by Ian Kershaw
During a further stay at the Deutsches Haus in Berchtesgaden in early autumn 1926, Hitler came into contact with Maria Reiter. Her friends called her Mimi. For Hitler she was Mimi, Mimilein, Mizzi, Mizzerl – whichever diminutive occurred to him. He also called her ‘my dear child’. He was thirty-seven years of age; she was sixteen. Like his father, he preferred women much younger than himself – girls he could dominate, who would be obedient playthings but not get in the way. The two women with whom he would become most intimately associated, Geli Raubal (nineteen years younger than he was) and Eva Braun (twenty-three years younger), fitted the same model – until, that is, Geli became rebellious and wanted a level of freedom which Hitler was unwilling to permit. But these relationships were still to come when Hitler encountered Mimi Reiter.
A fortnight or so before she met Hitler, Mimi’s mother had died of cancer. During her mother’s illness, her father, a founder member of the Berchtesgaden branch of the SΡD, had brought Mimi home from a boarding-school run by nuns in the Catholic pilgrimage centre, Altötting, to help run the family clothes shop on the ground-floor of the Deutsches Haus, where Hitler was staying. She had already heard that the famous Adolf Hitler had taken rooms in the hotel when he introduced himself one day when she was sitting on a bench in the nearby Kurpark, together with her sister Anni, playing with their alsatian dog, Marco. Soon, he was flirting with her. She and Anni were invited to a meeting he addressed in the hotel.171 ‘Wolf’, as he asked her to call him, using his own favourite nickname, took her for trips in his Mercedes, driven by the discreet Maurice. Hitler was evidently taken with the attractive, blonde young girl, charming in her naïve, youthful way, flirtatious, hanging on his every word. He flattered her, and played with her affections. She may have been emotionally disturbed, so soon after her mother’s death. At any rate, a sense of being courted by one enveloped in such an aura of power and fame must also have played its part. She found him an imposing figure. His manner of dress – complete with knee-length boots and whip – impressed her. Hitler demonstrated his domination by thrashing his own dog, an Alsatian called Prinz, when it misbehaved by fighting Mimi’s dog. She was in awe of him, and plainly became completely infatuated. According to her own account, long after the war, on one trip into the countryside near Berchtesgaden, Hitler took her to a remote forest glade, stood her against a tree, admired her from a distance, calling her his ‘woodland spirit’, then kissed her passionately. He intimated his undying love. Soon afterwards, he was gone – back to real life: politics, meetings, speeches, the regular whirl of activities in Munich. He gave her a leather-bound copy of Mein Kampf for Christmas; she gave him two sofa-cushions that she had embroidered. It was not enough. She dreamt of marriage. Nothing was further from his thoughts. Still following her own story, she attempted to hang herself in despair the following year but was found by her brother-in-law and rescued in time. She also told of visits to Hitler’s flat in Munich, on one occasion, in 1931, staying overnight, being held tightly by her lover, and letting ‘everything happen to me’. At this precise time, however, another woman-Geli Raubal-was the centre of Hitler’s attention. Whether Mimi’s story is located in the earlier part of 1931, when Geli was residing in Hitler’s apartment, or towards the end of the year, when the scandal of Geli’s death was reverberating through Munich, it is stretching belief to accept that she slept with Hitler in his flat at that time. This alone prompts suspicion that much of Mimi’s later story was an elaboration of part-fantasized memories of a lovestruck young girl who, through three marriages, never lost a devotion to Hitler which saw her make frequent visits to his mother’s grave in Leonding.172
She wrote him a number of fond letters. His own letters to her (whose authenticity has not been called into question) were affectionate, though in a fatherly, patronizing fashion. ‘My dear, good child,’ began his reply on 8 February 1927 to a letter from her, thanking her belatedly for her present – presumably the cushions,
I was truly happy to receive this sign of your tender friendship to me. I have nothing in my apartment whose possession gives me more pleasure. I am given a constant reminder of your cheeky head and your eyes… As regards what is causing you personal pain, you can believe me that I sympathize with you. But you should not let your little head droop in sadness and must only see and believe: even if fathers sometimes don’t understand their children any longer because they have got older not only in years but in feelings, they mean only well for them. As happy as your love makes me, I ask you most ardently to listen to your father. And now, my dear treasure (Goldstück), receive warmest greetings from your Wolf, who is always thinking of you.173
For Mimi, Germany’s great leader had fallen in love with her in the late summer of 1926. For Hitler, Mimi – a child holding the allure of a lover – had been an attractive temporary distraction.
