Explaining Hitler

by Ron Rosenbaum

  Meanwhile, with each passing week, the murder rate continues to make sickening leaps, the reports of individual feme murders give way to increasing numbers of multiple murders or “bloodbaths.” January 23: “Bloodbath in Dresden.” January 26: “19 Shot in Terrible Political Bloodbath.” Systematic assassination escalates to mass murder as Hitler comes closer to power. Hitler takes power, and socialist newspapers in Berlin are hit with temporary bans. But the Munich Post bravely, defiantly soldiers on. It’s often forgotten, this strange terror-filled interlude after Hitler became chancellor of a coalition cabinet on January 30 and before the Reichstag fire on February 27 and the truncated snap election in early March gave him the undisputed power of a führer to ban the opposition and the opposition press completely. Those last few weeks when Hitler ruled but an opposition press still published gave the world a glimpse of what was in store for Germany, for all Europe.

  After one week with Hitler in power, the Munich Post’s weekly political murder summary: eighteen dead, thirty-four badly wounded in death-squad attacks. February 9: “Nazi Party Hands Dripping with Blood.” February 10: “Germany under the Hitler Regime: Political Murder and Terror.” As the murderous days went by, the rhetoric understandably grew more strident, more horror-struck: “Blood Guilt of the Nazi Party.” “Germany Today: No Day Without Death.” “Brutal Terror in the Streets of Munich.” “Outlaws and Murderers in Power.” “People Allow Themselves to be Intimidated.” “Bloody Matters on Sunday.”

  The headlines, the murders, build to an almost unbearable crescendo until abruptly something strange happens in three issues beginning February 13. Suddenly, the murders are off the front page, the chronicle of the desperate struggle of persecuted opposition parties in the Reichstag is downplayed, and the Munich Post gives over its pages to what seems at first a quixotic if not irrelevant plunge into the past with a long, unsigned three-part series bannered THE NOVEMBER CRIMINALS: WHAT HITLER DOESN’T TELL HIS LISTENERS.

  It was, on the surface, an obsessively detailed history lesson, a response to now-Chancellor Hitler’s repeated vengeful boasts that he had come to power to rectify the betrayal of Germany by the “November Criminals,” the politicians who signed the armistice/surrender of November 1918. The series was an obsessed, intensive, remedial history lesson, yes, but it was more than that: It was an all-out frontal assault on what was the first, and in some ways most sinister instance of Nazi revisionism: the stab-in-the-back myth.

  Of course, the myth was a lie; the German armies were collapsing in November 1918, Germany’s borders were about to be overrun, the generals who later claimed to be on the verge of victory before being stabbed in the back were eager for the politicians to save them from ignominious rout, to make some deal that would permit them to march home at the head of their troops rather than flee home behind them. The generals forced the politicians to do the deal to save face for them, and then they turned around and stabbed the politicians in the back by claiming they had been betrayed.

  It was an obvious lie, but it was a lie Hitler rode to power on. More than that; it was not just a lie Hitler exploited, it was a lie that in some very important way created Hitler, made him who he was. It was, you’ll recall, in November 1918 at the army hospital in Pasewalk that Hitler experienced some kind of transformative vision or hallucination. It was a life-changing moment of metamorphosis brought on by the news of the German army surrender—a surrender that, he makes clear in his own account of the moment in Mein Kampf and elsewhere, was accompanied by a simultaneous sickening sense that the November surrender was a betrayal, a sellout, a stab in the back. In that moment of utter collapse (personal and national), total despair, and then subsequent visionary (or hallucinatory) summons, Hitler conceived the mission and the myth that would bring him to power fifteen years later. And so to the journalists of the Munich Post, the spiritual heirs of the socialist November Criminals, the stab-in-the-back myth was not merely a revisionist distortion, a historical fabrication, it was the lie that made Hitler Hitler. And a lie about them.

