Explaining Hitler

by Ron Rosenbaum

  In any case, if the particular nature of the way this Himmelfarbian consumer was educated has any bearing upon the book that resulted it may lie in a predisposition to Empsonian ambiguity and uncertainty rather than the certainties of theory. A preference for close reading (of documents, memoirs, police reports) and for close listening (to the voices of the explainers) in an effort to hear the unspoken subtext, the significant elision, the hidden agendas, conflicts, and in particular the doubts beneath the surface—to sense the nature of the longing that drives the explainers and the kinds of solace explanations offer.

  Consider, in this respect, one further excursion into a particularly poignant subcurrent of Hitler-explanation apocrypha in which the sense of something missing, something lost, something escaped finds an echo in a deeply resonant, recurrent image: the lost safe-deposit box. It’s remarkable how often it turns out that the evidentiary trails of certain arcane, apocryphal, but persistent Hitler explanations disappear into a limbo that is not exactly a dead end so much as a lost end, the dead-letter box of historical truth: the lost safe-deposit box. A place where allegedly revelatory documents—ones that might provide the missing link, the lost key to the Hitler psyche, the true source of his metamorphosis—seem to disappear beyond recovery.

  Take the case of the lost Hitler exposé of Fritz Gerlich: the last stifled effort by the last of the anti-Hitler Munich journalists left at large in the weeks following the Reichstag fire; a desperate attempt to get into print a purportedly devastating Hitler scandal in time to wake up the world to the truth about the new Reichschancellor before it was too late.

  But it was too late, as I’ve noted. Gerlich’s final exposé was ripped off the presses by a squad of SA storm troopers on March 9, 1933, just as Gerlich’s newspaper Der Gerade Weg—then the last surviving, openly anti-Hitler paper in Germany—was about to go to press. Because of the respect Gerlich had earned from his contemporaries both for his courage and for his intellectual integrity, a mystique has grown up around the lost scoop, about its content and its ultimate fate. In fact, it’s developed a kind of survival myth of its own—about the escape and survival of the lost truth about Hitler. The lost Gerlich scoop has become a symbol for all the lost secrets about Hitler, for the dark explanatory truths whose revelation might have—but did not—save history from Hitler.

  No copy of Gerlich’s investigation has ever come to light, but there are at least two stories about copies of the scoop escaping. According to the postwar biography of Gerlich by his colleague Erwin von Aretin, while the Brownshirts were busy sacking the place, a duplicate set of Gerlich’s press-ready copy and the documentary material supporting it was spirited out of the newspaper offices by a Count Waldburg-Zeil. Von Aretin reports that Waldburg-Zeil carried the materials off to his estate north of Munich and buried them on the grounds for safekeeping. But, Von Aretin dishearteningly adds, “during the war, Waldburg-Zeil dug them up and destroyed them because they were too dangerous to possess.”

  Nonetheless, there is a second survival story about the fate of Gerlich’s final exposé, a more open-ended one. One of Gerlich’s last surviving colleagues, Dr. Johannes Steiner, directed me to this story. Dr. Steiner was the one who provided me with the unforgettable image of Gerlich’s bloody spectacles. He put me back on the trail of the lost exposé by referring me to the son of Gerlich’s biographer, the late Von Aretin. The son, Professor Karl-Ottmar Freiherr von Aretin, had become a historian in his own right, specializing in aspects of the German resistance in Munich and Bavaria. He had a distinct memory of his father telling him about what sounds like the escape of a different set of Gerlich documents from the ones Waldburg-Zeil destroyed.

  According to the younger Von Aretin’s statement to me:

  There was a state’s-attorney inquiry into the matter of Geli Raubal. My father had a copy of the documents on his desk [in Gerlich’s office] in February 1933. When the situation became difficult, my father gave these documents to his cousin and co-owner of the Münchener Neueste Nachrichten, Karl Ludwig Freiherr von Guttenberg, in order to bring them to Switzerland and deposit them in a bank safe. As my father remembered, these documents showed that Geli was killed by order of Hitler. Guttenberg carried the documents to Switzerland but kept secret the number of the safe-deposit account because he thought it would be too dangerous to tell anyone. Guttenberg engaged in the 20 July 1944 [anti-Hitler coup attempt], was killed in 1945, and took the secret [of the account number] with him to the grave.

