Hitler
Page 116
8. Rauschning, Gespräche, p. 5; also his Revolution des Nihilismus, p. 53.
9. Trevor-Roper, “The Mind of Adolf Hitler.” Preface to Hitler’s Table Talk, p. xxxv. Heiden, Geschichte, p. 11, spoke of Hitler’s having a “distinct talent for combination.” Cf. also R. H. Phelps, “Hitlers grundlegende Rede über den Antisemitismus,” in: VJHfZ, 1968:4, pp. 395 ff.
10. Preiss, pp. 39 f. It may be pointed out here that this attempt to present Hitler’s Weltanschauung coherently cannot be based exclusively upon Mein Kampf; earlier and later utterances must be taken into account. There is all the more justification for this approach because Hitler’s ideology in essentials did not change after 1924.
11. Mein Kampf, p. 662.
12. Tischgespräche, p. 346; also p. 321 and Domarus, p. 647.
13. Mein Kampf, p. 296.
14. Ibid., pp. 383, 290.
15. Cf. Ernst Nolte, Eine frühe Quelle, p. 590. Nolte deserves much credit for having unearthed this half-forgotten and at any rate largely ignored publication, Der Bolschewismus von Moses bis Lenin. Zwiegespräche zwischen Adolf Hitler und mir, and subjecting it to analysis. Cf. also Nolte, Epoche, pp. 404 ff. The identity of Christianity and Bolshevism, he comments, was also “the central thesis of the table talk,” although Hitler even at the height of his power would never have dared to say so bluntly. On the 30 million victims, cf. Hitler’s speech of July 28, 1922, quoted in Boepple, p. 30.
16. Printed in: Der Nationalsozialist, 1:29 (August 17, 1924), quoted from Eberhard Jäckel, Hitlers Weltanschauung, p. 73.
17. Trevor-Roper, op. cit., p. xxv, n. 9.
18. Ibid.; for the preceding quotation cf. Libres propos, p. 321.
19. Mein Kampf, pp. 138 ff.
20. Our approach here owes a good deal to the summing-up presented by H. R. Trevor-Roper in his fundamental lecture on “Hitler’s War Aims,” given at the 1959 congress of historians in Munich; cf. VJHfZ 1960:2, pp. 121 ff.
21. Mein Kampf, p. 649, 652.
22. Ibid., p. 654.
23. Ibid., pp. 654 f.
24. Nolte, Faschismus, pp. 135 f.
25. Albert Speer, Inside the Third Reich, p. 440: Speer’s letter to Hitler of March 29, 1945. Also IMT XLI, pp. 425 ff. Hitler’s speech at Erlangen is printed in Preiss, p. 171.
26. VB of March 7, 1925; also Heiden, Geschichte, p. 190.
27. Luedecke, p. 234.
28. Otto Strasser, Hitler und Ich, p. 113. According to this account, Goebbels made the demand in a speech that he delivered standing on a chair. With good reason doubts have been expressed about this scene; all the same, Gregor Strasser, who is more credible than his brother, confirmed it. Helmut Heiber may therefore be right in his conjecture that Goebbels actually uttered the words in dispute, but not under the dramatic circumstances described by Otto Strasser; rather, that he spoke in these terms to a small group, in conversation. Cf. Goebbels-Tagebuch 1925–26, p. 56.
29. These drawings cannot be definitely dated. According to Albert Speer, who bases his opinion on remarks by Hitler, the sketches date from this period. On the other hand, Speer’s office manager, Apel, who drew up a list of the Hitler sketches in the architect’s possession, assigns the date “about 1924” to the drawing of the “Grand Triumphal Arch,” the “Great Hall,” the “Berlin South Station,” and the “Berlin State Library.” Some of the sketches are reproduced in Speer’s Inside the Third Reich.
30. Cf. Goebbels-Tagebuch 1925–26, p. 60; also Hinrich Lohse, Der Fall Strasser, p. 5.
31. Sir Nevile Henderson, The Failure of a Mission, Berlin 1937—1939, p. 282.
32. Goebbels-Tagebuch, pp. 92 ff.
33. The report also states: “Violently firing their revolvers and employing iron flagpoles like lances, the National Socialists penetrated the ranks of the Communists. Nine lightly injured and five gravely injured persons were removed from the scene of the battle.” A month before, a battle in the Pharus Halls in Berlin’s North End had ended with ninety-eight serious casualties. After it Goebbels wrote triumphantly: “Since this day they know us in Berlin. We are not so naive as to believe that now everything has been done. Pharus is only a beginning.” See GoebbelsTagebuch, p. 119n.
