Hitler in Hell

by Martin van Creveld

  Back to the 1920s. So many female admirers did I have that it was necessary to keep most of them away from me. Some knew that I liked to go around armed with the kind of whip one sometimes uses to teach a dog what is what. I never used it for any purpose but for the one it had been intended for; it was part of my image, so to speak. As if to confirm Nietzsche’s famous saying on the subject, they competed to see which of them could give me the fanciest one. I ended up with quite a collection! Many of the women in question were not elderly and did not try to mother me. Some were very good looking indeed. Helene Hanfstängl apart, chief among them was Fräulein Leni Riefenstahl. Riefenstahl started her career as a dancer but later switched to film-making. She hovered over me and repeatedly tried to seduce me. But I was not interested.

  After my death Soviet doctors, claiming to perform an autopsy on what they claimed were the charred remains of my body, claimed to have discovered that I only had one testicle. Let me say, once and for all: that is pure hogwash. The more so because several extant doctors’ reports explicitly testify that such was not the case. And the more so because similar things have been said about Mao Zedong, Stalin, and Franco as well. One might think monorchism is some kind of occupational disease twentieth-century dictators suffer from! How about that great womanizer, Mussolini? How about Pinochet? How about Saddam Hussein? Did they have the same problem? To be sure, I kept myself to myself. I never allowed others to see me as I was washing or carrying out my natural functions. In my eyes, and I think in those of most people, any leader who does that instantly disqualifies himself.

  I did, however, have another problem. Germany enfranchised all women in 1919, ahead of both England and the U.S., and long before the great home of democracy, France, did the same. Women form fifty percent of the population. But for them, we National Socialists could not win. But how to go about it? I knew exactly how. I used to flatter them by speaking tenderly about my mother and the role she had played in my life. But I could also take the opposite line. On one occasion I told a female audience that I had brought them The Man. With great success; they were always prominent among those who cast their votes for the Party and me. At meetings they used to occupy the front ranks (which we reserved for them). As I spoke, I often heard and saw, in front of me, a sea of harsh breathing, heaving bosoms, and strangely contorted, half weeping, faces. Their expressions combined extreme concentration with ecstasy. Many seemed about to melt as if they were made not of flesh and blood but of jelly. Obviously my words, and even more so my personality, touched them to the marrow. Not because I tried to turn them into second-rate men, as most modern feminists and their decadent “male” fellow travelers do, but because I took them for what they were: women.

  Very early on I realized that their support was absolutely dependent on my remaining single. At all costs, they had to be kept in a position where they could retain their pretty little dreams. This was made evident, for example, on my birthdays, when they used to send me acres of presents, such as porcelain, clothing items, cushions, bed covers, table clothes, and what not. Many had my portrait, initials, and/or swastikas lovingly embroidered on them! The rooms in which they were stored looked like department stores. Some of my associates and I used to have fun going over them. Afterward, they would go to all kinds of welfare organizations.

  So I never married. I was not Mussolini, who always had his pockets full of mistresses as well as one-night lovers. And my people were not Italians; had I followed his example, they would have appreciated me less, not more. That does not mean I did not have a number of women friends. Beside those I have already mentioned, there was Maria Reiter. Ours was what is called a Hundenbekantschaft—our dogs met when she, accompanied by her younger sister Anni, went walking in the park in Munich. The rest followed of its own accord. This was 1926. I liked her and took her and her younger sister Anni out a few times. But that was all. She was, after all, only sixteen years old. I was in my mid-thirties, and with the best will in the world found it impossible to take her seriously, let alone marry her as she wanted. In 1928 we parted, and two years later she married. Unhappily, as it turned out. She divorced and remarried an SS officer. Later, when he was killed at Dunkirk, I sent her 100 red roses.

