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Chapter One
FORESHADOWINGS
ADOLF HITLER MIXED CANDOR and dissimulation in nearly
equal parts. His writings and speeches, as well as records of his private
monologues and other sources, gave important indications of his thinking,
but he was also a very secretive man. He sometimes issued instructions
as to what not to record, and he boasted of his refusal to confide
in others, of his willingness to lie. In modern times, only Joseph Stalin
could compete with Hitler on the standard of deceit.
Hitler organized a secret effort to overthrow the Bavarian state government
in November 1923, designed as the first step toward a general
revolution in Germany. After botching the coup d'etat in Munich, the
thirty-four-year-old Hitler was convicted of treason and served a brief
prison sentence. During his stay in Landsberg prison, he began work
on a long and rambling memoir and political tract, which he called
Mein Kampf (My Struggle). The book appeared in two volumes, the
first in July 1925, the second in December 1926. The sections about Hitler's
youth in Linz and Vienna traced his early rise to political and racial
consciousness, as well as his view of history and politics. But they distorted
and concealed as much as they revealed. Hitler may well have
picked up racist and anti-Semitic sentiments in his youth, but (though
some writers disagree) he actually drifted until he found his political
orientation and his calling in a chaotic postwar Munich in 1919.
The general, ideological sections of Mein Kampf, however, held
broader political significance--so much so that the book posed a problem
later for Hitler the politician and head of government. In 1938,
Hitler supposedly told his onetime lawyer Hans Frank that, if he had
known in 1924 that he was going to become chancellor, he would
never have written his book. This comment applied particularly to
what Hitler had stated about Germany's foreign-policy options and
goals, which revealed his conviction that the German race needed much
more land to survive and to thrive. He had shown not only his proclivity
for war but also his hostility to France and the Soviet Union.
After Mein Kampf, he wrote a second book specifically on foreign policy,
but by 1929 he had come far enough politically to recognize the
wisdom of not publishing it. The work remained secret for decades;
the historian Gerhard Weinberg discovered it and published the text
only in 1961.
Hitler's worldview--a blend of intense and expansionist nationalism,
racism, antiliberalism, anti-Marxism, and, not least, anti-Semitism
--pervaded both volumes of Mein Kampf as well as the unpublished
second book. Anti-Semitism cropped up even in strange contexts. In
chapters 10, 13, 14, and 15 of the second volume of Mein Kampf, Hitler
repeatedly "explained" how the Jews were behind all foreign opposition
to Germany and all internal problems afflicting the German people
and obstructing the advance of Nazism. Disputes between Roman
Catholics and Protestants within the Nazi Party were leading it from
its true mission and thereby, consciously or not, serving Jewish interests.
Russian Bolshevism was nothing other than the attempt by Jews to
seize world domination. In other words, Hitler automatically associated
any problem, any difficulty, any opponent with Jewish efforts or Jewish
interests. He believed there was no need for specific evidence, which
might be lacking because of Jewish secrecy and cunning. This conspiratorial
view of history and politics had practical implications: only a
conspirator could succeed in a conspiratorial world. Moreover, it suggested
that, if he came to power and held to his views, Hitler would
seek to neutralize what he perceived as the Jewish threat to Germany.
Scholars have described Hitler's early writings as everything from a
"blueprint for power" to "the generalizations of a powerful, but uninstructed
intellect: dogmas which echo the conversation of any Austrian
cafe or German beer-house." Virtually every expert has accepted
the sincerity of Hitler's early worldview; in dispute is whether the early
Hitler fixed a clear course for the future and subsequently held fast to
it.
Most individuals learn, adapt, and evolve over time; some politicians
switch parties and programs. Many a statesman has been known to
reverse previous foreign-policy pronouncements and respond primarily
to circumstances and opportunities. Some have used heated rhetoric to
make names for themselves or mobilize support. But there was a very
high correlation between what Hitler wrote in the 1920s about
Lebensraum (living space) and German foreign policy and the future path
of the Third Reich. Did Hitler tenaciously hold to his original vision
in other respects, or did the policies and programs of the Third Reich
occur because of the actions of others or the pressure of circumstances?
