Kaiser's Holocaust (44 page)

There is no evidence that Adolf Hitler, the working-class corporal, had met von Epp, the upper-class general, at this point. However, Hitler certainly had extensive dealings with von Epp’s former adjutant and
Freikorps
comrade, Ernst Röhm. Hitler was first introduced to Röhm by Captain Mayr in the autumn of 1919. Röhm is known to have attended the first German Workers’ party meeting at which Hitler spoke on 16 October 1919, and he joined the party shortly afterwards. In early 1920 Mayr took Hitler to a meeting of Röhm’s Iron Fist Club, a band of extremist nationalist officers, and it is around this time that
Röhm seems to have decided Hitler was ‘the man for Germany’ and worth supporting. In the Munich of 1920, the support of Ernst Röhm was no small matter.

In the chaos of the immediate post-war period, politics and organised political violence had become inextricable, particularly in Munich. Just months before Hitler became leader of the Nazi party, the Bavarian Minister President Gustav von Kahr, under pressure from the victorious Allies, was forced to disband the
Einwohnerwehr
, a right-wing citizens’ militia formed in the aftermath of the Freikorps’ ‘liberation’ of the city. The resulting power vacuum was filled by a plethora of new paramilitary formations. From von Epp’s
Freikorps
emerged the
Bund
Oberland
. Hermann Ehrhardt and his men formed the
Wiking
Bund
. But the National Socialists had no paramilitary wing, only a small gang of thugs to keep order during its beer-hall meetings. In November 1920 these strongmen were formed into the party’s ‘Gym and Sports Section’, which concentrated on providing physical training for young party members. A year later, Hitler redesignated them the
Sturmabteilung
‘Storm Section’, or SA. They quickly became known as the Brown Shirts. The final transformation of the SA, from a training programme for young party members into a fully-fledged paramilitary force, was primarily the work of Ernst Röhm and Hermann Ehrhardt.

By the time he began his association with the Nazis, Ernst Röhm had become the key link between Munich’s paramilitary organisations and the regular army.
12
His official role was to supply von Epp’s
Reichswehr
brigade with weapons, but in this position he also channelled
Reichswehr
funds and weapons into those paramilitary groups that the army believed might be deployed as reserves in time of trouble. Secure under the protection of General von Epp and the Bavarian Minister President von Kahr, it was Röhm who decided which groups received financial support and access to the large cache of arms and ammunition he had been busily stockpiling, in flagrant contravention of the terms of the Versailles Treaty and the Allied Disarmament Commissions. As the ‘Machine-Gun King’ of Munich, Röhm
supported the slow growth and development of the SA and helped strengthen the party’s connections to the real brokers of power in the city, including General von Epp. As the fledgling party learned how to spread its new paramilitary wings, Hitler and the Nazis increasingly found themselves in legal difficulties and Röhm’s influence with von Epp became ever more beneficial.

What Hermann Ehrhardt brought to the SA was not guns, but men and money. After playing a critical role in a disastrous attempted coup in Berlin in 1920, Ehrhardt and his men became virtual fugitives and naturally sought sanctuary in Munich. With Röhm most likely acting as an intermediary, Hitler and Ehrhardt agreed that former members of Ehrhardt’s
Freikorps
would be channelled straight into the SA, and funds to train them into a paramilitary force would be provided.

General von Epp did not become directly and personally involved with the Nazi party until late in 1920. In the middle of that year, the Nazis had learned that the
Völkischer Beobachter
, the newspaper of the Thule Society, formerly the
Münchener
Beobachter
, had fallen upon hard times and was on the verge of folding. Unable to secure the funds to buy the paper outright and aware of a number of rival bidders, Hitler and his supporters approached General von Epp, who agreed to illegally supply the party with a loan of 60,000 marks, taken from the funds of the
Reichswehr
. This allowed the party to seize control of the paper that remained its prime propaganda organ until 1945, and made von Epp one of its greatest benefactors.

