Hitler

by Ian Kershaw

  The Reichstag elections that took place on 7 December demonstrated just how marginal this perpetual squabbling in the völkisch movement was to the overall shaping of German politics. The NSFB won only 3 per cent of the vote. It had lost over a million votes compared with the völkisch showing in the May election. Its Reichstag representation fell from thirty-two to fourteen seats, only four of whom were National Socialists. It was a disastrous result. But it pleased Hitler. In his absence, völkisch politics had collapsed, but his own claims to leadership had, in the process, been strengthened. The election result also had the advantage of encouraging the Bavarian government to regard the danger from the extreme Right as past. There was now, it seemed, no need for undue concern about Hitler’s release from Landsberg, for which his supporters had been clamouring since October.

  Only political bias explains the determination of the Bavarian judiciary to insist upon Hitler’s early release, despite the well-reasoned opposition of the Munich police and the state prosecutor’s office. On 20 December, at 12.15 p.m., he was released. A calculation in the files of the state prosecution office noted that he had three years, 333 days, twenty-one hours, fifty minutes of his short sentence still to serve. History would have taken a different course had he been made to serve it.

  The prison staff, all sympathetic to Hitler, gathered to bid their famous prisoner an emotional farewell. He paused for photographs by the gates of the old fortress town, hurrying his photographer, Heinrich Hoffmann, because of the cold, then was gone. Within two hours, he was back at his Munich apartment in Thierschstraße, greeted by friends with garlands of flowers, and nearly knocked over by his dog, Wolf. Hitler said later that he did not know what to do with his first evening of freedom. Politically, he continued at first to remain publicly non-committal. He needed to take stock of the situation in view of the months of internecine warfare in the völkisch movement. More important, it was necessary in order to establish with the Bavarian authorities the conditions for his re-entry into politics and to ensure that the ban on the NSDAP was lifted. Now that he was released, serious preparation for his party’s new start could begin.

  II

  ‘Landsberg’, Hitler told Hans Frank, was his ‘university paid for by the state’. He read, he said, everything he could get hold of: Nietzsche, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Ranke, Treitschke, Marx, Bismarck’s Gedanken und Erinnerungen (Thoughts and Memories), and the war memoirs of German and Allied generals and statesmen. Other than dealing with visitors and answering correspondence – neither of which preoccupied him much once he had withdrawn from public involvement in politics in the summer – the long days of enforced idleness in Landsberg were ideal for reading and reflection. But Hitler’s reading and reflection were anything but academic. Doubtless he did read much. However, reading, for him, had purely an instrumental purpose. He read not for knowledge or enlightenment, but for confirmation of his own preconceptions. He found what he was looking for. As he remarked to Hans Frank – the party’s legal expert who would eventually become Governor General in occupied Poland – through the reading he did in Landsberg, ‘I recognized the correctness of my views.’

  Sitting in his cell in Nuremberg many years later, Frank adjudged the year 1924 to have been one of the most decisive turning-points in Hitler’s life. This was an exaggeration. Landsberg was not so much a turning-point as a period in which Hitler inwardly consolidated and rationalized for himself the ‘world-view’ he had been developing since 1919 and, in some significant ways, modifying in the year or so before the putsch. As the Nazi Movement fell apart in his absence, and with time on his hands, away from the hurly-burly of active politics, Hitler could scarcely avoid ruminating on past mistakes. And, expecting his release within months, he was even more strongly compelled to look to the way forward for himself and his broken movement. During this time, he revised in certain respects his views on how to attain power. In so doing, his perception of himself changed. He came to think of his own role in a different way. In the wake of the triumph of his trial, he began to see himself, as his followers had started to portray him from the end of 1922 onwards, as Germany’s saviour. In the light of the putsch, one might have expected his self-belief to be crushed once and for all. On the contrary: it was elevated beyond measure. His almost mystical faith in himself as walking with destiny, with a ‘mission’ to rescue Germany, dates from this time.

