by Thomas Weber
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Hitler’s Damascene moment—the signing of the Versailles Treaty and its subsequent ratification: Germany’s acceptance of the treaty compelled Hitler’s delayed realization that Germany had lost the war. Two questions would torment him until his death: Why did Germany lose the war? And how must Germany recast itself to survive in a rapidly changing world?
Credit: United States National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, MD
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Karl Mayr, Hitler’s paternal mentor, in the summer of 1919: Mayr opened Pandora’s box when he took Hitler under his wing. He soon lost control over Hitler and died in a Nazi concentration camp in 1945.
Credit: Bayerische Staatsbiliothek, Fotoarchiv Hoffmann, Munich
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Camp Lechfeld: Hitler represented his propaganda work for Mayr in Lechfeld and elsewhere as an absolute success. The reality could not have been more different. At Lechfeld, he was not even allowed near the soldiers he was supposed to address.
Credit: Thomas Weber, Aberdeen
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Hitler’s savior, Georg König, aka Michael Keogh, an Irish volunteer in the German forces: Keogh rescued Hitler from being beaten up by the soldiers he addressed at Munich’s Türken Barracks.
Credit: Kevin Keogh, Dublin
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A home at last: It was in the Leiber Room of the Sternecker Beer Hall at a meeting of the German Workers’ Party on September 12, 1919, that Hitler finally found like-minded people who responded enthusiastically to his ideas and accepted him for who he was.
Credit: Bayerische Staatsbiliothek, Fotoarchiv Hoffmann, Munich
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Dietrich Eckart, Hitler’s longtime paternal mentor: Hitler barely acknowledged Eckart’s influence, as he was trying to present himself as an entirely self-made man and a genius.
Credit: Gerd Heidemann, Fotoarchiv Hoffmann, Hamburg
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Alfred Rosenberg, one of Hitler’s chief advisers: Even though people close to Hitler referred to Rosenberg as an “undernourished gaslight” for his cold, expressionless, and sarcastic personality, his influence on Hitler was enormous. Under Rosenberg and Eckart, Hitler pivoted from predominantly anticapitalist Jew-hatred to conspirational anti-Semitism, believing that Bolshevism was a Jewish financiers’ ploy.
Credit: Gerd Heidemann, Fotoarchiv Hoffmann, Hamburg
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Hitler with Grand Duchess Victoria Feodorovna of Russia in 1923: Hitler’s racism was not initially directed at Slavs. He believed that a permanent alliance with a restored Russian monarchy would put Germany on equal footing with the Anglo-American world and ensure the country’s survival. He thus collaborated with Victoria’s husband, Grand Duke Kirill, one of the pretenders to the Russian throne.
Credit: Bayerische Staatsbiliothek, Fotoarchiv Hoffmann, Munich
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“The German Girl from New York”: Helene Hanfstaengl: In 1923, at a time when Munich’s political and social establishment still shunned him, Hitler felt emotionally close to Helene Hanfstaengl, whose apartment was for him a home away from home.
Credit: Bayerische Staatsbiliothek, Fotoarchiv Hoffmann, Munich
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Hitler at the 1923 party rally, in January 1923: As Hitler refused to be photographed, only a small number of blurry photographs exist of his political activities between 1919 and the summer of 1924.
Credit: Bayerische Staatsbiliothek, Fotoarchiv Hoffmann, Munich
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The SA during the 1923 party rally: Brown shirts were only introduced in the mid-1920s. SA members initially wore makeshift uniforms.
Credit: Gerd Heidemann, Fotoarchiv Hoffmann, Hamburg
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National Socialist activist in northern Bavaria in early 1923: Due to Germany’s deteriorating political crisis, National Socialists lived in anticipation of an imminent national revolution.
Credit: Gerd Heidemann, Fotoarchiv Hoffmann, Hamburg
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“What does Hitler look like?”: As no public photos of Hitler existed due to his refusal to be photographed, the German satirical magazine Simplicissimus speculated in 1923 as to what Hitler might look like.
Credit: Simplicissimus
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Viktor von Koerber (right): The purported author of Hitler’s first book, standing next to General Erich Ludendorff.
Credit: University of the Witwatersrand, Historical Papers Research Archive, Johannesburg
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Hitler’s first book: Hitler realized that he would not be able to head a national revolution if no one knew what he looked like and what his convictions were. He thus wrote an autobiographical sketch and sold it under Koerber’s name as a biography.