While dictating the last chapters of Mein Kampf during his stay on the Obersalzberg, Hitler had, as we have seen, consolidated his thinking on foreign policy, notably the acquisition of territory in the east. This idea, especially, was to dominate his speeches and writings of the mid-1920S. However, he was skilful in tailoring his speeches to his audience, as he showed in an important speech he delivered a few months earlier. Hopes of gaining financial support and of winning influential backing for his party had made him keen to accept the invitation of the prestigious Hamburger Nationalklub to address its members in the elegant Hotel Atlantic on 28 February 1926. It was not his usual audience. Here, he faced a socially exclusive club whose 400–450 members were drawn from Hamburg’s upper bourgeoisie – many of them high-ranking officers, civil servants, lawyers, and businessmen.174 His tone was different to that he used in the Munich beerhalls. In his two-hour speech, he made not a single mention of the Jews. He was well aware that the primitive antisemitic rantings that roused the masses in the Circus Krone would be counter-productive in this audience. Instead, the emphasis was placed entirely on the need to eliminate Marxism as theprerequi-site of Germany’s recovery. By ‘Marxism’, Hitler did not merely mean the German Communist Party, which had attained only 9 per cent of the vote at the last Reichstag election, in December 1924, and by this time had a substantially smaller membership than in 1923.175 Beyond the KPD, the term served to invoke the bogy of Soviet Communism, brought into power by a Revolution less than a decade earlier, and followed by a civil war whose atrocities had been emblazoned across a myriad of right-wing publications. ‘Marxism’ had even wider application. Hitler was also subsuming under this rubric all brands of socialism other than the ‘national’ variety he preached, and using it in particular to attack the SPD and trade unionism. In fact, to the chagrin of some of its followers, the SPD – still Germany’s largest political party – had moved in practice far from its theoretical Marxist roots, and was wedded to upholding the liberal democracy it had been instrumental in calling into being in 1918–19. No ‘Marxist’ apocalypse threatened from that quarter. But Hitler’s rhetoric had, of course, long branded those responsible for the Revolution and the Republic which followed it ‘the November criminals’. ‘Marxism’ was, therefore, also convenient shorthand to denigrate Weimar democracy. As a rhetorical device, therefore, ‘Marxism’ served a multiplicity of purposes. And to his well-heeled bourgeois audience in Hamburg, anti-Marxist to the core, his verbal assault on the Left was music to the ears.
Hitler reduced it to a simple formula: if the Marxist ‘world-view’ was not ‘eradicated’ (ausgerottet), Germany would never rise again. The task of the National Socialist Movement was straightforward: ‘the smashing and annihilation of the Marxist Weltanschauung’. 176 Terror must be met with terror. The bourgeoisie itself was incapable of defeating the threat of Bolshevism. It needed a mass movement as intolerant as that of the Marxists themselves to do it. Winning the masses rested on two premisses. The first was to recognize their social concerns. But in case his audience thought this was back-door Marxism, Hitler was quick to reassure them: social legislation demanded ‘the promotion of
the welfare of the individual in a framework that guaranteed retention of an independent economy’. ‘We are all workers,’ he stated. ‘The aim is no longer to get higher wages, but increase production, because that is to the advantage of each individual.’ His audience was unlikely to disagree with such sentiments. The second premiss was to offer the masses ‘a programme that is unalterable, a political faith that is unshakeable’. The usual party programmes, manifestos, and philosophies of bourgeois parties would not win them over. Hitler’s contempt for the masses was plain. ‘The broad mass is feminine,’ he stated, ‘one-sided in its attitude; it knows only the hard “either-or”.’ It wanted only a single viewpoint upheld – but then with all available means, and, he added, now mixing his genders and pointing to what is normally taken to be a more masculine characteristic, ‘does not shrink from using force’.177 What the mass had to feel was its own strength.178 Among a crowd of 200,000 in Berlin’s Lustgarten, the individual felt no more than ‘a small worm’, subject to mass-suggestion, aware only of those around him being prepared to fight for an ideal.179 ‘The broad masses are blind and stupid and don’t know what they are doing,’ he claimed.180 They were ‘primitive in attitude’. For them, ‘understanding’ offered only a ‘shaky platform’. ‘What is stable is emotion: hatred.’181 The more Hitler preached intolerance, force, and hatred, as the solution to Germany’s problems, the more his audience liked it. He was interrupted on numerous occasions during these passages with cheers and shouts of ‘bravo’. At the end there was a lengthy ovation, and cries of ‘Heil’.182
