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'Hitler' (book by Brendan Simms) Mein Kampf (book)

Hitler, 51

The principal method through which Hitler sought to re­establish control over the party was through ideological purity and coherence. He did this the hard way, seeking to achieve uniformity across a range of highly contentious issues. Hitler could not simply impose his views: he had to cajole and persuade. This was done through speeches, declarations, debates and, from the end of 1925, through the publication in succession of the two volumes of Mein Kampf. These were only partly written from scratch at Landsberg and after his release, the rest being cobbled together from various articles and instructions, and even from drafts dating back to before the Putsch. Much of Mein Kampf originated as a direct response to the political events of 1925-6, and Hitler used the text to lay down the law, at least implicitly, not just to the membership but also to his internal critics. For this reason the book needs to be seen in the context of the many contemporaneous statements he made before and after publication…

Much of what Hitler said in Mein Kampf and his various speeches rehearsed familiar themes from the time before the Putsch. There was the same focus on the forces of domestic fragmentation. Hitler inveighed once more against the ‘mendacity of these so-called federalist circles’ who were only promoting their ‘dirty’ party interest. He continued to fulminate about the disintegrative effect of Marxism, and to lament the alienation of German workers. Hitler rose to new heights of invective against the German middle class, whom he dismissed as ‘philistines’, ‘bourgeois boobies’, who were so befuddled by the ‘fug of associational meetings’ that they were unable to transcend the ‘usual jingoism of our bourgeois world of today’. He contrasted the robustness of the SA, who knew that ‘terror can only be broken by terror’, with ‘bourgeois wimpishness’. Hitler also trenchantly restated his objections to parliamentarism and electoral politics, and western democracy in general, concluding that the ‘majority principle’ amounted to ‘the demolition of the Führer idea as such’.
 

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Editor’s note: In the American racial right I have never seen a critical attitude to democracy, which we could define as the secular religion of the ‘divine right of the people’. Nor do we know a critique of the bourgeoisie. Fortunately, today’s progressive religion is so delusional that even the rich of Pacific Palisades in California are, at this very hour, being punished by the loss of their mansions. The time will come when the whole American nation will go up in flames, when its precious dollar will collapse (a crisis that, fortunately, will also affect the rest of the degenerate, Mammon-worshipping West)…
 

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The main danger of Germany’s internal weakness was that it made her vulnerable to external attack, especially from the enemies that Hitler feared most: international capitalism, Anglo-America and the associated forces of world Jewry. Hitler critiqued the economics of inequality and exploitation, the ‘jarring juxtaposition of poor and rich so close to each other’, the ‘role of money’, in which ‘money [became] God’ and ‘the false God of Mammon was offered incense’. He became increasingly convinced that ‘the heaviest battle to be fought was no longer against enemy peoples but against international capital’. Here Hitler insisted more than ever on his earlier distinction between national capital, which the state could control, and pernicious international capital, which controlled states or sought to do so. One of its principal instruments of subjugation was revolutionary Marxism, which undermined national economies, societies and governments. Others were economic immiseration and racial contamination, both of which also reduced the capacity of nations to resist international takeover. For Hitler, maintaining an independent national economy was therefore absolutely central to the defence of national identity, sovereignty and racial purity. Hitler violently objected to international capitalism even when it was not Jewish, but he assigned the Jews a particularly malevolent role within the global capitalist system; this remained the principal root of his anti­semitism. In Mein Kampf, as in his earlier rhetoric, Jews were inseparably linked with money and the whole capitalist system as ‘traders’, as ‘middlemen’, who levied an ‘extortionate rate of interest’ for their ‘financial deals’. Jewry, he claimed, aimed at nothing less that the ‘financial domination of the entire economy’. Yet because ‘a Bolshevized world can only survive if it encompasses everything’, a ‘single independent state’—such as a revived Germany—could bring the whole juggernaut to a standstill…

Hitler returned to this theme in Mein Kampf, when he said that ‘for purely emotional reasons one should not show the masses two or more enemies, because this would otherwise lead to a complete fragmentation of their striking power’…

Hitler’s rhetoric was thus far more anti-capitalist than anti-communist: references to Dawes in his speeches dwarfed those to Lenin at this time. He continued to fear Bolshevism, not in the form of the Red Army, but principally as a virus which would render Germany ripe for takeover by the forces of international capitalism.

