‘The secret of this personality resides in the fact that in it the deepest of what lies dormant in the soul of the German people has taken shape in full living features… That has appeared in Adolf Hitler: the living incarnation of the nation’s yearning.’
Georg Schott, Das Volksbuch vom Hitler, 1924
‘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.’
Hitler, in Mein Kampf
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 preeminence 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. The months of his imprisonment saw his rivals for the leadership on the radical völkisch Right attempt, and fail, to assert their dominance. Without him, any semblance of unity collapsed. As the Reichstag elections of December 1924 just before his release showed, thevölkisch Right had by then been all but obliterated as a serious factor in German politics.
Within some fractions of the splintered völkisch movement, however, Hitler became almost deified after his trial in the spring. Admiration for him in völkisch circles stretched, indeed, far beyond the effusions of the hard-core fanatics. But it was such effusions that were ceaselessly at work on Hitler’s egomania, which, as the trial itself had demonstrated, had only temporarily been dented by the putsch failure. The fan-mail that teemed daily into Landsberg; the fawning disciples who hung on his every word; the sycophancy of his guards; the non-stop flow of admiring visitors: such adulation could not fail to affect someone with self-belief transcending all normal bounds, someone already looking for ‘historical greatness’ and by no means averse to hearing from his adoring following that he possessed it.
The public projection of greatness on to Hitler at this time by his followers and admirers met with no more unconstrained expression than in Georg Schott’s Das Volksbuch vom Hitler, published in 1924. Schott’s eulogy included sub-headings such as: ‘The Prophetic Person’, ‘The Genius’, ‘The Religious Person’, ‘The Humble One’, ‘The Loyal One’, ‘The Man of Will’, ‘The Political Leader’, ‘The Educator’, ‘The Awakener’, and ‘The Liberator’. In a dense text full of literary and religious allusions, Hitler was turned into nothing short of a demi-god. ‘There are words,’ wrote Schott, ‘which a person does not draw from within himself, which a god gave him to declare. To these words belongs this confession of Adolf Hitler… “I am the political leader of the young Germany”.’ Just as mystically, Schott rhapsodized in equally pseudo-religious terminology about the person of Hitler: ‘The secret of this personality resides in the fact that in it the deepest of what lies dormant in the soul of the German people has taken shape in full living features… That has appeared in Adolf Hitler: the living incarnation of the nation’s yearning.’1
As his movement was dissolving into the myriad of rival factions that offered apparent proof of his indispensability, the enforced idleness in Landsberg and his inability to direct events outside led Hitler to the writing of Mein Kampf and the ‘rationalization’ and partial modification of his political ideas. The process of writing the first volume of his book cemented and rounded off his ‘world-view’. It also reinforced his unbounded, narcissistic self-belief. It gave him absolute conviction in his own near-messianic qualities and mission, the feeling of certainty that he was destined to become the ‘Great Leader’ the nation awaited, who would expunge the ‘criminal betrayal’ of 1918, restore Germany’s might and power, and create a reborn ‘Germanic State of the German nation’.2 By the time he left Landsberg, the transition – in his own mind, as in that of his followers – from ‘drummer’ to ‘leader’ was complete.
The fragmentation of the völkisch movement in Hitler’s absence, the extraordinary adulation he received from those who already saw greatness in him, and the recognition in himself of ‘great’ leadership were closely interlinked. By the date of his release from Landsberg, on 20 December 1924, the basis for his later incontestable position as Leader had been laid.
I
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 court-room 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 Hitler’s absence, this was insufficient in itself to ensure success.3 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 an exclusive leadership position was, however, upheld only by a minority in the völkisch movement. And as long as Hitler was in no position 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.4 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.5 Distinctly lacking in leadership qualities, he was scarcely an obvious choice, and was as surprised as others were by Hitler’s nomination.6 Possibly, as is usually surmised, it was precisely Rosenberg’s lack of leadership ability that commended itself to Hitler.7 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.8 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.9 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.