National revival through terroristic anti-Marxism built on the cynical manipulation and indoctrination of the masses: that was the sum total of Hitler’s message to the upper-crust of the Hamburg bourgeoisie. Nationalism and anti-Marxism were scarcely peculiarities of the Nazis alone. Nor did they amount in themselves to much of an ideology. What distinguished Hitler’s approach to his Hamburg audience was not the ideas themselves, but the impression of fanatical will, utter ruthlessness, and the creation of a nationalist movement resting on the support of the masses. And it was plain from the enthusiastic response that selective terror deployed against ‘Marxists’ would meet with little or no opposition from the élite of Germany’s most liberal city.
Back among his ‘own sort’, little or nothing had changed. The tone was very different to that adopted in Hamburg. In closed party meetings or, after the speaking ban had been lifted in early 1927, once more in Munich beerhalls and the Circus Krone, the attacks on the Jews were as vicious and unconstrained as ever. In speech after speech, as before the putsch, he launched brutal assaults against the Jews, bizarrely depicted both as the wire-pullers of finance capital and as poisoning the people with subversive Marxist doctrine.183 Explicit attacks on the Jews occurred more frequently and extensively in 1925 and 1926 than in the subsequent two years. Antisemitism seemed now rather more ritualist or mechanistic. The main stress had moved to anti-Marxism.184 But only the presentation of his ideas had been modified to some extent; their meaning had not. His pathological hatred of Jews was unchanged. ‘The Jew is and remains the world enemy,’ he once more asserted in an article in the Völkischer Beobachter in February 1927, ‘and his weapon, Marxism, a plague of mankind.’185
Between 1926 and 1918, Hitler became more preoccupied with the ‘question of [living]-space’ (Raumfrage) and ‘land policy’ (Bodenpolitik), 186 Though, as we have seen, the idea of an eastern ‘land policy’ at the expense of Russia had been present in Hitler’s mind at the latest by 1922, he had mentioned it in his public statements – written or spoken – only on a handful of occasions before the end of 1926. He referred in a speech on 16 December 1925 to the ‘acquisition of land and soil’ as the best solution to Germany’s economic problems and alluded to the colonization of the east ‘by the sword’ in the Middle Ages.187 He remarked on the need for a colonial policy in eastern Europe at Bamberg in February 1926.188 And he returned to the theme as a central element of his speech at the Weimar Party Rally on 4 July 1926.189 The completion of Mein Kampf, which ends with the question of eastern colonization, must have further focused his mind on the issue.190 Once he was allowed to speak in public again in spring 1927, the question of ‘living-space’ became frequently, then from the summer onwards, obsessively emphasized in all his major addresses. Speech after speech highlights in more or less the same language ideas that became embodied in the ‘Second Book’, dictated during the summer of 1928. Other economic options are mentioned only to be dismissed. The lack of space (Raumnot) for Germany’s population could be overcome only by attaining power, then by force. The ‘eastern colonization’ of the Middle Ages was praised. Conquest ‘by the sword’ was the only method. Russia was seldom explicitly mentioned. But the meaning was unmistakable.
The social-Darwinist, racist reading of history offered the justification. ‘Politics is nothing more than the struggle of a people for its existence.’ ‘It is an iron principle,’ he declared: ‘the weaker one falls so that the strong one gains life.’191 Three values determined a people’s fate: ‘blood-’ or ‘race-value’, the ‘value of personality’, and the ‘sense of struggle’ (Kampfsinn) or ‘self-preservation drive’ (Selbsterbaltungstrieb). These values, embodied in the ‘Aryan race’, were threatened by the three ‘vices’ – democracy, pacifism, and internationalism – that comprised the work of ‘Jewish Marxism’.
