Explaining Hitler

by Ron Rosenbaum

  While the truth of the Maria Schicklgruber blackmail intrigue must remain suppositious—did it happen in fact, did Hitler invent it, did Hans Frank invent a Hitler who invented it?—there does exist a peculiar kind of corroboration of this seedy vision of Hitler, confirmation that the blackmail transaction is somehow at the heart of who Hitler was—a recurrent Hitler family trait in fact. Confirmation that blackmail rather than Jewishness may be the hidden defining hereditary strain in Hitler’s blood.

  I’m speaking of the Hitler-versus-Hitler blackmail intrigue that erupted two generations after the events in Döllersheim: the blackmail plot involving another shadowy Hitler family couple, this one initiated by the shady mother-son team of Bridget Hitler and her son William Patrick Hitler, whose attempt to extort money from Adolf represents an uncanny recapitulation of the notional extortion plot of the previous Hitler couple: Maria Schicklgruber and Johann Georg Heidler.

  The “loathsome relative” (as Hans Frank quotes Hitler calling William Patrick Hitler) as much as admitted it himself in a debriefing interview he gave to the OSS. The never-published summary of the OSS debriefing of this black-sheep Hitler nephew reveals a kind of low-comic duel between two Hitler family grifters, both playing for high stakes. The debriefing took place on September 10, 1943, in New York City. The nephew had arrived in the United States in 1939, after fleeing from Germany to France and then France to England, spreading insidious rumors about his Uncle Adolf along the way. Later, he mysteriously dropped out of sight, although John Toland hinted to me that he’d located William Patrick Hitler living in New York in the 1970s under a different name—one which Toland refused to disclose to me—and that he’d confirmed the substance of what he had told the OSS.

  Before disappearing, William Patrick left behind with the OSS his own version of a sleazy standoff with his uncle, the outlines of which roughly match Hans Frank’s account—a sordid, occasionally black-comic saga that gains some credibility because the younger Hitler is quite cheerful about assigning himself a rather disreputable mercenary role in the affair.

  Money was his motive from the start, he admits to the debriefing officer. “In the late 1920s,” the OSS summary records,

  when Adolf began to rise in popularity sufficiently to get into the English newspapers, they [William and his mother, Bridget] wrote to Adolf. [Then,] in 1930 when Hitler suddenly became famous with over 100 seats in the Reichstag they thought it was an opportunity of making some money by giving an interview to the Hearst press. Negotiations were underway but they felt the need of additional information and wrote to Alois [Jr., then living in Germany] asking for further details about Adolf’s youth. The reply came in the form of a demand from Adolf to come to Munich immediately for a conference. . . .

  Upon their arrival in Munich they found Adolf in a perfect rage.

  The gist of what Adolf said was now that he was gaining some importance the family need not think that they could climb on his back and get a free ride to fame. He claimed that any release to the Hearst newspapers involving his family would destroy his chances for success in view of Alois’ record.

  The “record” Hitler was referring to was Alois’s arrest for bigamy in 1924. This was embarrassing to Hitler, but did he really believe that was enough to “destroy his chances for success”? Or was his concern for Alois’s petty misdemeanor a screen for a real family scandal he didn’t wish exposed, the dubious Döllersheim transactions?

  Hitler concluded his tirade, the nephew told the OSS, with the demand that “negotiations with the Hearst syndicate . . . be stopped immediately. . . . The great problem was how this could be done without arousing suspicion” that Hitler wasn’t suppressing skeletons in the closet of his family history.

  Hitler’s first attempt to devise a solution to this problem—the mistaken-identity cover story—was laughable and reflects the short-term thinking of the petty criminal that backfires in the long run. Hitler

  suggested that William Patrick and his mother return to London and tell the Hearst people that it was a question of mistaken identity, and that they had discovered that the Adolf Hitler who was the leader of the Nazi party was not the uncle they had supposed, but an Adolf Hitler who was no kin of theirs whatever. Hitler was pleased with this solution . . . handed Alois 2,000 pounds to cover their expenses . . . [and] instructions to give Mrs. [Bridget] Hitler what was left over when their expenses had been paid.