Worse still, Hitler claimed, international capitalism sought to destroy the German bloodline by ‘contamination through Negro blood on the Rhine’ (an allusion to colonial soldiers in the French forces of occupation) in order to ‘begin the bastardization of the European continent from its central point’. Contamination of the blood, he warned, could only be removed in the course of ‘centuries, if at all’. In this narrative, German mass emigration took on a particular importance. Hitler saw it as part of a concerted plan to destroy the biological substance of German people going back centuries. ‘The German people had to send out their sons,’ Hitler lamented, with the result that for some three hundred years, Germans had served as ‘beasts of burden for other nations’ and had moved to ‘Australia, Central America and South America’. He would return to this theme over and over in the years to come.

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David Irving Heinrich Himmler

True Himmler, 10

Early photo of Heinrich Himmler with his two brothers.

HUMBLED BY DEFEAT, RUINED BY REPARATIONS, the future for Germany looked bleak. A nameless gloom assailed Himmler, the military reservist. On November 7, 1919 he and Lou fetched helmets; he already had ‘the King’s tunic,’ as he called it, explaining, I’m a soldier and always will be.’ ‘Gebhard, Lou, and I talked some more,’ he wrote, ‘about how fine it would have been to go off to war together. Perhaps then I wouldn’t be here today – one fighting heart fewer… In a few years’ time I may yet go off to war and do battle. I’m looking forward to the war of liberation,’ he hinted, ‘and if there’s still a sound limb left on me I’ll be there.’ ‘Today,’ he wrote on December 1, 1919, ‘I’ve got a uniform on again. It’s the only suit I love to wear…’

Now nineteen, he began thinking of emigrating – to Russia. Back in Ingolstadt for a day, he talked it over with his parents. ‘There’s no place like home,’ he wrote. ‘Went for an evening stroll and a long chat – with Papa about Louisa, with Mama about the Russia thing mostly, and about the political and economic future. I prayed in the evening and was in bed by ten-thirty already.’ He missed his mother’s at-chocolate comforts: ‘It’s nice to be back home again,’ he wrote a few days before Christmas, ‘then you can be a child again.’

Louisa or Maja? ‘How happy could I be with either,’ John Gay had written in The Beggar’s Opera, ‘Were t’other dear charmer away.’ On the eve of St Nicholas, December 6, Heini found a mystery present, a gift hamper; from a blonde hair which his careful search discovered on it, he deduced that it was from Maja. On the way to the ice rink with Ludwig on the eighth, they talked about Maja, Kathe, and Gebhard, but at the ice rink Maja was downright obnoxious. The gift was from another blonde. ‘Just shows how stupid a man in love can be.’ He decided, ‘If l don’t find the girl who loves me, then I’ll head off to Russia alone. If Maja is still in love with me, then I’m glad for her because it’s great to love and be loved.’ A few days later, he summed up: ‘Maja is ignoring me. With her and Louisa I have learned one lesson: “There’s none so cruel as girls who have once loved you”.’

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David Irving’s book can be purchased on his website.

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'Hitler' (book by Brendan Simms)

Hitler, 50

Despite the bravado, Hitler trod very carefully. Shortly after his release, Hitler had two meetings with the Bavarian minister president, Heinrich Held, at which he assured him that he would not attempt another putsch. He toned down some of the rhetoric in Mein Kampf, the second volume of which he was writing in the calm of his mountain retreat at Berchtesgaden, the use of which had been given to him by a well-wisher.

