Explaining Hitler

by Ron Rosenbaum

  On the next morning, the eighteenth, a Friday, Schaub reports in his memoir (using the third person to describe himself), “Schaub said goodbye to his wife because he had to go to Hamburg with Hitler.”

  Almost all accounts have Hitler eating lunch with Geli in his apartment that Friday, with the household staff present. A lunch during which there was something of a disagreement, quarrel, or unpleasantness over Geli’s desire to make a trip to Vienna. Accounts vary as to the nature of the quarrel, but almost all accounts (including those of anti-Hitler newspapers such as the Munich Post) have Geli alive and lunching with Hitler on Friday the eighteenth. Following which Hitler took off en route to Hamburg and spent the night in Nuremberg, two hours north, at the Deutscher Hof Hotel, while Geli went to her room, never to be seen alive again. Ambiguous noises heard in her room after Hitler left have led most accounts to have her shooting herself sometime after lunch on the eighteenth, her body not being discovered until the following Saturday morning, the nineteenth.

  But Hayman is determined to offer a novel solution in which Geli had been dead for nearly two days by the time her body was discovered, in which Geli had been dead all day Friday when she’d been reported lunching with Hitler, a scenario in which Geli had been murdered Thursday night, the seventeenth.

  How Hitler spent the missing day, the Friday between his supposed Thursday-night crime and the Saturday-morning discovery of the body, is not clear from Hayman’s scenario. Did he go north to Nuremberg Thursday night, in which case the people at the Nuremberg hotel had to be coached to lie that he didn’t arrive till Friday night? Or did he hang around his apartment all day Friday as Geli’s body cooled and stiffened and an elaborate cover-up was concocted? And then slip out, drive north to Nuremberg so he could establish an alibi the morning the body was “discovered” (by getting a speeding ticket as he was racing back to Munich, supposedly after receiving the terrible news)?

  It’s not even clear Hayman needs this missing day to give his conspiracy theory more credibility—it makes it more suspect, it seems to me. But then he proceeds to add to his account an apocryphal story from a deeply discredited source: a story about Fritz Gerlich and a late-night final quarrel between Hitler and Geli in a public place. The story is told by Bridget Hitler in her long-unpublished and much-distrusted memoir, the one that contains at least one glaring, self-promoting fabrication—that young Adolf Hitler spent a missing year of his youth with Bridget and her husband, Alois Jr. (Hitler’s half brother), in their Liverpool apartment in 1911.

  Hayman uses the fabricator of a missing year to bolster his story about the murder night because Bridget Hitler purports to tell us the true story of Geli’s last night, the truth (Bridget claims) that Fritz Gerlich himself uncovered: the long-lost, never published Gerlich scoop on Geli Raubal’s death, the one Gerlich had been about to publish in his newspaper when he was dragged off by the Gestapo in 1933, the one thought lost to history or to some lost safe-deposit box.

  But no, Bridget Hitler says, it might not have been lost. She doesn’t reproduce it herself, it’s not even in the Hitler documents she claims she and her son keep “in our safe deposit box at the bank.” No, she says, Gerlich’s lost scoop did get published, not in his newspaper but in a pamphlet, which she says was entitled by Gerlich J’Accuse, one in which he laid out his proof that Hitler murdered Geli. Bridget hasn’t seen it herself, she tells us, rather she just heard about it in a conversation with her son William Patrick Hitler, who claims he heard about it from Geli’s surviving brother Leo Raubal, who happened to run across Gerlich “by accident” and received from Gerlich’s own hands the purported revelatory pamphlet.

  If it ever existed, no such pamphlet has surfaced. It exists only in the Shadow Hitler realm, and no other person ever reports having seen it or heard of it, but Hayman wants to adopt Bridget Hitler’s description of its contents, that “the evidence accumulated by Dr. Gerlich’s investigation pointed inevitably to just one verdict: murder.”

