The Nazis- a Warning From History Read online

  In Bavaria, part of southern Germany, this feeling of betrayal was keenly felt among many of the returning soldiers and civilians on the right of the political spectrum. Munich, the capital of Bavaria, was in political chaos in 1919. The socialist politician Kurt Eisner was assassinated in February and this led to the Räterepublik (the councils republic), eventually a Communist government of Bavaria, in April 1919. In the violence and disorder of that spring the military forces of the Right, in part consisting of Freikorps troops (armed mercenaries supported by the government) brutally suppressed the Communists in Munich on 1 and 2 May. The very existence of this final, Communist-led, government of Munich made it plain to many in this traditionally conservative part of Germany that their fear of Communism was well founded. ‘Long Live the World Revolution!’ ends one of the pamphlets from this period by the Communist Party of Germany – just one of the many pieces of propaganda that fed the Right’s paranoia and created an atmosphere in which radical parties opposed to the Communists could flourish.

  There was another, more sinister, reason why the Munich Räterepublik was to have a lasting effect on the consciousness of the Right. The majority of the leaders of this left-wing coup were Jewish. This served to reinforce the prejudice that the Jews were behind all that was wrong in Germany. Rumours spread of how Jews had shirked their war service and of how it had been a Jew in the government – Walther Rathenau – who had deviously inspired the humiliating armistice. Even now, so the lies continued, German Jews were selling the country out as part of a worldwide conspiracy organized by international Jewry.

  These lies were effective partly, and ironically, because there were surprisingly few Jews actually living in Germany. In June 1933 they numbered only 503,000, a mere 0.76 per cent of the population, and, unlike the Jewish populations of other European countries, such as Poland, they were relatively assimilated into the general population. Paradoxically, this worked in the German anti-Semites’ favour, for in the absence of large numbers of flesh-and-blood Jews, a fantasy image of Jewishness could be spread in which the Jews became symbolic of everything the Right disliked about post-war Germany. ‘Politically it was very easy for lots of people to focus upon the Jew,’ says Professor Christopher Browning. ‘The Jew became a symbol for left-wing politics, for exploitative capitalism, for avant-garde cultural kinds of experimentation, for secularization, all the things that were disturbing a fairly large sector of the conservative part of the political spectrum. The Jew was the ideal political buzz-word.’

  German Jews had been the victims of prejudice for hundreds of years and banned from many walks of life. Not until the latter half of the nineteenth century were they free even to own land and farm it. Germany after World War I was a country in which anti-Semitism was still common. Eugene Leviné, a German Jew brought up in Berlin in the 1920s, suffered as a child simply because he was Jewish. Until he was four or five he used to play with other, non-Jewish children; then, when their older brothers came home, they began to say, ‘Dirty little Jew, you can’t play here, you’ve got to go.’ ‘The other children were quite sad,’ says Eugene Leviné, ‘but these boys were already full of anti-Semitism. Once, one of the bigger boys beat me up, and as a six-year-old you’re not much match for a fourteen-year-old.’ Other than that brutal experience, the anti-Semitism he experienced had a bizarre ritual to it: ‘In any new school in the first mid-morning break somebody would pick on you because you were a Jew and see what you were made of, and you’d have a fight. And if you could fight back – you didn’t even have to win – but if you could fight back adequately, they’d leave you alone.’

  Yet one must be careful not to be guilty of overstatement. As everyone knows the reality of Auschwitz, it is all too simple to leap to the conclusion that at this time Germany was a uniquely anti-Semitic country. It wasn’t. While anti-Semitism existed, it was generally, in the words of Eugene Leviné, ‘not the kind of anti-Semitism that would get people to burn synagogues’. Tragically, given what was to happen in Germany under the Nazis, a number of Jews fled from Poland and Russia to Germany after World War I partly in order to escape anti-Semitism at home. These ‘eastern Jews’ tended to be less assimilated than other German Jews, and so attracted more anti-Semitism. Bernd Linn, who later became an SS officer, grew up in Germany in the early 1920s and his anti-Semitism was fed by what he perceived as the ‘foreign’ behaviour of the ‘eastern Jews’ in his father’s shop: ‘We had many Jewish customers. They took so many liberties. After all, they were our guests and they didn’t behave as such. The difference was obvious between them and the long-settled Jews with whom we did have a good relationship. But all those eastern Jews that came in, they didn’t get along at all with the western Jews, the settled ones. And how they behaved in the shop, that increased my antagonism all the more.’ Bernd Linn happily confessed to us that as a child he threw fireworks at the Jews in the school playground and, in one trick which was a personal favourite, he and his schoolmates would post pretend one-way tickets to Jerusalem through Jewish letterboxes.

