The Third Reich

by Thomas Childers

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  CONTENTS

  Maps of Germany

  The German Party System

  Glossary of German Terms

  1. The Serpent’s Egg

  2. Hitler and the Chaos of Postwar Germany

  3. On the Fringe, 1925–28

  4. Into the Mainstream

  5. Making Germany Great Again

  6. The Nazis Hit a Wall

  7. The Impossible Happens

  8. Seizing Power

  9. Consolidation of Power

  10. The People’s Community

  11. A Racial Revolution

  12. Courting Disaster

  13. Early Success

  14. Hitler Turns West

  15. The Crusade Against Judeo-Bolshevism

  16. Holocaust and Total War

  17. Apocalypse

  Photographs

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Index

  For Kristen

  THE GERMAN PARTY SYSTEM

  GLOSSARY OF GERMAN TERMS

  Ahnenpass (“racial passport”)

  Bürgfrieden (political truce)

  Deutschlandflug (flight over Germany)

  Einzelaktionen (individual/independent actions)

  Gauleiter (district leader)

  Hofoper (Court Opera House–Vienna)

  Landespolizei (State Police)

  Lebensraum (living space)

  Mischling (mix/hybrid)

  Ortsgruppen (local party chapters)

  Realschule (technical school)

  Salonfähig (respectable)

  Schaffenden (productive)

  Stimmungsbericht (morale report)

  Völkisch (populist)

  Volksbewegung (people’s movement)

  Volksempfänger (people’s radio)

  Volksgemeinschaft (people’s community)

  Volksgenossen (people’s comrades)

  Volkskörper (body of the people)

  Wählerei (choice/vote)

  1

  * * *

  THE SERPENT’S EGG

  Adolf Hitler was born on April 20, 1889, in the Austrian town of Braunau am Inn on the German-Austrian border. His father, Alois Hitler, was a provincial customs official of liberal views who had risen from an unpromising background to the respectable status of middle-grade civil servant of the Habsburg Empire. Alois’s patrimony was a source of controversy and rumor. He was the illegitimate son of Maria Anna Schicklgruber and an unknown father. In 1842 Maria Anna married Johann Georg Hiedler, and in 1876 Alois adopted the name of his stepfather, later changing the spelling to Hitler. As the Nazis came to prominence and Adolf Hitler emerged a national political figure, there was some speculation that Adolf’s unknown grandfather was Jewish, but no credible evidence to support such rumors has ever surfaced.

  The family moved several times, from Braunau to Passau to Linz, where Adolf spent most of his unexceptional youth. There was nothing notable about him in his early life, nothing to suggest potential of any sort. He read, he daydreamed—he was a great artist, a great architect, the builder of monumental buildings and grand cities, a Wagnerian hero. None of these dreams translated into serious work or training. He loved music, especially the operas of Richard Wagner, but had only a rudimentary knowledge of music. He liked to sketch, to paint in watercolors, but he had neither the talent nor the work ethic to achieve the grandiose successes he envisioned.

  Hitler’s father provided a comfortable existence for the family. He hoped that young Adolf would follow him into government service, and he had little patience with his son’s dreaminess. He was a gruff, authoritarian paterfamilias, a strict disciplinarian who terrorized his indolent son. Beatings were not infrequent. Adolf took refuge with his mother, Klara, who doted on him. Alois had three children from an earlier marriage but three of his children with Klara died, two brothers and a sister, before Adolf was born, and Klara was determined to protect this son spared by providence. Sickly as a baby, he grew to be very much a mamma’s boy, lazy, self-indulgent, and coddled. His father died in 1903, when Adolf was fourteen, easing some of the tension in the Hitler household.

  Young Adolf was a loner, a perpetual outsider. He had few friends, in fact, only one to speak of. He showed little interest in girls, had no sweethearts or even friendly relationships with the opposite sex. He shied away from physical contact, only reluctantly shaking hands; he was “almost pathologically sensitive about anything concerning the body,” according to his one genuine friend, the son of an upholsterer in Linz, August Kubizek, who aspired to be a musician. Together the boys roamed the Danubian countryside, strolled the streets of Linz, and attended the opera, Adolf expounding all the while on his many enthusiasms. Kubizek’s essential qualification for Hitler’s friendship was that he was a good listener. Impressionable and unassertive, he hung on Adolf’s every word. In return he was granted visiting rights into Hitler’s intense fantasy world, a world of grand illusions in which Adolf Hitler would be recognized as an artistic giant, an architectural genius, a shaper of worlds.

  Hitler was, to put it generously, an indifferent student. His grades were so poor at the technical school (Realschule)—he failed math; he failed German!—that he was held back a year and forced to take qualifying exams to avoid being held back a second time. Misunderstood and unappreciated, by his lights, he had had enough, and at age sixteen he left school without a degree. He set his sights on a career in art and hoped to gain admission to the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. In July 1907 he convinced his mother that he should go to Vienna to prepare for the entrance exam, which was held every year in October. Initially he was captivated by the city, especially its magisterial buildings—the Opera, the Parliament, all the grand structures along the Ringstrasse. It was the great world, far from provincial Linz.