Hitler also moved to sort out his national status, which acquired renewed importance after the speaking ban. In early April 1925, he wrote to the authorities in Linz requesting his ‘release from Austrian citizenship’. Hitler also had a long discussion with the Austrian consul in Munich and expressed his desire to surrender his nationality. On 30 April 19 25, the Austrian authorities finally stripped him of the citizenship he had never accepted. This did not mean that Hitler had established his right to stay in Germany beyond all doubt—he was now formally ‘stateless’—but he had at least ensured that it would be more difficult to deport him somewhere else. The threat of removal, however, remained, and the Bavarian authorities reminded him of it from time to time…

Hitler avoided confrontation, partly in order to concentrate on the completion of Mein Kampf. ‘Not a word from Hitler,’ Goebbels noted right at the end of 1924, ‘Oh this sly fox with the political instinct.’ A fortnight later, he asked anxiously, ‘What will Hitler do? That is the anxious question every day. Hopefully he will not go over to the camp of reaction.’ Hitler’s reticence annoyed some of the rank and file, who complained that it would be better for him to sort out the ‘problems’ in the movement than to work on a ‘high political work’. The Bavarian police, which kept a close eye on Hitler after his release, also reported that he seemed to be absorbed by Mein Kampf, which was concerned ‘exclusively with Marxism and Jewry’. This was, as we shall see, by no means a completely accurate summary…

Hitler gave thirty-eight speeches in 1925, and fifty-two in the following year. This gave him limited traction, however, partly because the numbers attending were substantially lower than during his heyday in 1923, and partly because he was still banned from appearing in public in much of Germany. Hitler was thus forced to speak to closed party meetings, in salons, or at private events. Nor could he put too much reliance on his personal magnetism…

Hitler would have to work with the people he had rather than the people he would like to have had. He knew that the party needed to transcend his own person. Personal loyalty was not enough; he needed party cadres to obey not just him but their immediate superiors. The Führer principle was thus extended beyond the Fuhrer himself. More talented and trained speakers were needed, so that the entire strain of communicating the message did not fall on him and a few others. ‘We need speaker schools,’ he announced in March 1925, ‘because to this day this mass movement has only 10-12 good speakers.’ In other words, Hitler was learning not to hog his charisma, but to spread it around. His speeches and instructions increasingly referred not just to the Führer in the singular, but to the plural Führers upon whom the leadership of the movement depended.

Central to this was the establishment of a proper party bureaucracy. Here the Social Democrats explicitly served as a model. Hitler spoke grudgingly of the SPD as a party ‘organized like the SA’. Despite shortage of funds, the NSDAP moved to new premises in the Schellingstrasse in Munich in the summer of 1925, and Hitler signalled his plan to build a dedicated ‘Party Headquarters’ in Munich paid for by the membership…

Hitler also resurrected the Sturmabteilungen, not as a paramilitary formation, as it had developed in the months preceding the Putsch, but as an organization dedicated to ‘strengthening of the bodies of our youth, bringing them up on discipline and dedication to the common great ideal [and] training in the marshalling and reconnaissance service of the movement’.There should be no weapons, either carried openly or stored in depots. Anybody who violated that rule was to be expelled. Hitler’s concern here was to avoid being dragged into illegality by armed hotheads. The immediate effect of this ruling was to precipitate a breach with Röhm, for whom the paramilitary aspects of the SA remained central. He resigned and eventually emigrated to South America . That same month Hitler created the ‘Protective Squadron’ soon known simply as the SS, a personal protection squad whose first leader, Josef Berchtold, placed particular stress on ideological purity. In a critical assertion of authority, Hitler had established a monopoly of violence within the movement.

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David Irving Heinrich Himmler

True Himmler, 9

HE DID NOT UNDERSTAND WOMEN at all. After supper one evening he and Maja played the piano. ‘I think we see eye to eye. By God´s grace!’ He hurried home and worked some more on his Russian, a language he had started to learn. They held hands a lot that winter, or read books together, like the 1911 love story by Richard Voss, Zwei Menschen, Two People: the hero’s mother, a religious fanatic, dies of grief when he fails to take orders as a priest; guilt-stricken, he dumps his girl, whereupon she too kills herself, and he officiates at her funeral. Yes, women were odd creatures, and he spent a lot of his time feeling sorry for them. Maja performed more student chores for him, and he felt guilty about Louisa: ‘Over at four p.m. to the Hagers,’ he wrote: ‘I feel sorry for Louisa but there´s not much I can do. Perhaps this first big episode in her life will help her grow up.’ With Louisa he talked about everything under the sun, but then it was back to Maja. They kissed goodnight, and on Odeon Square afterwards a hooker caught up with him. ‘Obviously without scoring,’ he virtuously recorded. ‘But interesting all the same.’

