The Holocaust: A New History

by Laurence Rees

  The whole episode was misconceived from the beginning. Despite promising to support the Putsch when Hitler threatened him at the Bürgerbräukeller, Kahr disavowed the Nazis as soon as he was out of their hands. Hitler had misread the potential willingness of the right-wing Bavarian authorities to support his revolution and had no contingency plan to put in place once the revolutionaries were on their own. But despite all this, he was able to transform this humiliating defeat into a propaganda triumph.

  He was arrested and put on trial in February 1924. Knowing, as a result of Kahr’s initial support at the Bürgerbräukeller, that the Bavarian authorities themselves were implicated in the Putsch, Hitler used the courtroom as a stage to shout his political beliefs to the world. He announced that he was the ‘destroyer of Marxism’ and that far from practising ‘high treason’ he had wanted only to create conditions in Germany that would ‘make it possible for the iron grip of our enemies to be removed from us’.52 Hitler did not regret his actions. Instead, he appeared proud of them.

  Hitler was found guilty of high treason – no other verdict was possible given the evidence against him. But the court was lenient. The judge, Georg Neithardt, was one of many leading figures in the Bavarian establishment who was sympathetic to the aims of the Nazis. As a result, Hitler received the lightest sentence possible – five years in prison – with the expectation that he would be out on probation long before that sentence had been served.

  What is significant about this episode in any attempt to understand the origins of the Nazi party as a revolutionary, anti-Semitic movement, is not so much the individual character of Hitler – though that is important – as the noxious mix of circumstances that made the situation in Bavaria possible. It is hard to see how the rise of such a motley group of violent people could have been tolerated in a civilized state without the turbulent conditions of the time.

  Germans wrestled in the years immediately following the First World War with a whole host of difficulties that made their lives potentially hazardous. Hyperinflation wrecked their savings, the Weimar administration appeared impotent in the face of foreign intervention – the arrival of French and Belgian troops on German soil in the Rhineland was a particular humiliation – and Communist revolutionaries still threatened. Democracy appeared to have brought little but chaos. But paradoxically, since the Nazis were a party of violence, they claimed to offer a path to stability. As a result, a small minority of Germans – and only a small minority at this stage – supported them.

  Finally, at a time of enormous suffering, Hitler offered reassurance. ‘Listen,’ the subtext of his speeches seemed to say, ‘none of these problems are your fault.’ Over the next months as he served his prison sentence, he would elaborate on just whose fault he believed all of Germany’s troubles were – and why.

  3. From Revolution to Ballot Box

  (1924–1933)

  Hitler served his sentence at Landsberg prison, just over 30 miles west of Munich. Landsberg was a Festungshaft or ‘fortress’ prison, which meant that the accommodation was comfortable and there were few restrictions on visitors. One Nazi supporter later remarked that he thought he had ‘walked into a delicatessen’ when he visited Hitler, since he found that admirers had provided the Nazi leader with an abundance of ‘ham, sausage, cake, boxes of chocolates and much more’.1

  In these convivial surroundings, among many of his comrades who had also taken part in the Putsch, Hitler composed a book – Mein Kampf (My Struggle). Though written in a crude and hyperbolic style, Mein Kampf nonetheless offers valuable insights into Hitler’s worldview. The book was not a blueprint for the Holocaust – Hitler did not outline a plan to exterminate the Jews – but he did lay bare the nature of his own anti-Semitism. He explained, in greater detail than in any of his previous utterances, just why he hated the Jews. It was a hatred that reads today as the product of a mind so deeply mired in prejudice as to be almost unhinged.

  The subject of the Jews dominated the book. Indeed, it is not going too far to say that ‘the Jew’ was the glue that held Hitler’s entire worldview together. ‘The Jew’ was, in this sense, helpful to Hitler in an almost calculated way. For he believed the ‘great leader’ should direct ‘the struggle’ against just ‘one enemy’.2 This was partly, he argued, because ‘the receptivity of the great masses is very limited, their intelligence is small, but their power of forgetting is enormous.’3 However, the tactical usefulness that Hitler found in linking the Jews to every problem Germany faced should not blind us to the reality that he genuinely believed in the threat the Jews posed. ‘Was there any form of filth or profligacy, particularly in cultural life, without at least one Jew involved in it?’ he wrote in Mein Kampf. ‘If you cut even cautiously into such an abscess, you found, like a maggot in a rotting body, often dazzled by the sudden light – a kike!’4

  Hitler attempted to outline in Mein Kampf not just a coherent vision of the way the world worked, but also the manner in which his own life had developed since his youth. We have already noted how doubts have been cast on the extent to which he held anti-Semitic views during his time in Vienna, but in Mein Kampf he asserted unequivocally that he had formed his destructive views about the Jews as a result of his time in the Austrian capital. In Vienna, he claimed, he had come to hate the Jews for a myriad of reasons. The Jews were dirty – ‘by their very exterior you could tell that these were no lovers of water’;5 they were cunning – ‘I didn’t know what to be more amazed at: the agility of their tongues or their virtuosity at lying’;6 they were involved in sexual slavery – ‘The relation of the Jews to prostitution and, even more, to the white slave traffic, could be studied in Vienna as perhaps in no other city of Western Europe, with the possible exception of the southern French ports’;7 and they were behind the political ideology he most despised – ‘The Jewish doctrine of Marxism rejects the aristocratic principle of Nature …’8

