I was agreeably surprised to find that my modest expectations
for a book dealing with a single year of Hitler's life were more than exceeded by
Peter Ross Range’s 1924: The Year That Made Hitler (Little, Brown; 2016).
I regard Range’s book as one of the most important works on Hitler's political development.
Range's lucid and well-paced narrative details the
critical events during the thirteen months between November 1923 and December 1924.
By the end of 1924, at the age of thirty-five, Hitler rose from the ashes of
his failed Munich beer hall putsch, emerging from prison unbowed and confident,
poised to pick up the reins of his Nazi Party and drive it to its next level.
Range's focus on Hitler's consequential year also opens
the way to examining some of the elements that will figure for the remainder of
Hitler's career: his key anti- Semitism
and lebensraum watchwords; his
homosexuality and his fateful plans for Germany, Europe, and the whole world.
Range's account covers the critical details of Hitler's
failed power grab, some of the main personalities involved, and the reasons it
failed. The debacle landed him in Landsberg prison near Munich, on charges of
high treason and sent Hitler into the deepest depression of his life. So despairing
was he at first that he determined on suicide--his lifelong and life-ending
obsession. He refused food for a week before allowing himself to be talked into
resuming his life.
In due course his spirits were lifted in prison by
the surge in support he experienced from his many well-wishers. His spiritual
renewal enabled him to take on the preparations for his trial with the vigor
and purpose that led to his triumph. Famously, he turned his trial into a political
victory and became a national and international phenomenon. Due to politically
sympathetic judges and the nationalist feelings which he tapped into, Hitler
was paroled after only eight months of a strikingly lenient five-year prison
sentence, to be added to the four months he had served on remand.
Hitler made very good use of his prison time, especially
by writing his political memoir, Mein Kampf. Range provides evidence that Hitler typed all
of Mein Kampf himself, thus puncturing the widely believed story that
Hitler dictated his book to Rudolf Hess, his fellow prison inmate. Range quotes
a 1952 letter from Hess’s wife, Ilse Pröhl Hess, published in Der Spiegel in 1966, asserting that
Hitler pounded out Mein Kampf “’with
two fingers’ on his little typewriter.”[1]
In[MNH1] Range’s telling, Rudolf Hess, though not his amanuensis,
was Hitler’s first reader and sounding-board, patiently listening and providing
feedback.[MNH2] [2]
More than half of Range’s sources--if they can be
estimated from his notes and bibliography--come from German books and documents,
enabling him to provide readers limited to English with important new details. For
example, until I read Range’s book I was unaware that during the course of
Hitler's nearly day-long seizure of power in Munich, on November 8-9, 1923, his
Storm troopers demonstrated ugly and unspeakable foreshadowing of what life was
to be like in a Hitler regime.[3] His thugs
arrested dozens of people, mostly Jews, beating up some of them and threatening
others with death. Some of Hitler's victims came from a prepared list of his
political enemies who were in attendance at the Munich Burgerbraukeller beer hall
where Hitler announced his intended coup. Others were rounded up from the
prosperous neighborhood in Bogenhausen where it was thought many Jews lived.
