Explaining Hitler

by Ron Rosenbaum

  “Now,” they continue, “Hitler is making Roehm [who’d spent several years in semiofficial exile in Bolivia to let previous homosexual scandals die down] his chief commander, [which] is like trusting the cat to guard the cream.” The Munich Post is not, it goes to great length to make clear, condemning homosexuality but rather “the disgusting hypocrisy that the Nazi Party demonstrates—outward moral indignation while inside its own ranks the most shameless practices . . . prevail.” It is for this reason “we feel the need to denounce the shocking events inside the Hitler Party. Herewith we publish a report by a press officer of the Nazis, Dr. Meyer in Regensburg, sent to Roehm in Munich. . . . This report is both a letter of confirmation [of tasks completed], at the same time it is a blackmail letter addressed to the commander in chief, making him aware of his own words about his illegal homosexual activities—in order to gain further promotion [for the letter writer] above others in the party.”

  It’s a brilliantly insidious piece of work, Dr. Meyer’s letter. The talented Restoration rakes and poets were once famously described as “a mob of gentlemen who wrote well” in the late seventeenth century. Meyer was one of the mob of educated thugs among the Hitler Party inner circle who wrote blackmail literature well.

  Meyer’s letter to Roehm, obtained by and published in full in the Post, begins with an ostentatiously detailed recounting of his previous meeting with Roehm, a recounting that would be unnecessary if he had not wanted to put his potential leverage against Roehm in written form. It was a night, he recalls, in which the well-oiled SA chief was flushed with the triumph of his return to head Hitler’s private army. He gives us Roehm joking boastfully that “homosexuality had been something unknown [in Bolivia] until [he] arrived, but [he’d] been working to produce rapid and lasting changes in that situation.”

  Then, according to Meyer’s “reminder” to Roehm, the SA chief commissioned Meyer to intervene in a blackmail attempt against him, which initiates the spying and break-in mission Meyer proceeds to describe—ostensibly for Roehm’s benefit, but more to demonstrate the dirt he has on him.

  Meyer proceeds to take us on a tour of Roehm’s demimonde as he tries to trace Roehm’s blackmailer back to its source. First stop is a den of iniquity passing as the offices of a certain Dr. Heimsoth, a figure out of later Raymond Chandler. “You mentioned,” Meyer meticulously and unnecessarily recalls to Roehm, that “inadvertently you have visited some homosexual pubs together with Dr. Heimsoth to get to know some homosexual boys. You also have been, several times, to Dr. Heimsoth’s doctor’s office and had the opportunity to see his ‘artistically precious’ collection of homoerotic photographs. You called my special attention to the fact that Dr. Heimsoth has some letters from you that you are very anxious to get back.”

  It’s useful to consider, as we accompany Roehm’s designated blackmail troubleshooter to the office of the blackmailing doctor, how such an account would play if it was an American newspaper publishing the results of an investigation into the chief aide of a homophobic American presidential candidate.

  At the doctor’s office, Meyer accuses Heimsoth of being the source of previous scandalous articles about the Hitler Party that appeared in the Munich Post. Heimsoth plays it cool and reads to Meyer his own thinly veiled blackmail letter to Roehm “asking for the organization of a news service and the provision of funds to supply it”—a blackmail letter within a blackmail letter.

  “I calmed him,” Meyer deviously reassures Roehm, “and asked him to consider that you are completely occupied with the Stennes case” (an internal rebellion within the SA). This does not satisfy the anxious Roehm. When Meyer returns empty-handed, without the doctor’s stash of Roehm’s love letters, Roehm tells him the letters “have to be recovered a tout prix and you [Roehm—he’s still ostentatiously recalling these events that Roehm needs no reminder of] asked me to arrange ‘the payoff.’” He further inflames Roehm’s paranoia by telling him that “according to my judgment [there are] relationships between Dr. Heimsoth and Dr. Strasser,” referring to Otto Strasser, a Hitler Party defector and now opponent (and Gregor Strasser’s brother).

