Hitler’s response was typically twofold, licit and illicit: Nazi death threats against the writers of the Munich Post in the night; by day, he took them to court, suing them for libel and fraud, taking advantage of the right-wing nationalist character of the Bavarian judiciary, as he would repeatedly in the twelve-year struggle that followed.
When the libel suit came to trial later that year, Hitler shamelessly accused the Post of fabricating, counterfeiting the poison-pen polemic that originated within his own party. The verdict, as would become the pattern, went against the Post, and a fine of six hundred marks was imposed. The headline on the story the Post ran about the verdict starkly defined the combat in the epic duel that would ensue:
HITLER GEGEN DIE MÜNCHENER POST
Hitler against the Munich Post. It was an unfair, uneven struggle. They were a small band of unarmed scribblers taking on a well-financed army of murderous thugs. But in ways large and small, they made his life miserable. Hitler “has no secrets from us,” they liked to boast. And throughout the extraordinary, nightmarish last-ditch war they waged in the final years of Hitler’s ascent to power, they found a way to obtain and publish one damning secret after another, often internal memos and correspondence of Hitler’s inner circle that linked him and his cronies to sexual scandal, financial corruption, and serial political murder. They had eyes everywhere: If Hitler went to Berlin and spent lavishly at a luxury hotel, the next morning the Post would print the hotel bill under the derisive headline “How Hitler Lives.” More grimly, they printed a running total of another kind of Hitler bill: the growing number of political murders credited to the account of the “Hitler Party,” as they preferred to call the National Socialist gang.
“The Hitler Party”: Their repeated use of the term was a relentless reminder to their readers that the crimes they reported on by Nazi Party members were the personal responsibility of one man, that the party they reported on was less a serious, ideologically based movement than an instrument of one man’s criminal pathology.
At the close of the Post’s 1932 exposé of the death squad within the Hitler Party known as “Cell G,” a story that was picked up by newspapers all over the world (and soon forgotten, alas), the Munich Post writers appended a revealing quotation from Adolf Hitler about his personal responsibility for his party’s acts, a remark that has resonance beyond that particular scandal: “Nothing happens in the movement without my knowledge, without my approval,” Hitler boasted. “Even more, nothing happens without my wish.”
The Nazi Party and its crimes were Hitler’s personal responsibility, the Poison Kitchen always insisted. And they had no hesitation about making their attacks on Hitler relentlessly personal. They never, for instance, let Hitler or his followers forget Hitler’s notorious belly flop in the face of hostile fire at the climactic moment of the November 1923 putsch attempt, the march on the Munich Odeonsplatz. As soon as loyal government troops fired at his mob, Hitler dived to the street and used the corpses of comrades to shield himself from bullets. There are conflicting interpretations of the belly flop: Some say Hitler was deliberately or inadvertently dragged down out of the line of fire by the grasp of a falling comrade, others that it was the instinct of a combat soldier to hit the deck when shots were flying. But it’s also true that Hitler’s chief ally, General Erich Ludendorff, picked himself up and marched straight into the hostile fire after that first volley, while Hitler, suffering from a dislocated shoulder, slunk away in pain before being carried off into hiding.
But for the Post, Hitler was always on his belly, a creature both craven and dangerously serpentlike. In reviewing the Post issues from the final months of the struggle against Hitler, I came across a cartoon they published in November 1932. It was a moment of heartbreaking false hope. After surging for two years, Hitler’s vote in the final free national election, the one held on November 7, plummeted. There were those, even at the Post, who believed that at last Hitler’s threat was fading, short of takeover. The cartoon showed a Hitler having been kicked out of a door by voters and landing ignominiously on the pavement. The prematurely triumphant caption read:
ON HIS BELLY AGAIN!
