6
I
The year that ought to have seen the spectre of Hitler banished for good brought instead – though this could scarcely be clearly seen at the time – the genesis of his later absolute pre-eminence in the völkisch movement and his ascendancy to supreme leadership. In retrospect, the year 1924 can be seen as the time when, like a phoenix arising from the ashes, Hitler could begin his emergence from the ruins of the broken and fragmented völkisch movement to become eventually the absolute leader with total mastery over a reformed, organizationally far stronger, and internally more cohesive Nazi Party.
Nothing could have demonstrated more plainly how indispensable Hitler was to the völkisch Right than the thirteen months of his imprisonment, the ‘leaderless time’ of the movement. With Hitler removed from the scene and, from June 1924, withdrawing from all involvement in politics to concentrate on the writing of Mein Kampf, the völkisch movement descended into squabbling factionalism and internecine strife. By courtesy of Bavarian justice, Hitler had been allowed to use the courtroom to portray himself as the hero of the Right for his role in the putsch. Competing individuals and groups felt compelled to assert Hitler’s authority and backing for their actions. But in his absence, this was insufficient in itself to ensure success. Moreover, Hitler was often inconsistent, contradictory, or unclear in his views on developments. His claim to a leadership position could not be ignored, and was not disputed. Any claim to exclusive leadership was, however, upheld only by a minority in the völkisch movement. And as long as Hitler was unable directly to influence developments, the narrow core of his fervent devotees was largely marginalized even within the broad völkisch Right, often at war with each other, and split on tactics, strategy, and ideology. By the time of his release in December 1924, the Reichstag elections of that month had reflected the catastrophic decline of support for the völkisch movement, which had come to form little more than a group of disunited nationalist and racist sects on the extreme fringe of the political spectrum.
Just before his arrest on 11 November 1923, Hitler had placed Alfred Rosenberg, editor of the Völkischer Beobachter, in charge of the banned party during his absence, to be supported by Esser, Streicher, and Amann. Like a number of leading Nazis (including Heß, Scheubner-Richter, and Hitler himself ), Rosenberg’s origins did not lie within the boundaries of the German Reich. Born into a well-off bourgeois family in Reval (now Tallinn), Estonia, the introverted self-styled party ‘philosopher’, dogmatic but dull, arrogant and cold, one of the least charismatic and least popular of Nazi leaders, united other party bigwigs only in their intense dislike of him. Distinctly lacking in leadership qualities, he was scarcely an obvious choice, and was as surprised as others were by Hitler’s nomination. Possibly, as is usually surmised, it was precisely Rosenberg’s lack of leadership ability that commended itself to Hitler. Certainly, a less likely rival to Hitler could scarcely be imagined. But this would presume that Hitler, in the traumatic aftermath of the failed putsch, was capable of lucid, machiavellian planning, that he anticipated what would happen and actually wanted and expected his movement to fall apart in his absence. A more likely explanation is that he made a hasty and ill-conceived decision, under pressure and in a depressed frame of mind, to entrust the party’s affairs to a member of his Munich coterie whose loyalty was beyond question. Rosenberg was, in fact, one of the few leading figures in the movement still available. Scheubner-Richter was dead. Others had scattered in the post-putsch turmoil, or had been arrested. Even – though Hitler could scarcely have known this – the three trusted lieutenants he had designated to support Rosenberg were temporarily out of action. Esser had fled to Austria, Amann was in jail, and Streicher was preoccupied with matters in Nuremberg. Rosenberg was probably no more than a hastily chosen least bad option.
On 1 January 1924, Rosenberg founded the Großdeutsche Volksgemeinschaft (GVG, ‘Greater German National Community’), intended to serve, during the NSDAP’s ban, as its successor organization. By the summer, Rosenberg had been ousted, and the GVG had fallen under the control of Hermann Esser (returned in May from his exile in Austria) and Julius Streicher. But the coarse personalities, insulting behaviour, and clumsy methods of Esser and Streicher merely succeeded in alienating many Hitler followers. Far from all Hitler loyalists, in any case, had joined the GVG. Gregor Strasser, for example, a Landshut apothecary who was to emerge in the post-putsch era as the leading figure in the party after Hitler, joined the Deutschvölkische Freiheitspartei (DVFP), a rival völkisch organization headed by Albrecht Graefe, formerly a member of the conservative DNVP, with its stronghold in Mecklenburg and its headquarters in Berlin.
Conflict was not long deferred once Hitler was in prison. The DVFP had been less affected by proscription than had the NSDAP. In contrast to the disarray within the Hitler Movement, Graefe and other DVFP leaders were still at liberty to control a party organization left largely in place. And though the DVFP leaders lauded Hitler’s actions in the putsch in an attempt to win over his supporters, they were actually keen to take advantage of the situation and to establish their own supremacy. That the DVFP leaders advocated electoral participation by the völkisch movement added to the growing conflict. A move towards a parliamentary strategy alienated many Nazis, and was vehemently opposed by NSDAP diehards in northern Germany. Their spokesman, Ludolf Haase, the leader of the Göttingen branch, was increasingly critical of Rosenberg’s authority, and above all keen to keep the north German NSDAP from the clutches of Graefe.
