Becoming Hitler Read online

  As a result of encountering a strong resurgence of anti-Prussian sentiment and sectionalism in Munich when he was recuperating in the winter of 1916/17 from the injury on one of his thighs that he had incurred on the Somme, Hitler did not display any interest in visiting Munich on two subsequent occasions when he received home leave from the front. Both times, he opted to stay in Berlin, the capital of both Prussia and the German Empire. That preference for the capital of Prussia over Munich constituted a double rejection of the latter: It was not just a negative decision against Munich and Bavaria, but also a positive one for Berlin and Prussia at a time when nowhere in Germany was Prussia hated quite as intensely as in Bavaria. At the time, many Bavarians thought that it was Prussia’s fault that the war was still going on.9

  Contrary to the image that is sometimes conveyed about Bavaria as the birthplace of the Nazi Party, the political development of Bavaria had looked hopeful, at least until the end of the First World War. From a prewar perspective, it would have been a reasonable assumption that a full democratization of Bavaria would be in the cards sooner or later. The often-heard belief that German democracy was stillborn due to an unsuccessful and incomplete revolution at the end of the First World War that would ultimately lead the country into the abyss after 1933 is based on the wrong assumption that revolutionary republican change was a precondition for a democratization of Germany. It results from an exclusive worshipping of the spirit of American Revolution of 1776 and the French Revolution of 1789. It also results from the ignorance surrounding what one may call the spirit of 1783, the final year of the American War of Independence. That year marked the beginning of an age of gradual reform, incremental change, and constitutional monarchy in Britain and the rest of its remaining empire. Over the next century or so, the spirit of 1783 was just as successful across the globe as was that of 1776 and 1789 in spreading liberty, the rule of law, and humanitarian ideals, and in fostering democratization. Crucially, Bavaria’s own homegrown political tradition shared central features with the spirit of 1783, but not with that of 1776 and 1789.10

  Bavaria had been well on the path toward a democratization of its political system prior to the war. Furthermore, prewar Social Democrats, Liberals, and at least the progressive wing of the Catholic Center Party had all accepted a path toward gradual reform and constitutional monarchy. Through their actions, the members of the Bavarian royal family, too, had accepted a gradual transformation toward parliamentary democracy already prior to the war. This was particularly the case for Crown Prince Rupprecht, nominally the Stuart pretender to the British throne, who was known for his ethnographical travelogues of his adventures around the world, including his explorations of India, China, and Japan, and his travels incognito with a caravan through the Middle East, which also had led him to Damascus, where he had been enthralled by the Jewish community of the city. It was equally true of King Ludwig’s sister, Princess Therese of Bavaria. She had not only made herself a name as a zoologist, botanist, and anthropologist exploring the wilderness in South America, inner Russia, and elsewhere, but she was also known within her family as the “democratic aunt.”11

  In many ways, Princess Therese epitomized the city in which she lived and which would give birth to the Nazi Party. Munich was an old medieval city that for centuries had been the seat of the House of Wittelsbach, which ruled Bavaria. However, as Bavaria had been one of Europe’s backwaters for a long time, Munich had paled in size and in importance to the great cities of Europe. Yet by the eighteenth century, the transformation of Munich into an elegant city of arts had begun. By the time of Hitler’s arrival, it was famed for its beauty, its arts scene, and its liberalism, which coexisted with traditional Bavarian life, centering on Catholic tradition, beer hall culture, lederhosen, and oompah bands. Life in Schwabing, Munich’s most Bohemian neighborhood, resembled that of Montmartre in Paris, while life only a few streets away had more in common with that of Bavarian villagers, as a large proportion of the Munich population had moved only in previous decades to the city from the Bavarian countryside. Prewar Munich had hardly been the kind of city people expected would give birth to political extremism.

  With the writing of Hitler’s First War, it had become clear to me that all our previous explanations of how Adolf Hitler turned into a Nazi were no longer tenable. While researching and composing the book had allowed me to understand what role the war really had played in Hitler’s development and what role his invented narrative about his war experience would play politically in the years to come, it also had posed a new riddle: How was it possible that Hitler turned into a star propagandist of the nascent Nazi Party within just one year, and soon thereafter became not only the party’s leader but a cunning and skillful political operator?

  The answer that has been given a number of times, in different variations, to this question since the publication of Mein Kampf, has been to present Hitler as a man returning from the war with a radical but unspecific right-wing predisposition; as someone who kept his head down during the months of revolution that he experienced in Munich, and who then suddenly in the autumn of 1919 becomes politicized by soaking up like a sponge and internalizing all the ideas expressed by the people he encounters in the army in Munich.12 While having the greatest respect for the historians advancing these views, the surviving evidence about how Hitler turned into a Nazi, as I will argue in this book, points to a very different direction.

  Becoming Hitler also challenges the view that Hitler was merely a nihilist and an unremarkable man without any real qualities. Neither was he, until the writing of Mein Kampf, the “drummer” for others. This book disagrees with the proposition that Hitler is best understood as someone “run” by somebody else and who subsequently was little more than an almost empty shell onto whom Germans could project their wishes and ideas. Moreover, this book rejects the idea that Mein Kampf was little more than the codification of ideas that Hitler had propagated since 1919.