34. Quoted in Heiden, Hitler, I, p. 242; see also Goebbels, “Der Führer als Staatsmann,” p. 51.
35. Sales began to rise significantly only after the NSDAP made its breakthrough and became a mass party. Wider distribution was helped by the issuance of a cheap edition costing eight marks for both volumes. In 1930, 54,086 copies were sold, in 1931, 50,808, and in 1932, 90,351; the following year the annual sale passed the 200,000 mark, and thereafter repeatedly exceeded it. In 1943, total sales of the book were alleged to be 9,840,000; cf. Hermann Hammer, “Die deutschen Ausgaben von Hitlers ‘Mein Kampf,’ ” in: VJHfZ 1956:2, pp. 161 ff.
36. Shirer, Rise and Fall, p. 134; Shirer refers to a study by Professor Oron James Hale in The American Historical Review, July, 1955.
37. Geheimes Staatsarchiv, Munich, quoted in Tyreil, Führer befiehl…, pp. 269 ff. In this speech, also, Hitler referred, by way of comparison, to primitive Christianity.
38. Quoted in Tyrell, pp. 211 ff., also p. 196; see also Heinrich Hoffmann, Hitler Was My Friend, pp. 151 ff.
39. Preiss, p. 81.
BOOK IV
1. Bracher, Auflösung, p. 291.
2. Heiden, Hitler I, p. 268.
3. Quoted from Shirer, Rise and Fall, p. 136.
4. A study by S. M. Lipset defines the typical Nazi voter as follows: “An independent Protestant member of the middle class who lived either on a farm or in a very small town and who formerly had voted for a centrist party or a regional party that opposed the power and influence of big industry and the unions”; cf. Nolte, Theorien, p. 463.
5. Frank, p. 58.
6. Quoted in Heiden, Hitler I, p. 275, and in Kühnl, Die nationalsozialistische Linke, p. 374.
7. Cf. Albert Krebs, Tendenzen und Gestalten der NSDAP, pp. 138 f.
8. The Daily Mail of September 24, 1930, quoted according to the VB of September 25. Lord Rothermere’s article began significantly by calling on Englishmen to change their conception of Germany which, he said, they remembered chiefly as prisoners of war. He pointed out that Germany was not free as other nations were; that the Allies had made the regaining of her full national freedom dependent upon payments and conditions imposed upon her against her will. And he asked whether it was wise to insist upon the ultimate letter of the law. It would be best for the welfare of Western civilization, he concluded, if there came to the helm in Germany a government permeated by the same healthy principles with which Mussolini had renewed Italy in the last eight years.
9. Quoted from Bullock, p. 163, and Frankfurter Zeitung, September 26, 1930. Cf. also Mein Kampf, p. 345: “The movement is anti-parliamentarian, and even its participation in a parliamentary institution can only imply activity for its destruction, for eliminating an institution in which we must see one of the gravest symptoms of mankind’s decay.”
10. Hitler’s statement is not complete and not recorded in the transcript of the trial; the quotations given here sum up the substance of different texts. See the attempt to reconstruct the exact wording on the basis of press reports in Peter Bucher, Der Reichswehrprozess, pp. 237 ff.
11. Willi Veller’s letter of August 16, 1930, abridged, quoted from Tyrell, pp. 297 f.
12. A. Fran?ois-Poncet, The Fateful Years, pp. 5 ff.
13. J. Curtius, Sechs Jahre Minister der deutschen Republik, p. 217.
14. Report of the British ambassador for July 16, 1931, cited from Bullock, pp. 177 f.
15. The meeting was continued in Berlin shortly afterward. According to the testimony of Ernst Poensgen, Hitler pleaded with the captains of industry to withdraw their support for Brüning, but without success. See Poensgen’s Erinnerungen, p. 4; also Dietrich, Mit Hitler in die Macht, p. 45.
16. Ernst von Weizsäcker, Erinnerungen, p. 103, adds to the remark on the postmaster generalship the anecdo
tal phrase: “Then he can lick my ass on the stamps.” Hindenburg habitually called Hitler the “Bohemian corporal” because he mistakenly assumed that Hitler came from Braunau in Bohemia. But it is also possible that he intended simultaneously to stress a certain foreignness and un-Germanness in Hitler, who struck him as “bohemian” in both senses of the word.
17. Carl J. Burckhardt, Meine Danziger Mission, pp. 340, 346. Hitler made it clear that he could not be considered bourgeois in an interview with Hanns Johst published in Frankfurter Volksblatt, January 26, 1934. Cf. also Tischgespräche, p. 170.
