Hitler's Charisma (8 page)

For Hitler, the key opponent in this fight for racial supremacy was the Jew.
Mein Kampf
exudes animosity in almost every paragraph, but the overwhelming volume of hatred is directed at the Jews. “He [i.e., the Jew] remains the typical parasite,” writes Hitler, “a sponger who like a noxious bacillus keeps spreading as soon as a favourable medium invites him.”
⁸
And whilst Hitler does not call for all the Jews to be killed, he made it clear that the “sacrifice” of German soldiers on the front line during the First World War “would not have been in vain” if “twelve or fifteen thousand of these Hebrew corrupters of the people had been held under poison gas …”
⁹
Hitler also linked Judaism to Marxism and said that “Fate” was calling the German people to colonise land in “Russia and her vassal border states.”
¹⁰
He called on his readers to “never forget that the rulers of present day Russia are common blood stained criminals.”
¹¹

Hitler had arrived at this bleak and violent vision having been influenced by many different sources. From Social Darwinists he took the idea that the essence of life was struggle; from Arthur de Gobineau, author of
The Inequality of Human Races
, and his followers, he took the notion of the superiority of the Aryan Race; from events on the Eastern Front towards the end of the First World War—when Germany had snatched
agricultural land from the nascent Soviet Union (land which had been lost to Germany at the end of the conflict)—he took the idea of creating an empire in the east; and from Alfred Rosenberg, a Nazi born in the Baltic States, he took the idea of a linkage between Judaism and Bolshevism. He then mixed these noxious elements into a uniquely potent and deadly philosophy of his own. His ideas were now fixed.

Hitler’s argument was this: life was a struggle between races for living space; the greatest danger to the Ayran race in pursuit of victory in this struggle was the Jews; the Soviet Union was run by Jews; and the Soviet Union contained prime agricultural land which the Aryan Germans needed. Ergo: creating an Aryan German Empire in the agriculturally rich territories of the western Soviet Union would solve three problems in one—destroy the threat from Bolshevism, the threat from the Jews and gain Germany
Lebensraum
, valuable “living space.”

Each element in this specious argument supported the other—something that made Hitler’s vision enormously robust. If you disagreed that Jews were a threat, or that Jews controlled the Soviet Union, or any other aspect of Hitler’s political thinking, then he would simply dismiss you as “wrong” and incapable of seeing what was in front of you. But once you accepted one element then you were embarked on a carousel where one idea led to another.

Wrapped around this central vision of hate, struggle and conquest, Hitler tried to create a coherent story out of his autobiography, demonstrating the consistency of his views over his lifetime. But as we have already seen, and as historical research over the last twenty years has demonstrated, many of these auto-biographical sections were simply a crude attempt to rewrite history. Hitler was never as certain in his views prior to 1919 as he pretends to have been in
Mein Kampf
.

Nonetheless,
Mein Kampf
remains an extraordinary piece of work, not least because there is no evidence that the vast majority of Germans agreed with the twin pillars which underpinned Hitler’s vision—the desire to systematically persecute the Jews and the need to capture and colonise land in the western territories of the Soviet Union. After all, the idea of “colonising” parts of the Soviet Union would most certainly mean another war.

So what kind of politician espouses policies that appear to render him unelectable? A
conviction
politician, one might argue—someone who seeks first to state policies that appear unattractive and then persuade the
general public to support them. But that is not what happened here. By the time the Nazi party had a chance of political breakthrough—from 1929 onwards—Hitler was careful not to push either of these two policies to any great degree. He remained an anti-Semite, of course, and still hated the Soviet Union, and he never publicly renounced these views, but he sought to emphasise other ideas that were much more popular—like the rejection of the peace treaties made at the end of the First World War and a call for a new united Germany of brotherhood and fellow feeling.

