Becoming Hitler

by Thomas Weber

  Hitler’s interest in the Germanic past was highly selective and of a historical rather than quasi-religious character. For instance, in Mein Kampf he would celebrate “Germanic democracy,”’ that is, the election of a leader with supreme power, over parliamentary, Western-style democracy.45

  Despite Hitler’s limited interest in some of the books that he was sent, he was nevertheless a bookworm. His passion ever since growing up in rural Austria had been to read. He had no interest in fiction, preferring history, military affairs, art, architecture, technology and engineering, to some extent philosophy, and above all encyclopedia articles. As Esser put it, Hitler’s primary reading interest lay in “the contemporary political history of that time. [… ] Actually, no writings of an ideological nature, but historical renditions. For example, he has never dealt with writings of the socio-revolutionaries, Marx, Engels and so on.” In addition, “He is very fond of reading historical works. All works on Frederick the Great, he bought for himself, then Prince Eugen. Then anything on the military history of the First World War. [… ] I also believe he had [Leopold von] Ranke. And he had Schopenhauer.” Hitler also tried to read whatever he could obtain on Wagner. Esser’s testimony confirms that prior to 1923 Hitler’s interest in racism and social Darwinism had been limited: “He also hadn’t read Darwin. Only in later times did he become familiar with Darwin. That all came after ’23. Until then it was all historical stuff. Military history, and historical stuff.”46

  The books from Hitler’s private library at the Library of Congress that were published prior to his entry into the DAP and that he most likely bought himself confirm that his primary interests had been in history and art. They include a history of the French Revolution, a history of the fortifications of Strasbourg, a book about the German engagement with the Renaissance in Italy, architectural plans for the municipal theater of Kraców, an art guidebook to Brussels, and a compendium of Bismarck cartoons. Furthermore, Hitler owned a book, published in 1900 and owned today by Brown University, about the history of Traunstein in the nineteenth century, which presumably he had bought during his stint in the town in the winter of 1918/19.47 Of the books held by the Library of Congress, the compendium of cartoons appears to be most read, while many of the books on occultism and racial theory that Hitler had been given between his entry into politics and 1923 look as if they were shelved unread.48

  His early anti-British animus, meanwhile, also found its expression in another of his books, Adolar Erdmann’s Englands Schuldbuch der Weltversklavung in 77 Gedichten (England’s Debts and Guilt: Global Enslavement in 77 Poems), published in 1919. A further indicator of Hitler’s preference for books on history and current affairs lies in the fact that between 1919 and 1921, he borrowed various books on history, political and social thought, and anti-Semitism from a right-wing lending library in Munich. He also borrowed books from his associates, leaning toward history books on the French Revolution and on Frederick the Great.49

  Hitler seldom read a book from cover to cover. Rather than trying to understand a text on its own terms and in all its complexity, he leafed through works of philosophy and political thought, looking for confirmation of his evolving ideas, new inspiration, or phrases that would express his ideas better than he could do previously.50 His was the mind of a curious autodidact. It is tempting to sneer at how Hitler read, although his technique is equally common among people with gentler political ideas.

  What was the effect and function of his reading style? It functioned, first and foremost, to confirm his preexisting ideas. His reading was driven by a confirmation bias. He popped in and out of books to look for ideas that confirmed his beliefs, while ignoring or undervaluing the relevance of contradictory ideas. This explains why Hitler as well as people at the opposite end of the political spectrum would refer to the works of Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Nietzsche, and other philosophers51 to justify competing worldviews that had little, if anything, in common. And this is why it is so hard to measure the respective importance for Hitler of print influences to which he was exposed. While it is reasonably easy to find the echoes of the works of various writers and thinkers in his speeches and writings, it is far more difficult to tell apart influences that genuinely shaped Hitler from those to which he subsequently turned with a confirmation bias.

