Becoming Hitler
Page 33
Hitler did not wish to have just a general chat with Tröbst; he hoped to get detailed and actionable ideas on how to stage a successful coup, which explains why he wanted the SA (Sturmabteilung) leaders to be present at the meeting. Lauböck had stressed in the letter to Tröbst how important Hitler deemed it to talk directly with a participant in the “events in Turkey.” To Tröbst’s great disappointment, the proposed gathering did not take place in the end, as Tröbst had already left Munich for north Germany by the time Lauböck sent the letter.4
Even though the meeting between Tröbst and Hitler did not materialize, Tröbst’s articles are highly significant. Not only do they reveal some of Hitler’s sources of inspiration during the autumn of 1923 as he tried to figure out how best to plot himself to power. They are also of the utmost importance in shedding light on the genesis of the Holocaust, as another of Tröbst’s articles, published on October 15, 1923, laid out lessons for a “national purification” of Germany along Turkish lines, based on the Armenian genocide of 1915:
Hand in hand with the establishment of a united front must be national purification. In this respect the circumstances were the same in Asia Minor as here. The bloodsuckers and parasites on the Turkish national body were Greeks and Armenians. They had to be eradicated and rendered harmless; otherwise the whole struggle for freedom would have been put in jeopardy. Gentle measures—that history has always shown—will not do in such cases. And considerations for the so-called “long-established” or “decent” elements, or whatever these catchwords may be, would be fundamentally wrong, because the result would be compromise, and compromise is the beginning of the end. [… ] Almost all of those of foreign background [Fremdstämmige] in the area of combat had to die; their number is not put too low with 500,000. [… ] The Turks have provided the proof that the purification of a nation of its foreign elements on a grand scale is possible. It would not be [really] a nation if it were unable to deal with the momentary economic difficulties resulting from this mass expulsion!5
Curiously, even though in this article Tröbst laid out a plan for how Germany could get rid of its own “bloodsuckers and parasites”—which everybody would have understood to refer to Germany’s Jews—Hitler did not publicly take up his thinly veiled suggestion that the Jews of Germany should meet the same fate as the Armenians in the First World War.
In fact, the only known time that Hitler previously had mentioned the Armenians—during a conversation with one of his financial backers, Eduard August Scharrer, in late December 1922—he had not been prophesying at all that the Jews would meet the fate of the Armenians, even though the reference had come in the context of a threat he had made against the Jews. On the contrary, Hitler had compared Germany’s fate with that of the Armenians, arguing that Jews were increasingly gaining control over Germany. According to Hitler, Germany would go the way of the Armenians and become a defenseless nation in decline, unless the Germans defended themselves against the Jews:
The Jewish question needs to be solved in the manner of Frederick the Great, who made use of the Jews where he might profit from them and removed them where they might be harmful. [… ] There will have to be a solution to the Jewish question. It would be best for both sides if it were to be a solution governed by reason. Failing that, there will be only two alternatives: either the German people will come to resemble a people like the Armenians or the Levantines; or there will be a bloody conflict.6
Only in 1939, on the eve of the Second World War, when Hitler was trying to figure out how to clear people from the territory in the East he was intending to conquer, would he pick up Tröbst’s Armenian proposal from 1923. On August 22, 1939, when the leaders of the armed forces, totaling approximately fifty generals and other high-ranking officers, would be summoned to his alpine retreat to be told Hitler’s imminent plans for war, he would refer to the fate of the Armenians during the First World War:7
And so for the present only in the East I have put my death-head formations in place with the command relentlessly and without compassion to send into death many women and children of Polish origin and language. Only thus we can gain the living space we need. Who after all is today speaking about the destruction of the Armenians? [… ] Poland will be depopulated and settled with Germans. My pact with the Poles was merely conceived of as a gaining of time. As for the rest, gentlemen, the fate of Russia will be exactly the same as I am now going through with in the case of Poland. After Stalin’s death—he is a very sick man—we will break the Soviet Union. Then there will begin the dawn of German rule of the earth.8
Hitler’s point in 1939 was that Germany would be able to get away with treating the populations living in territories earmarked for German colonization in the same way the Ottomans had treated the Armenians during the First World War. In other words, when raising the question of “who after all is today speaking about the destruction of the Armenians,” he argued that even if there were a public outcry over German conduct in the east, it would blow over.
