| How did Hitler become a Nazi ? THE MELTING POT OF AN AUTODIDACT Hitler did not become nazi out of divine inspiration. It was a long process, a sort of melting pot where his curiosity, his lack of real education, his bookworm appetite, his frustrations and an authentic -although biased and quite deformed- social consciousness played a role. |
Young Hitler was not a nice boy but there was not only dark or wicked sides to him. His
friend Kubizek really liked him. The problem is that Kubi has been the only friend capable
to stand his jealous and exclusive character and his flashing bad temper. His temporary
associate in Vienna, Reinhold Hanisch did not like him: "I recall Hitler as undisciplined
and moody, always hanging around the men's home (in the Meldemannstrasse
pension), eager to discuss politics and often making speeches to the residents. He
usually flew into a rage if anyone contradicted him."
A hodgepodge of nationalistic & anti-semitic attitudes
Eventually, Hitler quarreled with Hanish, accusing him of stealing his property and
falsely testified against him in court in August, 1910, getting Hanish an eight day jail
sentence. Eventually Hanish hated Hitler and spent the following 25 years badmouthing
Hitler and selling Hitler's watercolours forgeries. In the 30s, Hanish's declarations to the
press and innumerable forgeries brought his life to a brutal end: in 1936, he was
accused of forgery, sentenced to jail. Incarcerated in a camp, he died in his cell under
mysterious circumstances, officially of a heart attack..
Hitler had a curious but academically untrained mind, the mind of a rather arrogant and
bullying autodidact. He perused the difficult philosophical works of thinkers like
Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Hegel, Fichte, Treitschke, the racist Englishman, Houston
Stewart Chamberlain and then picked up bits and pieces of philosophy and ideas from
them and wound up with a hodgepodge of racist, nationalistic, anti-Semitic attitudes that
over time became a die hard philosophy, later to be described in his book, Mein Kampf.
But his real mentors were people like Dietrich Eckart, Gottfried Feder, Karl Haushofer ,
second rank "thinkers" generally racists and conveyors of economic fantasies or lunatics
like Guido von List and Georg von Liebenfels, rabid anti-semites.
His political training (sic) was completed during his years in Vienna and one of the most
influental political "thinker" and politician was the racist, anti-semite, anti-catholic,
anti-Hapsburg, pan-German Georg von Schönerer . Hitler was also extremely sensitive
to the ideas of a Viennese lunatic calling himself von List (real name : Guido List born in
1848) who pretended that the Aryans were from a continent near the North Pole and that
they moved Southward bringing with them "Kultur" and raising the quality of the inferior
Southern races.
According to List, the master race's worst ennemies were the "international" : the
Catholic church, Jews, Freemasons, who were waging a war of extermination against
the Aryans. Early books by List contain the Swastika as a sign of the invincible, the
"Strong ones from above", that is to say, of the German's savior. In 1908, Hitler bought
and read, according to his friend Kubizek, Des Geheimnis der Runen (The Secret of the
Runes), abundant with descriptions of Nordic myths, illustrations and discoveries which
permitted inferences on the Germanic tribes' level of cultural development. There is no
doubt that hitler was familiar with List's ideas and theories : in 1920, in a speech in
Munich, he said that "this race which we call the Aryans was in fact the originator of all
major cultures of the future..." It is exactly what List wrote in his book The Names of
Germania's Tribes.
It was in this state of mind that young Hitler went to war. World War I terminated the
process and turned the mind of a would-be political thinker into a pernicious and evil
machine where human feelings, compassion and tolerance have been excluded from.
The man of 1919 had nothing in common with the one who set foot in Vienna in 1908 but
the 1919 version still was the sinister achievement of its previous version. It did not take
long for the subservient and somehow courageous Lance-Corporal to become a vicious
snitch.
A successful Kubizek vs. a failing Hitler
A very talented learning musician, Kubizek displayed the sensitivity of a real artist and
was doing very good at the Academy while Hitler was being rejected and was pretending
to self-educate himself by long hours of reading and wandering in Vienna. But when
Kubizek went back home for two months in the summer of 1908 and came back to the
room he has been sharing with his friend, there was no Hitler to be seen anymore. Gone
the friend ! Without a word.
Some exegetes of Hitler's life have since affirmed that in the meanwhile Hitler got
syphilis and simply left the room never to come back shameful of his condition. It is pure
crap. The real reason is different: in July 1908, just before holiday recess, Kubizek and
Hitler came back to the lodging after an evening of triumph at the Vienna Opera where
Kubizek has been conducting the orchestra and the singer Rossi sang three songs he
had composed; more, two movements from his sextet for strings were performed for the
first time. Both compositions met with great success. Back home, Hitler did not say a
word, he was livid jealous and could not take the triumph of his young friend: it
remembered him of his own failures and poor achievements. Some time after this
brilliant night, Kubizek left for Linz to spend summertime with his folks. He never saw his
friend again for years. In Fall, before Kubi return's from Linz, Hitler tried once more his
chance to the Academy and once more flunked the test. He could not then face the music
and tell his successful friend he had as usual failed the exam.
Unknown to Kubizek, Adolf then moved to another pension only a few blocks away from
his old lodgings. In Austria every change of address has to be reported to the police and
accordingly on November 18 he signed a police registration giving his address as Room
16 at 22 Felbergasse with a Frau Helene Riedl. The new room had more light than the
one he had shared with Kubizek and cost more money. He liked the place well enough
to stay there for eight months, living alone, rarely leaving his room, speaking to scarcely
anyone, and having no visible occupation. He left on the 20th of August 1909.
A common love of music and a romantic friendship
Another testimony -although less rosy- is the one left by a Josef Greiner, who claimed to
have known Hitler when "both were lodging in the pension in the Meldemannstrasse,
first during Hitler's second visit to Vienna in September 1907, later on [Greiner's] return to
Vienna in 1910". In 1907, Hitler was not yet a patron of Meldemann but it is possible that
they were there at the same time in 1910. In 1947, Greiner wrote the portrait of a
shiftless, roving, almost weak character entitled "Das Ende des Hitler-Mythos" (The end
of the Hitler's myth, Wien, Amalthea-Verlag [1947]) : he painted Hitler as a harsh
inhuman, mechanical, repetitive fanatic. Hitler, he said, was a sorry figure, unpleasing to
men and women alike, and his existence in Vienna -although he read hugely- was utterly
purposeless.
