by A. N. Wilson
Had he been a regular politician, there is no doubt that he would have vanished without trace after the prison experience. By the time he emerged from Landsberg, the party which he had led had shattered into many fissiparous and quarrelsome groups. There was no party funding, no party discipline, and, what was worse from the point of view of these right-wing malcontents, the Weimar Republic began to enjoy a period of comparative stability. Hitler was not a politician. Politics have been called the ‘art of the possible’. Hitler dealt with the art of the impossible. He was more a mage or a conjuror than a politician. Politics are the method of governing a country by some process of reason. The debate is: how. As Lenin asked: Who whom? Who would control whom? Who would control the economy? Who, if anyone, would attempt to control the market? Obviously when Hitler did eventually assume control of Germany, he would be compelled to address these political questions. Patient politicians of the Weimar Republic had to deal with the day-to-day movements of world markets, the grind of international diplomacy, the economic problems of unemployment. Politicians watched the weather and waited for calm. Hitler wanted to ride storms.
In the five years after he left prison, however, the skies over Germany slowly cleared and it looked as if no storms would come. In 1924 an international committee headed by the American banker Charles G. Dawes proposed a system of foreign loans which would make the repayment of reparations conceivable. The currency stabilized with the introduction of the Rentenmark. The politicians, or would-be politicians, of the völkisch Right did not enjoy much success. Franconia and Bavaria, their supposed heartland, produced a dwindling of votes at elections. In the course of one year nearly 70 per cent of their following had evaporated.3
The next five years saw no great advance for the Nazis. It was a time, however, for Hitler, when he began to collect about him some of the companions who would make his success, when it came, so stupendous. One of these followers was Gregor Strasser, a pharmacist from Landshut. A great big man, who enjoyed pub brawls, he was also one who enjoyed reading Homer in Greek, and who was a great phrase-maker. It was Strasser who saw clearly that Nazism could only succeed on the back of Germany’s failure. It needed not just setbacks but the worst of times to stimulate its desperate purposes. ‘We will attain everything if we set hunger, despair and sacrifice marching for our aims’, he said. He saw nationalist and socialist despair flaming in ‘a single great fire’. Here was a man after Hitler’s own Schopenhauerian heart. He advocated ‘the politics of catstrophe’,4 and if there is one phrase which sums up Hitler’s credo, it was this. Schopenhauer and Strasser had only despair in their souls. For Hitler, with his craving for adulation, however, despair was only a means to an end. Riding on the storms of Germany’s despair, he wanted to be able to bring salve and cure, to be hailed as the Saviour. He had been denied the chance to save Germany by armed revolution. He could now only hope to do so through the ballot box. And no sane German would vote for the politics of catastrophe until, once more, they lived in catastrophic times.
Strasser, the leading light of the Berlin radical Right, would not last long in the Nazi movement. He insisted that its anti-Bolshevist prejudice was wrong and that they should aim for a socialist transformation of society. Someone who took the opposite view was Strasser’s colleague Joseph Goebbels. This extraordinarily unpleasant person, who physically resembled Nosferatu the Vampyre of film legend, came from Rheydt, a small industrial town in the Elberfeld area of the Ruhr. Born in 1897, Goebbels had been educated at Catholic boarding schools, but his faith did not survive beyond childhood. Osteomyelitis rendered him lame, and he had to wear a metal brace on his leg and a block shoe. His condition had in fact rendered him unfit for military service. A shameless liar, he had no compunction about suggesting that his limping gait was caused by war wounds. The fact that he was only five foot in height did not deflect his energy as a determined amorist: one of the many ways in which he differed from Hitler. It was the French occupation of the Ruhr region which radicalized Goebbels. His Ph.D. and his aspirations to be a poet, playwright or novelist made him seem like the intellectual of the movement, but he was no more a writer than Hitler was a painter. The fact that both had attempted success in their various creative fields and both had abjectly failed only increased the bitterness with which they looked out upon the world.
In 1925–6 it looked likely that the northern Nazis, dominated by Strasser and Goebbels, would take precedence over the madder rabble in Munich, and that Hitler would be superseded. Strasser was appalled, for example, by the low-grade quality of the Völkischer Beobachter. Goebbels wrote in his diary, ‘Nobody has faith in Munich any more.’5 But when Hitler began to visit Berlin, he learnt how to woo Goebbels at Strasser’s expense. ‘He pampers me like a child’, Goebbels told his diary.
