The Holocaust: A New History

by Laurence Rees

  Mein Kampf was an immensely significant piece of work. It laid bare unequivocally the central pillars of Hitler’s thinking. Everything was here: the enormity of the threat posed by the Jews; the centrality of the issue of race; the importance of policing who was allowed to breed; the need for Germany to gain territory in the east. The content was so explicit that it was as if Hitler was hiding his radical ideas in plain sight. As his first biographer Konrad Heiden wrote, it did indeed turn out that ‘there was no more effective method of concealment than the broadest publicity.’25

  What Mein Kampf did not contain was any mention of the planning or implementation of the Beer-Hall Putsch. Yet this was the event that had spread Hitler’s name across Germany and was the one subject guaranteed to interest his readers. There was a simple reason, however, why Hitler would have wanted to avoid raking up once again the events of Munich in November 1923. As he sat in his well-appointed cell in Landsberg in 1924, he could not be sure when he would be granted release on probation; and once he was released, he needed the cooperation of the Bavarian authorities in order to re-form the Nazi party and practise politics once again. Why risk antagonizing powerful figures in Munich by naming – and potentially shaming – those figures in the administration who had been involved in the initial stages of the Putsch? Far better to let it all lie quiet. It thus followed that Hitler must have calculated that the views he expressed in Mein Kampf would not upset the Bavarian authorities and so stand in the way of re-establishing his political career.

  By the autumn of 1924 Hitler hoped that he would soon be permitted to leave prison. But officials working for the Bavarian state prosecutor were against the idea. They reminded the court that Hitler had incited a revolution and had never expressed remorse for his actions. Furthermore, he had been sentenced to five years’ incarceration and had served less than a year.26 However, a number of influential figures supported his early release. The governor of Landsberg prison, Otto Leybold, for instance, wrote an effusive report in which he claimed that Hitler had ‘undoubtedly become more mature and calm’ during his imprisonment, and that he was ‘a man of many-sided intelligences, particularly political intelligence, and possesses extraordinary will power and directness in his thinking’. Leybold’s report also revealed that he was not only aware that Hitler had been writing Mein Kampf while behind bars, but knew of the contents: ‘He is entirely taken up with the writing of his book, which is due to appear in the next few weeks. It consists of his autobiography together with his thoughts about the bourgeoisie, Jewry and Marxism, the German revolution and Bolshevism, and the National Socialist movement with the events leading up to November 8th 1923.’27

  In a further report, written in December 1924, Leybold was even more emphatic, writing that Hitler was ‘especially deserving of parole’.28 The Bavarian Minister of Justice, Franz Gürtner, agreed with this judgement and Hitler was released on 21 December 1924. Hitler did not forget Gürtner’s generosity. After the Nazis came to power, Gürtner served Hitler as Reich Minister of Justice.

  Hitler emerged from Landsberg having made two crucial decisions. One was about the future tactics he would employ to overthrow the Weimar state. He resolved now to seek power through democratic means, remarking, ‘If outvoting them takes longer than outshooting them, at least the results will be guaranteed by their own constitution.’29 The second was about the Jews. In the summer of 1924, while working on Mein Kampf, he said this to a comrade: ‘It is quite true that I have changed my view on the way of fighting the Jews. I have realized that I have been far too mild up to now. While working on my book, I have come to the realization that in the future, the harshest means of struggle need to be adopted in order to win through. I am convinced that this is a vital issue not only for our people, but for all peoples. For the Jews are the pestilence of the world.’30

  Hitler found on his emergence from prison that the political climate in Germany had changed, and not to his advantage. The Allies had agreed via the Dawes Plan to restructure the debts the Germans owed and to end the occupation of the Rhineland. The Americans had arranged to loan the Germans money, which then helped them to pay the reparations owed to the Allies. As a consequence, the United States became a more prominent player in the European economy than before, and any subsequent financial problems that the Americans faced would impact strongly on Europe – as would be discovered five years later at the time of the Wall Street Crash. But at the end of 1924 it appeared that the worst might be behind Germany. The currency was stabilized and Gustav Stresemann as Foreign Minister was negotiating with the Western Allies to try and normalize relationships – a process that would result in the signing of the Locarno Treaties in 1925. At the Reichstag elections in December 1924 there was a massive fall in support for extremist parties. The Communists alone saw their share of the vote drop by 17 per cent.

