The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany (6 page)

One day, he recounts in
Mein Kampf
, he witnessed a mass demonstration of Viennese workers. “For nearly two hours I stood there watching with bated breath the gigantic human dragon slowly winding by. In oppressed anxiety I finally left the place and sauntered homeward.”
⁴⁸

At home he began to read the Social Democratic press, examine the speeches of its leaders, study its organization, reflect on its psychology and political techniques and ponder the results. He came to three conclusions which explained to him the success of the Social Democrats: They knew how to create a mass movement, without which any political party was useless; they had learned the art of propaganda among the masses; and, finally, they knew the value of using what he calls “spiritual and physical terror.”

This third lesson, though it was surely based on faulty observation and compounded of his own immense prejudices, intrigued the young Hitler. Within ten years he would put it to good use for his own ends.

No more precise analysis of Nazi tactics, as Hitler was eventually to develop them, was ever written.

There were two political parties which strongly attracted the fledgling Hitler in Vienna, and to both of them he applied his growing power of shrewd, cold analysis. His first allegiance, he says, was to the Pan-German Nationalist Party founded by Georg Ritter von Schoenerer, who came from the same region near
Spital
in Lower Austria as had Hitler’s family. The Pan-Germans at that time were engaged in a last-ditch struggle for German supremacy in the multinational empire. And though Hitler thought that Schoenerer was a “profound thinker” and enthusiastically embraced his basic program of violent nationalism, anti-Semitism, anti-socialism, union with Germany and opposition to
the Hapsburgs
and the Holy See, he quickly sized up the causes for the party’s failure:

“This movement’s inadequate appreciation of the importance of the social problem cost it the truly militant mass of the people; its entry into Parliament took away its mighty impetus and burdened it with all the weaknesses peculiar to this institution; the struggle against the Catholic Church … robbed it of countless of the best elements that the nation can call its own.”
⁵⁰

Though Hitler was to forget it when he came to power in Germany, one of the lessons of his Vienna years which he stresses at great length in
Mein Kampf
is the futility of a political party’s trying to oppose the churches. “Regardless of how much room for criticism there was in any religious denomination,” he says, in explaining why Schoenerer’s Los-von-Rom (Away from Rome) movement was a tactical error, “a political party must never for a moment lose sight of the fact that in all previous historical experience a purely political party has never succeeded in producing a religious reformation.”
⁵¹

But it was the failure of the Pan-Germans to arouse the masses, their inability to even understand the psychology of the common people, that to Hitler constituted their biggest mistake. It is obvious from his recapitulation of the ideas that began to form in his mind when he was not much past the age of twenty-one that to him this was the cardinal error. He was not to repeat it when he founded his own political movement.

There was another mistake of the Pan-Germans which Hitler was not to make. That was the failure to win over the support of at least some of the powerful, established institutions of the nation—if not the Church, then the Army, say, or the cabinet or the head of state. Unless a political movement gained such backing, the young man saw, it would be difficult
if not impossible for it to assume power. This support was precisely what Hitler had the shrewdness to arrange for in the crucial January days of 1933 in Berlin and what alone made it possible for him and his National Socialist Party to take over the rule of a great nation.

There was one political leader in Vienna in Hitler’s time who understood this, as well as the necessity of building a party on the foundation of the masses. This was Dr. Karl Lueger, the burgomaster of Vienna and leader of the Christian Social Party, who more than any other became Hitler’s political mentor, though the two never met. Hitler always regarded him as “the greatest German mayor of all times … a statesman greater than all the so-called ‘diplomats’ of the time … If Dr. Karl Lueger had lived in Germany he would have been ranked among the great minds of our people.”
⁵²

There was, to be sure, little resemblance between Hitler as he later became and this big, bluff, genial idol of the Viennese lower middle classes. It is true that Lueger became the most powerful politician in Austria as the head of a party which was drawn from the disgruntled petty bourgeoisie and which made political capital, as Hitler later did, out of a raucous anti-Semitism. But Lueger, who had risen from modest circumstances and worked his way through the university, was a man of considerable intellectual attainments, and his opponents, including the Jews, readily conceded that he was at heart a decent, chivalrous, generous and tolerant man. Stefan Zweig, the eminent Austrian Jewish writer, who was growing up in Vienna at this time, has testified that Lueger never allowed his official anti-Semitism to stop him from being helpful and friendly to the Jews. “His city administration,” Zweig recounted, “was perfectly just and even typically democratic … The Jews who had trembled at this triumph of the anti-Semitic party continued to live with the same rights and esteem as always.”
⁵³

This the young Hitler did not like, He thought Lueger was far too tolerant and did not appreciate the racial problem of the Jews. He resented the mayor’s failure to embrace Pan-Germanism and was skeptical of his Roman Catholic clericalism and his loyalty to
the Hapsburgs
. Had not the old Emperor Franz-Josef twice refused to sanction Lueger’s election as burgomaster?