Those völkisch groups that were prepared, however reluctantly, to enter parliament in order to be in a position one day to destroy it, decided to enter into electoral alliances to allow them to contest the series of regional (Landtag) elections that began in February, and the Reichstag election – the first of two that year – on 4 May 1924. Hitler was opposed to this strategy, but his opposition made no difference. The decision to participate went ahead. It seemed to be borne out by the results. In the February Landtag elections in Mecklenburg-Schwerin, Graefe’s stronghold, the DVFP won thirteen out of sixty-four seats. And on 6 April in the Bavarian Landtag elections, the Völkischer Block, as the electoral alliance called itself there, won 17 per cent of the vote.
The Reichstag election results, it seems, helped persuade Hitler that the parliamentary tactic, pragmatically and purposefully deployed, promised to pay dividends. The völkisch vote, bolstered by the publicity and outcome of the Hitler trial, had stood up well, with a result of 6.5 per cent and thirty-two seats in the Reichstag. The results in Graefe’s territory of Mecklenburg (20.8 per cent) and Bavaria (16 per cent) were particularly good. That only ten of the völkisch Reichstag members were from the NSDAP and twenty-two from the DVFP gave some indication, however, of the relative weakness of the remnants of the Hitler Movement at the time.
In the first of two visits he paid to Landsberg in May, Ludendorff, whose contacts in north Germany were extensive despite his continued residence near Munich, seized the moment to try to persuade Hitler to agree to a merger of the NSDAP and DVFP fractions in the Reichstag, and in the second meeting even to full unity of the two parties. Hitler equivocated. He agreed in principle, but stipulated preconditions that needed to be discussed with Graefe. One of these, it transpired, was that the headquarters of the movement would be based in Munich. Hitler was in difficulties because, though he had always insisted on a separate and unique identity for the NSDAP, there was the danger, following the electoral success of the Völkischer Block, that such an uncompromising stance would seem less than compelling to his supporters. Moreover, the DVFP was the stronger of the two parties, as the election had shown, and Ludendorff was now generally regarded as the leading figure in the völkisch movement.
Some north German Nazis were, not surprisingly, confused and uncertain about Hitler’s position regarding any merger. In a letter of 14 June, Haase, the Nazi leader in Göttingen, sought confirmation that Hitler rejected a merger of the two parties. Replying two days later, Hitler denied that he had fundamentally rejected a merger, though he had stipulated preconditions for such a step. He acknowledged the opposition among many Nazi loyalists to a merger with the DVFP, which, he also pointed out, had made plain its rejection of some of the old guard of the party. Under the circumstances, he went on, he could no longer intervene or accept responsibility. He had decided, therefore, to withdraw from politics until he could properly lead again. He refused henceforth to allow his name to be used in support of any political position, and asked for no further political letters to be sent to him.
Hitler announced his decision to withdraw from politics in the press on 7 July. He requested no further visits to Landsberg by his supporters, a request he felt compelled to repeat a month later. The press announcement gave as his reasons the impossibility of accepting practical responsibility for developments while he was in Landsberg, ‘general overwork’, and the need to concentrate on the writing of his book (the first volume of Mein Kampf ). A not insignificant additional factor, as the opposition press emphasized, was Hitler’s anxiety to do nothing to jeopardize his chances of parole, which could be granted from 1 October. His withdrawal was not a machiavellian strategy to exacerbate the split that was already taking place, increase confusion, and thereby bolster his image as a symbol of unity. This was the outcome, not the cause. In June 1924, the outcome could not be clearly foreseen. Hitler acted from weakness, not strength. He was being pressed from all sides to take a stance on the growing schism. His equivocation frustrated his supporters. But any clear stance would have alienated one side or the other. His decision not to decide was characteristic.
Hitler’s frustration was also increased by his inability, despite his outright disapproval, to curtail Röhm’s determination to build up a nationwide paramilitary organization called the Frontbann. Unable to deter Röhm – already freed on 1 April, bound over on probation, his derisory fifteen-month prison sentence for his part in the putsch set aside on condition of good behaviour – Hitler ended their last meeting before he left Landsberg, on 17 June, by telling him that, having laid down the leadership of the National Socialist Movement, he wished to hear no more about the Frontbann. Röhm nevertheless simply ignored Hitler, and pressed on with his plans, looking to Ludendorff for patronage and protection.
A much-vaunted conference in Weimar on 15–17 August, intended to cement the organizational merger of the NSDAP and DVFP, produced only the most superficial unity in a newly-proclaimed National Socialist Freedom Movement (Nationalsozialistische Freiheitsbewegung, NSFB). By the end of the summer, the fragmentation of the NSDAP, and of the völkisch movement in general, was, despite all the talk of merger and unity, advancing rather than receding. Only Hitler’s position was emerging significantly strengthened by the inner-party warfare.
As summer dragged into autumn, then winter approached, the rifts in the völkisch movement widened still further. From the NSFB’s point of view, unity without Hitler, and in the face of his continued refusal to commit himself publicly to a unified organization, was impossible. In Bavaria, the völkisch feud surrounding the figures of Esser and Streicher widened into open breach. On 26 October, the Völkischer Block decided to join the NSFB to create a united organization to fight the coming elections. With this, it accepted the NSFB’s Reich Leadership. Gregor Strasser, the spokesman of the Völkischer Block, hoped that the Großdeutsche Volksgemeinschaft would also soon join the NSFB, but at the same time openly condemned its leaders, Esser and Streicher. Esser’s reply in a letter to all GVG affiliations, a bitter attack on the leaders of the Völkischer Block, with a side-swipe at Ludendorff for his support of the Block’s position, reaffirmed the Munich loyalist position: ‘the only man who has a right to exclude someone who has fought for years for his place in the Movement of National Socialists is solely and singly Adolf Hitler.’ But Esser’s bravado, and the brash attacks of Streicher, supported by the Thuringian National Socialist, Artur Dinter, could not conceal the sharp decline of the GVG.