  The two volumes of Mein Kampf were thus launched in the mid-1920s into an indifferent world. The book did not sell well. Only 15,000 copies of the second volume had been bought by 1929. In part that was because of the lack of quality in the writing – Mussolini famously remarked that the book was so boring he had been unable to finish it31 – but it was also because by the time of its publication interest in Hitler had cooled.

  However, the prejudice against the Jews that had been vociferously fostered in the immediate post-war years could not so easily be extinguished. Arnon Tamir, a Jewish German who went to school in Stuttgart during the 1920s, recalls that his teachers ‘never missed an opportunity to make disparaging remarks about the Weimar Republic. And the Republic was to a large extent identified with Jews.’ He remembers that, ‘even as a small boy, I had already experienced what anti-Semitism was. First of all I had it drummed into me, by my parents, how a Jewish child had to behave, in order not to be conspicuous.’ When he was a young boy, his Jewish origin was ‘betrayed’ to the rest of his playmates by a friend. ‘As a child I found it especially painful when my so-called best friend joined the others and then they roared out in chorus: “Jewish pig, cowardly Jewish pig!” or some other zoological expression. I learnt very quickly that I was different and seen differently, and then when I came home crying, my father said to me: “Don’t put up with it when they pester you, hit back!” The consequence was that I came home every couple of days bloody from fighting, with torn clothes, but I had begun to defend myself. Now I had the misfortune to be the only Jew in a rather reactionary grammar school. There were teachers who were perhaps not expressly anti-Semitic, and one, a former major general with scars on his face, said: “Yes, in my regiment there were decent and brave Jews.” But it sounded as if what he meant to say was that in other regiments, or among the Jews he didn’t know, there were actually cowardly and ignoble people. That seeped in so, in some subterranean way, it was fed to us, drop by drop. And such remarks, and other remarks, they made me seem, to my classmates, a person set apart.’32

  As Arnon Tamir struggled to reconcile his life as both a German and a Jew, around 320 miles to the north-east, in Berlin, Eugene Leviné wrestled with many of the same emotions. He shared a similar name to that of his father, and it was a name in Germany that was infamous – or famous – depending on your point of view. Eugen Leviné the elder had been one of the Jewish leaders of the Communist Revolution in Munich in 1919, and had been shot by a firing squad just after the Freikorps regained control of the city. For his son, this was a heavy history to carry: ‘I was made to understand that he had been very brave the way he met his death – in fact, he had called out “Long live the world revolution!” As a little boy I didn’t understand the whole thing, I just knew that this is what you have to say when they shoot you – and I used to practise saying, “Es lebe die Weltrevolution!” [Long live the world revolution]. And I also wondered, increasingly, would I be brave enough if they put me against the wall to be shot? When I was a little boy I used to practise going up to a wall, turning round and imagining I was going to be shot, because I realized it would be most important not to be
frightened and to die bravely. And, somehow, I came to the conclusion as a boy that it would be all right on the day, and that I would be able to make it. Right throughout my young years I believed that an honourable person would die sooner or later – either on the barricades or put up against the wall.’33

  Eugene’s mother told him stories of her own childhood in Russia. How her family had sat huddled in their house at night with the lights out, as gangs of anti-Semites marched by, looking for Jews to attack. ‘But Communism was to end all that,’ says Eugene; ‘under Communism the Jews were simply one national minority and officially there was no anti-Semitism.’