  The implication: somewhere in Switzerland, perhaps even now, a lost key to Hitler lies locked away in a long-neglected safe-deposit box, slowly turning to dust. But this is not the only instance of a tenuous evidentiary trail leading to an ambiguous survival in a lost safe-deposit box. The image, or a close variant of it, recurs several times in Hitler-explanation lore.

  There is the purported fate of the Pasewalk case notes, for instance, a story about the doctor who treated Hitler’s hysterical blindness in 1918—the treatment that, some Hitler explainers believe, might have been responsible for Hitler’s metamorphosis from insignificant, obscurity-seeking corporal to charismatic, mesmerizing führer-in-the-making. Hitler biographers Rudolph Binion and John Toland have both adopted a version of the speculation first put forward in thinly veiled fictional form by émigré German novelist (and friend of Franz Kafka) Ernst Weiss, who argued that the episode represented one of the great tragic, Kafkaesque ironies of history. Weiss claimed to have learned, through sources in the émigré community, the true story of the “voice” Hitler heard at Pasewalk in the feverish extremity of his breakdown at the time of the German surrender, the voice Hitler claims to have heard summoning him to a mission to avenge Germany. It was that moment, that vision in which, Lucy Dawidowicz believes, Hitler defined the mission of his life: to murder the Jews.

  According to Weiss’s account, much of which Toland and Binion and the German historian Ernst Deuerlein have lent credence to (although others, such as Robert Waite, dispute it), that voice was actually the voice of a staff psychiatrist at Pasewalk, a Dr. Edmund Forster, who sought to cure Hitler’s hysterical blindness by putting him in a hypnotic trance and implanting the posthypnotic suggestion that Hitler had to recover his sight to fulfill a mission to redeem Germany’s lost honor. Weiss seems to have befriended Dr. Forster when Forster fled Germany after 1933, shortly before his suicide. According to Weiss’s novelistic account of Forster’s story, the Pasewalk psychiatrist had discovered, in the course of his hypnotic sessions with Hitler, a profound and shameful secret of Hitler’s psyche, the key to his pathology. A secret so shameful that as soon as Hitler took power, Forster was pursued, harassed, and ultimately driven to his death by the Gestapo, which was determined to recover from him his case notes on the medical treatment of Patient Hitler at Pasewalk, to silence him, and to erase that secret from history.

  According to Weiss’s fictionalized account, a fearful Forster, desperate to preserve the truth about Hitler from destruction, crossed the border to Switzer land shortly before his death and locked the Pasewalk case notes in a safe-deposit box in a bank in Basel. Purportedly quoting Forster, Weiss says, “The most important part [of Forster’s records are] the part concerning [Hitler’s] relationships with women.” Weiss has Forster giving special treatment to this secret: “‘I wrote it down in hieroglyphics which no one but me can decipher.’” Unfortunately, Forster killed himself before confiding whatever secret he may have learned, and with Weiss dead, we cannot be sure how much he fictionalized.

  Forster’s death again leaves us with no key to his Swiss safe-deposit box and no key to Hitler, leaves us with the image of the truth stranded, abandoned, or moldering away in some basement bank vault, perhaps untranslatable even if recovered, because of Forster’s hieroglyphics.

  The unreadable cipher in the lost safe-deposit box: an irresistible metaphor for the explanation of Hitler that has eluded us, for the irretrievable enigma of his psyche. There have been similar disappearances of other phanto
m proofs purportedly crucial to deciphering Hitler’s mind. There were, for instance, Hitler’s alleged pornographic drawings of Geli Raubal, which were said to have disclosed the truth about his psychosexual nature, drawings which, once recovered from a blackmailer, were said to have disappeared into a safe in Nazi Party headquarters in Munich. There was the rumored “Austrian secret-police dossier” about Hitler’s alleged Jewish ancestry, said in one version of the apocryphal story to have been stashed in a safe in the home of the Austrian chancellor’s mistress until stolen by Hitler’s minions.

  We are clearly in the realm of folklore here, not verifiable history. And yet there’s something in the image common to these tales, the image of the locked safe or the lost safe-deposit box that seems to capture in the way folklore sometimes can—and history sometimes can’t—some deeply felt collective longing, a shared myth about a figure who was himself as much a piece of self-created folklore as history.