  Not wishing to neglect any opportunity to embarrass Roehm should this letter become public (i.e., should Roehm fail to pay him off), Meyer then reports some of Roehm’s bitter denunciations of Goebbels. Then he comes to the break-in: “The room in Bayreuther Strasse in which Dr. Heimsoth runs his doctor’s office and keeps the letters can be opened without difficulties by a skillful toolmaker after seven o’clock in the evening,” he reports.

  The canny Meyer, obviously not wishing to incriminate himself—and perhaps wishing to keep Roehm guessing about who has the letters now—leaves it ambiguous as to whether he went ahead and executed the burglary. This dizzying whirl of break-ins, extortion, counterextortion, and primary, secondary, and tertiary overlapping blackmail threats, suggests a web entangling Hitler’s chief of staff like the snakes around Laocoön—all of it laid out in the words of Roehm’s “friend,” Dr. Meyer, on the front pages of a Munich newspaper.

  Roehm and the Hitler Party responded the following day by claiming that the letter from Meyer was forged or counterfeit. In the complicated litigation that dragged on afterward for many months, it emerged that Meyer did write the letter, that he may not have sent it to Roehm directly but used it to blackmail the SA chief with the threat of giving it to the Munich Post, which he eventually did. In the end, eight months later, Roehm withdrew his charges against the Munich Post over the letter and agreed to pay all the costs of the proceeding and those of Munich Post editor Martin Gruber.

  But the repercussions of this story went beyond litigation. It exposed and further provoked a deadly schism in the party between Roehm and his blackmailing enemies within; it led to the formation of the Nazi Party death squad, “Cell G,” which provided sensational material for another Post exposé, and ultimately brought the swamp of murder, prostitution, and blackmail to Hitler’s doorstep: “Nothing happens in the movement without my wish,” as the Post reminded the people of Munich and a world that wouldn’t listen.

  What’s revealing about these scandals is not so much the specific misdeeds as the culture of blackmail it opens a window into—a swamp of secret shames, a web of covert, coercive bonds with Hitler in the center. That is the unspoken assumption: Hitler can’t act, he can’t purge the tainted players in this sordid farce, because he, too, is caught in the web. They all have something on him, too.

  Consider the comment of the Bavarian weekly Die Fanfare on Hitler’s relationship to the blackmail stew within his party. In September 1931 (three months after this scandal broke), in an editorial addressing the rumors about the perverse nature of Hitler’s relationship to Geli Raubal that arose in the wake of her mysterious suicide, Die Fanfare asserted that “leaders of subordinate rank know so much about their top leader that Hitler is, so to speak, their hostage and thus unable to intervene and conduct a purge if party leaders are involved in dark affairs.”

  Here we have the quintessential vision of the Munich Hitler: Hitler as Laocoön, utterly enmeshed in serpentine blackmail plots, unable to extricate himself from his own implication in “dark affairs.”

  I’ve devoted scrutiny to the texture of the blackmail consciousness in which Hitler was enmeshed because I believe that there is something more serious than tabloid sensationalism to the dogged attention the Munich Post reporters paid to the concatenation of blackmail scandals that plagued the Hitler Party. I’ve come to believe that they found reflected in them a defining truth about the party and movement Hitler created, a truth that emanated from something essential about Hitler himself. It’s the Hitler we’ve seen enmeshed in the minutiae of blackmail negotiations with his black-sheep nephew, a Hitler who we’ll see enmeshed in blackmail intrigues that arose from his relationship with his half-niece Geli Raubal, a Hitler for whom blackmail has become more than second nature but an aspect of his primary nature, his defining relationship to the world.

  While the term
“blackmail” is most often employed today to describe a threat to reveal shameful secrets, a threat to harm by exposure such intangibles as reputation and image, I’m speaking here of blackmail in its original, more expansive sense of “any payment extorted by intimidation or pressure” (as the Oxford English Dictionary puts it), which includes the threat of physical or economic harm as well as damage to image. The essence of the blackmail relationship is a threat of future harm to extort present compliance. And one truth about Hitler which the Munich Post journalists were the first to capture in their reporting was the way he saw the world, the way he rose to power—the way he’d go on to manipulate statesmen and nations—with the mentality and the method, with the hard-won experience, and the discerning art of the blackmailing extortionist.