There, Hitler's men broke into the homes of those with Jewish-sounding names,
fired shots into ceilings, and caused general mayhem. One Nazi suggested
executing some of those they had arrested, but Hermann Göring, already a top
lieutenant, wisely countered with: “We don’t
have the right to shoot them yet.”[4]
At the same time, other Nazis targeted the Münchener Post, a Social Democratic newspaper that
had exposed Hitler's extremist views. Hitler’s men destroyed everything they
could: they smashed windows and tables, made off with or destroyed typewriters,
and wrecked the presses and typesetting equipment.[5]
Lebensraum, Living Space for Germany
More substantially, Range takes a critical look at two
of the watchwords most closely associated with Hitler: anti-Semitism and Lebensraum. In both cases, Range
highlights evidence that whatever may have been Hitler's essential beliefs, he
used these concepts cynically to advance his political agenda. In prison,
Rudolf Hess introduced Hitler to the term Lebensraum,
literally, “living space” for the German people. Hess was a close disciple of Karl
Haushofer, a quirky ex-military man turned university professor who often
visited Hess in prison, and who had developed the term. Hitler had earlier put
forth in his Nazi Party manifesto the slogan that extraterritorial “land and
soil” was required for Germany’s future. Since the “living space” Hitler wanted
for Germany was to come at the expense of sovereign countries, it was no secret
that from the beginning of his political career, he intended aggression. As
Range puts it, “military invasion was now elevated to a law of nature, and
Hitler had a shiny new name for one of his fundamental principles.”[6]
Anti-Semitism
Range
is also skeptical of Hitler's claim in Mein Kampf that his
anti-Semitism was stimulated in his pre-war Vienna period by suddenly noticing
an Orthodox Jew--“an apparition in a black caftan and black hair locks”--as he
walked the streets of Vienna in his pre-war period--1908-1912. As Range argues,
such Jews were a constant presence in Vienna at this time, so that Hitler’s claim
“smacks of a stylized eureka moment to dramatize Hitler's developmental tale.”[7]
Range quotes historian Othmar Plochinger that Hitler only began using
anti-Semitism as a political weapon in Munich, after WWI, presumably because he
saw it “as the winning horse in the existing political environment.”[8]
Before WWI Hitler appears not to have been a fanatical
anti-Semite. Well known is Hitler's feeling of indebtedness to Eduard Bloch, his
Jewish family doctor in Linz, Austria, not least for the care he gave to Hitler’s
mother in the course of her suffering, and eventual death, from breast cancer.
After Germany absorbed Austria in the March 1938 Anschluss and Austrian Jews faced
dire oppression, Hitler went out of his way to ensure the safety of Eduard Bloch
and his family. Hitler saw to their safe emigration and they finally arrived in
the U.S. in 1940.
Testimony from Reinhold Hanisch, Hitler's close
companion in the years 1909 and 1910, reveals that Hitler was not a Jew-hater
during those years.[9] Hanisch
cited Hitler's Jewish friends and acquaintances in the Men's Home where he
lived for three years. Hitler even preferred to sell his paintings to Jewish
dealers.[10]
In 1912 one anonymous resident of the Men’s Home commented, “Hitler got along
exceptionally well with Jews, and said at one time that they were a clever
people who stick together better than the Germans do.”[11]
Were Germans, Too, Hitler's Intended Victims?
Jews of course were not Hitler's only victims. Among
the 60 million WWII deaths were also eight million Germans.[MNH3] Were
the Germans who died merely collateral damage, or were they also Hitler's intended
victims? Joachim Fest, one of Hitler's German biographers, tellingly wrote in 2004
of Hitler's "hatred
of the world and his thirst for extermination."[12][
In
March 1945, a month and a half before ending his life, Hitler issued his
scorched-earth orders for Germany, similar to the orders he issued as his
troops retreated from occupied territory. (Hitler had ordered the destruction
of Paris, but mercifully his orders were not carried out.) But when it came to
similar orders for Germany, Albert Speer, Hitler's senior minister for
armaments, objected, arguing that Hitler had no right to doom [Germany's
future.
Risking
his life, Speer spoke up forcefully, actually upbraiding Hitler for his demonic
plans: "No one," said Speer, "has the right to take the
viewpoint that the fate of the German people is tied to his personal fate. . .
. At this stage of the war it makes no sense for us to undertake demolitions
which may strike at the very life of the nation."[13]
Hitler's
reply (as reported by Speer) was as cold as ice. Since Germany had fallen to
its eastern enemy, asserted Hitler, she didn't deserve a future.