  Some light may be shed on the deeper source of this image by its manifestation in a different context. Once, in the course of investigating a shady cancer-cure clinic south of Tijuana, Mexico, I came upon a smooth-talking “metabolic technician” who told me he was seeking to recover a lost cancer-cure formula devised by a certain Dr. Koch, a formula said to have disappeared after Koch’s death in the 1930s. The metabolic technician believed he knew what had become of it, however; he’d had some indications that the formula for this philosopher’s stone of health might still be found “in a safe-deposit box in a bank in Detroit,” although he worried about reports that—like the secret of Hitler’s sex life hieroglyphically entombed in a safe-deposit box by the Pasewalk mesmerist—the formula might be in code, and that without the actual begetter of the formula, the safe-deposit box might contain nothing but an indecipherable matrix of meaningless numbers.

  These lost safe-deposit stories clearly serve as expressions of anxiety about—and talismans against—an otherwise apparently inexplicable malignant evil. In fact, despite the despairing tone of the safe-deposit box myths, they represent a kind of epistemological optimism, a faith in an explicable world. Yes, something is missing, but if we don’t have the missing piece in hand, at least it exists somewhere. At least somewhere there’s the lost key that could make sense of the apparently motiveless malignancy of Hitler’s psyche or the cancer cell. A missing piece, however mundane or bizarre—a Jewish grandfather, even a billy-goat bite—but something here on earth, something we can contain in our imagination, something safely containable within the reassuring confines of a box in a Swiss bank. Something not beyond our ken, just beyond our reach, something less unbearably frightening than inexplicable evil.

  When the recent controversy over Swiss-bank holdings of gold and valuables stolen from murdered Jews hit the press, for a brief moment a part of me felt a frisson of what I knew was false hope. That somehow, some lost and long-forgotten safe-deposit box would come to light and yield up one or another of the apocryphal grails of Hitler explanations. That the search for the stolen legacies of the dead would somehow materialize the missing key, the lost link needed to bridge the abyss between the baby picture and the baby killer. Needless to say, this was not a realistic expectation. But it made me think of a term of art in the philosophic literature on epistemology, the study of the nature and limits of knowledge: “the mind of God.” It’s a term used even by nonbelievers to express the idea of a realm in which the truths that elude human investigation—the answers to mysteries we fail to solve for lack of evidence—exist, even if they exist beyond our grasp. That’s what the lost safe-deposit box folklore gestures at: the missing explanation of Hitler locked up tight in the inaccessible, indecipherable mind of God.

  PART ONE

  THE BEGINNING OF THE BEGINNING

  In which theories about Hitler’s “racial origins” become the origin of a debate about Hitler’s psyche

  CHAPTER 1

  The Mysterious Stranger, the Serving Girl, and the Family Romance of the Hitler Explainers

  In which the author makes an expedition to the Hitler family “ancestral home” and meditates upon the romantic life of Maria Schicklgruber, as imagined by historical fantasists

  I was ready to give up and turn back. A surprise mid-autumn snowstorm had blown out of Russia and was blanketing Central Europe, making the relatively primitive back roads of this backwoods quarter of Austria increasingly impassable.

  We were only about twenty miles short of our objective, but our rented Volkswagen was beginning to skid, once bringing us perilously close to the brink of one of the woody ravines that crisscrossed the otherwise featureless reaches of snow-covered farmland stretching north to the Czech border.

  I’d timidly suggested to my Austrian researcher, Waltraud, who was at the wheel, that we ought to consider abandoning our quest for the day because of the risk. But she wanted to press on, declaring that, as a native of the mountainous Tyrol, she had experience navigating the far more treacherous mountain roads of the Alps.

  Not entirely reassured, I nonetheless felt there was something appropriate about the blizzardy circumstances of this venture: The storm we were heading into was an autumnal version of the blitz of snow that had halted Hitler’s panzer divisions just short of Moscow in the winter of 1941—the beginning of the end for him. The place we were fighting through the snow to find—a ghost town called Döllersheim—was the beginning of the beginning: the primal scene of the mysteries behind the Hitler family romance.