Credit: Eva Weig, Konstanz
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An icon is born: In the late summer of 1923, Hitler had portraits of himself taken and distributed as postcards.
Credit: Gerd Heidemann, Fotoarchiv Hoffmann, Hamburg
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National Socialists preparing for their attempted putsch on November 9, 1923: No photos were taken of Hitler during the putsch.
Credit: Gerd Heidemann, Fotoarchiv Hoffmann, Hamburg
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Hitler invents his own past: The fact that no photos were taken of Hitler during the putsch allowed Nazi propagandists later to represent his role as more prominent and heroic than it was.
Credit: Gerd Heidemann, Fotoarchiv Hoffmann, Hamburg
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All eyes are on Ludendorff: Photograph from the trial following the failed putsch. The putsch was originally known as “the Ludendorff putsch,” or at best as “the Ludendorff-Hitler putsch,” and Hitler was recognized as the man standing in Ludendorff’s shadow.
Credit: Gerd Heidemann, Fotoarchiv Hoffmann, Hamburg
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Hitler in Landsberg fortress in 1924: In captivity, he lived a comfortable life and had time to reassess and change his plans on how to build a safe Germany.
Credit: Staatsbibliothek
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“The Ludendorff putsch” becomes “the Hitler putsch”: Hitler cleverly used his trial to achieve in defeat what he had not managed to accomplish previously: to establish himself as a prominent national figure.
Credit: Gerd Heidemann, Fotoarchiv Hoffmann, Hamburg
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Advertisement for Hitler’s book written at Landsberg: He only later shortened the title to Mein Kampf. The nature of Hitler’s racism had radically changed, as he now advocated grabbing land in the east and enslaving and annihilating its populations.
Credit: Bayerische Staatsbiliothek, Fotoarchiv Hoffmann, Munich
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Hitler after his release from Landsberg fortress in December 1924.
Credit: Bayerische Staatsbiliothek, Fotoarchiv Hoffmann, Munich
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The railway line leading into Auschwitz: The road from Landsberg to Auschwitz was long, but less twisted than commonly believed.
Credit: Robert Jan van Pelt, Toronto
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Lewis Rubenstein’s rendering of Hitler as Alberich: Impressive as it is, this image of the spiteful dwarf of Wagner’s Ring Cycle, at the Center for European Studies at Harvard, misrepresents Hitler by reducing him to an opportunist for whom nothing but lust for power and domination matters.
Credit: Thomas Weber, Aberdeen
Acknowledgments
This book started its life over two meals, one with Christian Seeger in Berlin and one with Robert Jan van Pelt in Toronto. It is due to their inspiration that I embarked on a quest to make sense of how Hitler became a Nazi and emerged as a demagogue.
I could not have completed this quest without the intellectual stimulation, support and encouragement of my friends and colleagues at Aberdeen and at Harvard. The Center for European Studies, the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, and
Lowell House at Harvard, as well as the Department of History and the Centre for Global Security and Governance in Aberdeen, come as close to intellectual paradise as I can imagine.
It is through the enormous generosity of the Fritz Thyssen Stiftung, the British Academy, and the School of Divinity, History and Philosophy at Aberdeen that I have been able to write my book.
I am in particular indebted to Richard Millman, Ulrich Schlie, Jonathan Steinberg, Cora Stephan, and Heidi Tworek for reading and commenting on the manuscript of this book. I also greatly benefited from feedback on some of my chapters by Niall Ferguson, Carsten Fischer, Karin Friedrich, Robert Frost, Jamie Hallé, Tony Heywood, Nicole Jordan, Carolin Lange, Marius Mazziotti, Ian Mitchell, Mishka Sinha, Niki Stein, and Daniel Ziblatt.
I am immensely grateful for the feedback I received on talks about my research at Harvard, the Central European University, Cambridge University, Edinburgh University, the Universities of Aberdeen, Bonn, Freiburg, Mainz, and St. Andrews, University College Dublin, the Fritz Thyssen Stiftung Herbstfest, the Austrian Embassy in Paris, the Hessische and Bayerische Landeszentralen für politische Bildung, the Wiener Library, the Hay Festival, the Stadt Nürnberg, the Stadt Stuttgart, and the Körber Forum in Hamburg. I am also grateful to the late Frank Schirrmacher for letting me try out some of my evolving ideas on Hitler in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.