Whatever the reasoning, Rosenberg soon found that his writ did not run: simply calling on Hitler’s authority did not help. One immediate sign was the insistence of the acting head of the now illegal SA, Major Walter Buch, that the organization of the Storm Section, while retaining its loyalty to Hitler, would not be subjected to the party’s leadership and would keep out of party-political conflict.10 This was the direct opposite of Hitler’s instructions, that the SA would be subordinated to the party.11 Rosenberg also found in any case that there was no party organization to speak of. The haphazard way in which the party had developed before the putsch had left it unprepared for illegality. Close coordination even of groups in southern Bavaria was now impossible. Rosenberg devised the code-name ‘Rolf Eidhalt’ – ‘Keep the Oath’ – as an anagram of ‘Adolf Hitler’, and used it in letters passed on by courier.12 Camouflage organizations – hiking clubs and the like – were established. Local party groups were sent copies of postcards carrying a picture of Hitler which, they were told, had to be sold in millions ‘as a symbol of our Leader’, since ‘the name of Adolf Hitler must always be kept alive for the German people’.13 Successor newspapers to the banned Völkischer Beobachter attempted to keep the flame alight among Nazi followers. Hitler himself contributed articles and drawings to one clandestine production smuggled out of Landsberg.14 Whatever the difficulties of communication at first, any cloak-and-dagger activity was soon shown to be unnecessary. The authorities proved willing to permit the creation of obvious successor organizations to the banned NSDAP.15
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.16 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.17 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 (DVFΡ), a rivalvölkisch organization headed by Albrecht Graefe, formerly a member of the conservative DNVP, with its stronghold in Mecklenburg and its headquarters in Berlin.
Graefe and two other dissidents from the DNVP, Reinhold Wulle and Wilhelm Henning, all members of the Reichstag with good connections to former officers and businessmen, had formed the DVFP in Berlin in the late autumn of 1922, wanting a more radicalvölkisch line than that offered by the DNVP. Hitler had been forced to a temporary agreement with Graefe in March 1923, allowing the DVFP dominance in northern Germany, with the south retained for the NSDAP. A further agreement, reaffirming that of March and recommending close cooperation between the two parties, had been signed by Hermann Esser on 24 October 1923. It was subsequently claimed by Rosenberg and others that Esser had acted without Hitler’s knowledge, and that the latter had not disowned the pact only to save Esser’s face. But since Hitler had agreed to the March arrangement, and since it is scarcely probable that Esser could or would have taken such a step without his approval, this is unlikely.18
The agreement had not caused any conflict before the putsch, and, in fact, Graefe had taken part in the march to the Feldherrnhalle on 9 November. But 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 the 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. Rosenberg’s position was still further undermined when a draft agreement with Graefe, allowing for unified party organization and combined leadership, which the acting Nazi leader had turned down at a secret meeting in Salzburg at the end of January, was then accepted after all, at Ludendorff’s insistence, on 24 February. This was with Hitler’s express permission (though stipulation that the agreement should last for only six months). It was a further sign of how little clear and unequivocal guidance those left trying to run a party banned and in disarray were given by their imprisoned leader. Immediately after this, on the day before the trial of the putschists began, Ludendorff publicly recommended support for Graefe as his representative in north Germany, thereby lending his prestige to the DVFP and at the same time tacitly claiming leadership of the völkisch movement.19
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. As Rudolf Heß, on Hitler’s behalf, was still explaining over a year later: ‘Herr H. was against participating in the elections from the first moment onwards, and said this clearly and plainly to a number of gentlemen, including His Excellency L[udendorff]. He was convinced that the Movement was not mature enough, that we also had to stay true to our principle of anti-parliamentarism, and that money was only squandered pointlessly.’20 Hitler’s 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.21
Even after these results, Hitler was still letting it be known that he opposed the activities of the Völkischer Block in the forthcoming Reichstag elections. Yet at the very same time he allowed his name to go over an electoral proclamation of the Block. And soon after the election, he told Kurt Lüdecke that policy would have to change, and that ‘we shall have to hold our noses and enter the Reichstag against the Catholic and Marxist deputies’.22 How he viewed this was made plain a year or so later by Rudolf Heß, replying for Hitler to a letter from a party member: ‘Herr Hitler is of the view that, after parliament was entered against his will, participation in parliament has to be seen as one of many methods of combating the present system, including parliamentarism. But participation should not be “positive cooperation”, as was unfortunately carried out by the völkischparliamentarists with very little success, but only be through the fiercest opposition and obstruction, through constant criticism of the existing system in parliament. Parliament, or better still parliamentarism, should be taken to absurdity in parliament.’23
