Hitler

by Brendan Simms

  Hitler was also beginning to think more creatively about how to revive the economy. He believed in the ‘multiplier effect’, by which a sum of money invested could generate a much larger figure through salaries and consumption. Hitler therefore claimed that an annual reparations bill of 2 billion RM actually deprived the German economy of about 10 to 12 billion marks.94 Though now routine, the multiplier effect was a new-fangled and disputed concept at the time and contemporary experts laughed Hitler out of court.95 Hitler also believed in deficit-financing by the state to stimulate the economy, what we today call ‘priming the pump’. He lampooned German economists for standing before a stopped clock without considering that all that was needed was to rewind it.96 Hitler may well have been influenced here by John Maynard Keynes, or at least by Keynesian thinking.

  Thanks to the collapsing economy, Nazism began to surge forward again at the polls. In mid May 1931, the NSDAP gained 37 per cent of the vote in the regional elections in Oldenburg and became the largest party in the Landtag there. The Republic was now subjected to mass battery fire by the party propaganda machine. The recently disciplined SA was part of this strategy, which Hitler conceived of in political rather than military terms, but expressed in the language of the battlefield. ‘The SA man,’ he stated, ‘is a political fighter’ whose job it was ‘to enable the leadership of the movement to protect the movement.’ ‘For National Socialism,’ Hitler continued, ‘propaganda is and remains the attack artillery.’ The SA, he explained, were ‘the infantry’. ‘The SA and SS,’ Hitler elaborated, served to ‘cover’ the propaganda barrage, while ‘the organization [meaning the Party] occupies and fortifies the captured positions’. The growing success of the Nazis increased the number of those switching from other parties. Hitler gave orders that those who were likely to do so should not be criticized in the party press.97

  The Nazi advance and the failure of the Brüning government to get to grips with the escalating political and economic crisis led some of the established elites to take a greater interest in Hitler. It was around this time that Emil Georg von Stauss, a director of the Deutsche Bank, met him in Berlin at Göring’s instigation.98 Hitler also made the acquaintance of Walther Funk, the economics editor of the conservative Berliner Börsen-Zeitung. He was the first voice in Nazi policy which was not fundamentally anti-capitalist. Hitler signalled to him that the Nazi economic programme was flexible. For all that, despite high hopes and Hitler’s repeated claims to his associates that the world of finance had seen the light,99 the NSDAP made no breakthrough with big business in the summer of 1931. Looking back on those events, his press secretary Otto Dietrich recalled that ‘The authoritative men of [the economy] and the associational officials of industry displayed a cool political reserve and awaited developments’. The result, he wrote, was that Hitler had to continue ‘to rely in his propagandistic endeavors on the financial sacrifices of his party comrades, on membership dues and entrance fees for rallies’.100

  In terms of high politics, though, Hitler began to make serious progress. In early July 1931, Hitler had his first meeting with the head of the mainstream conservative DNVP, Alfred Hugenberg. There followed encounters with the two leaders of the Stahlhelm, Seldte and Duesterberg. He also met with the chairman of the DVP, Eduard Dingeldey, and privately signalled his respect for Brüning’s foreign and domestic policy, which he was traducing in public. Göring conveyed as much directly to the chancellor.101 Hitler’s strategy here was to undermine the government through ‘100 conferences’.102 Likewise, his dealings with big business, which picked up again in the autumn, were not so much intended to win over its leaders as to ‘neutralize them’.103 Central to this strategy was shattering their confidence in the Weimar system. ‘Hitler,’ Hess remarked in early September 1931, ‘is now more in Berlin than Munich’ because ‘he has set himself the task of causing the remaining pillars of the current government in industry and banking to totter’.104 He was, as yet, a great deal further from achieving this than he claimed, but a lot of progress had been made.