The Reichstag elections that took place on 7 December demonstrated just how marginal this perpetual squabbling in the völkisch movement was to the overall shaping of German politics. The NSFB won only 3 per cent of the vote. It had lost over a million votes compared with the völkisch showing in the May election. Its Reichstag representation fell from thirty-two to fourteen seats, only four of whom were National Socialists. It was a disastrous result. But it pleased Hitler. In his absence, völkisch politics had collapsed, but his own claims to leadership had, in the process, been strengthened. The election result also had the advantage of encouraging the Bavarian government to regard the danger from the extreme Right as past. There was now, it seemed, no need for undue concern about Hitler’s release from Landsberg, for which his supporters had been clamouring since October.
Only political bias explains the determination of the Bavarian judiciary to insist upon Hitler’s early release, despite the well-reasoned opposition of the Munich police and the state prosecutor’s office. On 20 December, at 12.15 p.m., he was released. A calculation in the files of the state prosecution office noted that he had three years, 333 days, twenty-one hours, fifty minutes of his short sentence still to serve. History would have taken a different course had he been made to serve it.
The prison staff, all sympathetic to Hitler, gathered to bid their famous prisoner an emotional farewell. He paused for photographs by the gates of the old fortress town, hurrying his photographer, Heinrich Hoffmann, because of the cold, then was gone. Within two hours, he was back at his Munich apartment in Thierschstraße, greeted by friends with garlands of flowers, and nearly knocked over by his dog, Wolf. Hitler said later that he did not know what to do with his first evening of freedom. Politically, he continued at first to remain publicly non-committal. He needed to take stock of the situation in view of the months of internecine warfare in the völkisch movement. More important, it was necessary in order to establish with the Bavarian authorities the conditions for his re-entry into politics and to ensure that the ban on the NSDAP was lifted. Now that he was released, serious preparation for his party’s new start could begin.
II
‘Landsberg’, Hitler told Hans Frank, was his ‘university paid for by the state’. He read, he said, everything he could get hold of: Nietzsche, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Ranke, Treitschke, Marx, Bismarck’s Gedanken und Erinnerungen (Thoughts and Memories), and the war memoirs of German and Allied generals and statesmen. Other than dealing with visitors and answering correspondence – neither of which preoccupied him much once he had withdrawn from public involvement in politics in the summer – the long days of enforced idleness in Landsberg were ideal for reading and reflection. But Hitler’s reading and reflection were anything but academic. Doubtless he did read much. However, reading, for him, had purely an instrumental purpose. He read not for knowledge or enlightenment, but for confirmation of his own preconceptions. He found what he was looking for. As he remarked to Hans Frank – the party’s legal expert who would eventually become Governor General in occupied Poland – through the reading he did in Landsberg, ‘I recognized the correctness of my views.’
Sitting in his cell in Nuremberg many years later, Frank adjudged the year 1924 to have been one of the most decisive turning-points in Hitler’s life. This was an exaggeration. Landsberg was not so much a turning-point as a period in which Hitler inwardly consolidated and rationalized for himself the ‘world-view’ he had been developing since 1919 and, in some significant ways, modifying in the year or so before the putsch. As the Nazi Movement fell apart in his absence, and with time on his hands, away from the hurly-burly of active politics, Hitler could scarcely avoid ruminating on past mistakes. And, expecting his release within months, he was even more strongly compelled to look to the way forward for himself and his broken movement. During this time, he revised in certain respects his views on how to attain power. In so doing, his perception of himself changed. He came to think of his own role in a different way. In the wake of the triumph of his trial, he began to see himself, as his followers had started to portray him from the end of 1922 onwards, as Germany’s saviour. In the light of the putsch, one might have expected his self-belief to be crushed once and for all. On the contrary: it was elevated beyond measure. His almost mystical faith in himself as walking with destiny, with a ‘mission’ to rescue Germany, dates from this time.
At the same time, there was an important adjustment to another aspect of his ‘world-view’. Ideas which had been taking shape in his mind since late 1922, if not earlier, on the direction of future foreign policy were now elaborated into the notion of a quest for ‘living space’, to be gained at the expense of Russia. Blended into his obsessive antisemitism, aimed at the destruction of ‘Jewish Bolshevism’, the concept of a war for ‘living space’ – an idea which Hitler would repeatedly emphasize in the following years – rounded off his ‘world-view’. Thereafter, there would be tactical adjustments, but no further alteration of substance. Landsberg was no ‘Jordan conversion’ for Hitler. In the main, it was a matter of adding new emphases to the few basic idées fixes already formed, at least in embryo, or clearly taking shape in the years before the putsch.