  Nevertheless, it is too simplistic to see only a confirmation bias at work in his reading. In reality, a limited Socratic dialogue occurred between Hitler and the ideas with which he engaged. Even though he blocked out most contradictory evidence while he read, he nevertheless came across new ideas that initially he often stored in the back of his mind. When and if the political context in which he operated changed, he would sometimes return to those ideas for inspiration on how best to respond to the new situation. In 1924/25, this would be true for Hans Günther’s writings on race at the very time that the nature of Hitler’s racism fundamentally changed.

  As a book given to him in mid-April 1923 reveals, by the spring of that year Hitler still believed that an alliance between Germans and Russian Slavs would solve Germany’s strategic problem and thus he did not display the kind of racism toward Slavs that would become so important to him in the mid-1920s. He further believed that such an alliance would combat what he saw as the harmful influence of Jews. As the dedication scribbled on April 10 into the book by its author, Nikolai Snessarev, indicates, Snessarev and Hitler had recently met. Snessarev was a sixty-seven-year-old former journalist for the Russian nationalist newspaper Novoe vremya, and a former member of the Saint Petersburg City Duma. In exile, he had become one of the leading supporters of Grand Duke Kirill, the Coburg-based pretender to the Russian throne.

  The book Snessarev gave to Hitler, Die Zwangsjacke (The Straitjacket), declared that “Fascism offers the first realistic possibility for European civilization to save itself from its imminent downfall.” However, Snessarev argued that there was no time left to wait for the triumph of fascism in all of Europe, writing that in the short term only an alliance between Germany and Russia could rescue Europe: “Unified Germany, and unified Russia. Is this not the beginning of a realization of the greatest and most humane dream of our time—the unification of the two youngest, but also the most vital peoples of the old world?”52

  Hitler’s and Nikolai Snessarev’s relationship was but the latest chapter in the attempt of Hitler, Scheubner-Richter, and other early National Socialists to forge a permanent alliance with Russian nationalist monarchists in defense against “the Communist and golden-Jewish International.” For instance, Vladimir Biskupski, the cochair of Aufbau as well as the leader of the Pan-Russian People’s Military League, saw in Hitler an admirably “strong man” and developed close ties with him. Moreover, Fyodor Vinberg, the “white” Russian Aufbau activist who had republished the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” after his arrival in Germany, held numerous lengthy meetings and personal discussions with Hitler in the summer and autumn of 1922. Hitler, meanwhile, supported Grand Duke Kirill’s claim to the Russian throne in the autumn of 1922 and in return received large sums of money from Kirill (see Image 14).53 Hitler, his associates, and Grand Duke Kirill grew so close to each other that Kirill’s wife, Grand Duchess Victoria Feodorovna, stayed at Scheubner-Richter’s house on the night of Hitler’s putsch in November 1923.54

  Hitler had also continued to speak publicly about Russia in complimentary terms. For instance, in his speech of August 4, 1921, he said, “The war turned out especially tragic for two countries: Germany and Russia. Instead of entering into a natural alliance with one another, both states concluded sham alliances to their detriment.” The following year, one day after his thirty-third birthday, he called upon Russians to “shake off their tormentors” (i.e., the Jews), after which Germany could “get closer” to the Russians.55

  The longer Hitler was under the influence of Scheubner-Richter and the greater his interactions with Russian monarchists, the more he talked about the need to counter the threat of Bolshevism. For instance, a fr
ont-page article in the Völkischer Beobachter, published on July 19, 1922, and signed by the “party leadership,” presented the NSDAP as being engaged in an anti-Bolshevik struggle. “Germany is rushing toward Bolshevism with giant strides,” it read. The party leadership under Hitler stated that Germans had to realize that “one has to fight now if one wants to live.” They presented the struggle with “Jewish Bolshevism” as a life-and-death struggle,56 similar to the way Dietrich Eckart had called upon Peer Gynt and Germans to fight to the death the trolls of the world.

