Hitler 1889-1936: Hubris

by Ian Kershaw

  State Prosecutor Stenglein, who had himself done what he could to hinder Hitler’s parole, now passed on the court order to Landsberg by telegram.80 The Governor, his voice faltering, gave his prisoner the news. Hitler assured him there would be no demonstrations outside the prison and asked to be collected by Adolf Müller, proprietor of a Munich publishing firm and the party’s printer. Müller drove the next morning to Landsberg in his Daimler-Benz together with the photographer Heinrich Hoffmann.81 On 20 December, at 12.15p.m., Hitler was released. A calculation in the files of the state prosecution office noted that he had three years, 333 days, twenty-one hours, fifty minutes of his short sentence still to serve.82 History would have taken a different course had he been made to serve it.

  The prison staff, all sympathetic to Hitler, gathered to bid their famous prisoner an emotional farewell. He paused for photographs by the gates of the old fortress town, hurrying Hoffmann because of the cold, then was gone. Within two hours he was back at his Munich apartment in Thierschstraße, greeted by friends with garlands of flowers, and nearly knocked over by his dog, Wolf.83 Hitler said later that he did not know what to do with his first evening of freedom.84 Politically, he continued at first to remain publicly non-committal. He needed to take stock of the situation in view of the months of internecine warfare in the völkisch movement. More important, it was necessary in order to establish with the Bavarian authorities the conditions for his re-entry into politics and to ensure that the ban on the NSDAP was lifted. Now that he was released, serious preparation for his party’s new start could begin.

  III

  ‘Landsberg’, Hitler told Hans Frank, was his ‘university paid for by the state’. He read, he said, everything he could get hold of: Nietzsche, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Ranke, Treitschke, Marx, Bismarck’s Gedanken und Erinnerungen (Thoughts and Memories), and the war memoirs of German and allied generals and statesmen.85 Other than dealing with visitors and answering correspondence – neither of which preoccupied him much once he had withdrawn from public involvement in politics in the summer – the long days of enforced idleness in Landsberg were ideal for reading and reflection.86 But Hitler’s reading and reflection were anything but academic. Doubtless he did read much. However, as we noted in an earlier chapter, he made clear in Mein Kampf that reading, for him, had purely an instrumental purpose.87 He read not for knowledge or enlightenment, but for confirmation of his own preconceptions. He found what he was looking for. As he told Hans Frank – the party’s legal expert who would eventually become Governor General in occupied Poland – through the reading he did in Landsberg, ‘I recognized the correctness of my views.’88

  Sitting in his cell in Nuremberg many years later, Frank adjudged the year 1924 to have been one of the most decisive turning-points in Hitler’s life.89 This was an exaggeration. Landsberg was not so much a turning-point as a period in which Hitler inwardly consolidated and rationalized for himself the world-view he had been developing since 1919 and, in some significant ways, modifying in the year or so before the putsch. As the Nazi Movement fell apart in his absence, and with time on his hands, away from the hurly-burly of active politics, Hitler could scarcely avoid ruminating on past mistakes. And, expecting his release within months, he was even more strongly compelled to look to the way forward for himself and his broken movement. During this time, he revised in certain respects his views on how to attain power. In so doing, his perception of himself changed. He came to think of his own role in a different way. In the wake of the triumph of his trial, he began to see himself, as his followers had started to portray him from the end of 1922 onwards, as Germany’s saviour. In the light of the putsch, one might have expected his self-belief to be crushed once and for all. On the contrary: it was elevated beyond measure. His almost mystical faith in himself as walking with destiny, with a ‘mission’ to rescue Germany, dates from this time.