The theme of personality and leadership, little emphasized before 1923, was a central thread of Hitler’s speeches and writings in the mid – and later 1920s. The people, he said, formed a pyramid. At its apex was ‘the genius, the great man’.192 Following the chaos in the völkisch movement during the ‘leaderless time’, it was scarcely surprising that there was heavy emphasis in 1925 and 1926 on the leader as the focus of unity. In his refoundation speech on 27 February 1925, Hitler had stressed his task as leader as ‘bringing together again those who are going different ways’.193 The art of being leader lay in assembling the ‘stones of the mosaic’194 The leader was the ‘central point’ or ‘preserver’ of the ‘idea’.195 This demanded, Hitler repeatedly underlined, blind obedience and loyalty from the followers.196 The cult of the leader was thus built up as the integrating mechanism of the movement. With his own supremacy firmly established by mid-1926, Hitler never lost an opportunity to highlight the ‘value of personality’ and ‘individual greatness’ as the guiding force in Germany’s struggle and coming rebirth. He avoided specific reference to his own claims to ‘heroic’ status. This was unnecessary. It could be left to the growing number of converts to the Hitler cult, and to the orchestrated outpourings of propaganda. For Hitler himself, the ‘Führer myth’ was both a propaganda weapon and a central tenet of belief. His own ‘greatness’ could be implicitly but unmistakably underscored by repeated references to Bismarck, Frederick the Great and Luther, along with allusions to Mussolini. Speaking of Bismarck (if without mentioning his name) in May 1926, he commented: ‘It was necessary to transmit the national idea to the mass of the people.’ ‘A giant had to fulfil this task.’ The sustained applause showed that the meaning was not lost on his audience.197
Goebbels had been thrilled on more than one occasion in 1926 by Hitler’s exposition of the ‘social question’. ‘Always new and compelling’, was how Goebbels described his ideas.198 In reality, Hitler’s ‘social idea’ was simplistic, diffuse, and manipulative. It amounted to little more than what he had told his bourgeois audience in Hamburg: winning the workers to nationalism, destroying Marxism, and overcoming the division between nationalism and socialism through the creation of a nebulous ‘national community’ (Voiksgemeinschaft) based on racial purity and the concept of struggle. The fusion of nationalism and socialism would do away with the class antagonism between a nationalist bourgeoisie and Marxist proletariat (both of which had failed in their political goals). This would be replaced by a ‘community of struggle’ where nationalism and socialism would be united, where ‘brain’ and ‘fist’ were reconciled, and w
here – denuded of Marxist influence – the building of a new spirit for the great future struggle of the people could be undertaken. Such ideas were neither new, nor original. And, ultimately, they rested not on any modern form of socialism, but on the crudest and most brutal version of nineteenth-century imperialist and social Darwinistic notions.199 Social welfare in the trumpeted ‘national community’ did not exist for its own sake, but to prepare for external struggle, for conquest ‘by the sword’.
Hitler repeatedly stated that he was uninterested in day-to-day issues. What he offered, over and over again, was the same vision of a long-term goal, to be striven after with missionary zeal and total commitment. Political struggle, eventual attainment of power, destruction of the enemy, and build-up of the nation’s might were stepping-stones to the goal. But how it was to be then attained was left open. Hitler himself had no concrete notion. He just had the certainty of the fanatical ‘conviction politician’ that it would be attained. Clarity was never aimed at. The acquisition of ‘living-space’ through conquest implied at some distant future date aggression against Russia. But it had no more precise meaning than that. Hitler’s own firm belief in it need not be doubted. But, even for many of his followers, in the world of the mid-1920s, with Germany engaged diplomatically with the Soviet Union following the Rapallo Treaty of 1922 as well as improving relations with the western powers through the 1925 Treaty of Locarno then membership of the League of Nations, this must have seemed little more than sloganizing or a pipe-dream.