  Hitler’s shift to conspiratorial anti-Semitism under the influence of Eckart, Rosenberg, Scheubner-Richter, and other émigrés from tsarist Russia received further fuel in 1922 with the publication of the German translation of Henry Ford’s The International Jew. Published originally in English in four installments between 1920 and 1922, The International Jew was written by the American industrialist who had set up the Ford automobile company. Ford’s thoughts had been fed both by homegrown Western traditions of anti-Semitism and by Russian ideas of a Jewish world conspiracy. The ideas expressed by Ford did not differ significantly from those to which Hitler had already been exposed before. However, Henry Ford’s book is important for having provided to Hitler confirmation, coming from the very heart of America, of an idea that had been brewing in his mind since day one of his politicization and radicalization and that had been refined by the influences of Rosenberg, Scheubner-Richter, and Eckart: namely, that Jewish finance capitalism constituted the very core of the central problem faced by the world. Further, that Jewish financiers were behind a global conspiracy, of which Jewish Bolshevism was a part, to subjugate the world. Henry Ford thus turned into an anti-Semitic icon for Hitler.

  As the New York Times reported in December 1922, “The wall beside his desk in Hitler’s private office is decorated with a large picture of Henry Ford.” The newspaper also reported that the office’s antechamber was full of copies of the German translation of The International Jew. The following year, Hitler would tell a journalist from the Chicago Tribune, upon being asked about his thoughts on a possible run by Ford for the US presidency, that he wished he could send some of his SA troops to Chicago and other major US cities to help Ford in his election campaign. Even during the Second World War, Hitler would still refer in his monologues at his military HQ to Henry Ford’s work on anti-Semitism.57

  Around the time that Henry Ford became important to him, and when in general he hoped to benefit from American support, Hitler started to tone down and conceal some of his anti-Americanism, for instance, observing in one of his speeches: “If Wilson hadn’t been a swindler, he would not have become President of America.” When in 1923 the NSDAP prepared a collection of Hitler’s speeches to be published in book form, the reference to America was taken out of that speech. It now read: “If Wilson hadn’t been a swindler, he would not have become President of a democracy.” When ten years later the book was reissued, the quote was missing altogether from the speech.58

  By the autumn of 1922, things had gone very well indeed for Hitler and the NSDAP. He was its uncontested head. Under his leadership, the party had been spreading all over southern Germany and had started to make inroads into central Germany and other regions of the country as well. He experienced a particularly big triumph in October, when Julius Streicher, one of the cofounders of the German Socialist Party, who had a huge following in Nuremberg in Franconia, switched sides and joined the NSDAP. Streicher brought so many new members with him that the party’s membership doubled.59

  By toning down his anti-Americanism, by thorough tactical compromises, and by charming—rather than destroying—those whom he had sidelined or whose ideas he found boring and pointless, Hitler had started to widen his appeal. All the while, he had continued to work toward the establishment of a permanent German-Russian alliance. And things seemed to be going his way. Two days after Streicher joined forces with Hitler, Benito Mussolini embarked on his “march on Rome.” A week later, he was the Italian prime minister. There was a sense of excited anticipation among Hitler’s supporters that if Mussolini could bring fascism to power in Italy, Hitler would soon be able to do the same in Bavaria.

  Yet, the NSDAP still had not managed to solve its financial troubles; Munich remained a fairly forbidding place in which to raise large donations for Hitler and his party. Even though the general political situation was conducive to the growth of the NSDAP, a sense of frustration reigned at its helm at the failure to persuade a sufficiently large number of wealthy people in Munich to give the party the support and funds it needed to thrive. Hitler and the inner circle of the NSDAP therefore turned to the desperate measure of trying to raise funds abroad, hoping to capitalize on the fact that Rudolf Heß was spending the winter semester of 1922/23 in Zurich and had started to socialize regularly with Ulrich “Ully” Wille at Villa Schönberg, Wille’s grand villa, in which Richard Wagner had lived in the 1850s and which was within walking distance of both Zurich’s city center and Lake Zurich.

