by Ian Kershaw
281. MK, 55–9 (trans., MK Watt, 48–51). In his letter to the anonymous ‘Herr Doktor’ of 29 November 1921, Hitler wrote of his ‘conversion’: ‘Coming from a family more attuned to more cosmopolitan (weltbürgerlich) views, I became an antisemite in scarcely a year through the school of hard reality’ (IfZ, MA-731 (HA, Reel 1), repr. in Joachimsthaler, 92).
282. MK, 59 (trans., MK Watt, 52).
283. MK, 60 (trans., MK Watt, 52).
284. MK, 61.
285. MK, 64 (trans., MK Watt, 56).
286. MK, 65–6. Hitler singled out the names of four Jewish leaders of the working class: Viktor Adler, Friedrich Austerlitz, Wilhelm Ellenbogen, and Anton David. The first three were frequently linked together in the attacks of Viennese antisemites; the fourth played a leading role in worker demonstrations against inflation in 1911 (Hamann, 258–9).
287. MK, 66 (trans., MK Watt, 57).
288. MK, 69.
289. Kubizek, 94.
290. Kubizek, 62 (aversion to Jewish students in the Mensa); 249–50 (Jewish journalist).
291. Kubizek, 250–51. Kubizek’s story was probably based on Hitler’s own account in Mein Kampf (59). And see Jetzinger’s criticism of Kubizek’s account (214).
292. Hamann, 83.
293. See Hamann, 82–3.
294. Hamann, 22.
295. Hamann, 28–9. Hitler (MK, 55) claimed he was not antisemitic in Linz. Stronger emphasis is placed on antisemitism in Hitler’s school in Linz, and on support in the school and town for the antisemitic programme of Schönerer, by Friedrich Heer, Der Glaube des Adolf Hitler, Munich/Eßlingen, 1968, 25, 72; Friedrich Heer, Gottes erste Liebe, Munich/Eßlingen, 1967, 355. But Bukey, 8–9, also implies that antisemitism in Linz, while widespread and pernicious, was far less significant than anti-Czech feeling.
296. Albert Speer, Erinnerungen, Frankfurt am Main/Berlin, 1969, 112; Hamann, 29–30. To Goebbels, too, Hitler spoke of Vienna as the place where he first became an antisemite (Tb Reuth, iii. 1334 (17 October 1939)).
297. See Hamann, 344–7, for Schönerer’s racial antisemitism.
298. IfZ, MA-731 (HA, Reel 1), ‘Notizen für Kartei’ of 8 December 1938, refers to Bloch receiving two cards, one a nicely painted one with New Year greeting (presumably 1908), and ‘cordial thanks’ (‘herzlichem Dank’). They were confiscated by the Gestapo in March 1938. Bloch, 69–70, refers to the cards in his own account. See also Binion, Hitler among the Germans, 19.
299. MK, 59.
300. Daim, 25–6, 270.
301. MK, 59–60.
302. Hanisch, 271.
303. Hamann, 242.
304. Hanisch, 271–2, 299. And see Hamann, 242, 246–7, 498.
305. Smith, 149.
306. Anonymous, ‘My Friend Hitler’, 11.
307. Hanisch, 272.
308. Greiner, 75–82. Greiner (79) claimed Hitler brought his antisemitism with him from Linz.
309. Binion, Hitler among the Germans, 2, 19; Binion, ‘Hitler’s Concept of Lebensraum’, 201–2.
310. See Binion, ‘Hitler’s Concept of Lebensraum’, 189; Binion, Hitler among the Germans, 2. Joachimsthaler, 44, sees no significant hatred of the Jews in Hitler before as late as June 1919.
311. See MK, 71 for the implication that his unchanging political philosophy had been formed before entry into politics at the age of thirty.
312. Jones, 129. On the menacing anti-Jewish atmosphere in Vienna, see Hamann, 472–82.
313. Pulzer, 202.
314. Jenks, 127–33.
315. Hitler later claimed to have ‘intensively studied’ Theodor Fritsch’s Handbuch der Judenfrage as a young man in Vienna (Hitler. Reden, Schriften, Anordnungen. Februar 1925, bis Januar 1933, Munich etc., 1992- (= RSA), IV/1, 133).
