During competitive sports, Hitler’s role was that of sideline spectator or referee. He refereed soccer matches among his men and, on one occasion, attended a boxing match that got out of hand. A punching bag had come with the gym equipment, and one inmate, Edmund Schneider, gave boxing lessons. “Hitler showed great interest in this especially hard, masculine sport,” Kallenbach wrote. So an exhibition match was organized. The short but game Fobke challenged the much taller Maurice to a friendly fight. The match escalated quickly, however, when both men became overeager and began whaling wildly at each other. Fobke concentrated on Maurice’s mid-section while the taller boxer let loose on Maurice’s head. Finally, other men jumped in to pull apart the bleeding fighters. Fobke’s left eye was closed and turning purple; Maurice could barely breathe. Hitler, meanwhile, loved it. “I rarely saw him laugh as heartily as he did when the two separated boxers were presented to him,” wrote Kallenbach.19
Nonetheless, following the bloody match, boxing was dropped from the outdoor curriculum and wrestling was added, followed later by jujitsu, both leading to frequent pulled muscles and tendons.
While Hitler was clearly the most serious and studious of the fortress inmates, he still occasionally participated in the fun and games of the younger prisoners. He was drawn in to a long evening of surprise entertainment on June 17, his “name day”—an occasion celebrated in Germany with all the ceremony of a birthday. Secretly decorating the first floor dayroom, the fortress men prepared a series of sketches, songs, poems, and miming that, according to Kallenbach, had Hitler laughing and applauding for hours (one poem “sentenced” Hitler to travel throughout Germany “beating up Jews and Reds”). By the end of the evening, the men decided to stage such jolly diversions every Saturday night—and to create a house newspaper.
The Landsberger Ehrenbürger (Landsberg Honorary Citizen) became, for a while, the weekly newspaper of the Hitler crew. It was somehow copied by hectograph and, according to several sources, kept secret from prison officials. Typically it contained three or four pages of tongue-in-cheek commentary on the oddities of life in prison and the prospect of the Nazis someday reviving their cause. Like the entertainment on Hitler’s name day, creative doggerel and feisty jokes laced the pages. And there was usually an essay, often of a historical nature, by Hitler, sometimes including drawings by him.
Alas, all but one copy of the Honorary Citizen was lost. Because the newspaper was supposedly secret, copies were limited and hidden. But when one inmate carelessly referred to it in a letter home (which was of course read by the censors), the guards executed a raid. Hearing the approaching guards, the fortress rowdies quickly threw all copies of their little newspaper into the burning stove in their dayroom. All but one copy went up in smoke.
The rescued “newspaper” was issue number six; it celebrated on August 1 the tenth anniversary of the beginning of World War I. The issue, which Kallenbach reprinted in his book, contained eighteen articles and poems filled with war remembrances. Kriebel wrote about the “Mobilization of the Second Company.” Fobke penned a poem called “The Dead.” Dr. Weber related the successful attack by the First Bavarian Snowshoe Battalion on a snowed-in French position in the Vosges Mountains of Alsace. Hess wrote a 140-line poem called “Facing Verdun,” the story of the famous battle in northern France where he had been wounded.20 He read it aloud, stirring an emotional response from the assembled Landsberg crew at a special dinner on the war’s anniversary.
But Hitler wrote nothing for this issue of the Honorary Citizen. He was busy preparing his longer work to share with the outside world.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The Holy Book
“Without my imprisonment, Mein Kampf would never have been written.”
—ADOLF HITLER, 19421
“I’ve decided to withdraw from politics.”
Those stunning words came at the end of a long letter Hitler sent on June 16, 1924, to Ludolf Haase, a young Nazi in the small university town of Göttingen. Haase was a friend of Fobke’s and one of the activists in the restless northern German wing of the party. Disgusted with the backbiting and disarray in the Nazi Party, Hitler had decided to quit the whole mess, he said, until his release from prison would give him the chance to be “a real leader again.” From now on, wrote Hitler, “no one has the right to speak in my name.”
