1924: The Year That Made Hitler (34 page)

Before the speech, Hitler made clear in a
Völkischer Beobachter
editorial that his first demand was instant peace among rival factions and unconditional obedience to him. Hitler’s sense of mastery—of the movement and of the moment—was so complete that he would accept conditions from no one. Everyone had to rejoin the refounded party; no previous memberships would be carried over. It was to be a totally new beginning. There was no talk of shared leadership, joint decision-making, or special roles for special people. Hitler was to have absolute authority.

On the evening of the speech, however, it looked as though Hitler might have walked into a trap of his own making, raising expectations that he could not fulfill. General Ludendorff, Gregor Strasser, and Ernst Röhm weren’t attending Hitler’s grand show. Alfred Rosenberg also stayed away, dismissing the event as a “comedy” and anticipating the “brother-kissing” that Hitler would demand in such a setting. Hitler asked Drexler, as founder of the original German Workers’ Party, to preside. But Drexler would agree only if Hitler first expelled the hated Hermann Esser, which Hitler refused to do. Finally, Hitler settled on Max Amann, a good businessman but no stem-winding speaker, to open the big evening.

Given the anticipation and adulation in the crowd, it probably wouldn’t have mattered what Hitler said. He delivered in his usual style. Speaking for two hours, Hitler managed to whitewash all that had gone wrong over recent years. He also highlighted his belief
that, in the fight with Jewish Marxism, there had been only two possibilities—“either the enemy walks over our dead bodies or we over theirs.” The old Hitler was back, signaling that violence was still an option (and leading to the party’s re-banning by Governor Held a few days later).

Hitler also issued a warning to rivals who might want to constrain him. “Anyone who thinks he can condition his joining the party with some stipulations doesn’t know me very well,” said Hitler to loud applause. “As long as I carry all the responsibility, I’m not willing to let others set conditions for me. And I take full responsibility for everything that happens in this movement!” Hitler finished to cheers and
“Heils!”
just as he had in years gone by. He could still whip up a crowd. Astonishingly, he even promised that if he had not fulfilled the members’ expectations after one year, he would resign. Hitler had thrown down the gauntlet, daring anyone to pick it up.

Then came the
coup de théâtre
that was the real point of the evening. Demanding that feuding factions put aside their differences, Hitler called to the stage the sometimes bitter enemies who
had
showed up for the event. These included Gottfried Feder, Wilhelm Frick, and Rudolf Buttmann, the part of the
völkisch
movement that favored parliamentary participation; and Esser, Julius Streicher, and Artur Dinter, who opposed it. Various other players joined them on the stage. Hitler once again demanded the hearty handshakes and deep-in-the-eyes looks that he’d forced from his three hostages on this same stage fifteen months earlier, gestures of emotional and political commitment for the benefit of the crowd. The hack artist had composed a grand tableau of unity, with himself as the central figure, before thousands of witnesses. And, as on the evening of the putsch, the performance culminated with three thousand people singing
“Deutschland, Deutschland über alles.”

The rousing night in the Bürgerbräukeller was a triumphal return for Hitler. Despite its flaws—the absence of some top names, the soon-to-be-restored party ban—Hitler had used it as the springboard not only back to where he had been before, but to a level of leadership and control that was unprecedented. He had presented himself as god, and the believers had accepted. It would not mark the end of internal struggles—some would last up to the 1930s—but it signaled a relaunch of Hitler’s
Führerpartei,
a leader-dominated party that would become his personal tool and vehicle for building a dictatorship. And the night of rhetoric and adoration signaled the end of Hitler’s journey through exile, trial, and resurrection. Restored and reinvented, with his catastrophic putsch attempt far behind him, he had begun the long march to power.

EPILOGUE

What Finally Happened

“If twelve or fifteen thousand Hebrew corrupters of the people had been held under poison gas… the sacrifice of millions at the front would not have been in vain.”