  At the same time, there was an important adjustment to another aspect of his world-view. Ideas which had been taking shape in his mind since late 1922, if not earlier, on the direction of future foreign policy were now elaborated into the notion of a quest for ‘living-space’, to be gained at the expense of Russia. Blended into his obsessive antisemitism, aimed at the destruction of ‘Jewish Bolshevism’, the concept of a war for ‘living-space’ – an idea which Hitler would repeatedly emphasize in the following years – rounded off his ‘world-view’. Thereafter, there would be tactical adjustments, but no further alteration of substance. Landsberg was no ‘Jordan conversion’ for Hitler.90 In the main, it was a matter of adding new emphases to the few basic idées fixes already formed, at least in embryo, or clearly taking shape in the years before the putsch.91

  The modifications in Hitler’s world-view that had already been taking shape in the year before the putsch are clearly evident in Mein Kampf. Hitler’s book offered nothing new. But it was the plainest and most expansive statement of his world-view that he had presented. He acknowledged that without his stay in Landsberg the book which after 1933 (though not before) would sell in its millions would never have been written.92 Its genesis is not altogether clear. If Otto Strasser – admittedly a biased and often unreliable source – is to be believed, it was his brother, Gregor, who, during the short time he spent in Landsberg, had the ‘machiavellian idea’ Hitler that he write his ‘memoirs’ in order to relieve the burden on the other inmates of having to listen to endless monologues from ‘the man on the first floor’. Hitler was taken with the idea, began work on it straight away, and the prisoners on the ground floor were left in peace to return to playing cards, eating and drinking.93 At least, they thought they would be left in peace. If the story has any substance to it, they must have been sorely disappointed when Hitler took to reading out each day the sections he had written to a literally captive audience.94 More likely, if more prosaic than Otto Strasser’s colourful explanation, is that the suggestion to Hitler to write his autobiography came from Max Amann, persuading him to cash in on the publicity stirred up by his trial.95 Amann was expecting revelations about the background to the putsch.96 Instead, he and many disappointed readers found largely a repetition of what Hitler had said in countless speeches, interspersed with superficial and triumphalist accounts of parts of his own life story.97

  Hitler was already at work on what would become the first volume when Haase and the north German delegation visited him on 26–7 May 1924. He called his book at that time by the scarcely catchy title: ‘Four and a Half Years of Struggle against Lies, Stupidity, and Cowardice’.98 The eventual pithy title seems to have been suggested by Max Amann.99 The book was dictated by Hitler to chauffeur and general dogsbody Emil Maurice, then, from July onwards, to Rudolf Heß (both of whom were also serving sentences for their part in the putsch).100 The first volume, which appeared on 18 July 1925, was largely autobiographical – though, as we have noted, with many distortions and inaccuracies. It ended with Hitler’s triumph at the announcement of the party programme in the Hofbräuhaus on 24 February 1920. The second volume, which Hitler wrote only after his release, and which was published on 11 December 1926, dealt more extensively with his ideas on the nature of the völkisch state, questions of ideology, propaganda and organization, concluding with chapters on foreign policy.

  Badly written and rambling as the published version of Mein Kampf was, it was a considerable improvement on what Hitler had initially produced, thanks to editorial interventions from a number of people. ‘A veritable chaos of banalities, schoolboy reminiscences, subjective judgements, and personal hatred’ was how Otto Strasser described the draft.101 Amann, the party printer Müller, Heß, and Hanfstaengl (whose brother turned down flat the prospect of Mein Kampf appearing in the family publishing house) all had a hand in altering and revising the text.102 The music critic of the Völkischer Beobachter, Stolzing-Cerny, together with a former Hieronymite, Father Bernard Stempfle, one-time editor-in-chief of the Miesbacher Anzeiger, a provincial Bavarian newspaper that sympathized with the Nazi Moveme
nt, played the main role in re-couching whole sections into a style still inimitably Hitlerian, often barely readable, but nonetheless more literate than the original.103 Even then, there were many later alterations before the volume appeared in print.104 Hitler himself, according to Hans Frank, accepted that it was badly written, and described it as no more than a collection of leading articles for the Völkischer Beobachter.105