The critical role of the colonial soldiers of the Second Reich in the birth of the Third has been almost completely forgotten. The best visual record that reveals the links between the colonial army and the Nazi movement is stored in the film canisters of the Bundesarchiv in Berlin. The first and most striking feature of the early Nazi films is their amateurism. More accustomed to the later films of Leni Riefenstahl, we have come to imagine the Nazis en masse as ordered, symmetrical, purposeful and always on the move. These early films are static and banal by comparison. They show the first Nazis and their supporters in Munich’s
squares, and on rain-soaked parade grounds waiting for speeches or assembling for marches. Most of the framings are wide shots, capturing as much of the action and as many of the players as possible. Only occasionally are there close-ups of groups or individuals; even Hitler rarely appears alone. The framing hints at the confusion of the times, as if the cameraman was uncertain as to the significance of the events he was recording and, to be safe, filmed as widely as his lens would allow, in case some figure in the margins was destined for greatness or power.

In Riefenstahl’s films of the vast Nuremberg rallies of the 1930s, the Nazis appear in the uniforms and symbols of the Third Reich. In these early party gatherings the men filmed shuffling together for the photographers wear a bewildering array of uniforms, hats, insignia, tunics and medals – the symbols and honours of the Reich that had so recently collapsed. Through this muddle of uniforms, the spectrum of various military and paramilitary subcultures from which the Nazis drew their early support is clearly visible. Alongside the old Prussian generals with their spiked
Pickelhaube
helmets and ex-
Freikorps
commanders proudly wearing their modern
Stalhelm
is a uniform that is now almost completely unrecognisable: that of the
Schutztruppe
officers. The desert-brown tunic and wide-brimmed hat of the men who had avenged Germany after the Boxer Rebellion and exterminated the Herero and Nama appears time and again in these films. In the 1920s the uniform was a potent reminder of the painful loss of Germany’s colonies and their living space. Today the
Stalhelm
is an instantly recognisable icon of Nazi aggression and the
Pickelhaube
, although rendered slightly comical by historical distance, is firmly associated with the sabre-rattling militarism of the old Prussian-dominated Germany of the Kaisers. The
Schutztruppe
uniform, in its obscurity, is untarnished by any association with Nazism.

One feature of the
Schutztruppe
uniform has a direct association with Nazism, though that connection has been obscured.
The brown shirts of the SA, the first symbol of Nazi brutality, were surplus
Schutztruppe
uniforms. They had been manufactured for von Lettow-Vorbeck’s
Schutztruppe
units in German East Africa, but as von Lettow-Vorbeck and his men had been cut off from Germany for the entire duration of the war, the uniforms had become unwanted army surplus. They were procured for the SA probably by Gerhard Rossbach, another former
Freikorps
commander and reputedly the homosexual lover of Ernst Röhm.

Nazism as a political ideology emerged, half-formed and half-baked, from the primordial,
Völkisch
soup of the Munich beer halls. Just as the soldiers of the lost colonial empire in Africa were key players in the emergence of the party as a political and paramilitary force in Munich, the philosophers of colonial expansion, racial inequality and
Völkisch
nationalism were among its most important intellectual benefactors.

In this early stage – between 1919 and 1923 – what is most striking about Nazism as an ideology was its unoriginality. There was little within the party’s manifesto – the ‘twenty-five points’ – that distinguished the Nazis from many of the other conservative parties that had sprung up in Munich and across Germany. Other than its opposition to the Treaty of Versailles, the party’s programme was remarkably similar to the stated aims of innumerable pre-war
Völkisch
parties, such as the Pan-Germanic League and the Fatherland party.

Nazism’s roots in
Völkisch
mysticism and nationalist politics of the Second Reich have encouraged some historians to look for a single inspirational figure from whom Hitler might have derived political inspiration. The fact is that Nazism was not so much invented as reassembled from the enormous array of traditional nationalist obsessions and the racial pseudo-sciences that had mushroomed in the last decades of the nineteenth century. The acute fear of encirclement by other European powers, a
determined belief that Germany was chronically overcrowded and an unshakeable suspicion that the nation was being denied her rightful place in the world – these were all concerns that exercised the Kaiser and his clique as much as the future Führer and his party. The prejudices and neuroses of the Second Reich were passed down to Hitler and the Nazis like family silver.

