1924: The Year That Made Hitler (29 page)

In two volumes and nearly eight hundred pages, Hitler would not only present a vision of Germany’s political future, but declaim, with a dilettante’s fluency, on any subject that occurred to him, be it the “sole” purpose of marriage (“increase and preservation of the species and the race”), the “art of proper reading” (“to fit into one’s existing picture”), and the importance of combating syphilis (“
the
task of the nation”). Except for the overwrought syphilis part, he said years later, he would not change a thing in
Mein Kampf
. He would also carefully craft an image of himself, through an autobiographical structure, as a man uniquely endowed to remake the world in Germany’s favor—a politician-philosopher chosen by fate to lead the nation (and eventually the world) in its darkest hour.

Though he claimed that he was addressing his work “not to strangers” but to heart-and-blood “adherents of the movement,” Hitler said he decided to set down the basic elements of his political
doctrine “for all time”—hardly the description of an internal party document.
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On the contrary, it was as though Hitler were carving his words into stone. Even as he was hammering it out in his room at Landsberg, Hitler’s writing had, to him, the gravitas of a holy book. Like a divine voice from on high delivering final wisdom to his messenger—God to Moses—Hitler was channeling his chaotic years of reading and speaking onto the written page. He was both god and messenger. With almost no bows to the sources of his mostly derivative thinking, Hitler’s book does indeed have a biblical tone of oracular truth.

In biblical terms, Hitler’s four months at the typewriter were his forty days in the wilderness. Just as Jesus (according to the Gospels) came out of the desert and its satanic temptations with a clarified sense of self and dedication, Hitler came out of his moment of internal exile—and the trials of failure and scorn—with a heightened and hardened sense of his destiny and of his capability to lift Germany out of the valley of misery. Whether he anticipated that the months of removal from the churn of politics and a forced period of thinking and writing would have such a clarifying effect on him is unknown. But they did.

Even as he transformed the raw clay of his political instincts into a coherent if exceedingly broad-gauged doctrine, Hitler was transforming himself into his own truest believer. Hitler’s “ruthless systematizing power” grew from the “crystallizing experiences”
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of his time in Landsberg, wrote historian Hugh R. Trevor-Roper in his renowned 1953 essay, “The Mind of Adolf Hitler.”
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Much of the crystallizing took place in Hitler’s room in the fortress building as he poured forth the pages of
Mein Kampf
(then still known only as “my book” or “my work”). “I gained clarity about a lot of things that I had previously understood only instinctively,” said Hitler.

During this time, he later said, he acquired enough knowledge
and understanding “to provide my philosophy with a natural, historical foundation.” In short, he found the “facts” to support his prejudices and to convince himself that he was right about everything; his self-belief no longer “could be shaken by anything.” This completed Hitler’s conversion, in his own mind, from “drummer”—chief propagandist—to leader. This is the period that can be said to have made Hitler into the man who would not rest until he had Germany in his grip. This was the final step toward self-legitimization, the intellectual certification that was missing from Hitler’s résumé.

Hitler was also busily creating a Great Man persona, with himself as the unnamed candidate for that job. He emphasized the paramount importance of “personality” in political change. “Personality cannot be replaced,” he wrote. “It is not mechanically trained, but inborn by God’s grace.” The right personality was required for what Hitler called “Germanic democracy” in which “the leader is elected but then enjoys unconditional authority.” This is the
Führerprinzip
—the Führer principle that would lead to Hitler’s unchallenged control once he achieved power.

At the outset of his project, Hitler’s focus had been on revenge. With more than four years of grievances to redress against all manner of adversaries, Hitler wanted to attack every establishment figure, left-wing political force, or national government official who’d ever crossed him. But by late May, Hitler had begun sliding away from his revenge theme and into an autobiographical structure. He began conflating ideology and autobiography. Hitler was now at the “interface between rabid party leader and ideological theorist,” noted Beierl and Plöckinger, and he was moving increasingly toward the theorist.
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To rationalize his standing as political philosopher, Hitler had to polish, and sometimes seriously embellish, his personal story to fit the new image that he was creating. His very birth
in a small Austrian town smack on the German border served in
Mein Kampf
’s opening line as his first claim to be a child of Providence. In language almost identical to the words he had typed in his earlier five-page beginning, Hitler wrote: “Today it seems to me providential that Fate should have chosen Braunau on the Inn as my birthplace. For this little town lies on the boundary between two German states which we of the younger generation have made it our life’s work to reunite by every means at our disposal.” Historian Kershaw noted, “His almost mystical faith in himself as walking with destiny… dates from this time.”
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As he wrote the tale of his early years in Vienna, Hitler created a mini-bildungsroman
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of hard luck and hard lessons, which led inevitably to his hatred for polyglot legislatures (“a wild, gesticulating mass… screaming in every key”), mongrel nations, Marxism, and Jews; the autobiography was already fitting the politics that were yet to come. There is an “innocent abroad” quality to Hitler’s alleged discovery of his anti-Semitism through his first sighting of an Eastern Jew in a caftan (“Is this a Jew?… Is this a German?”), followed by his scales-fell-from-my-eyes realization that the Social Democratic Party (synonymous with Marxists in Hitler’s view) “was run by Jews.”
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His bitter disagreements with fellow workers on a construction site exposed, in Hitler’s telling, the tyranny of the Socialists, who “made use of… terror and violence” by forcing him “to leave the building at once or be thrown off the scaffolding.”
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Whether true or not, this version of events makes for better storytelling
than admitting he gathered his ideas from the political tracts and free newspapers he found in Vienna’s grungy slum cafés, which, to some historians, seems more likely the case.
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Equally suspect is Hitler’s claim that he fell on his knees “with an overflowing heart”
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when Germany declared war in 1914 since it gave him a chance to fight for his fatherland (Germany, not Austria). Similarly, Hitler’s alleged road-to-Damascus decision to take on the Jews, which he describes in a way that makes it sound fated, comes as the perfect end to his war story and Germany’s 1918 revolution. A novelist could hardly have done better.