  Supremely confident in his own talents, he did little in the way of preparation for the exam. He submitted a portfolio of his drawings and sat for the exam, but to his utter astonishment he failed. “I was so convinced that I would be successful that when I received my rejection, it struck me as a bolt from the blue.” It is telling that while Hitler was a passable draftsman—he could draw buildings, street scenes, structures of all kinds—he was unable to render the human form. He was hopelessly unqualified for painting, one examiner told him. Perhaps he was better suited for architecture. Hitler liked the idea, but the academy’s School of Architecture required a high school degree or at least some previous technical training, which thanks to his own negligence he could not provide. There was, he realized, no chance that he could study painting or architecture. Hitler kept this humiliating rejection a secret, never telling his gravely ill mother and waiting months before confessing it to his loyal friend Kubizek. In December 1907, his mother died after a painful and protracted battle with cancer. Adolf rushed back to Linz to care for her in her final days and was devastated when she finally succumbed. His mother’s death shook Hitler to the core. The family doctor, a Jewish physician from Linz, later recalled that he had never seen anyone so overcome with grief as eighteen-year-old Adolf.

  After settling his mother’s affairs and arranging for his orphan’s pension to be forwarded, he returned to Vienna in January 1908, still hopi
ng to pursue his dream of becoming a great artist. He settled back into his dingy room in the Stumpergasse, located in a derelict section of the city near the West Train Station. When he learned that Kubizek was preparing for the entrance exam at the Conservatory for Music, Hitler convinced him to share his quarters. The two young men, neither yet twenty, lived together for five intense months, from February to the end of July in 1908. Kubizek provided the perfect audience for his friend’s endless lectures. Adolf had opinions, passionate opinions, about everything—art, opera, architecture, politics, morality, even diet. When Kubizek meekly ventured to offer his own opinion, Hitler would burst into a rage, storming around their shabby room, shouting imprecations, pounding on the door, the walls, and Kubizek’s rented piano. He would tolerate no dissent. He was determined to retake the academy’s admission exam, but he could not be moved to prepare. While Kubizek studied diligently and passed his entrance exam to the conservatory, Hitler spent his time developing fantastical schemes of all kinds—he would write an opera, a play, reform workers’ housing in Vienna, rebuild the city of Linz; he would establish a traveling symphony orchestra and even develop a new soft drink. His feverish imagination lurched from one grandiose project to the next without missing a beat. When a new inspiration seized him, he would talk obsessively about it for days, sometimes weeks; he would make notes, write scenes, draw sketches, only to drop the whole thing from one day to the next, never to mention it again. He could never complete a project.

  As long as the money from home lasted, Adolf led a life of idleness. He dallied in cafés, read the free newspapers available there; he went to the opera; he visited the museums and art galleries. It was a bohemian existence, staying up to all hours, sleeping late, bound by no fixed schedule—a routine that he would maintain throughout the Third Reich, even into the darkest days of the Second World War. He had few physical needs. He neither smoked nor drank and rarely ate meat. There were no women in his life during the Vienna years. He was fascinated but frightened by sex, afraid of women, and he remained terrified of syphilis until the end of his life. The two young men lived frugally, eating spartan meals, buying little but the bare necessities. They subsisted in their cheap, dimly lit room, with its “crumbling walls, bug infested furniture and constant smell of kerosene,” and considered themselves in solidarity with the long-suffering lower classes they found all around them—a solidarity, however, that did not include mingling or interacting with them. All the while Hitler was receiving his monthly orphan’s pension and a portion of his father’s estate, the remainder to be paid when he turned twenty-four. He lived frugally, but he was not, as he would later imply, on the brink of starvation or in desperate straits.

  His one extravagance was the opera. Hitler and Kubizek were regulars at the magnificent Hofoper, standing in line for hours hoping to buy tickets for the cheap seats or standing room for several nights of the week. For Hitler it was money well spent. He appreciated Verdi and Puccini, but he strongly preferred German composers and was utterly enthralled by Wagner. He was a keen analyst of the productions, paying particular attention to all the elements of stagecraft—lighting, scenery, special effects, the placement of the actors, and their dramatic entrances and exits from the stage—all of which he later employed to great effect in Nazi propaganda. His nights at the opera were far more than a musical experience for him; they were his spiritual sustenance, his inspiration, and his escape. Listening to Lohengrin, his favorite, or Parsifal or the Ring, he would be mesmerized for hours, transported into Wagner’s mythical world of fog-shrouded mountains and doomed Nordic heroes. These were the only occasions, Kubizek realized, that Hitler seemed calm and at peace. Yet, he was an angry man. His moods alternated between frenzied elation and the darkest depression. His friend worried that Adolf “had become unbalanced. He would fly into a temper at the slightest thing,” Kubizek recalled. “He was at odds with the world. Wherever he looked, he saw injustice, hate and enmity. Nothing was free from his criticism; nothing found favor in his eyes.” At the slightest provocation, he railed against “the times, against the whole world; choking with his catalogue of hates, he would pour his fury over everything, against mankind in general who did not understand him, who did not appreciate him and by whom he was persecuted.”