Perhaps the most critical stage of the synthesis and appropriation of old ideas took place between 1923 and 1925. In November 1923 the Nazis attempted to seize power in Bavaria by force. The Munich Beer Hall Putsch was a spectacular mistake, an absurdly premature grasp for power. General von Epp considered it to be so badly organised that he refused to participate, but was persuaded to help clean up the political mess left in its wake. Yet this crass miscalculation provided Hitler with the time and space to complete his political education.

Imprisonment at Landsberg Castle, on the edge of Munich, should have been the end of Adolf Hitler and the beginning of the end of the Nazi party. He was, to all intents and purposes, a washed-up beer-hall agitator, yesterday’s man. As his trial began, the newspapers confidently predicted the end of his political career. Yet when Hitler was released at the end of 1924, he was politically stronger, and had codified and ordered Nazism into a political ideology. At the heart of that process was his autobiography and political manifesto –
Mein Kampf
.

Away from the Munich beer halls and the task of organising the party and dominating its membership, Hitler peered back into the history of German mysticism,
Völkisch
nationalism and the history of German colonialism, in both Africa and the East. He communed with the philosophers and scientists who had travelled the same intellectual paths before him and took from his fellow travellers only what he needed to support his own simplistic ideas. With fellow prisoner Rudolf Hess taking dictation in their comfortable suite of prison rooms – and they were more rooms than cells – Hitler explored the scientific racism that had flourished during the age of empire. His reading took him back to Friedrich Ratzel’s
Lebensraum
theory, Arthur Gobineau’s
theories on racial mixing and the principles behind Francis Galton’s pseudo-science of eugenics – by then distorted by an army of eugenicists and race hygienists, including Eugen Fischer. Years later, when describing his time in Landsberg, Hitler claimed to have also read Nietzsche’s philosophy, the memoirs of Bismarck and the works of Heinrich von Treitschke, the nationalist German historian and teacher of Heinrich Class, the leader of the Pan-Germanic League. Although many aspects of the political credo that appear in
Mein Kampf
had certainly begun to emerge before Hitler’s imprisonment, it was within the walls of Landsberg Castle that his ideas crystallised. Many of the conclusions he reached remained unshakeable convictions for the rest of his life.

At the core of the ideology outlined in
Mein Kampf
was Hitler’s dedication to the Social Darwinian notion of the struggle for existence.
Mein Kampf
is littered with analogies of the struggle for life taken from the natural world – as were the speeches that Hitler gave in the months leading up to the Beer Hall Putsch. What was true for animals and plants, he believed, was true for humans: life was a perpetual battle for existence in which the strong were predestined to overwhelm and destroy the weak. Hitler’s belief in ‘the struggle’ provided him with a theor etical framework through which to see the world and a pseudoscientific language with which to describe it. Social Darwinism also permitted Hitler, like the militarists and racists of the previous century, to explain away terrible acts and justify the destruction or enslavement of other peoples as being natural, inevitable and therefore somehow moral. Of course, many Germans who accepted the apparent logic of Social Darwinism did not support imperialism, anti-Semitism or militarism. Yet much of the medical profession, the criminal justice system, the army and the ruling elite had by the 1920s come to view conflicts between races, nations and classes in similar ways to Hitler. This great cultural shift had taken place long before the Nazis emerged as a major political force, and similar ideas had taken root in most European nations, as well as in America and Japan. However,
the widespread acceptance of the general principles of Social Darwinism and equanimity with which millions in Germany had come to view the displacement or destruction of the ‘weak’ eased Hitler’s rise to power. The same phenomenon later helped soothe the conscienses of those millions of Germans, soldiers and civilians who chose to follow Hitler’s orders.