A common love of music -they attended Wagner's "Tristan" 40 times- and a romantic
friendship kept Hitler and Kubizek together, Hitler always the dominant, Kubizek the
recessive adoring partner. Kubizek who knew Hitler from 1905 to 1908 is certainly more
credible than Greiner who wrote in 1947 what people wanted to read and what he might
have collected episodely in 1910.
A modern Babylon
It is today fashionable to write about 1900's Vienna as a decadent capital of a
heterogeneous empire collapsing under ethnic, racial, languistic, religious problems, a
modern Babylon bursting at the seams and fraught with an arrogant aristocracy and a
selfish bourgeoisie indifferent to poverty as Hitler loved to describe in his writings after
WWI: "that was the night the Habsburgs were entertaining, old Josef was still alive but he
didn't appear. I saw Karl and Zita step out of their imperial coach and grandly walk into
this hotel over the red carpet. We poor devils shoveled the snow away on all sides and
took our hats off every time the aristocrats arrived. They didn't even look at us although I
still smell the perfume that came to our noses. We were about as important to them, or
for that matter to Vienna, as the snow that kept coming down all night, and this hotel did
not even have the decency to send out a cup of hot coffee to us."
This sort of self commiseration would be laughable if it was not put in the context of what
happened later to his author. Furthermore, in London, Paris or New York, aristocrats
and bourgeois were not showing more attention to the needy in the streets but "poor
Adolf" had a limited experience of the world in 1909. In 1933 also but at that time it did
not matter anymore. Hindenburg had made him Chancellor.
A consciousness of injustices
After his failures to the Academy, the end of his inheritance and his selfish decision to
leave Kubizek alone, his life and his vision of the world changed radically. The rather
nonchalant artist full of confidence in his talent and his future who loved the image of
himself as a grandiose visionary became rapidly an angry radical, social conscious of
the injustices of this world, shocked by the contemptuous indifference of the wealthy and
disgusted by the inefficiency of the Austrian parliamentary regime. Even if Stefan Zweig
could write that "whoever who lived and worked there (in Vienna) felt free of
narrowmindedness and prejudice", it is true as well that Cisleithania (as was then called
the Austrian part of the Empire) with her Parliament of 516 seats offered the sad
spectacle of an horrible mess that did not work. The Parliament with its mosaic of
ethnies and parties (more than 33 parties ranging from Christian-Socials to Slovenian
Conservatives) was a modern Babylon where each party could speak indefinitely in his
own etchnic language without being interrupted.
Filibustering reigned supreme and the extremists in this assembly were the masters
-and the negationists- of the democratic life of Austria. In December 1908, the Reichsrat
turned into a mad house after martial law was declared in Prague. There is no doubt that
Hitler's repudiation of the Parliamentarism's regime stemmed from this era and from the
sad spectacle he then witnessed in the company of Kubizek. In this, he showed all the
limitations of self-education and probably also the limitations of his own mind but it is
obvious that he could not have studied better the power of the terror of a few against the
general interest.
At the same time, as Reinhold Hanish used to say, rather than working hard to get out of
his misery, Hitler, "unpractical and with a distaste for work, found an opportunity to earn
money only when some other person helped him; thus the young man was, to a great
extent, himself to blame for his material distress." Every time Hitler entered into a
partnership with somebody capable to help him out, the association ended in acrimony.
Hitler let grew on him the idea that he was a genius, an artist alien to compromises, and
probably that he did not have to get up early to prove his talent. He was before all a lazy
brat unable of any sustained effort, except reading or listening to music. An indecisive
dreamer.
Hitler fancied himself in the skin of Lohengrin
Kubizek tells us in his book that Hitler was mad about Wagner. He saw Lohengrin ten
times, he knew the Libretto by heart thanks to his prodigious memory, a trait that had
probably influenced many admirers to believe Hitler had some genius.
Mesmerized by the personage of Lohengrin whom his fans used to call "der Fuhrer",
Hitler was not long to fancy himself in the skin of this Lohengrin: he would be an Austrian
Fuhrer who would redesign Vienna, Austria, Germany and why not the whole world
according to his heart and his sublime visions. For Kubizek, his only audience, he
redrew the streets of Vienna and its mass transit network to which he proposed an
underground alternative on the model of Paris and London. At this respect, many Hitler's
fans have always tried to convert Hitler into a visionary, a pioneer, a revolutionary man
bursting at the seams with terrific and innovative ideas.
Reality is more humble. Hitler who had certainly a form of social consciousness and
who was an avid bookworm has never done anything else than borrowing ideas from
real precursors or innovators or used them as he used the very talented and subservient
to him Albert Speer, the IIIrd Reich architect and minister of Armaments, to enhance his
own prestige and limit the influence of possible rivals.
So, was the future Fuhrer of Germany, the man who launched the first planification of the
economy, the first highways network, the popular Volkswagen, a plagiarist without ideas
of his own ? His economic adviser until 1933, Otto Wagener (1888-1971) eventually
acknowledged in his "Memoirs" that Hitler was vain. The man had ideas and intuitions,
he said, some "diabolical", some "cynical" and some "astonishing" as when he showed
on a map of Germany the respective implantations of the SA and the SS. Then he
explained to his audience that the contours of divide between Catholic and Protestant
Germania matched the implantation of the SA and the SS. But basically Hitler was a
pedant and a glib-talker who always gave the impression that he was saying things of
his own whereas they were the result of other thinkers' ruminations.
We threw ourselves down on our bellies
Furthermore it is the seal of Fascism to be a dictatorship pretending to be close to the
people needs and aspirations but at the same time supported by a technocratic elite
remote from democratic concern or bourgeois compromise. It was the fashion in the 30s
and it occurred in France, in Italy and in Spain. Germany was the consecration of this
philosophy not the inventor: Albert Speer was the best example of it. As he said in his
Memoirs, "we literally threw ourselves down on our bellies". Kubizek also reported in his
"Memoirs" that Hitler did not show much solidarity with the needy in spite of his
glorification of his years of misery in Mein Kampf : Hitler, the drop out of high school,
considered himself as an "educated" and called himself an "art academy graduate." He
did not even consider getting into personal contact with his fellow sufferers :"Contact with
people simply disgusted him, even physically", wrote Kubizek. When Hitler said in Mein
Kampf :"I stood with the workers at the construction site, I was hungry with them when
we were unemployed", it was nothing but political propaganda and outright lies.