If the war is lost, the people will be lost also. It
is not necessary to worry about what the German people will need for elemental
survival. On the contrary, it is best for us even to destroy these things. For
the nation has proved to be the weaker, and the future belongs solely to the
stronger eastern nation. In any case, only those who are inferior will remain
after this struggle, for the good have already been killed.[14]
Hitler's last testament, written shortly before he
committed suicide, can also be read as a disguised acknowledgement that by
engaging in war, he was responsible for the destruction of Germany. In his
testament he wrote that the Jews were “'the real people to blame for this
murderous struggle,' calling upon Germany and the Germans ‘to observe the
racial laws precisely and to resist pitilessly the world-poisoner of all
peoples, international Jewry.'"[15]
Hitler used the device of his last public
pronouncement, typically a special moment of sincerity, to deflect blame away
from himself onto the Jews. One clue is his use of the meaningless intensifier
"real" when he wrote: "the real
people to blame would be the Jews!" The real person to blame was of
course himself. Ever the ultimate cynic and con-man extraordinaire, Hitler attempted to obscure his use of Allied
personnel and Allied weaponry as his means of killing his own people and
destroying his country. His last testament, was indirectly his sardonic boast that
he was going to his death knowing that he had accomplished much more of his
agenda of destruction, suffering, and death than he could have expected to
fulfill ten years earlier.
Hitler Finds a Career
After WWI Hitler had no prospects for, nor any interest
in, pursuing a civilian career. He resisted demobilization and remained in the
army, doing odd jobs like pulling guard duty and taking on temporary assignments.
In June 1919 he was recruited into an intelligence unit to spy on leftist
elements. It was at one of his training sessions that his extraordinary gift
for oratory emerged. "I can speak," Hitler is reported to have said, as
he became aware of his political potential. Range believes that this was “the
moment that created Adolf Hitler, the politician.”[16]
As an army spy, in September 1919 Hitler was sent
to Munich to report on a new political group, the German Worker’s Party (Deutsche
Arbeiterpartei). In the discussion period[MNH8] at the end of the meeting Hitler displayed his verbal
gifts and his ability to think on his feet when he was roused to speak against a
participant who favored Bavarian secession. Afterwards, Anton Drexler, the
Party's co-founder, pressed on Hitler his own forty-page manifesto, inviting him to return to future party meetings. Hitler
wrestled for two days over whether to join the little group. In the end, of
course, he did join the German Worker’s Party, understanding that he would acquire
a ready-made speaking platform, and a political base.[17] As
early as that first meeting, Hitler is likely to have sized up his chances for
a future leadership role.
The Tottering Weimar Republic
Hitler’s intuition was accurate. Relatively soon,
he defeated those in the party who opposed him and eventually he was recognized
as the Nazi Party’s unchallenged leader. In fewer than two years he built up
his name to the point where he successfully addressed a crowd of four thousand
people. Not long after, in January 1923, the French (and Belgians) invaded Germany’s
Ruhr, as punishment for defaulting on German reparations payments and to ensure
the continuation of German coal exports. In response, Germany devalued the mark,
presumably to make Germany’s mineral resources less valuable to the French.
Large-scale printing
of German marks led to the notorious hyperinflation of 1923-1924, resulting in widespread
misery—a terrific boost to Nazi Party membership. About ten months later, in the midst of
Germany’s social turmoil, a politically surging Hitler tried to reproduce, in
Germany, Mussolini's successful March on Rome of the year before.
The Putsch
I will never let those swine take me. I will shoot myself
first.
It is widely understood that Hitler's inexperience, his
naiveté, doomed his power grab of November 8-9, 1923. But the larger point to
be made, in hindsight, is Hitler's resilience reflected in his willingness and
ability to learn from his mistakes. His flexibility was due to a realistic
self-appraisal of his extraordinary political, administrative, and rhetorical
abilities, and to his clear understanding of the turbulent politics in which he
operated. Before his release from prison, he had come to the realization that
henceforth he would have to operate nominally within constitutional limits and
with the approval of the military.