Hitler’s unexpected exit reverberated throughout the banned Nazi Party and the völkisch movement across Germany. His letter was fervently discussed in such faraway places as Hamburg and Greifswald on the Baltic coast, where splinter groups were sprouting. Even with all the party upheaval, people asked, How could Hitler just quit politics?
Their answer came soon enough. Hitler sent a resignation statement to the Völkischer Kurier,2 a Munich newspaper that was partially filling the void of the Nazi Party’s now-banned Völkischer Beobachter. The newspaper ran a front-page box reporting Hitler’s decision to step down from Nazi Party leadership, noting that he “asks that his former followers please refrain from visiting Landsberg.… The reason for this decision is the current impossibility of exercising political leadership.… Also, Herr Hitler needs time for his work on a comprehensive book.”3
There it was—Hitler was writing a book. He not only wanted the disputatious party squabblers out of his life, he wanted time and peace for writing. He now had something else to do besides referee quarrels among his would-be rivals and successors. “He’s showing everybody on the outside that they can’t function without him,” wrote Hess.4 The party that Hitler was quitting was broken, no longer healthy. While his rivals depleted their energies with infighting, he withdrew from the field to consolidate his own strength. Staying out of the mud fights would help clear the way for an unchallenged comeback later on. “[Hitler] considers the cart hopelessly off track,” wrote Fobke in a subsequent letter to Haase. “He knows that he’s going to have to start from scratch once he’s free.”5
With Nazi Party problems now someone else’s to solve, Hitler was free to write. Whether he was conscious of entering the long lineage of prison memoirists—from Marco Polo to Martin Luther to Sir Walter Raleigh—is impossible to know. Yet somehow he sensed it was time to turn himself into one, cranking out a classic of the genre, a message-driven outpouring of pent-up passions and beliefs that had been percolating for several years and needed to be channeled between two covers.
In taking over the Nazi Party in 1920, Hitler had cavalierly elbowed aside its founders and demanded unlimited executive power. In following his dream of a triple-bank-shot putsch and a Mussolini-like march on Berlin, he had stuck with his grandiose idea until it left him injured, jailed, and with a banned political party. In taking on the weight of German justice in a Bavarian courtroom, he had rolled all his dice—and won, at least symbolically. Hitler always went for the big play.
So it was with Mein Kampf. Hitler plunged into his writing project with the same “brutal fanaticism” that he had invoked during his trial as a necessity for his movement. He was not writing a simple political tract, or an entertaining memoir, or a typical party program: he was writing his version of a bible (though he never called it that), an ideological guide for the sum of life, the catechism for a new secular religion. His new creed was National Socialism, and Mein Kampf (My Struggle) would be its scripture.
In two volumes and nearly eight hundred pages, Hitler would not only present a vision of Germany’s political future, but declaim, with a dilettante’s fluency, on any subject that occurred to him, be it the “sole” purpose of marriage (“increase and preservation of the species and the race”), the “art of proper reading” (“to fit into one’s existing picture”), and the importance of combating syphilis (“the task of the nation”). Except for the overwrought syphilis part, he said years later, he would not change a thing in Mein Kampf. He would also carefully craft an image of himself, through an autobiographical structure, as a man uniquely endowed to remake the world in Germany’s favor—a politician-philosopher chosen by fate to
lead the nation (and eventually the world) in its darkest hour.
Though he claimed that he was addressing his work “not to strangers” but to heart-and-blood “adherents of the movement,” Hitler said he decided to set down the basic elements of his political doctrine “for all time”—hardly the description of an internal party document.6 On the contrary, it was as though Hitler were carving his words into stone. Even as he was hammering it out in his room at Landsberg, Hitler’s writing had, to him, the gravitas of a holy book. Like a divine voice from on high delivering final wisdom to his messenger—God to Moses—Hitler was channeling his chaotic years of reading and speaking onto the written page. He was both god and messenger. With almost no bows to the sources of his mostly derivative thinking, Hitler’s book does indeed have a biblical tone of oracular truth.
