1924: The Year That Made Hitler (26 page)

Sometime in April or early May, he began typing on the same old typewriter he had used before his trial:

“It seems to me a felicitous omen that my cradle.…”

Hitler stopped. Throwing the carriage back, he started over:

“Today it seems to me a happy omen that my cradle… stood in Braunau [Hitler’s birthplace]. This little town lies on the border of the two German states whose reunification we of the younger generation have made into a truly noble life’s goal.” In something close to that form, those words would become the opening paragraph of Hitler’s famous, infamous book,
Mein Kampf.

Hitler wrote at least five pages in this first stab at his book. The
original typescripts disappeared at the end of World War II from his Berchtesgaden retreat, taken by invading French soldiers. Decades later, they were found in a private U.S. collection. Carefully analyzed by scholars and certified by forensic experts for handwriting, typescript, and paper, the pages were described in detail in a 2009 article in the Munich-based
Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte
(Quarterly Journal of Contemporary History) by Florian Beierl and Othmar Plöckinger.
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Those first five pages turned out to be Hitler’s original typescripts of what appeared in
Mein Kampf
’s opening chapter, entitled “Im Elternhaus” (“In the House of My Parents”).

Hitler by now knew he was on a track he liked. He was convinced that he had a book in him—at least one, maybe more. He also thought he could write a book quickly. By early May, just five weeks after returning to prison, he was talking about the work as if it already existed. In a May 5 letter to Siegfried Wagner (son of Richard), Hitler noted that he was “finally writing a thorough reckoning with the men who enthusiastically shouted ‘Hurray!’ on November 9 [1923]”—but who had then turned coat and denounced the putsch as “an insane undertaking.” Hitler was, of course, still obsessed with settling scores with Kahr, Lossow, and Seisser. His book’s working title was a vindictive mouthful:
Four-and-a-Half Years of Struggle Against Lies, Stupidity, and Cowardice: A Reckoning.

With the book still mostly a gleam in Hitler’s eye, a small bidding war broke out. Clearly, a tell-all from the triumphant convict of the high treason trial, who knew so much about the questionable dealings of the Bavarian triumvirate and the Bavarian Reichswehr, could be a hot property. Max Amann, Hitler’s former sergeant and now business manager of the temporarily banned
Völkischer Beobachter,
had major publishing ambitions (he would later control more than half of all German publishing interests). As the head of Eher Verlag—essentially the Nazi Party publishing house—he commissioned market
research on the viability of a Hitler book. The response he received was astonishing: “If the publisher issues a limited collector’s edition of only 500 copies of a work by Hitler with special treatment [laid paper and semi-leather binding], each numbered and signed by Mr. Hitler, it would have a collector’s value of at least 500 marks each,” wrote the assessor.
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Amann wanted Hitler’s book, but he was short of funds—the book market was very weak, he said. And Hitler seemed interested in the possibilities of reaching beyond the Nazi-leaning market. He entertained overtures from another
völkisch
publisher, the Grossdeutscher Ringverlag. The Ringverlag (Ring Publishers) seems to have made a serious run at acquiring Hitler’s book. Its editor, its business manager, and one of its co-owners paid Hitler a series of five visits beginning in April. Ernst Hanfstaengl also visited five times that month; he wanted to publish Hitler’s book, he claimed, but could not persuade his brother, who controlled the family publishing company. In the end, for reasons unknown, Hitler spurned Ring Publishers and instead gave his book to Amann. While there were later claims of other publishers—such as Ernst Boepple’s Deutscher Volksverlag—and even foreign publishers making serious offers to Hitler, no evidence has been found to support these statements.
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Nor is there any known indication of interest by Hitler’s conservative publishing friends—Julius Lehmann or Hugo Bruckmann. In any case, no matter what counter-offers may have materialized, Hitler clearly made the right choice: by keeping his book in the Nazi family, he and Amann both became very rich.
Mein Kampf
became the foundation of Amann’s vast publishing enterprise and of Hitler’s personal fortune. All the royalties from the book went into his personal account, not that of the Nazi Party.