  Before Hitler came to power, Mein Kampf, brought out in the party’s own publishing house, the Franz Eher-Verlag, run by Max Amann, was scarcely the runaway bestseller he had apparently expected it to be. Its turgid content, dreadful style, and relatively high price of 12 Reich Marks a volume evidently deterred many potential readers.106 By 1929, the first volume had sold around 23,000 copies, the second only 13,000. Sales increased sharply following the NSDAP’s electoral successes after 1930, and reached 80,000 in 1932. From 1933, they rose stratospherically. One and a half million copies were sold that year. Even the blind could read it – should they have wished to do so – once a braille version had been published in 1936. And from that year, a copy of the people’s edition of both volumes bound together was given to each happy couple on their wedding day. Some 10 million copies were sold by 1945, not counting the millions sold abroad, where Mein Kampf was translated into sixteen languages.107 How many people actually read it is unknown.108 For Hitler, it was of little importance. Having from the early 1920s described himself in official documents as a ‘writer’, he could well afford in 1933 to refuse his Reich Chancellor’s salary (in contrast, he pointed out, to his predecessors): Mein Kampf had made him a very rich man.109

  No policy outline was offered in Mein Kampf. But the book did provide, however garbled the presentation, an uncompromising statement of Hitler’s political principles, his ‘world-view’, his sense of his own ‘mission’, his ‘vision’ of society, and his long-term aims. Not least, it established the basis of the Führer myth. For in Mein Kampf Hitler portrayed himself as uniquely qualified to lead Germany from its existing misery to greatness.

  Mein Kampf gives an important insight into his thinking in the mid-1920s.110 By then, he had developed a philosophy that afforded him a complete interpretation of history, of the ills of the world, and how to overcome them. Tersely summarized, it boiled down to a simplistic, Manichaean view of history as racial struggle, in which the highest racial entity, the Aryan, was being undermined and destroyed by the lowest, the parasitic Jew.111 ‘The racial question,’ he wrote, ‘gives the key not only to world history but to all human culture.’112 The culmination of this process was taken to be the brutal rule of the Jews through Bolshevism in Russia, where the ‘blood Jew’ had, ‘partly amid inhuman torture killed or let starve to death around 30 million people in truly satanic savagery in order to secure the rule over a great people of a bunch of Jewish literati and stock-market bandits’.113 The ‘mission’ of the Nazi Movement was, therefore, clear: to destroy ‘Jewish Bolshevism’. At the same time – a leap of logic that moved conveniently into a justification for outright imperialist conquest – this would provide the German people with the ‘living-space’ needed for the ‘master race’ to sustain itself.114 He held rigidly to these basic tenets for the rest of his life. Nothing of substance changed in later years. The very inflexibility and quasi-messianic commitment to an ‘idea’, a set of beliefs that were unalterable, simple, internally consistent and comprehensive, gave Hitler the strength of will and sense of knowing his own destiny that left its mark on all those who came into contact with him. Hitler’s authority in his entourage derived in no small measure from the certainty in his own convictions that he could so forcefully express. Everything could be couched in terms of black and white, victory or total destruction. There were no alternatives. And, like all ideologues and ‘conviction politicians’, the self-reinforcing components of his ‘world-view’ meant that he was always in a position to deride or dismiss out of hand any ‘rational’ arguments of opponents. Once head of state, Hitler’s personalized ‘world-view’ would serve as ‘guidelines for action’ for policy-makers in all areas of the Third Reich.115

  Hitler’s book was not a prescriptive programme in the sense of a short-term political manifesto. But many contemporaries made a mistake in treating Mein Kampf with ridicule and not taking the ideas Hitler expressed there extremely seriously. However base and repellent they were, they amounted to a set of clearly established and rigidly upheld political principles.116 Hitler never saw any reason to alter the content of what he had written.117 Their internal coherence (given the irrational premises) allows them to be described as an ideology (or, in Hitler’s own terminology, a ‘world-view’).118 Hitler’s ‘world-view’ in Mein Kampf can now be more clearly seen than used to be possible in the context of his ideas as they unfolded between his entry into politics and the writing of his ‘Second Book’ in 1928.