With Maja, the girl with the flaxen hair, came the inevitable denouement. It was the last day of November 1919. ‘I don´t know if I´m imagining it, but Maja is not the same toward me as she used to be.’ He took her skating the next day. The ticket is still tucked into his diary today, together with five snapshots of a young girl.

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Irving’s book can be purchased on his website.

Categories
David Irving Heinrich Himmler

True Himmler, 8

The above image appears in Irving’s book with this footnote: ‘Heinrich Himmler preserves the certificate recording his First Communion until the end.’

THE PLEASURES WHICH MADE those evenings ‘unforgettable’ also helped young Heinrich Himmler overcome his tendency to adolescent depression . ‘First of all Maja sang, “A Woman’s Love and Sorrow.” She sang the verses with tears in her eyes. I don’t think Ludwig understands her, his Golden girl, but I can’t be sure of that. I just don’t get him. Later Gebhard and Kathe played the piano.’ Kathe Loritz – also Maja – was Ludwig Zahler’s girl, and later his wife. ‘Ludwig and I shared an armchair. Marielle [Lacher] and Maja sat on the floor clinging to us both. We all cuddled, partly in love and partly in a fraternal embrace. It was an evening I won’t easily forget.’

He felt sorry for poor Maja, he wrote on November 5, 1919; and two days later there was more of the same: then he sermonized to a hidden congregation in his diary, ‘Yes, it’s true: Mankind is a wretched creature. Restless is the heart, until it rests with Thee, 0 Lord [see my comment in the comments section - Editor]. How powerless are we, we can’t help it. I can but be a friend to my friends, do my duty, work, struggle with myself, and never allow myself to lose control.’ After just a month living among educated youngsters like himself, he was beginning to question everything. Louisa no longer excited him. On Sunday morning he went to the cathedral for Mass and the sermon, and then over to her family, the Hagers: ‘Louisa was nice enough, but not the way I like.’ He spent a cheerful evening after that with Maja’s family. ‘Today I have by and large regained my spiritual balance. God will help me forwards.’

Thus as he plunged into the world of agriculture an inner turmoil began, between the strict religious doctrines impressed upon him by his parents, and the unfamiliar chemistry of student life and adolescence. ‘I work,’ he wrote on November 11, i919, ‘because it is my duty, because I find peace in work; and I work for my Germanic ideal of womanhood with whom I shall one day live my life and fight my battles as a German in the East, far from my beloved Germany.’ One evening a hypnotist came round to the Loritz household and tried his black art on them. ‘I summoned up all my powers of resistance,’ boasted Heini. ‘Obviously it did not work with me. But it did totally with poor little Maja. I felt so sorry for her when I saw her go under. I could have strangled the dog in cold blood. I worked against him where I could. . . His mind-reading was very good, but I think anybody capable of concentrating could do it with sufficient practice. I instinctively disliked the fellow, I hate this whole swindle; it only comes off if you go along with him.’

He loved Maja’s eagerness to help; she made a fair-copy in twenty pages of neat handwriting for him of his zoology paper, and repeated the drawings with great care. A day or two later he helped her with her math, and ‘she thanked me very much – (he drew a careful line, and did that again the next day). His heart in a whirl, zerwühlt, he wrote that Friday evening: ‘Then over to the Loritz’s for a meal. Maja was very nice – and there was the line again. (Those who research in private diaries know not to ignore such signs.)

He was still acquiring social graces. That included taking lessons in ballroom dancing, which he loathed as only a nineteen-year-old can. ‘Diary, November 15, 1919: From eight to ten at dancing-class.’ – and here he inserted three [iron] crosses. ‘All beginnings are hard,’ he added, using a German aphorism, ‘but I’ll get the hang of it. Dance classes seem pretty pointless to me, and just a waste of time.’ ‘What a disgusting fraud it all is,’ he commented. ‘But I’ll be glad once I’ve learned to do it, and I can dance with whoever takes my fancy.’ ‘If I could only look danger squarely in the eye,’ he added in one entry, ‘risk my life somewhere, fight, that would be a real liberation for me.’

