Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler

by Robert Gellately

  Some mention of concentration camps (Sammellager) was later found among the papers of one of the conspirators, but it is unlikely that they had really worked out a full-fledged terror system, as is sometimes suggested. The idea of using concentration camps for political enemies was very much in the air, however, and associated mainly with the Soviet Union. There were many stories about them in newspapers, including in the Socialist press, so copying even the hated Soviets was tempting for anyone looking to carry out a revolution.43

  The timing of the coup fell on the evening of November 8, when Kahr was to address a large audience in the Bürgerbräukeller. This was the fifth anniversary of the revolution of November 1918, and there was bound to be a raucous crowd of anti-Berlin and anti-Socialist activists.

  Kahr was speaking to the packed hall when Hitler showed up just after 8: 00 p.m. and went to an adjoining room to wait for his armed troop. Upon the arrival of the entourage, which included his bodyguard Ulrich Graf, Max Amann, Putzi Hanfstaengl, Rudolf Hess, and Hermann Göring, he stormed the podium. By the time Hitler, his loaded pistol waving wildly about, reached Kahr, people in the room were in an uproar. He got their attention by firing a shot into the ceiling.44

  Hitler announced the overthrow of the government and warned that the building was surrounded by six hundred armed men. He then led Kahr, Lossow, and Seisser to a side chamber for discussions. Time passed and the crowd grew restless, so Hitler had to quiet them. The historian Karl Alexander von Müller wrote down the brief speech Hitler gave when he returned to the main room. The crowd grew calmer when they heard him say, falsely, that the army supported him, but he roused enthusiasm when he told them that Kahr, Lossow, and Seisser would be working for a free Bavaria. He put this question to them: “‘Outside are Kahr, Lossow and Seisser. They are struggling to reach a decision. May I say to them that you will stand behind them?’ ‘Yes! Yes!’ swelled out the roaring answer from all sides. ‘In a free Germany,’ he shouted passionately out over the crowd, ‘there is also room for an autonomous Bavaria! I can say this to you: Either the German Revolution begins tonight or we will all be dead by dawn!’”45

  Kahr, Lossow, and Seisser caved in. General Ludendorff turned up to offer his support, after assuring himself the outcome was going to be favorable. Hitler then led the four back into the main hall, where they were greeted wildly. This was Hitler’s evening. He pressed each of the main players to say a few words, and his three captives grudgingly agreed to stand behind “the new government.” Their speeches were received with howls of approval.46

  But the curtain was about to come down on this political theater. When the lightly armed SA and Combat League tried to secure various strategic places in the city, they realized they were too few. Unlike the situation in Petrograd in 1917, the troops and police were not dispirited. Sometimes they simply locked the front gate of their barracks and left the would-be revolutionaries wondering what to do.

  Hitler was still feverishly trying to keep the crowd behind him in the Bürgerbräukeller when he got word that everything was not going as planned. He made the mistake of leaving headquarters to see what he could do, and in his absence Ludendorff, whom he had left in charge, released Kahr, Lossow, and Seisser. The naive Ludendorff accepted their assurances that they would keep their promises, but no sooner were they in safety than they repudiated everything.

  There was little or no shooting during the night, and Kahr ordered Lossow to put an end to the putsch as quickly as possible, to avoid bloodshed. The Combat League was not in a position to offer resistance, because large numbers of troops and police were mobilized.47

  By 5: 00 a.m. if not earlier, Hitler had resigned himself to failure. Ludendorff assured him that the army would certainly never fire: “The heavens will fall before the Bavarian Reichswehr turns against me!”48

  Two thousand or so men from the Combat League, most of them Nazis, with Hitler and his close comrades in the lead, set off at around noon for downtown. The column pushed past the first light police resistance but soon ran into serious opposition. Just who fired the first shot was long disputed, but three or four policemen were killed and fourteen putschists. The most prominent Nazi fatality was Scheubner-Richter, struck by a bullet as he marched arm in arm next to Hitler.49

  AFTERMATH OF THE HITLER PUTSCH

  Following the abortive coup, the ringleaders of the putsch, Hitler among them, were tracked down, arrested, and put on trial between February 26 and March 27, 1924.

