Becoming Hitler

by Thomas Weber

  Despite Ernst Hanfstaengl’s subsequent fame, which would stem from the books and articles that he would write about his time with Hitler, his wife was far more emotionally important to Hitler. Throughout his visits, Hitler felt drawn to the twenty-nine-year-old blonde, slim and tall—taller than Hitler himself—who saw herself as “a German girl from New York.” For Hitler, she was, as subsequently he was to recall, “so beautiful that next to her everything else just vanished,” while for Helene, the leader of the NSDAP was a “warm man” who, as she would recall later in her life, “had a great habit of opening his big blue eyes and using them.”4

  Born and raised in New York, Helene’s German parents had always spoken in German to her. Even though she insisted that her feelings were “those of a German, not an American,” she had a mixed identity. She said those sometimes she was thinking in German and sometimes in English. To everyone in Munich she was simply “the Amerikanerin” (the American woman). It was thus with “the Amerikanerin”—someone who, like Hitler, was a German from abroad and who also had made Munich her home without really quite belonging there—that he felt at ease. Whether or not he was sexually attracted to Helene, her apartment started to be his home in Munich.

  As she prepared lunches for him in the improvised kitchen that she and her husband had erected behind a makeshift wall in the foyer of their apartment, or as Hitler dissolved squares of chocolate in his black coffee, Hitler and Helene got to know each other well. At times, he talked with her about his plans for the future of the party and of Germany. Or he simply sat quietly in a corner, reading or taking notes. At other times, he reenacted incidents from his past in a realistic manner, revealing his gift and love for drama, or simply played with Helene’s two-year-old son Egon, to whom he soon became very dedicated, patting him and showing him his affection. Every time he visited her apartment, Egon ran to the door to welcome “Uncle Dolf.”5

  To Helene, Hitler was not the rising star and orator of a political party but “a slim, shy young man, with a far-away look in his very blue eyes” who was dressed shabbily in cheap white shirts, black ties, a worn dark blue suit with a nonmatching dark brown leather vest, and cheap black shoes, who outside her apartment wore a “beige-colored trench coat, much the worse for wear” and “a soft, old grayish hat.” This was a characterization that would have been immediately recognizable to other women who encountered the private Hitler. In the words of Ilse Pröhl, Rudolf Heß’s future wife, who described Hitler as “shy,” too, “he was very, very polite, that was the Austrian in him.”6

  In one of their many conversations, Hitler admitted to Helene that as a child he had wanted to be a preacher: that he would put his mother’s apron around him like a surplice, climb on top of a stool in the kitchen, and pretend to sermonize at length. Possibly without realizing it, he was revealing to Helene Hanfstaengl not only that he traced his urge to speak to crowds back to his earliest childhood, but that he ultimately preferred to talk at, rather than with, people. Apparently, from an early age, he viewed connecting with others as a one-way process. As Helene observed, even when only she and her husband were around and Hitler talked, he walked up and down. It seemed to her that Hitler’s “body must move in accordance with his thoughts—the more intense his speech becomes, the quicker he moved about.”7

  Hitler told Helene about his relationship with his parents but never mentioned his siblings, not even their very existence. And he only occasionally talked about his time prior to his move to Vienna. Unlike with people in the party, he did not become cross when she asked him about his past. However, even though he was happy to talk about his adolescence in Austria and about his life since moving to Munich, he did not really talk to her about his experiences in Vienna. The only reference to his time in the Austrian capital occurred in his frequent rants against the city’s Jews. In 1971 she observed, “He was really very cagy about saying what he really did [in Vienna].” Helene believed that something personal must have happened to Hitler in Vienna, for which he blamed the Jews, which he could not, or did not want to talk about: “He built it up—this hatred. I often heard him raving about Jews—absolutely personal, not just a political thing.”8

  Helene Hanfstaengl may well have been right. It was not just that he did not want to talk to anyone about his Vienna years, but also he kept misdating his move to Munich. All evidence suggests that Hitler did not arrive in Munich before 1913. Yet in an article for the Völkischer Beobachter of April 12, 1922, he claimed to have moved from Vienna to Munich in 1912. He made the same claim during his trial following the failed coup of 1923.9

  Hitler did not simply make the same mistake twice, as, in a brief biographical sketch he had included in a letter he wrote to Emil Gansser, the party’s chief fund-raiser abroad, in 1921, he made the identical claim. And he would do so again in 1925 to Austrian authorities when requesting to be released from Austrian citizenship.10 It has never conclusively been resolved why Hitler deliberately predated his arrival in Munich by a year.

