Author: Ian Kershaw
Category: Nonfiction
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With Hanisch’s disappearance, Hitler’s life recedes into near obscurity for two years or so. When he next comes into view, in 1912–13, he is still in residence in the Men’s Home, now a well-established member of the community, and a central figure among his own group – the ‘intelligentsia’ who occupied the writing-room. He was by now well over the depths of degradation he experienced in 1909 in the doss-house, even if continuing to drift aimlessly. He could earn a modest income from the sale of his pictures of the Karlskirche and other scenes of ‘Old Vienna’. His outgoings were low, since he lived so frugally. His living costs in the Men’s Home were extremely modest: he ate cheaply, did not drink, smoked a cigarette only rarely, and had as his only luxury the occasional purchase of a standing-place at the theatre or opera (about which he would then regale the writing-room ‘intellectuals’ for hours). Descriptions of his appearance at this time are contradictory. A fellow resident in the Men’s Home in 1912 later described Hitler as shabbily dressed and unkempt, wearing a long greyish coat, worn at the sleeves, and battered old hat, trousers full of holes, and shoes stuffed with paper. He still had shoulder-length hair and a ragged beard. This is compatible with the description given by Hanisch which, though not precisely dated, appears from the context to refer to 1909–10. On the other hand, according to Jacob Altenberg, one of his Jewish art dealers, in the later phase at least in the Men’s Home Hitler was clean-shaven, took care to keep his hair cut, and wore clothes which, though old and worn, were kept neat. Given what Kubizek wrote about Hitler’s fussiness about personal hygiene when they were together in 1908, and what was later little short of a cleanliness fetishism, Altenberg’s testimony rings truer than that of the anonymous acquaintance for the final period in Meldemannstraße.
But, whatever his appearance, Hitler was scarcely enjoying the lifestyle of a man who had come by a substantial windfall – what would have amounted to a king’s ransom for someone living in a men’s hostel. Yet this is what was long believed. It was suggested – though based on guesswork, not genuine evidence – that towards the end of 1910 Hitler had become the recipient of a sizeable sum, perhaps as much as 3,800 Kronen, which represented the life-savings of his Aunt Johanna. Post-war inquiries indicated that this was the amount withdrawn from her savings account by Johanna on 1 December 1910, some four months before she died, leaving no will. The suspicion was that the large sum had gone to Adolf. This feeling was enhanced by the fact that his half-sister Angela, still looking after his sister Paula, soon afterwards, in 1911, staked a claim to the whole of the orphan’s pension, still at that time divided equally between the two children. Adolf who, ‘on account of his training as an artist had received substantial sums from his aunt, Johanna Pölzl’, conceded that he was in a position to maintain himself, and was forced to concede the 25 Kronen a month which he had up to then received from his guardian. But, as we have already noted, the household account-book of the Hitler family makes plain that Adolf, alongside smaller gifts from ‘Hanitante’, received from her a loan – amounting in reality to a gift – of 924 Kronen, probably in 1907 and providing him with the material basis of his first, relatively comfortable, year in Vienna. Whatever became of Aunt Johanna’s money in December 1910, there is not the slightest indication that it went to Hitler. And the loss of the 25 Kronen a month orphan’s pension would have amounted to a serious dent in his income.
Though his life had stabilized while he had been in the Men’s Home, during the time he had been trafficking in paintings, Hitler seems to have remained unsettled. Karl Honisch – keen to distance himself from his near-namesake Hanisch, of whom he had heard nothing good – knew Hitler in 1913. Honisch described him as slight in build, poorly nourished, with hollow cheeks, dark hair flopping in his face, and wearing shabby clothes. Hitler was rarely absent from the Home and sat each day in the same corner of the writing-room near the window, drawing and painting on a long oak-table. This was known as his place, and any newcomer venturing to take it was rapidly reminded by the other inmates that ‘this place is taken. Herr Hitler sits there.’ Among the writing-room regulars, Hitler was seen as a somewhat unusual, artistic type. He himself wrote later: ‘I believe that those who knew me in those days took me for an eccentric.’ But, other than his painting skills, no one imagined he had any special talents. Though well regarded, he had a way, noted Honisch, of keeping his distance from the others and ‘not letting anyone come too close’. He could be withdrawn, sunk in a book or his own thoughts. But he was known to have a quick temper. This could flare up at any time, particularly in the frequent political debates that took place. Hitler’s strong views on politics were plain to all. He would often sit quietly when a discussion started up, putting in the odd word here or there but otherwise carrying on with his drawing. If he took exception to something said, however, he would jump up from his place, hurling his brush or pencil on the table, and heatedly and forcefully make himself felt before, on occasion, breaking off in mid-flow and with a wave of resignation at the incomprehension of his comrades, taking up his drawing again. Two subjects above all roused his aggression: the Jesuits and the ‘Reds’. No mention was made of tirades against the Jews.