  The court treated Hitler and the others like celebrities. They were indicted on high treason, but Hitler was allowed to turn the trial into a political grandstand. In his final address he said he never wanted to be just another politician but had “resolved to be the destroyer of Marxism. That is my task, and I know if I achieve that goal, then I would find the title of ‘minister’ a joke.”50

  Because he was found guilty of treason, it would have been possible for the judges to order his deportation, for he was still an Austrian citizen. Instead, they sentenced him to five years, including time already served, plus a small fine. Three of his co-conspirators received similar light sentences, and Ludendorff was found not guilty. The court’s justification for the leniency in sentencing was that the accused had been led “in their deeds by pure nationalistic spirit and noblest, selfless will.” The judges were impressed by the aim of the Nazis: “the rescue of the fatherland.”51

  Hitler was released just before Christmas 1924. Like other extremist politicians, he thrived when the socioeconomic situation went from bad to worse. Mixed news began filtering into his cell in late 1923 and early 1924 indicating the economic crisis might be over. One obvious sign was the new currency issued on November 15, when Germans began exchanging their old money for new at the rate of one rentenmark for one billion of the old paper marks.52

  Chancellor Stresemann managed to create the basis for stability, but he was not rewarded by parliament, which passed a vote of non-confidence against him on November 23. Nevertheless, his accomplishments stood, the inflation ended, and the French went home. The Americans signaled the return of stability by promising to deal with the underlying reparations problem. A commission under Charles Dawes began studying the problem in mid-January 1924.

  During the five years that followed, a “precarious normality” returned. The radicals neither went away nor came to accept the republic. In 1924 or 1925 no one had any idea of the great dramas that lay ahead, much less how they would turn out.

  6

  HITLER STARTS OVER

  Hitler wrote an essay in April 1924, just before he was to begin serving his prison sentence in Landsberg. In the unpublished piece he claimed that Marxism had undermined the country since 1914 and that it was foolish of some German leaders to suggest they could simply “forbid” such a movement. He asserted that Marxism was the “deadly enemy of all present-day humanity.” With vehemence he insisted that “Marxist internationalism will only be broken through a fanatical, extreme nationalism of the highest social ethics and morality. One cannot take away the false idol of Marxism from the people without giving them a better God.” He called on the example of Benito Mussolini, whose “greatest merit” was to recognize that point. “In place of destructive, international Marxism, [Mussolini] established national, fanatical Fascism, which resulted in the almost complete dissolution of all the Marxist organizations of Italy.”

  The task of the National Socialist movement was similar and would be complete only “when Germany appears to be rescued.” The battle would not be over until the last Marxist was “either converted or exterminated.”1

  Hitler had never been a friend of parliamentary democracy and elections. Even as a youth in Vienna, he had been decidedly unimpressed with squabbling politicians. The Weimar Republic confirmed his worst fears, and his distrust turned to hatred. Nonetheless, as early as 1919, he calculated that given the present state of German culture, which he regarded as soft and excessively law-abiding, the most effective and lasting way to deal w
ith the Jews was to roll back their civil and legal rights through lawful measures.2

  For a while, in the midst of the economic and political chaos, he was carried along with the enthusiasm for a Mussolini-style takeover. With that failure, he soon returned to a position that advocated working through parliament to get the revolution he wanted. He told a Party member who visited him in Landsberg, “Instead of working to achieve power by armed conspiracy, we shall have to hold our noses and enter the Reichstag,” which is to say, participate in elections “against the Catholic and Marxist deputies. If outvoting them takes longer than out-shooting them, at least the results will be guaranteed by their own Constitution!” Moreover, it seemed to him that it was indeed possible for the Nazis to win power through elections. They had thirty-two Reichstag deputies (thanks to the national system of proportional representation) and were the second-largest party in the Bavarian Landtag diet. “Conditions in the country,” he mused, “changed so radically.”3

  MEIN KAMPF

  Everyone knows about Hitler’s notorious autobiography. It has the advantage of being propaganda and so reveals what Hitler wished people to know about him and his ideas. It presents him not so much as he really existed as how he wanted to be regarded and where he thought his appeal lay. What he said was meant to attract followers and win people over. The book was unusually frank about a number of key themes, above all anti-Semitism and anti-Marxism.