This book could not have been written had it not been for the indefatigable work of my two stellar research assistants, Marius Mazziotti and Calum White, as well as all the conversations I have had over the years with my PhD student Kolja Kröger. I have also greatly benefited from advice and help I received from more people than can be listed, among them Florian Beierl, Hanspeter Beisser, Ermenegildo Bidese, Robert Bierschneider, John Birke, Hark Bohm, Julian Bourg, Norman Domeier, Henrik Eberle, Helmut Eschweiler, Annette Fischer, Hal Fisher, Peter Fleischmann, Astrid Freyeisen, Bernhard Fulda, Detlef Garz, Jürgen Genuneit, Robert Gerwarth, Nassir Ghaemi, Cordula von Godin, Manfred Görtemaker, Adrian Gregory, Thomas Gruber, Franz Haselbeck, Gerd Heidemann, Andreas Heusler, Gerhard Hirschfeld, Peter Holquist, Paul Hoser, Michael Ignatieff, Albert Jacob, Harold James, Paul Jankowski, Heather Jones, Mark Jones, Nicole Jordan, Hendrik Kafsack, Miriam Katzenberger, Kevin Keogh, Sven Felix Kellerhoff, Johannes Kemser, Yacob Kiwkowitz, Susanne Klingenstein, Michael Kloft, Michael Koß, Florian Krause, Sylvia Krauss, Gerd Krumeich, Carolin Lange, Klaus Lankheit, Jörn Leonhard, Christiane Liermann, Eberhard von Lochner, Arnulf Lüers, Birte Marquardt, Thomas McGrath, Charles Maier, Michael Miller, Jörg Müllner, William Mulligan, Sönke Neitzel, Mikael Nilsson, Muireann O’Cinneide, Martin Oestreicher, Ernst Piper, Avi Primor, Wolfram Pyta, Nancy Ramage, Ralf-Georg Reuth, Joachim Riecker, Daniel Rittenauer, Chloe Ross, Thomas Schmid, Maximilian Schreiber, Thomas Schütte, Eugene Sheppard, Brendan Simms, Nick Stargardt, Thomas Staehler, Reinout Stegenga, Guido Treffler, Paul Tucker, Howard Tyson, Ben Urwand, Antoine Vitkine, Dirk Walter, Alexander Watson, Susanne Wanninger, Bernard Wasserstein, my namesake and Gandhi scholar Thomas Weber, Florian Weig, Calum White, Andreas Wirsching, Michael Wolffsohn, Karl-Günter Zelle, Benjamin Ziemann, and Moshe Zimmermann.
I am also very grateful to Imogen Rhiannon Herrad, Gurmeet Singh, Heidi Tworek, and Ronald Granieri for translating German quotes into English.
I feel privileged to have Clare Alexander and Sally Riley as my book agents. A very special thanks goes to Matthew Cotton and Luciana O’Flaherty at Oxford University Press, Lara Heimert at Basic Books, Christian Seeger at Propyläen, Henk ter Borgh at Nieuw Amsterdam, and their respective teams for turning my manuscript into a book, and in the process improving my manuscript manifold. I would like, in particular, to thank Roger Labrie and Iris Bass, who undertook the Herculean task of line editing and copy editing.
My biggest thanks are reserved for my wonderful wife and daughter. This book is dedicated to Sarah, my wife, companion, and best friend, with eternal love.
Photograph by Sarah Christie
Thomas Weber is Professor of History and International Affairs at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland. The award-winning author of several books, Weber divides his time between Aberdeen, Scotland, and Toronto, Ontario. Visit https://www.thomasweber.co.uk.
More advance praise for Becoming Hitler
“This is the most important book on Hitler and National Socialism since Ian Kershaw’s monumental biography. It is amazing how much new information and documentation Thomas Weber has used to show precisely when, how, and why Hitler’s world view was shaped, and precisely where the intellectual, emotional, and social origins of genocide and of the Holocaust lay. He has precisely recreated the world of Munich in the early 1920s, to show how a burning hostility to internationalism—we would say today globalism—emerged.”
—Harold James, professor of history, Woodrow Wilson School of Public & International Affairs, Princeton University
“In his brilliant Becoming Hitler, Thomas Weber offers an original, well-documented, and enthralling account of the how and why of Hitler’s rapid metamorphosis from zero to self-defined hero in the where of 1919 Munich—a city ripped apart by a short civil war and its vengeful aftermath. Becoming Hitler makes us rethink everything we thought we knew about the emergence of Hitler as a political leader.”
