1924: The Year That Made Hitler (25 page)

For now, however, only bumptious Colonel Kriebel and the bookish Dr. Weber were with Hitler in the thick-walled fortress building. The two fellow prisoners had moved into room numbers eight and nine, just to the right of Hitler’s. These rooms in the recently remodeled structure—“it still smelled of plaster and fresh paint,” noted Hemmrich—were nearly identical to the one Hitler had occupied during his first days at Landsberg, before his hunger strike. They were small but functional, with high windows and a pleasing view of outlying fields and the distant mountains beyond the tall prison wall (one inmate called the scene “friendly silence”
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). The prisoners’ rooms all gave onto a spacious dayroom. It was furnished with a table for six, spread with a white tablecloth, and had a sitting corner with comfortable wicker chairs surrounded by flowerpots. Along with a laurel wreath sent by an admirer, Hitler had hung two pictures of Frederick the Great on the wall (Hitler would still have Frederick the Great on his wall in the Berlin bunker at the moment of his demise in 1945). Alongside another wall stood a cast-iron stove—for heat and for warming food—beside double sinks
with a high mirror. Behind that lay a bathroom containing a bathtub “just for us,” marveled one inmate.

With their doors open as much as they wanted and no obligation to labor, the “honorable” prisoners could easily congregate or take their meals together. Spring was in the air and Hitler often wore his favorite prison outfit, Bavarian lederhosen (leather shorts) with suspenders and a white shirt, sometimes with a tie and cuff links, along with the customary kneesocks. He liked to read newspapers in the wicker chairs.
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The men could spend up to six hours per day outdoors in the adjacent garden.

But Hitler’s peace and quiet did not come immediately. He was flooded from the beginning with visitors, mail, and gifts. Landsberg Prison had never had such a celebrity on its hands. On his first day in Landsberg, Hitler received eleven callers in the visiting room of the fortress building. On the second day, thirteen came, including Hanfstaengl and Alfred Rosenberg, Hitler’s designee as acting head of the Nazi Party. The now-banned party, functioning under various disguises, was already showing signs of splintering or making alliances Hitler did not want. He spent much of the next two months meeting with party functionaries who were trying to hold the party to Hitler’s line.
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During his first months in prison, Hitler had visitors almost every day. Nearly everyone brought gifts of food or flowers. Knowing Hitler’s notorious sweet tooth, the edibles ran to pastries and cakes, regarded in Germany almost as a basic food group.

Settling into prison life, Hitler was at a crossroads. At a classic midpoint in life—his thirty-fifth birthday was just days away—he faced six months of empty time and an uncertain future. Triumphant in his trial but with his political movement still banned and crumbling, Hitler confronted the challenge of whether and how to reinvent himself for a new political reality. Germany was in economic and political recovery and the Nazi Party was in disarray and disrepute.
Would there be life after political death? How would Hitler position himself for a comeback? Beyond his hard-core adherents, did the Hitler idea—National Socialism, dictatorship, the Führer principle of infallible leadership, and especially anti-Semitism—have appeal? Was Adolf Hitler still a marketable brand? Hitler seemed to think so, or at least he put a good face on his prospects. “Our struggle must and will end in victory,” he wrote to an admirer.

On April 20, Easter Sunday, Hitler also received a positive answer from those who cared the most about him. It was his thirty-fifth birthday. His stream of well-wishers at Landsberg Prison peaked at twenty-one, the most he received in a single day. His mail over this weekend, reported Hemmrich, was delivered “in laundry baskets” and took several days to get through the prison censors. His room was “overflowing with flowers like in a greenhouse.” Hitler stood among the greenery to accept birthday greetings from Kriebel and Weber.
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In Munich, three thousand true believers gathered to celebrate his birthday at the Bürgerbräukeller, the beer hall where his disastrous coup attempt had begun. The hard core of Hitler’s following was holding strong. It did not take long for Hitler to choose his course. His trial success and the support of his devotees persuaded him of his continuing mission to save Germany. He would continue promoting his message. But since he could not mount the podium at the Circus Krone or the Hofbräuhaus, Hitler would now need to reach the masses through his pen rather than his voice. Always one to struggle more with writing than with speaking—he had said as much to Deputy Prosecutor Ehard in their first meeting—Hitler had recently undergone the longest writing exercise of his life, composing the sixty-plus-page defense memorandum, which had guided him to his courtroom speeches. That experience had increased his confidence.