As for the famous VW, the German people never saw the color of one: the first cars off
the production line were given to NSDAP leaders and the money collected to build the
plant and manufacture them financed the war effort as of 1939.
However Hitler knew how to handle the genius of some people. From 1933 he will use
Ferdinand Porsche's talents to give birth to his plan of a popular little car and Albert
Speer's expertise to draw the map of the Berlin of the future or Fritz Todt's genius to
establish the first network of autobahns.
Hitler was in essence an extreme liberal
Hitler always had great dreams but rarely delivered. During his Vienna years of
wandering and misery, he never ceased to predict he would become a somebody: he
constantly told Kubizek that he would be one day a great painter or alternatively a great
musician or a great architect. He even started to write the libretto of an Opera but Kubizek
who was a nice friend but an excellent musician told him out of it and Hitler did not go
further than the Prelude. Nevertheless, he was not totally put off by this rebuke and soon
he came up with a project of mobile opera for the poor who could not afford the real
Opera. Evidently Hitler whose means were dwindling fast and successes nil started to
develop a social consciousness -closer to bitterness than real social preoccupations-
but he felt closer to the needy than his friend Kubizek who was extremely successful.
Did he really like the poor and the needy or was he just pretending ? Otto Wagener's
"Memoirs" gave an answer to this question. For Wagener, Hitler really cared for his
people and had a genuine and real concern for their welfare: "he was a socialist, he
wrote in 1946, and determined to remain one, but his inner attachment to nature led him
to observe and acknowledge as a law of nature the struggle for existence, the struggle to
defeat the other." In other words, Hitler was in essence an extreme liberal whose
socialist preoccupations were always put on the backburner for realistic reasons.
Nazism was a scam. Nevertheless Hitler has been influenced by Left ideas and
concepts as they were developed in Vienne before WWI by his mentor Karl Luger,
Socialist mayor of the city. However, his Manifesto published in 1920 showed genuine
socialist preoccupations but they are more a catch-all program than the expression of a
real faith.
Unfortunately Herr Luger was also a rabid anti-semitic guy and his seeds, sowed in
Hitler's deranged mind, germinated during WWI and burst out in 1919 under the
fertilizing influence of movements like the "Spartacists" (a revolutionary organization,
from Spartakus, pen name of Karl Liebknecht, its cofounder) or other Socialist upheavals
orchestrated by Jews like Kurt Eisner and Rosa Luxembourg.
All Jews were in the rear profiteering, said Hitler
Hitler held them responsible for the defeat of 1918 without further or elaborate
explanation. For him, all Jews were in the rear profiteering, speculating or black
marketing while good German people were being killed at the front.
It never occured to Hitler-the-thinker the fact that thousands of German Jews had been
killed at the front and that thousands of French, English and American Jews had been
killed too. It never occurred to him either that all those Jews were internationally killing
themselves apparently unaware of a plan of a jewish conspiracy to take over the world
through the means of war. Under their dogmatic magma, Hitler's ideas were simple, let
say simplistic. Or he did not care, carried away by his hatred of the Jews: even the Head
of the Jewish War Veterans Bund was once incarcerated without any formal charges and
given the usual treatment of beating and trashing.
Step by step, the socialist ideas of Hitler were melt in a pot where one could find
according to the menu of the day:
* personal visions
* undigested thoughts from Shopenhauer, Marx, Engels
* misunderstood quotes from the Bible
* childhood frustrations
* furious and nostalgic gesticulations inspired by Wagner's music
* stupid theosophic rantings inspired by Madame Blavatsky and Dietrich Eckart
* borrowed concepts from Henry Ford
* notions of "living space" taken from Karl Haushofer (1)
* occult and supremacist ideas influenced by hours of reading the magazine Osara
published by von Lebenfels and von List writings at an occult bookshop owned by a man
named Ernst Pretzche in Vienne
* Pan-German ideas borrowed from the anti-semite and anti-catholic member of the
Austrian Parliament Georg von Schönerer
* megalomaniac visions of the ThuleGesellschaft which he joined in 1919(2)
* simplistic economic ideas on allocation of resources taken from Gottfried Feder (3)
The whole dinner being served with a hitlerite sauce upheld by an fascinating oratory
talent and a proverbial memory.
But this talent subdued his comrades at the front, impressed his officers after the war
and conquered the German lower middle-class crowds of the 20s and 30s. Even if the
real Socialists of the time, the Social-Democrats, judged Hitler for what he was, a bag of
wind, German lower middle-classes were hooked and the German elites -except for a
few- eager to facilitate his access to power which he did in the most democratic way
through universal suffrage.
When he became powerful enough to pay his people lip service, to disguise his cruelty
under the mask of Nazional-Socialist policies, to use his triumphing vanity as guide of
the German"Volk", then there was nothing more on his road to prevent him to think he
had found the secret martingale of power, the one that would allow him to achieve all his
frustrated dreams.
Mein Kampf was edited by a Jesuit Father Staempfle
Made in Germany out of the mind of a sick man, Nazism was nothing but a shock therapy
whose final goal was the elimination of all forms of opposition to the ideas of the "great"
madman, aka der Fuhrer. It was an incredible collective delusion. It is hardly believable
that it was able to do so much harm to so many.
One quotation sums him up. In 1943, after the collapse of the German army at Stalingrad
and the loss of a quarter million good German soldiers, he told his Generals :"Let this
much be understood, nothing shocks me, whaterver may happen. Some may think me
heartless to insist on fighting to the last man just because the enemy will also let more
blood that way, rather than undertake this maneuver or that. It has nothing to do with
heartlessness, only with my realization and conviction that this is not the action to be
taken... It is a matter of supreme indifference to me what posterity may think of me.."
