Hitler

by Ian Kershaw

  In physical appearance, Hitler was little changed from the time before the putsch. Away from the speaker’s podium he looked anything but impressive. His face had hardened. But, as he told Hanfstaengl would be the case, he soon lost the weight he had put on in Landsberg once he started speaking again. Hitler reckoned he lost up to five pounds in weight through perspiration during a big speech. To counter this, his aides insisted on twenty bottles of mineral water being provided at the side of the lectern. His dress sense was anything but stylish. He still often favoured his plain blue suit. His trilby, light-coloured raincoat, leather leggings, and riding-whip gave him – especially when arriving with his bodyguards in the big black six-seater Mercedes convertible he had bought in early 1925 – the appearance of an eccentric gangster. For relaxation, he preferred to wear traditional Bavarian lederhosen. But even when he was in prison, he hated to be seen without a tie. During the heat of the summer, he would never be seen in a bathing costume. Whereas Mussolini revelled in virile images of himself as a sportsman or athlete, Hitler had a deep aversion to being seen other than fully clothed. More than petty-bourgeois proprieties, or prudishness, image was the vital consideration. Anything potentially embarrassing or inviting ridicule was to be avoided at all costs.

  As they had done before the putsch, the Bruckmanns helped him to establish useful contacts in ‘better’ social circles. He had to adjust to a different type of audience from that in the beerhalls – more critical, less amenable to crude sloganizing and emotion. But in essence, little or nothing had changed. Hitler was at ease only when dominating the conversation. His monologues were a cover for his half-baked knowledge. There was no doubting that he had a quick mind and a biting and destructive wit. He formed instant – often damning – judgements on individuals. And the combination of a domineering presence, resort to factual detail (often distorted), for which he had an exceptional memory, and utter conviction (brooking no alternative argument) based on ideological certitude was impressive to those already half-persuaded of his extraordinary qualities. But those with knowledge and critical distance could often quickly see behind his crude arguments. His arrogance was breathtaking. ‘What could I learn that’s new?’ he asked Hanfstaengl, on being encouraged to learn a foreign language and travel abroad.

  Shortly after the Weimar Party Rally, in mid-July 1926, Hitler left Munich with his entourage for a holiday on the Obersalzberg. He stayed in a secluded and beautiful spot situated high in the mountains on the Austrian border above Berchtesgaden, flanked by the Untersberg (where legend had it that the medieval emperor, Frederick Barbarossa, lay sleeping), the Kneifelspitze, and the highest of them, the Watzmann. The scenery was breathtaking. Its monumental grandeur had first captivated Hitler when, under the pseudonym of ‘Herr Wolf ’, he had visited Dietrich Eckart there in the winter of 1922–3. The Büchners, owners of the Pension Moritz where he stayed, were early supporters of the Movement. He liked them, and could enjoy in this mountain retreat a level of seclusion which he could never expect in Munich. He had, he later recalled, gone there in 1925 when he needed peace and quiet to dictate parts of the second volume of Mein Kampf. Whenever he could in the next two years, he returned to the Obersalzberg. Then he learnt that an alpine house there, Haus Wachenfeld, belonging to the widow of a north German businessman, was available to let. The widow, whose maiden name had been Wachenfeld, was a party member. He was offered a favourable price of 100 Marks a month. Soon, he was in a position to buy it. That the widow was in financial difficulties at the time helped. Hitler had his summer retreat. He could look down from his ‘magic mountain’ and see himself bestriding the world. In the Third Reich, at enormous cost to the state, Haus Wachenfeld would be turned into the massive complex known as the Berghof, a palace befitting a modern dictator, and a second seat of government for those ministers who each year had to set up residence nearby if they had a hope of contacting the head of state and expediting government business. Before that, on renting Haus Wachenfeld back in 1928, Hitler had – rather surprisingly since they had never been close – telephoned his half-sister Angela Raubal in Vienna and asked her to keep house for him. She agreed, and soon brought her daughter, a lively and attractive twenty-year-old, also named Angela, though known to all as Geli, to stay with her. Three years later, Geli was to be found dead in Hitler’s flat in Munich.