The Reichstag election results had, 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.24 The results in Graefe’s territory of Mecklenburg (20.8 per cent) and Bavaria (16 per cent) were particularly good.25 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.26
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.27 The meeting with Graefe did not take place, however, before the Reichstag deputies of the two parties came together in Berlin on 24 May and agreed to merge for parliamentary purposes under the name of the National Socialist Freedom Party (Nationalsozialistische Freiheitspartei, NSFP). Ludendorff compromised Hitler’s position by announcing in a press release that the latter supported the creation of a single, unified party. 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.28
Hitler’s weakness, reflected in his habit of telling people what they wanted to hear, was revealed in a hastily arranged visit to Landsberg by a four-man north German Nazi delegation, led by Haase, at the end of May. Hitler insisted that the agreement with the DVFΡ of 24 February had been presented to him as a fait accompli, that he had opposed electoral participation but had been unable to prevent it, and that unity with the DVFP went no further than the combining of the Reichstag fractions.29 Ludendorff immediately cast doubt on Hitler’s sincerity in a published statement on 11 June flatly contradicting such a version, and stressing Hitler’s acceptance of the need for a merger.30 However, the result of the visit by Haase’s delegation was the establishment on 3 June 1924 in Hamburg by the north German Hitler loyalists of a ‘Directorate’ under the leadership of Dr Adalbert Volck, a lawyer based in Lüneburg whose embracing of the völkisch movement was strongly coloured by his Baltic origins.31 The Directorate totally rejected any notion of a merger with the DVFP which, it felt, would lead to it being sucked into ‘parliamentarism’ and becoming a party like others. Consequently, the Directorate aimed to be a tightly knit, centrally controlled organization, loyal to Hitler and holding to his principles until he could be released to take up the reins again.32
Even so, some north German Nazis were, not surprisingly, confused and uncertain about Hitler’s position regarding any merger. In a letter of 14 June, Haase 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.33 A week later, Hermann Fobke, a young Nazi from the Göttingen area, imprisoned with Hitler in Landsberg and acting as his general factotum and go-between with the north German faction, tried to assuage Haase by assuring him of Hitler’s support for the opposition of the north German National Socialists to the DVFP. ‘All in all,’ Fobke summed up, ‘H[itler] thinks things have gone so hopelessly off the rails that he is in no doubt that he will have to begin completely afresh when he is free. But in such a case, he is very optimistic and of the view that he will have firm control again within a few days.’ Fobke could not resist, however, pointing out his own disappointment at Hitler’s indifference to the ‘cries of distress’ of the north German NSDAP.34
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).35 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.36 The occasion for his decision was Ludendorff’s press statement on 11 June which had embarrassed and angered Hitler by claiming, despite the latter’s caution and equivocation, that he openly supported the merger of the two parties.37 Fobke told Haase on 23 June that the decision to withdraw from politics had been ‘born out of the anger over this statement’.38 However, the dominant reason was doubtless the one he had given Haase: his impotence at controlling developments from within Landsberg. The Ludendorff press release had simply been the last indication of this impotence. His withdrawal was not a machiavellian strategem to exacerbate the split that was already taking place, increase confusion, and thereby bolster his image as a symbol of unity.39 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 habitually rationalizes his choices,’ commented Lüdecke. ‘He was prepared to risk everything rather than delegate a portion of his personal authority while he remained confined.’40
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. This was intended to absorb and unify other existing paramilitary leagues of the völkisch movement, including the SA and the other banned units of the former Kampfbund, and to be placed under the military leadership of Ludendorff. Hitler was allergic to the inevitable loss of control over the SA which would certainly follow and concerned to avoid his own dependence, as before the putsch, on leaders of paramilitary organizations. Above all, he was anxious that what might be seen as his renewed involvement in paramilitary politics would hinder his chances of early parole and encourage moves to deport him back to Austria. 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.41