But even if Hitler subsequently didn’t press the core agenda in
Mein Kampf
as much as his own beliefs might warrant, the book still existed and anyone interested in the views of Adolf Hitler could read it. Not surprisingly, many Nazi supporters say they didn’t think Hitler “literally” meant what he said. Johannes Zahn, an economist who supported aspects of Nazi policy, says “reading
Mein Kampf
was exactly like belief in the demands of the Bible. These are demands, but nobody believed they would be fulfilled one hundred per cent.”
¹²
For diplomat Manfred von Schröder,
Mein Kampf
was a book that was easy to dismiss. “Nobody believed that
Mein Kampf
was of any importance, you know. That a young man has written a book—what would politicians think today of what they had written 20 years ago! So nobody took it really seriously. I have read it probably as a student once and didn’t think it was very interesting and then never opened the book again. One should have but we didn’t.”
¹³
Herbert Richter, who fought in the First World War and then later joined the German Foreign Office, says that he started to read the book and found it too crazy to continue. “This was the case for most educated people.”
¹⁴

Such comments, made after the war, might appear self-serving. But it is also true that many people at the time found
Mein Kampf
difficult, if not impossible to read. Benito Mussolini, for example, found it so boring that he was unable to get through it.
¹⁵
Equally, one must be careful to take the one section of the book where Hitler talks of “poison gas” in relation to the Jews in the context of many other pages of more generalised hatred, which call for Jews to be persecuted and stripped of their citizenship but not to be murdered en masse.

However, whilst there is no evidence that most Germans would have supported in the 1920s the seemingly wild beliefs Hitler expresses in
Mein Kampf
, there is plenty of evidence that many Germans, like Johannes Zahn, thought that Jewish influence had “gone too far” in Germany, and,
like Herbert Richter, that the settlement at the end of the First World War had been too harsh on Germany and that the territory lost—particularly in the East—should be returned. So in calling for the persecution of the Jews and land to be seized in the Soviet Union, Hitler was once again voicing in extreme form beliefs that existed amongst many Germans in more moderate form.
¹⁶

Yet it is still hard to read
Mein Kampf
without thinking that it is the work of an obsessive, almost unhinged, mind. That’s partly because of the sense of violence that pervades the work. “The fact that all of his schemes, even his friendships, mean bloodshed,” wrote Konrad Heiden, “that is what gives this foreign policy its sinister significance. Whether he speaks of art, of education, of economics, he always sees blood.”
¹⁷
But of equal importance in
Mein Kampf
is its enormous ambition and conceit. Hitler was a thirty-five-year-old convicted terrorist who had just led a small band of supporters in a hopeless attempt at revolution in Bavaria. Yet here he attempts a book that deals in large part with a proposed foreign policy for Germany, one of the most important states in Europe. Significantly, Hitler gives virtually no one else any credit for the development of the Nazi party. He positions himself not just at the centre of events but as effectively their sole creator. “The combination of theoretician, organiser and leader in one person is the rarest thing that can be found on this earth,” writes Hitler in
Mein Kampf
. “This combination marks the great man.”
¹⁸
And there is no doubt that Hitler now wanted the world to think that he himself was just such a “great man.”

Published in two volumes, the first in 1925 and the second the following year,
Mein Kampf
was not a best-seller—at least initially. By 1929, for example, less than 15,000 copies of the second volume had been sold. Only Hitler’s subsequent electoral success propelled the book into the publishing stratosphere with ten million copies sold in Germany alone by 1945.
¹⁹

Hitler was discharged from Landsberg prison shortly after midday on 20 December 1924. He had served only a fraction of his five-year sentence. The Bavarian state prosecutor had opposed his early parole, but the Bavarian Supreme Court had disagreed and ordered his release.

In Hitler’s brief absence the Nazi party had begun to fall apart. Alfred Rosenberg, chosen by Hitler to oversee the Nazi movement whilst he was incarcerated, had been unable to control the various factions. Hitler’s
appointment of the weak and academic-minded Rosenberg to act as his replacement was one of the first examples of his desire never to allow anyone to grow into a serious threat to his authority—even if it meant that his appointee was unsuited to the task in hand.

Hitler emerged from Landsberg as the leader not just of the Nazi party but of much of the
Völkisch
Right. He also now believed the Nazis should attempt a new way of gaining power—through the ballot box.
²⁰
As he famously remarked, “If outvoting them takes longer than outshooting them, at least the results will be guaranteed by their own Constitution!”

