by A. N. Wilson
The German mark lost its value on the international currency markets. By 1 July, the rate of exchange with the dollar had risen to 160,000 marks, by 1 August to a million, by 1 November to 130,000 million. The ultimate capitalist nightmare had fallen on the German middle classes. Their savings were worth nothing. With inflation running at this level even the simplest commodities of life became unaffordable, and it really was the case that people needed a wheelbarrow to carry enough paper money to buy a simple week’s groceries. Germany had been allowed, by the international community, to sink into a situation where there was no stability of any kind.
The army, in particular, and the ex-Freikorps officers, such as Ernst Röhm, favoured a military solution to the country’s problems: a march on Berlin, and a war of revenge against the French. Hitler, who already had his sights on real political power, could see that such talk was nonsense. If they attempted to fight France yet again, they would be defeated. If, however, they fought the German Republican Government, and created the greatest possible mayhem, they could only be marching in the right direction – in the direction where power lay. To make their objectives too specific at this stage would be to risk defeat. He must be seen to move from triumph to triumph. At the same time, he must not be seen as a supporter of the status quo, so that illegal street fighting or fisticuffs with the Reds would do his reputation no harm at all.
By now Hitler was beginning to collect around him the grotesque gang of misfits and semi-criminals who would, for a nightmarish decade, be the most powerful political clique in Europe. There was Julius Streicher, whose shaven head was an ugly pink sea urchin. This short, stocky primary school teacher ran a newspaper, Der Stürmer, with a line in anti-Jewish fantasy lurid even by the standards of southern Germany. The pages of Der Stürmer reflected a mind which was filled with bandy-legged Jews seducing pure German maidens, and money-grubbing Jews eating or murdering Christian babies.
Then there was the preposterous figure of Hermann Göring, a pampered, overweight kleptomaniac. He loved uniforms and when the Nazis achieved power, he appeared in ever more fantastical Ruritanian costumes, with epaulettes the dimension of elaborate Bavarian pastries, and rows of medals. He had been a flying ace in the war, which gave him contact with members of the aristocracy. He was more ‘class’ than most other members of the movement, a fact which in the initial stages gave him a certain clout. When Lord Halifax met him in 1936 he said that he was ‘a composite personality – film star, great landowner interested in his estate, prime minister, party manager, head gamekeeper at Chatsworth’.2
On May Day 1923 there was a peaceful march by the socialists through the centre of Munich. Hitler, clad in a steel helmet and wearing his Iron Cross, which he had won for being, in effect, little more than an obedient postman, accompanied by Göring, and a group of others – Streicher, Rudolf Hess and Gregor Strasser – stood ready to lead 20,000 storm-troopers (SA) to break up the socialists. But at the agreed signal, Captain Röhm did not come to their help. It was a serious humiliation for Hitler. His SA troops handed back their arms to the local army barracks. Meanwhile, in Berlin, the economic and political situation worsened. Wilhelm Cuno resigned as Chancellor to be replaced by Gustav Stresemann. There were strikes. There were riots by Communists. Trains and trucks were regularly raided by the hungry. The country was more or less in a state of anarchy.
On 2 September 1922, the anniversary of the defeat of France at Sedan in 1870, there was a huge demonstration in Nuremberg presided over by General Ludendorff, the distinguished old war general. On 26 September, Stresemann announced that the government was calling off the passive resistance plan and pleaded once more for a negotiated settlement with the French. Hitler put his own 15,000 storm-troopers on alert.
The State Governor in Munich, Gustav von Kahr, asked for, and received, Hitler’s solemn assurance that he was not planning an anti-government putsch. There followed one of Hitler’s characteristically whopping lies. The world would get used to these, and the more extreme the lie, the more decent people, such as Lord Halifax and Neville Chamberlain, would feel inclined to believe them. ‘Never as long as I live’, Hitler told Kahr, ‘would I make a putsch.’
