In fact, he exaggerates somewhat: There’s really no one in the world, not anymore, who can tell us that with certainty. Still, Gilbert does have a strong feeling on the matter: He believes Hans Frank.
“While he was prone to exaggerate many things, and of course to glamorize his own role,” the psychologist says, “this is something he thought of no great consequence and he said, ‘Well, I guess stranger things have happened than hatred of one’s own race.’ [Frank] was inclined to believe the results of his investigation. He [Hitler] wouldn’t acknowledge having Jewish blood but the mere fact that she [Maria] was in a position to blackmail a Jew, evidently having had relations with him, is enough to stir up this violent anti-Jewish sexual hatred in Hitler.”
Not only was Gilbert the first to believe Hans Frank’s story, he was the first psychologist to adopt it as a possible explanation, the hidden key to Hitler. It has a built-in attraction to psychologists because it makes the otherwise apparently unfathomable source of Hitler’s crimes so interestingly intrapsychic. Indeed, Gilbert is the first to “improve” upon Hans Frank’s own interpretation, developing what would become a paradigm of the psychologizing of the Hans Frank story: the shift from seeing Hitler’s anti-Semitism as something driven by an external ideology or hatred to seeing it as a product of internal self-hatred.
Gilbert sees that moment in 1930 when Hans Frank purportedly told Hitler he had come upon documentary proof that his father was fathered by a Jew as a profound turning point in the evolution of Hitler’s anti-Semitism. “Especially when he [Hitler] was already committed to being a violent anti-Semite with his whole ego structure depending upon this,” Gilbert told Toland, “the idea that it [the Jewish grandfather story] could have been true could have been resolved in his sick mind only by showing, as Frank said, that he was the worst anti-Semite in the world, so how could he possibly be a Jew?”
Hans Frank’s own explanation is both more tentative and more simple-minded than his psychologist’s. At first, Frank sounds skeptical. “That Adolf Hitler certainly had no Jewish blood in his veins seems to be so strikingly evident that it needs no further explanation.” But returning to the question again, he decides, “I must say that it is not absolutely impossible that Hitler’s father was in fact half Jewish. Then his hatred of Jews would have arisen from outraged blood-relative hate psychosis. Who could interpret all this?”
Of course, he’s already delivered his own off-the-cuff interpretation: Adolf Hitler is outraged at the violation of his blood relative Maria by a Jew, which explains his “hate psychosis” about the entire Jewish people. In other words, Frank seems to be saying, Hitler killed the Jewish people because of his hatred for one nineteen-year-old boy who might or might not have made advances to his grandmother a century ago.
Gilbert gives it a more complex, reflective interpretation: It’s not hatred for the boy or for living Jews, it’s hatred for the spectral Jew that might be within him and the need to eradicate even the suspicion of an internal presence by proving to the world—and to himself—that he was “the worst anti-Semite in the world.” And all of it—all these increasingly elevated scenarios of internal psychodrama—come spiraling out of an uncorroborated story about the sexual choices of a little-known peasant woman. The maddening growth of this unverifiable speculation led me to understand—metaphorically—the impulse to destroy the primal scene of this uncertainty: Döllersheim.
Of course, it’s unfair to blame the inanimate stones of Döllersheim. One might as well blame the Rothschild family: The Rothschild variant of the Jewish-blood explanation of Hitler’s psychology rears its head in the work of another American psychologist who circulated his analysis at least five years before Hans Frank gave birth to the Frankenberger variation.
It was Dr. Walter C. Langer, a psychoanalytically trained Harvard psychologist recruited by Office of Strategic Services (OSS) chief William J. Donovan to analyze the mind of Adolf Hitler, who seized on the Rothschild rumor and spun it into a Hitler family romance. The report he prepared on Hitler’s psychology—based on an array of raw material from published literature to confidential diplomatic reports—was circulated within the U.S. government at the highest levels, reportedly up to President Roosevelt himself, in 1943, although it wasn’t declassified until the late 1960s, nor published until 1972.