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Irving’s book can be purchased on his website.

Categories
'Hitler' (book by Brendan Simms) Mein Kampf (book)

Hitler, 48

Chapter 5

Anglo-American power and German impotence

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

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

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

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

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

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

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David Irving Heinrich Himmler

True Himmler, 7

THERE WAS ONE OVERHANGING PROBLEM, the growing left-wing unrest in Bavaria. The army might soon have him doing night patrols as a reservist. ‘Dear Mother, Dear Father,’ he wrote on November 6, 1919. ‘Today you get your promised letter. Thanks a lot for your dear packages. The one with coat and fur jumpers arrived this morning. Gebhard collected the other at the post office this afternoon. Again, dear Mother, thanks a lot. After all, your boys are a bothersome pair. The possibility exists that they will call us up in a few days’ time…’

After adding a breakdown of their expenses, he asked for more cash. ‘Then Mother, we would like to for the following with our next laundry parcel (but there is absolutely no hurry): 1. smokes for Gebhard, 2. a little green cover for the travelling suitcase, 3. wax paper to wrap sandwiches, 4. Gebhard’s electric flashlight, 5….’ Such letters are hard to paraphrase, but they provide much we need to know about Heinrich Himmler at this time.

After his recovery from illness he went to confession twice: he found himself thinking impure thoughts about women. He had begun cautious friendships – primarily with Ludwig’s girl, Maja Loritz and also with Louisa Hager, the daughter of trusted family friends; her mother evidently approved, as the two females came round and joshed him. ‘Friendship? Love?’ pondered Himmler in his diary. ‘Another step towards maturity. But I will stay indifferent.’

‘Then over to the Hagers for lunch,’ he confided on October 20, 1919, the day he registered at the Polytechnic: ‘Mama Hager was as nice and kind to me as ever. Afterwards we talk about private dancing lessons.’ Louisa resorted to tears, every woman’s last resort. ‘Floods of tears from the poor thing. I felt really sorry for her. She does not realise how pretty she is when she cries. I escorted her to the streetcar, then went to the State Library and read up on the war of 1812. From four to five o’clock I sat in on a lecture at the Veterinary School.’ Louisa went to Communion every day, and she shot up in his esteem. ‘This really was the best thing I have heard this last week.’ Most evenings after lectures, which began on November 3, the four friends went to concerts or an indoor swimming pool. Heini found it difficult to juggle these two females, Maja and Louisa. With Maja he visited the theatre and talked about religion; he wrote rapturously, ‘I think I’ve found a sister.’ Less innocently perhaps, he was thrilled that she hooked her arm in his, as they went for a stroll with Gebhard and his girl. But Heini was plagued with irritation about Louisa – and twice he lamented in his pages, ‘She won’t let her hair down.’

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Irving’s book can be purchased on his website.

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'Hitler' (book by Brendan Simms)

Hitler, 47

In late February 1924, Hitler was brought to stand trial before the Volksgericht in Munich in the old Infantry School on the Blutenburgstrasse. He was allowed to appear in a suit rather than prison clothes and sporting his Iron Cross. Security was strict, and the press interest, including from abroad, was intense. Hitler would no doubt have been pleased to know that ‘one heard particularly many English voices’. The Reich government had wanted the trial to be held in Leipzig, but the authorities in Munich were determined to keep it local, almost certainly because they feared what might otherwise emerge about their complicity in the various plots. Berlin gave way in the context of a broader rapprochement with Bavaria. In mid February 1924, about a week before the trial began, the Bavarian Reichswehr submitted once again to command from Berlin, thus reversing Kahr and Lossow’s position in November 1923; Kahr resigned.