  On Hitler’s central, overriding and all-embracing obsession, the ‘removal of the Jews’, Mein Kampf added nothing to the ideas he had already formulated by 1919–20. Extreme though the language of Mein Kampf was, it was no different to that which Hitler had been proclaiming for years. Nor, for that matter, did the inherently genocidal terminology substantially vary from that of other writers and speakers on the völkisch Right, extending, as we have already seen, well back beyond the First World War.119 His bacterial imagery implied that Jews should be treated in the way germs were dealt with: by extermination. Already in August 1920, Hitler had spoken of combating ‘racial tuberculosis’ through removal of the ‘causal agent, the Jew’.120 And there could be little doubt whom Hitler had in mind when, four years later in Mein Kampf, he wrote: ‘The nationalization of our masses will succeed only when, aside from all the positive struggle for the soul of our people, their international poisoners are exterminated.’121 The notion of poisoning the poisoners ran through another, notorious, passage of Mein Kampf, already cited in Chapter 5, in which Hitler suggested that if 12–15,000 ‘Hebrew corrupters of the people’ had been held under poison gas at the start of the First World War, then ‘the sacrifice of millions at the front would not have been in vain’.122 These terrible passages are not the beginning of a one-way track to the ‘Final Solution’. The road there was ‘twisted’, not straight.123 But however little he had thought out the practical implications of what he was saying, its inherent genocidal thrust is undeniable. However indistinctly, the connection between destruction of the Jews, war, and national salvation had been forged in Hitler’s mind.

  As we saw in Chapter 5, the initial anti-capitalist colouring of Hitler’s antisemitism had given way by mid-1920 to the connection in his thinking of the Jews with the evils of Soviet Bolshevism. It was not that Hitler substituted the image of the Jews behind Marxism for that of the Jews behind capitalism. Both coexisted in his fixated loathing. It was a hatred so profound that it could only have been based on deep fear. This was of a figure in his imagination so powerful that it was the force behind both international finance capital and Soviet Communism. It was the image of a ‘Jewish world conspiracy’ that was almost unconquerable – even for National Socialism.

  Once the link with Bolshevism was made, Hitler had established his central and lasting vision of a titanic battle for supremacy, a racial struggle against a foe of ruthless brutality. What he visualized, he had stated in June 1922, was a fight to the death between two competing ideologies, the idealistic and the materialistic. The mission of the German people was to destroy Bolshevism, and with it ‘our mortal enemy: the Jew’.124 By October the same year he was writing of a life and death struggle of two opposed ‘world-views’, incapable of existing alongside one another. Defeat in this great showdown would seal Germany’s destruction. The struggle would leave only victors and the annihilated. It meant a war of extermination. ‘A victory of the Marxist idea signifies the complete extermination of the opponents,’ he remarked. ‘The Bolshevization of Germany… means the complete annihilation of the entire Christian-western culture.’ Correspondingly, the aim of N
ational Socialism could be simply defined: ‘Annihilation and extermination of the Marxist Weltanschauung.’125

  By now Marxism and the Jew were synonymous in Hitler’s mind. At the end of his trial, on 27 March 1924, he had told the court that what he wanted to be was the breaker of Marxism.126 The Nazi Movement knew only one enemy, he had emphasized the following month – the mortal enemy of the whole of mankind: Marxism.127 There was no mention of the Jews. Some newspapers picked up the change of emphasis and claimed Hitler had altered his position on the ‘Jewish Question’. There were Nazi followers who were also puzzled. One, visiting him in Landsberg at the end of July, asked Hitler whether he had changed his views about Jewry. He received a characteristic reply. Indeed his position on the struggle against Jewry had altered, Hitler remarked. He had realized while at work on Mein Kampf that he had up to then been too mild. In future, only the toughest measures could be deployed if success were to be attained. The ‘Jewish Question’, he declared, was an existential matter for all peoples, not just the German people, ‘for Juda is the world plague’.128 The logic of the position was that only the complete eradication of the international power of Jewry would suffice.