Hitler’s failure publicly to take up Tröbst’s suggestion could be read as revealing that, in 1923, there was no apparent concern or desire on Hitler’s part to define the endgame for the minorities he was targeting, or at least a genocidal solution was not yet high on his agenda. Indeed, the statement made toward Scharrer would suggest that despite his allusion to a “bloody conflict,” his preference was for a “solution governed by reason,” along the lines of the anti-Jewish policies of Frederick the Great.
Even a reference that Hitler would make to the gassing of Jews toward the end of Mein Kampf does not demonstrate, in and of itself, genocidal intent. He would state: “If, at the beginning of the War and during the War, twelve or fifteen thousand of these Hebraic corrupters of the nation had been subjected to poison gas such as had to be endured in the field by hundreds of thousands of our very best German workers of all classes and professions, then the sacrifice of millions at the front would not have been in vain.”9 Here, he is speaking about something quite different from the extermination of the Jews of Europe during the Holocaust through gassing. Rather, he suggested that the Jews of Germany could be terrorized into submission, rather than be killed, by exposing several thousand of them to mustard gas.
However, as a letter Ully Wille had sent to Rudolf Heß the previous year indicates, Hitler and Heß, clearly had already, at the very least, toyed with the possibility of a genocidal anti-Jewish solution by the time Tröbst published his article about the Armenian lessons for Germany. On November 13, 1922, during Heß’s study-abroad semester in Zurich, Wille—who at the beginning of the First World War had expressed his equal admiration for German Jews and for German militarism—had written to him that he found the anti-Semitism of the NSDAP pointless and counterproductive: “Believing you can exterminate [Ausrotten] Marxism and the Jews with machine guns is a fatal mistake.” He added: “They are not the cause of the public’s lack of national pride. On the contrary, Marxism and the Jews have been able to win such scandalous influence among the German people precisely because the German people already lack sufficient national pride.”10 The letter is more interesting for what Wille was responding to than for his own attitudes toward Jews. Clearly, he would not have told Heß that trying to exterminate the Jews with machine guns was a mistake, had not Heß previously told Wille that the National Socialists were contemplating the idea. Thus, Hitler’s not publicly engaging Tröbst’s suggestion should not be taken as proof that he did not feel inspired by it, particularly since his statements to his generals from August 22, 1939, would closely resemble some of the ideas expressed by Tröbst. In fact, as become apparent in an interview Hitler gave a Catalonian journalist later in 1923, his preferred “final” anti-Jewish solution was already genocidal by 1923.
However, his primary goal that year was to figure out how to stage a successful coup, which is why Tröbst’s first article had had the most immediate impact on him. As Hitler walked the streets of Munich with his Alsatian, “Wolf,” whip in ha
nd and wearing a long black coat and black slouch hat; as he spent time in his favorite café, Café Heck on Hofgarten; as he attended the weekly gathering of the inner circle of the NSDAP leadership at Café Neumair, an old-fashioned café on Viktualienmarkt; or as he was treated to coffee, cake, and the latest gossip from across town at the stationery store of Quirin Diestl and his wife, two admirers of his,11 he analyzed how to change his tactics so as to hasten the advent of a national revolution and emerge as its leader.