Lord Beaverbrook once said that the way to run a successful newspaper was to put a ferret in the cage. What he meant by this was that if he appointed to his staff an individual whom the editor hated, the creative tension would produce interesting results. It would also leave both in a position of subordination to the proprietor. Hitler was a master of the ferret in the cage technique of man-management. As NSDAP leader, he appointed Strasser as head of propaganda. But he then made Goebbels the new Gauleiter, or district leader, of the capital. The Berlin Nazis were thereby locked in a situation by which both their leading figures would be at loggerheads. Hitler made the two friends into enemies.
Goebbels and Hitler during these quiescent years of the party’s history laid the foundations of its future success. Hitler made it his object to suppress dissent. The debates which Strasser and the other northern Nazis wished to have about the exactitudes of party doctrine were forbidden. Was the party pro-capitalist, or anti-capitalist? Surely, Strasser argued, it could not be both. Hitler responded that one of the great secrets of Christianity’s success was the unalterability of its dogmas.6 This demonstrated at least two things: Hitler’s ignorance of the ever-changing pattern of Christian history, and his determination to impose a discipline upon his party as intolerant as that of the nineteenth-century popes upon the church of his baptism.
In July 1926, he and Goebbels organized a mass rally in Weimar. Hitler, dressed in a belted tunic and puttees, addressed 5,000 people. Some said the performance was somewhat lacklustre. This was the first time that Hitler upraised his hand in a Roman salute, in the gesture which would soon become so familiar to his followers. The time would come when not 5,000 but a whole nation would return the salute with the cry of ‘Heil Hitler!’ But on this occasion, there was flatness. Only the hard core of the old völkisch Right had turned up. Gregor Strasser remarked on this occasion that National Socialism was dead.7
These were years of party retrenchment and reorganization, of waiting in the doldrums, waiting either for a helpful catastrophe, or, from a Nazi perspective, a disastrous progress towards national stability. They were also years in which Hitler appears in the company of women. Hitherto, the only women of note in his life had been his mother and a girl named Stefanie, loved from afar in Linz, and to whom he had not plucked up courage to speak. In his post-war celebrity as a speaker, he attracted female patrons. One of the earliest to join the NSDAP, even before the Munich putsch, had been Winifred Wagner, the Welsh daughter-in-law of the Master, a person with whom Hitler established an instantaneous rapport when they first met at the Golden Anchor Hotel in Bayreuth. The meeting occurred in 1923, when Hitler was thirty-four and she an attractive twenty-six-year-old. From the first, she bid him call her Winnie, and he asked her to use his pet name of Wolf. Albert Speer, the young architect who was destined to become one of Hitler’s closest associates, once told the historian Joachim Fest that Hitler and Winnie had been lovers at some point. Whether or not this was true, Winnie provided Hitler with something he had sorely lacked all his life – a family circle. Hitler stayed regularly with Winnie, her husband the composer and conductor Siegfried Wagner and her four children, who looked on the Leader as a benign uncle and family fri
end. In the Wagners’ company, clearly, Hitler was always on best behaviour. They did not see him rant or use foul language or lose his temper.
Family life was also on offer in the company of the Hanfstaengls. Catherine Hanfstaengl, an American by birth and of liberal political inclinations, had been bowled over very early by Hitler’s oratorical magic, and by the Wagnerian idea of a young man from nowhere arriving as the saviour. She was a noted Munich salonnière and it was in her house that Hitler met many of his rich backers for the first time. People noticed his sycophancy; the manner, for example, when talking to General Ludendorff, of raising his bottom with a half bow at the old man’s every sentence – ‘Very well, your Excellency!’ ‘Quite so, your Excellency!’8 Catherine’s son Ernst, known as Putzi, became Hitler’s friend, and he has left us some of the most vivid impressions of what it was like to be in the Leader’s presence: his habit of farting in cars, for example; or the way in which the oleaginous social manner could suddenly fall away, and an outburst like Tourette’s syndrome could burst through, as when, on one occasion, someone let fall a friendly remark about the Jews, and Hitler thrust back his chair, stood up and suddenly started yelling. These accounts of Hitler in the salon conjure up a mixture of amusement and horror, comparable to those scenes in Dostoyevksy’s The Devils, when the nihilist murderer/pervert Stavrogin misbehaves in his mother’s drawing room. In fact, one sees that Dostoyevsky with his prescient imagination has painted a horrifying tragic-comedy of what happens when an intelligent bourgeoisie sells its soul to a monster. Thinking to patronize him, these fools – both the fictitious ones in the pages of the Russian novel, and the actual friends of Hitler – have no idea that the ‘interesting’ figure they are hosting has a gigantic – to use one of his own favourite adjectives – demonic power; that they are his puppets, rather than he theirs.