316. Carr, 123; Waite, 188.
317. Langer, 187. And see Carr, 121–2.
318. See Fest, Hitler, 65.
319. Hanisch, 272. Hitler referred in Mein Kampf (61) to ‘the smell of these caftan-wearers’.
320. After the war, Hitler’s sister, Paula, thought it ‘possible that the hard years during his youth in Vienna caused his anti-Jewish attitude. He was starving severely in Vienna and he believed that his failure in painting was only due to the fact that trade in works of art was in Jewish hands.’ This seems, however, merely a surmise on her part; there is no evidence that Hitler gave her such an explanation (NA, NND-881077).
321. Hanisch, 272.
322. Hanisch, 271–2.
323. Hamann, 246.
324. Smith, 149–50.
325. Honisch testimony, HA, 17/1 (Joachimsthaler, 54).
326. Anonymous, ‘My Friend Hitler’, 10.
327. Langer, 185–6, commented on the lack of explanation for Hitler’s apparent reluctance for so long to leave Vienna (despite, as we have noted, his long-standing admiration for Germany and some reported talk of wanting to go to Munich). The wait for the inheritance provides the answer.
328. Hamann, 85, 568.
329. Jetzinger, 254.
330. Joachimsthaler, 25.
331. Smith, 150–51.
332. Jetzinger, 250.
333. Joachimsthaler, 15, 257–8. He established the fact, previously unknown, that Hitler’s travelling companion was Häusler. See especially on Häusler, Hamann, 566–8.
334. MK, 137.
CHAPTER 3: ELATION AND EMBITTERMENT
1. The title of ch.4 of Ralf Dahrendorf, Society and Democracy in Germany, London, 1968.
2. The thesis of Germany’s ‘special path’ (Sonderweg) to modernity found classical expression in Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Das Deutsche Kaiserreich 1871–1918, Göttingen, 1973. The clash of traditional and modern values and social structures as the framework for Hitler’s rise was advanced by Ernst Bloch, ‘Der Faschismus als Erscheinungsform der Ungleichzeitigkeit’, in Ernst Nolte (ed.), Theorien über den Faschismus, 6th edn, Königstein/Ts., 1984, 182–204.
3. The possibilities are outlined most prominently in Manfred Rauh, Die Parlamentarisierung des deutschen Reiches, Düsseldorf, 1977, esp. here 13–14, 363–5; the openness of the future development of the Kaiserreich is emphasized by Thomas Nipperdey, Deutsche Geschichte 1866–1918, vol.ii, Munich, 1992, 755–7, 890–93. The rejection of the ‘Sonderweg’ interpretation is most plainly evident in Nipperdey’s comment (891), that ‘the history of the Reich from 1871 to 1914 is a history of common European normality’.
4. The argument is most powerfully adduced by Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte 1849–1914, Munich, 1995, esp. 460–86, 1279–95, restated briefly and pointedly in Hans-Ulrich Wehler, ‘Wirtschaftliche Entwicklung, sozialer Wandel, politische Stagnation: Das Deutsche Kaiserreich am Vorabend des Ersten Weltkriegs’, in Simone Lässig and Karl Heinrich Pohl (eds.), Sachsen im Kaiserreich, Dresden, 1997, 301–8.
5. Nipperdey’s massive two-volume study of Imperial Germany ends with the comment: ‘The basic colours of history are not black and white, their basic pattern not the contrast of a chess-board; the basic colour of history is grey, in endless variations’ (Nipperdey, ii.905).