  Fridolin von Spaun was old enough, immediately after World War I, to have joined one of the Freikorps. Like Bernd Linn, he too was to support the Nazi Party and he too had a personal problem with Jews. ‘If the Jews had brought us something beautiful, that would have been OK,’ he says. ‘But they cheated us. When they make a fortune they go bankrupt and disappear with their pockets full. So I find it very natural that a generally anti-Jewish attitude became widespread.’ Fridolin von Spaun goes on to add, without irony: ‘Throughout my life I’ve had a lot to do with Jews, even as a child, and I must make this personal reproach to the Jews: among all those people whom I have met, not one has become my friend. Why? Not because of me. I had nothing against them. I always noticed they only want to use me. And that annoyed me. That is, I am not anti-Semitic. They are simply not my cup of tea.’

  Eugene Leviné’s reaction to all this is straightforward: ‘I can’t be very outraged by something that is so pointlessly unreasonable. To say it’s unjust is to give it too much pride. It’s a form of ignorance, isn’t it? If two people have the same fault, then if it’s a Jew they say, “Well typical – what would you expect. Bloody Jews.” And if it’s an Englishman, you say, “That’s odd, that’s not the English way of behaving.” There are, after all, a hundred stories about this very attitude. About how the anti-Semite says, “This is another outrage by the Jews, and quite apart from that you Jews sank the Titanic.” And the Jew says, “But excuse me, that’s ridiculous, the Titanic was sunk by an iceberg.” And he says, “Iceberg, Greenberg, Goldberg, you Jews are all the same.”’

  Against this background, on 12 September 1919, a 30-year-old German Army corporal called Adolf Hitler walked into a meeting of the German Workers’ Party in the Veterans’ Hall of the Sterneckerbräu beer hall in Munich. Hitler had been sent to observe the party by Captain Mayr, head of press and propaganda in the Bavarian section of the army. At the meeting Hitler turned on one speaker who was calling for the secession of Bavaria from Germany and, showing an immediate rhetorical gift, demolished his arguments. Anton Drexler, a locksmith, who had founded the right-wing party only nine months previously, immediately asked Hitler to join.

  Who was this man who walked into history that night at the Sterneckerbräu? Nothing in his first thirty years had marked him out as anything more than an oddball. A failure at school, a failure in Vienna where he had been rejected by the Academy of Graphic Arts, his only success in life had been as a soldier in World War I where his bravery had won him an Iron Cross First Class.

  Sources for Hitler’s life before that meeting in the Sterneckerbräu are sketchy. One of the chief ones is Hitler’s own writing, dating from 1924, in Mein Kampf. Here he writes how, as he travelled through Vienna before World War I, ‘I began to see Jews, and the more I saw the more sharply they became distinguished in my eyes from the rest of humanity . . . Was there any form of filth or profligacy, particularly in cultural life, without at least one Jew inv
olved in it?’ These familiar words confirm the idea Hitler wanted us to have – that here was a human being who had been set in his anti-Semitic views from the first. But is it true? Some of the most intriguing new work on Hitler’s time in Vienna has recently been completed by Dr Brigitte Hamann. She set herself the task of minutely checking the registration details of the people with whom Hitler had come into contact at the Viennese men’s hostel where he lodged. This led her to a startling conclusion: ‘The picture which Hitler gives of Vienna in Mein Kampf is not correct. He says he became an anti-Semite in Vienna, but if you check the contemporary sources closely, you see that, on the contrary, he was very good friends with very many, extraordinarily many Jews, both in the men’s hostel and through his contact with the dealers who sold his pictures.’ She found that none of those many Jews with whom Hitler had good relations during his time in Vienna said that he was an anti-Semite in the period before 1913. Indeed, says Dr Hamann, Hitler ‘preferred’ selling his paintings to Jewish dealers ‘because they took risks’.6

