Then they came to Rosenberg, and Hitler revived the argument he had used on Schulte: the Church was to blame for the Rosenberg success. “It wasn’t until the bishops’ conference in Freising issued a warning about the book, and then the Church placed the book on the Index, that the sales of the book begin to climb, and that it began selling in the hundreds of thousands,” Hitler said. Faulhaber said that before the Rosenberg indexing, Myth was being promoted across Germany. Equally matched in force of will and conviction, neither man would stand down, with Hitler raising both voice and hand and Faulhaber punctuating his objections with a thunderous “Herr Reichskanzler!”
After three hours, Hitler seized the final word. “Herr Cardinal, you should speak to the other leaders of the Church and consider in which way you will support the great task of nationalism not to allow Bolshevism to reign, and how you will come to a peaceful relationship with the state,” he threatened. “Either National Socialism and the Church will be victorious, or they will both be destroyed. I am telling you: I will remove all the small things that intervene in peaceful cooperation, like the trials against priests and the German religious movement. I don’t want to engage in horse-trading. You know that I am an enemy of compromise, but it should be a last attempt.” Then, Hitler’s tone softened. He grew reflective.
Anyone, he told Faulhaber, who looked at his own life had to know that at one point each and every person had to face his own mortality: Michael Faulhaber the cardinal, Alfred Rosenberg the best-selling author, and yes, even Adolf Hitler the Führer. “Every individual is nothing,” Hitler said. “Everyone will die. Cardinal Faulhaber will die, Alfred Rosenberg will die, Adolf Hitler will die. This makes one introspective and humble before God.”
The men rose from the sofa and went downstairs into the dining room, where they sat in a niche overlooking the Untersberg and had a small lunch. They chatted about economic affairs. Faulhaber was impressed by Hitler’s capacity to remember facts and details. At two o’clock that afternoon Faulhaber prepared to leave. The rain and fog had dissipated and the sun appeared through the clouds. Faulhaber was reminded of Psalm 29: First there is a storm over Lebanon, but in the end, Dominus benedicet populo suo in pace—the Lord will bless his people with peace. Back in Munich, Faulhaber reflected on the day. In a confidential memorandum of the meeting, he wrote that he was convinced Hitler was a man of serious spiritual conviction.
A few days later, Hitler reported to Goebbels on the meeting. He told him that he “had really let him have it.” Either they would fight together against Bolshevism or it would be war against the Church.
That same week in October, the first copies of Hudal’s book came off the press. Sitting at his desk on November 3, 1936, Hudal, with a series of elegant flourishes, inscribed the first copy to “the Führer of the German resurrection” and “the Siegfried of German hope and greatness,” then forwarded it to Papen for presentation to Hitler. On Saturday, November 14, Papen met with Hitler, along with Goebbels and Martin Bormann, in the Reich Chancellery to press for a final decision on the Hudal book. Papen handed Hitler the handsome brown volume with its gold embossing and personal dedication. Hitler took the book and told Papen he would be certain to read it.
Hudal’s Foundations, Papen said, had arrived at a time when both the Church and the government were ready for peace between them. He urged Hitler to allow the widest possible distribution of the book in Germany. It offered a chance to bridge the divide that had opened between Germany’s National Socialists and Roman Catholics, to heal the public wounds caused by the trials against priests and the debates over Myth. Hudal’s book embraced the common values of Nazis and German Catholics alike—it recognized the preeminent role of Germany on the Continent, the inherent dangers of Bolshevism, and, though admittedly in moderated form, the centuries-old threat of the Jews. Coming from a senior prelate in the Vatican, Foundations also bore a credibility that few other ideological treatises could have. The Hudal book represented a singular opportunity to forge a lasting and meaningful bond between Nazis and Catholics.