The criticism of the ‘Jesuits’ suggests that some embers of his former enthusiasm for Schönerer’s vehement anti-Catholicism were still warm, though the Schönerer movement had by this time effectively collapsed. His hatred for the Social Democrats was also long established by this time. His own version in Mein Kampf of the emergence of this hatred tells the story – almost certainly fictional – of the victimization and personal threats he allegedly experienced, on account of his rejection of their political views and refusal to join a trades union, at the hands of Social Democrat workers when he was employed for a short time on a building site.
There is, in fact, no need to look beyond the strength of Hitler’s pan-German nationalism as an explanation of his detestation of the internationalism of the Social Democrats. The radical nationalist propaganda of Franz Stein’s pan-German ‘working-class movement’, with its repeated shrill attacks on ‘social democratic bestialities’ and ‘red terror’, and its boundless agitation against Czech workers, was the type of ‘socialism’ soaked up by Hitler. A more underlying source of the hatred most likely lay in Hitler’s pronounced sense of social and cultural superiority towards the working class that Social Democracy represented. ‘I do not know what horrified me most at that time,’ he later wrote of his contact with those of the ‘lower classes’: ‘the economic misery of my companions, their moral and ethical coarseness, or the low level of their intellectual development.’
Though Hitler’s account of his first encounter with Social Democrats is probably apocryphal, status-consciousness runs through it, not least in his comment that at that time ‘my clothing was still more or less in order, my speech cultivated, and my manner reserved’. Given such status-consciousness, the level of degradation he must have felt in 1909–10 when the threat of social decline into the proletariat for a time became dire reality can be readily imagined. But far from eliciting any solidarity with the ideals of the working-class movement, this merely sharpened his antagonism towards it. Not social and political theories, but survival, struggle, and ‘every man for himself’ marked the philosophy of the doss-house.
Hitler went on in Mein Kampf to stress the hard struggle for existence of the ‘upstart’, who had risen ‘by his own efforts from his previous position in life to a higher one’, that ‘kills all pity’ and destroys ‘feeling for the misery of those who have remained behind’. This puts into context his professed interest in ‘the social question’ while he was in Vienna. His ingrained sense of superiority meant that, far from arousing sympathy for the destitute and the disadvantaged, the ‘social question’ for him amounted to a search for scapegoats to explain his own social decline and degradation. ‘By drawing me within its sphere of suffering,’ the ‘social question’, he wrote, ‘did not seem to invite me to “study”, but to experience it in my own ski
n.’
By the end of his Vienna period, it is unlikely that Hitler’s detestation of Social Democracy, firmly established though it was, had gone much beyond that which had been current in Schönerer’s pan-German nationalism – apart from the additional radicality deriving from his own bitter first-hand experiences of the misery and degradation that enhanced his utter rejection of international socialism as a solution. That his hatred of Social Democracy had already by this date, as Hitler claimed in Mein Kampf, married with a racial theory of antisemitism to give him a distinctive ‘world-view’ which remained thereafter unchanged, can be discounted.
IV
Why and when did Hitler become the fixated, pathological antisemite known from the writing of his first political tract in 1919 down to the writing of his testament in the Berlin bunker in 1945? Since his paranoid hatred was to shape policies that culminated in the killing of millions of Jews, this is self-evidently an important question. The answer is, however, less clear than we should like. In truth, we do not know for certain why, or even when, Hitler turned into a manic and obsessive antisemite.
Hitler’s own version is laid out in some well-known and striking passages in Mein Kampf. According to this, he had not been an antisemite in Linz. On coming to Vienna, he had at first been alienated by the antisemitic press there. But the obsequiousness of the mainstream press in its treatment of the Habsburg court and its vilification of the German Kaiser gradually led him to the ‘more decent’ and ‘more appetizing’ line taken in the antisemitic paper the Deutsches Volksblatt. Growing admiration for Karl Lueger – ‘the greatest German mayor of all times’ – helped to change his attitude towards the Jews – ‘my greatest transformation of all’ – and within two years (or in another account a single year) the transformation was complete. Hitler highlights, however, a single episode which opened his eyes to ‘the Jewish Question’.