  In July 1908, while Kubizek was away in Linz for his summer break, Hitler was once again turned down by the academy. This second rejection came as an even more devastating blow than the first, for after reviewing his drawings the admissions committee dismissed them as being without merit and pronounced young Hitler unqualified even to sit for the entrance exam. This time he was not so much shocked as enraged. Who were these pompous professors to reject him? How could these pedants have failed to appreciate his work, his potential, his genius! They were nothing but “a lot of old-fashioned fossilized civil servants, bureaucrats, devoid of understanding, stupid lumps of officials. The whole Academy,” he thundered, “ought to be blown up.” In the fall of 1908, with no career training, no position, and no prospects, he promised himself that he would continue his “studies” on his own; he would show all those who had scorned him and conspired against him.

  In spite of these setbacks, Hitler remained supremely confident, possessed of a stunning amalgam of arrogance, anger, and self-pity that would remain the core of his personality for the rest of his life. His failure at the academy did not motivate him to undertake any systematic study. He remained a hopeless dilettante, dabbling, fantisizing, and sliding ever deeper into a world of illusion, where he would yet emerge, like Wagner, as the triumphant artist hero who would stun the world with his ascent from obscurity to greatness.

  Almost out of money and embarrassed by his second humiliating failure at the academy, he did not want to face Kubizek again. He gave notice, paid his portion of the rent, and, while his friend was still away in Linz, simply vanished, leaving no forwarding address. Kubizek would not see him again for thirty years. After slipping his moorings in the Stumpergasse, Hitler drifted from squalid room to squalid room, beginning a gradual descent into the dismal netherworld of Vienna. He had squandered most of his father’s legacy, and his orphan’s pension was hardly enough to live on. He lost contact with his family—his Aunt Johanna, his half-sister Angela, and little sister Paula had no idea where he was. For months he lived on the streets; he slept in parks and all-night cafés, under bridges, on doorsteps, finding occasional refuge in flophouses and homeless shelters. He ate in charity kitchens. He had no overcoat; his once neat clothes were tattered and stained from the disinfectant used in the homeless shelters, and his dilapidated shoes were falling apart, their soles worn paper thin. In winter he was forced to take shelter during the day in a series of “warming rooms” provided by churches and other charitable organizations. He slept, when he could, in the Shelter for Homeless Men at Meidling, which provided a warm, cavernous dormitory, a meal of bread and soup, a shower, and a simple cot for the night. Every morning he was turned out for the day, and every evening found him once again standing in line with other wretched souls, the down-and-out flotsam of Vienna, hoping to be admitted to the shelter for the night. He had hit rock bottom.

  In later years Hitler, without the slightest corroboration, maintained that during this gloomy period he found occasional work as a day laborer in construction, sometimes carrying bags at the railway station and shoveling snow. For much of 1909 he subsisted on a meager diet of milk, bread, and thin soup and was so blade thin, so obviously frail that he might easily have passed for a consumptive. He certainly did not work “for years in the building trade,” and it is unlikely that any construction foreman in 1908 would have hired this sallow, unkempt young man when he had so many healthy jobless candidates to choose from. Carrying luggage and shoveling snow seem just as improbable.

  In January 1910 with the aid of a small-time operator and habitué of the Meidling shelter, Reinhold Hanisch, he landed a spot in a well-appointed home for the laboring poor. Administered by the government and funded by contribut
ions from prominent Jewish families, the Home for Men in the Meldemannstrasse was no cheap flophouse. Along with the usual derelicts and desperate cases, its inhabitants also included veterans, workers, respectable, educated men temporarily down on their luck, trying to keep their nose above water until times improved. It provided a simple meal in the evening, a communal kitchen where the men could cook their own meals, a cubicle for each inhabitant that allowed the men a modicum of privacy, and maintained a library and reading room. Ensconced in the library of the home, Hitler read voraciously with all the scattershot miscellany of the autodidact, supplementing the pamphlets and penny press of the cafés with bits and pieces of philosophy, history, art, and music. He later claimed to have read five hundred books while living in the Meldemannstrasse home, but this was a typical exaggeration. His reading appears to have been concentrated primarily on newspapers, pamphlets, and condensations of serious works found on the library shelves.

  During his time in the men’s home between 1909 and 1913, he survived by painting postcards of Viennese landmarks. In order to purchase his art supplies, he broke his silence and, at the prompting of Hanisch, contacted his Aunt Johanna. Fighting back his shame, he asked for a loan, probably implying that it was to help him with his studies. She responded not with a loan but with a generous gift, and possibly sent occasional funds to him thereafter. Thus equipped, he worked from photographs and prints, copying them mechanically in the home’s reading room. He rarely ventured forth to sell them—too much direct contact with the public. Instead, he made an arrangement with Hanisch, who hawked them in the cafés and pubs and to small-time, mostly Jewish art dealers. Hanisch also sold some slightly larger paintings to frame shops and furniture dealers, who attached them as a sales decoration to the backs of sofas—a common practice in showrooms. Hitler and his partners—later a Hungarian Jew named Jacob Neubauer and others took over for Hanisch—split the meager proceeds fifty-fifty. It was a hand-to-mouth existence, but it was stable, and it offered more than a modicum of comfort.