Langer, relying on the often undependable, partly spurious memories of industrialist Fritz Thyssen and SS defector Hans Jürgen Koehler, clearly believes there is merit in their accounts of the Rothschild rumor. He summarizes his sources as follows:
[Austrian] Chancellor Dollfuss had ordered the Austrian police to conduct a thorough investigation into the Hitler family. As a result of this investigation a secret document was prepared that proved that Maria Anna Schicklgruber was living in Vienna at the time she conceived. At that time she was employed as a servant in the home of Baron Rothschild. As soon as the family discovered her pregnancy she was sent back to her home in Spital where Alois was born. If it is true that one of the Rothschilds is the real father of Alois Hitler, it would make Adolf a quarter Jew. According to these sources, Adolf Hitler knew of the existence of the document and the incriminating evidence it contained. In order to obtain it he precipitated events in Austria and initiated the assassination of Dollfuss. According to this story, he failed to obtain the document at that time since Dollfuss had secreted it and had told Schuschnigg of its whereabouts so that in the event of his death the independence of Austria would remain assured.
Here, the Jewish-blood story in its most extreme version is elevated to a wellspring of power politics, the crux of a geopolitical blackmail intrigue that raises the petty-criminal transactions to world-historical levels. A fantasy undoubtedly, but what’s fascinating about it is that this fantasy was destined for the hands of FDR, who was himself the subject of Jewish-blood rumors widely publicized by the Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels, who, like Hitler, might have actually believed that the Roosevelt family was descended from Dutch crypto-Jews whose real name was Rosenfeld or some such variant. Was the titanic struggle between the two leaders of the opposing forces in the Second World War conducted by two men, each of whom mistakenly thought the other was a secret Jew?
Langer gives every indication he wants to adapt the Rothschild story in toto. You can see him struggling with the temptation in the prose that follows his account of the Rothschild variant. “This is certainly a very intriguing hypothesis,” he says, and “much of Adolf’s later behavior could be explained in rather easy terms on this basis.”
Only at the last moment does he pull back slightly, saying, “It is not absolutely necessary to assume that he has Jewish blood in his veins in order to make a comprehensive picture of his character. . . . From a purely scientific point of view, therefore, it is sounder not to base our reconstruction on such slim evidence. . . . Nevertheless, we can leave it as a possibility that requires further verification.”
Nonetheless, he immediately enumerates no less than six reasons that “favor its possibility,” most notably reason number four:
“That the intelligence and behavior of Alois, as well as that of his two sons [Alois Jr. and Adolf], is completely out of keeping with that usually found in Austrian peasant families. . . . Their ambitiousness and extraordinary political intuition are much more in harmony with the Rothschild tradition.”
Note that the moment Langer gives in to the temptation to explain Hitler’s character on the basis of the Rothschild thesis, subtle anti-Semitic characterizations begin to be applied to Hitler. The “ambitiousness and extraordinary political intuition” Hitler has “inherited” from the Rothschilds can be seen as a euphemistic way of calling them—and Hitler—pushy, scheming Jews.
The Jewish-blood story has been a veritable curse, an affliction for Hitler biographers and explainers—the elephant in the living room that is both impossible to ignore and impossible to accept. Freudians in particular have been profoundly conflicted about it. The psychoanalyst Norbert Bromberg, for i
nstance, coauthor of the 1983 book-length monograph Hitler’s Psychopathology, refers conspicuously to the Hans Frank story, at first declaring very responsibly, “without proof, the facts of this report remain a mystery.”
Yet when they come to the next-to-last chapter, “Behind the Intensity of Hitler’s Anti-Semitism,” Bromberg and his coauthor Verna Small reveal themselves to be virtually unable to analyze the subject without it: “It may be that [Hitler] believed his own blood was ‘poisoned’ by Jewish blood because of the rumors that he had a Jewish grandfather,” they say.
Bromberg and Small adopt the strategy used by those such as Robert Waite and Joachim Fest to almost have it both ways about the Hans Frank story. Fest, journalist author of the most popular German biography of Hitler, calls it “a rather wild story,” the contents of which “can scarcely bear close scrutiny.” But he’s actually casting doubt only on the factuality of someone named Frankenberger impregnating Maria Schicklgruber; he’s accepting as truth Hans Frank’s claim that he told this tale to Hitler: “The real significance [of Frank’s report] is independent of its being true or false. What is psychologically of crucial importance is the fact that Frank’s findings forced Hitler to doubt his own descent” (emphasis added).