  At the same time, there was an important adjustment to another aspect of his ‘world-view’. Ideas which had been taking shape in his mind since late 1922, if not earlier, on the direction of future foreign policy were now elaborated into the notion of a quest for ‘living space’, to be gained at the expense of Russia. Blended into his obsessive antisemitism, aimed at the destruction of ‘Jewish Bolshevism’, the concept of a war for ‘living space’ – an idea which Hitler would repeatedly emphasize in the following years – rounded off his ‘world-view’. Thereafter, there would be tactical adjustments, but no further alteration of substance. Landsberg was no ‘Jordan conversion’ for Hitler. In the main, it was a matter of adding new emphases to the few basic idées fixes already formed, at least in embryo, or clearly taking shape in the years before the putsch.

  The modifications in Hitler’s ‘world-view’ that were already forming in the year before the putsch are clearly evident in Mein Kampf. Hitler’s book offered nothing new. But it was the plainest and most expansive statement of his ‘world-view’ that he had presented. He acknowledged that without his stay in Landsberg the book which after 1933 (though not before) would sell in its millions would never have been written. No doubt he hoped for financial gain from the book. But his main motivation was the need he felt, as during his trial, to demonstrate his own special calling, and to justify his programme as the only possible way of rescuing Germany from the catastrophe brought about by the ‘November Criminals’.

  Hitler was already at work on what would become the first volume by May 1924, building upon ideas formed during and immediately after his trial. He called his book at that time by the scarcely catchy title ‘Four and a Half Years of Struggle against Lies, Stupidity, and Cowardice’, which gave way to the more pithy Mein Kampf (My Struggle) only in spring 1925. By then, the book had undergone major structural changes. The initial intention of a ‘reckoning’ with the ‘traitors’ responsible for his downfall in 1923 never materialized. Instead, the first volume, which appeared on 18 July 1925, was largely autobiographical – though with many distortions and inaccuracies – ending with Hitler’s triumph at the announcement of the Party Programme in the Hofbräuhaus on 24 February 1920. The second volume, written after his release and published on 11 December 1926, dealt more extensively with his ideas on the nature of the völkisch state, questions of ideology, propaganda, and organization, concluding with chapters on foreign policy.

  The presumption, widespread at the time and persisting later, that Hitler at first dictated the indigestible prose to his chauffeur and general dogsbody, Emil Maurice, later to Rudolf Heß (both of whom were also serving sentences for their part in the putsch), is wide of the mark. Hitler typed the drafts of the first volume himself (though some of the second volume was dictated to a secretary). Badly written and rambling as the published version of Mein Kampf was, the text had, in fact, been subjected to innumerable stylistic ‘improvements’ since the original composition. The typescript was read by the culture critic of the Völkischer Beobachter, Josef Stolzing-Cerny, and at least parts of it by the future wife of Rudolf Heß, Ilse Pröhl. Both made editorial changes. Others were by Hitler himself. According to Hans Frank, Hitler accepted that the book was badly written, and described it as no more than a collection of leading articles for the Völkischer Beobachter.

  Before Hitler came to power, Mein Kampf, brought out in the party’s own publishing house, the Franz Eher-Verlag, run by Max Amann, was scarcely the runaway bestseller he had apparently expected it to be. Its turgid content, dreadful style, and relatively high price of 12 Reich Marks a volume ev
idently deterred many potential readers. By 1929, the first volume had sold around 23,000 copies, the second only 13,000. Sales increased sharply following the NSDAP’s electoral successes after 1930, and reached 80,000 in 1932. From 1933, they rose stratospherically. One and a half million copies were sold that year. Even the blind could read it – should they have wished to do so – once a braille version had been published in 1936. And from that year, a copy of the people’s edition of both volumes bound together was given to each happy couple on their wedding day. Some 10 million copies were sold by 1945, not counting the millions sold abroad, where Mein Kampf was translated into sixteen languages. How many people actually read it is unknown. For Hitler, it was of little importance. Having from the early 1920s described himself in official documents as a ‘writer’, he could well afford in 1933 to refuse his Reich Chancellor’s salary (in contrast, he pointed out, to his predecessors): Mein Kampf had made him a very rich man.

