Explaining Hitler

by Ron Rosenbaum

  A primitive hatred does not necessarily need to cloak itself in the lineament of ideals or the pose of rectitude. A primitive hatred can manifest itself as a kind of primal, unresolved, ancient enmity, immune to reason, opaque to persuasion or even pragmatism. Pure pre-rational hatred, the kind of hatred Julius Streicher was notorious for. Streicher, of course, had founded an anti-Semitic political party in Nuremberg in 1919, months before Hitler joined the fledgling Nazi Party in Munich. A schoolteacher known for his brutality to more than just his pupils, known for his savage physical as well as verbal attacks on Jews and other opponents, the thuggish Streicher nonetheless deferred to Hitler once he became Führer of the Munich-based National Socialist Party; Streicher voluntarily relinquished his own primacy to merge his party with Hitler’s and take up a subordinate position as Gauleiter (regional leader) of Franconia.

  It was common for other members of Hitler’s inner circle envious of the brüderschaft, the special relationship between the two men, to disparage Streicher’s vulgar primitivism, to wonder aloud why Hitler appeared to protect and tolerate such a savage, primitive figure. To wonder aloud at Hitler’s continued devotion to Streicher’s vicious, pornographic hate sheet Der Stürmer with its compulsive focus on Jews as sexual predators upon innocent Aryan maidens. But in their efforts to distance themselves from Streicher, in trying to distance Hitler from him, they may have been ignoring or denying the possibility that the “strange bond” grew out of a deeper truth, a truth about Hitler rather than Streicher: that Streicher represented the true, unmasked face of primitive hatred that Hitler harbored.

  It’s interesting to see the way Streicher figures far more forcefully in the Shadow Hitler documents of the Sourcebook than he does in more sophisticated postwar ideological analyses of Hitler’s anti-Semitism and its role in the Final Solution. Many postwar analyses emphasize Hitler’s hesitations, his distance from the Final Solution decision, the way his genocidal intentions toward Jews played a perhaps lesser role in his hierarchy of priorities than more pragmatic considerations of battlefront exigencies, say.

  Even Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, who does give priority to genocidal intentions in the Nazi (and more broadly German) mind-set, postulates those intentions as the product of a relatively sophisticated ideology—“eliminationist anti-Semitism”—which, however murderous, had a sort of debased intellectual genealogy in the thought of nineteenth-century racial theorists and “scientists.” But primitive hatred, the kind manifested by Julius Streicher, the kind he perhaps shared in his strange bond with Hitler, is a different thing, not the product of thought and theory so much as unmediated emotional animus; it requires no grounding in theory and ideology but speaks, shrieks, for itself.

  What’s interesting in the comment of the “German physician” who diagnosed the strange bond and in Oechsner’s observation of Streicherkontakt is the assumption that Streicher was the one who made Hitler more anti-Semitic, that Streicher was the senior partner, the more primitive hater. When, in fact, there’s no reason not to entertain the opposite view. Hitler himself seems to suggest as much in an overlooked remark he made on the real relationship between his and Streicher’s hatred of Jews. It’s a line I first came across in John Toland’s biography of Hitler, one I’d forgotten until I came upon the references to the strange bond with Streicher at the bottom of the Shadow Hitler box.

  Toland frames this remark by painting the conventional portrait of Streicher as primitive: “A stocky, primitive man with bald head and gross features. . . . He had excessive appetites alike at table and in bed. . . . Like Hitler, he was rarely seen in public without a whip. . . . His speech was glutted with sadistic imagery. . . . [Der Stürmer’s] filth and virulence . . . was already a source of dismay to many of those close to Hitler.”

  This, then, is the conventional portrait of the Hitler-Streicher relationship: Hitler surrounded by “moderates” reflecting his own essential moderation, certainly by comparison with the extreme primitive vulgarity of Streicher’s savage, sex-obsessed, primitive hatred which—curiously, for some inexplicable reason—Hitler would not reprove or restrain. But Toland is conscientious enough to quote a startling Hitler remark that seems to pull the rug out from under that conventional assumption, which calls into question who was the extremist and who was the moderate.