In conclusion, Hitler was a monster under the disguise of pan-germanism (National)
and social preoccupations (Socialism). People who still want to see in him a precursor
of modern Socialism understand nothing to the complex personality of the Fuhrer.
Home
(1) A university professor and director of the Munich Institute of Geopolitics. In Berlin,
Haushofer had founded the Luminous Lodge or the Vril Society. The lodge's objective
was to explore the origins of the Aryan race and to perform exercises in concentration to
awaken the forces of "Vril", the Superman. The Vril Society -which formed shortly before
the Nazis came to power- believed they had secret knowledge that would enable them to
change their race and become equals of the men hidden in the bowels of the Earth.
(2) The Thule Society (Thule Gesselschaft), the real inspiration of Nazism, was founded
in 1918 in Munich, as an off-shot itself of the Germanen Order, under the initiative of a
Baron Rudolf Freiherr von Sebottendorf. According to Dr. Walter Johannes Stein, the
Thule was a "Society of Assassins." It held secret courts and condemned people to
death. It is likely that many victims murdered by the District Command had been
condemned earlier in the secret courts of the Thule. Many prominent Germans
supported this violence and were documented members of the Thule. For example, the
Police President of Munich, Franz Gurtner, was a reported member of the innermost
circle of the Thule. He later became Minister of Justice of the Third Reich. Among its
most important members were also Max Amann, Anton Drexler, Dietrich Eckart, Hans
Frank, Rudolf Hess, Alfred Rosenberg, Gottfried Feder, and others who later became
Nazi leaders. Adolf Hitler belonged to the Society as an "associate" or "visiting brother."
(3) Member of the D.A.P., Feder was an engineer who fancied himself as an economist.
He published in 1919 his Manifesto on Breaking the Shackles of Interest where he
concocted the theory that there were 2 sorts of capital: the international and jewish
capital, exploitive and loan capital that was bad, and the national, purely German capital,
productive that was good. Hitler took his mustache and his economic views from Feder
and then dropped the man after his election in 1933. He kept the mustache.
(4) Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei became known as "Nazi" party after
the italian press used to refer to it as the Nazionale Socialisti or Nazis. The american
and english press picked up, then the party itself. Others say that it is the making of a
German journalist who made fun of National-Socialist (Naso) into Nazi, a Bavarian slang
word that means stupid.
friend Kubizek really liked him. The problem is that Kubi has been the only friend capable
to stand his jealous and exclusive character and his flashing bad temper. His temporary
associate in Vienna, Reinhold Hanisch did not like him: "I recall Hitler as undisciplined
and moody, always hanging around the men's home (in the Meldemannstrasse
pension), eager to discuss politics and often making speeches to the residents. He
usually flew into a rage if anyone contradicted him."
A hodgepodge of nationalistic & anti-semitic attitudes
Eventually, Hitler quarreled with Hanish, accusing him of stealing his property and
falsely testified against him in court in August, 1910, getting Hanish an eight day jail
sentence. Eventually Hanish hated Hitler and spent the following 25 years badmouthing
Hitler and selling Hitler's watercolours forgeries. In the 30s, Hanish's declarations to the
press and innumerable forgeries brought his life to a brutal end: in 1936, he was
accused of forgery, sentenced to jail. Incarcerated in a camp, he died in his cell under
mysterious circumstances, officially of a heart attack..
Hitler had a curious but academically untrained mind, the mind of a rather arrogant and
bullying autodidact. He perused the difficult philosophical works of thinkers like
Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Hegel, Fichte, Treitschke, the racist Englishman, Houston
Stewart Chamberlain and then picked up bits and pieces of philosophy and ideas from
them and wound up with a hodgepodge of racist, nationalistic, anti-Semitic attitudes that
over time became a die hard philosophy, later to be described in his book, Mein Kampf.
But his real mentors were people like Dietrich Eckart, Gottfried Feder, Karl Haushofer ,
second rank "thinkers" generally racists and conveyors of economic fantasies or lunatics
like Guido von List and Georg von Liebenfels, rabid anti-semites.
His political training (sic) was completed during his years in Vienna and one of the most
influental political "thinker" and politician was the racist, anti-semite, anti-catholic,
anti-Hapsburg, pan-German Georg von Schönerer . Hitler was also extremely sensitive
to the ideas of a Viennese lunatic calling himself von List (real name : Guido List born in
1848) who pretended that the Aryans were from a continent near the North Pole and that
they moved Southward bringing with them "Kultur" and raising the quality of the inferior
Southern races.
According to List, the master race's worst ennemies were the "international" : the
Catholic church, Jews, Freemasons, who were waging a war of extermination against
the Aryans. Early books by List contain the Swastika as a sign of the invincible, the
"Strong ones from above", that is to say, of the German's savior. In 1908, Hitler bought
and read, according to his friend Kubizek, Des Geheimnis der Runen (The Secret of the
Runes), abundant with descriptions of Nordic myths, illustrations and discoveries which
permitted inferences on the Germanic tribes' level of cultural development. There is no
doubt that hitler was familiar with List's ideas and theories : in 1920, in a speech in
Munich, he said that "this race which we call the Aryans was in fact the originator of all
major cultures of the future..." It is exactly what List wrote in his book The Names of
Germania's Tribes.
It was in this state of mind that young Hitler went to war. World War I terminated the
process and turned the mind of a would-be political thinker into a pernicious and evil
machine where human feelings, compassion and tolerance have been excluded from.
The man of 1919 had nothing in common with the one who set foot in Vienna in 1908 but
the 1919 version still was the sinister achievement of its previous version. It did not take
long for the subservient and somehow courageous Lance-Corporal to become a vicious
snitch.
A successful Kubizek vs. a failing Hitler
A very talented learning musician, Kubizek displayed the sensitivity of a real artist and
was doing very good at the Academy while Hitler was being rejected and was pretending
to self-educate himself by long hours of reading and wandering in Vienna. But when
Kubizek went back home for two months in the summer of 1908 and came back to the
room he has been sharing with his friend, there was no Hitler to be seen anymore. Gone
the friend ! Without a word.