Another woman who made it her mission to civilize Hitler was Frau Bechstein, the wife of the celebrated piano manufacturer. She lent all her jewels, valued at 60,000 Swiss francs, as a surety which enabled Hitler to borrow money from a Berlin coffee merchant for much-needed party funds.9 She tried to teach him table manners and normal social graces, and at one of her soirées, when she had managed to persuade the teetotalling Leader to hold a glass of wine in his hand like everyone else, she was appalled to witness him calling over a servant with a sugar bowl, and scooping in a lump or two to make the grown-up drink acceptable to his childish palate.
Certainly, snobs found his intrusion into the houses of the rich disconcerting. The aristocratic misanthrope Friedrich Reck-Malleczewen was undoubtedly one such, but his account of what the Nazis did to his country, in his posthumously published Diary of a Man in Despair, is, once read, unforgettable. Reck-Malleczewen first encountered Hitler at the house of his friend Clemens von Franckenstein who was not a mad scientist as his name implies, but a musical composer and the director of the Bavarian Court Theatre. This was back in 1920. Hitler had forced his way into Franckenstein’s house alleging that he had come to discuss the design of sets for operas. When Reck-Malleczewen arrived at the house, the butler complained to him that Hitler had already been there an hour:
He had come to a house, where he had never been before, wearing gaiters, a floppy, wide-brimmed hat, and carrying a riding whip. There was a German Shepherd dog, too. The effect, among the Gobelin tapestries and cool marble walls, was something akin to a cowboy’s sitting down on the steps of a baroque altar in leather breeches, spurs, and with a Colt at his side. But Hitler sat there, the stereotype of a headwaiter – at that time, he was thinner, and looked somewhat starved – both impressed and restricted by the presence of a real, live Herr Baron; awed, not quite daring to sit fully in his chair, but perched on half, more or less, of his thin loins; not caring at all that there was a great deal of cool and elegant irony in the things his host said to him, but snatching hungrily at the words, like a dog at pieces of raw meat.
Eventually he managed to launch into a speech. He talked on and on, endlessly. He preached. He went on and on at us like a division chaplain in the Army. We did not in the least contradict him or venture to differ in any way, but he began to bellow at us. The servants thought we were being attacked, and rushed in to defend us.
When he had gone, we sat silently confused and not at all amused. There was a feeling of dismay, as when on a train you suddenly find you are sharing a compartment with a psychotic. We sat a long time and no one spoke. Finally, Cle stood up, opened one of the huge windows, let the warm spring air into the room. It was not that our grim guest had been unclean, and fouled the room in the way that so often happens in a Bavarian village. But the fresh air helped to dispel the feeling of oppression. It was not that an unclean body had been in the room, but something else: the unclean essence of a monstrosity.10
In 1926, Hitler had a Bavarian holiday with his gang of cronies in the Obersalzberg, the stupendous mountain scenery which will forever, thanks to his presence there, possess a rather sinister atmosphere. High in the mountains above Berchtesgaden, he stayed at the Pension Moritz, whose owners, the Büchners, were admirers, and it was while there that he took the lease on the Haus Wachenfeld. It belonged to a Berlin businessman’s widow – born Wachenfeld. The modest 100 marks a month were paid by yet another admirer, and he was eventually enabled to buy the property, transforming it into his vast mountain eyrie, a modern place known as the Berghof, or Mountain Court. Here indeed was a dream-place, a fantasy-residence worthy of the magician Klingsor.
‘When I go to Obersalzberg, I’m not drawn there merely by the beauty of the landscape’, he once told his friends. ‘I feel myself far from petty things, and my imagination is stimulated. When I study a problem elsewhere, I see it less clearly, I’m submerged by the details. By night, at the Berghof, I often remain for hours with my eyes open, contemplating from my bed the mountains lit up by the moon. It is at such moments that brightness enters my mind.’11
It was during one of his stays in Berchtesgaden that Hitler met Maria Reiter, always known as Mimi. She was sixteen; he was thirty-seven. Blonde, submissive, prepared to dote upon him and cover him with adulation, she was ‘my dear child’ to him; he was ‘Wolf’, an exciting authoritative figure who now often carried a whip and wore knee-length boots. Now that he had backers, and the hope of some regular life, he had begun the practice, which he retained to the end of his days, of keeping a dog. The current German Shepherd, known as Prinz, picked a fight with Mimi’s Marco – a dog of the same breed. Hitler gave Prinz a good thrashing with his whip, which clearly excited Mimi. It is to be assumed that they were lovers. When Hitler grew in fame and notoriety rumours circulated about his sexuality. The popular song during the Second World War, set to the tune of Colonel Bogey, was that
Hitler has only got one ball –12
This was not true. His doctors reported that all was normal in that area. At various stages, he was accused of crypto-homosexuality; of coprophilia; or the inability to penetrate women normally, and so on. In fact, it would seem as if Hitler’s sexuality was all but normal. Clearly in his early years he had been painfully shy in all areas of life. When Friedelind Wagner – the ‘black sheep’ of the family, who grew up as an anti-Nazi and went to live in America to escape the madness of her mother’s Nazism – once shocked the family table by asking, at her fifteenth birthday dinner, ‘Will someone please tell me what “prostitution” means?’ silence fell on the table, until her mother’s lover, Tietjen, asked, ‘Where did you read that word?’ ‘In Mein Kampf. I have just finished it,’ Friedelind replied. She pointed out that there were at least ten pages devoted to the subject. She tried the same trick with a schoolmistress, this time asking the meaning of the word ‘syphilis’ and saying she had read it first in My Struggle. The book does indeed reveal a morbid fear of syphilis, which has led some to suppose that he had some unfortunate experience with a prostitute in Vienna. But syphilis was a terrifying illness in the pre-penicillin world, and when one thinks of the widespread devastation it caused,
there was nothing surprising about an advanced hypochondriac such as Hitler having a morbid fear of it.
His domestic life in Munich was settling down. In 1928, he telephoned his half-sister Angela Raubal in Vienna and asked her to come to the Magic Mountain and to keep house for him. She brought her daughter with her, a sixteen-year-old girl called Geli. Hitler now spent as much time as possible in his mountain retreat. In 1929, rich benefactors enabled him to acquire a substantial nine-room apartment in Munich, 16 Prinzregentenstrasse. Geli was obsessed by the theatre, and came with him to Munich in order to take lessons in singing and acting. Almost from the beginning, there was gossip about the intimacy between Hitler and his niece. Undoubtedly, his relationship with her was intense, passionate, perhaps as intense as any in his entire life. No one knows quite what form it took, and whether there was an explicitly sexual element in it. Given the fact that Hitler’s own mother had married a man who was all but her uncle, there would have been family precedent for some level of incest. If your mother had habitually called your father ‘uncle’, you might well fall in love with your niece.
But as political and economic life in Germany stabilized, Hitler’s public backing began to diminish. When he addressed a rally in Munich in April 1927, the crowd had shrunk to 1,500. The Bavarian police were reporting that by 1928, branch meetings of the Nazi Party which might have been attended by 300–400 people in 1926 now attracted only 50 or 60 people.13
It was essential, in these conditions of apathy, to attempt to rally the faithful. From 1 to 4 August 1929 in Nuremberg, the great medieval mercantile centre of southern Germany, with its beautiful Gothic churches, its market-places, and its cherished House of Albrecht Dürer, Goebbels and Hitler decided to revive the party with a grand spectacle. The party membership all over Germany was just about 130,000. Not many when spread about the country, but if assembled in one spot, they would still seem ‘gigantic’. Hitler asked everyone of influence whom he had known during these doldrum years – Winifred Wagner came from Bayreuth, from the Ruhr came industrialist Emil Kirdorf. Thirty-five special trains brought SA (the Sturmabteilung, the storm-division, the Nazi street army) and SS men (the elite Schutzstaffel, or guard detachment, the hard core of Nazi Grail Knights) from all over Germany. The police reckoned that as many as 40,000 people were assembled in one place. There were floats, parades, torch-lit processions, and speeches by the Leader which were received with rapture.14