  “Hitler had an unexpected answer for those who reproached Streicher for his gross exaggerations [about the hatefulness of Jews] in Der Stürmer,” Toland reports. “The truth is the opposite of what people say,” Hitler confided to one of his early party colleagues, Dietrich Eckart. In fact, to his mind, Streicher “idealized the Jew. The Jew is baser, fiercer, more diabolical than Streicher depicted him,” Hitler declared (emphasis added).

  The tone of this remarkable statement is not entirely clear but it suggests something unexpected about Hitler’s hatred: that it is at once more primitive and more sophisticated than Streicher’s. It suggests that Hitler’s hatred was so primal that he could look at Streicher’s hate-filled, poison-pen, pornographic Der Stürmer vituperation—which ostensibly appalled even thuggish Nazis in Hitler’s inner circle—and call Streicher’s image of Jews unjustly “idealized,” too moderate and dainty for his taste, unwilling to go the full distance and tell the truth about how diabolical the Jews were.

  So, one could say, on the face of it, Hitler is portraying his hatred as more primitive, “fiercer” (the word he uses for the Jews) than Streicher’s. But one must also acknowledge the possibility that Hitler might have been making, as well, a kind of sophisticated, knowing in-joke for those of his inner-circle cronies with ears to hear it. By speaking ironically of Streicher as “idealizing” Jews, he’s having it both ways: relegating the Jews to an even lower circle of diabolism while having a little joke on himself and Streicher for the extremity of their views. His hatred is more extreme, but he’s sophisticated enough to joke about its extremity. It’s almost like Charles Manson calling Jeffrey Dahmer “a sentimentalist,” say, with a wink and a nudge, because Dahmer claimed to have loved (“idealized”) the victims he killed and ate.

  It is this combination of primitivism and knowingness that makes Hitler’s hatred so wickedly distinctive to those, like the philosopher Berel Lang and the historian Lucy Dawidowicz, who pay more than casual attention to the nature of Hitler’s hatred—something much of the current literature takes for granted or no longer finds relevant.

  The “strange bond” with Streicher suggests a hatred both hot-tempered and cold-blooded, and thus all the more chilling and wicked (in the technical philosophical sense of the word wicked—as evil done knowingly rather than with a conviction of rectitude).

  Why should the debate over the nature of Hitler’s hatred be of particular relevance to the search for Hitler and his place in history, and how does it relate to the Geli Raubal literature? The answer to the first question is suggested in what might be the single most significant anecdote in the Sourcebook, one buried in the final paragraph of the Princess Stephanie debriefing, one about Hitler’s role in the Kristallnacht pogrom of November 9, 1938. One that also has larger implications for how we construe Hitler’s role in the Final Solution.

  The OSS debriefer—making clear his belief that Princess Stephanie’s account of the true origin of the Kristallnacht pogrom appeared to come from Captain Wiedemann, a source in a position to know, an intimate who might well have been privy to the Kristallnacht discussions—records Princess Stephanie’s assertion that “It was Hitler not Goebbels who planned and instituted the November pogrom. He looked forward to it with the greatest relish and expected it would be a howling success among the German people and attract the attention of the entire world. When he discovered that the attention was not nearly as favorable as he had expected, he gave the impression that it was Goebbels’ doing and Goebbels could do nothing but accept the responsibility to a large degree” (emphasis added).

  It’s purely anecdotal but noteworthy because it goes against the grain of much postwar analysis of Krista
llnacht, analyses that buy into the idea that Hitler was somehow removed from unleashing the primitive hatred of that pogrom; that Hitler was appalled at its primitivism when he learned about it; that he tried to halt the violence once it was unleashed and regretted the damage the primitive Jew-bashing did to Germany’s image; that he favored a more “rational” and “unemotional” sophisticated and systematic anti-Semitism.

  This is not true of all postwar analysis of Kristallnacht and Hitler’s hatred. The Hohenlohe/Wiedemann account of Hitler’s instigator role in Kristallnacht corroborates the analysis of the episode by Lucy Dawidowicz, who in her The War Against the Jews argues that in Kristallnacht we can find a successful model of the deniability mechanism Hitler used to cloak his intentions, his similar prime instigator role in the Final Solution to come. It’s a charade of deniability that some serious historians, not just Holocaust deniers, still give credence to.