For one thing, Hitler wanted revenge; he wanted to expose “the lies and deceit” of his tormentors—Kahr, Lossow, and Seisser—who had slipped through the net he had thrown over them at the trial, then slipped out of town. He wanted to unmask the perfidy of the “November criminals,” as he labeled everyone associated with creating and running the Weimar Republic. He wanted a “reckoning,” as he called it—a settling of accounts.

Now that he had gotten people’s attention, Hitler was ready to preach to Germany. His mountaintop pronouncements from inside the Infantry School had been a mere prelude to what would grow into his massive, 782-page statement of what he believed, what he wanted to do, and how he wanted to do it. That statement would set forth Hitler’s worldview and his “road map” to Germany’s future, as some later described it.
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It would be titled
Mein Kampf.

But the title would come later. In his first days back at Landsberg Prison, Hitler’s first challenge was simply to produce an article. The right-wing publisher, Julius Lehmann, had asked Hitler to write an essay for his magazine,
Deutschlands Erneuerung
(Germany’s Renewal), Germany’s leading monthly journal of
völkisch
thought.
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Lehmann was also the book publisher of such famous racist writers as Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Hans F. K. Günther, Paul de Lagarde, and Arthur de Gobineau. The publisher’s political sympathies were clearly with the Nazis; he had allowed his villa on the outskirts of Munich to be used to hold hostages during the putsch. For
Deutschlands Erneuerung,
Lehmann wanted not a rehash of the trial or even a score-settler, but a think piece on Hitler’s politics pegged to the November 8, 1923, putsch attempt.

“Why Did November 8th Have to Happen?” ran in the April 1924 issue of
Deutschlands Erneuerung.
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This often overlooked essay, which contained numerous passages and concepts that would later appear in
Mein Kampf,
openly presented Hitler’s aggressive
expansionist dreams and his utterly race-driven view of the world. Though he had written numerous editorials for the
Völkischer Beobachter,
Hitler’s five-thousand-word article for Lehmann’s journal was an unusually detailed and concentrated summation of his thinking, especially on foreign policy. To read it now is to encounter a preview of the Third Reich.

In his very first sentence, the always apocalyptic Hitler cast his argument in grandiose terms, evoking the existential “being or non-being” (
Sein oder Nichtsein
) of Germany. Playing for the highest stakes, he argued that World War I had started a process—still unfinished—that would decide the continued existence of “the German nation for centuries into the future, maybe forever.” Germany’s enemies were bent on Germany’s obliteration. Their “battle cry is not, ‘Victory!’ but rather, ‘Destruction and annihilation!’” wrote Hitler.

The highest goal of national government was not simply “preserving the peace for its own sake,” Hitler claimed, but “preserving and expanding one’s own people.” Hitler was highlighting a central element of his political philosophy: the standing of one’s people, one’s
Volk,
is everything, and any means—including war—should be used to augment its strength. To Hitler, race was at the heart of the concept of nation; he considered not only Jews but Germans, as the perfect Aryans, to be a race. The “fundamental pillar” of the German nation, its “race and culture,” was under threat and must be protected in a “battle to the death,” he wrote. Marxism was the “mortal enemy,” and Marxism was a Jewish creation.