Some exegetes of Hitler's life have since affirmed that in the meanwhile Hitler got
syphilis and simply left the room never to come back shameful of his condition. It is pure
crap. The real reason is different: in July 1908, just before holiday recess, Kubizek and
Hitler came back to the lodging after an evening of triumph at the Vienna Opera where
Kubizek has been conducting the orchestra and the singer Rossi sang three songs he
had composed; more, two movements from his sextet for strings were performed for the
first time. Both compositions met with great success. Back home, Hitler did not say a
word, he was livid jealous and could not take the triumph of his young friend: it
remembered him of his own failures and poor achievements. Some time after this
brilliant night, Kubizek left for Linz to spend summertime with his folks. He never saw his
friend again for years. In Fall, before Kubi return's from Linz, Hitler tried once more his
chance to the Academy and once more flunked the test. He could not then face the music
and tell his successful friend he had as usual failed the exam.
Unknown to Kubizek, Adolf then moved to another pension only a few blocks away from
his old lodgings. In Austria every change of address has to be reported to the police and
accordingly on November 18 he signed a police registration giving his address as Room
16 at 22 Felbergasse with a Frau Helene Riedl. The new room had more light than the
one he had shared with Kubizek and cost more money. He liked the place well enough
to stay there for eight months, living alone, rarely leaving his room, speaking to scarcely
anyone, and having no visible occupation. He left on the 20th of August 1909.
A common love of music and a romantic friendship
Another testimony -although less rosy- is the one left by a Josef Greiner, who claimed to
have known Hitler when "both were lodging in the pension in the Meldemannstrasse,
first during Hitler's second visit to Vienna in September 1907, later on [Greiner's] return to
Vienna in 1910". In 1907, Hitler was not yet a patron of Meldemann but it is possible that
they were there at the same time in 1910. In 1947, Greiner wrote the portrait of a
shiftless, roving, almost weak character entitled "Das Ende des Hitler-Mythos" (The end
of the Hitler's myth, Wien, Amalthea-Verlag [1947]) : he painted Hitler as a harsh
inhuman, mechanical, repetitive fanatic. Hitler, he said, was a sorry figure, unpleasing to
men and women alike, and his existence in Vienna -although he read hugely- was utterly
purposeless.
A common love of music -they attended Wagner's "Tristan" 40 times- and a romantic
friendship kept Hitler and Kubizek together, Hitler always the dominant, Kubizek the
recessive adoring partner. Kubizek who knew Hitler from 1905 to 1908 is certainly more
credible than Greiner who wrote in 1947 what people wanted to read and what he might
have collected episodely in 1910.
A modern Babylon
It is today fashionable to write about 1900's Vienna as a decadent capital of a
heterogeneous empire collapsing under ethnic, racial, languistic, religious problems, a
modern Babylon bursting at the seams and fraught with an arrogant aristocracy and a
selfish bourgeoisie indifferent to poverty as Hitler loved to describe in his writings after
WWI: "that was the night the Habsburgs were entertaining, old Josef was still alive but he
didn't appear. I saw Karl and Zita step out of their imperial coach and grandly walk into
this hotel over the red carpet. We poor devils shoveled the snow away on all sides and
took our hats off every time the aristocrats arrived. They didn't even look at us although I
still smell the perfume that came to our noses. We were about as important to them, or
for that matter to Vienna, as the snow that kept coming down all night, and this hotel did
not even have the decency to send out a cup of hot coffee to us."
This sort of self commiseration would be laughable if it was not put in the context of what
happened later to his author. Furthermore, in London, Paris or New York, aristocrats
and bourgeois were not showing more attention to the needy in the streets but "poor
Adolf" had a limited experience of the world in 1909. In 1933 also but at that time it did
not matter anymore. Hindenburg had made him Chancellor.
A consciousness of injustices
After his failures to the Academy, the end of his inheritance and his selfish decision to
leave Kubizek alone, his life and his vision of the world changed radically. The rather
nonchalant artist full of confidence in his talent and his future who loved the image of
himself as a grandiose visionary became rapidly an angry radical, social conscious of
the injustices of this world, shocked by the contemptuous indifference of the wealthy and
disgusted by the inefficiency of the Austrian parliamentary regime. Even if Stefan Zweig
could write that "whoever who lived and worked there (in Vienna) felt free of
narrowmindedness and prejudice", it is true as well that Cisleithania (as was then called
the Austrian part of the Empire) with her Parliament of 516 seats offered the sad
spectacle of an horrible mess that did not work. The Parliament with its mosaic of
ethnies and parties (more than 33 parties ranging from Christian-Socials to Slovenian
Conservatives) was a modern Babylon where each party could speak indefinitely in his
own etchnic language without being interrupted.
Filibustering reigned supreme and the extremists in this assembly were the masters
-and the negationists- of the democratic life of Austria. In December 1908, the Reichsrat
turned into a mad house after martial law was declared in Prague. There is no doubt that
Hitler's repudiation of the Parliamentarism's regime stemmed from this era and from the
sad spectacle he then witnessed in the company of Kubizek. In this, he showed all the
limitations of self-education and probably also the limitations of his own mind but it is
obvious that he could not have studied better the power of the terror of a few against the
general interest.
At the same time, as Reinhold Hanish used to say, rather than working hard to get out of
his misery, Hitler, "unpractical and with a distaste for work, found an opportunity to earn
money only when some other person helped him; thus the young man was, to a great
extent, himself to blame for his material distress." Every time Hitler entered into a
partnership with somebody capable to help him out, the association ended in acrimony.
Hitler let grew on him the idea that he was a genius, an artist alien to compromises, and
probably that he did not have to get up early to prove his talent. He was before all a lazy
brat unable of any sustained effort, except reading or listening to music. An indecisive
dreamer.
Hitler fancied himself in the skin of Lohengrin
Kubizek tells us in his book that Hitler was mad about Wagner. He saw Lohengrin ten
times, he knew the Libretto by heart thanks to his prodigious memory, a trait that had
probably influenced many admirers to believe Hitler had some genius.
Mesmerized by the personage of Lohengrin whom his fans used to call "der Fuhrer",
Hitler was not long to fancy himself in the skin of this Lohengrin: he would be an Austrian
Fuhrer who would redesign Vienna, Austria, Germany and why not the whole world
according to his heart and his sublime visions. For Kubizek, his only audience, he
redrew the streets of Vienna and its mass transit network to which he proposed an
underground alternative on the model of Paris and London. At this respect, many Hitler's
fans have always tried to convert Hitler into a visionary, a pioneer, a revolutionary man
bursting at the seams with terrific and innovative ideas.