His 1923 plan to take power in Munich, and then Berlin,
had been founded on the three Bavarian power brokers: Gustav Ritter von Kahr, Bavaria's
commissioner general; General Otto von Lossow, Commander of the military region
that included Bavaria; and Colonel Hans Ritter von Seisser, Commander of the
Bavarian State Police. Although he understood that these three men were not one-hundred
percent on board with his plan to overthrow the Berlin government, one of his
big mistakes was to count on forcing them into obedience. Range details other
key mistakes that derailed the putsch, such as failing to control the communications
system. In the final confrontation, when Hitler's march with 2,000 men was
stopped by the Bavarian State police, four Bavarian police and sixteen Nazi
marchers were killed. Hitler was captured two days later and held on charges of
high treason. His twenty-four day trial began at the end of February 1924. He
was found guilty, sentenced to five years’ imprisonment, and paroled after only
eight months.
At his trial, Hitler turned the political tables on
the prosecution by embracing, rather than denying, his treason, which he held
up as the mark of his patriotism. He pointed out the stark truism that,
"High treason is the only crime that is punishable only if it fails."[19]
He argued that the traitors of 1918 should be held responsible for treason, but
not Hitler himself, for "I do not consider myself a traitor, but rather
simply a German who only wanted the best for his people."[20]
The decisive
factor responsible for Hitler's getting much his own way in the course of his
trial was chief judge Georg Neithardt's tolerant and openly partisan treatment.
The judge had a nationalist track record of harshness against leftists and leniency
for rightists. He revealed his bias when he granted Hitler early parole a year
earlier on a breach-of-the-peace conviction. Neidhart had also commuted to life
imprisonment, the death sentence of the assassin of Kurt Eisner, the Bavarian Minister President. Judge Neidhart's tendentious rationale was
that Eisner had such low standing in the polls that it was not such a terrible murder.
When Hitler came to power he duly rewarded Neithardt.[21][M
Rare Opposition to Hitler Noted
At his trial, Hitler had pretty much his own way,
suffering little pushback--with an exception noted below. This was not the case
earlier when, like other minor politicians, he was buffeted by the sort of opposition
an extremist rabble-rouser might expect. Range cites one such case from March
1923, some months before the putsch. By then, Hitler's political star had risen
to a point where he was granted an audience with the formidable General Hans
von Seeckt, commander in chief of the German army. At the meeting, Hitler had
no problem treating the general to a trademark four-hour harangue in which he inveighed
against the "November criminals"--those in Hitler's eyes who were
responsible for Germany's defeat in WWI--and the threats from the
"perfidious Jews." At one point Hitler declared, "We National Socialists will see
to it that the members of the present Marxist regime in Berlin will hang from
the lampposts. We will send the Reichstag up in flames, and when all is in flux
we will turn to you, Herr General, to assume leadership of all German workers." [22][MNH13]
When Hitler was finished, Seeckt simply replied: "From today forward, Herr
Hitler, we have nothing more to say to one another."[23]
Later, during Hitler's trial, General Otto von Lossow,
whom Hitler had attempted to suborn into treason, ably defended himself. With
great effect he called Hitler a liar, claiming that Hitler had given him "his
word of honor that he would not stage a putsch."[24][MNH14] Lossow noted that
"Hitler is obsessed with the word ‘brutality.’"[25][MNH15] Lossow's
effective speech turned out to be one of the few moments in the trial when Hitler
was exposed for who he was. As we know, Hitler never won a majority in any free
and fair election. Many were opposed to his policies, but the Hitler phenomenon
was one of those terrible cases where the majority did not prevail.
Parole and Escaping Deportation
Hitler was eligible for parole on October 1, 1924,
after serving less than a year in prison and only five months after his conviction.
One looming crisis he faced was whether he would be deported to his native
Austria, which could ended his political career. Though Hitler had the friendly
Bavarian courts on his side, he was still facing some formidable opposition from
the Bavarian bureaucracy. The Munich deputy police chief strongly opposed
Hitler's release on parole due to the "permanent danger" he represented
to the "internal and external security of the state." As “the soul of
the volkisch [nationalist] movement,”
if Hitler was to be released, then he
should be deported, wrote the deputy.[26]
The prosecuting attorney, Ludwig Stenglein, also weighed in, citing Hitler's
responsibility for the violence, kidnapping, and theft during the putsch, as
well as his 1922 conviction for assaulting opposing politician Otto Ballerstedt,
for which Hitler was still on parole!