—
ADOLF HITLER
,
Mein Kampf
¹

Seven months after his comeback speech, Hitler withdrew to his favorite place on earth, Berchtesgaden. There, in the Alps, he would continue writing his racist rancor, bombastic ideas, and histrionic plans for the world. Snug in a cottage rented from his friends, the Büchers, owners of the Platterhof Hotel (formerly Pension Moritz), Hitler composed volume two of
Mein Kampf.
This time, Hitler dictated his words to a secretary. As usual, Hitler was obsessing over Germany’s defeat in World War I, the beginning of history in the Hitlerian bubble. Blaming Jewish back-stabbers and alleged profiteers for Germany’s loss, he continued his habit of vitriolic and venomous comments about Jews. If twelve or fifteen thousand Jewish “scoundrels” had been “taken out at the right time,” he claimed, “a
million worthwhile, proper German lives would have been saved.”
²
These are the only lines in
Mein Kampf
suggesting that Hitler may have had visions of exterminating Jews by modern methods. Most historians, however, do not believe Hitler already planned massive death camps with gas chambers. Yet his statement clearly reveals a mind that could embrace mass annihilation.

Hitler’s suggestion of gassing twelve or fifteen thousand Jews shrinks to a footnote in the annals of his actual crimes. His actions as dictator, warlord, and mass murderer bore out the hubristic plans he developed in Landsberg Prison and crystallized in
Mein Kampf.
The entire war in the West—what Americans think of as World War II—was in fact just
Rückendeckung,
or covering his rear, for Hitler’s forward thrust to the East—just as he explained in
Mein Kampf
.
³
From the minute he left Landsberg until his final moment on earth, Hitler was obsessed with two things: capturing
Lebensraum
from Russia and ridding the world of Jews. Hitler had adopted
Lebensraum
as a concept while writing
Mein Kampf
in Landsberg; he had also concluded while in prison that he had to adopt “the harshest weapons”against Jews, as he revealed in his conversation with the Czech Nazi named Kugler. Twenty-one years later, in his final political testament composed on the day before he killed himself, Hitler exhorted the German people to “resist mercilessly the poisoner of all nations, international Jewry.” Those were his last written words.

Hitler’s year in Landsberg Prison soon became part of the growing Hitler myth. Like the failed putsch, his year behind bars was artfully blended into the legend of the future Führer’s “years of struggle.” After he took power in 1933, Hitler’s “cell”—room number seven in the fortress building—was converted into a shrine and place of pilgrimage, with a large plaque over the door (
ADOLF HITLER WAS IMPRISONED HERE
) and a swastika flag on the table. An old
upright typewriter—not the little portable on which Hitler had written
Mein Kampf
—was placed in the room for verisimilitude. Germans came by the thousands to stand for a few seconds before the open door to Hitler’s room, turning Landsberg Prison into a tourist attraction. Special trains with up to two thousand passengers arrived on weekends; people stood in long queues to get behind the prison walls. Some worshipful followers even
walked
from North Germany to set foot on the hallowed ground where Hitler had lived for a year. In 1934, ten years after his imprisonment, Hitler himself paid the prison a visit, inspecting his old quarters and gazing, once again, through the barred windows of his cell. Signing the “Golden Book” for visitors, with his old prison mate Emil Maurice by his side, Hitler effectively consecrated the spot.

Landsberg, the town, thrived on the attention. In 1937 and 1938, Hitler Youth delegations marched 116 miles from Nuremberg to Landsberg following Nazi Party conventions. City fathers began marketing Landsberg as “the Hitler city” and “the birthplace of the National Socialist philosophy.” In 1944, the city saw other new arrivals: Jewish prisoners driven from Auschwitz. More than twenty-three thousand captives were forced to live for months like half-blind animals in earthen huts and semi-underground barracks with clay roofs—cold, dark, damp, and overcrowded. An instant concentration camp of slave laborers had been created around Landsberg and the neighboring town of Kaufering for Hitler’s last-ditch attempt to build the world’s first jet fighter, the Messerschmitt 262. In ten frenzied months, at least six thousand of the enslaved Jews perished from overwork, hunger, executions, and typhus. Hundreds more died in a 1945 death march as U.S. forces approached Munich.

Following World War II, Landsberg willfully ignored its role in the persecution of the Jews, literally burying the past with bulldozers to build a commercial zone where many of the barracks once
stood. “The barracks were seen as a stain on the city’s history,” said Manfred Deiler, a leader of Landsberg’s European Holocaust Memorial Foundation. The organization is preserving the remaining barracks in remembrance of “genocide on our doorsteps” during the war’s waning months. The civic activists’ efforts have been rewarded with memorial headstones sent by the heads of ten European states from which the Jews had been taken—Václav Havel, Boris Yeltsin, and several others lent their names to the memorial. One section is becoming a visitors’ site and documentation center. “These are the last relics in Germany of this kind of camp,” said Deiler.