Reality is more humble. Hitler who had certainly a form of social consciousness and
who was an avid bookworm has never done anything else than borrowing ideas from
real precursors or innovators or used them as he used the very talented and subservient
to him Albert Speer, the IIIrd Reich architect and minister of Armaments, to enhance his
own prestige and limit the influence of possible rivals.
So, was the future Fuhrer of Germany, the man who launched the first planification of the
economy, the first highways network, the popular Volkswagen, a plagiarist without ideas
of his own ? His economic adviser until 1933, Otto Wagener (1888-1971) eventually
acknowledged in his "Memoirs" that Hitler was vain. The man had ideas and intuitions,
he said, some "diabolical", some "cynical" and some "astonishing" as when he showed
on a map of Germany the respective implantations of the SA and the SS. Then he
explained to his audience that the contours of divide between Catholic and Protestant
Germania matched the implantation of the SA and the SS. But basically Hitler was a
pedant and a glib-talker who always gave the impression that he was saying things of
his own whereas they were the result of other thinkers' ruminations.
We threw ourselves down on our bellies
Furthermore it is the seal of Fascism to be a dictatorship pretending to be close to the
people needs and aspirations but at the same time supported by a technocratic elite
remote from democratic concern or bourgeois compromise. It was the fashion in the 30s
and it occurred in France, in Italy and in Spain. Germany was the consecration of this
philosophy not the inventor: Albert Speer was the best example of it. As he said in his
Memoirs, "we literally threw ourselves down on our bellies". Kubizek also reported in his
"Memoirs" that Hitler did not show much solidarity with the needy in spite of his
glorification of his years of misery in Mein Kampf : Hitler, the drop out of high school,
considered himself as an "educated" and called himself an "art academy graduate." He
did not even consider getting into personal contact with his fellow sufferers :"Contact with
people simply disgusted him, even physically", wrote Kubizek. When Hitler said in Mein
Kampf :"I stood with the workers at the construction site, I was hungry with them when
we were unemployed", it was nothing but political propaganda and outright lies.
As for the famous VW, the German people never saw the color of one: the first cars off
the production line were given to NSDAP leaders and the money collected to build the
plant and manufacture them financed the war effort as of 1939.
However Hitler knew how to handle the genius of some people. From 1933 he will use
Ferdinand Porsche's talents to give birth to his plan of a popular little car and Albert
Speer's expertise to draw the map of the Berlin of the future or Fritz Todt's genius to
establish the first network of autobahns.
Hitler was in essence an extreme liberal
Hitler always had great dreams but rarely delivered. During his Vienna years of
wandering and misery, he never ceased to predict he would become a somebody: he
constantly told Kubizek that he would be one day a great painter or alternatively a great
musician or a great architect. He even started to write the libretto of an Opera but Kubizek
who was a nice friend but an excellent musician told him out of it and Hitler did not go
further than the Prelude. Nevertheless, he was not totally put off by this rebuke and soon
he came up with a project of mobile opera for the poor who could not afford the real
Opera. Evidently Hitler whose means were dwindling fast and successes nil started to
develop a social consciousness -closer to bitterness than real social preoccupations-
but he felt closer to the needy than his friend Kubizek who was extremely successful.
Did he really like the poor and the needy or was he just pretending ? Otto Wagener's
"Memoirs" gave an answer to this question. For Wagener, Hitler really cared for his
people and had a genuine and real concern for their welfare: "he was a socialist, he
wrote in 1946, and determined to remain one, but his inner attachment to nature led him
to observe and acknowledge as a law of nature the struggle for existence, the struggle to
defeat the other." In other words, Hitler was in essence an extreme liberal whose
socialist preoccupations were always put on the backburner for realistic reasons.
Nazism was a scam. Nevertheless Hitler has been influenced by Left ideas and
concepts as they were developed in Vienne before WWI by his mentor Karl Luger,
Socialist mayor of the city. However, his Manifesto published in 1920 showed genuine
socialist preoccupations but they are more a catch-all program than the expression of a
real faith.
Unfortunately Herr Luger was also a rabid anti-semitic guy and his seeds, sowed in
Hitler's deranged mind, germinated during WWI and burst out in 1919 under the
fertilizing influence of movements like the "Spartacists" (a revolutionary organization,
from Spartakus, pen name of Karl Liebknecht, its cofounder) or other Socialist upheavals
orchestrated by Jews like Kurt Eisner and Rosa Luxembourg.
All Jews were in the rear profiteering, said Hitler
Hitler held them responsible for the defeat of 1918 without further or elaborate
explanation. For him, all Jews were in the rear profiteering, speculating or black
marketing while good German people were being killed at the front.
It never occured to Hitler-the-thinker the fact that thousands of German Jews had been
killed at the front and that thousands of French, English and American Jews had been
killed too. It never occurred to him either that all those Jews were internationally killing
themselves apparently unaware of a plan of a jewish conspiracy to take over the world
through the means of war. Under their dogmatic magma, Hitler's ideas were simple, let
say simplistic. Or he did not care, carried away by his hatred of the Jews: even the Head
of the Jewish War Veterans Bund was once incarcerated without any formal charges and
given the usual treatment of beating and trashing.
Step by step, the socialist ideas of Hitler were melt in a pot where one could find
according to the menu of the day:
* personal visions
* undigested thoughts from Shopenhauer, Marx, Engels
* misunderstood quotes from the Bible
* childhood frustrations
* furious and nostalgic gesticulations inspired by Wagner's music
* stupid theosophic rantings inspired by Madame Blavatsky and Dietrich Eckart
* borrowed concepts from Henry Ford
* notions of "living space" taken from Karl Haushofer (1)
* occult and supremacist ideas influenced by hours of reading the magazine Osara
published by von Lebenfels and von List writings at an occult bookshop owned by a man
named Ernst Pretzche in Vienne
* Pan-German ideas borrowed from the anti-semite and anti-catholic member of the
Austrian Parliament Georg von Schönerer
* megalomaniac visions of the ThuleGesellschaft which he joined in 1919(2)
* simplistic economic ideas on allocation of resources taken from Gottfried Feder (3)
The whole dinner being served with a hitlerite sauce upheld by an fascinating oratory
talent and a proverbial memory.
