While recovering at Beelitz, Hitler had a chance to see Berlin, briefly visiting its museums and touring the city’s most prominent sites, including Unter den Linden, the elegant tree-lined boulevard anchored at one end by the Brandenburg Gate and, at the other, by an imposing monument to Frederick the Great. With this massive bronze equestrian of the Prussian king—in his cape and his signature headpiece—set atop a three-tiered stone pedestal carved with scenes of the warrior-king leading his troops, Osborn claims that the sculptor Christian Daniel Rauch struck the perfect balance between “classicism” and “Prussianism.” “Rauch understood how to suppress all his classical impulses,” Osborn rhapsodizes, “and to create in the Old Fritz with his three-cornered hat and wig and cane a masterwork of Berlin realism.”
Casualty report for Hitler dated October 15, 1916, from Hitler’s personal photostat copy of his military record
In December, Hitler was released from Beelitz and traveled to Munich, where he spent Christmas before rejoining the RIR 16 at the front. He returned to Berlin in October 1917, where he spent a ten-day furlough with the parents of an RIR 16 comrade, Richard Arendt. “The city is tremendous,” Hitler wrote Ernst Schmidt on October 6, 1917. “A real metropolis. The traffic is also overwhelming. Am under way almost the entire day. Have finally found time to study the museums better. In short: I have everything I need.” Including, we can assume, Osborn’s Berlin.
Hitler evidently relied on Osborn as a guide to Berlin’s museological holdings, which the author held in especially high regard and claimed “compensated” for the city’s architectural shortcomings. Osborn faults a museum for showcasing the works of the Bavarian painter Peter Cornelius at the expense of the Prussian artist Adolph Menzel and the Austrian Moritz von Schwind. “The entire floor plan of the National Gallery has suffered so much from the demand of having the two large Cornelius galleries,” Osborn says, “that the consequences of this step will never be completely remedied.” In his sketch for an imagined reordering of the collection, Hitler rectifies this curatorial shortcoming by relegating the works of Cornelius to a single modest room, accommodating the von Schwind collection in three successive galleries, and devoting an entire wing to the works of Menzel. Hitler made a second ten-day visit to Berlin in early autumn 1918 and passed his time again exploring the museums and architectural sites.
He returned to the front in the last days of September, just as the final British offensive of the war was under way. Here he was blinded in a gas attack. “On a hill south of Wervick, we came on the evening of October 13 into several hours of drumfire with gas shells which continued all night more or less violently,” Hitler remembered. “As early as midnight, a number of us passed out, a few of our comrades forever.” Hitler was taken from the front and transported to a lazarette near Pasewalk, in East Prussia, where he gradually regained his eyesight. That November, when he learned of the German capitulation, he was briefly stricken with a second attack of blindness.
A few years later, Hitler made much of his Pasewalk blindness, claiming that along with the combined trauma of the German capitulation, it precipitated his epiphany to enter politics, as he writes in Mein Kampf.
Although there is an approximate alignment between the end of Hitler’s frontline service and the beginning of his political activity, there is no indication that he returned from the war in December 1918 with any intent to act on his political views.
Hitler arrived in Munich with his eyesight and a slightly battered copy of Osborn’s guide to Berlin—as well as the companion volume to Brussels—that he was to keep with him for the rest of his life. In the early 1920s, Berlin joined a growing number of books in a wooden bookcase, first in his apartment at 41 Thiersch Street, and, after August 1929, accommodated in his more elegant third-floor residence on Munich’s Prince Regent’s Square. In the protective safety of Hitler’s collection, this volume survived the book burnings of May 1933—as a Jew, Osborn was on the list of banned authors and eventually immigrated to America—and the subsequent Allied bombings of the 1940s.
At some point in the spring of 1945, Berlin was packed into a crate with three thousand of Hitler’s other books and transferred to a salt mine near Berchtesgaden, where they were discovered by a unit of the American 101st Airborne Division, taken to a “collecting point” in Munich, and eventually shipped, via Frankfurt, to a warehouse in Alexandria, Virginia. After several years, the book became part of the rare book collection of the Library of Congress, where it was assigned the call number N6885.07.