  It’s hard to believe Hitler thought this “Oops! Wrong Hitler!” strategy would hold up for any length of time. But it reflects a certain desperation (as does the two-thousand-pound payoff, a considerable sum of money for “expenses”) to keep reporters away from the English Hitler relatives, from any discussion of family history.

  Having temporarily silenced his relatives, Hitler then supplied to Hearst a family figure he could control, the bigamous half brother Alois Jr., safely within Germany’s borders, who dutifully penned—or allowed to be penned under his byline—a short, pious story that appeared in the November 30, 1930, issue of Hearst’s New York American, entitled simply “Adolf Hitler.” It’s a brief, sanitized substitute for the one proposed by the English relatives, a story that admiringly details Hitler’s rise from poverty to lead a movement to save Germany and omits all mention of the Schicklgruber side of the family history.

  But the bought-off black-sheep nephew would not stay bought off. Sometime in the following two to three years, most probably in the summer of 1932, William Patrick Hitler put the squeeze on again. In his debriefing, he gallantly tried to shift the responsibility for this more overt and explicit extortion attempt to his mother:

  Mrs. [Bridget] Hitler chafed more and more under the poverty and thought Adolf might be willing to pay something to keep her quiet. . . . [She] wrote Hitler with a thinly veiled demand. Hitler replied and invited William Patrick to Berchtesgaden for a summer vacation. . . . Hitler . . . told William Patrick that . . . since he insisted on making demands on Hitler, that he could see no way out of it except to tell him the truth . . . that his father Alois Jr. was not really the son of Hitler’s father but a boy who had been orphaned as an infant and whom Alois Sr. [Adolf’s father] had taken into his home. . . . [Adolf] only wanted to make it clear to William Patrick that he had absolutely no claim on him as an uncle and that they were, in fact, not related at all.

  If we were not dealing with Adolf Hitler, this latest ploy would be a great comic moment in a small-time way. First, he tells William Patrick Hitler that he should tell people he had the wrong Hitler in mind as his relative; now, he’s suggesting to him that Adolf is the right Hitler, but he, William Patrick, is not; they’re not really relatives, not blood relatives, at all.

  It’s the comic inversion of the family romance; William’s father was not a prodigal who turned out to be related to royalty (i.e., Adolf Hitler), he’s someone who thinks he’s related to royalty but who turns out to be an orphan of nonroyal (non-Hitler) blood. In a sense, Hitler’s incredibly strained attempt to retrospectively detach the loathsome, troublesome relatives from his blood echoes the calculation attributed to Hitler by Hans Frank in his strained attempt to detach his grandmother Maria Schicklgruber from the taint of Jewish blood.

  One suspects an undertone of deadpan satire in William Patrick’s account of Hitler’s latest attempt to erase the relationship between the two Hitlers. His description of Hitler’s feigned reluctance to “break the news” that William’s father was not a true Hitler—“he could see no way out of it except to tell him the truth”—is particularly nice. One wants to know if there was an attempt on Hitler’s part to say this with a straight face, or whether there was a complicit smile between the two practiced Hitler-family con men, as one of them revealed his next move to the other in a duel of professionals.

  The next move was William Patrick’s, and he proved himself no novice; he was an investigative con man: “After his return to London,” the OSS summary continues, “William Patrick and his mother checked on this report [that Alois Jr.
was an orphan] through the British Consul General in Vienna who, after some time, said the story was impossible because no adoption papers were on record and the baptismal certificates were clear [that he was in fact a blood relative]. . . . William Patrick has also a photostatic copy of Adolf’s baptismal certificate.”

  Once again, William Patrick says he was summoned for a conference, apparently after renewing his blackmail threats and demands. Again, he says, “over and over again, Hitler warned him about trying to cash in on their relationship.” Unfazed by this onslaught, the nephew says he produced his trump card: “He said he then acquainted Hitler with the fact that he had documents from the British consul to the effect that his story about his father [being no blood relation to Adolf] was not true and that copies of these documents were deposited with the English government as well as with his mother in London.”