18. Cf. G. W. F. Hallgarten, Hitler, Reichswehr und Industrie, p. 120. Hallgarten gives details on the expenses of the NSDAP and the amount of support contributed by industry. See also Heiden, Hitler, vol. I, pp. 313 f. Some emendations may be found in Henry A. Turner, “Fritz Thyssen und ‘I Paid Hitler’ ” in: Faschismus und Kapitalismus in Deutschland, pp. 87 ff. The magnitude of the sums and the difficulties involved are illuminated by Thyssen’s unsuccessful attempt to withdraw 100,000 marks for the benefit of the NSDAP from the strike fund of the Northwest Group of the Association of German Iron and Steel Industrialists. When Ludwig Grauert, then business manager of the association, undertook the transaction without obtaining Chairman Ernst Poensgen’s consent, Poensgen rebuked him sharply. Krupp actually demanded Grauert’s dismissal, and Grauert was saved only when Thyssen came forward asserting that the 100,000 marks had merely been a loan—which he promptly paid back out of his own pocket. Cf. Turner, “Thyssen,” pp. 101 ff.
According to partially supported testimony given in court by Friedrich Flick, the Nazis received only 2.8 per cent of the money he spent for political purposes; cf. ibid., p. 20. Partly because of the altogether inadequate source materials, the question of how much financial support Hitler received from industry has become a broad field for speculation colored by ideology. Franz Xaver Schwarz, treasurer of the NSDAP, by his own testimony burned in the spring of 1945 all the documents in the Brown House in order to save them from confiscation by the advancing American troops. In addition, the source most frequently cited—Fritz Thyssen’s I Paid Hitler—has proved to be highly unreliable. Thyssen himself has contested the book’s authenticity. In Monte Carlo, where he was living in exile, he had granted several interviews to the editor, Emery Reves, in the spring of 1940. These interviews were to provide material for a volume of memoirs. The rapid advance of the German armies in France put an abrupt end to the undertaking. Reves fled to England with the documents and later published the interviews, considerably expanded. Reves tells another story which, however, seems a good deal less credible since it was not even accepted by the denazification tribunal in Königstein/Taunus.
In the above-mentioned study H. A. Turner has demonstrated that the very passages historians have hitherto regarded as especially relevant are among those parts of the book that Fritz Thyssen, the putative author, never saw, a fact Reves himself has confirmed. It further reduces the book’s value as a source that, for example, the passage in which Thyssen speaks of the “deep impression” Hitler’s Düsseldorf speech made upon the industrialists present does not appear in the stenographic record of the interview; thus it is obviously a later addition; moreover, Thyssen explicitly objected to it after the war. The other so frequently cited passage, in which Thyssen gives a figure of 2 million marks as the size of the Nazi party’s annual subsidy, was likewise more or less pulled out of a hat, as Turner convincingly demonstrates. Concerning the size of the actual payments, cf. Turner’s conclusions: “After weighing all the facts we must recognize that the financial subsidies from industry were overwhelmingly directed against the Nazis” (p. 25). We are still justified in assuming that the greater part of the funds available to the NSDAP came from membership dues. According to a police report, these were so high that they kept a good many persons from joining the party; see F. J. Heyen, NationalSozialismus im Alltag, pp. 22 and 63.
19. Thus Eberhard Czichon, Wer verhalf Hitler zur Macht? as one example among many similar writers on the subject; see also the review by Eike Henning, “Industrie und Faschismus,” in: Neue politische Literatur, 1970:4, pp. 432 ff., with many other citations and references. Czichon tends to prefer general references and unpublished documents, so that his sources in many cases can scarcely be checked. Frequently, too, he indulges in apparently deliberate deceptions, inaccuracies, and faulty references. Ernst Nolte has shown that Czichon reports a payment from IG Farben to the NSDAP in such a way that the reader would think the payment had been made before the seizure of power, whereas the document itself shows that the money was paid in 1944 (Ernst Nolte, Der Nationalsozialismus, p. 190). Czichon also asserts, referring to Bracher, Auflösung, p. 695, that after talking with Papen in Cologne on January 4, 1933, Hitler met with Kirdorf and Thyssen; but this passage is not to be found in Bracher. There is a similar misleading reference on Czichon’s part to Die Machtergreifung by H. O. Meissner and H. Wilde. More examples are given by Eike Henning, op. cit., p. 439.
20. The speech was given on January 26, not, as is usually stated, on January 27. Cf. Otto Dietrich, Mit Hitler in die Macht, pp. 44, 46. G. W. F. Hallgarten also stresses the differing attitudes among various branches of industry; see his Hitler; also his Dämonen oder Retter, pp. 215 f.; also Fetcher, “Faschismus und Nationalsozialismus: Zur Kritik des sowjet-marxistischen Faschismusbegriffs,” Politische Vierteljahresschrift, 1962:1, p. 55.