  Although Helene was closer emotionally to Hitler than her husband was, Ernst became ever more important to Hitler, too, throughout 1923. He introduced him to American football and college songs from Harvard, which Hitler loved. According to Ernst, the “Sieg Heil” used subsequently in all Nazi rallies and political meetings was a direct copy of the technique used by cheerleaders in American football. Furthermore, Ernst Hanfstaengl offered his business expertise as well as his experiences of America to Hitler’s movement. For instance, Ernst took a particular interest in the Völkischer Beobachter and persuaded Hitler to enlarge the paper to an American-size page.11

  Neither his family background in Munich, where he had grown up as a child and teenager, nor his time spent on the other side of the Atlantic had made him a natural, almost inevitable convert to Hitler’s movement. His parents, who had been friends with Mark Twain, had a cosmopolitan outlook.12 The reason that he was drawn to Hitler in the first place had little to do with feelings of guilt over having stayed in the United States during the First World War or an urge to compensate for the loss of his brother in the war.13 In fact, Ernst Hanfstaengl had felt at home in America. He was married to a “German girl from New York,” had spent the previous decade intermingling with American upper-crust society, and was half American by birth: his mother was American. Furthermore, his other brother, Edgar, who had lost a brother in the war just as much as Ernst had, had been one of the founding members of the Munich chapter of the liberal German Democratic Party after the war.

  At Harvard, “Hanfy,” as he was known at the time, had been at the center of the university’s social life, charming and entertaining his classmates and their families with his witty and funny stories and musical performances, which earned him invitations to their homes, including one to the White House, thanks to his friendship with classmate Theodore Roosevelt Jr. Upon leaving Harvard, he had taken over the American branch of the family’s art reproduction business on Fifth Avenue.

  There had been a time, in 1917 and 1918, when Hanfstaengl indeed could not have left the United States for Germany even if he had so wished. At the time, after the American entry into the war, due to his family’s German ties, the art business on Fifth Avenue had been confiscated and ultimately sold off. And yet, even after the war, Hanfstaengl had not returned to Germany as soon as he legally could.

  During his continued presence in America after the war, Hanfstaengl had not displayed guilt over having stayed on the western side of the Atlantic Ocean during the war and there is no sign that he believed he had betrayed his brother fallen in the First World War. Rather than rush back to Germany after the war, Ernst Hanfstaengl had set up a thriving new business of his own on Fifty-seventh Street, right opposite Carnegie Hall. In postwar Manhattan he had enjoyed serving the famous, rich, and powerful of America, including Charlie Chaplin, J. P. Morgan Jr., and the daughter of President Woodrow Wilson, and taking his meals at the Harvard Club with Franklin D. Roosevelt, the 1920 vice presidential candidat
e, and others. Only three years after the war did Hanfstaengl finally decide to return to Germany.

  In short, there was little in the recent history of Hanfstaengl and his family to set him on a path that would lead into Hitler’s arms. Moreover, rather than distance himself from US politics, ideals, and institutions, he had been socially as close as one could possibly be to the American political establishment of the Republican Party and the Democratic Party—though he had a preference for the former over the latter.

  Once back in Munich, rather than committing himself to avenging the wartime death of his brother, he had studied history and worked on a film script with the eastern European Jewish writer Rudolf Kommer, whom he had known from his time in New York City and who, like him, had moved back to Europe and now lived in southern Bavaria.14 Obviously, Hanfstaengl would not have started to associate with Hitler had he found the core of his ideas deeply repulsive. But going by his track record and by his character and personality, he seems to have been attracted by Hitler’s movement first and foremost because it offered him excitement and adventure in a city and a political class that must have felt like a parochial village after his years at Harvard and in New York City.