The modifications in Hitler’s ‘world-view’ that were already forming in the year before the putsch are clearly evident in Mein Kampf. Hitler’s book offered nothing new. But it was the plainest and most expansive statement of his ‘world-view’ that he had presented. He acknowledged that without his stay in Landsberg the book which after 1933 (though not before) would sell in its millions would never have been written. No doubt he hoped for financial gain from the book. But his main motivation was the need he felt, as during his trial, to demonstrate his own special calling, and to justify his programme as the only possible way of rescuing Germany from the catastrophe brought about by the ‘November Criminals’.
Hitler was already at work on what would become the first volume by May 1924, building upon ideas formed during and immediately after his trial. He called his book at that time by the scarcely catchy title ‘Four and a Half Years of Struggle against Lies, Stupidity, and Cowardice’, which gave way to the more pithy Mein Kampf (My Struggle) only in spring 1925. By then, the book had undergone major structural changes. The initial intention of a ‘reckoning’ with the ‘traitors’ responsible for his downfall in 1923 never materialized. Instead, the first volume, which appeared on 18 July 1925, was largely autobiographical – though with many distortions and inaccuracies – ending with Hitler’s triumph at the announcement of the Party Programme in the Hofbräuhaus on 24 February 1920. The second volume, written after his release and published on 11 December 1926, dealt more extensively with his ideas on the nature of the völkisch state, questions of ideology, propaganda, and organization, concluding with chapters on foreign policy.
The presumption, widespread at the time and persisting later, that Hitler at first dictated the indigestible prose to his chauffeur and general dogsbody, Emil Maurice, later to Rudolf Heß (both of whom were also serving sentences for their part in the putsch), is wide of the mark. Hitler typed the drafts of the first volume himself (though some of the second volume was dictated to a secretary). Badly written and rambling as the published version of Mein Kampf was, the text had, in fact, been subjected to innumerable stylistic ‘improvements’ since the original composition. The typescript was read by the culture critic of the Völkischer Beobachter, Josef Stolzing-Cerny, and at least parts of it by the future wife of Rudolf Heß, Ilse Pröhl. Both made editorial changes. Others were by Hitler himself. According to Hans Frank, Hitler accepted that the book was badly written, and described it as no more than a collection of leading articles for the Völkischer Beobachter.
Before Hitler came to power, Mein Kampf, brought out in the party’s own publishing house, the Franz Eher-Verlag, run by Max Amann, was scarcely the runaway bestseller he had apparently expected it to be. Its turgid content, dreadful style, and relatively high price of 12 Reich Marks a volume evidently deterred many potential readers. By 1929, the first volume had sold around 23,000 copies, the second only 13,000. Sales increased sharply following the NSDAP’s electoral successes after 1930, and reached 80,000 in 1932. From 1933, they rose stratospherically. One and a half million copies were sold that year. Even the blind could read it – should they have wished to do so – once a braille version had been published in 1936. And from that year, a copy of the people’s edition of both volumes bound together was given to each happy couple on their wedding day. Some 10 million copies were sold by 1945, not counting the millions sold abroad, where Mein Kampf was translated into sixteen languages. How many people actually read it is unknown. For Hitler, it was of little importance. Having from the early 1920s described himself in official documents as a ‘writer’, he could well afford in 1933 to refuse his Reich Chancellor’s salary (in contrast, he pointed out, to his predecessors): Mein Kampf had made him a very rich man.
No policy outline was offered in Mein Kampf. But the book did provide, however garbled the presentation, an uncompromising statement of Hitler’s political principles, his ‘world-view’, his sense of his own ‘mission’, his ‘vision’ of society, and his long-term aims. Not least, it established the basis of the Führer myth. For in Mein Kampf, Hitler portrayed himself as uniquely qualified to lead Germany from its existing misery to greatness.
Mein Kampf gives an important insight into his thinking in the mid-1920s. By then, he had developed a philosophy that afforded him a complete interpretation of history, of the ills of the world, and how to overcome them. Tersely summarized, it boiled down to a simplistic, Manichean view of history as racial struggle, in which the highest racial entity, the aryan, was being undermined and destroyed by the lowest, the parasitic Jew. ‘The racial question,’ he wrote, ‘gives the key not only to world history but to all human culture.’ The culmination of this process was taken to be the brutal rule of the Jews through Bolshevism in Russia, where the ‘blood Jew’ had, ‘partly amid inhuman torture killed or let starve to death around 30 million people in truly satanic savagery in order to secure the rule over a great people of a bunch of Jewish literati and stock-market bandits’. The ‘mission’ of the Nazi Movement was, therefore, clear: to destroy ‘Jewish Bolshevism’. At the same time – a leap of logic that moved conveniently into a justification for outright imperialist conquest – this would provide the German people with the ‘living space’ needed for the ‘master race’ to sustain itself. He held rigidly to these basic tenets for the rest of his life. Nothing of substance changed in later years. The very inflexibility and quasi-messianic commitment to an ‘idea’, a set of beliefs that were unalterable, simple, internally consistent, and comprehensive, gave Hitler the strength of will and sense of knowing his own destiny that left its mark on all those who came into contact with him. Hitler’s authority in his entourage derived in no small measure from the certainty in his own convictions that he could so forcefully express. Everything could be couched in terms of black and white, victory or total destruction. There were no alternatives. And, like all ideologues and ‘conviction politicians’, the self-reinforcing components of his ‘world-view’ meant that he was always in a position to deride or dismiss out of hand any ‘rational’ arguments of opponents. Once head of state, Hitler’s personalized ‘world-view’ would serve as ‘guidelines for action’ for policy-makers in all areas of the Third Reich.