Once, as I was strolling through the Inner City, I suddenly encountered an apparition in a black caftan and black hair locks. Is this a Jew? was my first thought.
For, to be sure, they had not looked like that in Linz. I observed the man furtively and cautiously, but the longer I stared at this foreign face, scrutinizing feature for feature, the more my first question assumed a new form:
Is this a German?
Following this encounter, Hitler continued, he started to buy antisemitic pamphlets. He was now able to see that Jews ‘were not Germans of a special religion, but a people in themselves’. Vienna now appeared in a different light. ‘Wherever I went, I began to see Jews, and the more I saw, the more sharply they became distinguished in my eyes from the rest of humanity.’
Now, to stay with his own account, his revulsion rapidly grew. The language Hitler uses in these pages of Mein Kampf betrays a morbid fear of uncleanliness, dirt, and disease – all of which he associated with Jews. He also quickly formed his newly-found hatred into a conspiracy theory. He now linked the Jews with every evil he perceived: the liberal press, cultural life, prostitution, and – most significant of all – identified them as the leading force in Social Democracy. At this, ‘the scales dropped from my eyes’. Everything connected with Social Democracy – party leaders, Reichsrat deputies, trade union secretaries, and the Marxist press that he devoured with loathing – now seemed to him to be Jewish. But this ‘recognition’, he wrote, gave him great satisfaction. His already existent hatred of Social Democracy, that party’s antinationalism, now fell into place: its leadership was ‘almost exclusively in the hands of a foreign people’. ‘Only now,’ Hitler remarked, ‘did I become thoroughly acquainted with the seducer of our people.’ He had linked Marxism and antisemitism through what he called ‘the Jewish doctrine of Marxism’.
It is a graphic account. But it is not corroborated by the other sources that cast light on Hitler’s time in Vienna. Indeed, in some respects it is directly at variance with them. It is generally accepted that, for all the problems with the autobiographical parts of Mein Kampf, Hitler was indeed converted to manic racial antisemitism while in Vienna. But the available evidence, beyond Hitler’s own words, offers little to confirm that view. Interpretation rests ultimately on the balance of probabilities.
Kubizek claimed Hitler was already an antisemite before leaving Linz. In contrast to Hitler’s assertion that his father had ‘cosmopolitan views’ and would have regarded antisemitism as ‘cultural backwardness’, Kubizek stated that Alois’s regular drinking cronies in Leonding were Schönerer supporters and that he himself was certainly therefore anti-Jewish. He pointed also to the openly antisemitic teachers Hitler encountered in the Realschule. He allegedly recalled, too, that Adolf had said to him one day, as they passed the small synagogue: ‘That doesn’t belong in Linz.’ For Kubizek, Vienna had made Hitler’s antisemitism more radical. But it had not created it. In his opinion, Hitler had gone to Vienna ‘already as a pronounced antisemite’. Kubizek went on to recount one or two episodes of Hitler’s aversion to Jews during the time they were together in Vienna. He claimed an encounter with a Galician Jew was the caftan story of Mein Kampf. But this, and a purported visit to a synagogue in which Hitler took Kubizek along to witness a Jewish wedding, have the appearance of an outright fabrication. Palpably false is Kubizek’s assertion that Hitler joined the Antisemitenbund (Antisemitic League) during the months in 1908 that the friends were together in Vienna. There was no such organization in Austria-Hungary before 1918.