  Hitler was persuaded to write his book in prison. He dictated it, first to his bodyguard Emil Maurice and later to the ever-faithful Rudolf Hess. Eventually called Mein Kampf (My Struggle), the book was brought out by the Party’s own publishing house (Eher Verlag) in two large volumes, which together had sold around thirty-six thousand copies by 1929. The first volume was written in 1924 and published the next year. Hitler was released from prison on December 20 that year and wrote the second volume in 1925, publishing it late in 1926. They were expensive, but when Hitler’s popularity grew, sales of his book did as well, and eventually it sold ten million copies in the Third Reich.4

  Mein Kampf was edited by several people and put into shape for publication, but Hitler admitted it was not a great read. The writings of Lenin and Stalin were not exactly page-turners, either, but at least Communism could point to key Marxist and Leninist texts. Stalin won out over his rivals to become Lenin’s heir by virtue of his command over these texts and his skill in making his own interpretations appear as scriptural extensions of Leninism and thus beyond dispute.

  Hitler’s movement, on the other hand, was based on his charismatic leadership, his words and deeds. The Nazi “text” was the schematic one-page program formulated in 1920, and it remained unchanged. Nazism was what Hitler said it was. Unlike Communism, there were no factions offering competing interpretations. Nevertheless, while a Nazi program was not systematically developed, Mein Kampf laid out many of Hitler’s ideas, if in a disjointed and disorganized way.

  The book was written as a political tract and was full of lies and self-deception. Lenin’s and Stalin’s texts were stitched together with falsehoods and exaggerations as well, but it would be foolish to ignore any of these works if we want to understand and explain how their brutal regimes operated.5

  Hitler’s tome runs to nearly seven hundred pages. Although he did not write much about Bolshevism in it, he continued, as in 1923, to combine anti-Semitism and anti-Marxism and emphasized that his mission was to save the country. His ultimate charge was brutally frank: “In Russian Bolshevism what we see is the attempt by the Jews in the twentieth century to achieve world domination.”6

  The underlying racial theory was culled from a host of authors who had popularized racism. The general synthesis ran as follows: there was a never-ending racial struggle for survival in which the stronger races defeated the weaker. This racial struggle was every bit as foundational for Hitler as class struggle was for Lenin and Stalin.

  According to Hitler, in order to preserve the species, the victors in struggle and war created communities, some more valuable than others. Humans were divided into three groups: “the founders of culture, the bearers of culture, and the destroyers of culture.” He viewed the “Aryans” as the primary “founders of culture,” the Japanese as an example of a “culture bearing” people, and the Jews as the ultimate “destroyers of culture.”7 He endowed Aryans, present in European fantasies from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, with all the virtues and gave the Jews, or Semites, the worst vices.8

  He explained his anti-Semitism in terms of striving for racial purity. But the struggle against the Jews had become special and urgent to him, allegedly because they had begun their “great last revolution” via Marxism. The Russian Revolution was held up as “the most frightful example” of what was in store unless Germans fought back. The alternative was National Socialism, which he saw as a “new philosophy of life,” völkisch or racist in orientation and opposed to Marxism. This new philosophy “finds the essence of mankind in its racial elements. The state it sees in principle as only a means to an end and construes its end as the preservation of the racial existence of man.” Hitler proclaimed his belief in the inequality of the races. Not only were the races different, but National Socialism insisted on “their higher or lesser value.” This was a kind of knowledge that carried obligations. Those in the know had “to work for the victory of the better and stronger, and insist on the subordination of the inferior and weaker in accordance with the eternal will that dominates this universe.”9