Hitler had a publisher. By mid-May, he was telling visitors from Salzburg (Austria) that his book “would appear soon.”
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Signaling
his intention to settle into a writing routine, Hitler had ordered a custom-made worktable from a Landsberg carpenter, Sebastian Springer. On May 8, Springer tendered a bill for fifteen marks for a “small typing table, stained brown and varnished.”
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A room, a table, peace and quiet, and lots of time. The only other thing a writer could want was a new typewriter. In yet another of the turns of fortune that seemed to befall Hitler just when he needed them, a guardian angel again descended into his life. It was Helene Bechstein, the wife of the famed Berlin piano builder, who arrived for a visit “in a big car with a liveried chauffeur” on May 15 with her husband and daughter in tow.
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All that is known about that first visit is that the
grande dame
with the private suite at Munich’s Four Seasons Hotel got into a high snit with the prison guards. She was upset that her gift package for Hitler had to be inspected for security in the customary way. Angrily ripping open the package, Frau Bechstein sent “pralines of the finest sort” flying all over the room, screaming: “There! See if you can find a machine gun in there!”
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Helene Bechstein returned five more times in the next two weeks. Already enamored of Hitler and a contributor to Nazi Party coffers at that time, she is considered to have been the probable donor of the next felicitous addition to Hitler’s writing setup, a brand-new, American-made Remington portable typewriter, black with white keys,
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built just one month before in New York, according to its serial number.
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The shiny little Remington was an appropriate complement to Hitler’s narrow room with its small, new typing table. Whatever its provenance, the Remington portable is the machine on which Hitler wrote almost the entire first volume of
Mein Kampf
(in the beginning, he planned only one volume).

Hitler began using his new machine in a surprisingly systematic way, given his generally unsystematic and chaotic style. Having already drafted the autobiographical opener to his book on the older
German typewriter, Hitler now set about writing an outline for the rest of the book on his Remington. He was using a new, higher quality paper at this point, apparently Nazi Party letterhead; each page had a swastika emblazoned on the upper left-hand corner. (Researchers Beierl and Plöckinger suggest that Helene Bechstein may have also brought the paper to Hitler, implying that the Bechsteins stopped by the Munich party headquarters on their way to Landsberg or were visited in their hotel by a party representative.)

The resulting outline, an eighteen-page document, bristled with such lines as “settlement policy can only happen in Europe… demands immediate war” and “renounce international trade and colonies, renounce a naval war fleet.” Another attention grabber: “I was never a pacifist.” The outline was logical and structured, built around an autobiographical approach to telling his political story and selling his ideological message. Most surprisingly, Hitler actually followed the outline, with many digressions, while writing his book.

By late May and early June Hitler was filling the fortress building with the clackety-clack of his new typewriter, often starting as early as five in the morning, reported a new prison inmate, Rudolf Hess. “At five o’clock, I make a cup of tea for Hitler (who is working on his book) and for me,” reported Hess in a letter home.
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Hitler also frequently paid an extra fee to keep his room lights on for two hours after the 10 p.m. curfew. Making notes and drafting sections in pencil, Hitler threw rejected pages into his trash can, which guards dutifully retrieved each morning. “From Hitler’s barely legible handwriting, we could tell it was something political,” wrote Hemmrich. “At first, we took the loose sheets to the censor. But since he would have to present the finished work to the censors when leaving the
prison, we were ordered just to destroy the [rejected] pages. I had the contents of the trash can thrown into the stove.”
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Though Hitler was still in the drafting stage, in mid-June Amann went so far as to produce a four-page brochure announcing a book “of approximately four hundred pages,” still including Hitler’s long, vengeful title about “lies, stupidity, and cowardice.” A formal photo of Hitler, mustache prominent, hair slicked back, nearly filled the first page. Stories about the brochure, along with ads for the coming book (“in July”) began appearing in some
völkisch
newspapers. One of them, the Nuremberg
Völkisches Echo,
ran a large front-page story headlined, “Hitler’s Sacrifice!” Two days later the newspaper breathlessly reported rumors of a press run of fifty thousand copies of Hitler’s (still unwritten) book, which the paper was already calling “the bible” of the
völkisch
movement.
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Amann had certainly succeeded in firing up interest. But, so far, there was no book.