  Hanfstaengl’s historical role also did not lie in opening the doors for Hitler to Munich’s upper-class society, as his ability to open doors for Hitler to the city’s establishment was limited. He was only marginally part of it himself, as evident in the fact that after more than a decade in America, he spoke German with a German-American accent.15 And he could hardly turn to his brother in the liberal German Democratic Party and ask him to arrange for Hitler to be introduced to Munich’s upper-class society.

  Rather, Ernst Hanfstaengl helped Hitler gain entry to the small American and German-American community in Munich, arranging meetings with such men as William Bayard Hale and German-American painter Wilhelm Funk. Like Hanfstaengl, Hale was a Harvard man, and he had been a European correspondent for the Hearst press. After his work as a wartime German propagandist, Hale had been ostracized in the United States and thus lived in retirement in the Hotel Bayerischer Hof in Munich. And it was at Funk’s salon that, according to Hanfstaengl, Hitler met Prince Guidotto Henckel von Donnersmarck, an Upper Silesian high aristocrat, son of a Russian mother. One of Germany’s wealthiest men, whose family seat lay in the part of Silesia lost to Poland, he now lived in Rottach-Egern on Tegernsee in the foothills of the Alps.16

  The only Munich family of note to whom Hanfstaengl seems to have introduced Hitler was that of Friedrich August von Kaulbach, the former director of the Munich Art Academy and a well-known painter who had died in 1920. Even Kaulbach’s widow, Frida, was hardly a native Bavarian. A Dane from Copenhagen, she had traveled the world as a violin virtuoso, and after falling in love with Kaulbach, who was twenty-one years her senior, she had made Munich her home. In 1925, one of their daughters, Mathilde von Kaulbach, would marry Max Beckmann, who, in the eyes of National Socialists, would become the epitome of a producer of “degenerate” art.

  Despite his friend’s best efforts, Hitler remained largely shut out of the social life of Munich’s indigenous upper and upper-middle classes,17 and so failed to gain new and wealthy patrons in Munich’s high society in 1923.18

  The Hanfstaengl household, meanwhile, became the social center for a number of Hitler’s associates who, like him and the Hanfstaengls, had not been born in Germany or had lived abroad for many years. Helene soon was particularly close to Hermann Goering’s new bride, who had first met Hitler in October 1922 and had become the wife of the head of the SA in December. The Swedish-born Carin Goering, whose mother was Irish and who also had German ancestors on her father’s side, spent many an hour in the company of the “German girl from New York,” either at the Hanfstaengls’ apartment or in the presence of their respective husbands in the drinking and smoking room below the dining room (accessible through a trapdoor in the floor) in Goering’s house in one of Munich’s suburbs.19

  It is striking that, in the early years of the NSDAP, the German-Austrian Hitler mixed with so many ethnic Germans who had grown up abroad, intermingling with German-Americans, Swiss-Germans, German-Russians, and even a German-Egyptian. He was admired by many people from humble backgrounds in Munich who felt that they had been the victims of social or economic change, by Protestants living in the city, by Catholics who wanted to break with their church’s internationalism, and by young idealistic students. The Bavarian establishment, meanwhile, saw in him nothing but a talented tool that they hoped they could use to change the constitutional arrangements in Bavaria’s favor. They did not anticipate that Hitler might turn the tables on them.

  Hitler much preferred the company of his newly adopted family over that of his real one. Thus, in late April 1923, he was less than excited about the imminent visit of his sister Paula to Munich. Even though she left Austria for the first time in her life to see him, he did everything he could to minimize the time he would have to spend with her. Conveniently, there was no space in his room on Thierschstraße to put her up. So he asked Maria Hirtreiter, whom he had known ever since the fifty-year-old owner of a stationery shop had joined the party not long after himself, whether Paula could stay with her while in Munich.20

  Even though Hitler did not care much about his sister’s visit, he realized Paula’s visit would provide a perfect cover for him to visit Dietrich Eckart, who was in hiding in the Bavarian Alps. The escape of his paternal mentor to the mountains had been necessitated by the publication of a slanderous poem about Friedrich Ebert, the German president. It had earned Eckart an arrest warrant from the German Supreme Court, the Leipzig-based Staatsgerichtshof für das Deutsche Reich. Since his escape from Munich, Eckart had been in hiding high in the mountains close to Berchtesgaden, on the German-Austrian border, a few miles to the south of Salzburg, under a false name: Dr. Hoffmann.