In fact, Kubizek is generally unconvincing in the passages devoted to the early manifestations of Hitler’s antisemitism. These are among the least trustworthy sections of his account – partly drawing on Mein Kampf, partly inventing episodes which were not present in the original draft version of his recollections, and in places demonstrably incorrect. Kubizek was keen to distance himself in his post-war memoirs from the radical views of his friend on the ‘Jewish Question’. It suited him to emphasize that Hitler had from Linz days hated the Jews. His suggestion that Hitler’s father (whom he had not known) had been a pronounced antisemite is probably incorrect. Alois Hitler’s own more moderate form of pan-Germanism had differed from that of the Schönerer movement in its continued allegiance to the Emperor of Austria and accorded with the line adopted by the dominant party in Upper Austria, the Deutsche Volkspartei (German People’s Party), which admitted Jews to membership. The vehemently antisemitic as well as radical German nationalist Schönerer movement certainly had a strong following in and around Linz, and no doubt included some at least of Hitler’s teachers among its supporters. But antisemitism seems to have been relatively unimportant in his school compared with the antagonism towards the Czechs. Hitler’s own later recollection was probably in this respect not inaccurate, when he told Albert Speer that he had become aware of the ‘nationalities problem’ – by which he meant vehement hostility towards the Czechs – at school, but the ‘danger of Jewry’ had only been made plain to him in Vienna.
The young Hitler, himself taken while still in Linz by Schönerer’s ideas, could scarcely have missed the emphatic racial antisemitism which was so integral to them. But for the Schönerer supporters in the Linz of Hitler’s day, antisemitism appears to have been a subdominant theme in the cacophony of anti-Czech clamour and trumpeted Germanomania. It certainly did not prevent Hitler’s warm expressions of gratitude in postcards and the present of one of his watercolours to Dr Bloch, the Jewish physician who had treated his mother in her last illness. The deep, visceral hatred of his later antisemitism was of a different order altogether. That was certainly not present in his Linz years.
There is no evidence that Hitler was distinctively antisemitic by the time he parted company with Kubizek in the summer of 1908. Hitler himself claimed that he became an antisemite within two years of arriving in Vienna. Could, then, the transformation be placed in the year he spent, mainly in Felberstraße, between leaving Kubizek and becoming a vagrant? The testimony of Lanz von Liebenfels would fit this chronology. But we have seen that this is of highly doubtful value. Hitler’s
descent into abject poverty in autumn 1909 might seem an obvious time to search for a scapegoat and find it in the figure of the Jew. But he had the opportunity less then than at any other time in Vienna to ‘read up’ on the subject, as he claimed in Mein Kampf.
Not only that: Reinhold Hanisch, his close companion over the following months, was adamant that Hitler ‘in those days was by no means a Jew hater. He became one afterwards.’ Hanisch emphasized Hitler’s Jewish friends and contacts in the Men’s Home to demonstrate the point. A one-eyed locksmith called Robinsohn spared Hitler some small change to help him out financially from time to time. (The man’s name was actually Simon Robinson, traceable in the Men’s Home in 1912–13.) Josef Neumann, as we have seen, became, as Hanisch put it, ‘a real friend’ to Hitler. He was said to have ‘liked Hitler very much’ and to have been ‘of course highly esteemed’ by him. A postcard salesman, Siegfried Löffner (misnamed Loeffler by Hanisch), was also ‘one of Hitler’s circle of acquaintances’, and, as we remarked, took sides with him in the acrimonious conflict with Hanisch in 1910. Hitler preferred, as we observed, to sell his pictures to Jewish dealers, and one of them, Jacob Altenberg, subsequently spoke well of the business relationship they had conducted. Hanisch’s testimony finds confirmation in the later comment of the anonymous resident of the Men’s Home in the spring of 1912, that ‘Hitler got along exceptionally well with Jews, and said at one time that they were a clever people who stick together better than the Germans do’.
The three years that Hitler spent in the Men’s Home certainly gave him every opportunity to pore over antisemitic newpapers, pamphlets, and cheap literature. But, leaving aside the fact that the chronology no longer matches Hitler’s own assertion of a transformation within two years of arriving in Vienna, Karl Honisch, we saw, makes a point of emphasizing Hitler’s strong views on ‘Jesuits’ and the ‘Reds’, though makes no mention at all of any hatred of Jews. Hitler certainly joined in talk about the Jews in the Men’s Home. But his standpoint was, according to Hanisch’s account, by no means negative. Hanisch has Hitler admiring the Jews for their resistance to persecution, praising Heine’s poetry and the music of Mendelssohn and Offenbach, expressing the view that the Jews were the first civilized nation in that they had abandoned polytheism for belief in one God, blaming Christians more than Jews for usury, and dismissing the stock-in-trade antisemitic charge of Jewish ritual murder as nonsense. Only Josef Greiner, of those who claimed to have witnessed Hitler at first hand in the Men’s Home, speaks of him as a fanatical Jew-hater in that period. But, as we have noted, Greiner’s testimony is worthless.