  I believe it was an acute sense of the centrality of this lie to the tragedy unfolding around them in the weeks after Hitler became chancellor that led the Poison Kitchen reporters to abandon for a full three issues the daily chronicle of horror, to return to 1918, to what might be called the primal scene of the crime, the lie of Hitler’s self-creation. It’s a lie they’d been fighting from the beginning, one they’d fought a veritable war over back in 1924. My sense of the doomed urgency they devoted to refighting the war over the stab-in-the-back lie in February 1933 was deepened by a discovery I’d made in the basement of the Institut für Zeitgeschichte, Germany’s repository of historical memory about the Nazi period, several days previously: the transcript of the epic 1924 “Stab-in-the-Back Swindle” trial, a discovery that made possible my tentative identification of the bitter, impassioned voice behind the unsigned November Criminals series in February 1933.

  In the last few years before the Hitler takeover, as the murder toll of political opposition rose, most Munich Post stories were published without bylines, the better to make responsibility collective and protect individual reporters from being singled out for reprisal from the death squads. The February “November Criminals” articles were unsigned as well, but I thought I recognized the distinctive, enraged, and eloquent voice of the author from the transcript of the 1924 Stab-in-the-Back trial, the first bitter battle the Poison Kitchen had fought against Hitler’s defining lie.

  It was a war they provoked deliberately, almost recklessly, when a right-wing pamphleteer named Nikolaus Cossman published a revisionist analysis of the events of November 1918, an attempt to give a fig leaf of scholarly legitimacy to the stab-in-the-back myth. Cossman had spun out a poisonous conspiracy theory accusing some of the politicians who signed the November armistice of being in the pay of the French secret service, alleging they’d turned traitor for foreign bribes.

  The Munich Post responded with a devastating attack on Cossman’s research and on Cossman himself in a manner so vicious and personal it seemed deliberately designed to provoke a libel suit. The attack was penned by the Post’s political editor, Martin Gruber, who called Cossman “a political poisoner,” a highly charged epithet in which the Poison Kitchen turned Nazi well-poisoning imagery on itself. While ridiculing Cossman’s research, Gruber insisted Cossman was not merely deluded: “If he was only an idiot, his writing would be enough to make him ridiculous, but he’s worse than an idiot,” he was sinister, and in a very particular way—as a “counterfeiter of history.” Gruber did more than characterize Cossman as a counterfeiter, he linked him with one of the most sinister and destructive historical forgeries ever fabricated: The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the counterfeit minutes of a meeting of the secret Jewish world conspiracy (forged by the czarist secret police) that had been the bible of anti-Semites since 1905. A forged document that achieved mass worldwide distribution in Henry Ford’s popularization, The International Jew, it was a forgery that indelibly shaped Hitler’s own vision of the Jews. A forgery that one historian called a “warrant for genocide,” which paved the way for Hitler’s rise and the mass murder to come.

  If the Protocols were the warrant for genocide, the stab-in-the-back lie was the local justification in Germany: Jews and Jewish money interests were behind the stab in the back in Hitler’s version of the myth. As far back as 1924, Gruber’s rhetorical rage against the counterfeiter Cossman seems fired by an awareness of the dire future consequences of counterfeiting history. He rails at Cossman as “a degenerate literary stock swindler, peddling false goods,” a falsifier of history who “deserves not to be hanged but locked up in an insane asylum.” Some of Gruber’s personal abuse is clearly designed to force Cossman to sue for libel and give Gruber a public judicial forum to combat the stab-in-the-back swindle. But the emphasis on counterfeiting and forgery, on the link with the Protocols, repeated in Gruber’s impassioned address to the court in the trial, comes from a serious po
litical analysis of the dangerous consequences of allowing history to be falsified to justify murder.

  The libel trial was briefly a national sensation in 1924, though almost forgotten now. Scrolling through the 2,500-page-long microfilm transcript of the trial, I was able to locate defendant Martin Gruber’s final appeal to the court, a long, eloquent, caustic, emotional plea that revealed him to be a man possessed, driven nearly mad by single combat with the hydra-headed historical error he was grappling with. Up to the very last minute of the trial, he was desperately trying to introduce new evidence, memoirs and diaries of dead generals he’d discovered, to refute the November Criminal lies and forgeries. He practically had to be dragged out of the courtroom kicking and screaming before he’d rest his case, before he’d cease from the near-hopeless task of trying to sweep back the tide of counterfeit history. He won the case on the evidence, but he lost it in the judgment of the right-wing nationalists who presided as judges. (Even they only fined him a nominal amount plus court costs.) But nothing succeeded in silencing him on the subject.

