by Ian Kershaw
Hitler and Goebbels worked hard to ensure declarations of loyalty from all the Gaue. Stennes, increasingly revolutionary in tone, succeeded in winning support from parts of the S A in Berlin, Schleswig-Holstein, Silesia and Pomerania. But his success was short-lived. A full-scale rebellion did not occur. Ironically, the Berlin police – the butt of so many vicious attacks by Goebbels in the Angriff – now helped the party win back control over its headquarters and over the newspaper’s offices.208 On 4 April, Hitler published in the Völkischer Beobachter a lengthy and cleverly constructed denunciation of Stennes and an emotional appeal to the loyalty of S A men.209 He stressed his own unique role in creating and building up the movement ‘as its founder and as its leader’.210 He poured scorn on Stennes’s contribution, compared with the sacrifices he himself and others had made for the movement. He accused Stennes of systematically undermining the loyalty of the SA men to him through attempting to separate the ‘idea’ from the ‘person’ – the same distinction he had rejected in the case of Otto Strasser the previous May. Hitler labelled anyone trying to lead the movement ‘into an open war against the state’ as ‘either a fool or a criminal’.211 Having marched himself in 1923, he had to recognize that any further attempt would be ‘madness’. He declared his intention ‘to eradicate this conspiracy against National Socialism root and branch’ and demanded S A men choose between ‘Police Sergeant (ret.) Stennes or the founder of the National Socialist Movement and the Supreme Leader of your SA Adolf Hitler’.212
Even before he wrote, the revolt was crumbling. Support for Stennes evaporated. About 500 S A men in north and eastern Germany were purged.213 The rest came back into line. Göring was empowered to re-establish control in Stennes’s area.214 Berlin was excluded from his remit. Jealously guarding his position, Goebbels had discovered that Göring had tried to exploit the situation to take over some of his own powers in Berlin. ‘I’ll never forget that of Göring,’ he wrote. ‘One could despair of mankind. It’s a heap of frozen shit.’215 He was placated when Hitler publicly called upon all Berlin SA men to show loyalty to his ‘friend’ Goebbels.216
The crisis was over. The SA had been put back on the leash. It would be kept there with difficulty until the ‘seizure of power’. Then, the pent-up violence would only be fully released in the first months of 1933. With great energy and no little organizational skill Röhm now took the restructuring of the S A in hand. By the end of 1931 its numbers had trebled from 88,000 in January to 260,000 in December.217 With such a rapid increase, a more tightly-knit organization was necessary. The SA’s image was also changing in some ways. Outside the big cities, the SA were not always archetypal street fighters and ‘political hooligans’.218 ‘Marxists’ were often scarce on the ground in rural areas. The SA’s role looked correspondingly different. Farmers’ sons and lads from other ‘upstanding’ local families, attracted by the success of the Nazi Movement and often encouraged by friends, now often joined the SA instead of (or as well as) shooting or sporting clubs. Much of their party ‘work’ was often little more than pageantry and parading. In some places, the ‘pious’ SA marched in uniform each Sunday to church.219 It was far from disreputable to belong to such an organization.
Under Röhm’s hand, nevertheless, the SA was returning to its character as a paramilitary formation – and now a much more formidable one than it had been in the early 1920s. Röhm had behaved with exemplary loyalty to Hitler during the Stennes crisis. But his own emphasis on the ‘primacy of the soldier’, and his ambitions, suppressed as they were in 1931, for the transformation of the SA into a popular militia, bore the seeds of conflict still to come. It prefigured the course of events which would reach their denouement only in June 1934.
VIII
Not only political, but personal crisis beset Hitler in 1931. On moving in 1929 into his spacious new apartment in Prinzregentenplatz, his niece, Geli Raubal, who had been living with her mother in Haus Wachenfeld on the Obersalzberg, had come to join him. During the following two years she was frequently seen in public with Hitler. Rumours already abounded about the nature of her relations with ‘Uncle Alf’, as she called him. On the morning of 19 September 1931, aged twenty-three, she was found dead in Hitler’s flat, shot with his pistol.