In the end, the friendly Bavarian courts beat back all
the opposition to Hitler's release, although there was an almost three months’ delay
until December as appeals made their way through the courts. Hitler managed to
escape deportation to Austria in large part because the Austrian government, challenged
by the strain of its own pro-Nazi elements, refused to allow him to be returned
to Austria. The Austrians used the legally dubious argument that Hitler's
service in the German army meant he was no longer an Austrian citizen.[27]
Hitler's Homosexuality
German professor Lothar Machtan's exposé in The
Hidden Hitler (2001)
has convinced many “by the sheer weight of direct and circumstantial evidence,"[28] that Hitler was a homosexual -- of the type that could not bear the slightest
intimacy with women. (Hitler's homosexuality is not addressed in Range's book.)
In Machtan's view, Hitler was able to conceal his sexual nature because he relentlessly
pursued and destroyed whatever evidence he could find. He was also determined
to silence, even by means of murder, those who could expose him. When he became
Chancellor of Germany he made a point of confiscating the six-volume file kept on
him by the Munich police.[29]
Similarly, in 1938, when Germany absorbed Austria into Greater Germany in the
Anschluss, Hitler sent agents to confiscate the files that the Vienna police
had compiled, presumably because in
addition to whatever else, it contained records of his sexual contacts.
In Explaining Hitler (1999), Ron Rosenbaum stresses
that Hitler was a frequent target of blackmail attempts. Machtan asserts that it
was the threat of exposing his sexuality that spurred much of the blackmail
efforts, some apparently successful. Along similar lines, Machtan provides a
revisionist angle to at least part of the motivation for Hitler's bloody purge
of June 30, 1934, known as the "Night of the Long Knives." Among the
hundreds Hitler ordered murdered was his mentor, friend, and perhaps lover, Ernst
Rohm, leader of the SA, the Sturmabteilung,
Hitler's paramilitary wing. Doubtless others were also murdered during that
time due to their knowledge of Hitler's sexual activity.
During
his time at Landsberg prison, Hitler and his fellow conspirators enjoyed relaxed
special treatment. Machtan reports that in the so-called Feldherren wing, Hitler and Hess and others took pleasure in
sporting contests, rowdy evenings, and hot baths in the "modern bathroom
reserved for us alone."[30][MNH16]
The prison governor had to restrain their unruly behavior from time to time
with such messages as: "Nudity outside the fortress living room . . . is
not allowed. The proprieties have to be observed everywhere, especially when
several fellow inmates share a room with you."[31]
Effect of Hitler's Homosexuality on His Politics
Clearly
it wasn't Hitler's homosexuality which turned him into one of history's most horrific
mass murderers. If his sexual orientation had anything at all to do with
Hitler's vicious ruthlessness it would likely have been his alienation in reaction
to society's prevailing homophobia. Once Hitler became Chancellor, Machtan
theorizes, Hitler lived under self-imposed celibacy for the rest of his life, a
condition that would seem to have done little to diminish his murderous
resolve.
Machtan's
findings may also spur new investigation into the radical change Hitler
underwent when he was an adolescent. He began as leader of his boyhood friends as they played cowboys and
indidans, and attained good marks in school. And all of a sudden, around 11
years old, he became anti-social and his schoolwork suffered dramatically to
the point that he never graduated from high school. Perhaps it was his
isolation, anger and frustration at the emergence of his sexual identity that
played a critical role in his "hatred of the world and his thirst for
extermination."[32]
Another Book
One of the best things about Range's 1924 is that it points to the need for a
similar book equally deep in German sources, a book that would give a sense of what political life was
like in the years leading up to January 30, 1933, when Hitler became Chancellor
of Germany. Such a book would detail the terribly destabilizing violence and
anarchy caused in large part by Hitler and his storm troopers, especially the
murders of political opponents whose elimination helped pave the way to Hitler’s
rise to power. In Explaining Hitler, Ron
Rosenbaum offers a window into some of
the "politics" of those years.