Hitler famously used the courtroom as a platform from which to expound his world view… The trial lasted just over a month, from 26 February to 27 March 1924… He did not deny the substance of the charges, but argued that he had acted at all times in the greater interest of Germany… Sometimes Kahr appeared so overwhelmed that his voice dropped to a whisper as the courtroom audience strained to hear him. The rampant Hitler, by contrast, was repeatedly told to lower his voice by the trial judge.

Hitler’s final speech was a triumphant reiteration of his beliefs and sense of mission. If he was a traitor, then so were Bismarck, Atatürk and Mussolini, whose treason had been ratified by success. Hitler decried that there was ‘self­ determination for every Negro tribe’, but that ‘Germany did not belong to the Negro tribes but stood under them’. The root of the German predicament, he continued, lay in Germany’s exposed geopolitical position in Europe. ‘The German people’, Hitler argued, ‘has perhaps the worst location of all nations in military-political terms. It is geographically extraordinarily badly located, surrounded by many rivals’. It was menaced by France’s determination to ‘Balkanize’ Germany and to reduce her population. In this context he referred to ‘Clemenceau’s [alleged] aim to exterminate 20 million Germans in Europe, to break up Germany into individual states and to prevent the emergence of another united large Reich’. It was also threatened by Britain’s supposed much broader policy of Balkanizing Europe as a whole in order to maintain the balance of power. There was no economic solution to this predicament, Hitler stressed, but only a powerful foreign policy based on the highest level of internal mobilization. Germany would need to get rid of ‘international Jewry’, which was coordinating the global forces against her. She would also need to pursue the related struggle against international capitalism. ‘The battle against international stock exchange enslavement’ and against the ‘trustification’ of the ‘entire economy’, Hitler demanded, must be taken up.

These were all familiar themes from Hitler’s previous statements, but this time he had the eyes of the German and even some of the international press upon him. His dosing speech concluded with a resounding statement that though the court might secure a conviction, posterity would surely acquit him. In an obviously choreographed sequence, the other accused said they had nothing to add, with the result that Hitler’s resonant last words were left ringing throughout the courtroom and shaped the story of the trial. He turned the defeat and humiliation of 9 November 1923 into a victorious narrative…

Hitler was now a hero not merely to the Bavarian right, but to many nationalists throughout Germany. What had begun in the public mind as the ‘Ludendorff Trial’ ended as the ‘Hitler Trial’. ‘I am occupying myself with Hitler and the National Socialist movement,’ the Rhenish student Joseph Goebbels wrote in his diary in early March 1923…

On his return to Landsberg to serve the rest of his sentence, Hitler was confronted with some serious strategic questions… Ernst Röhm began to revive the SA, under the cover of a front organization, and went to confer with Hitler at the very end of May 1924. Perhaps anxious not to provoke the authorities, and mindful of his inability to seize power by force, the Fuhrer insisted that the SA keep a lower profile…

Gregor Strasser and General Ludendorff strongly supported amalgamation with the DVFP to create a new National Socialist Freedom Party (NSFP). Hitler reluctantly agreed in broad terms but insisted that the main base and focus of the party remain in Munich….

Gottfried Feder remarked after visiting him that Hitler was ‘depressed [and] wants to withdraw completely from the movement’ in order to ‘work’, that is, ‘write’ to earn money. Over the next two months, Hitler repeated his message publicly on a number of occasions. He was acting partly because he was disenchanted with the way in which the various mergers and collaborations were turning the party into a purely bourgeois organization, and partly because he had no real power to turn things around from prison…

One reason why Hitler wanted to lie low was fear of having his release delayed, or of being deported to Austria. The Bavarian authorities had long hoped to do the latter, and in early May 1924, the Polizeidirektion in Munich told the Bavarian Ministry of the Interior that ‘Hitler constitutes a permanent threat to the internal and external security of the state’. In late April 1924, the Austrians agreed to accept him in principle. Hitler managed to avoid deportation, but after being refused probation he failed to get out by 1 October as he originally hoped. On 16 October he made a statement that he should be allowed to stay, ‘because I never felt myself to be an Austrian citizen but only a German’. ‘My affection for my Austrian homeland is great,’ Hitler continued, ‘but so is hostility of the Austrian state’, in which—like the ‘earlier Habsburg state’—he could only see ‘an obstacle for the unification of the German people’.