  In mid September, however, there was a shattering event, which nearly ended Hitler’s career. His somewhat irregular personal life was the subject of much concern within the party. ‘Hitler chats about marriage’, Goebbels noted earlier in the year, ‘he feels very lonely and yearns for [the right] woman, which he cannot find.’ In the autumn of 1931, matters came to a head. Relations between Geli and Hitler deteriorated, partly because of his desire to ‘protect’ her, and partly because he opposed her plans to become an opera singer. What triggered the final tragic climax is unclear. It may have been Hitler’s controlling nature, his growing interest in Eva Braun or his ill-concealed infatuation with Goebbels’s girlfriend Magda Quandt, which peaked in September 1931. ‘Hitler is in seventh heaven,’ Goebbels noted in his diary on 26 August, ‘beautiful women, that is his taste,’ adding that Magda had rather overstepped the mark with ‘the chief’, which caused him considerable anguish. A fortnight later, Goebbels and Magda told Hitler of their intention of getting married. He was visibly ‘crushed’, ‘resigned’ and ‘lonely’. Hitler ‘is unlucky with women,’ Goebbels opined, ‘because he is too soft on them’, which ‘women don’t like’ because ‘they must [have] a master over them’. ‘He loves Magda,’ Goebbels recorded, ‘and he too seeks a suitable girlfriend whom he can later marry’.105 All this this may have aggravated the tensions between Hitler and Geli. Whatever the reason, after a row with Hitler two days later, on 18 September 1931, Geli locked herself in her room and shot herself with his pistol. Hitler, who was in Nuremberg at the time, rushed back to Munich.

  Geli’s death was a massive emotional blow.106 For a long time afterwards, Hitler was inconsolable. At first, he seems to have said little. A few days afterwards, he sat ‘completely quietly and cowed’ in Goebbels’s flat, saying ‘not a word of Geli’. In late November he poured his heart out. ‘The chief speaks of women, whom he loves very much,’ Goebbels wrote, ‘of the [right] one, whom he cannot find’, of ‘the hysterical women who pursue him’, and ‘of Geli, whom he has lost and whom he mourns with all his heart’. At Goebbels and Magda’s wedding in mid December 1931, where he was best man, Hitler broke down in tears. ‘Then he speaks of Geli,’ Goebbels reports. ‘He loved her very much’ and she was ‘his “good comrade”’.107 That Christmas, he wrote his personal greetings on a black-framed postcard. ‘I am having very sad days,’ he told Winifred Wagner, adding that ‘the great loneliness first has to be overcome’. Hitler explained that he had recently passed through Bayreuth, but had not stopped off at Wahnfried because he ‘could not bring himself’ to seek her out, because–candidly acknowledging his morose state–‘what is the point of depriving people of joy just because one is unhappy oneself’.108

  Hitler also had to deal with the huge political fallout. Geli’s death, the manner of her passing and the rumours surrounding it were a public relations disaster. Thanks to the SA, the Nazis already had a grim reputation for violence and sodomy. Now the enemy press went to town on Hitler himself. They had a field day with the fact that he seemed to be in an intense and controlling relationship with his much younger niece, who had then shot herself with his pistol. It did not look good. Hitler responded with a two-pronged strategy. The first step was damage limitation. He did not go to the funeral in Vienna in order to avoid turning the event into a media spectacle at his expense, though he slipped into Austria quietly immediately after in order to pay his respects at her grave. A few days later, Hitler published a ‘Declaration’, denying any breach with Geli or intent to stop her from getting engaged.109 He did not retreat from the public eye, and continued his punishing schedule of speeches, though observers noted that he ‘looks very worn out’.110 With some difficulty, the crisis was contained, though Hitler remained the target of innuendo and sensationalism until he took power.

  It soon became clear, however, that a much broader response was necessary. For political reasons, the general whiff of sexual depravity, incest and hyst
eria emanating from Hitler’s entourage would have to be replaced by a more wholesome odour of domesticity. Heinrich Hoffmann was put to work to produce a photographic celebration of Hitler, which appeared in March 1932, six months after Geli’s suicide. This album, entitled ‘The Hitler Nobody Knows’, invited Germans to rethink their conception of Hitler the man. Instead of the single-minded political warrior, surrounded by homoerotic thugs and hysterical women, they were presented with a much more domesticated ‘Führer’, who communed with nature and, though childless himself, loved children. Images and text stressed his sobriety and clean-living: no alcohol, no smoking and no meat.111 There was no sign of Eva Braun, or indeed of any other woman. Germany had Hitler entirely to herself.