But this talent subdued his comrades at the front, impressed his officers after the war
and conquered the German lower middle-class crowds of the 20s and 30s. Even if the
real Socialists of the time, the Social-Democrats, judged Hitler for what he was, a bag of
wind, German lower middle-classes were hooked and the German elites -except for a
few- eager to facilitate his access to power which he did in the most democratic way
through universal suffrage.
When he became powerful enough to pay his people lip service, to disguise his cruelty
under the mask of Nazional-Socialist policies, to use his triumphing vanity as guide of
the German"Volk", then there was nothing more on his road to prevent him to think he
had found the secret martingale of power, the one that would allow him to achieve all his
frustrated dreams.
Mein Kampf was edited by a Jesuit Father Staempfle
Made in Germany out of the mind of a sick man, Nazism was nothing but a shock therapy
whose final goal was the elimination of all forms of opposition to the ideas of the "great"
madman, aka der Fuhrer. It was an incredible collective delusion. It is hardly believable
that it was able to do so much harm to so many.
One quotation sums him up. In 1943, after the collapse of the German army at Stalingrad
and the loss of a quarter million good German soldiers, he told his Generals :"Let this
much be understood, nothing shocks me, whaterver may happen. Some may think me
heartless to insist on fighting to the last man just because the enemy will also let more
blood that way, rather than undertake this maneuver or that. It has nothing to do with
heartlessness, only with my realization and conviction that this is not the action to be
taken... It is a matter of supreme indifference to me what posterity may think of me.."
In conclusion, Hitler was a monster under the disguise of pan-germanism (National)
and social preoccupations (Socialism). People who still want to see in him a precursor
of modern Socialism understand nothing to the complex personality of the Fuhrer.
Home
(1) A university professor and director of the Munich Institute of Geopolitics. In Berlin,
Haushofer had founded the Luminous Lodge or the Vril Society. The lodge's objective
was to explore the origins of the Aryan race and to perform exercises in concentration to
awaken the forces of "Vril", the Superman. The Vril Society -which formed shortly before
the Nazis came to power- believed they had secret knowledge that would enable them to
change their race and become equals of the men hidden in the bowels of the Earth.
(2) The Thule Society (Thule Gesselschaft), the real inspiration of Nazism, was founded
in 1918 in Munich, as an off-shot itself of the Germanen Order, under the initiative of a
Baron Rudolf Freiherr von Sebottendorf. According to Dr. Walter Johannes Stein, the
Thule was a "Society of Assassins." It held secret courts and condemned people to
death. It is likely that many victims murdered by the District Command had been
condemned earlier in the secret courts of the Thule. Many prominent Germans
supported this violence and were documented members of the Thule. For example, the
Police President of Munich, Franz Gurtner, was a reported member of the innermost
circle of the Thule. He later became Minister of Justice of the Third Reich. Among its
most important members were also Max Amann, Anton Drexler, Dietrich Eckart, Hans
Frank, Rudolf Hess, Alfred Rosenberg, Gottfried Feder, and others who later became
Nazi leaders. Adolf Hitler belonged to the Society as an "associate" or "visiting brother."
(3) Member of the D.A.P., Feder was an engineer who fancied himself as an economist.
He published in 1919 his Manifesto on Breaking the Shackles of Interest where he
concocted the theory that there were 2 sorts of capital: the international and jewish
capital, exploitive and loan capital that was bad, and the national, purely German capital,
productive that was good. Hitler took his mustache and his economic views from Feder
and then dropped the man after his election in 1933. He kept the mustache.
(4) Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei became known as "Nazi" party after
the italian press used to refer to it as the Nazionale Socialisti or Nazis. The american
and english press picked up, then the party itself. Others say that it is the making of a
German journalist who made fun of National-Socialist (Naso) into Nazi, a Bavarian slang
word that means stupid.
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Von Schoenerer was
a leading influence in
Hitler's development
of an intellectualized
anti-semitism
a leading influence in
Hitler's development
of an intellectualized
anti-semitism
Mein Kampf in Arabic is
still a huge success in
the Middle East
still a huge success in
the Middle East
Hitler liked nothing more than
parading from a tribune and
making of one of those speeches
that inflamed the crowds
parading from a tribune and
making of one of those speeches
that inflamed the crowds
| Porttrait of Rosa Luxembourg by an Austrian artist |
| FLEDGING NAZI 1920-1923 |
A good although rose-coloured testimony about Hitler's personality -and
probably the only one- is the book written after WWII by Kubizek ("Adolf
Hitler, Mein Jugendfreund") although also here there are grounds for
suspicion that material has been hugely edited if not invented. This book
has long been popular with Hitler's apologists and sympathisers, for its
unusually rose-coloured portrait of the Fuehrer as a young man, but fiercely
attacked by other authors and historians. The Hitler described in 'Young
Hitler' is no vicious madman, hardly even an anti-Semite, but rather an
intelligent aesthete and visionary, a patriot who showed unusual
leadership qualities from a young age. Kubizek was faithful to his friend
and certainly to his own early vision of Hitler. He was doubtless an excellent
man, sweet, indulgent and charitable. It took all those qualities to bear a
man like young Adolf Hitler, you had to be a true Christian.
probably the only one- is the book written after WWII by Kubizek ("Adolf
Hitler, Mein Jugendfreund") although also here there are grounds for
suspicion that material has been hugely edited if not invented. This book
has long been popular with Hitler's apologists and sympathisers, for its
unusually rose-coloured portrait of the Fuehrer as a young man, but fiercely
attacked by other authors and historians. The Hitler described in 'Young
Hitler' is no vicious madman, hardly even an anti-Semite, but rather an
intelligent aesthete and visionary, a patriot who showed unusual
leadership qualities from a young age. Kubizek was faithful to his friend
and certainly to his own early vision of Hitler. He was doubtless an excellent
man, sweet, indulgent and charitable. It took all those qualities to bear a
man like young Adolf Hitler, you had to be a true Christian.