  No policy outline was offered in Mein Kampf. But the book did provide, however garbled the presentation, an uncompromising statement of Hitler’s political principles, his ‘world-view’, his sense of his own ‘mission’, his ‘vision’ of society, and his long-term aims. Not least, it established the basis of the Führer myth. For in Mein Kampf, Hitler portrayed himself as uniquely qualified to lead Germany from its existing misery to greatness.

  Mein Kampf gives an important insight into his thinking in the mid-1920s. By then, he had developed a philosophy that afforded him a complete interpretation of history, of the ills of the world, and how to overcome them. Tersely summarized, it boiled down to a simplistic, Manichean view of history as racial struggle, in which the highest racial entity, the aryan, was being undermined and destroyed by the lowest, the parasitic Jew. ‘The racial question,’ he wrote, ‘gives the key not only to world history but to all human culture.’ The culmination of this process was taken to be the brutal rule of the Jews through Bolshevism in Russia, where the ‘blood Jew’ had, ‘partly amid inhuman torture killed or let starve to death around 30 million people in truly satanic savagery in order to secure the rule over a great people of a bunch of Jewish literati and stock-market bandits’. The ‘mission’ of the Nazi Movement was, therefore, clear: to destroy ‘Jewish Bolshevism’. At the same time – a leap of logic that moved conveniently into a justification for outright imperialist conquest – this would provide the German people with the ‘living space’ needed for the ‘master race’ to sustain itself. He held rigidly to these basic tenets for the rest of his life. Nothing of substance changed in later years. The very inflexibility and quasi-messianic commitment to an ‘idea’, a set of beliefs that were unalterable, simple, internally consistent, and comprehensive, gave Hitler the strength of will and sense of knowing his own destiny that left its mark on all those who came into contact with him. Hitler’s authority in his entourage derived in no small measure from the certainty in his own convictions that he could so forcefully express. Everything could be couched in terms of black and white, victory or total destruction. There were no alternatives. And, like all ideologues and ‘conviction politicians’, the self-reinforcing components of his ‘world-view’ meant that he was always in a position to deride or dismiss out of hand any ‘rational’ arguments of opponents. Once head of state, Hitler’s personalized ‘world-view’ would serve as ‘guidelines for action’ for policy-makers in all areas of the Third Reich.

  Hitler’s book was not a prescriptive programme in the sense of a short-term political manifesto. But many contemporaries made a mistake in treating Mein Kampf with ridicule and not taking the ideas Hitler expressed there extremely seriously. However base and repellent they were, they amounted to a set of clearly established and rigidly upheld political principles. Hitler never saw any reason to alter the content of what he had written. Their internal coherence (given the irrational premises) allows them to be described as an ideology (or, in Hitler’s own terminology, a ‘world-view’). Hitler’s ‘world-view’ in Mein Kampf can now be more clearly seen than used to be possible in the context of his ideas as they unfolded between his entry into politics and the writing of his ‘Second Book’ in 1928.

  On Hitler’s central, overriding, and all-embracing obsession, the ‘removal of the Jews’, Mein Kampf added nothing to the ideas he had already formulated by 1919–20. Extreme though the language of Mein Kampf was, it was no different to that which he had been proclaiming for years. Nor, for that matter, did the inherently genocidal terminology substantially vary from that of other writers and speakers on the völkisch Right, extending well back beyond the First World War. His bacterial imagery implied that Jews should be treated in the way germs were dealt with: by extermination. Already in August 1920, Hitler had spoken of combating ‘racial tuberculosis’ through removal of the ‘causal agent, the Jew’. And there could be little doubt whom Hitler had in mind when, four years later in Mein Kampf, he wrote: ‘The nationalization of our masses will succeed only when, aside from all the positive struggle for the soul of our people, their international poisoners are exterminated.’ The notion of poisoning the poisoners ran through another, notorious, passage of Mein Kampf, in which Hitler suggested that if 12–15,000 ‘Hebrew corrupters of the people’ had been held under poison gas at the start of the First World War, then ‘the sacrifice of millions at the front would not have been in vain’. These terrible passages are not the beginning of a one-way track to the ‘Final Solution’. The road there was ‘twisted’, not straight. But however little he had thought out the practical implications of what he was saying, its inherent genocidal thrust is undeniable. However indistinctly, the connection between destruction of the Jews, war, and national salvation had been forged in Hitler’s mind.