They are also the last remains of Landsberg’s tortured involvement with Adolf Hitler.

From Hitler’s stay in the prison, the most tangible legacy was
Mein Kampf.
The book went on to have a remarkable career, as its publishing trajectory has been called.
⁴
The 1925 press run of the first volume, 10,000 books, sold well, at least to the true believers. “Amann beginning to cash in on
Mein Kampf,”
noted Hanfstaengl in December, just as a second press run of 10,000 was begun.
⁵
Volume two, published in December 1926, sold more slowly. Both volumes were later consolidated into a single book, usually called the
Volksausgabe
—the “people’s edition.” Yet Hitler’s turgid style and ideological obstinancy—along with the abject failure of his putsch—led political reviewers at the sophisticated publications to dismiss Hitler as “finished.” “Adolf Hitler exhausted his whole arsenal in a single day,” opined the oracular
Frankfurter Zeitung
.
⁶

Interest in
Mein Kampf
picked up as Hitler’s political fortunes soared in the early 1930s, with 240,000 books sold by the time he took office in January 1933.
⁷
Then the book leapt into the stratosphere, selling one million books by year’s end, including a large number to Germany’s public libraries.
⁸
By the time Hitler
committed suicide in 1945,
Mein Kampf
had sold twelve million copies and had been translated into eighteen languages. And the book was not mere decoration or obligatory material in every German family’s library. It was read. In a meticulous, 632-page study of the writing, publication, and reception of
Mein Kampf,
scholar Othmar Plöckinger refuted the long-standing myth that
Mein Kampf
was the biggest unread bestseller of all time. Through examination of German lending library records, for example, Plöckinger was able to show that the book enjoyed lively circulation numbers that belie the belief that people only owned the book for show or received it as a wedding gift. People read
Mein Kampf
by choice.
⁹

The original manuscript for
Mein Kampf
is lost. Or rather, all the manuscripts (actually, typescripts) are lost, for the book is thought to have had numerous mutations as it was edited and re-edited by Hitler and various helpers before publication. Even at the time of Hitler’s political triumphs, the manuscript was treated almost as a state secret. Though Hitler owned a copy, in 1940 he personally refused permission for the Nazi Party archivist to display any pages of it—or even photographs of the pages—in an exhibition celebrating the “Struggle for Germany’s Greatness” at that year’s party convention.
¹⁰
Helene Bechstein was reportedly given a copy by Hitler, which she either returned or lost to fire during the bombing of Berlin—though the story may be apocryphal. Almost all of Hitler’s personal papers, in Berlin, Munich, and Berchtesgaden, were burned during the war’s last week by his adjutant, Julius Schaub. Many original documents went up in smoke as Nazi archivists committed tons of their holdings to the furnaces in the final days of the war. Years later, as noted in
chapter 9
(“Rearranging the World”), only the first five pages of the manuscript, plus Hitler’s eighteen-page outline, were found.

Following World War II,
Mein Kampf
went into a strange limbo. American authorities had in 1945 seized Hitler’s and the Nazi Party’s
remaining assets, including Max Amann’s Eher Verlag publishing house. But the occupying power soon passed ownership to the revived Bavarian government. Hypersensitive to Munich’s role as the breeding ground of the Nazi Party and as the “capital of the movement,” as Hitler called it, the Bavarians immediately put
Mein Kampf
under wraps and kept it there for the next seven decades. With a seventy-year copyright in force, all discussion of republishing Hitler’s book in German was thwarted by the Bavarian authorities, even though Germany’s first postwar president, Theodor Heuss, recommended it as an object lesson for the young generation. Available only in the back rooms of antiquarian bookshops or in libraries for research purposes,
Mein Kampf
became both forbidden fruit and demonized detritus of the worst period of German history. The general public had a hard time finding it, but then almost nobody was looking. That changed, of course, with the arrival of the Internet, when the book was made available online, mainly by neo-Nazi groups. Yet even though it was there, only tiny numbers of right-wingers were interested in reading it. It is not known how many of them actually have made the long march through the tedious and pompous prose.