Hitler’s relations with women, as we have already remarked, were in some respects abnormal. He liked the company of women, especially pretty ones, best of all young ones. He flattered them, sometimes flirted with them, called them – in his patronizing Viennese petty-bourgeois manner – ‘my little princess’, or ‘my little countess’.220 Occasionally, if the stories are to be believed, he made a clumsy attempt at some physical contact, as in the case of Helene Hanfstaengl and Henrietta Hoffmann, the daughter of his photographer, who was to marry Baldur von Schirach (from 30 October 1931 the Reich Youth Leader of the NSDAP).221 His name was linked at various times with women from as diverse backgrounds as Jenny Haug, the sister of his chauffeur in the early years, and Winifred Wagner, the Bayreuth maestro’s daughter-in-law.222 But, whatever the basis of the rumours – often malicious, exaggerated, or invented – none of his liaisons, it seems, had been more than superficial. No deep feelings were ever stirred. Women were for Hitler an object, an adornment in a ‘men’s world’. Whether in the Men’s Home in Vienna, the regiment during the war, the Munich barracks until his discharge, and his regular gatherings of party cronies in Café Neumaier or Café Heck in the 1920s, Hitler’s environment had always been overwhelmingly male. ‘Very occasionally a woman would be admitted to our intimate circle,’ recalled Heinrich Hoffmann, ‘but she never was allowed to become the centre of it, and had to remain seen but not heard… She could, occasionally, take a small part in the conversation, but never was she allowed to hold forth or to contradict Hitler.’223 Beginning with the semi-mythical Stefanie in Linz, Hitler’s relations with women had usually been at a distance, a matter of affectation, not emotion. The brief flirtation with Mimi Reiter had not broken the mould. Fond of Mimi though he had been, the loving devotion of the besotted sixteen-year-old remained unrequited. Nor was his long-standing relationship with Eva Braun, one of Hoffmann’s employees whom he had first met in autumn 1929, an exception. ‘To him,’ remarked Hoffmann, ‘she was just an attractive little thing, in whom, in spite of her inconsequential and feather-brained outlook – or perhaps just because of it – he found the type of relaxation and repose he sought… But never, in voice, look or gesture, did he ever behave in a way that suggested any deeper interest in her.’224
It was different with Geli. Whatever the exact nature of the relationship – and all accounts are based heavily upon guesswork and hearsay – it seems certain that Hitler, for the first and only time in his life (if we leave his mother out of consideration), became emotionally dependent on a woman. Whether his involvement with Geli was explicitly sexual cannot be known beyond doubt.225 Some have hinted darkly at the incestuous relationships in Hitler’s ancestry – presumably along the lines that he was keeping incest in the family.226 But lurid stories of alleged deviant sexual practices put about by Otto Strasser ought to be viewed as the fanciful anti-Hitler propaganda of an outright political enemy.227 Other tales, also to be treated with scepticism, circulated of a compromising letter and of pornographic drawings by Hitler that had to be bought off a blackmailer by the Party Treasurer Schwarz.228 But whether actively sexual or not, Hitler’s behaviour towards Geli has all the traits of a strong, latent at least, sexual dependence. This manifested itself in such extreme shows of jealousy and domineering possessiveness that a crisis in the relationship was inevitable.