One of his challenges was that a lot of the people in Munich who were generally positively predisposed to his political ideas, expressed doubts that Hitler was really the right man to lead them. For instance, Gottfried Feder—the senior figure in the party who had introduced him to the alleged ills of “interest slavery”—thought the party’s political chances were undermined by Hitler’s work habits. On August 10, 1923, Feder wrote to Hitler, “I really have to tell you that I find the anarchy in your time management most detrimental for the entire movement.” Furthermore, some of the people Hans Tröbst had encountered in Munich over the summer had wondered whether there was anything to Hitler, other than empty words not backed up by action. For instance, that summer, Tröbst had overheard his brother’s maids say, “When will Hitler at last get things started? He must also have received money from the Jews, if he always is nothing but words.” Publisher Julius Friedrich Lehmann’s wife, too, had her doubts. As she wrote in her diary in early October: “Now more than ever we are waiting for a savior. Here in Munich many deem Hitler, the leader of the National Socialists, to be that man. I know him too little and for the time being do not hold him in high esteem.”12
As that diary entry implies, the biggest obstacle Hitler had to overcome was not the existence of doubts toward him among some of the people who knew him well. Rather, it was that Hitler was still far too little known. This, he believed, was the single biggest factor holding him back. If even the wife of one of his most loyal backers in Munich thought she did not really know him, the head of the NSDAP, he could not hope to become Germany’s “savior.” If Hitler did not just want to preach to the converted in Munich, he had to change his tactics dramatically. He urgently needed to boost his image among conservatives and populists on the right all over Bavaria, and all over Germany, to enable himself ultimately to become their Mussolini.
So far, Hitler’s life had largely remained an enigma. Unless he was forced to, he never had publicly spoken about himself. With the exception of a brief reference to his entry into the party in a speech he had given on January 29, 1923, he had not given away anything about his life in his speeches. Only in a small number of private letters—in police and court statements, and in two articles for the Völkischer Beobachter, in response to what he perceived as a libelous statement about him made elsewhere—did he offer details about his life.13
For the time being, most people did not even know what Hitler looked like, as no photo of him had ever been published—indeed, he had enforced a Bilderverbot, a prohibition against taking photos of him and circulating them. Even most of the attendees of his talks had only seen him from the distance. In May 1923, the German satirical magazine Simplicissimus even had poked fun at this, publishing a series of silly drawings and cartoons imagining Hitler’s appearance (see Image 19). If we can believe Konrad Heiden—who first encountered Hitler when Heiden was head of a group of Democratic pro-Republic university students who opposed the NSDAP, and then as a journalist—Hitler was afraid of being recognized and assassinated, and thus refused to be photographed. As a result, even in the spring and summer of 1923, Hitler could still intermingle with people in Munich and southern Bavaria without being recognized. During the Second World War, he would recall how amusing it had been for him during his visits to Dietrich Eckart in the mountains “to listen in to the debates that people were having over meals about Hitler [… ] No pictures of me existed. Unless you knew me personally, you would not know what I looked like. The days in which nobody recognized me were for me the most beautiful time. How much I liked going elsewhere in the Reich at the time! Everyone believed me to be someone different, just not Hitler.”14
Hitler’s strategy to create a public image of himself without using any photos had worked well as long as he had operated solely in Munich and its environs. Although he had choreographed his events prior to 1923 and pursued his style of politics with the help of visual imagery, he had had to rely on his followers to tell their friends and acquaintances about the spectacle of his speeches and hope that next time, they, too, would want to experience him. Indeed, people had come to attend his speeches because they were curious about his voice, rather than his face.15 This approach had allowed Hitler to turn from a nobody into a local celebrity. But it would not suffice to turn him into a Bavarian Mussolini. During the summer of 1923, he had a sudden change of heart. He seems to have realized that if no one knew what he looked like, he could not be the face, or at least a face, of the national revolution that he deemed to be imminent. He hence went from one extreme to the other, commissioning Heinrich Hoffmann to take photos of him and then having thousands of picture postcards of himself printed, as a result of which photos of Hitler appeared all over Munich by the autumn of 1923. (See Images 22 and 23.)
Hitler and his party now were trying to portray Hitler as the young and energetic face—the future—standing next to General Ludendorff, who many people on the radical right all over Germany hoped would head a national revolution.16 For the next twenty years, until Hitler would suddenly reinstate a Bilderverbot in 1943, Hoffmann and his fellow propagandists would carefully stage photographs and film footage of him that would turn him into an icon. The resulting iconography has been so powerful that it dominates our image of Hitler to the present day.