  And given one last chance in 1933, as time was running out, even after time had run out, to strike a final blow against Hitler, Gruber, then editor in chief of the Post, preempted all other coverage to take on once again the counterfeit fabrication that by then had been virtually canonized as the official state truth of the new Third Reich. Gruber attacked Hitler personally this time as a “political counterfeiter,” a forger of the past, a murderer of historical truth.

  I found myself profoundly stirred by the doomed passion of Martin Gruber, the voice of the Poison Kitchen, making a final desperate plea against the poisoner of history. And I found myself thinking more deeply about the pervasiveness of counterfeiting as a defining element of Hitler’s mind and method.

  It recalled to me the regrettably neglected vision of the origin of Hitler’s rise with which another Munich journalist Konrad Heiden opened his still memorable but out-of-print 1944 biography of Hitler, Der Fuehrer. It was a vision that seemed, when I first read it, a bit overwrought and melodramatic, but a vision which the Munich Post’s focus on counterfeiting made me reconsider: an utterly unexpected vision of the relationship between Adolf Hitler and the most sinister historical counterfeit of the century, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

  Heiden had followed Hitler and the Hitler Party since 1921, when he began attending their meetings to report on them for a student socialist newspaper and then later for the Frankfurter Zeitung. He was so familiar to the Hitler Party that it was said Hitler himself would not begin a speech until he saw Heiden there to record and report it, however unfriendly the coverage. As time went on, there was less jocularity and familiarity in the relationship, and with death threats following him Heiden was forced to take flight across the French border after Hitler took power in 1933.

  What had always struck me in reading and rereading the biography of Hitler that Heiden wrote in exile was the melodramatic opening passage, a dramatic reconstruction of the moment in 1917 when Heiden envisions a shadowy representative of the czarist secret police, the Okrana, the malign agency that created the forgery known as The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, slipping a copy of their deceitful document to a student in Moscow named Alfred Rosenberg. Heiden sees Rosenberg bringing it to Munich when he fled the Bolshevik Revolution, bringing it to the attention of Hitler through the circle of German mystical anti-Semites and Russian émigré haters of “Jewish Bolshevism” who became the nucleus, the source of funds for the Hitler Party and of Hitler’s conspiratorial vision of the International Jewish Bolshevik threat. To Heiden, Hitler was first of all a handmaiden, a construct of the counterfeiters who created the Protocols. But Heiden believed Hitler’s relation to the counterfeit conspiracy went beyond that.

  Heiden is not alone in his emphasis on the centrality of the Protocols to Hitler and the Hitler Party vision, but he is alone in going on to posit a startling and ingenious relationship between Hitler and this counterfeit history—one that no one else, to my knowledge, has imagined. And yet it is one I believe worth rescuing from oblivion for the kind of paradoxical metaphorical way it illuminates a truth about Hitler: Hitler as a product, a virtual creation of a counterfeit of history, and history as a creation of this counterfeit.

  Heiden reminds us that the Protocols didn’t merely imagine a secret worldwide Jewish cabal. In fact, it posed as an actual tactical and strategic manual for such a conspiracy: how to subvert traditional institutions and values: how to manipulate public opinion and the media, and so on, all these supposed Jewish techniques lifted by the Okrana counterfeiters of the Protocols from an 1864 satire on the Machiavellian methods of Emperor Napoleon III of France.

  Heiden’s stunning conjecture, which deserves attention because of his intimate acquaintance with the Hitler Party from the very beginning of the Führer’s rise, was that the secret of that rise lay in Hitler’s adapting the modernized Machiavellian tactics attributed to his archenemy, the Elders of Zion, and putting them to his own use in manipulating the media, subverting the institutions of the state, and crafting his own successful conspiracy to rule the world. Heiden argues that Hitler did not merely adopt the counterfeit Jewish conspiracy as his vision of the world, he adopted the tactics falsely attributed to Jews by czarist forgers as his own—and used them with remarkable success. A success that made Hitler himself a kind of creation of a counterfeit.