6. This was implicit in Gerhard Ritter’s comment that it was ‘almost unbearable’ to think how ‘the will of a single madman’ had driven Germany into the Second World War (Gerhard Ritter, Das deutsche Problem. Grundfragen deutschen Staatslebens gestern und heute, Munich, 1962, 198). The use of the ‘works accident’ metaphor to describe Hitler as an unpredictable and sharp break in the continuity of German history is analysed by Jürgen Steinle, ‘Hitler als “Betriebsunfall in der Geschichte”’, Geschichte in Wissenschaft und Unterricht, 45 (1994), 288–302. Eberhard Jäckel reverses the usual argument in insisting that Hitler was, indeed, the equivalent of a nuclear accident in society (Jäckel, Das deutsche Jahrhundert, ch.4, 153–82, and ‘L’arrivée d’Hitler au pouvoir: un Tschernobyl de l’histoire’, in Gilbert Krebs and Gérard Schneilin, Weimar ou de la Démocratie en Allemagne, Paris, 1994, 345–58). I had used precisely the same metaphor in The Nazi Dictatorship. Problems an
d Perspectives of Interpretation, 215–16, but emphasized – a point Jäckel included in his argument – that a nuclear accident did not occur without structural systemic causes as well as human errors and miscalculations.
7. See Geoff Eley, Reshaping the German Right, New Haven/London, 1980, ch.10.
8. The title of George Mosse’s book, The Nationalisation of the Masses, New York, 1975.
9. Nipperdey, ii.265; see also Thomas Nipperdey, Deutsche Geschichte 1866–1918, vol.i, Munich, 1990, 599–600 for nationalist academics.
10. Cit. Pulzer, 242.
11. See Lothar Kettenacker, ‘Der Mythos vom Reich’, in K. H. Bohrer (ed.), Mythos and Moderne, Frankfurt am Main, 1983, 261–89.
12. Mosse, Nationalisation, 62–3 and pl. 9; Nipperdey, i.739, ii·599·
13. MK, 180. For the monuments, see Nipperdey, i.738–41, ii.261.
14. Mosse, 36–7; Nipperdey, ii.599.
15. Elisabeth Fehrenbach, ‘Images of Kaiserdom: German attitudes to Kaiser Wilhelm II’, in John C.G. Röhl and Nicolaus Sombart (eds.), Kaiser Wilhelm II. New Interpretations, Cambridge, 1982, 269–85, here 276.
16. Nipperdey, ii.289; Léon Poliakov, The History of Anti-Semitism, vol.iv, Oxford, 1985, 23–4, 31, 83ff.
17. See Fritz Stern, The Politics of Cultural Despair, Berkeley, 1961; George Mosse, The Crisis of German Ideology, pts. I—11 ; and – specifically for Paul de Lagarde’s influence – Nipperdey, i.825–6.
18. Nipperdey, ii.256.
19. Pulzer, 231.
20. Pulzer, 236 (citing August Julius Langbehn).
21. See Nipperdey, ii.290.
22. Nipperdey, ii.299, 305; Mosse, Crisis, esp. 93–7, 112. Houston Stewart Chamberlain, born in England but an avid Germanophile, became a German citizen, married Richard Wagner’s daughter, and developed his racist theories within the Wagner circle at Bayreuth. He saw history as racial struggle, with the German race representing good and the Jewish race evil. He was full of praise for Hitler, who visited him shortly before his death in 1927. Theodor Fritsch was one of the most vitriolic early antisemitic writers and founder of the radical racist ‘Hammerbund’ to propagate his ideas, which linked racism to vehement opposition to urbanism and industrialization. He died, aged seventy-nine and much honoured by the Nazis, in 1933.
23. Jeremy Noakes, ‘Nazism and Eugenics: the Background to the Nazi Sterilisation Law of 14 July 1933’, in R.J. Bullen, H. Pogge von Strandmann and A.B. Polonsky (eds.), Ideas into Politics, London/Sydney, 1984, 79–80.
24. The title of the popular novel by Hans Grimm, Volk ohne Kaum, Munich, 1926.
25. On the development of the dual forms of expansionist idea, see Woodruff D. Smith, The Ideological Origins of Nazi Imperialism, New York/Oxford, 1986.
26. Nipperdey, ii.601.
27. Eley, Reshaping, 218–23. Eley (230–31) notes that the Imperial League against Social Democracy put out close on 50 million pamphlets and leaflets between 1904 and 1914 attacking the Social Democrats.