  In late September 1931, Hitler predicted to Goebbels twice that they would soon take power.112 In order to prepare for that event, Hitler had already begun to establish new party structures. In June, he had set up the Imperial Leaders’ School in Munich. ‘What we expect from the future’, Hitler told them in late September 1931, ‘must already be visible in us today’ so that ‘our current organization must already embody that which is to come in the Third Reich,’ one of his few uses of that term to describe a Nazi regime.113 He appointed Otto Dietrich as his press chief on 1 August 1931. Right at the end of October, Hitler made Baldur von Schirach ‘youth leader’. A few days later, he established the ‘Economic Council’, under the chairmanship of Gottfried Feder, which was charged with advising on ‘preparations for economic legislation’ and ‘for all fundamentally important matters of economic policy’.114 On New Year’s Eve, he set up the ‘Race and Settlement Office’ under Walther Darré. The contours of the coming Third Reich were increasingly visible.

  The problem was how to crack open the Brüning government, which produced more emergency legislation in early October 1931, and looked set to rule by presidential decree for the foreseeable future. The key was President Hindenburg himself, the clique of conservatives around him and the broader network of established right-wing power brokers in the Stahlhelm, among estate owners and in industry.115 Once again, Hitler’s aim here was not so much to win over as to neutralize these actors, by reducing their instinctive dislike for, and distrust of, the NSDAP. A meeting with the Empress Hermine, the second wife of Wilhelm II, went reasonably well. Moving beyond the piecemeal contacts of the past, in December 1931 he tasked the North Badenese entrepreneur Wilhelm Keppler, who had already been serving as his personal economic adviser for seven months, to reach out to businessmen beyond the usual NSDAP circles.116 Hitler indicated to him that he was not wedded to any part of the Nazi economic programme, and expressed the fear that Otto Wagener, Strasser and Gottfried Feder would repel business with their socialist talk.117 He met with Hindenburg for the first time on 10 October 1931, and though Hitler managed to improve the atmosphere between them a little, the president made no secret of his determination to prevent Hitler from seizing power outright. It was the start of a clash of two charismas, and for now Hitler was outshone by the older man.118

  In the course of the next day, the limits to Hitler’s charm offensive became evident at a joint rally with the mainstream right in Bad Harzburg.119 This was a complete failure, as each party sought to dominate and marginalize the other. Hitler first let the nationalists wait, and then left before they had completed their parades. There were even brawls between Stahlhelm and SA. ‘Hitler is furious,’ Goebbels noted, ‘because one is trying to push us against the wall.’120 The feeling was mutual. It was clear that, just as with the Bavarian conservatives, the common ground between the mainstream nationalist right and Hitler was not large enough to permit a stable alliance. There would not be room for both of them in the new Germany.

  Central to Hitler’s strategy remained the maintenance of a strict façade of ‘legality’, partly to reassure established elites, middle-class voters and foreign opinion, especially in Anglo-America, but also to deny the authorities an excuse to ban the party or its organizations. In mid November 1931, for example, Hitler once again stressed the need for the ‘complete legality of the party’ and his opposition to ‘any illegal possession and use of weapons’. He was therefore deeply embarrassed when shortly afterwards a disaffected party official leaked documents, drafted in the Boxheimer Hof in Hessen without Hitler’s knowledge by some local party figures, which suggested that the NSDAP was planning a coup, or at least to take over power in the aftermath of a communist one. His subsequent Tagesbefehl to the SA and SS sought to calm matters. ‘Do not allow yourselves to be provoked,’ he wrote, ‘do not allow yourselves to be seduced.’ This was all the more important, as the paramilitary formations were expanding at a considerable rate–twenty-eight new regimental-sized units were established in the autumn of 1931 alone121–and they were getting restless again. Hitler was always treading a fine line, seeking to impress and intimidate audiences by mass rallies, and to keep his men in fighting trim, but at the same time avoiding a premature eruption of revolutionary violence.

  Meanwhile, Hitler never lost sight of the broader international context. In November 1931, he took time out to read Julian Corbett’s book on British seapower.122 Hitler also made direct overtures to the Duce via Renzetti.123 In December 1931, Hans Nieland, the head of the newly founded ‘Foreign Section’, was sent to Rome in search of support from Mussolini. Hitler’s main audience, though, was Anglo-America. Alfred Rosenberg was dispatched to London.124 In the meantime, Hitler reached out to the American ambassador, Frederic M. Sackett, through the intercession of Emil Georg von Stauss. The encounter was unorthodox, as meetings with the opposition were even more frowned upon among diplomats then than they are now, and it was not a success. Hitler harangued Sackett at length. The ambassador was unpersuaded by his arguments, and dismissed his qualifications for office, but he was impressed by Hitler’s ‘forcefulness and intensity’, which had communicated itself even via the translator.125