There was something about seeing that cartoon that brought home to me the exhilaration and tragedy of the Munich Post struggle. They always seemed to be one more story, one more exposé away from scotching the serpent. Once it seemed they were one story away from driving him to suicide. At the time of Geli Raubal’s death, the questions the Post raised about the nature of Hitler’s relationship to his attractive half-niece and about his role in her death and the suggestion that her nose had been broken in a quarrel brought Hitler close to the brink of shooting himself, according to several associates who were with him at the time. According to Hitler’s attorney, Hans Frank, whom he’d dispatched to threaten the Post with a lawsuit over its Geli Raubal coverage, Hitler was moaning that “he could not look at a paper any more, the terrible smear campaign would kill him.”
Alas, it didn’t: In the end, in the sixteen months following Geli’s death, as their pitched battle with Hitler and the Hitler Party reached a peak, they were still one story shy of bringing him down on January 30, 1933, when it became too late.
There were other journalists engaged in the same struggle. There was Konrad Heiden, Munich correspondent for the Frankfurter Zeitung, who went on to found an anti-Nazi press syndicate based in Berlin, and Rudolf Olden, Munich correspondent for Berlin papers, both of whom escaped with their lives to write scathing books about Hitler in an attempt to warn the West. And there was Fritz Gerlich of Der Gerade Weg, who did not escape.
But the Munich Post reporters—men such as Martin Gruber, Erhard Auer, Edmund Goldschagg, Julius Zerfass, among others—were in the trenches every day, taking on Hitler, facing down his thugs and their threats, testing the power of truth to combat evil, and sharing the Cassandra-like fate of discovering its limits. They lost, but there is more to their legacy than the heroism they displayed (although that in itself deserves far more recognition than it’s received from their contemporary successors among German journalists). They also left behind a vision of Hitler, a coherent explanation, a perspective on him that’s been lost, for the most part, to history and to the debate over who Hitler was. It’s a perspective they never had the leisure to sum up in so many words in a tract, but it’s one that emerges clearly from an immersion in their day-to-day coverage of Hitler and the Hitler Party.
Those hectic, nightmarish final two years were dominated in the Post coverage by a series of serial, detonating, closely linked Hitler Party scandals that began with a relatively small-time sexual-blackmail plot that, when exposed by the Post, led to escalating revelations of far more serious and deadly Hitler Party scandals: First, the exposé of “Cell G,” the Hitler Party’s secret death squad, which had been caught red-handed trying to assassinate the party members who’d brought them embarrassment in the original sexual-blackmail scandal. This led to an even more frightening and unfortunately prophetic exposé: secret Hitler Party plans for a bloodbath, a massacre of their political enemies once they came to power, a mass murder in embryo for all to see.
They even glimpsed, through a glass darkly, the shadow of the Final Solution. In fact, they picked up on the fateful Hitler euphemism for genocide—endlösung, the final solution—in the context of the fate of the Jews as early as December 9, 1931, in a chilling and prophetic dispatch called “The Jews in the Third Reich.”
More than a year before Hitler came to power, the Post reported it had uncovered “a secret plan” from an inside source in Hitler’s SA. A secret plan in which the Hitler Party had “worked out special orders for the solution of the Jewish question when they take power, instructions that are top secret. They have forbidden discussion of these in public for fear of its foreign policy effects.”
What followed was an extremely detailed list of a score of anti-Jewish measures that foretold with astonishing precision all the successive stages of restrictions and persecution
s the Nazi Party was to take against the Jews in the period between 1933 and 1939. And then the Post hinted at more: It spoke of a further “final solution.”
The list of restrictions it predicted seems familiar now: removal of Jews from the courts, from the civil service, the professions; police surveillance, including residency and identity permits; confiscation of Jewish enterprises and property; detention and expulsion of “unwanted” Jews; Nuremberg-type laws against intermarriage and sexual and social intercourse.
All of this leading up to a further “final solution” beyond that: “for the final solution of the Jewish question it is proposed to use the Jews in Germany for slave labor or for cultivation of the German swamps administered by a special SS division.”