  The case of my niece, Angela (“Geli”) was very different. She was a bit older than Maria, an artless, lively, quite curvaceous girl. Quite unlike the bones, ribs, and nipples one sees hopping about the stage today, who are always starving, always frowning, and always complaining about one thing or another! I loved her very much, and regularly took her to the cinema, the theater, and on trips. For her sake, I was even prepared to set aside my aversion for shopping! She, for her part, called me Uncle Alf. As my protégé, she used to harmlessly amuse herself by lording it a little over my entourage and flirting with some of its members. Yes, I did a few nude drawings of her, but not nearly as many as any art student is being made to do every day. To repeat, all other details about our relationship were spread by Hanfstängl, who picked them out of his filthy imagination. Next, they were taken up by my enemies, such as Otto Strasser, and eagerly collected by my sensation-hungry “biographers,” such as the half-Jew Konrad Heiden; who in turn served many of the rest as their source.

  Geli ended up shooting herself with my gun in my apartment. She left no note, so I never knew why. This was 19 September 1931, when I was already the leader of the second-largest party in Germany and famous the world over. I was traveling to Berlin and received the news on the way; that fact prevented my enemies from claiming that I had killed her. They did, however, leave no stone unturned in their search for all the bad things I might have done and not done to her and which supposedly had driven her to commit the terrible deed she did.

  It is true that, busy as I was, I could no longer give her the sort of attention she had become used to. It is also true that I broke up her relationship with Emil Maurice. Maurice was a good man who had worked for me for quite a few years. However, at one point I found out that his great-grandfather had been a Jew. Could I, and through me Germany, afford to have a Jew in my family? Much to my regret, I had to let him go. But this did not prevent him from staying in the SS, where he eventually rose to full colonel. Much later, Himmler wanted to dismiss him and his brother from the organization. But I have never been ungrateful, so I intervened and prevented him from doing so. Finally, it is also true that Geli wanted to go to Vienna to study singing. However, it is not true, as has been claimed, that I opposed the move. All I did was watch over her and make sure she would not lose her heart to an unsuitable man.

  Her death left me prostrated with grief, so much so that I did not have what it took to attend her funeral and thought about leaving politics altogether. Later, I ordered her room in my apartment to be kept just as it had been. I also had bronze busts of her placed in all my residences. But life goes on. We bear what we have to bear. This was a critical juncture in German history, and I had no choice but to proceed along the road Providence had laid down for me. Our relationship was no one’s business but ours, and I do not want to go into any more detail about it. Suffice it to say that, while the lying stories told about me caused me much pain, I was not the only leader to be surrounded by similar ones. Far from it! Stalin, according to his daughter Nadezha Alliluyeva, had a very low sex drive. Frederick the Great’s intimate life remains a mystery to the present day. So does that of Alexander the Great. And how about Achilles and Patroclus? Were they bosom-friends, or were they more?

  In brief, it seems to be the fate of great historical figures that both their supporters and their enemies want to know everything about what is, after all, the aspect of their lives that is the least important and the least differentiated from that of other people. Meaning, what they do and don’t do in the bedroom. Never more so than today. They are welcome to their prurient fantasies. But I am not going to oblige them.

  9. Into the Storm

  Volume I of Mein Kampf dealt with my early life and my rise as a leader. Volume II dealt with the
ideology and structure of the National-Socialist State my associates and I wanted to build. In the summer of 1928, having a little spare time on my hands, I decided to add a third volume, one specifically directed toward foreign policy. The immediate background was an ongoing public debate about the future of South Tyrol. South Tyrol, as a separate geographical and administrative district, was a new entity. It only came into being in 1918-19 when the Allies tore it off the southern part of the County of Tyrol and handed it to Italy. The county itself had been part of Austria-Hungary since 1867, part of the Austrian Empire since 1814, and part of the Holy Roman Empire since the days of Emperor Maximilian I in 1504.

  That the population of South Tyrol, or the Alto Adige, as it pleased the Italians to call it, was almost entirely German no one could deny. The question was what to do about it. The Austrians strongly resented the loss of part of the province and its people. And indeed, according to the Allies’ own loudly-proclaimed principle of nationality, they had every right to do. But Austria was a rump state that barely survived the multiple amputations it had suffered in 1919. Small, poor, and in disarray, on its own it was powerless in front of the power Mussolini possessed or seemed to possess. What ought the Reich to do? At the time of writing in 1928 it, too, was powerless to do anything. Still, most people believed we ought to support Vienna, as our common blood demanded. I disagreed. Recalling the World War, when we had been encircled on all sides, I thought an alliance with Italy was essential for the future. The problem of our Volksgenossen in South Tyrol would have to be solved by other means.