Hitler’s radical recasting of his public image in anticipation of an imminent national revolution went much further than the reversal of his previous Bilderverbot. In an attempt to boost his standing among conservatives in the rest of the country, he decided to publish a selection of his speeches in book form—the collection of speeches purged of negative references to the United States—that was aimed at pitching himself toward a conservative readership. Hitler also decided to write a biographical sketch of his life to precede his speeches in the book, to sell the idea that he was Germany’s savior-in-waiting. After writing the nine-page sketch, he gave it to his close associate Josef Stolzing-Czerny—an Austrian-born journalist and National Socialist who would also help Hitler bring Mein Kampf into shape—for copyediting.17
The sketch—which constitutes the first published Hitler biography—tells the life of Adolf Hitler from his years in Vienna to 1923. It narrates how his experiences as a manual worker in Vienna provided him with revelations about the nature of politics and about how Germany could be saved. It claims that Hitler had fully developed all his major ideas by the time he was twenty. As the book was aimed at a conservative readership, it sought to demonstrate how Hitler’s experiences had taught him that workers and the bourgeoisie needed to be brought together under one roof. For him, they were all workers: some used their hands, others their head. The sketch also makes the case that all Germans, both inside and outside the country’s current borders, should be brought together under one roof. It celebrates the idealism and sacrifice of Germans as the antithesis of the activities of “international Jewish Mammonism.” And it makes the promise to Germans, both figuratively and literally, to bring back the colors of the prewar German Reich—black, white, and red: “We will give the German people the old colors back in a new form.”
The biographical sketch also tells the story of how Hitler had been an unusually brave soldier on the western front, and yet in his sentiments had been the personification of Germany’s unknown soldier. Well in line with what Hitler would write in Mein Kampf, it presents his time at Pasewalk at the end of the war as the moment that transformed him into a leader, and tells the story of his purported attempted arrest by Red Guardists as well as his task as an “educa
tion officer” in 1919. Next, it falsely presents Hitler as one of the seven founders of the NSDAP. It culminates in an account of the growth of the movement between 1919 and 1923, arguing that deliverance for Germany was nigh, as Hitler would be the nation’s savior.18
As writing a self-laudatory biographical sketch himself would hardly go over well with traditional conservatives, Hitler decided that it would be more appropriate to find a conservative writer, one without any prior involvement with National Socialism, who would agree to lend his name to the sketch and claim to be the compiler and commentator of the speeches.19 In other words, Hitler wrote an autobiography but sought to publish it as a biography under somebody else’s name so as to boost his profile in anticipation of a national revolution. Finding a conservative writer willing to pretend to be the author of the first ever published Hitler biography would come with a double payoff: Hitler’s shameless act of self-promotion would be concealed, while the impression would be created that he already was in receipt of widespread support among traditional conservatives.20
Since, with the facilitation of Erwin von Scheubner-Richter, Hitler and Erich Ludendorff had been liaising ever more frequently about the need to trigger a national revolution,21 Hitler turned to the retired general for help in finding a pretend author for his book. Ludendorff was happy to oblige and put Hitler in touch with a young man whom he knew well: Victor von Koerber.
The blue-eyed and blond young aristocrat fit the bill perfectly. Koerber was a military hero and writer who felt attracted by the promise of a new conservatism that would bridge old-style conservatism with National Socialism. Two years younger than Hitler, he hailed from an aristocratic Protestant family based in West Prussia, one of the heartlands of German conservatism. He had been raised on the island of Rügen in the Baltic Sea, where his father had served as a district governor, and subsequently had opted for the career of a professional soldier and officer in elite units. In 1912, Koerber had trained as one of the first fighter pilots in the Prussian armed forces. Yet, as his real passions had been of a literary kind, prior to the First World War he had left the armed forces and, in Saxony’s capital, Dresden, had embarked on a new career as a poet, playwright, and art critic. He also had traveled widely around Europe. During the war, he had reentered the military, first serving on the western front before being transferred to the headquarters of the air force in Berlin, where he had headed the press department. In 1917, he had been demobilized for health reasons and had returned to Dresden before moving to Munich in the spring of 1918.22