At the beginning of October, it looked as if Kahr was heading for a major confrontation with the Berlin government. Stresemann and his liberal-socialist Cabinet expressed the desire to close down the scurrilous right-wing Bavarian newspaper, the in-effect Nazi Völkischer Beobachter (The Nazi Observer – the word ‘völkisch’ meaning literally ‘of the people’ came to stand for the whole bundle of patriotic or nationalist feelings which the Nazis represented). They also wanted to replace the right-wing General Otto von Lossow as leader of the army in Bavaria and put General Kress von Kressenstein in his stead. This set of proposals delighted Hitler by causing violently anti-government feelings to be aroused in otherwise moderate Bavarians. ‘Auf nach Berlin!’ – ‘On to Berlin!’ – became a nationalist watchword.
But then Stresemann’s government appeared to be on top of things. They broke the threat of a Communist uprising. General Müller suppressed the governments of Saxony and Thuringia, which had the effect of strengthening central power and was designed pour encourager les autres. Colonel Hans Ritter von Seisser warned Hitler and the Bavarian would-be rebels that, in the event of a putsch, there was no hope that malcontents in the north of the country would join it.
By now it was too late. Hitler had already primed his followers, telling them that he would take part in a putsch. On 8 November Kahr was due to speak to a sympathetic right-ring audience in the Bürgerbräukeller or Citizen’s Beer Hall. Twenty minutes after Kahr had begun to speak, Hitler, Göring and twenty-five armed Brownshirts burst into the building.
One symptom of Hitler’s being strangely at variance with reality, or the nature of things, was his gift for wearing inappropriate or ludicrous clothing. Even if you overlook his fondness for lederhosen and knee-length pale socks, his dress sense was, to put it mildly, uncertain. On this occasion, when he was supposed to be starting a militaristic revolution, he was wearing evening dress and an ill-fitting black tailcoat, which reminded one observer of ‘the slightly nervous sort of provincial bridegroom you can see in scores of pictures behind the dusty windows of Bavarian village photographers’,3 and his army medals. He fired a revolver in the air and shouted, ‘The National revolution is begun!’ It was Hitler’s aim to persuade Kahr, and the army, supported by Ludendorff, to march on Berlin, and overthrow the left-wing government. Any such adventure would have been doomed to end in failure, and Kahr had no intention of going along with the Nazi plans. Kahr behaved unflappably. ‘You can arrest me or shoot me. Whether I die or not is no matter.’ Colonel Seisser reproached Hitler for so flagrantly breaking his word. ‘Yes, I did’, admitted Hitler. ‘Forgive me. I had to, for the sake of the Fatherland.’4 He then announced that the Berlin government had been overthrown and that Herr von Kahr was the ‘Regent’ – not an honour which he accepted. But the crowd liked it. Hitler’s announcement that they had replaced the Berlin government was greeted with applause.
Two Hitlers were on display that evening. One was the strutting populist revolutionary demagogue, thirsting for the applause of the crowd. But his sense of timing had deserted him, and he knew that this coup d’état was not going to happen. So there was seen that other Hitler, the cringing lower middle-class man who felt ill at ease with his social or military superiors and would do all in his oleaginous power to be ingratiating. Almost bowing to Kahr, he said, ‘If your Excellency permits, I will drive out to see His Majesty [that is the Bavarian Crown Prince Rupprecht] at once and inform him that the German people have arisen and made good the injustice done to His Majesty’s late lamented father.’
Kahr agreed that this should be done. But he had no intention of bowing to Hitler’s pressure. He and his Cabinet withdrew during the night to Regensburg where they continued the legal government of Bavaria. General Lossow returned to barracks, where the commander of the Munich garri
son, General Danner, asked drily, ‘All that was bluff, your Excellency?’ The next day, Hitler and General Ludendorff returned to the Bürgerbräukeller with a column of Nazi storm-troopers. They were met, not by the army, which would have provided too great a clash of loyalty in some storm-troopers’ hearts, but by the police. In the exchange of gunfire, which lasted only a minute or so, sixteen Nazis were killed and three police. Göring was wounded and smuggled across the Austrian border and given hospital treatment at the expense of the Wagners. Hitler suffered a dislocated shoulder.