Geli, broad-featured, with dark-brown, wavy hair, was no stunning beauty but nonetheless, all accounts agree, a vivacious, extrovert, attractive young woman. She livened up the gatherings in Café Heck. Hitler allowed her, something he permitted no one else, to become the centre of attraction. He took her everywhere with him – to the theatre, concerts, the opera, the cinema, restaurants, for drives in the countryside, picnics, even shopping for
clothes.229 He sang her praises, showed her off. Geli was in Munich ostensibly to study at the university. But little studying was done. Hitler paid for singing lessons for her. But she was clearly never going to make an operatic heroine. She was bored by her lessons.230 She was more interested in having a good time. Flighty and flirtatious, she had no shortage of male admirers and was not backward in encouraging them. When Hitler found out about Geli’s liaison with Emil Maurice, his bodyguard and chauffeur, there was such a scene that Maurice feared Hitler was going to shoot him.231 He was soon forced out of Hitler’s employment. Geli was sent to cool her ardour under the watchful eye of Frau Bruckmann.232 Hitler’s jealous possessiveness took on pathological proportions. If she went out without him, Geli was chaperoned, and had to be home early.233 Everything she did was monitored and controlled. She was effectively a prisoner. She resented it bitterly. ‘My uncle is a monster,’ she is reported as saying. ‘No one can imagine what he demands of me.’234
By mid-September 1931 she had had enough. She planned to return to Vienna. It was later rumoured that she had a new boyfriend there, even that he was a Jewish artist whose child she was expecting.235 Geli’s mother, Angela Raubal, told American interrogators after the war that her daughter had wanted to marry a violinist from Linz, but that she and her half-brother, Adolf, had forbidden her to see the man.236 At any rate it seems certain that Geli was desperate to get away from her uncle’s clutches. Whether he had been physically maltreating her is again impossible to ascertain. It was said that her nose was broken and there were other indications of physical violence, when her body was found.237 Once more the evidence is too flimsy to be certain, and the story was one put out by Hitler’s political enemies.238 The police doctor who examined the body, and two women who laid out the corpse, found no wounds or bleeding on the face.239 But that Hitler was at the very least subjecting his niece to intense psychological pressure cannot be doubted. According to the version put out a few days later by the Socialist Münchener Post – vehemently denied in a public statement by Hitler – during a heated argument on Friday, 18 September he refused to let her go to Vienna.240 Later that day, Hitler and his entourage departed for Nuremberg.241 He had already left his hotel the next morning when he was urgently recalled to be told the news that Geli had been found dead in his apartment, shot with his revolver. He immediately raced back to Munich – in such a rush that his car was stopped by the police for speeding about half-way between Nuremberg and Munich.242
Hitler’s political enemies had a field day.243 There were no holds barred on the newspaper reports. Stories of violent rows and physical mistreatment mingled with sexual innuendo and even the allegation that Hitler had either killed Geli himself or had had her murdered to prevent scandal.244 Hitler himself was not in Munich when his niece died. And it is not easy to see the reasoning for a commissioned murder to prevent a scandal being carried out in his own flat.245 As it was, the scandal was enormous. The party’s own line that the killing had been an accident, which had occurred when Geli was playing with Hitler’s gun, also lacked all conviction.246 The truth will never be known. But suicide – possibly intended as a cri de coeur that went wrong – driven by the need to escape from the vice of her uncle’s clammy possessiveness and – perhaps violent – jealousy, seems the most likely explanation.
Hitler appears to have been near-hysterical, then fallen into an intense depression. Those close to him had never seen him in such a state. He seemed to be on the verge of a nervous breakdown. He spoke of giving up politics and finishing it all. There were fears that he might be suicidal. Hans Frank’s account implies that his despair at the scandal and press campaign against him outweighed any personal grief during these days. He took refuge in the house of his publisher, Adolf Müller, on the shores of the Tegernsee. Frank used legal means to block the press attacks. And once he had visited Geli’s grave in Vienna’s sprawling Central Cemetery, a few days after the funeral, Hitler was suddenly able to snap out of his depression.247 All at once, the crisis was over.
At his first speech a few days later, in Hamburg, he received an even more rapturous reception than usual.248 According to one person who was there, he looked ‘very strained (angegriffen)’ but spoke well.249 He was back in business. More than ever, the orgiastic frenzy he worked himself up into during his big public addresses, and the reponse he encountered in what he saw as the ‘feminine mass’, provided a substitute for the emptiness and lack of emotional bonds in his private life.
Some who saw Hitler at close quarters were convinced that Geli could have exerted a restraining influence upon him.250 It is a highly dubious theory. His emotional involvement with Geli, whatever its precise nature, was – everything points to this – more intense than any other human relationship he had before or after. There was something both obsessive and cloyingly sentimental about the way her rooms in the Prinzregentenplatz apartment and in Haus Wachenfeld were turned into shrines.251 In a personal sense, Geli was indeed irreplaceable (though Hitler soon enough had Eva Braun in tow). But it was a purely selfish dependency on Hitler’s part. Geli had been allowed to have no existence of her own. Hitler’s own extreme dependency insisted that she should be totally dependent upon him. In human terms, it was a self-destructive relationship. Politically, apart from the short-lived scandal, it was of no significance. It is difficult to imagine Geli turning Hitler away from his deeper, less personal, obsession with power. Nor was his embittered thirst for vengeance and destruction altered by her death. History would have been no different had Geli Raubal survived.
