In 1924, the year that tuberculosis killed Kafka, Adolf Hitler celebrated his thirty-fifth birthday – in prison. He was in Landsberg jail, west of the Bavarian capital, serving a five-year sentence for treason and his part in the Munich putsch. There were several other National Socialists in prison with him, and as well as being given minimum sentences, they had an easy time inside. There was plenty of good food, they were allowed out into the garden, Hitler was a favourite with the jailers, and on his birthday he received numerous parcels and bunches of flowers. He was putting on weight.109
The trial had been front-page news in every German newspaper for more than three weeks, and for the first time Hitler broke through to a national audience. Later, he was to claim that the trial and the publicity surrounding it were a turning point in his career. It was during his time in prison that Hitler wrote the first part of Mein Kampf. It is entirely possible that he might never have written anything had he not been sent to Landsberg. At the same time, as Alan Bullock has pointed out, the opportunity was invaluable. Mein Kampf helped Hitler establish himself as the leader of the National Socialists, helped him lay the foundation of the Hitler myth, and helped him clarify his ideas. Hitler instinctively grasped that a movement such as the one he planned needed a ‘sacred text,’ a bible.110
Whatever his other attributes, Hitler certainly thought of himself as a thinker, with a grasp of technical-military matters, of natural science, and above all of history. He was convinced that this grasp set him apart from other men, and in this he was not entirely wrong. We need to remember that he started adult life as an artist and an aspiring architect. He was transformed into the figure he became first by World War I and the ensuing peace, but also by the education he gave himself. Perhaps the most important thing to grasp about Hitler’s intellectual development is that it was so far removed from that of most if not all the people we have been considering in this chapter. As even a cursory examination of Mein Kampf will show, this is because most of Hitler’s ideas were nineteenth-century or turn-of-the-century ideas – the kind examined here in chapters 2 and 3 – and once they were formed, Hitler never changed them. The Führer’s ideas, as revealed in his table talk during World War II, are directly traceable to his thinking as a young man.111
The historian George L. Mosse has disinterred the more distant intellectual origins of the Third Reich, on which this section is chiefly based.112 He shows how an amalgam of völkisch mysticism and spirituality grew up in Germany in the nineteenth century, in part a response to the romantic movement and to the bewildering pace of industrialisation, and was also an aspect of German unification. While the Volk were coming together, forging one heroic PanGerman nation, the ‘rootless Jew’ was a convenient, negative comparison (though of course this was not at all fair: in Germany Jews could not be government officials or full professors until 1918). Mosse traces the influence of thinkers and writers, many completely forgotten now, who helped create this cast of mind – people like Paul Lagarde and Julius Langbehn, who stressed ‘German intuition’ as a new creative force in the world, and Eugen Diederichs, who openly advocated ‘a culturally grounded nation guided by the initiated elite,’ by the revival of German legends, such as the Edda, which stressed Germany’s great antiquity and its links to Greece and Rome (great civilisations but also pagan). The point about all this was that it elevated the Volk almost to the level of a deity.113 There were nineteenth-century German books such as that by Ludwig Woltmann, examining the art of the Renaissance, identifying ‘Aryans’ in positions of power and showing how much the Nordic type was admired.114 Mosse also emphasises how social Darwinism threaded through society. In 1900, for example, Alfred Krupp, the wealthy industrialist and arms manufacturer, sponsored a public essay competition on the topic, ‘What can we learn from the principles of Darwinism for application to inner political development and the laws of the state?’115 Not surprisingly, the winner advocated that all aspects of the state, without exception, should be viewed and administered in social Darwinian terms. Mosse further describes the many German attempts at utopias – from ‘Aryan’ colonies in Paraguay and Mexico to nudist camps in Bavaria, which tried to put völkisch principles into effect. The craze for physical culture grew out of these utopias, and so too did the movement for rural boarding schools with a curriculum based on ‘back to nature’ and Heimatkunde, rendered as ‘lore of the homeland,’ emphasising Germanness, nature, and ancient peasant customs. As a boy, Hitler grew up in this milieu without realising that there was any alternative.116
In fact, Hitler never made any secret of this. Linz, where he was raised, was a semirural, middle-class town populated by German nationalists. The town authorities turned a blind eye to the gatherings of the banned ‘Gothia’ or ‘Wodan’ societies, with their Pan-German tendencies.117 As a boy, Hitler belonged to these groups, but he also witnessed the intolerant nationalism of the town’s adults, whose anti-Czech feelings boiled over so easily that they even took against the eminent violinist Jan Kubelik, who was scheduled to perform in Linz. These memories, all too evident in Mein Kampf, helped account for Hitler’s attacks on the Habsburgs for the ‘Slavisation’ of the Austrians. In his book Hitler also insists that while at school in Linz he ‘learned to understand and grasp the meaning of history.’ ‘To “Learn” history,’ he explained, ‘means to seek and find the forces which are the causes leading to those effects which we subsequently perceive as historical events.’118 One of these forces, he felt (and this too he had picked up as a boy), was that Britain, France, and Russia were intent on encircling Germany, and he thereafter never rid himself of this view. Perhaps not surprisingly, for him history was invariably the work of great men – his heroes were Charlemagne, Rudolf von Habsburg, Frederick the Great, Peter the Great, Napoleon, Bismarck, and Wilhelm I. Hitler therefore was much more in the mould of Stefan George, or Rainer Maria Rilke, rather than Marx or Engels, for whom the history of class struggle was paramount. For Hitler, history was a catalogue of racial struggles, although the outcome always depended on great men: ‘[History] was the sum total of struggle and war, waged by each against all with no room for either mercy or humanity.’119 He often quoted Helmut von Moltke, a nineteenth-century German general, who had argued that one should always use the most terrible weapons and tactics available because, by shortening hostilities, lives would be saved.
Hitler’s biological thinking was an amalgam of Thomas R. Malthus, Charles Darwin, Joseph Arthur Gobineau, and William McDougalclass="underline" ‘Man has become great through struggle…. Whatever goal man has reached is due to his originality plus his brutality…. All life is bound up in three theses: struggle is the father of all things, virtue lies in blood, leadership is primary and decisive…. He who wants to live must fight, and he who does not want to fight in this world where eternal struggle is the law of life has no right to exist.’120 Malthus had argued that the world’s population was outstripping the earth’s capacity to provide for it. The result must be famine and war. Birth control and much-improved agriculture offered the only hope for Malthus, but for Hitler there was another answer: ‘a predatory war of annihilation as a means to an end, an historically all-important act in response to natural law and necessity.’ According to Werner Maser, one of Hitler’s biographers, his brutal attitude to ‘weaklings’ was transplanted from the teachings of Alfred Ploetz, whose book, Die Tüchtigkeit unserer Rasse und der Schutz der Schwachen (The Efficiency of our Race and the Protection of the Weak), Hitler had read as a young man in Vienna before World War I. The following extract from Ploetz will show how his thinking had ‘advanced’ since the nineteenth century: ‘Advocates of racial hygiene [the new phrase for eugenics] will have little objection to war since they see in it one of the means whereby the nations carry on their struggle for existence… In the course of the campaign it might be deemed advisable deliberately to muster inferior variants at points where the main need is for cannon fodder and where the individual’s efficiency is of secondary importance.’121