Following Hitler’s press statement about his withdrawal from all political involvement, Ludendorff and Graefe moved quickly, with their own press release two days later, to claim the leadership of the völkisch movement ‘until the liberated hero of Munich can again step into their circle as the third leader’. Hitler, they stated, had asked them to take over the leadership in his place. At the same time, Rosenberg had resigned his position, and Gregor Strasser had been brought into the Reich Leadership (Reichsführerschaft) of the ΝSFΡ along with Ludendorff and Graefe for the duration of Hitler’s internment. A conference planned to take place in Weimar in mid-August would bring unity in the völkisch movement, they added.42 This horrified the northern Nazis. The Directorate sought clarification from Fobke. They were told that Hitler had given up his leadership only during his imprisonment, had delegated his powers to no one, and had had no part in the appointment of Strasser to the Reich Leadership, though this step had met with his approval.43 The Directorate’s leader, Volck, once more, on 18 July, made plain where the northern National Socialists stood on questions of a merger: ‘Our programme consists of two words: “Adolf Hitler”.’44 But a meeting of eighty NSDAP representatives from across Germany at Weimar on 20 July, gathered to discuss the merger issue (which would explicitly arise in the conference in the same town the following month) and the question of a parliamentary strategy, and with Ludendorff as guest of honour, ended in acrimony, recrimination, disorder, and greater division than ever.45
Volck immediately compiled a highly critical report of events, which he sent to Landsberg.46 Hitler’s reply, through his intermediary Fobke, offered some encouragement to the northern group. He said they were ‘on the right track’. He strongly criticized Ludendorff, who, he commented, should concentrate solely on the military side of the movement. He was also critical of Esser and Streicher. However, he refused adamantly to deviate from his position of neutrality towards the various rival factions. At the same time he regarded the merger issue as finished, and played down the significance of the conflict. He had scant sensitivity for the north German National Socialists in their ‘despairing struggle’. He knew what he had to do on release, and the rebuilding of the movement could only start from Bavaria.47 Volck was unenthusiastic about Hitler’s response which, he thought, showed little understanding for the NSDAP’s position in the north. It was the first sign of Volck’s growing criticism of Hitler. ‘When leaders in the first place think they can judge everything alone and better,’ he commented, ‘we won’t get any farther.’48
The 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). A high-point of the conference was a greetings telegram from ‘your leader Adolf Hitler’ that was read out to ecstatic applause and threatened to upstage Ludendorff (though he had in fact solicited it in the first place). Unity without Hitler’s leadership could not be attained, was the implication of the conference. But Hitler’s leadership – of the kind he would demand – was, it became increasingly apparent, incompatible with the expectations of Ludendorff and Graefe of a type of leadership triumvirate.49
Once more the embattled northern group of fundamentalists, worried by Hitler’s greetings telegram to the conference, turned to him for clear, unambiguous guidance. Once more he disappointed them. Fobke’s reply tried to reassure his northern comrades that Hitler did not accept that the two parties had completely merged, nor that the movement had become ‘parliamentarized’. But he accepted the need for compromise, and for parliamentary action. Hitler, through Fobke, expressed once more his wish to refrain from any statement of opinion. He ended by emphasizing that his priority on release (which he fully expected to be on 1 October) would be to restore order in Bavaria. He simply exhorted the northern Directorate to hold out until then. The north Germans were distinctly unimpressed.50
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. The crudely insulting, overbearing, and bullying style of Streicher and Esser stirred deep rancour even within the GVG, caused great antagonism with the Völkischer Block (whose leader in Bavaria, Gregor Strasser, was also of course a member of the Reich Leadership of the NSFB), and totally alienated the northern National Socialists. They in turn rejected the Reich Leadership of the NSFB, which for its part refused to accept that the Directorate had any authority.51 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. Hitler assured the northern loyalist faction in mid-September that on release he would seek a clean break and summon all those in leading positions to a meeting. The only question at issue would be: who should lead the movement? Or rather: who stood behind Hitler as sole leader? ‘H[itler] does not recognize a Reich Leadership,’ Fobke’s letter stated, ‘and will never be part of such a soldiers’ council construction.’ So there was no question of him joining Ludendorff and Graefe in a combined Reich Leadership. But he refused to make a public statement to that effect. The frustration and impatience of his northern supporters mounted. His failure to gain the release on parole from 1 October that his supporters had been anticipating further complicated the situation. 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.52 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’.53 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.54
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 völkischshowing 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.55 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.56
II
The hopes of Hitler and his supporters for his early parole on 1 October, once the stipulated six months since his sentence had elapsed, had depended on attestation of his good conduct while in prison, and on his intentions after release.57 In a report on 15 September, the governor of Landsberg prison, Oberregierungsrat Otto Leybold – along with most of the warders warmly sympathetic to Hitler – painted a eulogistic picture of his prize inmate:
Hitler shows himself to be a man of order, of discipline, not only with regard to his own person, but also towards his fellow internees. He is contented, modest, and accommodating. He makes no demands, is quiet, and reasonable, serious and without any abusiveness, scrupulously concerned to obey the confinements of the sentence. He is a man without personal vanity, is content with the catering of the institution, does not smoke or drink, and, despite all comradeliness, knows how to command a certain authority with his fellow inmates… He is not drawn to the female sex. He meets women with whom he comes into contact on visits here with great politeness without becoming engaged with them in serious political discussions. He is always polite and never insulting towards the officials of the institution. Hitler, who at the beginning had a great number of visitors, has kept for some months, as is well known, as far as possible from political visits, and writes only few letters, mainly notes of thanks. He occupies himself every day for many hours with the draft of his book, which should appear in the next weeks and will contain his autobiography, thoughts on the bourgeoisie, Jewry and Marxism, German revolution and Bolshevism, on the National Socialist Movement and the prehistory of the 8th of November 1923… During the ten months of his remand and sentence he has without doubt become more mature and quiet than he had been. He will not return to liberty with threats and thoughts of revenge against those in public office who oppose him and frustrated his plans in November 1923. He will be no agitator against the government, no enemy of other parties with a nationalist leaning. He emphasizes how convinced he is that a state cannot exist without firm internal order and firm government.58
This paean of praise convinced neither the Munich police nor the state prosecutor’s office, both of which provided clear and compelling reasons for rejecting Hitler’s early release.
The report of the Deputy Police President of Munich, Oberregierungsrat Friedrich Tenner, of 23 September 1924, warned in the strongest terms against parole. The Deputy Police President recalled the assessment the Police Direction had earlier made, in a report of 8 May 1924: given Hitler’s temperament and the energy with which he pursued his goals, that report had stated, it could be taken for granted that he would not give up his aim after release from prison and ‘would constitute a constant danger for the internal and external security of the state’. Events since then had confirmed that assessment. The Deputy Police President drew attention to the statements of Hitler, Kriebel and Weber at their trial that they would continue in the same vein after release. And he referred to documents found on 16 September in the offices of the Frontbann which, it was claimed, proved the involvement of the internees in the reformation of the dissolved paramilitary bodies.59 There could in these circumstances be no question of parole, the report went on, but should the court grant it, against all expectations, then it would be crucial to deport Hitler ‘as the soul of the entire völkisch movement’ and so remove the imminent danger for the Bavarian state. The report described prophetically what could be expected after Hitler’s release: ‘Hitler’s influence on all those of a völkisch mind – he is today more than ever the soul of the whole movement – will not only stop the regressive development of the völkisch movement, but will unite the currently fragmented parts and lead great masses of those supporters of his idea who have already fallen off and are still detached back to the NSDAP.’ Meetings, demonstrations, public outrages, and a ‘ruthless struggle with the government’ would be the outcome.60
The state prosecutor for the judicial district of Munich I, Ludwig Stenglein, who had served as the chief prosecutor in the Hitler trial, also emphatically underlined, in a letter of 23 September, how little Hitler’s intentions had changed during his imprisonment, that it could be presumed he would take up where he had left off, and what a danger for public order Hitler’s release would constitute. Implicitly hinting how scandalous the trial had been, he also stressed the serious criminal nature of Hitler’s behaviour before and during the putsch. Not only had the attempted putsch endangered the Bavarian state and the German Reich. It had resulted in considerable loss of life, a major robbery of banknotes, and premeditated armed conflict with the police. The prosecutor pointed out that Hitler’s conviction in 1922 for breach of the peace had earned him a month’s jail sentence with two months suspended sentence, on probation, until 1 March 1926 (something which ought to have been, but was not, mentioned at his trial). He sought the withdrawal of the probation. The evidence connecting Hitler with the plans to reconstitute the banned paramilitary organizations showed, the prosecutor alleged, what he and his fellow internees Kriebel and Weber had in mind after such a release. It also demonstrated, through the misuse of their privileges in Landsberg (in smuggling out letters by way of visitors who had been allowed to see them in private), their lack of good conduct during their internment. There could be no grounds, he concluded, for an early release and he recommended rejection of parole.61