Scarcely an issue [of the newspaper] went by in those final
years without one and usually two, three, or four brief dispatches reporting
the blatant cold-blooded murder of political opponents by Hitler Party members.
Cumulatively, what one is witnessing is the systematic extermination of the
best and bravest, the most outspoken opponents of the Hitler Party as they’re
gunned down or clubbed to death with truncheons or as bodies are found stabbed,
strangled, drowned, or simply never found at all. Followed frequently by
reports of how one court after another has allowed the murderers to go free or
get off with sentences more appropriate for petty theft.[33]
Rosenbaum's details were based on his research in German
archives, where he found contemporary newspaper articles. A book-length
treatment could provide the context that made it possible even for Hitler's
opponents to accept the new reality when they woke up on the morning of January
31, 1933 to their new Nazi Chancellor.
Optimists might have hoped to regain some of the law and order missing in the
last months--if not years--of the Weimar Republic. Unfortunately, they got the
order, but not the law they preferred.
The End
December 2016
[1] Peter Ross Range,
1924: The Year That Made Hitler (New
York: Little, Brown, 2016), p. 224-225.
[2] Range, 224-225.
[3] This raid is not
mentioned in William L. Shirer's account of the putsch in The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (New York: Simon &
Schuster, 2001), nor in Ian Kershaw, Hitler,
1889-1936: Hubris (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998). Allan Bulloch, in Hitler: A Study in Tyranny (New York:
Konecky & Konecky, 1962), p. 109, takes less than a sentence to mention
that Hitler’s “own bodyguard . . . occupied the offices of the Münchener Post and smashed the
machines.” Robert Payne, in the one sentence he devotes to the incident in The Life and Death of Adolph Hitler (New
York: Barnes & Noble Books, 1973), p. 176, also mentions that it was
Hitler’s bodyguard, the Stosstruppe, that destroyed the Post’s printing presses.
[4] Range, 1924: The Year That
Made Hitler, p. 80-81.
[5] Range, 1924, p. 81.
[6] Range, 1924, p. 231.
[7] Range, 1924, p. 14.
[8] Range, 1924, p. 15.
[9] Ian Kershaw, Hitler, 1889-1936: Hubris (New
York: W. W. Norton, 1998), p. 63.
[10] Range, 1924, p. 64.
[11] Kershaw, Hitler, 1889-1936, p. 62-66.
[12] Joachim C. Fest, Inside Hitler’s Bunker: The Last Days of the Third Reich, (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004) p.128
[13] Albert Speer, Inside the Third Reich: Memoirs (New
York: Galahad Books, 1970), pp. 436-437.
[15] Richard J.
Evans, The Third Reich at War: 1939-1945 (New York: The Penguin Press,
2009), p. 726.
[16] Range, 1924, p. 20.
[17] Range, 1924, p. 22-23.
[19] Range, 1924, p. 142.
[20] Range, 1924, p. 143
[21] Range, 1924, p. 130.
[22] Range, 1924, p. 42-43
[23] Range, 1924, p. 42-43.
[24] Range, 1924, p. 163.
[25] Range, 1924, p. 163.
[26] Range, 1924, p. 243.
[27]
Range, 1924, p. 244-245.
[28] James Wilson, review
and plot summary of Lothar Machtan, The
Hidden Hitler (New York: Basic Books, 2001), http://allreaders.com/book-review-summary/the-hidden-hitler-10328
(accessed 30 November 2016).
[29] Lothar Machtan, The Hidden
Hitler (New York: Basic Books, 2001), p. 132.
[30] Machtan, The Hidden Hitler, p.147.
[31] Machtan, The Hidden Hitler, p. 146-147.
[33] Ron Rosenbaum, Explaining
Hitler: The Search for the Origins of His Evil (New York: Random House,
1998), p. 45.