  While dictating the last chapters of Mein Kampf during his stay on the Obersalzberg in summer 1926, Hitler had, as we saw, consolidated his thinking on foreign policy, especially the acquisition of territory in the east. This idea, especially, was to dominate his speeches and writings of the mid-1920s. However, he was skilful in tailoring his speeches to his audience, as he showed in an important speech he delivered a few months earlier. Hopes of gaining financial support and of winning influential backing for his party had made him keen to accept the invitation of the prestigious Hamburger Nationalklub to address its members in the elegant Hotel Atlantic on 28 February 1926. It was not his usual audience. Here, he faced a socially exclusive club whose 400–450 members were drawn from Hamburg’s upper bourgeoisie – many of them high-ranking officers, civil servants, lawyers, and businessmen. His tone was different from that he used in the Munich beerhalls. In his two-hour speech, he made not a single mention of the Jews. He was well aware that the primitive antisemitic rantings that roused the masses in the Zircus Krone would be counter-productive in this audience. Instead, the emphasis was placed entirely on the need to eliminate Marxism as the prerequisite of Germany’s recovery. By ‘Marxism’, Hitler did not merely mean the German Communist Party, which had attained only 9 per cent of the vote at the last Reichstag election, in December 1924. Beyond the KPD, the term served to invoke the bogy of Soviet Communism, brought into power by a Revolution less than a decade earlier, and followed by a civil war whose atrocities had been emblazoned across a myriad of right-wing publications. ‘Marxism’ had even wider application. Hitler was also subsuming under this rubric all brands of socialism other than the ‘national’ variety he preached, and using it in particular to attack the SPD and trade unionism. In fact, to the chagrin of some of its followers, the SPD – still Germany’s largest political party – had moved in practice far from its theoretical Marxist roots, and was wedded to upholding the liberal democracy it had been instrumental in calling into being in 1918–19. No ‘Marxist’ apocalypse threatened from that quarter. But Hitler’s rhetoric had, of course, long branded those responsible for the Revolution and the Republic which followed it ‘the November Criminals’. ‘Marxism’ was, therefore, also convenient shorthand to denigrate Weimar democracy. And to his well-heeled bourgeois audience in Hamburg, anti-Marxist to the core, his verbal assault on the Left was music to the ears.

  Hitler reduced it to a simple formula: if the Marxist ‘world-view’ was not ‘eradicated’, Germany would never rise again. The task of the National Socialist Movement was straightforward: ‘the smashing and annihilation of the Marxist Weltanschauung’. Terror must be met with terror. The bourgeoisie itself was incapable of defeating the threat of Bolshevism. It needed a mass movement as intolerant as that of the Marxists themselves to do it. Winning the masses rested on two premisses. The first was to recognize their social concerns. But in case his audience thought this was back-door Marxism, Hitler was quick to reassure them: social legislation demanded ‘the promotion of the welfare of the individual in a framework that guaranteed retention of an independent economy’. ‘We are all workers,’ he stated. ‘The aim is not to get higher and higher wages, but to increase production, because that is to the advantage of each individual.’ His audience was unlikely to disagree with such sentiments. The second premiss was to offer the masses ‘a programme that is unalterable, a political faith that is unshakeable’. The usual party programmes, manifestos, and philosophies of bourgeois parties would not win them over. Hitler’s contempt for the masses was plain. ‘The broad mass is feminine,’ he stated, ‘one-sided in its attitude; it knows only the hard “either-or”.’ It wa
nted only a single viewpoint upheld – but then with all available means, and, he added, now mixing his genders and pointing to what is normally taken to be a more masculine characteristic, ‘does not shrink from using force’. What the mass had to feel was its own strength. Among a crowd of 200,000 in Berlin’s Lustgarten, the individual felt no more than ‘a small worm’, subject to mass-suggestion, aware only of those around him being prepared to fight for an ideal. ‘The broad masses are blind and stupid and don’t know what they are doing,’ he claimed. They were ‘primitive in attitude’. For them, ‘understanding’ offered only a ‘shaky platform’. ‘What is stable is emotion: hatred.’ The more Hitler preached intolerance, force, and hatred, as the solution to Germany’s problems, the more his audience liked it. He was interrupted on numerous occasions during these passages with cheers and shouts of ‘bravo’. At the end there was a lengthy ovation, and cries of ‘Heil’.