In biblical terms, Hitler’s four months at the typewriter were his forty days in the wilderness. Just as Jesus (according to the Gospels) came out of the desert and its satanic temptations with a clarified sense of self and dedication, Hitler came out of his moment of internal exile—and the trials of failure and scorn—with a heightened and hardened sense of his destiny and of his capability to lift Germany out of the valley of misery. Whether he anticipated that the months of removal from the churn of politics and a forced period of thinking and writing would have such a clarifying effect on him is unknown. But they did.
Even as he transformed the raw clay of his political instincts into a coherent if exceedingly broad-gauged doctrine, Hitler was transforming himself into his own truest believer. Hitler’s “ruthless systematizing power” grew from the “crystallizing experiences”7 of his time in Landsberg, wrote historian Hugh R. Trevor-Roper in his renowned 1953 essay, “The Mind of Adolf Hitler.”8 Much of the crystallizing took place in Hitler’s room in the fortress building as he poured forth the pages of Mein Kampf (then still known only as “my book” or “my work”). “I gained clarity about a lot of things that I had previously understood only instinctively,” said Hitler.
During this time, he later said, he acquired enough knowledge and understanding “to provide my philosophy with a natural, historical foundation.” In short, he found the “facts” to support his prejudices and to convince himself that he was right about everything; his self-belief no longer “could be shaken by anything.” This completed Hitler’s conversion, in his own mind, from “drummer”—chief propagandist—to leader. This is the period that can be said to have made Hitler into the man who would not rest until he had Germany in his grip. This was the final step toward self-legitimization, the intellectual certification that was missing from Hitler’s résumé.
Hitler was also busily creating a Great Man persona, with himself as the unnamed candidate for that job. He emphasized the paramount importance of “personality” in political change. “Personality cannot be replaced,” he wrote. “It is not mechanically trained, but inborn by God’s grace.” The right personality was required for what Hitler called “Germanic democracy” in which “the leader is elected but then enjoys unconditional authority.” This is the Führerprinzip—the Führer principle that would lead to Hitler’s unchallenged control once he achieved power.
At the outset of his project, Hitler’s focus had been on revenge. With more than four years of grievances to redress against all manner of adversaries, Hitler wanted to attack every establishment figure, left-wing political force, or national government official who’d ever crossed him. But by late May, Hitler had begun sliding away from his revenge theme and into an autobiographical structure. He began conflating ideology and autobiography. Hitler was now at the “interface between rabid party leader and ideological theorist,” noted Beierl and Plöckinger, and he was moving increasingly toward the theorist.9 To rationalize his standing as political philosopher, Hitler had to polish, and sometimes seriously embellish, his personal story to fit the new image that he was creating. His very birth in a small Austrian town smack on the German border served in Mein Kampf ’s opening line as his first claim to be a child of Providence. In language almost identical to the words he had typed in his earlier five-page beginning, Hitler wrote: “Today it seems to me providential that Fate should have chosen Braunau on the Inn as my birthplace. For this little town lies on the boundary between two German states which we of the younger generation have made it our life’s work to reunite by every means at our disposal.” Historian Kershaw noted, “His almost mystical faith in himself as walking with destiny… dates from this time.”10
As he wrote the tale of his early years in Vienna, Hitler created a mini-bildungsroman * of hard luck and hard lessons, which led inevitably to his hatred for polyglot legislatures (“a wild, gesticulating mass… screaming in every key”), mongrel nations, Marxism, and Jews; the autobiography was already fitting the politics that were yet to come. There is an “innocent abroad” quality to Hitler’s alleged discovery of his anti-Semitism through his first sighting of an Eastern Jew in a caftan (“Is this a Jew?… Is this a German?”), followed by his scales-fell-from-my-eyes realization that the Social Democratic Party (synonymous with Marxists in Hitler’s view) “was run by Jews.”11 His bitter disagreements with fellow workers on a construction site exposed, in Hitler’s telling, the tyranny of the Socialists, who “made use of… terror and violence” by forcing him “to leave the building at once or be thrown off the scaffolding.”12 Whether true or not, this version of events makes for better storytellingthan admitting he gathered his ideas from the political tracts and free newspapers he found in Vienna’s grungy slum cafés, which, to some historians, seems more likely the case.13 Equally suspect is Hitler’s claim that he fell on his knees “with an overflowing heart”14 when Germany declared war in 1914 since it gave him a chance to fight for his fatherland (Germany, not Austria). Similarly, Hitler’s alleged road-to-Damascus decision to take on the Jews, which he describes in a way that makes it sound fated, comes as the perfect end to his war story and Germany’s 1918 revolution. A novelist could hardly have done better.