  During his own childhood in Germany in the 1920s, Eugene experienced some problems as a result of his Jewish background. On occasion bullies picked on him in school, but since he was keen on boxing he was able to fight back. Overall, he says, ‘I had a very happy boyhood in Germany. I like German. I like German art, I like German poetry, I like German songs. I liked many of my comrades … I mean anti-Semitism was there, but if you’d said to most Germans, “Look, you’re going to have a government that’s going to kill six million Jews,” they would have said, “No, no, no, no. This is a civilized country.” ’

  ‘I’m not suggesting’, he adds, ‘that all the Germans were rushing around to be kind to Jews, but there was a lot of individual sympathy.’ A number of the people he encountered made a distinction between their hatred of the supposed ‘Jewish international conspiracy’ and the individual Jews they met in everyday life: ‘To an extent, some people realized that when you hate “the Jews” it isn’t because you hate individual Jews, you just believe “the Jews” are bad – they’ve crucified Jesus Christ, they’ve lost the war, and they’ve done all sorts of things which are bad. But individual Jews can be OK. At one of the schools I was in, there was a Nazi and he said, “You really should be one of us,” and I said, “Look, I can’t, I’m a Jew.” He would [then] say – and many Jews had that said to them – “We don’t mean you. Decent chaps like you will be perfectly all right in the New Germany.” After all I’d proved that I must be a decent Jew because I’d joined the fencing club so I can’t be all that bad.’

  Eugene Leviné even recalls that some Nazi Stormtroopers had Jewish girlfriends – a claim that might seem outlandish were it not for the fact that in the 1920s Joseph Goebbels, who would later become close to Hitler and offer enthusiastic support for the Holocaust, also had a girlfriend with Jewish ancestry. Goebbels, active in the Nazi party from 1924, dated a schoolteacher called Else who had a Jewish mother. He claimed that he had loved Else, and said she was ‘good and beautiful’. But he was also anxious about her background, writing in his diary that the ‘Jewish spirit in part of Else’s nature has often tormented and depressed me’.34 The fundamental problem, as far as he was concerned, was that she was a ‘half-breed’.35

  What is extraordinary about Goebbels’ relationship with Else is that he was emotionally attached to her at precisely the moment that his own anti-Semitism was hardening. Shortly after the failure of the Beer-Hall Putsch, Goebbels wrote that ‘the Jews are the poison that is killing the body of Europe’ and that one wants to ‘punch’ the Jews ‘in the face’.36 In April 1924 he was one of the founder members of a group that supported the Nazis in his hometown in the Rhineland. Their first meeting was dominated by a discussion about the ‘anti-Semitic idea’. Afterwards, Goebbels wrote that ‘I am on the völkisch side: I hate the Jew with my instincts and my reason. I detest and dislike him from the depth of my soul.’37 Yet a few weeks later he wrote of Else that she was ‘a dear, good child. A bit boring. But a loyal, hard-working little servant. One can rely on her, and she’ll do you every possible favour.’38

  The fact that Goebbels could hold two contradictory ideas in his head – he hated ‘the Jews’ and yet he loved a woman of Jewish ancestry – is a powerful reminder of the reality that Eugene Leviné encountered: that it was possible for some Nazis to despise Jews in the abstract and yet care for an individual Jew in the flesh. As Bruno Hähnel, who was a Stormtrooper in the 1920s, says, ‘I had relatives who were Jews and we would meet at family gatherings. I had a very warm relationship with two cousins who were Jewish.’39 Yet none of that prevented Bruno Hähnel – or seemingly Joseph Goebbels – from becoming a committed Nazi.

  Goebbels’ journey to Nazism is also instructive because it demonstrates the key role the political and economic situation played in creating support for the far right. There is no evidence that Goebbels was a committed anti-Semite before the end of the First World War. He was twenty-one years old when the war ended and had been unable to serve in the army because of a disabled leg, an affliction which caused him to walk with a pronounced limp. Prevented from becoming a soldier, he had pursued an academic career. The supervisor of his thesis was a Jew – Professor Max von Waldberg. But this doesn’t appear to have bothered Goebbels. The turning point in his life came in 1923 when the French entered the Rhineland. He had been born in the small town of Rheydt in the west of the Rhineland, and in 1923 was living at home with his parents. He was out of work, suffering like millions of others through a time of hyperinflation and political chaos, and now a despised enemy had just occupied his homeland; like many others he sought someone to blame for what was happening, and found an easy target in the Jews.