A few days after the attempted putsch, Hitler was arrested.
If Hitler had been an inhabitant of the rational world, the world of John Locke or Abraham Lincoln, the ridiculous putsch of 1923 would have been seen as an abject and humiliating exposure of weakness. But he lived in strange times, and he had an altogether anti-rational take on events.
Hitler made his trial a piece of drama. General Lossow was the man who did not survive the trial. He emerged as a Prince Hamlet, unable to decide whether he had or had not supported the Nazis and their putsch. ‘The well-known eloquence of Herr Hitler at first made a strong impression on me, but the more I heard of him, the fainter this impression became. I realized that his long speeches were always about the same thing, that his views were partly a matter-of-course for any German of nationalist views, and partly showed that Hitler lacked a sense of reality and the ability to see what was possible and practical.’5
Exactly. Which was why Hitler, in the topsy-turvy world of the Weimar Republic, was going to succeed and why Lossow was on the heap. Lossow accused Hitler of personal ambition, and said that he was a mere ‘drummer’. While attempting to subdue the infuriating Hitler he had in fact given the great diva his cue for a magnificent aria in the court room –
‘How petty are the thoughts of small men! Believe me, I do not regard the acquisition of a minister’s portfolio as a thing worth striving for. I do not think it worthy of a great man to endeavour to go down in history just by becoming a minister …’6
So, Hitler, the thirty-four-year-old down-and-out failed art-student who had never achieved anything at all in his life, was now the ‘great man’. The judge, the lawyers, the generals, and the elected politicians in the court room were the also-rans. It was a useful lesson for them to learn.
Revealingly, Hitler did not compare himself to Bismarck, still less to Kahr or Lossow or to any of the political figures in German history. No, he took his audience in spirit to stand beside the grave of the Master.
When I stood for the first time at the grave of Richard Wagner my heart overflowed with pride in a man who had forbidden any such inscription as: Here lies Privy Councillor, Music-Director, His Excellency Baron Richard von Wagner. I was proud that this man and so many others in German history were content to give their names to history without titles. It was not from modesty that I wanted to be a drummer in those days. That was the highest aspiration: the rest is nothing.
The man who is born to be a dictator is not compelled; he wills it. He is not driven forward, but drives himself. There is nothing immodest about this. Is it immodest for a worker to drive himself towards heavy labour? Is it presumptuous of a man with a high forehead of a thinker to ponder through the nights till he gives the world an invention? The man who feels called upon to govern a people, has no right to say: if you want me, or summon me, I will co-operate. No, it is his duty to step forward.7
It was a strange defence. He had taken part in a failed attempt at the violent overthrow of the legal government. His response was that he was a great man, an imaginative genius in the tradition of a great composer, a national saviour.
In an English court, Hitler would have been asked whether he had, or had not, planned the putsch; whether he had, or had not, attempted to overthrow the legitimate government of his country; whether he had, or had not, urged his followers to shoot policemen. In Bavaria, 1923, Hitler was given a prison sentence of five years, and sent to the fortress prison of Landsberg. From this perspective in time, it might be thought that he would have emerged from the court room as a ridiculous failure who had been guilty of sedition and mind-bogglingly absurd folie de grandeur. On the contrary, at the time, he was seen by thousands of admirers as a hero. Far from laughing at his claim to be Germany’s natural dictator, who was merely waiting for the moment when Destiny called, they took him completely seriously. And it was less than a decade before Destiny would comply.