The court simply set aside the state prosecutor’s arguments and on 25 September approved the parole. It took the view that considering the persons concerned and the motives for their actions the serving of a relatively light sentence would be sufficient punishment. It regarded the by-passing of the censor in smuggling out a few letters of insignificant content as a minor consideration, which did not affect the excellent conduct of the internees, attested by the declaration of the prison governor.62 There was no proof, it stated, of connections between Hitler and Kriebel and the Frontbann. In this, the court was presumably influenced by the public declarations by Röhm and others, dissociating Hitler from the Frontbann.63 Nor were there any grounds, the court stated, to accept the state prosecution’s request for a revocation of the existing probationary period being served by Hitler (from his sentence of 1922).64
Undeterred, State Prosecutor Stenglein worked over the weekend to prepare a further appeal against parole for Hitler, Kriebel and Weber, to be sent to the Bavarian Supreme Court. This was delivered on Monday, 29 September. It repeated the charges of poor conduct (through at least nine cases of smuggled letters), strong suspicion of participation in further illegal organizations (through involvement with the Frontbann), and the security risk that would present itself for the state on their release.65 With this appeal, there was no possibility that Hitler could be released, as he and his supporters had pressed for, on 1 October.66
However, the matter was pending, the court would soon have to decide on the parole, and the prospects of preventing Hitler’s early release were not great. Even if parole were not immediately forthcoming, the chances were that it would be granted before much longer, not least given the unrelenting pressure from Hitler’s supporters.67 With this in mind, a representative of the Bavarian government visited Vienna at the beginning of October to try to secure the deportation of Hitler to Austria, which it wanted to achieve immediately if he were released on parole.68 In response to a Bavarian inquiry as early as 26 March 1924 the authorities in Upper Austria had, in fact, recognized Hitler’s Austrian citizenship on 20 April and been prepared to accept his deportation over the border at Passau.69 A report by the Munich Police Direction on 8 May then recommended his deportation in the interest of Bavarian state security.70 But no steps were taken then, or at any other time before late September. Presumably, the matter had simply been deferred as non-urgent. By September, when a sense of urgency was certainly present, the Bavarian cabinet was divided on Hitler’s deportation.71 In any case, by then the Passau border authorities were reporting that they had received orders from Vienna not to accept Hitler.72The directive had been sent on the instructions of no less authority than that of the Federal Chancellor, Ignaz Seipel, himself.73 Subsequent Bavarian attempts to use legal arguments – in themselves persuasive – to pressurize the Austrian government to take back Hitler were to no avail. Seipel simply refused to take him, remaining adamant that Hitler’s service in the German army incurred loss of Austrian citizenship. It was legally not a sound argument. But it sufficed.74 Despite Hitler’s fears, nothing more came of the attempt to deport him.75 Following his release from Landsberg, Hitler inquired in March 1925 how he could relinquish his Austrian citizenship. He was told to put in a formal request, which he then did on the grounds of his war service in the German army and desire to acquire German citizenship. On 30 April 1925, he received the anxiously awaited authorization that his Austrian citizenship was terminated.76 This removal of any fear of deportation at a future date cost him the grand sum of 7.50 Austrian Schillings.77 It would be seven years before he acquired German citizenship. Until then, he would remain stateless.
Meanwhile, on 6 October, the Bavarian Supreme Court gave its judgement, rejecting the state prosecutor’s plea opposing Hitler’s parole. The court took the view that the strong suspicion against Hitler, Kriebel and Weber for involvement with banned paramilitary organizations had still to be proved. The decision on parole hinged on this evidence, and could only be taken when it was available. The judgement paved the way for the eventual order of 19 December which would grant Hitler’s release. The state prosecution office had still not given up. It made a last attempt to prevent Hitler’s release in a carefully argued appeal of 5 December. Even if the evidence assembled might not suffice for a court conviction, it claimed, it did suffice to demonstrate the ‘strong suspicion’ that Hitler and Kriebel, whatever their protestations to the contrary, were guilty of actions in the same context as those for which they had been sentenced, and that they were unlikely to be of good conduct after release. The Bavarian Supreme Court then requested, on 12 December, a report from the Governor of Landsberg on the conduct of Hitler and Kriebel since his earlier report of 15 September. Reading the signals, Leybold replied within two days with another glowing account of Hitler’s character and behaviour in the prison. ‘He is in his conduct during his sentence,’ Leybold concluded, ‘quite especially worthy of parole.’78 With this new documentation of Hitler’s good conduct, the Bavarian Supreme Court, on 19 December, finally rejected the state prosecution’s case against early release, and ordered his parole – the clamour for which had not ceased in the völkisch press since October.79 That the December elections were out of the way, and appeared to show National Socialism in steep decline, doubtless helped. But 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.