  Another major point was the need to form an alliance with England. As I wrote above, I considered the Kaiser’s policy toward that country one of the greatest, if not the greatest, blunders in his entire career. Basically, it was determined by the fact that he liked sailing so much! I did not begrudge him his fun. However, that is no basis on which to build the foreign policy of a great power or, indeed, a small one. The plain fact is that there were no fundamental issues dividing us from our racial cousins, the English. They were a naval power; we were a continental one. They were the Leviathan; we were the rhinoceros and should have never tried to learn to swim as well. They could have their empire, provided that we could have a free hand on the Continent.

  The war had enabled the English to add vast spaces and millions of people to their empire, both in Africa and the Middle East. However, as the outcome of the Irish struggle for independence proved, under the surface both the empire and the home country were already showing clear signs of decline. Had the English had any sense, or, which is more or less the same thing, had they not fallen under the influence of the Jewish plutocrats such as the Rothschilds (who day-by-day fixed the gold-prices in London and continued to do so until 2004), they would have welcomed our offer with open arms.

  Another advantage of an English alliance was as follows. It would do away with any possibility that the U.S. might come across the Atlantic and wage war on us, as it had done in 1917-18. Many Germans have tended to underestimate American power, none more so than the Kaiser’s admirals. In 1917, hoping to win the war before the U.S. could intervene in force, they decided to declare unrestricted submarine warfare. They persuaded Ludendorff, and the rest is history. American democracy was and remains a source of weakness. It is nothing but a device for plundering the nation and dividing what the Americans themselves call the pork barrel. What passes for American “culture” is even worse. It is a repulsive combination of plutocracy, Fordism, and all sorts of scraps dug up from the garbage heap by Indians, Negroes, and Jews.

  The U.S. was hardly a military nation. Americans, proud of their “individualism” and lacking a strong sense of duty, have never made very good soldiers. Referring to the Civil War, our good old Moltke said that it consisted of “two mobs chasing one another.” Yet do not delude yourself. Some small minorities apart, the population’s racial makeup was (in 1929, not today) excellent. It consisted of Englishmen, Irishmen, Scandinavians, and Dutch along with a very large and potentially very powerful German element. And America’s industrial power was far greater than that of anyone else. This became clear in 1917-18 and, much more so, in 1942-45 when we faced the GIs first in Africa, then in Italy, and finally in France. Every time our brave troops saw an American tank, they shot it up. Not too difficult, incidentally, because their Shermans burned like lighters and were, accordingly, nicknamed Ronsons. The problem was that we ran out of shells before they ran out of tanks.

  There would be nothing better, therefore, than to put the English Navy between them and ourselves. That would leave us with France and the Soviet Union, and those we could very well tackle on our own. The former was in an even greater mess than England. Its birthrate was sinking like a stone, its public life was characterized by corruption and low morale, and socialism was on the rise. The French were also cursed with a defensive mentality intent on avoiding casualties at all cost—one that later led to the expensive fiasco known as the Maginot Line. The Soviets had been devastated by years of war, revolution, and war again, to say nothing of the idiotic inefficiencies of Communism. The Jews and Bolsheviks who ran the place, presiding over as many as a 160 million Slav Untermenschen, only made everything that much worse.

  I also used the opportunity to repeat my views on foreign policy in general. The struggle for existence among states, nations, and races was not something a few kings and aristocrats had invented for their own amusement. Instead, it was an unalterable law of nature that made the strong prevail and the weak go under. Nor, contrary to the views of some good souls both in Germany and abroad, had it ended in 1919. That was what the English and the French, in an all-too-transparent attempt to legitimize their possessions, claimed; in fact, though, it was an exercise in hypocrisy second to none. From our German point of view, adopting this idea meant resigning ourselves to our current weak situation without any prospect of improving it. The best we could expect was the quiet life. The worst we could expect was slow—and perhaps not so slow—strangulation. Hence the need for an active foreign policy based on risk taking of the kind, I might add, that few, if any Germans, or Europeans for that matter, even dare think about today.