There is unfortunately no definitive way to trace the range and consistency
of Hitler's thinking and state of mind from 1925 until his suicide
on April 30, 1945. His writings, speeches, and decisions supply
crucial evidence but also contain mendacious elements, gaps, and camouflage.
If key Nazi officials took Mein Kampf--or the ideology expressed in
it--as a guide for their actions, then it becomes even harder for a
historian to discount the continuity and impact of Hitler's early ideology.
If sophisticated non-Nazi observers at the time looked to Mein
Kampf to help them understand the impulses and direction of the Nazi
regime, the case is stronger still. This chapter offers a small sample of
both types of assessments of Mein Kampf.
One of the most assiduous readers of Mein Kampf was a young Bavarian
political organizer named Heinrich Himmler. Mortified by Germany's
defeat in World War I, which he blamed on the Marxist left,
and fascinated by the principles and methods of breeding in agriculture,
which he had studied at Munich's Technische Hochschule, Himmler
was particularly susceptible to Hitler's line of racial thought. In fact, he
may have taken it more literally than Hitler himself. Later, as Reich
Fuhrer SS, he would try to make his own organization into a racial and
political elite. Himmler first met the Fuhrer in 1926, when he was
serving as deputy Gauleiter (regional party leader) under Gregor Strasser
in Lower Bavaria. Within a year Himmler was also deputy leader of
the small unit of Nazi guards known as the SS, outnumbered by the
larger Nazi paramilitary force, the Sturmabteilung, or SA.
A meticulous record keeper, Himmler kept a partial, dated list of his
reading, along with brief comments about each book. He finished the
first volume of Mein Kampf on June 19, 1927, writing: "It contains
tremendously many truths. The first chapters about his own youth
contain many weaknesses." Not captivated by Hitler's personal story,
Himmler nonetheless found the book a great inspiration.
Himmler's copy of volume 2 of Mein Kampf, which he read in December
1927, has now emerged from obscurity. From markings on
this volume, it is possible to examine his early reactions to Hitler's
ideology in greater detail. In general, he looked for practical ways to
apply the "truths" of his Fuhrer. Next to the passage about the importance
of instilling self-confidence and a sense of racial superiority
into youths through education and training, Himmler wrote in the
margin: "education of SS and SA." Hitler had blamed the German
revolution of 1918, which he said had been carried out by pimps, deserters,
and rabble, partly on the failure of the intellectual elite, hobbled
by its upper-class etiquette and lack of manliness: they should have
learned boxing. Himmler endorsed the criticism and Hitler's remedy.
Himmler approved of Hitler's comment that, just as races were different
and unequal, some individuals within a race were more valuable
than others. Hitler had expounded in some detail on how those races
that had remained pure throughout history had thrived; they began to
decline when they intermarried with others: nature did not love "bastards."
Racial intermingling created a new hybrid but also tension between
the hybrid and the remaining pure element of the "higher" race.
The danger for the hybrid race would end only when the last pure
elements of the higher race had been corrupted. Himmler took Hitler's
remarks very seriously, writing: "the possibility of de-miscegenation is
at hand" (die Moglichkeit der Entmischung ist vorhanden). Just how this
would be accomplished remained unclear in 1927.
This criticism of racial intermingling was directed at Germans as well
as Jews. The current German population was already racially suspect
according to this view; only a segment remained pure. Hitler believed
that Jews were seeking to defile and corrupt the "Aryan race" through
intermarriage and seduction of German women. Ending the threat to
the higher race meant not only neutralizing the hybrid but also removing
the threat of Jewish infiltration and destructiveness. Himmler
later used underlining and a margin line to highlight many passages in
Mein Kampf, among them Hitler's retroactive solution for Germany's
defeat in World War I:
If at the beginning of the War and during the War twelve or fifteen
thousand of these Hebrew corrupters of the people had been held under
[subjected to] poison gas, as happened to hundreds of thousands of our
very best German workers in the [battle]field, the sacrifice of millions at
the front would not have been in vain. On the contrary, twelve thousand
scoundrels eliminated in time might have saved the lives of a million real
Germans, valuable for the future.