  Hitler wrote that he had vociferous arguments with Jews in an attempt to convince them of the dangers of their ‘Marxist doctrine’. But the trouble was that ‘Whenever you tried to attack one of these apostles, your hand closed on a jelly-like slime which divided up and poured through your fingers, but in the next moment collected again.’9 Hitler portrayed himself during his time in Vienna as a political agitator who ‘talked my tongue sore and my throat hoarse’ in argument with Jews. It was a claim that was scarcely believable, since no one ever came forward subsequently and said they were part of any such discussion. But it is not hard to understand why Hitler wanted to craft this image of his pre-war self. That is because what he created in Mein Kampf was a mythic fable – almost an ersatz religious tract. The stages of his awakening, as he described them, are clear and logical. In Vienna as a young man he became a fanatical Jew-hater because he saw the dangers inherent in their ‘race’. During the First World War he learnt of the way in which Jews, luxuriating back in Germany, were sabotaging the brave soldiers in the front line. As soon as the war ended, he was finally enlightened to his mission – ‘I, for my part, decided to go into politics.’10

  The reality was very different. During his time in Vienna and serving in the German Army he remained a solitary figure on the edge of the group. He never demonstrated any interest in a career in politics or in arguing for hours with Jews. After all, he already knew the career he wanted to pursue – he longed to be an artist. Even in the immediate aftermath of the war, and contrary to his assertion in Mein Kampf, he showed no desire to go into politics. He didn’t join a paramilitary Freikorps but remained in the army. Only in the summer of 1919 after he had been assigned to work for Captain Karl Mayr, head of the army’s Information Department in Munich, does he appear to have manifested any interest in becoming a politician.

  The trouble for Hitler was that his true autobiography did not make him look heroic. In reality he was just like most people, knocked about by events over which he had no control. If it had not been for the outbreak of the First World War he would most likely have remained
a struggling artist who was prepared to sell his pictures to Jewish dealers. If the war had not ended as it did, he would almost certainly have never entered politics. But Hitler was astute enough to realize that no potential follower of his would value his genuine personal history. He had to maintain that he was born to greatness. He had to claim that he was the master of events; they were not the master of him.

  This is significant in the context of the Holocaust, because it means that one cannot explain the crime by arguing that Hitler was somehow destined to commit it. While it is true that by the time he wrote Mein Kampf he had developed an immense hatred of Jews, the real trigger for that emotion seems to have been the manner of the German defeat in November 1918 combined with the political and economic situation in Bavaria in the immediate post-war years. These circumstances also explain why many people were suddenly entranced by his speeches. Before the war, when Hitler had ranted on to his acquaintances about his views on art, no one wanted to listen. Now, talking about politics, he connected with his followers because they shared the same essential emotions and prejudices.

  However, Hitler did more than merely parrot back to his followers the views they already held. His anti-Semitism and racism were so extreme that they legitimized his supporters as they extended and hardened their own hatred. When he wrote a hyperbolic sentence in Mein Kampf like the Jew ‘is and remains the typical parasite, a sponger who like a noxious bacillus keeps spreading as soon as a favourable medium invites him’,11 he acted to push the boundaries of his supporters’ existing anti-Semitic views and radicalize the latent or ‘moderate’ anti-Semite. It would have been much harder to infect with anti-Semitism an adult who was not already contaminated by such prejudice. As Aldous Huxley wrote: ‘The propagandist is a man who canalizes an already existing stream. In a land where there is no water, he digs in vain.’12

  Hitler’s most radical statement about the Jews in Mein Kampf is notorious. ‘If at the beginning of the War and during the War,’ he wrote, ‘twelve or fifteen thousand of these Hebrew corrupters of the people had been held under poison gas, as happened to hundreds of thousands of our very best German workers in the field, the sacrifice of millions at the front would have not been in vain. On the contrary: twelve thousand scoundrels eliminated in time might have saved the lives of a million real Germans, valuable for the future.’13

  It seems unequivocal. Hitler was arguing that Jews should have been gassed during the First World War. But it would be a mistake to conclude from this that he necessarily had a similar fate in mind for all Jews at some point in the future. While we cannot look into Hitler’s mind and know his unspoken intentions, we can say with some certainty that he did not argue publicly for the extermination of the Jews at this time. In his statement about ‘poison gas’ he was speaking about a specific number of Jews whom he considered had sabotaged the war effort. There was no suggestion that he wanted to extend this fate to entire Jewish families and murder Jews en masse. The policy of the Nazi party remained one of persecuting the Jews and removing their German citizenship – and that was the assumption about their future on which the rest of Hitler’s comments in Mein Kampf were based.