Hitler’s book was not a prescriptive programme in the sense of a short-term political manifesto. But many contemporaries made a mistake in treating Mein Kampf with ridicule and not taking the ideas Hitler expressed there extremely seriously. However base and repellent they were, they amounted to a set of clearly established and rigidly upheld political principles. Hitler never saw any reason to alter the content of what he had written. Their internal coherence (given the irrational premises) allows them to be described as an ideology (or, in Hitler’s own terminology, a ‘world-view’). Hitler’s ‘world-view’ in Mein Kampf can now be more clearly seen than used to be possible in the context of his ideas as they unfolded between his entry into politics and the writing of his ‘Second Book’ in 1928.
On Hitler’s central, overriding, and all-embracing obsession, the ‘removal of the Jews’, Mein Kampf added nothing to the ideas he had already formulated by 1919–20. Extreme though the language of Mein Kampf was, it was no different to that which he had been proclaiming for years. Nor, for that matter, did the inherently genocidal terminology substantially vary from that of other writers and speakers on the völkisch Right, extending well back beyond the First World War. His bacterial imagery implied that Jews should be treated in the way germs were dealt with: by extermination. Already in August 1920, Hitler had spoken of combating ‘racial tuberculosis’ through removal of the ‘causal agent, the Jew’. And there could be little doubt whom Hitler had in mind when, four years later in Mein Kampf, he wrote: ‘The nationalization of our masses will succeed only when, aside from all the positive struggle for the soul of our people, their international poisoners are exterminated.’ The notion of poisoning the poisoners ran through another, notorious, passage of Mein Kampf, in which Hitler suggested that if 12–15,000 ‘Hebrew corrupters of the people’ had been held under poison gas at the start of the First World War, then ‘the sacrifice of millions at the front would not have been in vain’. These terrible passages are not the beginning of a one-way track to the ‘Final Solution’. The road there was ‘twisted’, not straight. But however little he had thought out the practical implications of what he was saying, its inherent genocidal thrust is undeniable. However indistinctly, the connection between destruction of the Jews, war, and national salvation had been forged in Hitler’s mind.
As we remarked, the initial anti-capitalist colouring of Hitler’s antisemitism had given way by mid-1920 to the connection in his mind of the Jews with the evils of Soviet Bolshevism. It was not that Hitler substituted the image of the Jews behind Marxism for that of the Jews behind capitalism. Both coexisted in his fixated loathing. It was a hatred so profound that it could only have been based on deep fear. This was of a figure in his mind so powerful that it was the force behind both international finance capital and Soviet Communism. It was the image of a ‘Jewish world conspiracy’ that was almost unconquerable – even for National Socialism.
Once the link with Bolshevism was made, Hitler had established his central and lasting vision of a titanic battle for supremacy, a racial struggle against a foe of ruthless brutality. What he visualized, he had stated in June 1922, was a fight to the death between two competing ideologies, the idealistic and the materialistic. The mission of the German people was to destroy Bolshevism, and with it ‘our mortal enemy: the Jew’. By October the same year he was writing of a life and death struggle of two opposed world-views, incapable of existing alongside one another. Defeat in this great showdown would seal Germany’s destruction. The struggle would leave only victors and the annihilated. It meant a war of extermination. ‘A victory of the Marxist idea signifies the complete extermination of the opponents,’ he remarked. ‘The Bolshevization of Germany … means the complete annihilation of the entire Christian-western culture.’ Correspondingly, the aim of National Socialism could be simply defined: ‘Annihilation and extermination of the Marxist Weltanschauung.’
By now Marxism and the Jew were synonymous in Hitler’s mind. At the end of his trial, on 27 March 1924, he had told the court that what he wanted to be was the breaker of Marxism. The Nazi Movement knew only one enemy, he had emphasized the following month – the mortal enemy of the whole of mankind: Marxism. There was no mention of the Jews. Some newspapers picked up the change of emphasis and claimed Hitler had altered his position on the ‘Jewish Question’. There were Nazi followers who were also puzzled. One, visiting him in Landsberg at the end of July, asked Hitler whether he had changed his views about Jewry. He received a characteristic reply. Indeed his position on the struggle against Jewry had altered, Hitler remarked. He had realized while at work on Mein Kampf that he had up to then been too mild. In future, only the toughest measures could be deployed if success were to be attained. The ‘Jewish Question’, he declared, was an existential matter for all peoples, not just the German people, ‘for Juda is the world plague’. The logic of the position was that only the complete eradication of the international power of Jewry would suffice.
Hitler’s obsession with the ‘Jewish Question’ was inextricably interwoven with his notions of foreign policy. Once his antisemitism had, by the middle of 1920, fused with anti-Bolshevism into the image of ‘Jewish Bolshevism’, it was inevitable that his thinking on foreign policy would be affected. However, not only ideological influences, but questions of pure power politics shaped Hitler’s changing position. In their concentration on France as the arch-enemy, hostility to Britain, recovery of colonies, and the restoration of Germany’s borders of 1914, Hitler’s early views on foreign policy were conventionally pan-German. They were no different from those of many nationalist hotheads. In fact, in essence (if not in the extreme way they were advanced) they accorded with a revisionism that enjoyed wide popular backing. Nor, in his emphasis on military might to overthrow Versailles and defeat France, however unrealistic it sounded in the early 1920s, did he differ from many others on the Pan-German and völkisch Right. Already in 1920, before he had heard of Fascism, he was contemplating the value of an alliance with Italy. He was determined even then that the question of South Tyrol – the predominantly German-speaking part of the former Austrian province of Tyrol lying beyond the Brenner, ceded to Italy in 1919, and since then subjected to a programme of ‘Italianization’ – would not stand in the way of such an alliance. By late 1922, an alliance with Britain, whose world empire he admired, was in his mind. This idea had sharpened in 1923 when the disagreements of the British and French over the Ruhr occupation became clear.