In the prison, Hitler had now near-perfect conditions to achieve the task he had set for himself. With his Nazi Party duties shed and the visitor stream diminished, he could set as a goal the completion of his book before his expected parole date of October 1. He was burrowing deeper into his own head, into the small world of his little room in the fortress building, and into the airy constructs of world history that derived from the autodidact’s sprawling reading habits. He was fitting together the “mosaic stones,” as he liked to call them, that he had gathered along the way from the diverse material that passed through his brain. He culled nuggets from a body of ideas that included, according to political scientist Barbara Zehnpfennig, a dizzying array of sources: Schopenhauer’s and Nietzsche’s metaphysics of will; Karl Haushofer’s and Friedrich Ratzel’s geopolitics; Arthur de Gobineau’s, Houston Stewart Chamberlain’s, and Paul de Lagarde’s anti-Semitism and racism; Thomas Malthus’s population theories; Charles Darwin’s theories of survival; Gustave Le Bon’s teachings on mob psychology; and, of course, Karl Marx. Hitler also leaned on conspiracy theories like
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion;
borrowed from post-Spenglerian theories of history such as anti-modernism, anti-liberalism, and
anti-capitalism; dabbled in obscure and occult explanations of the universe; and absorbed ideas about a “conservative revolution.” Hitler was, in his way, a scatterbrained renaissance man who believed that when he reassembled the booty of his intellectual piracy, the new version possessed an internal consistency that gave it the strength of religious belief. “He adopted almost nothing in its original form,” wrote Zehnpfennig. “He simply took the parts he could use and fitted them to the frame that he had already created.”
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And he attributed almost nothing to anyone. Giving credit to the sources of his thinking would have vitiated the godlike sound of his own voice. Hitler was used to speaking in the omniscient tone before masses of people; why change that in a book? As he explained in
Mein Kampf,
“the magical power of the spoken word” has its greatest impact when kept simple: one enemy, one idea, one solution (Hitler’s enemy was the Jews and his solution was their removal.)
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Likewise in a book: offering complex explanations or comparative versions of one’s ideas would only undermine them and distract readers.

For all its strewn writing and wandering anecdotes, Hitler’s book offered clear clues to his future actions. The book was dismissed for decades by postwar critics as a mishmash of “grubby jargon,”
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a “chaos of banalities,”
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and “superficial and triumphalist accounts”
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of his life story, and it was all of these things. Yet Hitler’s work presented, for those willing to put together its scattered pieces, a worldview that gave meaning and understanding to all that followed later. “Rarely in history—if ever—has a ruler so precisely described in writing before coming to power what he did after coming to power as did Adolf Hitler,” wrote historian Eberhard Jäckel.
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In the space of four months—and drawing on four years of speechmaking as well as his lengthy statements at his trial—Hitler was able to lay out
most of a political dogma that had at least some structure and logic. The degree to which this scheme led directly to Auschwitz, however, has been hotly debated by historians.
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Hitler’s intellectual starting point was apocalyptic: Western civilization, and especially Germany, he believed, faced downfall. In an atmosphere shaped by the pessimistic thesis of Oswald Spengler’s 1918 runaway bestseller,
The Decline of the West,
Hitler was playing the “politics of cultural despair,” as historian Fritz Stern described the prevailing mood. Fueled by writer Arthur Moeller van den Bruck’s proposals for a German “special path” between eastern Communism and western capitalism under a newly invented label—the “Third Reich”—this unsettled political climate was ideal for Hitler’s portentous predictions and offers of salvation. He proferred an instant “leap from despair to utopia,” wrote Stern.
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In this Hitlerian vision, only radical measures could halt the collapse. World War I had left Europe reeling and the entire existing order threatened by the sole winner of the horrible conflagration: Marxism. The Russian revolution had exposed itself as a murderous perversion and declared itself a world revolution. Germany was its next target. Both Lenin and Trotsky had spoken openly of Germany as the coming prize: “Without the victory of the revolution in Germany we are doomed,” Trotsky quoted Lenin as having said in 1918.
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This Marxist threat, Hitler wrote in
Mein Kampf,
was controlled by Bolsheviks who were “a band of Jewish writers and stock market thieves.”
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The Marxist virus had already infected Germany in the
form of Social Democrats, the largest political party, and by Communists as well (much smaller but still able to poll 10 percent in national elections). The enemy was inside the gates.

The only antidote to these destructive forces, in Hitler’s eyes and in his book, was the nation—united, pure-blooded, ready to fight. Fighting, in fact, was nature’s imperative for cleansing, growth, and survival. “Struggle is always a means for improving a species’ health and power of resistance and, therefore, a cause of its higher development,” he wrote in
Mein Kampf.
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The strength of the nation lay in the concept of race; only a pure race, not degraded by outside elements, could fight and win. Thus, one must raise national (racial) consciousness and expel any impure elements, which meant Jews. No matter how hard they tried, claimed Hitler, Jews could never be Germans (or any other nationality). Their claim to be only a “religious community,” he wrote, was “the first great lie.” They were, instead, a separate race—a condition that could not be overcome by geography (living for generations in Germany), language (speaking only German), or even religious affiliation (converting to Christianity). As a race, a Jew was always a Jew (and a German was always a German). And fighting the Jews, for Hitler, was a veritable religious calling. “In resisting the Jew, I am doing the work of the Lord,” he wrote.
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