  National revival through terroristic anti-Marxism built on the cynical manipulation and indoctrination of the masses: that was the sum total of Hitler’s message to the upper-crust of the Hamburg bourgeoisie. Nationalism and anti-Marxism were scarcely peculiarities of the Nazis alone. Nor did they amount in themselves to much of an ideology. What distinguished Hitler’s approach to his Hamburg audience was not the ideas themselves, but the impression of fanatical will, utter ruthlessness, and the creation of a nationalist movement resting on the support of the masses. And it was plain from the enthusiastic response that selective terror deployed against ‘Marxists’ would meet with little or no opposition from the élite of Germany’s most liberal city.

  Back among his ‘own sort’, little or nothing had changed. The tone was very different from that adopted in Hamburg. In closed party meetings or, after the speaking ban had been lifted in early 1927, once more in Munich beerhalls and the Circus Krone, the attacks on the Jews were as vicious and unconstrained as ever. In speech after speech, as before the putsch, he launched brutal assaults against the Jews, bizarrely depicted both as the wire-pullers of finance capital and as poisoning the people with subversive Marxist doctrine. Explicit attacks on the Jews occurred more frequently and extensively in 1925 and 1926 than in the subsequent two years. Antisemitism seemed now rather more ritualist or mechanistic. The main stress had moved to anti-Marxism. But only the presentation of his ideas had been modified to some extent; their meaning had not. His pathological hatred of Jews was unchanged. ‘The Jew is and remains the world enemy,’ he once more asserted in an article in the Völkischer Beobachter in February 1927, ‘and his weapon, Marxism, a plague of mankind.’

  Between 1926 and 1928, Hitler became more preoccupied with the ‘question of [living] space’ (Raumfrage) and ‘land policy’ (Bodenpolitik). Though, as we have seen, the idea of an eastern ‘land policy’ at the expense of Russia had been present in Hitler’s mind at the latest by the end of 1922, he had mentioned it in his public statements – written or spoken – only on a handful of occasions before the end of 1926. He referred in a speech on 16 December 1925 to the ‘acquisition of land and soil’ as the best solution to Germany’s economic problems and alluded to the colonization of the east ‘by the sword’ in the Middle Ages. He remarked on the need for a colonial policy in eastern Europe at Bamberg in February 1926. And he returned to the theme as a central element of his speech at the Weimar Party Rally on 4 July 1926. The completion of Mein Kampf, which ends with the question of eastern colonization, must have further focused his mind on the issue. Once he was allowed to speak in public again in spring 1927, the question of ‘living space’ became frequently, then from the summer onwards, obsessively emphasized in all his major addresses. Speech after speech highlights in more or less the same language ideas that became embodied in the ‘Second Book’, dictated during the summer of 1928. Other economic options are mentioned only to be dismissed. The lack of space for Germany’s population could be overcome only by attaining power, then by force. The ‘eastern colonization’ of the Middle Ages was praised. Conquest ‘by the sword’ was the only method. Russia was seldom explicitly mentioned. But the meaning was unmistakable.

  The social-Darwinist, racist reading of history offered the justification. ‘Politics is nothing more than the struggle of a people for its existence.’ ‘It is an iron principle,’ he declared: ‘the weaker one falls so that the strong one gains life.’ Three values determined a people’s fate: ‘blood-’ or ‘race-value’, the ‘value of personality’, and the ‘spirit of struggle’ or ‘self-preservation drive’. These values, embodied in the ‘aryan race’, were threatened by the three ‘vices’ – democracy, pacifism, and internationalism – that comprised the work of ‘Jewish Marxism’.