21. R. Dahrendorf, Gesellschaft und Demokratie in Deutschland, p. 424. Dahrendorf argues—and he is surely right about the motives—that the big businessmen supported Hitler in the same way that they granted financial aid to every right-wing party that had prospects of coming to power, not at all as part of a plot. Their attitude, that is, was largely defensive; they were thinking only of reinsurance or, to quote a famous remark by Hugo Stinnes in 1919, they were paying “a social-insurance premium against uprisings.” Hallgarten, too, concludes that although Hitler was vigorously supported by industry’s funds, this by no means signified that he was “made” by industry; Hallgarten, cf. Dämonen, p. 113. We might say, then, that although “industry” did not put Hitler in power, he would scarcely have attained power against its declared will.
22. The full text of the speech is given in Domarus, pp. 68 If.
23. Speech to the Hamburg Nationalist Club in the ballroom of the Hotel Atlantic, February 28, 1926. The transcript notes at this point “tempestuous applause”; cf. Werner Jochmann, Im Kampf um die Macht, pp. 103, 114.
24. Documents on British Foreign Policy 1919–1939, 2nd series, vol. I, p. 512, n. 2.
25. Arnold Brecht, Vorspiel zum Schweigen, p. 180, points out that the authors of the Constitution deliberately renounced taking over the provision in the American Constitution that only native-born citizens can become candidates for the highest office in the land. Ironically, they did so in order not to exclude their Austrian brothers. Incidentally, the efforts to obtain citizenship for Hitler began as early as the autumn of 1929. At that time Frick unsuccessfully attempted to have him naturalized in Munich. Six months later, by which time Frick had advanced to the position of a Minister in Thuringia, Frick tried to obtain German citizenship for Hitler by appointing him to a civil-service post. The post Frick had in mind was that of a police inspector in Hildburghausen, which happened to be vacant. But the situation seemed a bit ludicrous, and Hitler called off the effort. Next Klagges tried to have Hitler appointed to a teaching post at the technical college in Brunswick, but this too failed. A solution was finally found: Hitler was appointed Regierungsrat with the Berlin delegation from Brunswick.
26. Goebbels, Kaiserhof, pp. 22 ff.
27. Ibid., pp. 120 f.
28. On this whole subject cf. Frank, pp. 90 f.; Hanfstaengl, pp. 231 ff. The reference to the unwritten law that no one must mention his niece’s name in Hitler’s presence is based on information from Albert Speer.
29. For the different versions cf. Hansfstaengl, pp. 231 ff.; Heiden, Hitler I, p. 371; Görlitz and Qui
nt, pp. 32211: Frank, p. 90. The complaints by Gauleiter Munder of Württemberg that Hitler was being excessively diverted by the company of his niece from his political duties were certainly a significant factor in Munder’s removal.
30. Cf. on this and what followed: Frank, p. 90. Ernst Hanfstaengl (p. 242) relates a story that he alleges was bandied about in the Hitler family, to the effect that Geli had been made pregnant by a Jewish drawing master from Linz. Hanfstaengl also reports that Geli’s body was found with a broken nose, but he gives no supporting evidence. In response to an inquiry Hanfstaengl informed the author that this had been generally known at the time, but so far as I know the fact appears nowhere in the scholarly literature.
31. The Dual State is the title of a study by Ernst Fraenkel (London and New York, 1941).
32. Mein Kampf, pp. 474 ff.
33. Ibid., pp. 478 f.
34. Krebs, Tendenzen, p. 154; also Preiss, pp. 45 f.
35. Mein Kampf, p. 473.
36. H. R. Knickerbocker, The German Crisis, p. 227.
37. Heinrich Brüning, Memoiren 1918–1934, p. 195.
38. Harry Graf Kessler, In the Twenties, p. 426; also Werner Jochmann, Nationalsozialismus und Revolution, p. 405; and Helmut Heiber, Joseph Goebbels, p. 65.
39. Preiss, p. 179 (speech of March 7, 1932).
40. Harold Nicolson, Diaries and Letters 1930–1939, English ed., entry for January 24, 1932.
41. Goebbels, Kaiserhof, p. 87. The make-up of the Nazi Reichstag faction after the July elections is quite interesting. There were 230 Nazi deputies altogether. Of these, fifty-five were blue-collar and white-collar workers, fifty peasants, forty-three independent representatives of commerce, the crafts and industry, twenty-nine functionaries, twenty civil servants, twelve teachers, and nine former army officers. Cf. Reichstags-Handbuch, 6. Wahlperiode, Berlin 1932, p. 270.
42. For details cf. Bracher, Auflösung, pp. 522 ff.; also W. Conze, “Zum Sturz Brünings,” in VJHfZ 1952:3, pp. 261 ff.; also H. Brüning, Memoiren, pp. 273 and 597 ff. The importance of the information on the favorable turn in the disarmament negotiations has been challenged by historians; there are indications that Brüning overestimated it. For a characterization of the pressures on Hindenburg at Gut Neudeck cf. Theodor Eschenburg, “The Role of the Personality in the Crisis of the German Republic” in Holborn, ed., Republic to Reich, pp. 43 f.