The presumed rule of the Jews in Russia stood, on the other hand, as Hitler had pointed out as early as July 1920, firmly in the way of any alliance with Russia. Even so, at this time Hitler shared the view of many on the völkisch Right that a distinction could be drawn between ‘national’ Russians – where the Germanic influence was strong – and the ‘bolshevization’ of Russia brought about by the Jews. Hitler’s approach to Russia was probably in part shaped by Rosenberg, the early NSDAP’s leading ‘expert’ on eastern questions, whose Baltic origins fed a ferocious antipathy towards Bolshevism. It was, most likely, reinforced by Scheubner-Richter, another prolific writer on eastern policy in the infant party, with extremely strong connections to Russian exiles. Dietrich Eckart, too, who was already in early 1919 writing of the identity of Jewry and Bolshevism, probably also exerted some influence.
Russia was coming already before the putsch to loom larger in Hitler’s thoughts on foreign policy. He had somewhat vaguely mentioned the ‘land question’, comparing Germany unfavourably with Russia in its relation of population to the land at its disposal, as early as December 1919. He hinted in a speech on 31 May 1921, through praise of the Brest-Litovsk Treaty of 1918 (which had ended Russian participation in the war) for giving Germany the additional land it needed to sustain its people, at an expansion of German ‘living space’ at the expense of Russia. On 21 October 1921 he was still speaking, somewhat cryptically, of an expansion with Russia against England opening up ‘an unlimited possibility of expansion towards the east’. Such remarks indicated that at this time, Hitler still shared – even if vaguely expressed – the Pan-German view on eastern expansion. This amounted broadly to the notion that eastern expansion could be carried out through collaboration with a non-Bolshevik Russia, whose own territorial demands would be settled also through looking eastwards, towards Asia, leaving the former Russian border areas in the west to Germany. It would have amounted, essentially, to something like a resurrection of the Brest-Litovsk arrangement, while Russia would have been left to find compensation in the lands on its own eastern borders.
By early 1922, these views had shifted. By now, Hitler had abandoned any idea of collaboration with Russia. He saw no prospect of Russia looking only eastwards. Extension of Bolshevism to Germany would prove an irresistible urge. The logic of the changed position was evident. Only through the destruction of Bolshevism could Germany be saved. And at the same time, this – through expansion into Russia itself – would bring the territory which Germany needed. During the course of 1922 – perhaps reinforced towards the end of the year by contact with the arch-expansionist, Ludendorff – the changed approach to future policy towards Russia was consolidated. By December 1922, Hitler was explaining in private to Eduard Scharrer, co-owner of the Münchner Neueste Nachrichten and favourably disposed towards the Nazi Party, the outline of the foreign alliance ideas which he was to elaborate in Mein Kampf. He ruled out the colonial rivalry with Britain that had caused conflict before the First World War. He told Scharrer:
Germany would have to adapt herself to a purely continental policy, avoiding harm to English interest. The destruction of Russia with the help of England would have to be attempted. Russia would give Germany sufficient land for German settlers and a wide field of activity for German industry. Then England would not interrupt us in our reckoning with France.
In the light of his comments to Scharrer, it can scarcely be claimed that Hitler developed an entirely new concept of foreign policy while in Landsberg, one based on the idea of war against Russia to acquire Lebensraum. And what he wrote in Mein Kampf on Germany’s need for land being satisfied at the expense of Russia had indeed already been anticipated in an essay he wrote in spring 1924, which was published in April that year. There was no ‘transformation’ of Hitler’s ‘vision of the world’ in Landsberg. What he came to write in Landsberg was the result of the gradual gestation of his ideas, rather than a flash of intuition, set of new insights, or overnight conversion to a different approach.
The imperialist and geopolitical ideas that went to make up the idea of Lebensraum were, in fact, common currency on the imperialist and völkisch Right in Weimar Germany. The idea of Lebensraum had been a prominent strand of German imperialist ideology since the 1890s. It had been strongly represented in the Pan-German League under Heinrich Claß, supported by the press controlled by founder-member of the League, director of Krupp’s, and media tycoon Alfred Hugenberg. For Pan-Germans, Lebensraumcould both justify territorial conquest by evoking the colonizing of Slav lands by Teutonic knights in the Middle Ages and, emotively, conjure up notions of uniting in the Reich what came to be described as Volksdeutsche (ethnic Germans) scattered throughout eastern Europe. For the most part these constituted fairly small minorities, as in the parts of Poland (outside the towns) which Prussia had ruled before 1918. But in a number of areas – Danzig, for example, parts of the Baltic, or the area of Czechoslovakia later known as the Sudetenland – the German-speaking population was sizeable, and often vociferously nationalist. The idea of Lebensraum symbolized, then, for Pan-Germans the historic conquest of the East while at the same time, in emphasizing German alleged over-population, cloaking real, modern, power-political imperialist ambitions. It existed alongside, rather than blending with, the mainstream imperialist concentration on overseas trading colonies, encapsulated in the slogan of Weltpolitik. In the Weimar era it came to be popularized by Hans Grimm’s best-selling novel Volk ohne Raum (People without Space), published in 1926.