In the spring of 2001, when I first opened Osborn’s Berlin in the subdued atmosphere of the Rare Book Reading Room, with the muffled sounds of midday traffic, I discovered, tucked in the crease between pages 160 and 161, a wiry inch-long black hair that appears to be from a moustache. An extension of the Benjaminian conceit—the collector preserved within his books, literally.
* * *
1 At Brown University, I found a cache of thirty-three etchings made between 1914 and 1916 by the artist Fritz Gärtner, depicting Bavarian frontline soldiers; the signed etchings were found among Hitler’s remnant papers in the Berlin bunker after his suicide.
BOOK TWO
The Mentor’s Trade
His idea of becoming the king of the world should not be taken literally as the “Will to Power.” Hidden behind this is a spiritual belief that he will be ultimately pardoned for all his sins.
FROM DIETRICH ECKART’s introduction to his stage adaptation of HENRIK IBSEN’s Peer Gynt
HITLER’S COPY OF Peer Gynt is a corpse of a book. It is a second edition, published by Hoheneichen Verlag in 1917. The cover boards are warped, bowed at the center, and turned inward. The cheap, wide-weft linen cover has faded unevenly. A patch of dirty green at the center drains into lifeless brown along the edges, like a scorched lawn in late summer. A tasteless strip of lime-green paper has been pasted along the spine, bearing traces of the original gold-stenciled title: the upper portions of a G and a T. The jagged letters of the Fraktur script jangle the eyes.
The volume flops open effortlessly, revealing a personal dedication from Dietrich Eckart to Adolf Hitler, scrawled in a bombastic cursive script that spirals across the page, to “his dear friend”—seinem lieben Freund—which is rendered in the shorthand initials: S. L. Freund.
Few people could consider Hitler a “friend,” let alone a “dear” one, and yet Eckart was more than that. He was patron, mentor, and father figure, the man who bought Hitler his first trench coat, and took him on his first airplane ride and to his first theater production in Berlin. Eckart taught Hitler how to write and he published his first essays. He circulated Hitler among his well-heeled friends with the icebreaker “This man is the future of Germany. One day the entire world will be talking about him.”
“Intended for his dear friend Adolf Hitler”
—Dietrich Eckart’s inscription in Peer Gynt
Most significant, Eckart shaped the soft clay of Hitler’s emotional and intellectual world. When they first met, Hitler was thirty-one and just finding his way onto the Munich political scene. Eckart was a generation older and a commanding figure in not only Munich but also much of Germany. His adaptation of Peer Gynt was one of the most successful theater productions of the age, allegedly with more than six hundred performances in Berlin alone.
He was a man of strong appetites—for women, alcohol, and morphine—and even stronger opinions, especially when it came to Jews. He published the hate-mongering weekly Auf gut deutsch (In Plain German) and cofinanced, also in Munich, Hoheneichen Verlag, a publishing house that specialized in anti-Semitic literature. One Munich newspaper claimed that Eckart’s hatred of the Jews was so fierce that he could “consume a half dozen Jews along with his sauerkraut for lunch.” Eckart gave focus, form, and fire to Hitler’s own anti-Semitism.
“Eckart was the man who, according to Hitler’s own repeated statements, had the greatest significance for his personal development,” a close Hitler associate observed. “H
e was Hitler’s best friend and one can also consider him his intellectual father. This is true especially of the beginning; his fanatic racial patriotism and his radical anti-Semitism made Eckart the greatest influence on his political development.” On his deathbed, Eckart is reported to have said, “Follow Hitler! He will dance, but it is I who called the tune!” Hitler hailed Eckart as the “polar star” of the Nazi movement.