  It was crucial in almost every stage of his rise to power. In the final, feverish months of vicious factional infighting, street warfare, political murder, and cynical deal making that led to Hitler’s capture of the chancellorship on January 30, 1933, many (not all) historians believe blackmail played a crucial role in sealing the deal. Particularly in overcoming the reluctance of Reichspresident Hindenburg—who’d famously dismissed Hitler as “that Bohemian corporal”—to appoint Hitler to the chancellorship.

  Many historians believe that a secret meeting between Hitler and President Hindenburg’s son, private secretary, and factotum in charge of intrigue, Oskar von Hindenburg, resulted in a significant shift in the attitude of the revered but rapidly weakening octogenarian president. Many believed that the implicit threat Hitler held over the Hindenburgs’ heads was the power of the Nazi Party in the Reichstag to support or kill the parliamentary investigation into the “East Help” scandal (allegations of massive, corrupt misappropriation of parliamentary subsidies for the aristocratic but impoverished Junker land barons in East Prussia, who numbered among them, as beneficiaries, the Hindenburgs). It had been widely rumored that the scandal could reach as high as Hindenburg and his closest allies and financial angels among the Junkers. The Nazi Party had initially supported the Reichstag corruption investigation—Hindenburg had, after all, been Hitler’s chief opponent in a bitterly contested presidential election. But after Hitler’s secret meeting with Oskar von Hindenburg and after Hitler took power with Hindenburg’s blessing, the East Help investigation was quashed entirely.

  And then in early 1938, at a crucial moment in Hitler’s quest for unchallenged internal control of Germany, a crucial moment as well in his quest for the upper hand in the external power struggle over the map of Europe, two sordid blackmail episodes made all the difference. In January 1938, before forcing the Anschluss with Austria, before making his final extortionate move on Czechoslovakia, and before blackmailing the British and French into the Munich appeasement surrender, Hitler first needed to consolidate his personal control over the German army, whose relatively conservative officer corps had been reluctant to back up Hitler’s threats to reoccupy the Rhineland in 1936 (only the inaction of the French army had allowed Hitler to succeed in his gamble then). The conservative army General Staff was convinced that Hitler’s ambitions for Austria and Czechoslovakia would touch off a war they could not win. In particular, the resistance of the two top commandants of the German army, Generals Blomberg and Fritsch, was frustrating Hitler, because without the credible threat or bluff of armed invasion, he could not make his blackmail stick even with peace-at-any-price statesmen.

  Hitler and his minions had an archetypal Hitlerian solution to the problem: sexual blackmail. Two shocking, successive blackmail intrigues apparently engineered on Hitler’s behalf by Reinhard Heydrich. First, pornographic photographs of General Blomberg’s new young wife illustrating her recent past in the sexual demimonde were dredged up and presented to Blomberg, then the highest ranking officer in the Reich. He resigned rather than face scandal. And then a homosexual prostitute known as “Bavarian Joe” materialized to make secret accusations to army authorities that he had observed General Fritsch, the second highest officer in the army, paying for the services of boy prostitutes in Berlin dives. Although this accusation (unlike the photographs of General Blomberg’s wife) seemed to have been fabricated from whole cloth, General Fritsch, either from a horror of scandal or from something else real to hide, promptly resigned as well. Leaving Hitler free to appoint puppet generals Brauchitsch and Reichenau to replace them and to proceed with the successful extortion of Austria and Czechoslovakia from their Allied protectors without having to fire a shot.

  It could be said as well that extortion was critical to Hitler’s control over Germany’s captive Jewish population in the years between 1933 and the invasion of Poland in 1939. In the first months after his takeover in January 1933, when anti-Semitic rampages and boycotts by the SA led some groups in the world Jewish community to press for a worldwide boycott of German goods, Hitler skillfully undermined the unity and power of the external threat by threatening to ratchet up internal persecution of Jews even more brutally if German Jews didn’t try to dissuade their fellows abroad from pressing the boycott. He threatened, in other words, to hold “his” Jews hostage to the behavior of foreign Jews, in effect blackmailing both into relative paralysis. And he blackmailed those few non-Jewish nations and statesmen who spoke out against Hitler’s tightening noose on German Jews by threatening to expel them all and deposit them on the shores of nations whose statesmen and population were only (barely) willing to show concern at a safe distance—and certainly not ready to make them welcome as refugees.