  The theme of personality and leadership, little emphasized before 1923, was a central thread of Hitler’s speeches and writings in the mid-and later 1920s. The people, he said, formed a pyramid. At its apex was ‘the genius, the great man’. Following the chaos in the völkisch movement during the ‘leaderless time’, it was scarcely surprising that there was heavy emphasis in 1925 and 1926 on the leader as the focus of unity. In his refoundation speech on 27 February 1925, Hitler had stressed his task as Leader as ‘bringing together again those who are going different ways’. The art of being Leader lay in assembling the ‘stones of the mosaic’. The Leader was the ‘central point’ or ‘preserver’ of the ‘idea’. This demanded, Hitler repeatedly underlined, blind obedience and loyalty from the followers. The cult of the Leader was thus built up as the integrating mechanism of the movement. With his own supremacy firmly established by mid-1926, Hitler never lost an opportunity to highlight the ‘value of personality’ and ‘individual greatness’ as the guiding force in Germany’s struggle and coming rebirth. He avoided specific reference to his own claims to ‘heroic’ status. This was unnecessary. It could be left to the growing number of converts to the Hitler cult, and to the orchestrated outpourings of propaganda. For Hitler himself, the ‘Führer myth’ was both a propaganda weapon and a central tenet of belief. His own ‘greatness’ could be implicitly but unmistakably underscored by repeated references to Bismarck, Frederick the Great, and Luther, along with allusions to Mussolini. Speaking of Bismarck (if without mentioning his name) in May 1926, he commented: ‘It was necessary to transmit the national idea to the mass of the people.’ ‘A giant had to fulfil this task.’ The sustained applause showed that the meaning was not lost on his audience.

  Goebbels had been thrilled on more than one occasion in 1926 by Hitler’s exposition of the ‘social question’. ‘Always new and compelling’ was how Goebbels described his ideas. In reality, Hitler’s ‘social idea’ was simplistic, diffuse, and manipulative. It amounted to little more than what he had told his bourgeois audience in Hamburg: winning the workers to nationalism, destroying Marxism, and overcoming the division between nationalism and socialism through the creation of a nebulous ‘national community’ (Volksgemeinschaft) based on racial purity and the concept of struggle. The fusion of nationalism and socialism would do away with the class antagonism between a nationalist bourgeoisie and Marxist proletariat (both of which had failed in their political goals). This would be replaced by a ‘community of struggle’ where nationalism and socialism would be united, where ‘brain’ and ‘fist’ were reconciled, and where – denuded of Marxist influence – the building of a new spirit for the great future struggle of the people could be undertaken. Such ideas were neither new, nor original. And, ultimately, they rested not on any modern form of socialism, but on the crudest and most brutal version of nineteenth-century imperialist and social-Darwinistic notions. Social welfare in the trumpeted ‘national community’ did not exist for its own sake, but to prepare for external struggle, for conquest ‘by the sword’.

  Hitler repeatedly stated that he was uninterested in day-to-day issues. What he offered, over and over again, was the same vision of a long-term goal, to be striven after with missionary zeal and total commitment. Political struggle, eventual attainment of power, destruction of the ene
my, and build-up of the nation’s might were stepping-stones to the goal. But how it was to be then attained was left open. Hitler himself had no concrete notion. He just had the certainty of the fanatical ‘conviction politician’ that it would be attained. Clarity was never aimed at. The acquisition of ‘living space’ through conquest implied at some distant future date aggression against Russia. But it had no more precise meaning than that. Hitler’s own firm belief in it need not be doubted. But, even for many of his followers, in the world of the mid-1920s, with Germany engaged diplomatically with the Soviet Union following the Rapallo Treaty of 1922 as well as improving relations with the western powers through the 1925 Treaty of Locarno then membership of the League of Nations, this must have seemed little more than sloganizing or a pipe-dream.

  Even on the ‘Jewish Question’, the wild tirades, vicious as they were, offered no concrete policies. ‘Getting rid of the Jews’ could only reasonably be taken to mean the expulsion of all Jews from Germany, as when Hitler called for chasing ‘that pack of Jews … from our Fatherland … with an iron broom’. But even this aim seemed less than clear when he stated – to tumultuous applause from the stalwarts of the movement gathered in Munich’s Hofbräuhaus on 24 February 1928 to celebrate the eighth anniversary of the launch of the Party Programme – that ‘the Jew’ would have to be shown ‘that we’re the bosses here; if he behaves well, he can stay – if not, then out with him’.