In late 1918, Hitler returned from war to find Germany in chaos. In Berlin, the socialists had toppled the kaiser and proclaimed a socialist republic. In Munich, a socialist radical named Kurt Eisner declared Bavaria an independent country, only to be assassinated by a right-wing count. In the ensuing turmoil, the government was taken over by Bolsheviks—including an anarchist, a playwright, and a psychiatric patient who, in his brief stint as foreign minister, declared war on Switzerland—who established a shortlived Soviet state of Bavaria. Eventually, a force of nine thousand regular troops supported by a Freikorps of thirty thousand decommissioned soldiers toppled the Bolsheviks and, after executing their leaders, reestablished relative order.
Amid the turmoil Hitler found refuge in the Oberwiesenfeld barracks on the outskirts of Munich. For a few weeks, he stood guard at a prison in the nearby town of Traunstein, along with former fellow RIR 16 message runner Ernst Schmidt, then for a month or so with the watch detail at Munich’s main train station. At the barracks, he began circulating among military units agitating against Bolshevik insurgency, and was briefly assigned to a decommissioning interrogation panel that determined soldiers’ political loyalties before approving their release from the army.
In these weeks, Hitler came to the attention of Captain Karl Mayr, who was impressed by his strong anti-Bolshevik sentiments and compelling manner of speaking. That spring, Mayr suggested Hitler attend a one-week course in political ideology at the University of Munich, and in August, he sent him on a two-week training course in propaganda and public speaking at a military training facility near Augsburg. When Hitler returned, Mayr dispatched him on intelligence-gathering forays among the upstart extremist parties proliferating in the uncertain political atmosphere.
On Friday, September 19, 1919, Hitler attended a meeting of the Deutsche Arbeiterpartel (German Workers Party), a new movement founded that January by a sports journalist, Karl Harrer, and a local railroad mechanic, Anton Drexler, at which Dietrich Eckart was scheduled to speak. When Eckart fell ill, Gottfried Feder, whose book on “interest slavery” Hitler had read earlier that year, stood in. “My impression was neither good nor bad, a new organization like so many others,” Hitler later said of the meeting. “This was a time in which anyone who was not satisfied with developments and no longer had confidence in existing parties felt called upon to found a new party. Everywhere these organizations sprang out of the ground, only to vanish silently after a time.”
During the discussion that followed Feder’s lecture, an argument erupted over Austria—a professor called for the creation of an Austrian-Bavarian state—and Hitler launched into a tirade against the professor, who eventually fled the room hat in hand. Impressed by Hitler’s oratorical skills, Drexler handed him a political pamphlet he had written about his personal conversion to radical nationalism.
That same evening at the Oberwiesenfeld barracks, Hitler read the Drexler treatise, My Political Awakening: From the Diary of a German Socialist Worker. In this forty-page political coming-of-age story, Hitler read about Drexler’s transformation from an apathetic and near destitute teenage laborer in Berlin—“As a result of unemployment I survived by playing zither in a night club”—to a fervent German nationalist and equally virulent anti-Semite. “By anti-Semite one means all those who recognize the destructive Jewish influence on the life of our people, who fight against it and who protect themselves from the economic strangulation by the Jews!” Drexler traces his conversion to anti-Semitism to a night in November 1917 when he encountered a Jewish businessman in Antwerp and engaged in an argument on German nationalism that ended with Drexler unconscious in a local prison. “I cannot say whether this apostle of the Talmud poured something in the wine,” Drexler wrote, “but later the more I thought about it, it led me to a clue that I only now recognize.” Drexler’s epiphany, of course, was the alleged pervasiveness of Jewish influence and control.
Drexler claims to have traced Jewish influences into the press, including the Vossische Zeitung; into finance, where he asserts that 80 percent of Germany’s assets are “in Jewish hands”; into the trade unions; political parties; the Bolshevik movement; and ultimately into the collapse of the German war effort. Drexler speaks ominously of the “corrosive Jewish influence on the life of our people” and underscores the alleged economic threat, peppering his treatise with excerpts from the Talmud, his own speeches, a poem by Dietrich Eckart, and with eerily portentous concepts like “eradication” (Ausrottung) and “extermination” (Vernichtung). “From the moment that I recognized the true enemy of all workers, there was no stopping me,” Drexler wrote. “With the great love that I felt for my fatherland I set myself the task to use every means at my disposal to help to open the eyes of those poor misled souls to the true enemy.”