  It is in this account of what we might call the Shadow Gerlich investigation that Hayman finds his missing night. He accepts the fabricator Bridget Hitler’s account of William Patrick Hitler’s account of the Gerlich investigation purportedly recalled by Geli’s brother Leo (and ignores the fact that Leo, who survived the war, made no such report to any of the authors who interviewed him). But the missing night is there in the shadow affidavit in the Shadow Gerlich investigation, in the purported affidavit of a crony of Hitler, a Herr Zentner, the proprietor of the Bratwurstglöckl, one of Hitler’s favorite restaurant hangouts. In the summary of Gerlich’s J’Accuse pamphlet in Bridget’s memoir, in the shadow of a shadow of a report Hayman relies on, Zentner “testified” that

  Adolf had come to his restaurant with his niece and remained there until nearly one o’clock occupying a private room on the first story. . . . Adolf was slightly intoxicated as a result of drinking beer, an extremely unusual practice for him. . . . After Adolf and Geli left the restaurant, they returned to the apartment about one o’clock. Happy to find himself alone with her, Adolf renewed his advances, which Geli opposed. During the discussion, he threatened her with the service revolver he habitually wore. Certainly there was a struggle and during it a shot was fired.

  So Hitler shoots Geli, Hayman argues, after a Bratwurstglöckl quarrel on Thursday night, shoots her back at his place, in her bedroom. Not only is this missing-night theory not even necessary—there’s no reason the Bratwurstglöckl quarrel couldn’t have occurred late Friday (as Zentner’s apocryphal affidavit has it) rather than Thursday night with less sneaking around and slipping in and out than a Thursday-night scenario requires. But Hayman has created the missing night from an extremely strained interpretation of the evidence—in what actually looks like a glaring mistake in dating the Thursday and Friday in question, a mistake in interpreting one single source: Julius Schaub’s unpublished memoir.

  Even Hayman calls the reference he uses to create the missing night “ambiguous,” although one has to strain to find any ambiguity, if you ask me. For the record, here is all the evidence for the missing night, Schaub’s two-decade-later recollection that “On the day before the suicide (17.9.31) he [Hitler] left Munich in his car to hold a meeting at Nuremberg.” Hayman insists this “could mean either that Geli died on Thursday 17, September or that Hitler left Munich on 17, September.” But either way, it means Hitler left Munich before Geli died (which contradicts Hayman’s murder scenario).

  It’s difficult to rule out the possibility that Hitler murdered Geli or had Geli murdered. He certainly lied about the nature of his relationship and the nature of his quarrel with her, dissembled about the source of her supposedly suicidal proclivity (the séance story). But absent the emergence of a smoking gun from the Shadow Hitler realm or the materialization of some truth Fritz Gerlich dug up, absences I suspect will persist, there is no positive proof. The missing night Hayman pulls like a rabbit out of his hat cannot make up for the missing evidence he does not have.

  The missing night is a phantom of the Shadow Hitler realm, but I understand the evidentiary despair that may have caused Hayman to want to believe in it. I, too, had hoped to find in the Shadow Hitler realm, supplemented by contemporary investigation—even exhumation of Geli’s body—a solution to the Geli Raubal mystery that would pin her death directly—in a hands-on way or by personal order—on Adolf Hitler. It certainly seems he was capable of it, that he had the motive, means, and opportunity. And it certainly can be said that if he didn’t do it himself or didn’t order her murder, he was at least in some larger sense responsible for her death. But Hayman’s missing-night gambit is akin to the lost safe-deposit boxes of the Shadow Hitler Switzerland—an illusion born of the hope that the solution not just to Geli Raubal’s death but to Adolf Hitler’s psyche can be found in some inaccessible place.

  Such a solution would make Hitler’s purported transformation from human to inhuman, the “No More Mr. Nice Guy” metamorphosis, explicable as a product of b
lood guilt over Geli as well as grief. It would suggest that killing Geli Raubal “blooded” him in some way he hadn’t been personally blooded before, exterminated the last bit of humanness within him. And that the specter of a Jewish seducer of Geli behind their fatal quarrel then set him on a course that made extermination of the Jews inevitable.

  In a certain sense, this increasingly strained argument is as unjust to Geli Raubal as Simon Wiesenthal’s fantasy of a Jewish prostitute giving Hitler syphilis would be to that poor woman of the streets if she’d ever existed: appearing to place the whole weight of the Holocaust on her shoulders. More important, the whole line of No More Mr. Nice Guy speculation (which enjoys favor from sober and rational historians as well as conspiracy theorists) about Geli’s death as a great divide is contradicted by the evidence that Hitler’s primitive hatred burned with a hard, gemlike flame long before September 1931. Burned with sufficient virulence in Hitler to account for his subsequent exterminationist acts without any reference to Geli Raubal’s character or fate. The primitive hatred Hitler shared in his strange bond with Streicher, the primitive hatred Streicher manifested, a hatred that might have been the true face of Hitler’s own hatred, was in place in Hitler’s heart long before Geli Raubal moved into his apartment. And whatever emotion he felt upon her death paled in comparison to the primitive fury of the entrenched ruling emotion of his existence.