  The notion of primitive hatred has a particular relevance to the literature on the Geli Raubal case as well, to the literature, memoirs, and the like dominated by what I’ve come to think of as the “No More Mr. Nice Guy” school of interpretation. This is the notion that until he was overwhelmed by bitter grief over the death of Geli Raubal, his only true love, Hitler wasn’t really Hitler. Adherents of this school, who include a conspicuous number of Hitler’s own closest aides and colleagues, portray him as, if not a sentimental humanist up to that point, then certainly a far more human, less hardened, less ruthless and cruel a fellow than the one he became after Geli Raubal’s death.

  It is a line of thought that has persisted from the time Geli died until the current moment. It’s a temptation, I must admit, I’ve given into myself in the past because of the very absence of a more convincing candidate for a moment of metamorphosis, a point of punctuated evolution in Hitler’s life. It’s a view a remarkable number of Hitler’s Nazi colleagues promoted in the aftermath of Geli’s death—which is one reason I came to distrust it. It clearly serves their purposes to split off the later genocidal Hitler from a purportedly nicer early Hitler, the Hitler they first knew and bonded with, the Weimar Hitler, the Munich Hitler, the Hitler without (mass quantities of) victims.

  Göring himself pushes this view: “Geli’s death had such a devastating effect on Hitler that it . . . changed his relationship to everyone else.” And Hitler’s photographer Hoffmann argued that “at this time the seed of inhumanity began to sprout in Hitler.”

  Only then! Just a seed!

  Hanfstaengl in particular flogs the “No More Mr. Nice Guy” concept: “With her death the way was clear for his final development into a demon”—which absolved Hanfstaengl from full implication in the crimes of the putative predemonic fellowship he shared with his Wagner-loving friend and Führer. Because up to that time Hitler was strange, quirky, yes, but not demonic.

  Demonizing Hitler has been criticized by some historians not with a view to minimizing Hitler’s crimes so much as with an awareness that to demonize can mean to distance Hitler, in a falsely comforting way, from ourselves. In any case, the view that Hitler became a demon only after the death of Geli Raubal is not limited to old cronies of Hitler. It finds a contemporary champion in Hitler and Geli, a 1997 book by prolific British biographer Ronald Hayman. Hayman uses all three of these quotes from Hitler cronies—Göring, Hoffmann, and Hanfstaengl—to support his view that after Geli’s death (which Hayman attempts to prove Hitler caused with his own hands) “the change must have been substantial.”

  Hayman goes much further; he tries to explicitly link Hitler’s loss of Geli with the genocide to come: “[Hitler’s] appetite for carnage grew monstrously after Geli’s death,” Hayman writes. He adopts for his purposes the Shadow Hitler realm’s belief in the excretory perversion Hitler supposedly practiced with Geli. And he adopts as well Hanfstaengl’s interpretation of the effect the loss of Geli had on Hitler: the abrupt loss of the fulfillment it had brought him removed the only inhibition he had to committing mass murder.

  Hayman even seems to fault Eva Braun for failing to provide the crucial distraction or sublimation for Hitler’s “appetite for destruction”: Eva was “never his partner in the same sense as Geli,” Hayman tells us. “Eva could never release his nervous energy nor restrain his destructiveness. Certain subjects had never been discussed with Geli, but at least there had been some human interaction. Eva’s company never seemed to have much effect on him.”

  Setting aside all the suppositions rendered as fact here—about the nature of Hitler’s small talk with Geli and the nature of his sexual relationship with Eva (which is the subject of a range of conflicting reports)—one could characterize the gist of Hayman’s argument as the assertion that if Eva Braun had somehow been able to make more meaningful small talk with Hitler, he might have had an outlet to “release his nervous energy” and restrain his destructiveness. Small talk might have substituted for genocide.