  According to Hitler’s own claim in his quasi-autobiographical Mein Kampf, published in the mid-1920s, he became the man the world knows at the end of the war, amid the left-wing revolution that broke out in early November and that brought down monarchs all over Germany. At the time, he was back in Germany after having recently been exposed to mustard gas on the western front. In Mein Kampf, Hitler described how he had responded to the news broken by the pastor assigned to his military hospital in Pasewalk, close to the Baltic Sea, that revolution had broken out and that the war was over and had been lost. According to Mein Kampf, he had run out of the room while the pastor was still addressing the hospital’s patients: “It was impossible for me to stay any longer. While everything began to go black again before my eyes, stumbling, I groped my way back to the dormitory, threw myself on my cot and buried my burning head in the covers and pillows.”13

  Hitler’s description of the return of his blindness, first experienced on the western front in the wake of a British gas attack in mid-October, constitutes the climax of the dramatic conversion that purportedly made him a right-wing political leader. He described how in the nights and days after learning about the Socialist revolution, while experiencing “all the pain of my eyes,” he decided upon his future: “I, however, resolved now to become a politician.”14

  The previous 267 pages of Mein Kampf had been but a buildup to this one sentence. They detail how his childhood in rural Austria, his years in Vienna, and, above all, the four and a half years with the Sixteenth Bavarian Reserve Infantry Regiment on the western front had turned him into a National Socialist, from an unknown soldier to the personification of Germany’s unknown soldier15—in short, how he had metamorphosed first into a person who at the mere thought of a Socialist revolution would turn blind, and from there into a radical right-wing, anti-Semitic, and anti-Socialist political leader in the making. In telling the story of his life in Mein Kampf, Hitler followed the conventions of a Bildungsroman, which at the time would have been immediately recognizable to almost all his reader
s—a novel that tells how the protagonist matures and develops during his or her formative years, both morally and psychologically, by going out into the world and seeking adventure.16

  It is in the immediate aftermath of Hitler’s discharge from Pasewalk and his purported dramatic conversion that our story begins. It tells in three parts two parallel stories: how Hitler became a Nazi and metamorphosed into the leader immediately recognizable to all of us, as well as how Hitler constructed an alternative, fictional version of his transformation. The two stories are interwoven, because how he created an alternative narrative about his metamorphosis was an integral part of his attempt to build a political place for himself and to create the perception of a political gap or void that only he could fill. In other words, only telling both stories will reveal how Hitler functioned as a manipulative and conniving political operator.

  PART I

  GENESIS

  CHAPTER 1

  Coup d’État

  (November 20, 1918 to February 1919)

  On November 20, 1918, shortly after his release from Pasewalk military hospital, twenty-nine-year-old Adolf Hitler faced a choice. Upon his arrival at Stettiner Bahnhof in Berlin en route to Munich, where he had to report to the demobilization unit of his regiment, there were several paths he could take to Anhalter Bahnhof, the station from which trains for Bavaria left. The most obvious route was the shortest, across central Berlin along Friedrichstraße. Going that way, he would likely see or hear faintly in the distance the enormous Socialist public rally and march taking place that day right next to the former imperial palace, from which Kaiser Wilhelm II had so recently fled.1

  Another option was to put as much distance as possible between himself and the Socialist revolutionaries. Hitler could do so easily without losing much time by steering west for a while toward the area from which he would rule the Third Reich many years later, as Anhalter Bahnhof lay to his southwest and the demonstration was to his east. A third option was to take a detour eastward to watch from close quarters the Socialist demonstrators honoring the workers killed a week and a half earlier during the revolution.

  Following the logic of his own account in Mein Kampf of how he had learned about the revolution the previous week in Pasewalk and in the event had been radicalized and politicized, the first two options were the only truly plausible ones, with the second being the most likely. If his own story about how he became a Nazi was correct, in all likelihood he would have tried to put as much distance as possible between himself and the Socialist revolutionaries. That would have been the only way to avoid the risk of losing his eyesight again and being exposed at close quarters to the doctrine he so despised.

  Yet Hitler did nothing to avoid the Socialist revolutionary rally. In stark contrast to his description in Mein Kampf of the return of his blindness and his closing of his eyes toward the revolution, he sought out the left-wing revolutionaries, to witness them with his own eyes and to experience Socialism in action. In fact, elsewhere in Mein Kampf, Hitler inadvertently admitted that he had literally gone out of his way to see the Socialist show of strength on that day: “In Berlin after the War, I experienced a Marxist mass demonstration in front of the Royal Palace and in the Lustgarten,” he wrote. “An ocean of red flags, red scarves and red flowers gave this demonstration,[… ]a powerful appearance at least outwardly. I personally could feel and understand how easily a man of the people succumbs to the suggestive charm of such a grand and impressive spectacle.”2

  Hitler’s behavior in Berlin reveals a man who lacked the hallmarks of a recent convert to National Socialism with deep-seated antipathy for Socialist revolutionaries. Yet as he finally sat on the train that would take him back to Munich, a city in the grip of an even more radical left-wing coup than the one Berlin had experienced, it still remained to be seen how he would respond to daily exposure to revolutionary life.