Hitler could scarcely have avoided the imperialist and geopolitical writings in circulation on ‘living space’. Among them, whether read at first hand or in bowdlerized form, it seems highly likely that those of Karl Haushofer, the leading exponent of ‘geopolitics’, were one significant source for his notion of Lebensraum. Through Rudolf Heß, Hitler already knew Haushofer by 1922 at the latest. Haushofer’s influence was probably greater than the Munich professor was later prepared to acknowledge. If he was not acquainted with them before, Hitler certainly had time on his hands while in prison to read his works, as well as those of Friedrich Ratzel, the other foremost geopolitics theorist. Whether he did so cannot be proved. But it seems at the very least likely that the broad lines of their arguments were made known to him by Haushofer’s former pupil, Rudolf Heß.
At any rate, by the time of the Scharrer discussion at the end of 1922, Hitler’s thinking on Russia and the ‘living space’ question was essentially in place. And by spring 1924, his views were effectively fully formed. What Landsberg and the writing of Mein Kampf did was to provide elaboration. Beyond that, it showed that Hitler had by then firmly established the link between the destruction of the Jews and a war against Russia to acquire Lebensraum.
Already in the first volume of Mein Kampf, the choice – which Hitler had still rhetorically left open in his article of April 1924 – of a land-policy directed against Russia, with Britain’s support, or a world trading policy upheld by sea-power directed against Britain with Russia’s support, was emphatically determined. By the second volume, mainly written in 1925, the enemy in the short term was still seen as France. But in the baldest language, the long-term goal was now stated to be the attaining of ‘living space’ at the expense of Russia.
We National Socialists consciously draw a line beneath the foreign policy tendency of our pre-War period. We take up where we broke off six hundred years ago. We stop the endless German movement to the south and west, and turn our gaze towards the land in the east. At long last we break off the colonial and commercial policy of the pre-War period and shift to the soil policy of the future.
If we speak of soil in Europe today, we can primarily have in mind only Russia and her vassal border states … For centuries Russia drew nourishment from [the] Germanic nucleus of its upper leading strata. Today it can be regarded as almost totally exterminated and extinguished. It has been replaced by the Jew … He himself is no element of organization, but a ferment of decomposition. The giant empire in the east is ripe for collapse. And the end of Jewish rule in Russia will also be the end of Russia as a state …
The mission of the National Socialist Movement was to prepare the German people for this task. ‘We have been chosen by Fate,’ wrote Hitler, ‘as witnesses of a catastrophe which will be the mightiest confirmation of the soundness of the völkisch theory.’
With this passage, the two key components of Hitler’s personalized ‘world-view’ – destruction of the Jews and acquisition of ‘living space’ – came together. War against Russia would, through its annihilation of ‘Jewish Bolshevism’, at the same time deliver Germany its salvation by providing new ‘living space’. Crude, simplistic, barbaric: but this invocation of the most brutal tenets of late nineteenth-century imperialism, racism, and antisemitism, transposed into eastern Europe in the twentieth century, was a heady brew for those ready to consume it.
Hitler himself repeatedly returned to the ‘living space’ notion, which became a dominant theme of his writings and speeches in the following years. His foreign-policy ideas were to be more clearly laid out, but in no significant way altered, in his ‘Second Book’, written in 1928 (though left unpublished in Hitler’s own lifetime). Once established, the quest for Lebensraum – and with it the destruction of ‘Jewish Bolshevism’ – would remain a keystone of Hitler’s ideology. One element remained to complete the ‘world-view’: the leader of genius who would accomplish this quest. In Landsberg, Hitler found the answer.
III
Many years later, Hitler regarded ‘the self-confidence, optimism, and belief that simply could not be shaken by anything more’ as deriving from his time in Landsberg. His self-perception did indeed alter while he was in prison. Even at his trial, as we have seen, he had been proud to be the ‘drummer’ of the national cause. Anything else was a triviality, he had declared. In Landsberg this changed – though, as noted, the change had already been under way during the year preceding the putsch.
Hitler was preoccupied from the beginning of his sentence with the question of his own future and that of his party after his release. Since he expected his release within six months, the question was an urgent one. For Hitler, there was no turning back. His political ‘career’, which had developed into his political ‘mission’, left him nowhere to go but forwards. He could not return to anonymity, even had he wanted to do so. A conventional ‘bourgeois’ lifestyle was out of the question. Any retreat, after the acclaim he had won on the nationalist Right at his trial, would have confirmed the impression of his opponents that he was a figure of farce, and would have exposed him to ridicule. And as he pondered over the failed putsch, transforming it in his mind into the martyrs’ triumph that would come to have its central place in Nazi mythology, he had no trouble in assigning the blame to the mistakes, weakness, and lack of resolve of all the leading figures to whom he was at the time bound. They had betrayed him, and the national cause: this was his conclusion. More than that: the triumph at his trial; the torrents of adulation ever-present in the völkisch press or pouring unabated from letters sent to Landsberg; and not least the collapse of the völkisch movement in his absence into derisory sectarian squabbling, and the growing conflict with Ludendorff and the other völkisch leaders; all these contributed towards giving him an elevated sense of his own importance and of his unique historic ‘mission’. The idea, embryonically forming in 1923, took firm hold in the strange atmosphere of Landsberg. Surrounded by sycophants and devotees, foremost among them the fawning Heß, Hitler now became certain: he himself was Germany’s coming ‘great leader’.