CHAPTER TEN

The Boss

“No throwing cigarettes into the flowerpots.”

—
HANS KALLENBACH, “TEN COMMANDMENTS FOR DECENCY AND ORDER
”

“In the evenings, Hitler frequently read to his fellow prisoners from his work in progress. They gathered around him like apostles on the Mount of Olives and hung on his words.” Prison guard Hemmrich could report this scene because he, along with some of the other prison personnel, had begun eavesdropping on Hitler’s unofficial lecture series in the fortress dayrooms. As Hitler was plunging ahead with his book, Landsberg Prison had come to life.

After a month of living as a threesome, Hitler, Kriebel, and Weber now had some company. Forty members of the Hitler Shock Troop—those arrested for violence and hostage-taking during Hitler’s putsch—had been tried in Munich. Despite its forty defendants, the proceeding against them was called “the little Hitler trial” by the newspapers to distinguish it from the “big” one that
had tried the leader himself. The “little” trial took only five days; all the Shock Troops were convicted on May 3 of being accessories to high treason and sentenced to an average of fifteen months in fortress arrest—honorable imprisonment, just like Hitler’s. Yet they, too, enjoyed the prospect of early parole if they exhibited good behavior.

In the first week of May, the convicted men began filtering into the prison, filling rooms on the fortress building’s first floor and overflowing into specially segregated quarters in the main prison. Though the rooms in the main prison were darker and cut off from the social atmosphere of the fortress building, each prisoner sent into the main building received two cells, one as his “sitting room” and the other for sleeping. Still, some prisoners—like Hermann Fobke, the law student—opted to move into a crowded, large room in the fortress building (“with five other guys,” he wrote to a friend) rather than live in the main prison.
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Others had to double up in the single rooms—it was “like being inside a submarine,” noted one prisoner.
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There was one exception to this arrangement. Emil Maurice, Hitler’s sometime chauffeur and close companion, was given space on the second floor—in room number six, just to the left of Hitler’s. Maurice, the tall, dark-featured former watchmaker, was the first of the Shock Troops to arrive and was regarded as a hard case: recall that he had been especially aggressive during the ransacking of the
Münchener Post
and was accused of manhandling the wife of one of its editors. Yet it was Maurice’s special relationship with Hitler—and the leader’s need for a kind of manservant—that had earned Maurice a coveted spot on the second floor. “My room is large, bright, and spacious,” he wrote to a friend.
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Maurice initially took on both secretarial and everyday menial chores for Hitler, such as procuring milk and eggs.
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Soon, however, he was relieved of the secretarial assignment by the arrival, on May 15, of Rudolf Hess.

Hess was a very special case. The former World War I pilot and university student, quiet but devoted to Hitler, had become one of the leader’s closest co-workers in everyday Nazi Party activities. With his bourgeois upbringing and higher education, Hess was more than a scheduling secretary—he was also a sounding board for Hitler’s intellectual meanderings. During the putsch, Hess’s most serious crime had been the kidnapping of two Bavarian government ministers, and he had been on the lam ever since. He finally turned himself in and was convicted on the very last day of the People’s Court’s existence. Arriving at Landsberg, he was given the last remaining room on the second floor, room number five, right next to Maurice’s.

Some of Hitler’s most revealing conversations during the writing of
Mein Kampf
would take place in that room, as Hess would disclose in the roughly thirty letters he wrote over the next few months, most to his future wife, Ilse Pröhl. But in his very first letter, written to his mother on his first night in Landsberg, Hess captured another aspect of prison life with World War I veterans led by a man whose greatest formative experience had been at the combat front. “I can hear [Hitler’s] voice coming from the common room right now,” wrote Hess. “He seems to be reliving his war experiences—he is imitating the sounds of grenades and machine guns, jumping wildly around the room, carried away by his fantasies.”
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