  However, there was one direct causal link between the views he expressed about the Jews in Mein Kampf and what was to come. That’s because, believing as he did that the Jews had sabotaged Germany’s chance of winning the First World War from behind the front line, he was determined that they would never get the chance to do the same thing again. ‘That race of criminals has on its conscience the two million dead of the [First] World War,’ he said in private on 25 October 1941, two years into the Second World War, ‘and now already hundreds of thousands more …’14 The idea that there was a straightforward ‘lesson’ to be taken from the First World War and that this legitimized the Holocaust is something that we will encounter later.

  Equally, even though it is hard to sustain the argument that Hitler at the time he wrote Mein Kampf intended to institute a policy to kill all the Jews if he ever came to power, that is not to say that somewhere in his mind, even at this stage, he would not have liked them just to disappear. If, as he wrote Mein Kampf, he had been able to push a button that made all the Jews of the world vanish – without any repercussions to him or the Nazi party – then surely he would have pressed it. That doesn’t mean he already had a plan to kill the Jews, merely that his hatred of Jews was so intense as to be almost overwhelming.

  When it came to the underlying justification for anti-Semitism, Hitler was careful to make a reference in Mein Kampf to the traditional Christian-based prejudice against the Jews. He said that he believed he was ‘acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator: by defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord.’15 Two years before, in a speech he gave in Munich, he had been even more explicit in his reference to Christianity. ‘My feeling as a Christian points me to my Lord and Saviour as a fighter,’ he said in April 1922. ‘It points me to the man who, once in loneliness, surrounded by a few followers, recognized these Jews for what they were and who – God’s truth! – was greatest not as a sufferer but as a fighter.’16

  The fact that Jesus was born Jewish was obviously awkward for the Nazis, but the widespread adoption of Houston Chamberlain’s argument that Jesus might have been not of Jewish but of Aryan descent overcame this difficulty. In his Myth of the Twentieth Century the Nazi theorist Alfred Rosenberg developed Chamberlain’s idea and proposed ‘Positive Christianity’ – the establishment of a Christian church free of ‘Jewish’ influence, with Jesus descended from a Nordic ancestor.

  However, Hitler’s own position on Christianity was more complex than it first appeared. While in 1922 he explicitly said that he was a ‘Christian’, the motive behind this statement was almost certainly cynical, since he was well aware that he risked alienating many of his own followers if he said he was a non-believer. As he remarked: ‘I need Bavarian Catholics as well as Prussian Protestants to build up a great political movement. The rest comes later.’17

  Revealingly, two years later as he wrote Mein Kampf, Hitler did not say he was a Christian. Instead he made the ambiguous statement that he was acting in accordance with the ‘Almighty Creator’ and fighting for the ‘work of the Lord’. The Christians who read this would have assumed that ‘the Lord’ in question was Jesus, but Hitler’s words could also mean that he believed in a non-Christian creator God who left human beings to work out their own problems on earth, and that there was no afterlife except the life of the nation. His subsequent statements about Christianity make this interpretation persuasive. For instance, he later criticized the ‘meekness and flabbiness’ of Christianity.18 In 1941 Goebbels wrote that Hitler ‘hates Christianity, because it has crippled all that is noble in humanity’.19 There is no evidence that Hitler genuinely believed in Jesus’ divinity or resurrection or any of the other key tenets of the Christian faith. Instead, he was careful to point out that ‘for the space of many millenniums, a uniform concept of God did not exist.’20

  The whole thrust of the argument in Mein Kampf, apart from this mention of the ‘Almighty Creator’, was anti-religious. For Hitler, the issue that determined the nature of the world was not religion but race. The reason the Jews were dangerous was because of who they were in themselves. In Mein Kampf he wrote that the ‘whole existence’ of the Jews ‘is based on one single great lie, to wit, that they are a religious community while actually they are a race – and what a race!’21

  The ‘sole’ reason that cultures decline, he argued, was the interbreeding of different races and the ‘resultant drop in the racial level’. Adopting Houston Chamberlain’s argument, Hitler maintained that because the Jews jealously guarded their own blood, since ‘The Jew almost never marries a Christian woman,’22 they were particularly dangerous. The central struggle of existence was therefore the fight between the two most racially pure peoples – the Aryans and the Jews. None of this, it is worth stating, was true. In fact the German Jews were
one of the most assimilated Jewish groups in Europe.

  Two further ideas that Hitler outlined in Mein Kampf were important for what was to come. The first was the attraction he felt towards the idea, developed by the ‘racial hygiene’ theorists, of preserving the quality of the ‘race’ through controlling who was allowed to produce children. ‘The demand’, he wrote, ‘that defective people be prevented from propagating equally defective offspring is a demand of the clearest reason and if systematically executed represents the most humane act of mankind.’23 The second was Hitler’s belief that more land must be obtained for the German people if the nation was to flourish. He explicitly said where this extra ‘living space’ (Lebensraum) was to be found. ‘If we speak of soil in Europe today,’ he wrote, ‘we can primarily have in mind only Russia and her vassal border states.’24 Moreover, the area of the Soviet Union coveted by Hitler – such as the fertile land of the Soviet republics of Belarus and Ukraine – also contained a large number of Jews. A confrontation with both the Soviet Union and the Jews was therefore inevitable if Hitler ever pursued his stated intention.