Hitler’s fortress prison was scarcely penitential. Winifred Wagner, Richard Wagner’s daughter-in-law and an early supporter, sent pencil and papers urging him to write a great tract, or his memoirs. She also supplied him with hampers of delicious foods, as did many other faithful followers. Hitler was allowed an airy upstairs room, comfortably furnished, with a clear view of rolling countryside. Dressed in lederhosen, he could loll in a comfortable armchair, attended by the devout Rudolf Hess, the heavily eyebrowed earnest figure, besotted from the beginning by Hitler’s personality, and who was allowed the privilege of answering the letters and arranging the flowers sent to Landsberg by the faithful. Hess spoke at this time of the way that Hitler radiated ‘something that puts those around him under its spell and spreads in ever-widening circles’.8 Ridiculous as Hess might seem to posterity, he spoke no less than the truth. Whether we like to admit it or not, Hitler did have this mesmeric force. Before the catastrophic end, millions had felt its dark, hypnotic strength.
To the faithful Hess fell the sacred task of typing out the Leader’s great book, My Struggle. For, although Winifred Wagner imagined her hero sitting busily at his table and filling notebooks with his wisdom, he in fact preferred speaking to writing.
It is a curious work. We have already indicated that the title is one of its fictitious aspects. True, it was a misfortune that his parents had died early. The rest of the struggle is less easy to identify. The grinding poverty came about simply from Hitler’s personal fecklessness, and not because he had lived through an economic crisis. As for the downfall of Greater Germany and the defeat of both Germany and Austria in the World War, while he took these things intensely personally, they were phenomena which affected persons other than himself.
But you would never guess so from reading My Struggle. The British novelist Anthony Powell used to say that self-pity was an essential ingredient in any bestseller and to this extent, the self projected through the pages of My Struggle is one with mass appeal.
The political programme which it advances is one from which Hitler deviated very little over the next twenty years, though he was compelled to modify his expressed belief that Britain would be his ally, or at best a neutral partner in the programme of Teutonic world domination which he outlined. He said that Germany was either a great world power or it was nothing. It would become a great world power again when it waged war in the East and took Lebensraum from the Russians. Those responsible for the tragedy of German defeat in the war must be held to account. These were the Communists and, often the same people, the Jews. The sacrifice of millions in the battlefields at the Front would not have been necessary if ‘twelve or fifteen thousand of these Hebrew corrupters had been held under poison gas’.
It is a baffling fact that so many historians of Hitler continue to speak belittlingly of My Struggle as a key text explaining his later intentions. We must not suppose, they say, that when he speaks of gassing the Jews in My Struggle, he already had in mind a Final Solution. Maybe not, but the intention was plain enough. And this was the book which was freely available throughout Germany during all the years of his increased popularity. No one can say that his followers did not know what he was advocating. Likewise, we are told that the Germans were all shocked when Hitler led the world into a war. Very likely they were. But by then, there had been sixteen years in which to read his book, in which he repetitively harangues the reader with the necessity of war, its cleansing effects and its inevitability after the perfidy of Versailles and the actions of the November criminals.
&nbs
p; So, although it is in many ways a boring book, My Struggle is also one of stupendous historical importance. Other men write their autobiography when they have passed through their great life-experiences. Hitler wrote his autobiography as a manifesto of what he wanted to do. The Struggle was one which he believed himself to have passed through. But in another sense, the clever title is an indication of what is to come.
Over 500 visitors came to Landsberg Prison to see him, including General Ludendorff himself. The very act of being imprisoned, as other great political demagogues have discovered since in imitation of Hitler, was a very useful career move. It was now felt among the extreme Right that no move forward was possible without Hitler. That Struggle, or Fight – in German the same thing, Kampf – was not a reference to Hitler’s inability to buy a decent suit of clothes or sell his lousy postcard paintings in the back-streets of Vienna in the years before the war. The Struggle/Fight lay ahead. It was the fight for the future identity of Germany. If he were successful, it would be a fight for the future identity of the world itself.
FOUR
The Politics of Catastrophe
‘I guarantee you’, Hitler proclaimed, ‘that the impossible always succeeds. What is unlikeliest is surest.’1 Certainly, as he emerged from Landsberg Prison, it would have seemed unlikely, if not impossible, to most analysts of his situation, that he was within rather less than nine years of becoming the Chancellor of Germany. ‘For me and for all of us’, he said on another occasion, ‘setbacks have been only the whiplash which drove us onward with more determination than before.’2