State Prosecutor Stenglein, who had himself done what he could to hinder Hitler’s parole, now passed on the court order to Landsberg by telegram.80 The Governor, his voice faltering, gave his prisoner the news. Hitler assured him there would be no demonstrations outside the prison and asked to be collected by Adolf Müller, proprietor of a Munich publishing firm and the party’s printer. Müller drove the next morning to Landsberg in his Daimler-Benz together with the photographer Heinrich Hoffmann.81 On 20 December, at 12.15p.m., Hitler 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.82 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 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.83 Hitler said later that he did not know what to do with his first evening of freedom.84 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.
III
‘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.85 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.86 But Hitler’s reading and reflection were anything but academic. Doubtless he did read much. However, as we noted in an earlier chapter, he made clear in Mein Kampf thatreading, for him, had purely an instrumental purpose.87 He read not for knowledge or enlightenment, but for confirmation of his own preconceptions. He found what he was looking for. As he told 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.’88
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.89 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.90 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.91
The modifications in Hitler’s world-view that had already been taking shape 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.92 Its genesis is not altogether clear. If Otto Strasser – admittedly a biased and often unreliable source – is to be believed, it was his brother, Gregor, who, during the short time he spent in Landsberg, had the ‘machiavellian idea’ Hitler that he write his ‘memoirs’ in order to relieve the burden on the other inmates of having to listen to endless monologues from ‘the man on the first floor’. Hitler was taken with the idea, began work on it straight away, and the prisoners on the ground floor were left in peace to return to playing cards, eating and drinking.93 At least, they thought they would be left in peace. If the story has any substance to it, they must have been sorely disappointed when Hitler took to reading out each day the sections he had written to a literally captive audience.94 More likely, if more prosaic than Otto Strasser’s colourful explanation, is that the suggestion to Hitler to write his autobiography came from Max Amann, persuading him to cash in on the publicity stirred up by his trial.95 Amann was expecting revelations about the background to the putsch.96 Instead, he and many disappointed readers found largely a repetition of what Hitler had said in countless speeches, interspersed with superficial and triumphalist accounts of parts of his own life story.97
Hitler was already at work on what would become the first volume when Haase and the north German delegation visited him on 26–7 May 1924. He called his book at that time by the scarcely catchy title: ‘Four and a Half Years of Struggle against Lies, Stupidity, and Cowardice’.98 The eventual pithy title seems to have been suggested by Max Amann.99 The book was dictated by Hitler to chauffeur and general dogsbody Emil Maurice, then, from July onwards, to Rudolf Heß (both of whom were also serving sentences for their part in the putsch).100 The first volume, which appeared on 18 July 1925, was largely autobiographical – though, as we have noted, with many distortions and inaccuracies. It ended with Hitler’s triumph at the announcement of the party programme in the Hofbräuhaus on 24 February 1920. The second volume, which Hitler wrote only after his release, and which was 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.