Such a notion in its full implications was unimaginable before his triumph at the trial and the acclaim that followed. The ‘heroic’ leadership he now claimed for himself was an invention of his followers before he saw himself in that role. But the role fitted the temperament of one whose personal failures in early life had found an exaggerated wish-fulfilment in unbound admiration for heroic figures, above all the artist-hero Wagner. Whether an extraordinary depth of self-loathing is a necessary precondition for such an abnormal elevation of self-esteem into that of the heroic saviour of the nation is a matter best left to psychologists. But whatever the deep-seated reasons, for such a narcissistic egomaniac as Hitler, the hero-worship which others directed towards him, combined with his own inability to find fault or error in himself, now produced a ‘heroic’-leadership self-image of monumental proportions. No one in mainstream German political life, outside the tiny and fractured völkisch movement, was aware of or would have taken seriously the change in Hitler’s self-perception. At the time it was of no consequence. But for Hitler’s demands on the völkisch movement, and for his own self-justification, it was a vital development.
In Mein Kampf, Hitler pictured himself as a rare genius who combined the qualities of the ‘programmatist’ and the ‘politician’. The ‘programmatist’ of a movement was the theoretician who did not concern himself with practical realities, but with ‘eternal truth’, as the great religious leaders had done. The ‘greatness’ of the ‘politician’ lay in the successful practical implementation of the ‘idea’ advanced by the ‘programmatist’. ‘Over long periods of humanity,’ he wrote, ‘it can once happen that the politician is wedded to the programmatist.’ His work did not concern short-term demands that any petty-bourgeois could grasp, but looked to the future, with ‘aims which only the fewest grasp’. Among the ‘great men’ in history, Hitler singled out at this point Luther, Frederick the Great, and Wagner. Seldom was it the case, in his view, that ‘a great theoretician’ was also ‘a great leader’. The latter was far more frequently ‘an agitator’: ‘For leading means: being able to move masses.’ He concluded: ‘the combination of theoretician, organizer, and leader in one person is the rarest thing that can be found on this earth; this combination makes the great man.’ Unmistakably, Hitler meant himself.
The ‘idea’ he stood for was not a matter of short-term objectives. It was a ‘mission’, a ‘vision’ of long-term future goals, and of his own part in the accomplishment of them. Certainly, these goals – national salvation through ‘removal’ of the Jews and acquisition of ‘living space’ in the east – did not amount to short-term practical policy guidelines. But, incorporated into the notion of the ‘heroic’ leader, they did amount to a dynamic ‘world-view’. This ‘world-view’ gave Hitler his unremitting drive. He spoke repeatedly of his ‘mission’. He saw the hand of ‘Providence’ in his work. He regarded his fight against the Jew as ‘the work of the Lord’. He saw his life’s work as a crusade. The invasion of the Soviet Union, when it was launched many years later, was for him – and not just for him – the culmination of this crusade. It would be a serious error to underestimate the ideological driving-force of Hitler’s few central ideas. He was no mere propagandist or ‘unprincipled opportunist’. He was indeed both a masterly propagandist and an ideologue. There was no contradiction between the two.
When he left Landsberg, to try to rebuild a crippled movement, Hitler’s leadership claims were, therefore, not only externally enhanced within the völkisch movement, but had been inwardly transformed and consolidated into a new perception of himself and awareness of his role. His sense of realism had by no means altogether disappeared beneath his messianic claims. He had no concrete notion of how his aims might be achieved. He still imagined that his goals might be brought to fruition only in the distant future. Since it consisted of only a few basic, but unchangeable tenets, his ‘world-view’ was compatible with short-term tactical adjustments. And it had the advantage of accommodating and reconciling a variety of otherwise conflicting positions on particular issues and fine points of ideology adopted by subordinate Nazi leaders. Within the framework of his basic ‘world-view’, Hitler himself was flexible, even indifferent, towards ideological issues which could obsess his followers. Opponents at the time, and many later commentators, frequently underestimated the dynamism of Nazi ideology because of its diffuseness, and because of the cynicism of Nazi propaganda. Ideology was often regarded as no more than a cloak for power-ambitions and tyranny. This was to misinterpret the driving-force of Hitler’s own basic ideas, few and crude as they were. And it is to misunderstand the ways those basic ideas came to function within the Nazi Party, then, after 1933, within the Nazi state. What mattered for Hitler was indeed the road to power. He was prepared to sacrifice most principles for that. But some – and those were for him the ones that counted – were not only unchangeable. They formed the essence of what he understood by power itself. Opportunism was always itself ultimately shaped by the core ideas that determined his notion of power.
Following his months in Landsberg, Hitler’s self-belief was now such that, unlike the pre-putsch era, he could regard himself as the exclusive exponent of the ‘idea’ of National Socialism and the sole leader of the völkisch movement, destined to show Germany the path to its national salvation. The task facing him on release would be to convince others of that.