—Robert Jan van Pelt, University of Waterloo, Canada
Abbreviations
• EPE–Eugenio Pacelli Edition
• HFW—Hitler’s First War
• KSR—Kriegsstammrolle (muster roll)
• loc.—location
• MK—Mein Kampf
Please see here, Archival Collections & Private Papers and Interviews, for additional abbreviations.
Archival Collections & Private Papers and Interviews
Archival Collections
Archiv des Erzbistums München und Freising, Munich (AEMF)
Nachlaß Michael von Faulhaber (NMF)
Baltimore Museum of Art, Archive, Baltimore, Maryland (BMA-A)
Cone Papers
Bayerisches Hauptstaatsarchiv, Munich
• Abt. I (BHStA/I): Generaldirektion der Bayerischen Archive
• Abt. IV, Kriegsarchiv (BHStA/IV): files of the 6th Bavarian Reserve Division (RD6); files of the 16th Bavarian Reserve Infantry Regiment (RIR16); files of the 17th Bavarian Reserve Infantry Regiment (RIR17); files of the Reichswehrgruppenkommando 4 (RwGrKdo4); Handschriften (HS); Kriegstammrollen (KSR); Nachlaß Adalbert Prinz von Bayern (NL Adalbert von Bayern); Offiziersakten (Op)
• Abt. V, Nachlässe (BHStA/V): Nachlaß Rudolf Buttmann (NL Buttmann); Nachlaß Josef Grassmann (NL Gramnann); Nachlaß Julius Friedrich Lehmann (NL Lehmann); Nachlaß Otto von Groenesteyn (NL Groenesteyn); Nachlaß Franz Schmitt (NL Schmitt); Nachlaß Bernhard Stempfle (NL Stempfle)
Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich (BSB)
Bildarchiv, Heinrich Hoffmann Collection; Nachlass Elsa and Hugo Bruckmann (NL Bruckmann)
Bundesarchiv Berlin
R 9361 - V/7158/7159, Reichsschrifttumskammer
Bundesarchiv Koblenz
N1270, Nachlaß Fritz Wiedemann (NL Wiedemann)
Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum, Hyde Park, NY
John Toland Papers (RPR-TP)
Institut für Zeitgeschichte, Munich (IFZ)
ED561, Sammlung Hermann Esser; ED874, Sammlung Gottfried Feder; Zeugenschriftum (ZS)
Leo Baeck Institute, New York City (LBI)
Ernst Kantorowicz Collection
Library of Congress, Rare Book and Special Collections Division, Washington DC (LOC), Hitler Collection (LOC/RBSCD)
National Archives of the United States of America, College Park, Md. (NARA)
M1270, Interrogation records prepared for war crimes proceedings at Nuremberg; RG 238, War Crimes Record Collection, Record of the US Nuremberg War; RG 263, records of the Central Intelligence Agency
Staatsarchiv München (SAM)
Polizei Direktion München (PDM); Spruchkammerakten; StA M, Staatsanwaltschaft Mün
chen (StAM),
Schweizerisches Bundesarchiv, Berne (SBA)
Nachlaß Rudolf Heß (NL Heß)
Stadtarchiv Traunstein (SAT),
Akten 1870-1972, 004/1, Wahlen zur Nationalversammlung (1918); Sammlung “Dokumentationen”; Sammlung “Graue Literatur” (GL); Oberbayerische Landeszeitung–Traunsteiner Nachrichten; Traunsteiner Wochenblatt
Stadtarchiv München
Wahlamtsunterlagen
The National Archives, United Kingdom, Kew (TNA)
Cabinet Papers (CAB); Foreign Office files (FO); War Office files Österreichisches Staatsarchiv, Neues Politisches Archiv, Vienna (ÖSNPA)
Liasse Bayern 447
University College Dublin, Archives
Michael McKeogh Papers
University of the Witwatersrand, Historical Papers Research Archive, Johannsburg (Wits)
Collection A807, Victor von Koerber Papers
Yad Vashem, Jerusalem
The Central Database of Shoah Victims’ Names
Private Papers and Interviews
• Interview and correspondence with Cordula von Godin
• Hugo Gutmann Papers, in the possession of Gutmann’s daughter-in-law, Beverly Grant
• Interview with Gerd Heidemann
• Friedrich Lüers Private Papers, in the hands of his son (FLPP)