  The disappearance, the apparently deliberate erasure, of Döllersheim is one of the most peculiar aspects of the deeply tangled Hitler-genealogy controversy. The tiny village was literally blasted off the map and out of existence sometime after Hitler annexed Austria. An effort—some partisans in the controversy contend—to erase all traces of certain irregular and disreputable Hitler family events that took place there. Irregularities that have long cast a shadow over accounts of Hitler’s origins. Irregularities that had given rise to repeated pilgrimages to Döllersheim in the prewar years by journalists and other interested investigators, news of which invariably provoked Hitler into near-apoplectic rages.

  “People must not know who I am,” he was reported to have ranted when he learned of one of the early investigations into his family history. “They must not know where I come from.”

  And there are those who insist that after 1938 he made Döllersheim pay the price for being the site of such inquiries, made it disappear. Whatever the cause of the erasure, there can be little doubt of its effectiveness. That morning in Vienna, as the snow began gusting in from the east, I searched in vain for a map that still had the hamlet of Döllersheim on it, until I happened on a little shop belonging to a rare-book dealer who was able to dig up a musty 1896 German atlas of the world which still had the hamlet of Döllersheim on its map of Austria. While the map showed no roads, it did provide a means of triangulation: The dot on the map for Döllersheim was just north of a bend in the river Kamp and just east of another little dot on the map called Ottenstein.

  Ottenstein: That name conjured up a peculiarly memorable phrase, “scion of the seigneurial house of Ottenstein.” This Heathcliffian heroic epithet appears in a catalog of candidates—list of suspects, one might say—for the shadowy figure at the heart of the Hitler family romance: the man who fathered Hitler’s father. The identity of the man who impregnated a forty-two-year-old unmarried serving woman named Maria Schicklgruber sometime in late 1836 was not disclosed on the baby’s baptismal certificate filed in her parish church in Döllersheim when the child (christened Alois Schicklgruber) was born on June 7, 1837. That blank line on the baptismal certificate, in the space where the name of the father of the child should be, has become a kind of blank screen onto which journalists, intelligence agencies, historians, psychoanalysts, and other fantasists have projected a wild array of alternative candidates to the man named in the official Nazi genealogies as Hitler’s paternal grandfather, Johann Georg Hiedler.

  Hundreds and hundreds of p
ages in scores of books have been devoted to trying to divine the sexual choice behind that blank line, to read the mind of the woman who made the choice: Maria Schicklgruber. She was, in fact, the first of three generations of Hitler-related women whose unfathomable erotic liaisons cast a powerful spell over Hitler’s life—and over his subsequent biographers. After Maria, there was Hitler’s mother, Klara, and then his half-niece Geli Raubal. Three women—all, interestingly, serving girls—whose greatest service has been to the Hitler explainers.

  The flavor of the speculation over Maria Schicklgruber’s sexual choices is captured by the partial catalog of candidates for the role of Hitler’s paternal grandfather offered by the impressionable German biographer of Hitler, Werner Maser.

  “Various candidates have been suggested,” Maser writes. In addition to the official nominee on the Nazi Party family tree for Hitler, Johann Georg Hiedler, and Maser’s own candidate, Johann Georg’s wealthier brother Johann Nepomuk Hiedler, there are “a ‘Graz Jew’ by the name of Frankenberger, a scion of the seigneurial house of Ottenstein, and even a Baron Rothschild of Vienna.” Maser doesn’t believe Adolf Hitler was a Frankenberger, an Ottenstein, or a Rothschild descendant (the latter astonishing suggestion seems to be traceable to the pre-Anschluss anti-Hitler Austrian secret police). But he has concocted an elaborate theory of rural sexual intrigue and greed over a legacy to bolster the candidacy of his man, Johann Nepomuk Hiedler.

  One can argue with Maser’s Brueghelian explanation of the Döllersheim ambiguities, but it’s hard to deny his summary of the confused state of Hitler studies on the paternal-grandfather question: “If there is one fact on which at least some biographers are agreed, it is that Adolf’s paternal grandfather was not the man officially regarded as such, namely the journeyman miller Johann Georg Hiedler.” (A “fact” only “some” biographers agree upon is hardly a fact to rely upon.) The more judicious Alan Bullock says, “In all probability, we shall never know for certain who Adolf Hitler’s grandfather, the father of Alois, really was. It has been suggested that he may have been a Jew, without definite proof one way or the other.”