Categories
David Irving Heinrich Himmler

True Himmler, 6

ON JUNE 26, 1919 Himmler’s father had become headmaster of the Gymnasium in Ingolstadt. For a few weeks Heini worked on a farm at Oberhaunstadt nearby. A work diary started on August 1 shows him toiling in stables, fields, and the dairy. On August 15 he entered, ‘Stables as usual. Church in the morning, with Mr Franz after lunch.’

On September 2 he fell ill with salmonella poisoning, and he remained bedridden for the rest of the month. On the twenty-fourth a doctor in Munich diagnosed an enlarged heart, and advised him to quit farm work for a year and concentrate on studies. Himmler transferred from rural Bavaria to Munich. He applied to study at the Polytechnic and paid the requisite fees. At the same time his brother Gebhard engaged to read mechanical engineering. The four storeyed building sat with its square, copper-sheathed clocktower between Gabelsberger Strasse and Theresien Strasse. The Polytechnic’s file records them as living just two blocks away from the college at No. 5, Schelling Strasse, a street much trodden later in history.

The Polytechnic issued a matriculation certificate on October 18, 1919. Heini would study here until 1922. He had chosen to read agriculture, and he might well have prospered as a farmer; farmers seldom go hungry. The two brothers would share digs, and take their weekly bath at the Luisenbad (at home they had only an old-fashioned bath contraption). ‘Our room looks very comfortable right now,’ he wrote to his parents a few days later. ‘I just wish you could see it. Everything excellently in its rightful place. In the mornings we drink tea, which is very good. We get up at six-thirty. Then we tot up our outgoings of the day before and reconcile them’ – this no doubt for their father’s benefit. ‘For the morning break we always buy cheese.’

His mother did the laundry for them both. The parents still required him to practise the piano, and he struggled with the keys until they conceded defeat. He went back to Ingolstadt frequently, and took Thilde their old nanny from Sendling, the Munich suburb where she lived, to the Waldfriedhof to see one grandmother’s grave and then a day later with Gebhard to the southern cemetery to visit their other’s.

Like freshers everywhere, Heini signed up for everything – the Polytechnic union, an old boys’ society, a breeding association, a gun club, the local Alpine society, and the officers’ association of the 11th Infantry Regiment. The return to Munich, his big native city, also brought Heini together with Mariele, the sister of Ludwig Zahler, a former comrade during his military training at Regensburg; Ludwig was Heini’s second cousin, and became his best friend at the Poly.

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David Irving’s book can be purchased on his website.

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'Hitler' (book by Brendan Simms)

Hitler, 46

A pamphlet published immediately after the failed coup, penned by either Hitler himself or someone briefed by him, traced the collapse of relations between Munich and Berlin throughout October 1923. It quoted from a conversation which allegedly took place between Hitler and Lossow, in which the latter ‘repeatedly spoke of an Ankara-government’, on the lines of the Turkish national revival under Atatürk, which would take on Berlin. The pamphlet went on to attack Kahr, who was allegedly ‘completely dependent on the Roman Jesuits’. ‘Because Hitler knew,’ it continued, ‘that the “black [i.e. clerical] danger” in Bavaria was even bigger than the red one’ [emphasis by Ed.], Hitler had been compelled to pre-empt the machinations of the Jesuits, the Wittelsbach dynasty, the French, the papacy and the Habsburgs. The main lines of Hitler’s rather contradictory interpretation of the Putsch were thus clear: it had been carried out both with the collusion of the Bavarian conservatives and in order to forestall their plans for a clerical, monarchist and separatist coup at the expense of the Reich as a whole.