  This racial theory was a deliberate and calculated attempt to make anti-Semitism the centerpiece of a political strategy that would appeal. Hitler’s intention was to win over the people by explaining anti-Semitism in terms of science and reason. Similarly, he called on what went for science in other areas of his racial thought. For example, he favored keeping the race pure by sterilizing the incurably ill and forbidding marriage to those deemed unfit. He accepted uncritically the body of teachings on eugenics as if it were revealed gospel. Eugenics was popular at the time not only in Germany but also in the United States. Its simple principle was to foster “racially fit” people and to stop all others (the “dysgenic”) from having children. Eugenics and compulsory sterilization were a perfect fit with the rest of Hitler’s racial philosophy.10

  He despised parliamentary democracy, but the dictatorship he wanted had to be backed by the people. In Mein Kampf he wrote there were two foundations of political authority: popularity and power. Popularity combined with a firm grasp of power would result in a system we might call a consensus dictatorship, in which by common consent the people agree to be ruled by a strongman. Hitler pointed to the failed German revolution of 1918–19, when the “Marxist gangsters” tried being popular and succeeded for a time but did not know how to rule.11 In Germany, he said, “the real organizer of the revolution [of 1918–19] and its actual wirepuller was the international Jew,” but the German people were “not yet ripe for being forced into the bloody Bolshevistic morass, as had happened in Russia.” In Hitler’s view, a major factor in the German response to revolution was the “greater racial unity that existed between the German intelligentsia and the German manual worker.” In Russia, by contrast, the intelligentsia was “in large part not of Russian nationality or at least was of non-Slavic racial character.” There was only a “thin intellectual upper stratum,” and it was easily stripped away. Once the illiterate masses turned on this intelligentsia, the “fate of the country was decided, the revolution had succeeded.” But far from winning through revolution, “the Russian illiterate had become the defenseless slave of his Jewish dictators who, it must be admitted, were clever enough to let this dictatorship ride on the phrase ‘people’s dictatorship.’”12

  In Mein Kampf, Hitler established in broad outline what he wanted to do. After reviewing the options, he said, “We National Socialists must not flinch from our aim in foreign policy, namely, to secure for the German people the land and soil to which they are entitled.” The “s
oil” was in the east, specifically in Russia, and it was going to be the “duty” of the National Socialists to get it or else Germany was “doomed to destruction.” In a remarkable statement about the alternatives, Hitler said that “Germany will either be a world power or there will be no Germany.”13

  To Hitler’s way of thinking, when Russia became a victim to “Jewish Bolshevism,” it was a sign given by fate. The empire had been ruled, he claimed, by a “Germanic element” that had provided the intelligentsia and organized the once mighty state. That class was “almost totally exterminated and extinguished. It has been replaced by the Jew. Impossible as it is for the Russian to shake off the yoke of the Jew by his own resources, it is just as impossible for the Jew to maintain the mighty empire forever…. And the end of Jewish rule in Russia will also be the end of Russia as a state.”14

  Having said that the “Germanic element” in Russia had been extinguished, Hitler now called on Germans outside Russia to take up the challenge of the racial struggle. “We have been chosen by Fate to witness a catastrophe which will be the strongest confirmation of the soundness of the völkisch theory. Our task, the mission of the National Socialist movement, is to bring our own people to such political awareness that they will not see their goal for the future in the breath-taking terms of a new Alexander’s conquest, but in the industrious work of the German plow, to which the sword need only give soil.”15

  The war with Russia was presented as a war of self-defense. “Germany is today the next great war aim of Bolshevism. It requires all the force of a nascent missionary idea to lift our people up again, to free them from the snares of this international serpent.” The fight was to be “against Jewish world Bolshevization.”16 In a follow-up book, completed only in 1928 and never published in his lifetime, he fleshed out these foreign policy outlines and their unique combination of race and space. The key points, however, were already there in his autobiography.17