  Hitler boarded the Munich-bound train at Anhalter Bahnhof not for a particular love of the city and its inhabitants, but for two different reasons. First, he had no real choice in the matter. As the demobilization unit of the List Regiment was based in Munich, he had been ordered to make his way back to Bavaria’s capital. Second, his best hope to reconnect with his wartime peers from regimental headquarters (HQ) was to head to Munich.3

  Even though they had treated him as a bit of an oddity, Hitler felt extremely close to his brothers-in-arms from the support staff of regimental HQ, unlike to the men in the trenches. As his contacts with his prewar acquaintances had petered out over time during the war and as, orphaned at the age of eighteen, he had long since cut off contact with his sister, half sister, half brother, and extended surviving family, the support staff of regimental HQ of the List Regiment had become his new quasi-surrogate family. Throughout the war, he had preferred the company of his fellow staff over that of anyone else. As Hitler headed south from Berlin, the men of the List Regiment were still deployed in Belgium, but it was now only a question of time before the members of regimental HQ would also return to Munich. As Hitler’s train puffed its way through the plains and valleys of central and southern Germany, he could look forward to being reunited soon with the wartime companions he cherished so much.4

  Once in Munich, Hitler made his way to the barracks of the demobilization unit of his regiment on Oberwiesenfeld, in the northwestern part of Bavaria’s capital. Along the way, he encountered a city run down by more than four years of war and two weeks of revolution. He walked past crumbling facades and through streets full of potholes. This was a city where paint was peeling off most surfaces, grass was left uncut, and parks had become almost indistinguishable from wilderness.

  It must have looked disheartening for someone who had chosen to see himself, despite being a subject of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, as an Austrian German living among Bavarian Germans. Blue-and-white Bavarian flags had been put up everywhere to welcome returning warriors, while precious few German flags could be seen anywhere, bearing witness that the city still prioritized its Bavarian over its German identity, just as it had when Hitler had encountered and disliked Munich in the winter of 1916/1917. In the minds of many people, the “German question”—whether all German-speaking territories should really be united and live together under one national roof—was still not settled.5

  As Hitler walked the streets of Munich, he experienced a variant of socialism in power that, following the logic of his later claims, he should have hated even more than the one experienced in Berlin. Even though Bavaria had had a more moderate political tradition than Prussia had, the revolution in Berlin had been spearheaded by moderate Social Democrats (the SPD), while in Munich the more radical left-wing breakaway Independent Social Democrats (the USPD) had been in the driver’s seat. Despite the much smaller popular base enjoyed by the radical left, it had acted more decisively and so had prevailed in Bavaria.

  It is impossible to understand why Bavaria would eventually provide Hitler with a stage from which to launch his political career without understanding the peculiarities of the Bavarian revolution that set it apart from most of the rest of Germany. The events of late 1918 and early 1919 would destroy the fabric of Bavaria’s moderate tradition, thus creating the conditions under which eventually Hitler could emerge as a National Socialist.6

  Lacking an experienced leader, due to the recent resignation of their ill and frail longtime chairman Georg von Vollmar, and reared in a belief in gradual reform and doing deals with opponents, moderate Social Democrats in Bavaria simply did not know how to capitalize on the sudden onset of political turmoil in November 1918. In the dying days of the war, protests erupted all over Germany, demanding democratization and a swift end to the war. The ineptitude of “Royal Bavarian Social Democrats,” as moderates jokingly were known, to deal with the situation became apparent during a political mass rally, which took place on the sunny afternoon of November 7 on Theresienwiese, the site of Munich’s famous annual folk and beer festival, the Oktoberfest. The rally had been called to demand immed
iate peace as well as the abdication of Wilhelm II, the German emperor, rather than to embark on revolution or to demand the end of monarchy as an institution.7

  At the rally, moderates by far outnumbered radicals. Yet as the event drew to an end, the former lacked decisive leaders and were caught off guard when the leader of the Independent Social Democrats, Kurt Eisner, seized the moment. Eisner and his supporters streamed to the military barracks located in Munich, intending to invite the soldiers to join them in immediate revolutionary action. Meanwhile, moderate Social Democrats and the majority of people present at the rally had gone home to have dinner and go to bed.8

  As Eisner and his followers reached military installations, Bavaria’s state institutions failed to respond to the revolutionary action now taking place in the city. In hindsight, the sum of the individual decisions made that night amounted to a collapse of the old order. However, this was not how those responding to USPD actions intended and conceptualized the decisions they made at the time.

  People responded, often perfectly rationally, to localized events without seeing, let alone understanding, the bigger picture, and therefore without anticipating the consequences of their actions. For instance, needlessly putting up resistance against actions of Eisner and his followers that did not imminently endanger the well-being of the Bavarian king would have seemed pointless late at night on November 7, for a simple reason. Earlier in the evening, King Ludwig III, with no luggage other than the box of cigars that he had carried in his hands, had exited the city, believing he was leaving Munich merely temporarily to weather the storm.9