IX
Little over a week after Geli’s death, the city elections in the relatively unresponsive territory of Hamburg gave the Nazis 26.2 per cent of the vote, ahead of the Communists and only fractionally behind the SPD.252 With as high a vote as 37.2 per cent in rural Oldenburg the previous May, the NSDAP had become for the first time the largest party in a state parliament.253 In the last state elections of the year, in Hessen on 15 November, this feat was repeated in a remarkable poll that gave the Nazis, with 37.1 per cent, a higher proportion of the vote than the Communists and Socialists put together, and twenty-seven seats in a Landtag where they had previously been unrepresented.254 The electoral landslide showed no signs of abating. With the Brüning government under siege, ruling by emergency decree, its policies – calculated to demonstrate Germany’s inability to pay reparations – sending the economy plummeting to disaster in a catastrophic downward spiral of cascading production levels and soaring levels of unemployment and social misery, more and more voters were cursing the wretched Republic. By the time of the calamitous bank crash in July, when two of Germany’s major banks, the Darmstädter and the Dresdner, collapsed, those voters looking to the survival and recovery of democracy were in a dwindling minority. But what sort of authoritarian solution might follow the liquidation of the Weimar Republic was still anything but clear. Germany’s power élites were no more united on this issue than were the mass of the population.
With the levels of popular support the Nazis now enjoyed, no potential right-wing solution could afford to leave them out of the equation. In July, Hugenberg, the leader of the DNVP, and Franz Seldte, the head of the huge veterans’ organization, the Stahlhelm, had renewed their alliance with Hitler – resurrecting the former grouping to fight the Young Plan – in the ‘National Opposition’. Hugenberg assuaged the criticisms of Reich President Hindenburg, who thought the Nazis not only vulgar but dangerous socialists, by assuring him that he was ‘politically educating’ them towards the national cause to prevent them slipping into Socialism or Communism. Hitler’s line was, as ever, pragmatic. The publicity and contacts won through allying with Hugenberg were valuable. But he made sure he kept his distance. At the highly publicized rally of Nationalist Opposition forces at Bad Harzburg on 11 October, resulting in the creation of the ‘Harzburg Front’ and a manifesto (which he thought worthless) demanding new Reichstag elections and the suspension of emergency legislation, Hitler stood for the
march-past of the S A then demonstratively left before the Stahlhelm could begin, having left them waiting for twenty-five minutes. He also refused to attend the joint lunch of the nationalist leaders. He could not suppress his repulsion at such meals, he wrote – deflecting the criticism of his behaviour into a further advertisement for his image as a leader who shared the privations of his followers – ‘when thousands of my supporters undertake service only at very great personal sacrifice and in part with hungry stomachs’.255 A week later, to underline the NSDAP’s independent strength, he took the salute at a march-past of 104,000 SA and SS men in Braunschweig, the largest Nazi paramilitary demonstration to date.256
Among those taking part at Bad Harzburg, and whose presence there made a stir, was the former President of the Reichsbank Hjalmar Schacht, now turned political adventurer. Some other figures – though not prominent ones – from the world of business were also there.257 Schacht – a freemason, and founding member of the pro-Republican DDP – was an unlikely fellow-traveller of Nazism. But he had moved strongly to the Right after resigning the presidency of the Reichsbank in March 1930 in protest at the ways of implementing the Young Plan, and had publicly expressed admiration for vitality of the NSDAP in December 1930.258 Göring, with whom he was on good terms, arranged for Schacht to come to dinner and meet Hitler on 5 January 1931. The dinner was also attended by another Nazi sympathizer from big business, Fritz Thyssen, the chairman of the supervisory board of the United Steel Works.259 Hitler arrived, wearing party uniform, only after the meal was over. As usual, he dominated the ‘conversation’, contributing, thought Schacht, some 95 per cent of what was said.260 Even so, Schacht, intelligent and with sharply critical acumen, was impressed: