Hitler

by Brendan Simms

  These were all familiar themes from Hitler’s previous statements, but this time he had the eyes of the German and even some of the international press upon him. His closing speech concluded with a resounding statement that though the court might secure a conviction, posterity would surely acquit him. In an obviously choreographed sequence, the other accused said they had nothing to add, with the result that Hitler’s resonant last words were left ringing throughout the courtroom and shaped the story of the trial. He turned the defeat and humiliation of 9 November 1923 into a victorious narrative. If the attempted coup had actually had many fathers, it was now the ‘Hitler-Putsch’, a phrase with which Kahr had originally sought to scapegoat the Nazis but which had in fact propelled Hitler to the front of a crowded field of German ‘saviours’. The sentences reinforced this impression. Ludendorff was acquitted, lenient treatment which tended to accentuate Hitler’s role. Hitler himself was convicted of ‘high treason’ against the state and sentenced to five years’ imprisonment–technically ‘incarceration in a fortress’–with the opportunity of parole after six months and a fine of 200 goldmarks.

  Hitler was now a hero not merely to the Bavarian right, but to many nationalists throughout Germany. What had begun in the public mind as the ‘Ludendorff Trial’ ended as the ‘Hitler Trial’. ‘I am occupying myself with Hitler and the National Socialist movement,’ the Rhenish student Joseph Goebbels wrote in his diary in early March 1923, almost certainly following press reports of the trial, ‘and I suppose I shall have to do so for some time.’ He wished that every town would have its Adolf Hitler, ‘who burns through his holy fire everything that is tepid and dull’. Goebbels’s conversion was a slow one, however. Partly this was a question of style. As an intellectual, Goebbels objected to the ‘simplistic’ nature of much of Hitler’s rhetoric. It was also a matter of policy. Goebbels, then an avowed Slavophile with more than a sneaking regard for the Russian Revolution, was unhappy with Hitler’s view of the Soviet Union in particular and what he considered the reactionary nature of his Munich entourage more generally.96

  On his return to Landsberg to serve the rest of his sentence, Hitler was confronted with some serious strategic questions. The paramilitary formations at his command during the Putsch had been scattered by the authorities. Armed with a proclamation from Hitler naming him the ‘military leader’ of the Kampfbund,97 Ernst Röhm began to revive the SA, under the cover of a front organization, and went to confer with Hitler at the very end of May 1924. Perhaps anxious not to provoke the authorities, and mindful of his inability to seize power by force, the Führer insisted that the SA keep a lower profile. Hitler also struck a more conciliatory note towards the BVP, no doubt partly for tactical reasons but probably also because the threat of Bavarian separatism had receded. That said, he let it be known in May 1924 that he would continue to oppose the party if it persisted with ‘purely reactionary and particularist’ policies.98

  The next issue was elections, which Hitler had grudgingly allowed Rosenberg to participate in. The central issue in German politics, Hitler believed like many others, was the recommendations of the Reparations Committee chaired by the American banker Charles Dawes, which the government and the Weimar Coalition accepted. One of the most controversial proposals was to place the Reichsbahn under international administration in order to secure its revenues for the payment of reparations.99 It was, Hitler claimed, one of the ‘primary aim of the Völkisch movement’ to fight this planned ‘national crime’. Handing over the Reichsbahn, he continued, would cut the ‘subtle and vitally necessary railway network which ran across the area of the German people’.100 Hitler was violently opposed to the loss of a national asset to an internationally mandated austerity plan.

  The Reichstag election of May 1924 was thus essentially a referendum on the Dawes Plan. Throughout the campaign, Nazi propaganda and iconography systematically, and more or less exclusively, targeted the ‘Jewish capitalist’.101 In this respect, its iconography differed little from that of the communists and indeed of the cartoons by the leftist artist Georg Grosz.102 The communist vote leaped from half a million in 1920 to 3.7 million. Right-wing parties walked off with an even larger share: 7.5 million votes. Of these only a small proportion went to the NSDAP’s place-holder parties.103 The north German Nazis, who opposed any involvement in the electoral process on principle and were generally to the left, were unimpressed, and so were their Völkisch allies. The south German party, who had done a lot better, and were less ‘socialist’, inclined more to repeating the experiment, and to continuing the relationship with the DVFP.

  This brought the thorny question of the Nazi Party’s relationship to other parties and groups back to the fore. There were vigorous discussions about which of the various groups in the alphabet soup of right-wing organizations the Nazis should align or unite with, and on what terms. Gregor Strasser and General Ludendorff strongly supported amalgamation with the DVFP to create a new National Socialist Freedom Party (NSFP). Hitler reluctantly agreed in broad terms but insisted that the main base and focus of the party remain in Munich. Tensions boiled over at the congress of the north German NSDAP in Hamburg in early June 1924, when delegates rejected the merger with the DVFP ‘parliamentarism’ and the ‘party spirit’ in general. They decided to break with Munich and set up a North German Directory.104 The Frankfurt Nazis were so disgusted with the idea of a merger that they split to become the Deutsche Partei, pledging loyalty only to Hitler. These differences meant that Hitler was plagued by an interminable stream of people visiting Landsberg to brief him, to complain or to try to persuade him to support one faction or the other.105

  Hitler responded by announcing his withdrawal from active politics in mid June 1924. ‘From now on,’ he wrote, ‘no one has the right to act in my name.’106 Gottfried Feder remarked after visiting him that Hitler was ‘depressed [and] wants to withdraw completely from the movement’ in order to ‘work’, that is, ‘write’ to earn money.107 Over the next two months, Hitler repeated his message publicly on a number of occasions.108 He was acting partly because he was disenchanted with the way in which the various mergers and collaborations were turning the party into a purely bourgeois organization, and partly because he had no real power to turn things around from prison.109 One young Nazi responded that all Nazis were merely ‘place-holders’ awaiting the Führer’s release; another said that ‘Our programme is summarized in two words: “Adolf Hitler”.’110 Hitler’s ‘withdrawal’ thus turned out to be an inspired move, not just because it relieved him of the responsibility of taking sides. It greatly reduced fissiparous tendencies because nobody could claim his backing, and there was no point in attempting to take over the party in his absence as his release was expected to be imminent. Clearly, the charisma which Hitler had taken to Landsberg remained with him for the duration of his sentence.

  One reason why Hitler wanted to lie low was fear of having his release delayed, or of being deported to Austria. The Bavarian authorities had long hoped to do the latter, and in early May 1924, the Polizeidirektion in Munich told the Bavarian Ministry of the Interior that ‘Hitler constitutes a permanent threat to the internal and external security of the state’.111 In late April 1924, the Austrians agreed to accept him in principle.112 Hitler managed to avoid deportation, but after being refused probation he failed to get out by 1 October as he originally hoped. On 16 October he made a statement that he should be allowed to stay, ‘because I never felt myself to be an Austrian citizen but only a German’. ‘My affection for my Austrian homeland is great,’ Hitler continued, ‘but so is hostility of the Austrian state’, in which–like the ‘earlier Habsburg state’–he could only see ‘an obstacle for the unification of the German people’.113 He asserted his right to German citizenship on the basis of his ‘four-year commitment of my blood and life’. In the following month, he let it be known that he was ‘the child of an Austrian territory which belonged to Bavaria a hundred years ago. His home town is Braunau.’ ‘For this reason,
’ he continued, ‘he has an understanding for the stupidity of that border, which wants to divide Germans of the same tradition and language into two nations [sic].’114

  5

  Anglo-American Power and German Impotence

  The main reason why Hitler withdrew from party management was his plan to write a ‘large book’, which he stated clearly in the declaration announcing his decision.1 This project began as a quasi-legal defence of his actions for the court. It soon developed into the idea of producing, as Hitler told Siegfried Wagner in early May 1924, a ‘comprehensive settlement of accounts with those gentlemen who cheered on 9 November’, in other words Kahr, Lossow and Seisser. No doubt hopeful of signing a sensational book with high sales, various publishers offered their services to Hitler, either in person or by letter.2 In time, however, the emphasis of the work changed again, probably in part thanks to some sort of explicit or implicit bargain with the Bavarian state to let sleeping dogs lie in return for a mild sentence. There were also positive reasons, however, for the new approach. Hitler wanted to use the relative peace of Landsberg to write a much broader manifesto elaborating the principles of National Socialism, charting a path to power for the movement and showing how Germany could regain her independence and great power status.3 The first volume of Mein Kampf, most of which was written or compiled in Landsberg, seems to have been largely a solo effort, with relatively little input from others. Julius Schaub, another inmate who later became his personal adjutant, recalled that Hitler wrote Mein Kampf ‘alone and without direct input from anyone’, not even Hess, who had joined him in Landsberg.4 Hitler typed the book himself, reading out or summarizing large sections to his fellow prisoners, who constituted an appreciative or at any rate a captive audience.5 Sometimes, he was moved to tears by his own words.6

  Incarceration gave Hitler a chance to read more widely and gather his thoughts.7 One of his main preoccupations in Landsberg was the United States, which he was coming to regard as the model state and society, perhaps even more so than the British Empire. ‘He ‘devoured’ the memoirs of a returned German emigrant to the United States.8 ‘One should take America as a model,’ he proclaimed.9 Hess wrote that Hitler was captivated by Henry Ford’s methods of production which made automobiles available to the ‘broad mass’ of the people.10 This appears to have been the genesis of the Volkswagen. Hitler envisaged that the automobile would further serve as ‘the small man’s means of transport into nature–as in America’.11 He also planned to apply methods of mass production to housing, and experimented with designs for a Volkshaus for families with three to five children which would have five rooms and a bathroom with a garage in large terraced settlements. He was equally determined not be outdone in the construction of ‘skyscrapers’, and looked forward to the consternation of the ‘Deutsch-Völkisch’ elements by putting the party headquarters into such an edifice. Quite apart from showing that Hitler had an interest in vernacular architecture, and not just in monumental public buildings, these plans prove that he was thinking of elevating the condition of the German working class through American-style suburban and metropolitan modernity.12 This was the model of an ideal society against which he wrote Mein Kampf.

  Modernity was not an end in itself, but a means by which the German people, especially the German working class and German women, could be mobilized in support of the project of national revival. Hitler exalted technological development–aeroplanes, typewriters, telephones and suspension bridges, and even domestic appliances. These would free German women from drudgery and enable them to be better wives producing more children. ‘How little our poor women benefit from progress,’ he lamented, ‘there is so much one can do to make [a woman’s life] easier with the help of technology! But most people still think today that a woman is only a good housewife if she is constantly dirty and working from early until late.’ ‘And then,’ Hitler continued, ‘one is surprised when the woman is not intellectual enough for the man, when he cannot find stimulation and recuperation.’ Worse still, he went on, this was ‘bad for the race’ because it was ‘obvious that his overtired wife will not have as healthy children as one who is well rested, can read good books and so on’.13 The link between what Hitler would later call the racial ‘elevation’ of Germany, technological progress and maintaining the standard of living is already evident here.

  Part and parcel of this programme of racial improvement was Hitler’s support for what we would today call ‘alternative’ technology. ‘Every farm,’ he demanded, ‘which does not possess any alternative source of energy’ should set up a ‘wind motor with dynamo and rechargeable batteries’. This might not be possible in the current economic climate, Hitler continued, but it would be a viable long-term investment. He rejected the idea that technological change took the romance out of farming. ‘I couldn’t care less about a romanticism,’ he exclaimed, ‘which puts people behind frosted windows in the twilight, [and] which lets women age prematurely through hard work’. Hitler therefore sneered at the city folk who went into the country for a day, enthused about the scenery and then returned to their modern and efficient homes in the city. Hitler claimed to support ‘the preservation of nature’, but in his view it should take the form of national parks in the mountains. ‘Here too,’ Hitler concluded, ‘the Americans have made the right choice with their Yellowstone Park.’

  In Landsberg, Hitler did not abate his ferocious hostility to international finance capitalism. He did, however, qualify some of his earlier ideas about ‘national’ economies. Significantly, he rejected the demands of the German automobile manufacturers to be protected against competition from Henry Ford through higher tariff barriers. ‘Our industry needs to exert itself and achieve the same performance,’ Hitler remarked. Once again, the United States was the explicit model.14

  Hitler was also taking on board the concept of Lebensraum.15 This was one of the key ideas of Hess’s teacher and patron Karl Haushofer, the doyen of German Geopolitik. He visited Hess in prison, bringing him copies of Clausewitz and Friedrich Ratzel’s ‘Political Geography’, one of the seminal geopolitical texts.16 While there is no hard evidence that Haushofer met Hitler on those occasions it is highly likely he did so, or at any rate that his ideas found their way to him. In mid July, there was a debate about Lebensraum at Landsberg, which began with some good-natured joshing in the garden and ended with Hitler’s ‘marvelling’ inner circle being provided with a lengthy definition of the term by Hess.17 Its essence was simple: every people required a certain ‘living space’ to feed and accommodate its growing population. The idea seemed to provide the answer to the main challenge facing the Reich, which was the emigration of its demographic surplus to the United States. This was part of an important shift in Hitler’s thinking, away from a potential Russo-German alliance and the prevention of emigration through the restitution of German colonies, towards the capture of Lebensraum in the east, contiguous to an expanded German Reich.18 It had less to do with hatred of Bolshevism and eastern European Jewry, and more to do with the need to prepare the Reich for a confrontation or equal coexistence with an Anglo-America whose dynamism mesmerized Hitler more than ever.

  The centrality of the British Empire and the United States in the gestation of Mein Kampf is evident from the early outlines he sketched in June 1924.19 These were focused on foreign policy in general, and the Anglo-Americans in particular. Hitler criticized not only the failure to secure an alliance with Britain, but also the failure to make Germany strong in Europe rather than pursue colonial, naval and commercial expansion, as the imperial government had done. This, he argued, was ‘important especially in relation to the development of the American continent into the first world power’. The basis of the European great powers, Hitler continued, was too narrow. He compared them to inverted pyramids, whose base was overseas and whose apex was in Europe. By contrast, the United States had its ‘base in America and its peaks in the rest of the world’. This made it a better model than Britain, which, however, ben
efited from its kinship with the United States. His outline referred explicitly to ‘Great Britain and the Anglo-Saxon world’ and the ‘importance’ of the United States as ‘an Anglo-Saxon state’ for Britain itself. The contours of Hitler’s greatest preoccupation, the colossal strength of the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ world powers, were thus clearly visible.

  While Hitler tried to reduce his exposure to petty party disputes in prison, it is striking that he tried to maintain engagement with the wider world, especially potential ideological sympathizers and funders in Italy and the United States. Despite the fact that he allowed Göring to find sanctuary in Italy after the Putsch, Mussolini was careful to keep the Nazis at arm’s length.20 That left America. In early January 1924, not long after the start of his incarceration at Landsberg, Hitler penned a letter of accreditation for his envoy Kurt Lüdecke. He asked Lüdecke ‘to promote the interests of the German freedom movement in the United States and especially to collect money for them’.21 At the end of January, Lüdecke set off with Winifred and Siegfried Wagner to Detroit. Despite Lüdecke’s invocation of the ‘solidarity of white men’, and his offer to promote the kind of international anti-Semitism demanded by the Dearborn Independent, he was unable to persuade Ford at their meetings to provide any funding for the movement.22 Lüdecke repeatedly visited Hitler in Landsberg in May and June 1924.23 In 1924, a National Socialist Ortsgruppe was founded in the German quarter of Chicago, and there also appears to have been some sort of presence in New York City; a year later, Hitler personally thanked one of his activists in America for sending back money for the movement.24 In general, however, the attempt to reach out to the United States was a failure.