Influential Swiss psychoanalyst Alice Miller quotes from Fest but utterly ignores even Fest’s faint reservations about the Hans Frank story. She assumes it’s true and, not only that, assumes that Maria Schicklgruber’s son Alois knew his father was probably Jewish.
How does she know that Alois knew he was a half-Jewish bastard? “These facts were so well known in the village that they were still being mentioned a hundred years later,” she says. Her evidence for this is the Hans Frank story, which nowhere ascribes the Jewish-blood story to village talk. Still, Miller insists, “it is scarcely . . . conceivable that the villagers would believe such generosity [the supposed paternity payments from the Frankenberger family that Miller assumes were the talk of the town in Döllersheim] was unmotivated.”
With a final, halfhearted stab at displaying some reservations about the story, she plunges on to her conclusion: “Whatever the truth actually was, a fourfold disgrace weighed upon Alois: being poor, being illegitimate, being separated from his real mother at the age of five, and having Jewish blood.”
She veers back from the brink of total credulity—or tries to—by saying. “Even if the fourth [Jewish blood] was nothing but a rumor, this did not make matters any easier [for Alois]” (emphasis added). In fact, she uses its problematic rumor status as a reason for making the Hans Frank story even more powerful and important as an explainer: “If not consciously acknowledged and mourned, uncertainty about one’s descent can cause great anxiety and unrest, all the more so if, as in Alois’s case, it is linked with an ominous rumor that can neither be proven nor completely refuted.”
The problem is that neither the existence of this rumor nor Alois’s consciousness of it have ever been proven.
Undaunted, Miller goes on to construct a kind of Great Chain of Uncertainty, something akin to Waite’s but incorporating Miller’s preoccupation with corporal punishment of children as the root of all evil: Uncertainty about the responsibility for Maria’s pregnancy begat Alois’s uncertainty about his own identity, which begat in Alois “great anxiety.” This psychic pain of possible Jewishness begat Alois’s habit of beating little Adolf, inflicting physical pain on his son out of psychic pain for the sin of his uncertain father. The physical pain Adolf suffered, when transformed into psychic trauma, is what drove Adolf to inflict genocide on the Jews.
The remarkable persistence of the will to believe the Jewish-blood theory, however shaky the foundation it’s built on—despite the fact there might be no foundation for it at all—suggests it fills some deeper need. In a darker sense, it might fulfill some need to find some Jew, any Jew, even an apocryphal nineteen-year-old boy, to blame for the Holocaust. Alternately, it might fill a need to believe that the Holocaust was caused by something a Jew had done, however insanely disproportionate the punishment, rather than the more unbearable notion that it was not for an act but just for being that they were exterminated.
In any case, there’s no doubt of the appeal of the Hans Frank story to the imagination of anti-Semites. When I first began the frustrating task of reinvestigating the Hans Frank story, I came across a deeply delusional fantasy growing out of it in a relatively obscure Saudi Arabian publication, the Saudi Gazette, published in Jedda. I’d found a reference to the Saudi paper in a letter to the editor of New York City’s Jewish Press, and the letter writer supplied me with the complete text.
The author of the letter to the English-language weekly circulated among foreign workers in the Saudi kingdom identified himself as “A. Dusseldorf, Riyadh.” The Gazette editor headlined “Dusseldorf’s” letter with the inflammatory question in half-inch-high type:
WAS HITLER A JEW?
He had learned, the letter writer begins, that there is “evidence to prove that Hitler himself was a Jew. . . . Hitler’s mother was a poor Austrian woman, a Christian employed as a maidservant in a wealthy Jewish household. . . . The actual father . . . was one of the Jewish sons of the old man.”
Clearly, a garbled version of the Hans Frank story has entered into the venomous slipstream of anti-Semitic literature, the identifying fingerprint of the source being the characterization of the Jewish seducer as one of the “sons of the old man.” The malicious twist the letter writer gives to the story is to construct an argument that holds that since Hitler was a Jew, “the Jews should pay Germans reparations for the War, since one of theirs caused the destruction of Germany.”