  If we can believe the nephew—and at a certain point (perhaps here) I suspect his imagined vision of himself defying the Führer feared by the world exceeds the reality—Hitler could not have relished the notion of the British government and the loose-cannon mother having his personal genealogical documentary touchstones in their hands. The deal that followed was, according to the nephew, an uneasy truce of mutual hostage taking and reciprocal threat. First, “Hitler arranged a job for [William Patrick] at the Opel Auto Company” in Berlin. (Pictures exist to confirm his employment there.) This provided the nephew with the cash flow he’d sought; it gave Hitler the nephew as a kind of hostage (now that he’d come to power in Berlin) within watching distance; and it gave the English relatives a kind of counterthreat with the documents they supposedly held hostage in London.

  With an eerie ability to echo his Uncle Adolf’s characteristic fusion of cravenness and boastfulness, William Patrick Hitler bragged to the OSS that, with the deal sealed, he had Hitler in the palm of his hand. He depicts himself as the kind of fellow who could stroll into Hitler’s Reichchancellery and make the raging Führer of the German people quail into quiet submission: “From that time on,” he told the OSS, “Hitler became more tolerant of him and whenever he began to rage about William Patrick’s activities he [William Patrick] had only to mention the documents in order to get Hitler to calm down.”

  Although the OSS summary makes no skeptical comment, one really has to laugh at this picture for its peculiarly Hitlerian self-aggrandizement: the preening little blackmailer supposing he’s got the world-conquering Führer wrapped around his finger. If there’s something Adolfian in William Patrick, there’s also something William Patrickian in Adolf: that combination of low cunning and grandiose imagination. The glimpse William Patrick Hitler gives us into the thought-world of the blackmailer—his own and that of his uncle—brings us closer to the Munich Hitler. This is the Hitler his disreputable Brown House cronies knew. This is the film noir Hitler, the poison-pen Hitler, the Hitler exposed with pitiless clarity by the journalists of his chief newspaper enemy, the paper called “the Poison Kitchen.”

  CHAPTER 3

  The Poison Kitchen: The Forgotten First Explainers

  In which the heroic but doomed reporters of the Munich Post capture the essence of a “political criminal” in the blackmail consciousness of the Munich demimonde

  Hitler’s party called it the Poison Kitchen. That was the preferred epithet for his newspaper nemesis, the persistent poisoned thorn in his side, the Munich Post. The running battle between Hitler and the courageous reporters and editors of the Post is one of the great unreported dramas in the history of journalism—and a long-erased opening chapter in the chronology of attempts to explain Adolf Hitler.

  The Munich Post journalists were the first to focus sustained critical attention on Hitler, from the very first moment this strange specter emerged from the beer-hall back rooms to take to the streets of Munich in the early 1920s. They were the first to tangle with him, the first to ridicule him, the first to investigate him, the first to expose the seamy underside of his party, the murderous criminal behavior masked by its pretensions to being a political movement. They were the first to attempt to alert the world to the nature of the rough beast slouching toward Berlin.

  But the drama of their struggle has largely been lost to history. The exposés they published are remembered, if at all, only in obscure footnotes; the names of those who risked their lives to report and publish those exposés rarely appear even there. Their full story has never really been told, even in Germany, or perhaps especially in Germany, where it’s more comforting for the national self-image to believe that nobody really knew who Hitler was until it was too late, until after 1933, when he had too much power (or so it’s said) for anyone to resist.

  But the writers of the Munich Post knew, and they published the truth for those who cared to see it. While their opposition to Hitler grew initially out of ideology (the Post was founded and sponsored by the Bavarian Social Democratic Party), their struggle with Hitler became extremely personal. They came to know Hitler in a way few others have known him; they knew him and his circle as intimate enemies, grappling at close range with them in the streets, in the courtrooms, in the beer halls, attacking Hitler with a combination of Washington Post–like investigative zeal and New York Post–like tabloid glee—and a peculiar streetwise, wised-up Munich Post edge all their own.

  Their duel with Hitler lasted a dozen years and produced some of the sharpest, most penetrating insights into his character, his mind and method, then or since. Much of their work has been forgotten, but not much has been surpassed. And, as the name Poison Kitchen suggests, they succeeded in getting under Hitler’s skin.