Goebbels and Bormann both disagreed with this vehemently. By injecting Roman Catholicism into National Socialist ideology, they argued, Hudal diluted the essence of National Socialism, its grounding in scientific racism. Papen argued that at the very least, a public debate about the book would provide an opportunity to explore the potential for common ground. Goebbels and Bormann said that Hudal’s book would be divisive, dangerous, subversive. The debate went on for several tense hours. Each time Papen seemed to have Hitler convinced, Bormann would intervene and pull him back. Ultimately, the party “radicals” prevailed. “In the end, I succeeded in securing the import for two thousand copies with the understanding that these would be distributed to leading circles in the party,” Papen later recalled. “The attempt for a serious discussion was ultimately sabotaged.” “Hudal’s book shot down again,” Goebbels wrote in his diary.
When Hudal learned of the result, he was devastated. For all the ambition he had for his book, it had been relegated to a circle of individuals who were unlikely to read, let alone understand, it. Foundations had become a footnote.
At roughly the same time, the Vatican distanced itself from Hudal’s book in an official statement: “As the author himself has said to an Austrian agency, and based on various solicited remarks, it is declared: namely that in writing his book, he was inspired by no one else and received no official assignment to do so.” As the rector of the seminary of Santa Maria dell’Anima, as a prominent bishop with twenty years of service in the Vatican, Hudal was as insulted as he was hurt by this snub. When he complained to a cardinal about this public reprimand, he was told he had gotten off lightly. According to the cardinal, Pius XI had been furious with Foundations, and had argued for placing it on the Index. Had it not been deemed “inopportune” to do so, Hudal would have been the first bishop ever to be “indexed.” When Hudal attempted to address the matter with the pope himself, he was refused an audience. The Catholic bishops in Germany were equally harsh. They called him a “Nazi bishop.” Faulhaber dubbed him Hitler’s “court theologian.”
Hudal never recovered from the debacle. After the war, he was forced to leave his post in the Vatican, and was relocated to an isolated monastery. The embattled bishop may have taken solace in the Latin verity habent sua fata libelli—books have their own fate.
Hudal was spared one final disappointment. When I spread the copy of Foundations that Hudal had inscribed to Hitler, I was struck by two quotations on the second flyleaf, clearly intended to bolster Hudal’s argument for a “baptized” Nazi movement. One was the quote by Molotov, dating from 1934, claiming that the greatest threat to Bolshevik expansion would be an alliance between the “Catholic and fascist internationals.” The second is an extended passage from pages 124 and 125 of Mein Kampf: “He who believes that he can move from a political organization to a religious reformation only shows that he has absolutely no idea about the origins of religious faith let alone religious teachings and their theological impact.”
This particular volume contains no marginalia, though the first sixteen pages fall open easily as if having been exercised limber by a careful reading. The remainder of the book is held taut by the binding, clutching a message that never made it beyond these tightly bound pages.
* * *
1 Hitler’s library contains two copies of Rosenberg’s Myth, both relatively late editions, published in 1940 and 1942, and most likely perfunctory acquisitions for his Berlin library. As a registered Roman Catholic, Hitler himself would also have been subject to paragraph 47.
BOOK SEVEN
Divine Inspiration
The human intellect is thus never a prime mover, but rather a result of the interaction between body and soul.
MAXIMILIAN RIEDEL, “Law of the World”
IN THE EARLY 1930s, when the journalist Edward Deuss asked Hitler about the single most revealing sentence in Mein Kampf, Hitler answered that it was a short passage on
page 11 in which he talks about his interest in history. He then went on to say that an equally consequential influence was his religious upbringing. If Hitler said anything more about the matter, Deuss did not record it. In chapter one of Mein Kampf, Hitler speaks only in passing about the “intoxicating” influence of Roman Catholic ritual.
However, Hitler’s uncorrected manuscript of Mein Kampf suggests a more intense and sustained interest in religious ambition. In the surviving draft pages, Hitler describes his wish to become an abbot as his “highest and most desirable ideal,” without the qualifier “for a time, at least, this was the case” that appeared in the published version. Similarly, in these draft pages Hitler’s “aspirations” to a high religious station are untempered by the qualifying adjective “temporary.” Friends and family also provide witness to Hitler’s early obsession with Roman Catholicism. Helene Hanfstaengl recalled that Hitler spoke extensively of his early devotion to Roman Catholicism, how he used to drape a tablecloth over his shoulders, stand on a kitchen stool, and deliver extended sermons to his assembled siblings. Paula recalled her brother once telling her, “I believe the good Lord holds a protective hand over me.”