  As we remarked, the initial anti-capitalist colouring of Hitler’s antisemitism had given way by mid-1920 to the connection in his mind of the Jews with the evils of Soviet Bolshevism. It was not that Hitler substituted the image of the Jews behind Marxism for that of the Jews behind capitalism. Both coexisted in his fixated loathing. It was a hatred so profound that it could only have been based on deep fear. This was of a figure in his mind so powerful that it was the force behind both international finance capital and Soviet Communism. It was the image of a ‘Jewish world conspiracy’ that was almost unconquerable – even for National Socialism.

  Once the link with Bolshevism was made, Hitler had established his central and lasting vision of a titanic battle for supremacy, a racial struggle against a foe of ruthless brutality. What he visualized, he had stated in June 1922, was a fight to the death between two competing ideologies, the idealistic and the materialistic. The mission of the German people was to destroy Bolshevism, and with it ‘our mortal enemy: the Jew’. By October the same year he was writing of a life and death struggle of two opposed world-views, incapable of existing alongside one another. Defeat in this great showdown would seal Germany’s destruction. The struggle would leave only victors and the annihilated. It meant a war of extermination. ‘A victory of the Marxist idea signifies the complete extermination of the opponents,’ he remarked. ‘The Bolshevization of Germany … means the complete annihilation of the entire Christian-western culture.’ Correspondingly, the aim of National Socialism could be simply defined: ‘Annihilation and extermination of the Marxist Weltanschauung.’

  By now Marxism and the Jew were synonymous in Hitler’s mind. At the end of his trial, on 27 March 1924, he had told the court that what he wanted to be was the breaker of Marxism. The Nazi Movement knew only one enemy, he had emphasized the following month – the mortal enemy of the whole of mankind: Marxism. There was no mention of the Jews. Some newspapers picked up the change of emphasis and claimed Hitler had altered his position on the ‘Jewish Question’. There were Nazi followers who were also puzzled. One, visiting him in Landsberg at the end of July, asked Hitler whether he had changed his views about Jewry. He received a characteristic reply. Indeed his position on the struggle against Jewry had altered, Hitler remarked. He had real
ized while at work on Mein Kampf that he had up to then been too mild. In future, only the toughest measures could be deployed if success were to be attained. The ‘Jewish Question’, he declared, was an existential matter for all peoples, not just the German people, ‘for Juda is the world plague’. The logic of the position was that only the complete eradication of the international power of Jewry would suffice.

  Hitler’s obsession with the ‘Jewish Question’ was inextricably interwoven with his notions of foreign policy. Once his antisemitism had, by the middle of 1920, fused with anti-Bolshevism into the image of ‘Jewish Bolshevism’, it was inevitable that his thinking on foreign policy would be affected. However, not only ideological influences, but questions of pure power politics shaped Hitler’s changing position. In their concentration on France as the arch-enemy, hostility to Britain, recovery of colonies, and the restoration of Germany’s borders of 1914, Hitler’s early views on foreign policy were conventionally pan-German. They were no different from those of many nationalist hotheads. In fact, in essence (if not in the extreme way they were advanced) they accorded with a revisionism that enjoyed wide popular backing. Nor, in his emphasis on military might to overthrow Versailles and defeat France, however unrealistic it sounded in the early 1920s, did he differ from many others on the Pan-German and völkisch Right. Already in 1920, before he had heard of Fascism, he was contemplating the value of an alliance with Italy. He was determined even then that the question of South Tyrol – the predominantly German-speaking part of the former Austrian province of Tyrol lying beyond the Brenner, ceded to Italy in 1919, and since then subjected to a programme of ‘Italianization’ – would not stand in the way of such an alliance. By late 1922, an alliance with Britain, whose world empire he admired, was in his mind. This idea had sharpened in 1923 when the disagreements of the British and French over the Ruhr occupation became clear.