Beyond the focus on “nation and race”—the title of what would become the key chapter of
Mein Kampf
—Hitler was preoccupied with Germany’s international alliances. His essay sketched out what would, after 1939, become his policy of conquest toward Eastern Europe and Russia. To Hitler, war was already coming; that was the
natural state of relations among nations. It was just a question of who against whom. That’s why he had to work out the question of alliances. Hitler posited that France was Germany’s implacable “hereditary enemy” and was single-mindedly focused on the “Balkanization” of Germany into its weak component parts (Germany had consisted of three hundred independent states, municipalities, and principalities before Bismarck united them in 1870). Therefore, Germany had to choose Russia or England as its ally. The choice was a macroeconomic one: did Germany want “sea power and international trade,” or land power with greater “agrarian space”? If the former, then Germany should ally itself with Russia against the great colonial power, Britain. If the latter—forsaking overseas ambitions for “continental expansion” to the east—then Germany should seek an alliance with England against Russia. Though he had often talked of Germany’s need for “land and soil,” he left open for the moment the matter of which alliance he would choose.

But for the first time, Hitler linked acquisition of land for “continental expansion” to the fierceness and the threat of “the sword.” Trying to improve a nation’s economic position “without power-political thinking and actions” could lead only to disaster—“a Carthaginian end,” as Hitler liked to put it. Hitler also connected power politics to his racial doctrines in a foreshadowing of what would be called, in
Mein Kampf,
his policy of “living space” for the “Germanic race.”

All these dire conditions and harrowing possibilities, Hitler offhandedly noted at the end of his essay, convinced him that, on November 8, 1923, “the moment had arrived” for his putsch. And he reprised a favorite dramatic conclusion: “Whether or not we were right will be decided not by any state’s attorney or court but, someday, by German history.” He had, in a way, answered the question posed by the article’s title. More important, by writing the essay
Hitler had exercised the muscles that would help him draft one of the world’s best-known and most notorious books. “In structure, language and themes, and taken as a whole, the article can be seen as precursor to
Mein Kampf,
” wrote historian Plöckinger.

For a former trench runner sitting in a simple prison room in a sleepy town in the Bavarian countryside, this was big thinking. It was also radical thinking, and a sign of the special treatment given to Hitler as a prisoner, since inmates were theoretically not allowed to engage in political activities. The man who dropped out of school at age sixteen, never earned a diploma in anything, and got all his understanding of international relations from random though intensive reading could now rant at will in the public print without censure. And he obviously had no qualms about rearranging the world to his liking; he was moving nations about the global chessboard with the confidence of a seasoned statesman or, better, of a world conqueror.

The fact that he had jammed a number of bold ideas and complex international analyses into a relatively tight article showed Hitler that he could discuss big ideas that were not (this time) overfreighted with polemics. To be sure, he’d taken half a dozen ugly swings at Jews (a “racial tuberculosis”) and at the weakling politicians of prewar Germany (“world pacifists”). But mostly he’d argued a tightly woven if extreme case. His argumentation still had, of course, its contradictions and gaps, and Hitler may have had professional editorial help in getting it in shape for publication. Yet writing for a journal of ideas in the
völkisch
movement must have convinced Hitler that he could be taken seriously by the intellectual heavyweights who were published by Lehmann. From there, it was a fairly short leap to the idea of writing a full book.

Hitler may have had more mundane reasons for deciding to
proceed with a book-length treatment of the avalanche of ideas in his head. One is pecuniary; he needed money to pay his expensive lawyer’s bills. A fellow prisoner, Julius Schaub, later claimed that Hitler wrote
Mein Kampf
“only as a propaganda piece to earn money.”
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Another impetus to write was later attributed to fellow prisoner Gregor Strasser, who was said (in his own brother’s not always reliable memoir) to have grown tired of Hitler’s after-dinner perorations and suggested that, instead of talking ad infinitum, the party leader should be writing his wonderful thoughts down—in a book. In this unconfirmable version,
Mein Kampf
came about as a way of getting Hitler to shut up so the other inmates could relax, chat, and play cards.

Yet Hitler’s need to pontificate and persuade may have been enough, on its own, to motivate him to write. Upon returning to prison, he had already begun making autobiographical notations in a notebook.
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At his trial in Munich, his slightly exaggerated version of his youthful slide into hard times in Vienna had been a crowd-pleaser and easily framed the transition into politics. Two months later, sitting in room number seven in Landsberg Prison, Hitler apparently decided to try the same approach to a book.