One feels a chill reading this: the division between the ratcheting up of legal and civil restrictions and something beyond that—a final solution that involves removal of the Jews physically from German society for a worse fate in “the swamps” at the hands of the SS. That invocation of the final solution in the swamps carries with it a premonitory echo of an ugly euphemistic jest about the Final Solution Hitler, Himmler, and Heydrich would share ten years later as recorded in Hitler’s “Table Talk”: Isn’t it terrible the “rumor” that we’re exterminating the Jews when we’re only “parking them” in the swamps of Russia.
Were the Munich Post writers aware then that those swamps would become euphemisms for the mass graves to come? One can only guess at what they sensed beneath the swamps of the “final solution” they reported on in 1931. (A survey of contemporary German and foreign newspapers for that period shows no evidence that any of them thought this premonitory report on a “final solution” worthy of further investigation.) But in the concatenation of their exposés and investigations, in the chronicling of the string of political murders committed by the Hitler Party, the Munich Post reporters left little hidden about the party’s murderous nature and intent. They saw it as a homicidal criminal enterprise beneath the facade of a political party.
The emphasis on the down and dirty criminality of the Hitler Party is a signature of the Munich Post writers’ vision: They were, in effect, enlightened police reporters covering a homicide story in the guise of a political one. This point was brought home to me vividly in a conversation I had with a son of one of the foremost chefs of the Poison Kitchen, their star political reporter, “the Prussian Nightingale.” The Prussian Nightingale was the nickname his Munich Post colleagues gave to Edmund Goldschagg, one of the most visible point men in the Post’s war against Hitler—“Prussian” because he had come to the Post in 1928 after a long stint writing for a Berlin paper and “Nightingale” because he was known for his exuberant, convivial, often musical way with words, the way he would brighten the Post Stammtisch (communal table) at the Café Heck with his high spirits and songs.
When I spoke to Goldschagg’s son Rolf in Munich, I found him largely unaware of the details of his father’s most dramatic clashes with Hitler. They had, it’s true, taken place before Rolf was born. But the limited-edition memorial volume Rolf had commissioned about his father dwelt for little more than a chapter on the pre-1933 struggle. In part, this can be attributed to the fact that his father’s life after the Hitler takeover was so eventful—and also quite heroic. After the Post was sacked, the Prussian Nightingale was arrested and drafted into the army. But after being expelled for his political views, he went to ground in Freiburg, where, despite his own suspect status, he risked his life harboring a Jewish woman for a year until she could escape to Switzerland. Afterward, he became one of the founders of what was to become the powerful South German daily, the Süddeutsche Zeitung.
In part, the son’s lack of detailed knowledge about his father’s anti-Hitler journalism might be due to his temperamental distance from the flamboyant, socialist, anti-Hitler firebrand his father was. But the son of the Prussian Nightingale did make one memorable, defining remark to me about his father’s vision of Adolf Hitler. I’d asked him a question I’d put to a number of survivors and chroniclers of the Hitler period: Did he think Hitler’s evil could be explained by some insanity or mental derangement?
“No,” the son insisted to me, with more passion than he’d summoned for any other comment on the Poison Kitchen, “my father did not think Hitler was crazy. He always referred to him as a political criminal.”
Not a criminal politician; a political criminal. When I first heard it, I thought this phrase had the ring of sterile Marxist rhetoric. But after spending time in the archives with their back issues, it was clear to me the Post was not a captive of Marxist orthodoxy; they were, in fact, anticommunist and contemptuous of the police terror masquerading as Marxism in the Soviet Union, a contempt embodied in the derisive name they gave to the death-squad infrastructure they exposed in the Nazi Party: “The Cheka in the Brown House,” Cheka being at one time the informal name of the feared Soviet secret police. The Post was more liberal and populist than Marxist.
And, in fact, after immersing myself in their reportage on Hitler and the Hitler Party, I came to see that “political criminal” was not an empty epithet but a carefully considered encapsulation of a larger vision: that Hitler’s evil was not generated from some malevolent higher abstraction or belief, from an ideology that descended into criminality and murder to achieve its aims; rather, his evil arose from his criminality and only garbed itself in ideological belief.