On 11 November, Hitler was arrested at the home of Hanfstaengl at Uffing am Staffelsee, south of Munich. Just before his capture, Hitler managed to get off a short message to Alfred Rosenberg, asking him to lead the movement in his absence. He was imprisoned at Landsberg, awaiting trial. Hitler seems at first to have undergone some kind of personal crisis, appearing depressed and even suicidal. Hess, not yet in Landsberg, spoke of him being ’emotionally very down’. Following stormy interrogations, Hitler went on a ten-day hunger strike. According to the recollection of the resident psychologist, Alois Maria Ott, Hitler was distraught at the death of his comrades and announced that ‘I have had enough, I am done, if I had a revolver I would take it.’ Ott succeeded in calming Hitler and persuaded him to call off his protest; the planned forcible feeding proved unnecessary. In early December 1923, Winifred Wagner sent him blankets, books and other items to cheer him up; she also wrote frequently. Hitler’s spirits revived, and within a fortnight he was beginning to prepare his defence.

In mid December 1923, Hitler was questioned at Landsberg by the state prosecutor, Dr Hans Ehard. Still struggling with his injured arm, Hitler vowed ‘to play his best trump-cards in the court room itself ‘, and wondered aloud whether ‘certain gentlemen’ would have the courage to perjure themselves under oath in court. This was clearly directed at Kahr, Lossow and Seisser. Ehard reported that Hitler, having initially steadfastly refused to make any sort of statements on the record, to avoid ‘having words put into his mouth’, soon began to hold ‘interminable political lectures’. He explained that he had struck because the men of the Kampf bund had been impatient for action, and could not be held back any longer. Ehard, probably acting on instructions from superiors who feared dirty linen being washed in public, asked Hitler directly whether he planned ‘to bring the question of the alleged Bavarian separatist plans into [his] defence strategy’. Hitler pointedly declined to answer, but he soon launched into a lengthy attack on ‘well-known, influential, one-sidedly religiously inclined circles, which pursued solely separatist aims and to this end pushed forward Kahr as a straw man’. ‘These circles,’ he added, ‘sought the restoration of the monarchy.’ In the context of what he called ‘French plans to break up’, these tendencies would lead to ‘the separation of Bavaria’ and the ‘disintegration of the Reich’. Itis striking that Hitler again spent far more time on these dangers to the Reich than those from the left.

Hitler soon made himself comfortable in Landsberg. Conditions were remarkably good, as both the warders and the other prisoners treated him as a celebrity, even after his sentencing. The terms of his incarceration did not involve compulsory labour, a regimented diet, prison clothes or restrictions on visitors. His main companions behind bars were his chauffeur and bodyguard Emil Maurice and Rudolf Hess; his authority was unquestioned. The young Nazi Hermann Fobke related that it was not so much a question of ‘presenting to the boss’ as being ‘lectured to by the boss’. Admirers brought him books, food and flowers and news. Helene Bechstein provided cheese. In all, more than 500 people, including Elsa Bruckmann, visited him in the first few months alone. Hanfstaengl later remarked that the cell looked like a ‘delicatessen’. For all that, Hitler found captivity irksome, as he was kept cooped up and powerless to intervene in outside affairs. His surroundings were far from luxurious—Landsberg remained a prison, not a hotel. Music and hatred kept him going. ‘I let out my annoyance in my apologia/ he wrote in January 1924, ‘whose first part, at least, I hope will survive the court case and me. For the rest I am dreaming of Tristan and similar matters.’

The NSDAP, meanwhile, was in disarray. President Ebert announced that Hitler’s followers would be prosecuted for treason. The party itself was declared illegal and went underground; its press was banned, including the Völkischer Beobachter and Streicher’s newspaper Der Stürmer. The party premises were raided, with seven bags of potatoes being carried off by police along with all records and valuables. In Hesse and Wurttemberg the authorities moved quickly to stamp out any threatened copycat attempts. The Nazi leadership was now largely on the run, hiding among sympathizers in and around Munich. Hitler’s choice of Rosenberg to head the party in his absence took everybody by surprise and caused general consternation. Rosenberg was aloof and cerebral and had no personal following in the movement.

By contrast, the three deputies also appointed by Hitler—Julius Streicher, Max Amann and Hermann Esser—were powerful in their own right. Hitler did not explain his decision. It is possible that he saw Rosenberg as a straw man who would simply keep the seat warm for him for his release, but it may also be that he saw the main priority in his absence as the maintenance not of organizational coherence, but of ideological purity, and for that Rosenberg was the perfect fit.