  If there was any real shift in the nature of the hatred Hitler harbored, if his primitive hatred could be said to have evolved or changed, it might rather have been in the way Hitler came to acquire and deploy a kind of ironic knowingness about his primitive hatred. The way he would come to make artful little knowing jests about it, virtually chuckle over the magnitude of his hatred by telling his cronies, with a nudge and a wink, that he thought Streicher—and the notoriously, savagely primitive hatred Streicher so shockingly and nakedly displayed—was in fact practically temperate compared to his own hatred; that to him, to Hitler, Streicher “idealized” the Jews.

  The wickedly artful ironic consciousness of his own primitive hatred is a signature of Hitler to some thinkers. Bullock’s notion of Hitler’s duality sees him as the cynic who becomes possessed by sincere conviction, by “true” hatred. Here, though, it’s the possessed, true hater who can be wickedly ironic if not cynical about the degree of his hate-filled possession, who can jest about his own murderousness.

  The way Hitler jests, in the Table Talk, about the “rumor” he’s exterminating the Jews; the way he can jest to Christa Schroeder about feeling “clean as a newborn babe” after the Blood Purge; the way he speaks of the Final Solution in the imagery of laughter Lucy Dawidowicz picks up on (see chapter 20); the way he jests to Goebbels about the suffering of his victims throughout the war—this mirthful knowingness, the laughter and relish, is a sign and signature to the philosopher Berel Lang of the peculiar way Hitler and his cronies raised the consciousness of evil to a veritable art: created what Lang sees as an art of evil.

  PART FIVE

  THE ART OF EVIL AND THE FUTURE OF IT

  In which the perils of getting too close to the Führer are explored

  CHAPTER 11

  To the Gestapo Cottage; or, A Night Close to the Führer

  In which the philosopher Berel Lang closes in on the locus of Hitler’s evil in his identity as an artist

  Night and fog on the Obersalzberg, Hitler’s mountain retreat. We seem to have lost our way, although Herr H.—often in error, never in doubt—insists he knows exactly where we are. And so, despite the blowing fog that bounces the high beams of his BMW back into our faces, obscuring all but a few feet of the icy pavement in front of us, Herr H. presses on, up the mountain. He’s on a mission. He wants to “spend a night close to the Führer.” In a sense, so do I.

  The problem is that the main road up to the top of the mountain that had once been Hitler’s personal peak has been barricaded. Something to do with the preparations for the local Christmas market, not the dangerous ice, Herr H. insists, as he pilots us onto an even narrower, icier switchback route with no guardrails. The road seems dangerous to me and nothing less than terrifying to Herr H.’s Israeli girlfriend, Miriam, who has only recently recovered from a near-fatal car wreck on a similarly icy road and who is rigidly braced in the front passenger seat for a repetition of the horror.

  But Herr H. has determined not to permit poor visibility, dangerous road conditions, or painful memories to deter him from the now-so-near fulfillment of a long-held fantasy, the goal of this pilgrimage to the mountaintop shrine.

  In 1942, Martin Bormann announced with great fanfare a grand construction project on the mountain that had, since the 1920s, been Hitler’s Alpine retreat, the place where Hitler built a sumptuous rustic palace for himself, the Berghof, his Hall of the Mountain King. Here, Hitler would escape from the embroilments of Munich (and then Berlin) politics to meditate amid breathtaking Alpine vistas, hike in traditional Bavarian lederhosen, and imbibe the crystalline mountain air. Here, he’d receive heads of state and host strategy conferences with his generals, dictating from that heady perspective the future map of Europe against the backdrop of snowcapped peaks visible through vast floor-to-ceiling picture windows.

  It was here Hitler could ascend skyward to another aerie—to the tiny teahouse at the very top of the mountain where he could survey in lonely splendor the realm he commanded from his Eagle’s Nest. And it was here, Martin Bormann announced, that, at the request of the Führer, he was constructing a grand guest house for the German people on Hitler’s magic mountain.

  “Here,” the politically ambitious and slyly self-promoting Bormann proclaimed, “every German who participated in a pilgrimage to the beloved Führer would have the opportunity to spend one day and one night close to the Führer, for only one reichsmark.”

