that the former served the latter, that his hatred was, if not a complete counterfeit, then a device to serve his drive for power. While Trevor-Roper contends that Hitler’s convictions, including his anti-Semitism, were not only sincerely held but the source of his ambition, the reason he wanted power. But in fact, that dichotomy doesn’t really exhaust the possible ways to construe Hitler’s hatred. Bullock came up with a more complicated vision, a dynamic in which the actor who initially counterfeits passion and conviction becomes carried away with his own act. Yet there might be another, simpler way to look at the hatred at the heart of the controversy.

  When Trevor-Roper characterizes Hitler as “convinced of his own rectitude,” he is speaking of an ideologically based hatred, what one might have to call an “idealistic hatred,” however deluded the idealist, however wicked the ideals on which it is based. But there is another kind of hatred, one that is neither counterfeited for manipulating the masses nor ideologically driven and well thought-out. There is another kind of hatred that is not intellectual but visceral, personal; an irrational hatred that can assume the guise, the mantle, of an ideological antipathy but which is primitive in the sense of being prior to ideology—its source rather than its product.