In his after-dinner monologues delivered to his close circle of associates during the Second World War, Hitler returned repeatedly to issues of faith and the spirit, speaking of his attempts to square the rote catechisms of religious teaching with those of biology class—“I confronted the professor of the second hour with what I had learned in the first hour so that the teachers were driven to desperation”—and his gradual alienation from formal religious instruction. It appears to have been left to Dietrich Eckart to spike doubt with hatred, which was recorded in the “Conversation,” and which Hitler was echoing two decades later. “The worst blow ever suffered by mankind is Christianity,” Hitler observed in one of his evening rants. “Bolshevism is the illegitimate son of Christianity. Both are an outgrowth of the Jew. Through Christianity the world has been filled with the conscious lie in the questions of religion.”
The residual Roman Catholicism that Hudal and Papen detected in Hitler was little more than an empty shell, void of meaning. The Nazi rituals, with their twisted crosses and cathedrals of light, were a plagiarized sham, as were his speeches so resonant with biblical allusion; his invocation of the divine was little more than faux spiritual rhetoric full of sound and fury, to quote from volume six of Hitler’s collected works of Shakespeare, signifying nothing, rhetoric as empty of meaning as the reflexive or rehearsed—it doesn’t matter which—“amen” at the end of that one famously impassioned speech.
What remained of Hitler’s vacated spiritual life was the inner architecture that had emerged in his youth, once filled with the intoxicating impressions of the “solemn rituals,” and that Hitler spent a lifetime seeking to fill with meaning. It wasn’t belief itself he sought but that more fundamental human impulse, the need to believe, to understand, and to explain the deeper forces that move and shape our world.
“There exists in every human being the intuitive capacity to comprehend the forces that we call God,” Hitler once observed. “The church exploited this inner capacity by threatening to punish those who did not believe what was supposed to be believed.” According to Hitler, the Church had crippled this intuitive capacity and instrumentalized it for partisan purposes. How was it, he wondered, that there were two billion people on earth and 170major religions, each praying to a different deity? “A hundred and sixty-nine of them have to be wrong,” he declared, “because only one of them can be right.” It was a cynical observation to be sure, but one rooted in the sentiments of the searching agnostic rather than the confirmed atheist, and one to which Hitler returned repeatedly during his monologues.
Traudl Junge, one of Hitler’s longtime secretaries, was present for many of these extended musings on man, nature, religion, and God. When I visited her in her Munich apartment in the summer of 2002, she confirmed Hitler’s preoccupation with matters of the spirit, not only in his monologues but also in his nighttime readings. Though she refused to ascribe to Hitler a particular spiritual conviction—“How can we know what another person truly believes?”—she was certain he believed in the existence of a deeper force that moved the world as evidenced in the laws of nature, of the presence of a deeper intelligence, or, as he himself said, of a “creative force” that gave shape and meaning to the world.
The surviving books in Hitler’s library on spiritual and occult matters, of which there are scores, are perhaps the most articulate witnesses to Hitler’s lifelong preoccupation. Many of the books were acquired in the early 1920s, and others are from the final years of his life. Among them are Peter Maag’s Realm of God and the Contemporary World, published in 1915, with “A. Hitler” scrawled on the inside cover, but without date or place-name; an undated reprint of Annulus Platonis, an eighteenth-century mystical classic on occult sciences, inscribed to “Adolf,” with two pages of handwritten alchemical symbols; more tendentious books, such as a 1922 account of paranormal phenomena, The Dead Are Alive!, which features examples of “occultism, somnambulism and spiritualism” in various European countries, and provides sixteen photographs as “incontrovertible proof” of supernatural moments. One grainy black-and-white image shows four people at a 1909 séance in Genoa levitating a table. Another reveals “the ghost” of a fifteen-year-old Polish girl, Stasia, being consumed by a “luminous, misty substance.” A picture of a stately looking Englishman is captioned “The Phantom of the English writer Charles Dickens who died in 1871 and is buried in Westminster Abbey. He appeared in 1873 and was photographed.” The earliest such book is a 165-page treatise called The Essence of Creation: Research About This World and the Afterlife, About the Essential Truths of Nature, About the Substance of the Soul and the Resulting Conclusions, published in 1914, with an undated handwritten inscription to “Mr. Adolf Hitler” by the author.