In this book, he said that a Jewish hooker gave Hitler syphilis, an assertion
that was denied by a Wassermann test in 1940. According to Franz Jetzinger
who published a biography of Hitler in 1956 the "Myth of Hitler" was a web of
lies. In 1938, a first version of Hitler's life in Vienna by the same Greiner was
pulped by the NSDAP who declined his application to membership.
Personally, I discard Greiner's testimony as being influenced by after-events:
nobody in 1947 who wanted to sell a book about Hitler would have dared to
paint a rosy picture of "der Fuehrer". Kubizek, in all ingenuity, did in 1953 and it
is why his testimony might be considered as more valuable even if "Young
Hitler" was probably written or edited by a ghost as Kubizek always
complained to be a poor writer.
| "Entarte Musik" like "cabaret music" and surrealist painting were considered by Hitler as decadent and reprehensible. |
| As a vibrant orator, trained by jewish fortune teller Erik Jan Hanussen, alias Herman Steinschneider who became the first "honorary Aryan" of the NSDAP, Hitler often used very suggestive gestures to convince his people that the great orgasm was near. Hanussen was allegedly murdered by the Nazis in 1933. |
The incredible story of the "beetle"
In 1933, on the Berlin Motor show, Adolf Hitler announced his plans to produce a small car for the German people.
When Porsche heard that Hitler shared his dream of a popular affordable car, he quickly arranged a meeting with
him to find a business partner. At the meeting Hitler was very optimistic but had a few demands before to sign a
contract. These were:
* the car should be able to carry two adults and three children
* It should have a cruising speed of 100 kmph
* the fuel consumption should not exceed 8 liters per 100 km
* the engine had to be air cooled (which was the idea of Porsche since long)
* the car should also be able to carry three soldiers and a machine gun
* the price should be less than 1,000 RM.
Three prototypes were eventually delivered in October 1936 and were called "W1". That same year GeZuVor
(Gesellschaft Zur Vorbereitung des Deutschen Volkswagen, GmbH) was founded and became responsible for the
production of the car. The GeZuVor was part of DAF (Deutsches Arbeiter Front) which was an organization receiving
contributions from all workers and organized all kinds of family activities. A section called KDF (Kraft Durch Freude)
got the task of selling the car now referred to as "KDF wagens". The way you were supposed to become an owner
of a KDF wagen was unique. The idea was to save for it by buying a 5 RM stamp each month and when you had
enough of stamps (200) the car would be delivered. But when the war broke out all plans of production were halted
and a total of 337.000 people who had been saving for a car got cheated. Nobody got a car except some high Nazi
dignitaries. The workers were not compensated until 1961 after a lawsuit in a German court. A settlement was
reach where they either got a check of 100 DM or a 600 DM discount when buying a new bug. Such was Hitler's
socialism: a land of broken promises more or less like its Soviet counterpart.
In 1933, on the Berlin Motor show, Adolf Hitler announced his plans to produce a small car for the German people.
When Porsche heard that Hitler shared his dream of a popular affordable car, he quickly arranged a meeting with
him to find a business partner. At the meeting Hitler was very optimistic but had a few demands before to sign a
contract. These were:
* the car should be able to carry two adults and three children
* It should have a cruising speed of 100 kmph
* the fuel consumption should not exceed 8 liters per 100 km
* the engine had to be air cooled (which was the idea of Porsche since long)
* the car should also be able to carry three soldiers and a machine gun
* the price should be less than 1,000 RM.
Three prototypes were eventually delivered in October 1936 and were called "W1". That same year GeZuVor
(Gesellschaft Zur Vorbereitung des Deutschen Volkswagen, GmbH) was founded and became responsible for the
production of the car. The GeZuVor was part of DAF (Deutsches Arbeiter Front) which was an organization receiving
contributions from all workers and organized all kinds of family activities. A section called KDF (Kraft Durch Freude)
got the task of selling the car now referred to as "KDF wagens". The way you were supposed to become an owner
of a KDF wagen was unique. The idea was to save for it by buying a 5 RM stamp each month and when you had
enough of stamps (200) the car would be delivered. But when the war broke out all plans of production were halted
and a total of 337.000 people who had been saving for a car got cheated. Nobody got a car except some high Nazi
dignitaries. The workers were not compensated until 1961 after a lawsuit in a German court. A settlement was
reach where they either got a check of 100 DM or a 600 DM discount when buying a new bug. Such was Hitler's
socialism: a land of broken promises more or less like its Soviet counterpart.
All he had to do then was to develop the NSDAP (4), to promote
subservient, ambitious, megalomaniac, ready-to-all servants, like
Goebbels, Goering, Heydrich, Himmler and Hess, and mutate Hitlerian
pseudo-philosophy into Nazism out a slight of hand. Then to the
suggestion of Gregor Strasser he decided to put all this glibish talk into a
book that he pompuously titled "Mein Kampf" (My Fight) whose original
version was a collection of rambling, almost incoherent expressions of
political commonplaces : there were passages taken from Houston
Chamberlain and Lagarde, men whom Dietrich Eckhart used to quote in
his writing and conversations. It was so poor and ridiculous that it had to be
completely edited by a religious named Father Staempfle, a priest of
brilliant intellectual attainment who twice rewrote it for Hitler, making it
readable and coherent. Father Staempfle was murdered on the Night of the
Long Knives.
subservient, ambitious, megalomaniac, ready-to-all servants, like
Goebbels, Goering, Heydrich, Himmler and Hess, and mutate Hitlerian
pseudo-philosophy into Nazism out a slight of hand. Then to the
suggestion of Gregor Strasser he decided to put all this glibish talk into a
book that he pompuously titled "Mein Kampf" (My Fight) whose original
version was a collection of rambling, almost incoherent expressions of
political commonplaces : there were passages taken from Houston
Chamberlain and Lagarde, men whom Dietrich Eckhart used to quote in
his writing and conversations. It was so poor and ridiculous that it had to be
completely edited by a religious named Father Staempfle, a priest of
brilliant intellectual attainment who twice rewrote it for Hitler, making it
readable and coherent. Father Staempfle was murdered on the Night of the
Long Knives.