  In addition, Hayman makes much of the notion that Geli was Hitler’s first murder: “If Hitler did shoot Geli, she was his first human victim. There is no evidence of his killing anyone during the First World War, in which his main job was to carry messages. But the boy who shot rats turned into the man who gassed Jews, and it looks as if Geli’s death was a stepping stone” in that transformation or evolution.

  There are two problems with calling Geli Raubal Hitler’s “first human victim” in the sense Hayman uses the phase. First of all, by September 1931 the toll of dead who were, in a very real sense, Hitler’s victims had reached into the hundreds if not thousands. I’m speaking of the near-daily toll of political murders, fatal beatings, stabbings, and shootings inflicted upon opposition-party activists and other opponents by Hitler’s murderous SA thugs. Murders committed in his name, frequently accompanied by “Heil Hitler!” invocations, in fact. The toll is there in graphic detail in every issue of the Munich Post for that period. If those victims didn’t make Hitler a mass murderer yet, they certainly made him a serial killer by proxy by the time Geli Raubal died.

  These murders were Hitler’s responsibility; the blood of those victims was on his hands long before the blood of Geli Raubal was spilled in his apartment. While some have argued that the death of Geli Raubal (whether she was murdered, killed herself, or was driven to kill herself by Hitler) made a crucial difference in Hitler’s psyche, it was those other murders, the political murders, that made a more important difference: those bodies paved his path to power, those murders would certainly have given Hitler the feeling that he could get away with murder, with many murders. That he could have people killed to benefit him but escape the consequences because there was no written order—just as he may have left no written order for the Final Solution (and thus would, in the minds of some, escape full responsibility for that as well). It seems silly to have to say so, but after reading the lugubrious remarks of Göring and Hoffmann that Hayman cites—about the way their gemütlich Hitler turned cold and inhuman after Geli’s death—perhaps it does need to be said that Hitler was not exactly a nice guy before the alleged “No More Mr. Nice Guy” moment.

  The other problem with Hayman’s assertion that Geli Raubal was Hitler’s first victim is the literal sense in which Hayman intends that term: Hitler’s hands-on role in her murder. Hayman goes to great lengths to proffer a scenario in which Hitler and Geli are struggling for possession of his gun in her bedroom, a gun Hitler has drawn to shoot either himself or her, and which goes off in her chest as she’s trying to wrest it from his grasp.

  Now, few would have any problem in thinking Geli Raubal was Hitler’s victim in some sense—not necessarily his first victim, not necessarily by his own hand—but certainly in the sense of having been driven to her death by his oppressive attentions, whether perverse or merely possessive in the extreme. But Hayman is intent on proving a kind of Oliver Stone scenario involving Hitler’s struggle for the gun in Geli’s bedroom and an extensive conspiracy to cover up his role, his presence when the gun went off. A conspiracy that goes so far (
in Hayman’s view) that it involves concealing the body, concealing the murder for a day and a half while Hitler’s tracks are carefully covered, alibis are set up, stories are concocted by dozens of complicit conspirators to keep the secret. A conspiracy so elaborate Hayman needs to posit a missing night of murder to account for it and then a missing day to fabricate the cover-up and coin the counterfeit stories to maintain it.

  Hayman follows the Shadow Hitler literature in positing, as the cause of the fatal quarrel, Geli’s relationship with a spectral (probably Jewish) seducer who posed a threat to poison her blood, father her child, expose Hitler’s perversion to the Jewish press. But where Hayman departs from the Shadow Hitler (and from everyone else in the literature) is in altering radically the chronology of Geli’s death.

  I’ve come to think of Hayman’s creation of a missing day as the temporal equivalent of the lost safe-deposit box, a place, a locus of a solution that is inaccessible or unimaginable otherwise. Just to place Hayman’s missing-night gambit in the perspective of the case, let’s briefly recall the conventional chronology of Geli Raubal’s death, the one accepted by all previous commentators on the case, even those who believe Hitler murdered Geli.

  On Thursday evening, the seventeenth of September 1931, Geli goes to the theater with the wife of Julius Schaub, one of Hitler’s personal adjutants. In his postwar memoir, Schaub said his wife noticed that Geli seemed upset, even tearful, that night, but “they were used to mood changes in Geli.”