  Wille was an influential officer and figure on the political right in Switzerland. He was the brother of photographer Renée Schwarzenbach-Wille, the son of Ulrich Wille Sr., who had commanded the Swiss Army in the First World War, and a friend of Heß’s fatherly mentor Karl Haushofer. Ully Wille had repeatedly supported ultraconservative and radical right-wing groups in Germany, forging links with Heinrich Claß, the former leader of the Pan-German League, and with Alfred von Tirpitz, whose wife was related to Wille’s wife, as well as to other German National People’s Party members.60

  Having lost most of his money in German war bonds during the war, Wille would have been in no position to help ease the financial worries of Hitler’s movement. However, his sister Renée was married to Alfred Schwarzenbach, a rich entrepreneur who had made a fortune in the silk industry. Heß thus arranged for Dietrich Eckart and Emil Gansser, a pharmacist from Berlin who was the party’s chief fund-raiser abroad and who, like so many others of the early leading National Socialists, was a Protestant,61 to come to Switzerland and speak with Renée and her husband at their estate outside Zurich on November 1, 1922.

  No detailed records of the visit have survived.62 But as Gansser and Eckart would return to Zurich a year later for a repeat visit and at that time bring Hitler himself along, it is a safe bet to state that their meeting with the Schwarzenbachs paid off quite handsomely financially for the National Socialists.

  The 1922 entries of the three visitors in the guest book of the Schwarzenbach estate is a testimony to why the leadership of the NSDAP believed that it urgently needed extra funds. Heß and Gansser simply signed their name, but Eckart entered his “Sturmlied” (Storm Song), which summoned everyone, the living and the dead alike, to take revenge on Germany’s enemies, with its famous last line, “Germany, awake!” Significantly, he added to the song the phrase “In the year of decision, 1922.”63 Eckart and his peers in the leadership of the NSDAP clearly lived in anticipation of an imminent Italian-style takeover of Bavaria, which would then spread to the rest of Germany, led by Bavaria’s Mussolini, Adolf Hitler.

  CHAPTER 11

  The German Girl from New York

  (Winter 1922 to Summer 1923)

  As Christmas 1922 passed, it was clear that contrary to Dietrich Eckart’s expectations as expressed in the guest book of the Schwarzenbachs, 1922 would not be the “year of decision.” However, in the New Year, an event took place that, while not bringing about a political transformation, was of the utmost importance to Adolf Hitler, for it would provide him with a home away from home. And it would reveal who in Munich would open their doors to him and who would at best merely see him as a political tool with which to further their own interests.

  The event occurred on a day in early 1923, when Hitler boarded a tram that ran from Schwabing, Munich’s art district, to central Munich. On the tram, he bumped into Ernst Hanfstaengl, a German-American dealer of art reproductions and Harvard graduate who in 1921 had moved back to Germany, and his wife, Hel
ene. Ernst Hanfstaengl was excited finally to have a chance to introduce his wife to Hitler. The Harvard man had first encountered the leader of the NSDAP after a speech Hitler had given in November, when he introduced himself to Hitler. Hanfstaengl had been utterly taken by Hitler’s masterful command of his voice and his superb use of innuendo, mocking humor, and irony during his speech. On returning home, Hanfstaengl had talked about nothing but his encounter with Hitler, raving to his wife about this “earnest, magnetic young man.” Since then he and Hitler had seen each other a few times.1 Helene eagerly invited her husband’s object of fascination to come to their apartment at Gentzstraße 1 for lunch or dinner at his convenience.

  Hitler was all too happy to accept that invitation. From his first visit to the Hanfstaengls, where he immediately felt at home, he came more or less daily to their apartment.2 The very frequency of Hitler’s visits to their three-room sublet provides a glimpse of what had been lacking from his life. By early 1923 Hitler might have found a political home, but beyond that he was still the isolated person he had been in 1919, who desperately had been trying to find a surrogate family in Munich.

  Had he previously found a “home,” and had the city’s middle- and upper-class society opened its doors to him, Hitler’s transition to becoming a part of the life of the Hanfstaengls no doubt would have been more gradual. But he had found neither the kind of home where he could just be himself nor genuine social interactions with Munich’s middle and upper classes. The only other “surrogate” home he had found was with Hermine Hoffmann, an elderly widow of a teacher and early member of the party living in a suburb of Munich, whom he visited often and to whom he referred—using the affectionate southern German diminutive term for mother—as his “Mutterl.”3