  Hitler thus suggested to his sister, who did not know about his ulterior motive, that they take a trip to the mountains. When the siblings headed south toward the Alps on April 23, 1923, in the red convertible that Hitler owned by then, Hirtreiter, whose job was to chaperone Paula, and Christian Weber, as Hitler’s aide and driver, were with them. Once in Berchtesgaden, the two men left the women to explore and enjoy the resort, telling them that they had a meeting to attend in the mountains and would be back in a matter of days.

  Hitler and Weber then headed up the mountain. As the former recalled in 1942, he complained to Weber about what a hike it was: “Do you think I will climb up the Himalayas, that I have suddenly turned into a mountain goat?” But they soon came to the little village of Obersalzberg, a hamlet of farms, inns, and the summer homes of the well-to-do. They walked toward the Pension Moritz, where Eckart was staying under his false name. Hitler knocked on the door of Eckart’s room, calling out for “Diedi.” Eckart answered the door in his nightgown, excited at the sight of his friend and protégé.21

  Hitler’s visit to Eckart in the mountains high above Berchtesgarden, which lasted a few days, was his introduction to the Obersalzberg, which would become his alpine retreat, a favorite place to which he would withdraw while in power, before making big decisions. Subsequently he would say, “It was really through Dietrich Eckart that I ended up there.”22 Hitler’s trip to see Eckart—as well as his visits with the Hanfstaengls—also gives testimony as to who really mattered in his life: not his real family, but the man whom he considered a father figure and the “German girl from New York”—whereas when he had the opportunity to spend time with his sister, he abandoned her. And to add insult to injury, he used Paula to be able to see the person with whom he really wanted to spend time, Dietrich Eckart.23

  By that time, Hitler felt as close to Eckart as he ever had. And yet their relationship was undergoing a major transformation. Hitler had recently replaced Eckart with Alfred Rosenberg as editor in chief of the Völkischer Beobachter, which resulted in Rosenberg’s becoming the chief ideologue of the NSDAP.24 Eckart’s demotion was the consequence, first an
d foremost, of Hitler’s realization that Eckart simply was not up to the task of running a day-to-day business. In 1941, Hitler would say: “Never would I have given him a big newspaper to run. [… ] One day it would have been published, the next day it wouldn’t.” Yet Hitler would still talk of him with admiration and add that as far as running a big newspaper went, “I would not be able to do it, either; I have been fortunate that I got a few people who know how to do it. Dietrich Eckart could not have run the Reichskulturkammer [Reich Chamber of Culture], either, but his accomplishments are everlasting! It would be as if I tried to run a farm! I wouldn’t be able to do it.”25

  However, tensions did emerge between Hitler and Eckart during one of Hitler’s subsequent visits to the mountains that summer, as each thought the other had made a fool of himself over a woman. According to Eckart, Hitler was embarrassing himself in failing to conceal how much he fancied the six-foot-tall, blond wife of the innkeeper. In her presence, his cheeks turned red, his breath was short, and his eyes sparkled, while he walked about nervously or showed off around her like a pubescent boy. Clearly annoyed with Eckart’s disapproval, Hitler sneered in turn, behind Eckart’s back, that Eckart had “become an old pessimist” and “a senile weakling, who has fallen in love with this girl Annerl, who is thirty years younger than him.” Hitler was also very annoyed that Eckart disapproved that he was presenting himself politically as a “messiah” and had compared himself to Jesus Christ, and was furious that Eckart doubted a successful Bavarian putsch could turn into a successful national revolution. Eckart stated, “Suppose we even succeed in taking Munich by a putsch; Munich is not Berlin. It would lead to nothing but ultimate failure.” Hitler’s response was, “You speak of the lack of support—that is no reason to hesitate, when the hour is ripe. Let us march, then supporters will find themselves.”26