In the prison, Hitler had now near-perfect conditions to achieve the task he had set for himself. With his Nazi Party duties shed and the visitor stream diminished, he could set as a goal the completion of his book before his expected parole date of October 1. He was burrowing deeper into his own head, into the small world of his little room in the fortress building, and into the airy constructs of world history that derived from the autodidact’s sprawling reading habits. He was fitting together the “mosaic stones,” as he liked to call them, that he had gathered along the way from the diverse material that passed through his brain. He culled nuggets from a body of ideas that included, according to political scientist Barbara Zehnpfennig, a dizzying array of sources: Schopenhauer’s and Nietzsche’s metaphysics of will; Karl Haushofer’s and Friedrich Ratzel’s geopolitics; Arthur de Gobineau’s, Houston Stewart Chamberlain’s, and Paul de Lagarde’s anti-Semitism and racism; Thomas Malthus’s population theories; Charles Darwin’s theories of survival; Gustave Le Bon’s teachings on mob psychology; and, of course, Karl Marx. Hitler also leaned on conspiracy theories like The Protocols of the Elders of Zion; borrowed from post-Spenglerian theories of history such as anti-modernism, anti-liberalism, and anti-capitalism; dabbled in obscure and occult explanations of the universe; and absorbed ideas about a “conservative revolution.” Hitler was, in his way, a scatterbrained renaissance man who believed that when he reassembled the booty of his intellectual piracy, the new version possessed an internal consistency that gave it the strength of religious belief. “He adopted almost nothing in its original form,” wrote Zehnpfennig. “He simply took the parts he could use and fitted them to the frame that he had already created.”15
And he attributed almost nothing to anyone. Giving credit to the sources of his thinking would have vitiated the godlike sound of his own voice. Hitler was used to speaking in the omniscient tone before masses of people; why change that in a book? As he explained in Mein Kampf, “the magical power of the spoken
word” has its greatest impact when kept simple: one enemy, one idea, one solution (Hitler’s enemy was the Jews and his solution was their removal.)16 Likewise in a book: offering complex explanations or comparative versions of one’s ideas would only undermine them and distract readers.
For all its strewn writing and wandering anecdotes, Hitler’s book offered clear clues to his future actions. The book was dismissed for decades by postwar critics as a mishmash of “grubby jargon,”17 a “chaos of banalities,”18 and “superficial and triumphalist accounts”19 of his life story, and it was all of these things. Yet Hitler’s work presented, for those willing to put together its scattered pieces, a worldview that gave meaning and understanding to all that followed later. “Rarely in history—if ever—has a ruler so precisely described in writing before coming to power what he did after coming to power as did Adolf Hitler,” wrote historian Eberhard Jäckel.20 In the space of four months—and drawing on four years of speechmaking as well as his lengthy statements at his trial—Hitler was able to lay out most of a political dogma that had at least some structure and logic. The degree to which this scheme led directly to Auschwitz, however, has been hotly debated by historians.*
1924: The Year that Made Hitler Page 21