When Hitler read Anton Drexler’s My Political
Awakening, he saw “my own development
come to life before my eyes.”
As Hitler read Drexler’s treatise, he found familiar resonances with his own experiences. “Once I had begun, I read the little book through with interest; for it reflected a similar process to the one which I myself had gone through twelve years before,” Hitler remembered. “Involuntarily, I saw my own development come to life before my eyes.” A few days later Hitler received a postcard saying he had been “accepted” into the German Workers Party. He deliberated on membership and decided to join. “Now we have an Austrian. Man, he really knows how to talk,” Drexler later quipped. “We can certainly use him.”
When Hitler attended a second meeting in a back room at the Sternecker Beer Hall, he found himself with thirty or forty others listening to an extended and tedious speech by Karl Harrer. Harrer had gone on for some time when suddenly he was interrupted by the “rasping deep voice” of an elderly man: “Will you finally stop driveling. No one gives a damn about what you are saying!” Hitler turned and saw staring at him an imposing figure with a fiercely bald head, intense blue eyes, and a paintbrush moustache. “I could have thrown my arms around him,” Hitler later recalled.
Harrer sputtered to a conclusion, and as the meeting dispersed, Anton Drexler led Hitler to the older man and introduced him as Dietrich Eckart. Hitler sensed an instant affinity. Eckart asked Hitler if he had seen either Peer Gynt or Lorenzaccio, a play Eckart had written—Hitler had not—then invited him to his house. It was a landmark moment. The next week, Drexler accompanied Hitler to Eckart’s handsome villa, where they were escorted to Eckart’s upstairs library.
As the men entered, Eckart rose majestically from his desk, turned toward them, peered over the top of his reading glasses, raised his imperious head—Hitler vividly recalled every detail—and, removing his spectacles, stepped forward to welcome his guests with a handshake. “A powerful forehead, blue eyes, his entire visage like that of a bull, not to mention, a voice with a wonderfully forthright tone,” Hitler remembered.
Hitler had never met anyone quite like Eckart. His own father, Alois Hitler, had been a midlevel civil servant whose lack of formal education idled his career early on, despite his acknowledged intellectual capacities, leaving him to occupy a series of modest posts in customs offices along the Inn River, on the border between Austria and Germany. Late in life, he purchased a large country home that so taxed his resources and energies that he eventually abandoned it and moved to a more modest residence near Linz, where he was to spend the rest of his days. By the end, his only ambition in life was to see his two daughters married and his two sons gainfully employed. His obituary in the local paper noted his achievements in beekeeping, his irascible nature, and his res
onant voice.
As the son of a middling government official, Hitler was awed by Eckart’s stature, both physical and material, and flattered by his attentions. Eckart appears to have been similarly impressed with Hitler. Unlike Karl Harrer, whom Eckart found tedious, or even Drexler, who had spent the war years engaged in home-front politics, Hitler possessed the passion and frontline credentials Eckart had long been seeking.
“We need someone to lead us who is used to the sound of a machine gun. Someone who can scare the shit out of people,” Eckart allegedly proclaimed three years earlier over drinks in Munich’s Café Nettle. “I don’t need an officer. The common people have lost all respect for them. The best would be a worker who knows how to talk. He doesn’t need to know much. Politics is the stupidest profession on earth.” Eckart claimed that “any farmer’s wife” in Munich knew as much as any political leader. “Give me a vain monkey who can give the Reds their due and won’t run away as soon as someone swings a chair leg at him,” he said. “I would take him any day over a dozen educated professors who wet their pants and sit there trembling with their facts. He has to be a bachelor, then we’ll get the women.”
Hitler's Private Library Page 4