  This is an important discovery. It demonstrates that Hitler, far from being the certain, quasi-divine individual he wanted us to think he was, had actually been buffeted around by circumstances as much as anyone else. In Vienna, according to Dr Hamann, Hitler ‘didn’t harm anybody, he was law-abiding, he painted fairly good paintings to make ends meet. He was an innocuous person.’ The events that turned this ‘innocuous person’ into the Hitler that history was to know were the same events that traumatized the rest of Germany – World War I and its immediate aftermath. After his time in Vienna, in order to make sense of the new circumstances around him, Hitler, according to Dr Hamann, remembered the prophecies of the rabid Austrian anti-Semites and began spouting them himself.

  A common thread in almost all of Hitler’s political philosophy is theft. Most often he simply stole his arguments from others. But perhaps he knew that a ‘great man’ does not steal ideas, something that led him to place the origins of his vicious anti-Semitism in Vienna rather than in the commonplace feelings of betrayal and hatred felt by millions in 1918 and 1919.

  Hitler falsified his own early history in other ways. Once he became famous, he was eager to show that he had been one of the earliest members of the German Workers’ Party – member number seven. The fact that Hitler had been party member number seven was expressed to us by a number of former Nazis, proud of the fact that the Führer had been in at the start, shaping the fledgling Nazi Party from the very beginning. But it’s not true. Anton Drexler wrote a letter of complaint to Hitler in January 1940: ‘Nobody knows better than yourself, my Führer, that you were never the seventh member of the party, but at best the seventh member of the committee when I asked you to step in as propaganda representative. A few years ago I was forced to complain about this at a party meeting, that your first German Workers’ Front card which carried Shüssler’s and my own signature had been falsified, whereby the number 555 had been deleted and the number seven inserted . . . How much better and more valuable it would be for posterity if the course of history had been portrayed as it really had happened.’7

  However, during 1919 Hitler discovered he did have one genuine and original talent – a gift for public speaking. So effective was he at the kind of rabble-rousing speeches then necessary to distinguish one far-right party from another that the German Workers’ Party began to grow in membership. One of the earliest to join was Ernst Röhm, a Reichswehr (German Army) captain, who rapidly came to recognize the crowd-pulling attraction of Hitler’s personality. Röhm was a man who liked action. ‘Since I am an immature and wicked man,’ he said, ‘war and unrest appeal to me more than good bourgeois order.’8 The party Hitler wanted could use a thug like Röhm. ‘Brutality is respected,’ Röhm once stated. ‘The people need wholesome fear. They want to fear something. They want someone to frighten them and make them shudderingly submissive.’9

  Within two years of joining the German Workers’ Party Hitler had become its most valuable asset. His speeches attracted new members and his personality began to shape its growth. After a power struggle within the party in August 1921, Hitler emerged victorious, confirmed as the absolute ruler of the renamed National Socialist German Workers’ Party, or Nazis for short (a change of name made in February 1920 in an attempt to appeal both to nationalists and socialists). From the first this was a party that traded less in detailed political manifestos than emotional commitment, rejecting democracy, preaching revolution. ‘I joined the party because I was a revolutionary,’ Hermann Göring was later to say, ‘not because of any ideological nonsense.’10 The mission of the party was and would remain plain – to right the wrongs done to Germany at the end of World War I, to punish those responsible and to ‘annihilate the Marxist world view’.