  As it turned out, construction was so expensive and demand for rooms so great on the part of middle-management Nazi officials that only the elite of the Third Reich could be accommodated, although the structure Bormann built was a vast, rambling behemoth whose rustic exterior concealed high-ceilinged Teutonic reception halls, banquet rooms, and an extensive, high-tech underground bunker.

  Still, the dream of the pilgrimage, the goal of spending one night there, “one night close to the Führer,” has not died. It’s alive in Herr H.

  Getting close to the Führer is Herr H.’s lifelong project. He’s a forty-five-year-old Viennese furniture restorer and amateur historian of the variety one sarcastic German journalist characterized as the Hitler mit Schlippern (Hitler in slippers) school. They tend to be something more than serious memorabilia collectors (although they are that, too) and something less than serious historians. I’d first met Herr H. as a result of my Geli Raubal investigations: He had attracted some notice when he petitioned the city of Vienna to exhume Geli’s body in order to see if further forensic evidence on the circumstances of her death could be garnered from the remains (the pro-Hitler public prosecutor had forestalled a full forensic autopsy in 1931). The Vienna city government had derailed Herr H.’s effort over the question of the certainty of the grave location. Geli’s body had been moved from its pride of place in Vienna’s Central Cemetery shortly after the war when the Hitler family had, perforce, stopped making payments on its upkeep. Her remains, in a zinc coffin, had been shifted to an unmarked field of paupers’ graves. But Herr H. claimed to have dug up the moldering schematic diagrams of the cemetery that pinpointed Geli’s new resting place. The city disputed Herr H.’s certainty, and there the matter rested, although not Herr H., who produced an elaborate, privately printed volume of Geli Raubal documents, recollections, and interviews he’d conducted with those still alive who knew her.

  I found Herr H.’s attitude toward Geli and Hitler curiously inconsistent and sometimes self-contradictory. He claimed at one point he’d solved the case and that he knew the name of an SS man who’d murdered Geli at Hitler’s orders. But I hadn’t been convinced of the authenticity of the documentary ev
idence he’d shown me: an entry from a purported diary kept by Geli’s supposed spiritual adviser, a Viennese priest named Father Pant; and Herr H. didn’t take up my offer to have the diary-paper tested for historical authenticity. But despite trying to promote proof that Hitler had Geli murdered, he didn’t seem to be too exercised over Hitler’s other murders.

  It was in keeping with the disturbingly serene view of the Hitler mit Schlippern school: not neo-Nazi, not denying the Holocaust, but choosing to focus instead on the memorabilia Hitler, the “personal” Hitler, the Hitler relaxing at home with his beloved dog Blondi in Eva Braun’s home movies, the Hitler of the warm reminiscences by his secretarial staff and valets, who spoke of his fondness for their children, his delight in remembering their birthdays, the nightly tea parties in the command bunkers, the gemütlichkeit Hitler of the Table Talk.

  Underlying Herr H.’s ability to sustain this attitude is the relativization, the historicization of Hitler accomplished by the German nationalist historians of the Historikerstreit in the eighties, the ones who made the comparative-evil argument: Stalin was worse; Stalin invented mass murder and concentration camps; Hitler’s brutality was a response to the threat of the bloodthirsty “Asiatic” Bolsheviks in the east. Hitler was the lesser, or at least the later evil in world history.

  Herr H.’s mother was a postwar refugee from Stalinist Czechoslovakia who’d fled to Vienna (where Herr H. was born in 1949) and imbued him with a horror of the Bolsheviks. At an early age, he began to collect Wehrmacht uniforms and Hitler memorabilia, building up his collection from a personal hobby to a thriving business supplying German uniforms and ordnance to movie companies making Nazi-period films.

  This, along with his chain of antique-furniture restoration shops and some private dealings in Hitler watercolors and the like, have paid for the brand-new BMW and the expensive Armani jackets he wears over his carefully faded pressed jeans and his Gucci loafers. He’s a relatively genial fellow, and we’d come to an uneasy truce over our respective attitudes after a clash over roast goose at his favorite Vienna restaurant. After drinking some wine, Herr H. had been declaiming that the Russian people deserved their suffering under communism, because they’d put up with Stalin and his henchmen for so long. I countered by asking him if he then agreed with those who said the German people deserved their suffering for putting up with Hitler. For whatever reason, he had not wanted to progress beyond relativizing Stalin and Hitler’s comparative evil to explicitly portraying Hitler as somehow more defensible than Stalin.