  The Poison Kitchen: Let’s linger a moment on that epithet. As a metaphor, its literal meaning is probably intended to convey the notion of a kitchen “cooking up” poisonous slanders, poison-pen journalism. But “poison” was not a word Hitler used lightly—it was one he reserved for his most profound hatreds. In his final testament, the last words he addressed to the world before committing suicide in his Berlin bunker, he enjoined the German people above all else never to cease from the “struggle against the Jews, the eternal poisoners of the world.”

  Hitler’s final epithet for the Jews: “poisoners.” It’s an appellation with medieval roots in the accusations of well-poisoning that were used to incite pogroms in plague-stricken Central Europe. But “poison” and “poisoning” are more highly charged words than that; “poison” most often took on a racial, sexual meaning when referring to Jews, as in “blood poisoning”: the sexual adulteration, pollution, tainting, and infection of Aryan purity. Jewish blood for Hitler was a sexually transmitted poison. It’s hard to think of another word in his vocabulary more fraught with hatred and loathing.

  And Hitler’s hatred for the Poison Kitchen nearly matched in self-destructive fury the hatred he had for the “eternal poisoners.” An argument can be made (and has been made by J. P. Stern, Lucy Dawidowicz, and others) that Hitler sabotaged his chances to hold the eastern front against the Red Army in 1944 because he insisted on withdrawing troop trains from his fighting forces in order to use them to accelerate the delivery of Jews to Auschwitz and other death camps, where he used poison gas to poison the “poisoners.”

  Similarly, at the crucial turning point in his putsch attempt in November 1923, at the moment Hitler most needed to mobilize maximum armed support for his march on the government center, Hitler’s strongest and most fanatically devoted cohort—the Stosstrupp Hitler (the personal-bodyguard troops who were to evolve into the SS)—were dispatched instead to Number 19 Altheimer Eck, the building that housed the Munich Post, where they spent crucial hours sacking and looting and ripping apart the offices and presses of the Poison Kitchen. In what sounds like an early instance of the tactic of deniability that Hitler would employ to distance himself from the order for the Kristallnacht pogrom (and the Final Solution itself), he later proclaimed himself shocked, shocked at the assault on the Poison Kitchen by his personal bodyguards.

  On that occasion, the Poison Kitchen
rebuilt itself and rejoined the struggle. But ten years later, in March 1933, the moment the Nazi takeover in Bavaria was completed, a vicious troop of SA thugs burst into the Munich Post building, gutting it completely, dumping trays of broken type onto the streets, and dragging writers and editors away to prison.

  This savage attack is a perverse tribute to just how galling the Post had been to Hitler from the very beginning. They knew how to get to him, get under his skin. They had his number in a sense far deeper than skin-deep: in the sense that they’d seen into him, through him, in a way that few others had or would. They’d seen the Hitler within Hitler, and—I believe—he knew they knew. It’s been largely lost or forgotten to history, their vision of Hitler, but it’s still there, it’s still possible to retrieve it, or at least to glimpse, in the crumbling pages of the issues of the Munich Post decaying in Munich archives, some elusive truths about the Munich Hitler that have largely been eclipsed by the postwar focus on the Berlin Hitler, the Auschwitz Hitler.

  The battle between Hitler and the Poison Kitchen began as far back as 1921, before Hitler had succeeded in solidifying his control over the fledgling Nazi Party. In August of that year, the Post found a way to cause Hitler severe embarrassment, enough to provoke a howl of outrage and a resort to the courts. They’d obtained the text of a vicious attack on Hitler by an internal faction of the Nazi Party.

  This poison-pen polemic, entitled “Adolf Hitler, Traitor,” had been circulating privately until the Post made it available for all to see. And it struck home, raising what would become persistent questions about Hitler and persistent themes of the Munich Post’s reporting: Hitler’s alienness, his strangeness, both of origin and personality, his mysterious sources of support (“Just what does he do for a living?” the pamphlet asked), and, most woundingly, the question of his possible Jewishness or of some subterranean relationship to Jews. In his sudden grab for dictatorial power over the party, in his scheming divisive behavior, the anonymous Nazi authors of the poison-pen pamphlet claimed, Hitler was not only serving “Jewish interests” but acting “like a real Jew” himself.