Badly written and rambling as the published version of Mein Kampf was, it was a considerable improvement on what Hitler had initially produced, thanks to editorial interventions from a number of people. ‘A veritable chaos of banalities, schoolboy reminiscences, subjective judgements, and personal hatred’ was how Otto Strasser described the draft.101 Amann, the party printer Müller, Heß, and Hanfstaengl (whose brother turned down flat the prospect of Mein Kampf appearing in the family publishing house) all had a hand in altering and revising the text.102 The music critic of theVölkischer Beobachter, Stolzing-Cerny, together with a former Hieronymite, Father Bernard Stempfle, one-time editor-in-chief of the Miesbacher Anzeiger, a provincial Bavarian newspaper that sympathized with the Nazi Movement, played the main role in re-couching whole sections into a style still inimitably Hitlerian, often barely readable, but nonetheless more literate than the original.103 Even then, there were many later alterations before the volume appeared in print.104 Hitler himself, according to Hans Frank, accepted that it was badly written, and described it as no more than a collection of leading articles for the Völkischer Beobachter.105
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.106 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.107 How many people actually read it is unknown.108 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 Kampfhad made him a very rich man.109
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.110 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, Manichaean 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.111 ‘The racial question,’ he wrote, ‘gives the key not only to world history but to all human culture.’112 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’.113 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.114 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.115
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.116 Hitler never saw any reason to alter the content of what he had written.117 Their internal coherence (given the irrational premises) allows them to be described as an ideology (or, in Hitler’s own terminology, a ‘world-view’).118 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 Hitler 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, as we have already seen, well back beyond the First World War.119 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’.120 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.’121 The notion of poisoning the poisoners ran through another, notorious, passage of Mein Kampf, already cited in Chapter 5, 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’.122 These terrible passages are not the beginning of a one-way track to the ‘Final Solution’. The road there was ‘twisted’, not straight.123 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 saw in Chapter 5, the initial anti-capitalist colouring of Hitler’s antisemitism had given way by mid-1920 to the connection in his thinking 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 imagination 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’.124 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.’125
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.126 The Nazi Movement knew only one enemy, he had emphasized the following month – the mortal enemy of the whole of mankind: Marxism.127 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’.128 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.129 They were no different from those of many nationalist hot-heads. 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.130 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.131
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.132 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.133
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 1919.134 He already 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.135 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’.136 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.137
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.138 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.139 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.140
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.141 There was no ‘transformation’ of Hitler’s ‘vision of the world’ in Landsberg.142 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. As we noted in an earlier chapter, 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.143 For Pan-Germans, Lebensraum could 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 asVolksdeutsche (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.144 In the Weimar era it came to be popularized by Hans Grimm’s best-selling novel Volk ohne Raum (People without Space), published in 1926.145
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 Haushofer’s were one significant source for his notion ofLebensraum.146 Through Rudolf Heß, Hitler already knew Karl Haushofer, the leading exponent of ‘geopolitics’, by 1922 at the latest.147 Haushofer’s influence was probably greater than the Munich professor was later prepared to acknowledge.148 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 or not 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.149
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.150
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.151 By the second volume, mainly written in 1925 (and published at the end of the following year), 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.
The right to possess soil can become a duty if without extension of its soil a great nation seems doomed to destruction [wrote Hitler]… Germany will either be a world power or there will be no Germany. And for world power she needs that magnitude which will give her the position she needs in the present period, and life to her citizens.
And so 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.’152
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 anti-semitism, 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).153 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.
IV
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.154 Hitler’s 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.155 In Landsberg this changed – though, as we have 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.156 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 unbounded admiration for heroic figures, above all the artist-hero Wagner.157 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.158
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.159 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.’160Unmistakably, 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’.161 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’.162 He was indeed both a masterly propagandist and an ideologue. There was no contradiction between the two.
Hitler’s conviction of his own uniqueness conveyed itself to some, if not all, of those imprisoned alongside him in Landsberg. It was only in Landsberg, wrote Rudolf Heß, that he fully grasped the ‘mighty significance’ of Hitler’s personality.163 Some of the inmates, like Heß, would, on release, be instrumental in transmitting the ‘heroic’ image of Hitler within the party. Hermann Fobke, Hitler’s liaison with the north German faction and an internee in Landsberg along with around two dozen other young members of Hitler’s bodyguard, gave an indication of the impression Hitler was making on him in one of his letters to the Göttingen leader of the National Socialists, Ludolf Haase:
It is my rock solid conviction that Hitler will not move one iota from his National Socialist thinking… And if it nonetheless sometimes looks as if that is the case, then it is only for the sake of more important goals. For he combines in himself the programmatist and the politician. He knows his goal, but also sees the ways to accomplish it. My stay here has strengthened what I still doubted in Göttingen: the faith in Hitler’s political instinct.164
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.165Since 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.166 Ideology was often regarded as no more than a cloak for power-ambitions and tyranny.167 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.