  In terms of this general policy there was little to distinguish the embryonic Nazi Party from the host of other small, extreme right-wing groups that flourished in the turmoil of post-World War I politics in southern Germany. The first party programme, presented on 24 February 1920, was a mish-mash of vague economic promises intended to protect the middle class and small businesses, coupled with a clear commitment to exclude Jews from full German citizenship. In none of this was the party unusual. Indeed, in its published programme of action it did not go as far as some other right-wing groups of the time. In the Marktbreiter Wochenblatt, the party newspaper of the German Protection and Defiance League, there appeared the following statement: ‘It is absolutely necessary to kill the Jews.’11 Another pamphlet read: ‘What shall we do with the Jews? Don’t be afraid of the slogan “No violent anti-Semitism” because only through violence can the Jews be driven away.’12

  The symbols of the young Nazi Party were as unoriginal as its ideas. The swastika was already popular with other German right-wing groups before it was adopted by the Nazis. The skull and crossbones, which would become infamous on the caps of the SS, had been used by the German cavalry. Even the stiff-armed Roman salute was taken from the greeting used by Mussolini’s Fascists.

  In one respect, however, the Nazi Party was different. Though these were violent times, this was, from the first, an exceptionally violent movement. In 1921 ‘Storm Detachments’ were formed from the innocuously named ‘Gymnastic and Sports Section’ of the party to protect Nazi meetings and to disrupt the gatherings of rival parties. Battles between Nazi Storm Troopers and the followers of other political parties would be a common feature of German political life until 1933.

  Since the Nazis were preaching that they were the ‘salvation’ to Germany’s problems, it followed that their own fortunes would depend on the extent of the difficulties the country faced. The party had been born out of the trauma following the end of World War I and could flourish only in an atmosphere of political instability. Thus the Nazis benefited when a new crisis occurred involving the French. Angry at Germany’s failure to keep up with reparation repayments, France sent troops to occupy the Ruhr at the beginning of 1923. For a nation already dismayed by the loss of honour that accompanied the armistice of November 1918 and the harsh terms of the Versailles peace treaty this was a grave humiliation. The German sense of shame was further increased by the behaviour of the French Army of occupation. ‘That was when we found out that the French ruled with an iron hand,’ says Jutta Rüdiger, the woman who was later to head the BDM, the female equivalent of the Hitler Youth. ‘Perhaps they simply wanted their revenge. Revenge is an emotion I do not know at all.’ Frau Rüdiger then adds the following assessment of the French; more than ironic given what the Nazis were later to do, but none the less revealing: ‘But the French have a slightly different character, don’t they? Perhaps there is a tiny bit of sadism there.’

  Bernd Linn was five years old when he witnessed the French occupation of the Ruhr. As the French soldiers marched past, he stood on the pavement by his grandfather’s house, wearing a child’s army uniform and carrying a toy gun: ‘I turned round and then a Frenchman came and he disarmed me – apparently he needed t
his for his children. And I felt very hurt.’ Bernd Linn, the little boy from whom the French took a child’s pop gun, later became a colonel in the SS (Schutzstaffeln – originally the personal bodyguard of Hitler in 1920s).

  The Ruhr crisis coincided with Germany’s massive economic problems – most notoriously, runaway inflation. ‘I once paid 4 billion marks for a sausagemeat roll,’ says Emil Klein, who attended his first Hitler meeting in 1920. ‘And this collapse naturally supported the Hitler movement and helped it grow, because people said, “It can’t go on like this!” And then slowly emerged the discussion about the need for a strong man. And this stuff about a strong man grew more and more because democracy achieved nothing.’

  In the political crisis caused both by the French occupation and Germany’s economic difficulties, the right-wing Bavarian authorities clashed with the government of Gustav Stresemann in Berlin. The central government in Berlin tried to make the Bavarian authorities censor attacks by the Nazi paper, the Völkischer Beobachter, on Stresemann and his government. Kahr, the newly appointed state commissioner of Bavaria, refused, as did General von Lossow, the local military commander. In this atmosphere of internal conflict, Hitler attempted to hijack a meeting at the Bürgerbräukeller in Munich at which both Kahr and von Lossow were speaking. Hitler called for a Putsch (national revolution) to overthrow the central government. The Putschists began a march the next morning, intending to press on to Berlin. Emil Klein took part in that Nazi march through Munich; alongside him were Hitler, Göring and Himmler. ‘We shone as marchers that day,’ he recalls with fervour. ‘But then we turned on to the Maximilianstrasse and as I came to the corner of the Residence [the palace of the former kings of Bavaria] we heard the shots ahead. What’s going on?’