  These moves were accompanied by a barrage of media initiatives towards Anglo-America. In late September, Hitler bemoaned the west’s ‘unholy war psychosis’ to Sefton Delmer of the British Daily Express and expressed his hopes for the ‘start of a really warm relationship between the British and German peoples’. He claimed that the editors of some of the great papers in Britain and America supported the revision of the Versailles Treaty. During November he gave interviews to the New York Times and the New York Evening Post. In early December, Hitler convened the foreign press correspondents in the Berlin Kaiserhof. The following day he gave interviews to the Sunday Graphic and the Sunday News.126 He even had a radio address to the American people scheduled for 11 December 1931,127 though it was blocked by the Weimar authorities. Ten years later to the day, he would send them a very different message, when he declared war on the United States in the Reichstag.

  Hitler’s intensive cultivation of Anglo-American opinion–Goebbels spoke of ‘a veritable barrage’128–was intended to set out the basis of collaboration, or at least co-existence after a Nazi takeover of power. He did so partly by stressing past injustices, invoking ‘Professor Maynard Keynes of Cambridge University’ and his critique of the Versailles Treaty, and partly by promising to be a firm hand on the tiller. ‘The world must not expect fireworks from me,’ he averred, ‘the contrary is the case.’ ‘The National Socialist Movement,’ Hitler assured the New York Times, ‘will win power in Germany by methods permitted by the present constitution in a purely legal way.’ This careful formulation, which made no mention of elections or democracy, suggests that Hitler was already thinking of gaining power through the presidency, rather than the ballot box alone. He also promised that a National Socialist Germany would acknowledge its ‘private debts’, a gesture clearly aimed at placating US opinion. The same points were made in person to the US ambassador. Hitler defended the Weimar state against accusations that it had used American loans ‘wastefully’ to build ‘stadia and swimming pools’129 on the grounds that this expenditure was necessary to alleviate unemployment; this was a sign
of his intent to address joblessness through a programme of public works after he gained power.

  Ideologically, Hitler undertook to combat the threat of global Bolshevism, and he also made an open bid for American racial solidarity. Pointing to the alleged vast reserves of French colonial manpower in Africa, he claimed that ‘every American schoolchild can realize [that] Europe under French domination will cease to be European and will be in danger of becoming African’. Hitler went on to restate his belief that the United States should serve as a model for Germany. ‘It was America,’ he told the New York Times, ‘in spite of its enormous territory, that was the first country to teach us by the immigration law that a nation should [not] open its doors equally to all races. Let China be for the Chinese, America for the Americans, and Germany for the Germans.’ In other words, Hitler said, ‘we want nothing but a Monroe Doctrine for German men, women and children’,130 a hemispheric division of the world with the great Anglo-American powers based if not on cooperation then at least on non-

  interference in each other’s affairs. Behind closed doors, even as the drama of Weimar domestic politics swirled around him, Hitler also continued to stress the need for ‘space’. One activist recalls him gesticulating at the big map of Europe in his office and proclaiming that ‘we will in due course control immense territories which we will have to secure’.131

  Hitler’s longstanding ambivalence about the United States remained unchanged in the early 1930s. He saw Germany as engaged in a cultural struggle for mastery, which brought out the worst and the best in both sides. On the one hand, Hitler feared American popular culture. He inveighed against German performances of ‘Negro music’, composed by ‘pretty unmusical Americans’. Germany, Hitler argued, should not compete in this supposed cultural race to the bottom, but rather draw on the spiritual nourishment provided by Wagner and Mozart.132 On the other hand, he embraced a friendly rivalry on the architectural plane. This was demonstrated by the start of his interest in the reconstruction of Hamburg, the port city through which the import, export and transit trade from Germany and its central and eastern European hinterland passed, and for which Hitler had grander plans. What New York represented on one side of the Atlantic, he told Otto Wagener, Hamburg must become on the other. But instead of the skyscrapers, bustling functionality and impersonality of the American metropolis, in Hamburg incoming liners would gradually be embraced by the green riverbanks of the enchanting Elbe landscape, with its half-timbered houses along the shore and with blossoming gardens.133 It was a vivid example of how Hitler envisaged a future peaceful relationship between the new Reich and the United States, based on a common set of so-called racial values.