The idea of using poison gas against some Jews was already planted in
not only Hitler's mind but also Himmler's.
Plenty of others read Mein Kampf, even if few took it so literally.
Despite the hefty price of twelve marks per volume, 23,000 copies of
volume 1 and 13,000 copies of volume 2 were sold before 1930. Then
a cheaper edition and the Nazi breakthrough in the September 1930
national elections caused sales to take off dramatically. (By the time
Hitler became chancellor in 1933, sales totaled 287,000.) If Hitler the
ideologue was an unknown quantity to the German public during the
incessant election campaigns from 1928 to 1933, it was not for lack of
evidence.
Political campaigns often do not bring clarity to the issues. Nazi
organizers, speakers, and writers frequently campaigned against the
"Marxists" and the unwieldy democratic regime known as the Weimar
Republic. Successes came in part because their targets were widely unpopular
except with the German working class. The Nazis also learned
how to appeal to specific needs and fears of social and occupational
groups and to adjust basic Nazi principles to local preferences. The
image the Nazi movement presented to the German public was more
differentiated and in some ways more sophisticated than what Hitler
had formulated in Mein Kampf but also blurrier. The Nazis attracted the
most diverse constituency in German politics, held together primarily
by shared emotions--desperation, common resentment, and fear. Nazi
campaign propaganda called for a new start, a rebirth of Germany
through the creation of a national community that transcended traditional
divisions--a theme partly shared by right-wing nationalist parties,
but Nazi presentation was more vigorous and more effective. Partly
for this reason, Hitler and other key Nazi speakers exploited better than
more experienced political rivals first a rising tide of nationalism in the
late 1920s, and then growing public frustration with, and despair about,
the political system and the great economic depression.
In other words, a vote for Hitler or other Nazi candidates was hardly
a direct endorsement of Hitler's worldview. Still, none of Hitler's
themes, which other Nazi officials and candidates endorsed and reinforced,
hurt the Nazis politically; most of them found increasing resonance
from 1928 on. Shared ideas and emotions gave Hitler and the
Nazi Party a substantial base of enthusiasts and willing followers, whose
activity and dynamism drew others. The rise in the number of Nazi
Party members and their increasingly visible activities created a sense of
movement and hope for change in others. A substantial minority of
German voters either accepted the Nazi program or had no objection
to it, in part because it derived from a familiar late-nineteenth-century
current of radical nationalist and racist thought. Nazi electoral support
in democratic elections peaked at just over 37 percent of the vote in
July 1932, making the Party the largest in parliament by a considerable
margin. But the level of popular support was insufficient to bring Hitler
to power, and he refused to join any coalition government unless he
was made head of it, an intransigent stance that seemed to contribute
to a substantial Nazi decline in the November 1932 elections.
Then a political deadlock and convoluted backroom negotiations
gave Hitler coalition partners who were willing to accept his leadership
at a moment when the incumbent chancellor, General Kurt von Schleicher,
reached an impasse. Schleicher had no prospect of surviving a
vote of confidence in the newly elected parliament, and he could hardly
gain a breathing spell from still another dissolution of parliament and
new elections. His predecessor, Franz von Papen, had already tried that
tactic twice without success; it was played out. Schleicher could not
govern around the constitution any longer. Shunning a move toward
abolition of the constitution and a potential military dictatorship, on
January 30, 1933, the aged conservative President Paul von Hindenburg
reluctantly appointed Hitler as chancellor (head of government).
Germany had seen chancellors come and go; coalition governments
in the Weimar Republic had lasted on the average only a little more
than a year. Some expected the pattern to continue, because the new
government, like its predecessors, lacked a parliamentary majority and
needed the President's emergency authority to bypass the deadlock in
the Reichstag. Hitler, however, had not concealed his intention of abolishing
the democratic system. Some voters had undoubtedly backed
Nazi candidates for precisely that reason, thinking almost any change
would be for the better. They were quite wrong, but it took many of
them a decade or more to realize it--those who survived that long.
(Continues...)