This sick misuse of the Hans Frank story should not obscure the fact that there can be legitimate, or at least understandable, reasons for its persistent appeal. The Hans Frank story has both a deeply Freudian and a grandly Wagnerian dimension that makes it more tempting than, say, Simon Wiesenthal’s belief that an accidental encounter with a syphilitic Jewish prostitute explains Hitler’s anti-Semitism. The Hans Frank story has a plentitude of Wagnerian motifs: a “hero” with poison-maddened blood plunged into a frenzied Götter-dämmerung of world-destroying self-destructive fury. And it’s Wagnerian in another sense: There are those who believe that a study of Wagner’s own “Jewish problem” demonstrates that Wagner, who was a key source of Hitler’s mystical blood-and-race rationale for his anti-Semitism—what Saul Friedländer calls his “redemptive anti-Semitism”—suffered himself from the very syndrome many attribute to Hitler.
In his Cambridge University study, George Steiner made the Wagnerian parallel explicit for me: “The two great figures of modern German Jew-hatred may have suspected—may—that they were themselves tainted with Jewish blood. In Wagner’s case, the obvious resemblance to the actor Geyer [his mother’s Jewish paramour] is overwhelming. As to Hitler himself, it’s not the facts, alas, that are very important, it’s the possibility that he believed it. In which case, you have two self-doubting beacons of anti-Semitism whose self-hatred spiraled into an objective loathing of Jews.”
It’s a grand poetic vision, that spiral of self-hatred: it creates the image of a Dostoyevskian, literary Hitler, one that satisfies a hunger for profound explanations for profound events. But the facts, alas, are that we cannot even be sure Hitler suspected his grandmother of sleeping with a Jew, the alleged point of origin of the “spiraling self-hatred” Steiner suspects may lie beneath the objective loathing.
I’ve come to feel the Hans Frank story has been seized upon by the explainers for the wrong reason. Succumbing to the temptation to find a single-pointed theory, one that explains the single most significant and mysterious aspect of his psyche—his anti-Semitism—they’ve ignored the kind of story Hans Frank’s tale is.
It’s a blackmail story. Actually, it’s two blackmail stories, one nested within the other. One, perhaps fictional, is set in 1836; the other, at least partly real, is set between 1930 and 1933. Two blackmail stories featuring two sets of Hitler-family
blackmailers—as well as the spectacle of one Hitler blackmailed by another, indeed, one descendant of Maria Schicklgruber blackmailing another.
I believe that there is, in this more neglected aspect of the Hans Frank story, a window into a more neglected aspect of the Hitler thought-world: the pervasiveness of blackmail consciousness. Consider the kind of Hitler who emerges from the Hans Frank story. This is a Hitler steeped in the nuances of small-time sleaze, a Hitler who can think both like a blackmailer and like a blackmailer’s victim. When approached by one of the Hitler-family grifters—the Liverpool-based William Patrick Hitler, who makes “a disgusting blackmail threat”—when Hans Frank then supposedly produces documents to corroborate it, Adolf then conjures up, on the spot, a century-old blackmail scenario involving his own grandparents as an escape hatch from the imputation of the blackmail documents he’s confronted with.
It’s a remarkable performance under pressure, some fancy footwork that suggests a deep understanding of the mind of the blackmailer and the deep structure of the blackmail transaction. This is a Hitler for whom the feints and counterfeints of the blackmail relationship seem like second nature. This Hitler is a different one from the demonic, Wagnerian mass-mesmerist, the grandiose Svengali, the German Expressionist Hitler—the Caligari Hitler, one might say (after the demonic mesmerist figure in the Weimar Expressionist film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari). The Hitler Hans Frank saw (or created in the image of the one he knew) is the film noir Hitler, the Munich-demimonde Hitler, one whose relentlessly seedy, small-time character has been forgotten if not erased. This Hitler provides a useful corrective to a postwar Hitler who has grown ever more grandiose and all-powerfully demonic to match the gravity of the horrors he left in his wake. The Hitler known to Munich associates such as Hans Frank, the one that persists in Frank’s memory or imagination despite the subsequent horrors, is the resolutely small-time conniver who was forever enmeshed in petty blackmail schemes, devious subterfuges: Hitler as sleazy con man, small-time crook.
Explaining Hitler Page 11