But in the end Hitler was forced to acknowledge the genius of this man who knew how to win the support of the masses, who understood modern social problems and the importance of propaganda and oratory in swaying the multitude. Hitler could not help but admire the way Lueger dealt with the powerful Church—“his policy was fashioned with infinite shrewdness.” And, finally, Lueger “was quick to make use of all available means for winning the support of long-established institutions, so as to be able to derive the greatest possible advantage for his movement from those old sources of power.”
⁵⁴

Here in a nutshell were the ideas and techniques which Hitler was later to use in constructing his own political party and in leading it to power in Germany. His originality lay in his being the only politician of the Right
to apply them to the German scene after the First World War. It was then that the Nazi movement, alone among the nationalist and conservative parties, gained a great mass following and, having achieved this, won over” the support of the Army, the President of the Republic and the associations of big business—three “long-established institutions” of great power, which led to the chancellorship of Germany. The lessons learned in Vienna proved useful indeed.

Dr. Karl Lueger had been a brilliant orator, but the Pan-German Party had lacked effective public speakers. Hitler took notice of this and in
Mein Kampf
makes much of the importance of oratory in politics.

   Though refraining from actual participation in Austrian party politics, young Hitler already was beginning to practice his oratory on the audiences which he found in Vienna’s flophouses, soup kitchens and on its street corners. It was to develop into a talent (as this author, who later was to listen to scores of his most important speeches, can testify) more formidable than any other in the Germany between the wars, and it was to contribute in a large measure to his astounding success.

   And finally in Hitler’s Vienna experience there were the Jews. In
Linz
, he says, there had been few Jews. “At home I do not remember having heard the word during my father’s lifetime.” At high school there was a Jewish boy—“but we didn’t give the matter any thought … I even took them [the Jews] for Germans.”
⁵⁶

According to Hitler’s boyhood friend, this is not the truth. “When I first met Adolf Hitler,” says
August Kubizek
, recalling their days together in Linz, “his
anti-Semitism
was already pronounced … Hitler was already a confirmed anti-Semite when he went to Vienna. And although his experiences in Vienna might have deepened this feeling, they certainly did not give birth to it.”
⁵⁷

“Then,” says Hitler, “I came to Vienna.”

   One day, Hitler recounts, he went strolling through the Inner City. “I suddenly encountered an apparition in a black caftan and black side-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?”
⁵⁹

Hitler’s answer may be readily guessed. He claims, though, that before answering he decided “to try to relieve my doubts by books.” He buried himself in anti-Semitic literature, which had a large sale in Vienna at the time. Then he took to the streets to observe the “phenomenon” more closely. “Wherever I went,” he says, “I began to see Jews, and the more I saw, the more sharply they became distinguished in my eyes from the rest of humanity … Later I often grew sick to the stomach from the smell of these caftan-wearers.”
⁶⁰

Next, he says, he discovered the “moral stain on this ‘chosen people’ … Was there any form of filth or profligacy, particularly in cultural life, without at least one Jew involved in it? If you cut even cautiously into such an abscess, you found, like a maggot in a rotting body, often dazzled by the sudden light—a kike!” The Jews were largely responsible, he says he found, for prostitution and the white-slave traffic. “When for the first time,” he relates, “I recognized the Jew as the cold-hearted, shameless and calculating director of this revolting vice traffic in the scum of the big city, a cold shudder ran down my back.”
⁶¹

There is a great deal of morbid sexuality in Hitler’s ravings about the Jews. This was characteristic of Vienna’s anti-Semitic press of the time, as it later was to be of the obscene
Nuremberg
weekly
Der Stuermer
, published by one of Hitler’s favorite cronies, Julius Streicher, Nazi boss of Franconia, a noted pervert and one of the most unsavory characters in the Third Reich.
Mein Kampf
is sprinkled with lurid allusions to uncouth Jews seducing innocent Christian girls and thus adulterating their blood. Hitler can write of the “nightmare vision of the seduction of hundreds of thousands of girls by repulsive, crooked-legged Jew bastards.” As Rudolf Olden has pointed out, one of the roots of Hitler’s anti-Semitism may have been his tortured sexual envy. Though he was in his early twenties, so far as is known-he had no relations of any kind with women during his sojourn in Vienna.

“Gradually,” Hitler relates, “I began to hate them … For me this was the time of the greatest spiritual upheaval I have ever had to go through. I had ceased to be a weak-kneed cosmopolitan and become an anti-Semite.”
⁶²

He was to remain a blind and fanatical one to the bitter end; his last
testament, written a few hours before his death, would contain a final blast against the Jews as responsible for the war which he had started and which was now finishing him and the Third Reich. This burning hatred, which was to infect so many Germans in that empire, would lead ultimately to a massacre so horrible and on such a scale as to leave an ugly scar on civilization that will surely last as long as man on earth.

   In the spring of 1913, Hitler left Vienna for good and went to live in Germany, where his heart, he says, had always been. He was twenty-four and to everyone except himself he must have seemed a total failure. He had not become a painter, nor an architect. He had become nothing, so far as anyone could see, but a vagabond—an eccentric, bookish one, to be sure. He had no friends, no family, no job, no home. He had, however, one thing: an unquenchable confidence in himself and a deep, burning sense of mission.