However, though he was allowed to refound the Nazi Party on his release from prison, Hitler himself was banned from speaking publicly in almost all of Germany. But nonetheless his political rivals appeared to be fading away. In March 1925, his erstwhile senior partner in the Beer Hall Putsch, Erich Ludendorff, stood—disastrously—in the German Presidential election, gaining little more than 1 per cent of the vote. Ludendorff was destroyed as a political force. No one would speak of Hitler as Ludendorff’s inferior again.

Hitler worked to consolidate his own position as leader. And in that respect the greatest challenge he had to surmount in those immediate months after his release came from Gregor Strasser. At Hitler’s request, Strasser had moved from his chemist’s shop in Bavaria to northern Germany to help organise the Nazi party. Strasser took the opportunity to open a debate within this northern satellite about the precise content of Nazi policy. Included in the discussions was a young follower of Strasser’s called Joseph Goebbels. He was a relatively new member of the party—he had joined only at the end of 1924—and held a doctorate in German Literature.

Strasser wasn’t trying to overthrow Hitler as leader of the Nazi party, but his attempt to suggest changes to party policy was perceived by Hitler as almost as dangerous. At stake was not the detail of whether or not the Nazis should be more socialist in approach—which was ostensibly the point which divided Strasser and Hitler—but the broader issue of whether this was a “normal” political party that allowed internal debate or a “movement” led by a single charismatic leader.

One other problem Hitler faced was that it seemed as if Strasser and the other leaders of the Nazi party in northern Germany were as much at odds with the leadership in Munich—excluding Hitler—as anything
else. And Hitler’s way of dealing with this aspect of the dispute is an early example of his preferred method of resolving disputes between senior members of the party. His technique—as far as he felt able—was to do nothing. He intuitively realised that to come down on one side or another would only serve to alienate the disappointed faction. Such a leadership style went against his profound belief that people should be left to fight things out amongst themselves. Such inaction also suited his somewhat indolent character. Ultimately, he must have felt, what did it matter that Gregor Strasser and some northern Nazis couldn’t stand Julius Streicher and Hermann Esser in Bavaria?

But that relaxed attitude would change in an instant if Hitler felt that his personal authority as absolute dictator of the Nazi party was questioned. And that was what happened in November 1925 when the northern group of Nazi leaders asked Gregor Strasser to suggest amendments to the programme of policy that Hitler and Drexler had devised in 1920. Strasser was happy to oblige, but some of his new proposed policies—like the redistribution of land—threatened Hitler’s desire to make the Nazi party more attractive to the business community. So Hitler called a special party conference to meet on 14 February 1926 at Bamberg in the north of Bavaria. Strasser and Goebbels attended, along with Hitler’s dedicated Munich supporters, including Esser, Streicher and Feder.

Hitler, typically, did not debate with Strasser. He spoke for two hours in didactic terms, stating his—and thus the Nazi party’s—unalterable opposition on all of the policy issues that Strasser and his supporters wished to revisit. Goebbels was distraught. He was upset not just at Hitler’s view that the task of Nazism was to destroy Bolshevism—Goebbels wanted to work with the Soviets against, as he saw it, Jewish power in the West—but at the way the meeting was conducted. Hitler spoke, his supporters nodded, there was a short exchange of views, Strasser spoke briefly and that was it. The party programme stood word for word as it was written in 1920.

Goebbels wrote that he felt that he and Strasser were “a poor match” for “those pigs down there” and that he could “not entirely believe in Hitler any more.”
²¹
He was in “despair.” But he also had the sense that Hitler was somehow being constrained by those who were in leading positions in the party in Munich and that the only way forward for Strasser and his supporters was to talk to Hitler directly.

Goebbels’ belief that matters could be sorted out if only Hitler could be detached from his “rogue” advisors is an example of an attitude which would become commonplace within the Nazi state. This sense that “if only Hitler really knew” then everything could be sorted out would become a vital safety valve for the regime to deflect criticism away from the leader. But what is intriguing is that Goebbels expresses this attitude not only this early in the development of the Nazi party, but directly in the face of compelling evidence to the contrary. It had not been “rogues” in the party who had lectured Strasser and Goebbels about the error of their ways in Bamberg, but Hitler himself. So why would Goebbels think that a potential way forward was to talk to Hitler? Adolf Hitler, even by this stage, was the least likely person in the world to change his mind on any issue he felt was important.