  Once Goebbels started reading Hitler’s speeches, he concluded that the Nazi leader could be the saviour that Germany needed. In March 1924 he wrote that he found Hitler ‘liberating’ because of his ‘completely upright and honest personality. That’s rarely found in our world of party interests …’40 Three days later he added, ‘Hitler is an enthusiastic idealist. A man who brings new faith to the German people. I’m reading his speech, inspired and carried to the stars. The path runs from the brain to the heart … The Jewish question cannot be solved, unless one is hard and rigorous and relentless.’41

  Significantly, Goebbels was captivated by Hitler long before he met him face to face. The words of Hitler’s speeches on paper were enough to convince him of his worth, for though emotional feelings played a part in Goebbels’ journey to Nazism, so did rationality. He had looked around in order to find who was responsible for Germany’s problems, decided it was the Jews, and then discovered in Hitler someone who first reinforced and then extended his hatred.

  Goebbels also remained sane enough to recognize, when he attended a gathering in Weimar of the far right in August 1924, that some of his fellow Nazi supporters were – to put it mildly – rather odd. One encounter with Julius Streicher was enough for him to decide that he was a ‘fanatic with pinched lips’ and ‘a bit pathological’.42 But Goebbels remained true to the cause, and four months later when Hitler was released from Landsberg he wrote, ‘Adolf Hitler is free! Now we can break away from the backward-looking völkisch people and be true National Socialists again. Heil, Adolf Hitler! Now we have faith again in the victorious power of the idea.’43

  It was not until July 1925, when Goebbels attended another gathering in Weimar, that he finally encountered Adolf Hitler for the first time. The experience of seeing him in person was almost overwhelming. ‘Weimar was literally a resurrection,’ he wrote in his diary. ‘A day I will never forget. I am still in a dream … What a voice. What gestures, what passion. Just as I wanted him to be.’44 Goebbels, the man who would later write, ‘the world war is here, the destruction of the Jews must be the inevitable consequence,’45 was utterly entranced.

  Goebbels may have been immensely positive about Hitler, but as we have seen the vast majority of Germans were not. In the middle 1920s Germany appeared to grow more prosperous, and the Nazi party seemed an irrelevance, an eccentric group on the fringes of political life. But it would be a mistake to pass over this period of the Nazi party’s development. That’s because the way Hitler structured the decision-making process within the party elite during these years offers an insight into how his leadership would come to function during the years of extermination.

  Crucially, by t
he time Goebbels heard Hitler speak in the summer of 1925 the Nazis were not a normal political party, but a ‘movement’, led by a single individual who relied for his legitimacy primarily on the charismatic effect he had on his followers. ‘Now I know that the man who leads is a born leader,’ wrote Goebbels in his diary in July 1925. ‘I’m ready to sacrifice everything for this man. In times of greatest need, history gives the people the greatest men.’46 This notion that members of the Nazi party should subordinate themselves to their ‘Führer’ (leader) because he was somehow destined to lead them was thus central to the concept of the party long before the Nazis came to power.

  However, this was not an organization in which Hitler dictated all detailed policy. Indeed, as long as he was confident that his subordinates unquestioningly accepted the principle of his leadership, he could be remarkably non-dictatorial for long periods. Goebbels, for instance, held very different views in 1925 about the Soviet Union to those of Hitler. In an article in the Völkischer Beobachter in November 1925, Goebbels wrote that it would be wrong to see Bolshevism as essentially the work of Jews. Instead Bolshevism should be understood as a potential route to a better society in Russia. Such views were anathema to Hitler, but the Nazi leader was still friendly to Goebbels when they both subsequently attended a meeting.47

  By the start of 1926, Goebbels was part of a group within the party that was pressing for other changes. Led by Gregor Strasser, a leading Nazi from Bavaria now working in north Germany, this faction campaigned for the party to become more ‘socialist’. This crossed a line for Hitler – it appeared that Strasser and Goebbels were challenging his authority, which was something he would never permit. At a conference in Bamberg in February 1926 he dealt with the threat not by debating with the dissenters but by giving a two-hour speech in which he repudiated their ideas. He reiterated that ‘Bolshevism is a Jewish plot’ and that the ‘natural allies’ of Germany did not include Russia but were, instead, Italy and Britain.