  In the event the book was never published. But not because there was anything secret about it as some people, hoping of make money out of it, later claimed. Rather, following the radical improvement in the Party’s fortunes around this time I simply did not have the time or the inclination to complete it as it deserved to be. Eventually, the manuscript was “discovered” by an American-Jewish historian named Gerhard Weinberg. This was in 1961, and he used it to “prove” what a thoroughly wicked man I had always been, did remain, and would forever remain. In fact the book was an abortion. But it was no more so than thousands of others, and it did help me clear my mind, as writing one’s thoughts down often does.

  Another document which had its origins during these years was Hermann Rauschning’s Hitler m’a dit (Hitler Told Me, the original French title). Rauschning was a right-wing conservative politician from Danzig. The city which, in violation of the Allies’ own loudly proclaimed principles, had literally been torn out of Germany’s living body so as to allow Poland an outlet to the sea. After flirting with various local parties, he joined the NSDAP. Representing us, he was even able to win the local elections and became President of the Senate. However, his loyalty to Germany and the Party was always somewhat dubious. In 1935 he went so far as to start writing articles about the need for closer cooperation with the Poles as well as the Catholic Church. Subsequently, he felt his life was in danger. If so, he must have known why. He sold his property and fled the country, finally landing in the United States.

  Between 1932 and 1934 I did in fact meet Rauschning on a number of occasions. He and I talked a little, but definitely not over a hundred times as he later claimed. Where would I have found the time? Thus the book he wrote rests on rather shaky foundations. Subsequent research revealed that he had plagiarized Mein Kampf as well as many of my speeches. Ad
d some passages from Nietzsche and Ernst Jünger, stir well, and boil over a slow fire. The outcome is a broth ready to be eaten, or rather, slurped. Much in it is true; much false. However, considered from a literary point of view, the book is a real tour de force. That, of course, accounts for its success.

  Rauschning’s other book, The Revolution of Nihilism, also sold well. But it is not nearly as good. It is not true, as he and others after him claimed, that we National Socialists believed in nothing and were out to destroy all the values of Western civilization. In fact nihilism is an essential characteristic not of the German race but of the Slavs and the Jews. The former are like horses. Unless one rules them with a strong hand, they tend to fall back into the state of nature. The latter are ready to sacrifice anyone and anything for the sake of Mammon. Our own objective was just the opposite. We wanted to return to the old, pure, heroic Völkisch values of our own people. Values which Jews, Catholics, socialists, and freemasons had buried under mountains of pornography and other filth and were doing their best to destroy. And which, we hoped would enable us to restore the health, unity, and, yes, power of our people.

  That was not the end of the matter. Starting in the early 1960s, entire shoals of historians, both German and foreign, have spilled oceans of ink in an attempt to separate my “real” objectives from the chaff of my various tactical maneuvers. A. J. P Taylor (as he was known), Hugh Trevor-Roper, Eberhard Jäckel, Ernst Nolte, Volker Ulrich, the lot… The main texts they used were Mein Kampf, my “secret” book, and Rauschning. To these they added two other “secret” documents. One was the so-called Hossbach Memorandum. It got its name from a certain Colonel Friedrich von Hossbach, who took notes of a talk I held on 5 November 1937 in front of several dozen senior officers and high officials. It was indeed secret, but only in the rather limited sense in which a speech delivered to so many people can be secret in the first place. As Hossbach, whom I later promoted to general, himself said later on, had the meeting been pronounced secret, he never would have written down its contents. After the war, his notes fell into the hands of the Allied prosecution at the Nuremberg “War Criminal Trials.” It used an “edited” version of them—the notes themselves have disappeared—to “prove” that Göring and others were guilt of preparing and launching an “aggressive” war. From there it passed into the hands of the historians, who kept copying one another in saying the same. Big deal.