28. Nipperdey, ii.601; Roger Chickering, We Men Who Feel Most German. A Cultural Study of the Pan-German League, 1886–1914, London, 1984, 191.
29. Nipperdey, ii.602–9; Chickering, esp. chs.4, 6; Eley, Reshaping, 337–43.
30. Nipperdey, ii.607–8.
31. Daniel Frymann (Heinrich Gaß), Wenn ich der Kaiser wär!, 5th edn, Leipzig, 1914, 227.
32. See Axel Schildt, ‘Radikale Antworten von rechts auf die Kulturkrise der Jahrhundertwende’, Jahrbuch für Antisemitismusforschung, 4 (1995), 63–87.
33. See Geoff Eley, ‘The German Right, 1860–1945: How it Changed’, in his essay collection, From Unification to Nazism, London, 1986, 231–53, and his subsequent article along similar lines, ‘Conservatives and radical nationalists in Germany: the production of fascist potentials, 1912–1928’, in Martin Blinkhorn (ed.), Fascists and Conservatives. The Radical Right and the Establishment in Twentieth-Century Europe, London, 1990, 50–70.
34. Wilhelm II, born in Potsdam on 27 January 1859, became German Emperor and King of Prussia in 1888. His childish immaturity, extreme restlessness, imperious and explosive temperament, unbridled arrogance, intolerance of the slightest opposition, gross exaggeration of his own abilities, and obsessive hatreds – scarcely less violent than Hitler’s – were unmistakable indicators of personality disturbances in the man who ruled Germany for thirty years. He was to die in exile at Doom in Holland on 4 June 1941. See John C.G. Röhl, ‘Kaiser Wilhelm II. Eine Charakterskizze’, in his Kaiser, Hof und Staat, Munich, 1987, 17–34; and his major study, Wilhelm II. Die Jugend des Kaisers 1859–1888, Munich, 1993, where the birth trauma and withered left arm are strongly emphasized as contributory factors to the ‘disturbed character-formation of the last German Emperor’ (38).
35. MK, 138 and (139) ‘I achieved the happiness of a truly inward contentment’ (trans., MK Watt, 116–17).
36. MK, 138.
37. MK, 135–6 (trans., MK Watt, 113).
38. MK, 179 (trans., MK Watt, 150). In the Reichshandbuch der deutschen Gesellschaft, vol.i, Berlin, n.d. (1931?), 771, Hitler’s entry – misleading both as to date and motive – stated: ‘In spring 1912 he moved to Munich in order to have a greater, more promising, field for his political activity.’ Also cited in Fest, i.91.
39. MK, 139 (trans., MK Watt, 117).
40. Cit. Max Spindler, Handbuch der bayerischen Geschichte, vol.iv, pt.2, Munich, 1975, 1195. Lovis Corinth (1858–1925), though he came from East Prussia, made his mark in Munich during the 1890s as part of a group of progressive Munich artists who formed the Münchner Sezession and was in his early period one of the leading exponents of Jugendstil. See Spindler, iv.1196. Also Deutsche Biographische Enzyklopädie, vol.2, Munich etc., 1995, 373. The artistic and literary scene in Munich at the turn of the century is fully described in the Introduction and ch.1 of David Clay Large, Where Ghosts Walked. Munich’s Road to the Third Reich, New York, 1997.
41. MK, 139. Hitler claimed, too, that the Bavarian dialect had affinities for him – presumably a glamorized reference to the short time as a child that he had lived in Passau in Lower Bavaria (MK, 135, 138). His memories of Passau could not have been extensive. He had left around his sixth birthday, having lived there for only just over two and a half years (Jetzinger, 58, 64, 66; Smith, 53, 55).
42. MK, 139.
43. Monologe, 201 (15–16 January 1942).
44. Heinz A. Heinz, Germany’s Hitler, London (1934), 2nd edn, 1938, 49. This account, written to portray Hitler, soon after his takeover of power, in the best possible light to an English readership, evidently draws in this passage on Mein Kampf (including giving the date of 1912 for the move to Munich). There is, however, no reason to doubt Hitler’s admiration for the splendour of Munich’s buildings.