This reprint of an eighteenth-century alchemical treatise, Secret Sciences, belongs to a cache of occult books acquired by Hitler in the 1920s and 1930s.
Several of these early books found their way to Berlin and ultimately into the Führerbunker, where they were discovered after Hitler’s suicide, and today are in the rare book collection at Brown University. Others were taken from his Berghof library, including a 1934 German translation of Body, Spirit and Living Reason, by Dicaiarchos Carneades, a handsome, leather-bound tome that explores the complex of interactions—“philosophy, history, religion, monoism, dualism, pleiadism and myriadism”—underlying the human decision-making process. And still others were discovered among the crated volumes taken from the Berchtesgaden salt mine that are now at the Library of Congress.
A number of these books contain marginalia that correspond to similar marked passages in Hitler’s books at Brown University, suggesting a common authorship. Despite the absence of handwritten comments that would permit definitive attribution, there is a notable alignment between these marginalia and ideas expressed in Hitler’s monologues and other recorded comments. Like footprints in the sand, they do not necessarily reveal the purpose of the journey, but they do allow us to see where his attention caught and lingered, where it rushed ahead, where a question was raised or an impression formed. In these books one finds Hitler’s pencil repeatedly drawn to passages related to the connection between the scientific and the spiritual, between the material and immaterial worlds. In one book, on the “future state,” published in 1910 but with no indication when Hitler may have acquired it, he has written his last name on the inside cover in pencil, in carefully articulated script. On page 391, pencil markings indicate the passage “Whoever goes far enough in science, becomes accustomed to going from miracle to miracle, without ever coming to an end,” a sentiment echoed in Hitler’s monologues. “That which distinguishes the human being from the animal, possibly the most remarkable proof of the superiority of the human being is that he has comprehended the existence of a creative force,” Hitler observed. “You need only to look th
rough a telescope or a microscope: There you can understand that the human being has the capacity to comprehend these laws.”
In Hitler’s copy of the 1924 collection of essays by Carl Ludwig Schleich, I found a series of penciled markings in a chapter exploring the relationship between cellular biology, immortality, and human knowledge. “What I physically succeeded in creating in this life through struggle, exertion and suffering, I give back a billion-fold with my immortal cells, just like this small spark of life I call myself returns to the organic property of the earth, my spiritual self belongs to the universe,” Schleich observes, with the pencil following in the margin. “There it will find new forms as it slowly rises until it achieves equality with the collective soul of the world, and will rejoice at the opportunity to nourish a star with a being that is based upon my purified effigy.”
We find near identical passages marked in a 1923 handbook on the “history, theory and practice” of the occult by Ernst Schertel. In this handsome, red-linen volume bearing the Hitler bookplate and Schertel’s “respectful” dedication, Hitler has marked a passage in which Schertel cites Schleich, quoting almost verbatim from him: “Our body presents a collection of potential and kinetic world energies and extends beyond to other lineages through animals, plants and crystal down to the very beginning of things.” Hitler’s pencil traces the passage in the margin. “In our body rests the entire history of the world, beginning with the birth of the first star. Through our body flows the energies of the universe, from the eternal to the eternal. And these drive the mills of our existence.” Hitler recast this same pantheistic vision in his own words one evening in December 1941, while musing on suicide. “Even if you take your own life, you simply return to nature as much in substance as in spirit and soul,” he said, repeating the theme a few days later and arriving at the same conclusion drawn by Schleich and Schertel. “The notion of eternity is fundamental to our nature,” he said. “Spirit and soul definitely return to a collective reservoir—like the body. As the substance of life, we thereby fertilize the foundation from which new life emerges.”
Hitler's Private Library Page 17