  I should perhaps note that I’m not arguing that blackmail and counterfeiting are in any sense Hitler’s worst crimes, that they compare to the serial political murders his party committed in Munich and elsewhere in Weimar Germany or the mass murder he would commit after 1939. Rather, they were in some way signature crimes, signatures of something essential about Hitler’s psyche, reflecting some truths about his mind and his method. And beyond that, I have a feeling that in their focus on these particular crimes, the reporters of the Poison Kitchen were aware that the blackmail and counterfeiting were crucial accessory crimes, the ones that made the larger crimes possible.

  I think this is particularly true in their obsessive animus against counterfeiting—the counterfeiting not so much of currency but of history, of the past—against “political counterfeiters” as they recurrently called Hitler and the Hitler Party. It was something I began to grasp more deeply, this obsession with counterfeiting, after spending some harrowing days scrolling through microfilm of the final nine weeks of the Munich Post’s existence and experiencing with the Poison Kitchen reporters, day by day, those sickening last weeks that began with Hitler seeming like a politician on the wane (still suffering from an electoral setback in November). Until the last week—indeed, the last day—of January, when a collusion among corrupt and stupid right-wing party leaders, division on the left, and the maneuverings of amoral intriguers such as Franz von Papen with the acquiescence of the Hindenburgs suddenly and unexpectedly brought Hitler to power. I scrolled on, into the desperate final five weeks after the Hitler takeover when the Post continued to fight on futilely against the onrushing darkness, until March 9, when the Nazis banned the last opposition papers still publishing, and turned the Munich Post offices over to an SA squad to pillage.

  I had, perhaps unwisely, wanted to try to recapture what it was like to experience those last weeks through the eyes of these tragic eyewitnesses. I say unwisely because even at one or several removes, through the scrim of the microfilm, it was a nightmarish experience to suffer with the courageous writers of the Post the shocking, crushing realization that despite their best efforts, their sacrifices, the years of struggle against Hitler, the ridicule, the exposés, the crimes, the death toll they’d pinned on him, Hitler had won—and all he’d threatened was about to come horrifically true.

  The first thing one notices in the papers from the first two weeks of January 1933 is the way the drumbeat of political murder dramatically steps up its tempo. Beneath a ba
nner headline radiating New Year’s bravado in the January 3 issue—“It’s Our Duty to Beat Hitler in the Coming Year”—the inside pages of the paper chronicle the grim and growing toll: “Feme Murder Comes to Parliament” (the murder of a socialist Reichstag deputy), “Police and Feme Murders” (lenient treatment for Nazi death-squad killers), “Feme Murder Comes to Frankfurt,” “Feme Murder in Thuringia,” the list goes on, and to document its magnitude they inaugurate a weekly “political murder summary.”

  These murders—political assassinations, really—became too frequent, too often, too awful for the Post to report on in detail. Instead, I was intrigued by the way they chose to focus on the continuing chronicle of one individual murder in particular to epitomize the depredations of the death squads they had taken to calling, with understandable stridency, “Hitler’s murder beasts.”

  I was puzzled at first about why they’d chosen this case, the Hentze case, for intensive coverage; it was anomalous in the sense that the victim was not an anti-Hitler activist, as so many of the daily toll of feme murder victims were, but rather a teenage SA recruit named Herbert Hentsch who was murdered by SA thugs for some alleged deviation from party discipline—murdered, the Post reported, by executioners who “shouted ‘Heil Hitler’” as they beat him to death.

  “What Have You Done Hitler?” was the headline for a follow-up report on the Hentsch murder, the plaintive headline question coming from the slain boy’s stricken mother.

  What have you done Hitler: embedded in that question is, I believe, the larger reason for the close focus on this particular case. The naïve youth seduced by Hitler’s propaganda into becoming a follower and then beaten to death by the “murder beasts” he’s fallen in with—he’s a stand-in, young Herbert Hentsch, for all Germany, all Germans who have fallen under Hitler’s spell, and a kind of harbinger of the destruction Germany and Germans will suffer for having fallen for and unleashed the chief murder beast, Hitler himself.