45. Monologe, 400 (13 June 1943).
46. See, for the grandiose rebuilding plans for Munich, Hans-Peter Rasp, ‘Bauten und Bauplanung für die “Hauptstadt der Bewegung”’, in München – ‘Hauptstadt der Bewegung’, ed. Münchner Stadtmuseum, Munich, 1993, 294–309.
47. MK, 136.
48. Heinz, 56 – the glowing account, given in the 1930s, of his landlady, Frau Popp (who repeated the incorrect date of 1912, as given in Mein Kampf, for his arrival). On his police registration form in Munich, Hitler described himself as a painter (Kunstmaler) (Joachimsthaler, 17, 32).
49. JK, 54, written as ‘Architektur Maler’; Werner Maser, Hitlers Briefe und Notizen, Düsseldorf, 1988, 40; Jetzinger, 262.
50. IfZ, MA-731 (= HA, Reel 1), repr. in Joachimsthaler, 91–2.
51. Der Hitler-Prozeß 1924. Wortlaut der Hauptverhandlung vor dem Volksgericht München I, Teil 1, ed. Lothar Gruchmann and Reinhard Weber, assisted by Otto Gritschneder, Munich, 1997, 19; JK, 1062. The wording given by Joachimsthaler, 31, based upon Der Hitler-Prozeß vor dem Volksgericht in München, Munich, 1924, deviates in places from the authentic text.
52. Monologe, 115 (29 October 1941). The translation in Hitler’s Table Talk, 97–8 is incomplete and, as often, somewh
at too loosely rendered.
53. Heinz, 49–50.
54. Orr, Revue, Nr 46 (1952), 3; Joachimsthaler, 16, 81; Hamann, 570–74. Häusler, unlike Hitler, returned to Vienna at the outbreak of the war (Joachimsthaler, 81). Curiously, in an application to rejoin the NSDAP in Austria on 1 May 1938, Häusler made no mention of his earlier connection with Hitler (BDC, Parteikorrespondenz, Rudolf Häusler, geb. 5 December 1893, Personal-Fragebogen, 1 May 1938).
55. Heinz, 50.
56. Joachimsthaler, 84–9.
57. Report of a discussion at the midday meal on 12 March 1944 on the Obersalzberg, HA, Reel 2, File 3, printed in Schroeder, 134 (see ch.2, n.262).
58. JK, 54; Schroeder, 134 (from HA Reel 2, File 3).
59. Heinz, 51.
60. Heinz, 50–52 (account of Frau Popp).
61. MK, 139.
62. MK, 169–70.
63. Heinz, 51. See Franz Georg Kaltwasser, ‘Hitler als Benutzer der Königlichen Hofund Staatsbibliothek in München 1913/14’, Bibliotheksforum Bayern, 27 (1999), 46–9.
64. Heiden, Der Führer, 65, remarks – though without references – on Hitler haranguing people in beerhalls, including the Schwemme of the Hofbräuhaus.
65. MK, 171 (trans., MK Watt, 142).
66. MK, 139–42.
67. Jetzinger, 254–7; Joachimsthaler, 25–6.
68. Jetzinger, 259–62.
69. Jetzinger, 262–4 (and part-reproduction between 272–3); Maser, Hitlers Briefe, 40–42; JK, 53–5. Jetzinger’s criticism (265–72) of Hitler’s letter is excessively pedantic.
70. Jetzinger, 258–65.
71. Joachimsthaler, 27–31.
72. Jetzinger, 284–92.
73. MK, 173 (trans., MK Watt, 145).
74. MK, 173–4, 1 77 (trans., MK Watt, 145–6, 148).
75. David Lloyd George, War Memoirs, vol.i, London, 1933, 52.
76. J.P. Stern, Hitler: the Führer and the People, London, 1975, 12.
77. Fritz Wiedemann, Der Mann, der Feldherr werden wollte, Velbert/Kettwig, 1964, 29.
78. Joachimsthaler, 159–60.
79. MK, 179 (trans., MK Watt, 150).