  It was an argument that left me intrigued but skeptical until I discovered how obsessed with counterfeit history the Munich Post reporters’ vision of Hitler was, with counterfeiting as some primal aspect of Hitler’s character.

  And if one examines Hitler’s behavior after he assumed power, one realizes he didn’t merely use counterfeit documents and forged interpretations of history, he counterfeited the very stuff of history itself, a practice best exemplified in the ruse Hitler used to excuse his invasion of Poland in September 1939. The act that launched the war and the genocide to come was a charade in which a squad of Hitler’s troops dressed up in Polish army uniforms in order to stage a “raid” on a German installation on the Polish border. Hitler then used the raid by the counterfeit Poles, complete with staged photos of counterfeit German “casualties,” as the false excuse for the blitzkrieg that followed.

  Not long after I returned home from Munich, I happened across a curious, slim volume in a private library—a remarkable polemical pamphlet entitled Hitler’s Counterfeit Reich, written pseudonymously in 1940 by an author who described himself as “a German political refugee.” The author goes to great lengths to find counterfeiting the essential metaphor for every aspect of the Hitler regime: the counterfeit of a justice system that masked state terror; the counterfeit of diplomacy that masked systematic blackmail and lying; and especially the counterfeit of economic success that masked the use of forced labor, and impoverishment of political enemies and Jews, an economy artificially inflated by secret, illegal expansion of an army preparing for war. The analysis of the economy was particularly valuable because it gives the lie to the counterfeit history, the myth that persists in some accounts still, that Hitler had pulled off a genuine economic miracle in the thirties.

  It was heartening to feel somehow that the Poison Kitchen analysis, their focus on Hitler as a counterfeiter, had not fallen on deaf ears, that I was not alone in seeing it as an illuminating way to look at Hitler and his regime. But it was disheartening in a way as well, when I considered how successful Hitler had been in erasing his first, most brilliant, and intimate explainers from history and memory. Who knew of Martin Gruber anymore, who remembered him in Germany, much less the rest of the world?

  His words and those of his colleagues crumbled away in the basement of the Monacensia library, faded on the microfilms in the Institut für Zeitgeschichte, echoed perhaps in the obscure Counterfeit Reich pamphlet, but otherwise . . .

  I thought of that moment in November 1991 when I’d first searched the little crescent-shaped street in Munich for number 19 Altheimer Eck, h
oping to pay tribute somehow to the place where the Munich Post was published. The moment when I found that number 19 no longer existed as a street address anymore, when I found a printing shop inside a courtyard that seemed to be the place where the Post premises had once been. There was a plaque on the printing-shop wall that explained how it had moved into this space back in 1934 when the address had still been number 19. The plaque made no mention of the newspaper that had been there, that had been pillaged and ousted, and offered no explanation for why the number had been changed. (As it turned out, the street had been renumbered after the war.)

  One hope I had in writing this chapter was to challenge contemporary German journalists to do justice to the men of the Poison Kitchen, men who brought so much honor to the profession with their courage and investigative zeal. To challenge them to restore the Poison Kitchen’s work to print again, to give German readers of today the experience of living through the coming of Hitler through the eyes of Martin Gruber and his heroic colleagues. To restore the Poison Kitchen vision to history and to historians whose attempts to explain Hitler could not help but benefit from exposure to the kind of investigative intimacy the Munich Post achieved in its hand-to-hand, eye-to-eye combat with him.

  And one more thing I believe ought to be restored: their street address. Number 19 Altheimer Eck should become a memorial and shrine to the Poison Kitchen.

  PART TWO

  TWO POSTWAR VISIONS: SINCERITY AND ITS COUNTERFEIT

  In which the question of Hitler’s inwardness—was he conscious of his criminality or convinced of his rectitude—becomes the subject of a provocative dispute between two of the first and most influential Hitler explainers