One sees this in the paper day by day, not so much in the big scandals, the headline-making events, but in the daily log of murders. “Feme [Death Squad] Murder in Thuringia,” “Brown Murder in Stuttgart,” “SA Killing in Halle,” “Brown Terror in Magdeburg,” “Nazi Murders in Lippe.” Scarcely an issue went by in those final two years without one and usually two, three, or four brief dispatches reporting the blatant cold-blooded murder of political opponents by Hitler Party members. Cumulatively, what one is witnessing is the systematic extermination of the best and bravest, the most outspoken opponents of the Hitler Party as they’re gunned down or clubbed to death with truncheons or as bodies are found stabbed, strangled, drowned, or simply never found at all. Followed frequently by reports of how one court after another has allowed the murderers to go free or get off with sentences more appropriate for petty theft.
Reading the Post’s despairing daily drumbeat of murder adds a missing dimension to the account of Hitler’s rise, one that has been lost in some of the grand postwar explanations, which tend to assume some deep causal inevitability to Hitler’s accession to power—economic conditions, generational psychic trauma, Christian anti-Semitism, fear of modernism, the techniques of mass propaganda, the torch-lit Nuremberg rallies, the manipulation of emotional symbols, the mesmerized crowds, the rhetoric, and, above all, the ideology.
All of these may help explain Hitler’s appeal, but they do not necessarily explain Hitler’s success. As Alan Bullock was the first to demonstrate, Hitler came almost as close to failing in his drive to seize power as he did to succeeding; what’s missing from the grander explanations is what one sees on the ground, so to speak, the texture of daily terror apparent in the pages of the Munich Post, the systematic, step-by-step slaughter of Hitler’s most capable political opponents, murdered by his party of political criminals.
But there are two other crimes that emerge from the seamy web of political criminality the Post exposed, two types of crimes that, if less violent and bloody than murder, cumulatively emerge in the pages of the Post as the peculiar, metaphoric signature crimes of the Munich Hitler and the Hitler Party: blackmail and counterfeiting.
Perhaps the best way to get a feel for the Poison Kitchen vision of the Hitler Party is to look closely at one of the emblematic blackmail scandals they exposed and then move on to the sources of their preoccupation with counterfeiting, not just the small-time forgery of documents but the Hitler Party’s wholesale counterfeiting of history itself.
It began, the two-year-long final protracted battle between Hitler and the Poison Kitchen,
with the June 22, 1931, issue and a sardonic banner headline that read:
WARM BROTHERHOOD IN THE BROWN HOUSE
followed by the subtitle: SEXUAL LIFE IN THE THIRD REICH.
What followed was a plunge directly into the seamy heart of Hitler Party blackmail culture, a thriving criminal subculture preying on itself, which raised the blackmail letter to a black art.
The focus of the story is an elaborate masterpiece of a blackmail missive directed to SA chief Ernst Roehm in the guise of an investigation by the letter writer on behalf of Roehm into another blackmail plot against Roehm. Here we have the characteristic syndrome of Hitler Party blackmail intrigue: Every blackmail plot generates, hives off, a parasitical doppelgänger blackmail plot leeching off it. It’s a Hobbesean vision of predators preying on predators in a jungle of criminality. This one features, in addition, a Watergate-like break-in to retrieve the deeply embarrassing pornographic correspondence that gave rise to the original blackmail plot.
But before presenting its sensational report on “Sexual Life in the Third Reich,” the Munich Post carefully defined its own ostensibly high-minded motives for bringing to light this sordid material. The epigraph opening the article is a quotation from Nazi Party ideologist Gregor Strasser attacking the attempt by parties on the left to abolish the Weimar Constitution’s famous paragraph 175, the clause that made homosexual acts serious crimes. “But,” the article begins, “every knowledgeable person knows, especially Gregor Strasser, that inside the Hitler Party the most flagrant whorishness contemplated by paragraph 175 is widespread.”
Explaining Hitler Page 13