1924: The Year That Made Hitler (31 page)

But that did not matter. What mattered was that, through Hess, the term
Lebensraum
had now gotten into Hitler’s slogan-minded brain, where it must have gone off like a flashbulb. This single and singular word encompassed all he had been thinking about German overpopulation, German expansion, and Russian land. The word was a propagandist’s dream: positive, clear, self-explanatory, goal-oriented, and tilted toward the future—much more appealing than the inanimate phrase “land and soil” (
Grund und Boden
). Who, in densely populated Germany, would not want more
Lebensraum
? And “living space” was a much nicer way to describe future landholdings than to call them what they were—targets of conquest. Military invasion was now elevated to a law of nature, and Hitler had a shiny new name for one of his fundamental principles.

Hitler began using
Lebensraum
right away. In July, drafting a chapter called “Munich,” he laid out “four paths” by which German foreign policy could solve the country’s problem of an alleged net population growth of nine hundred thousand per year without enough land to feed such a rapidly expanding nation. Veiling his intentions in a hypothetical discussion of what German colonial policy should have been before World War I, Hitler clearly chose the same solution he had hinted at in many speeches and in his earlier journal article: a massive land grab in the East. A great deal of land was available only in western Russia, he claimed, which was underpopulated (Hitler asserted that Russia had eighteen times more land per capita than did Germany).
⁴⁵
The region was later called by the Nazis a
Raum ohne Volk,
a space without people. This was a dubious claim but it paired perfectly with the other side of their coin—that
the Germans were a
Volk ohne Raum,
a people without space. Thus, the obvious answer:
Lebensraum
for the Germans. It was a classic Hitlerian oversimplification of the facts to fit the theory. But there it was: Germany would conquer and settle the vast semi-empty spaces between the Russian border and the Ural Mountains, filling them with German agricultural settlers. The hapless and hopeless Russians—incapable of turning their land into highly productive modern agriculture—would become an underclass or die out, helped into serfdom or extinction by the merciless German rulers, the new
Herrenvolk,
or master race.

Thus
Lebensraum
became a powerful new concept in Hitler’s book, and later became a central pillar of Nazi territorial ambitions and justification for war. Thanks to Hess and Haushofer, Hitler now had an easily digestible term with scientific gloss and positive overtones to add to his expansionist arsenal. Having appeared nowhere in Hitler’s eighteen-page outline or in the previously written sections of his book,
Lebensraum
now sprang up repeatedly in Hitler’s manuscript, beginning in July.
⁴⁶
That marked a turning point in the writing of
Mein Kampf
and in the framing of Hitler’s future policies.

The
Lebensraum
formulation was also a handy fulcrum for Hitler’s corollary argument: that a nation without
Lebensraum
was not a true “culture-creating people,” as Hitler liked to call the nations he approved of. The Aryans, of course, and especially the Germans, were culture-creating. The Jews, of course, were not; they were parasites “on the body of other nations.” Part of their problem was that they had no
Lebensraum,
he argued. Alleging ahistorically that Jews had never had a country of their own, he dismissed Jews as a wandering band “always searching for new nourishment for [their] race.”
⁴⁷
When Jews settled, they created a state within a state. Since they lived everywhere, they had no well-defined
Lebensraum
anywhere. Even nomads, wrote Hitler in his book, “have a clearly delimited
Lebensraum
which they cultivate with their herds, just not as settled farmers.” The Aryans, Hitler claimed, “probably started as nomads.”
⁴⁸

By August, Hitler was in the midst of a writing marathon. Trying to stave off interruptions, he sent another statement to the
Völkischer Kurier:
“In spite of my previous plea in the press to refrain from visiting me in Landsberg-on-Lech, I still receive numerous outside visitors.… I must emphatically repeat my request and will only accept visits that are agreed to in advance.”
⁴⁹
Maurice wrote to a contact asking for understanding that Hitler was not answering his mail; he was under a “colossal mountain of work.”
⁵⁰
In early August, Hess wrote that “the Tribune thinks he’ll have his book finished by next week—I don’t believe it.”
⁵¹
Two weeks later, Fobke—who by now was acting as Hitler’s link to the North German Nazis and the liaison between the Field Marshal’s Hill and the foot soldiers—noted in a letter to a friend in his hometown of Stettin that “it’s hard to catch H. now for a conversation, he’s working non-stop on his book and doesn’t like to be disturbed.”
⁵²

Yet during this August writing rush, Hitler did find time for a detailed conversation with Fobke about a key topic that he was almost certainly just then writing into the book: the melding of the “programmatist” (
Programmatiker
) with the “politician” (
Politiker
).
⁵³
The words can better be translated, without the convenient alliteration, as theorist (or political philosopher) and practical politician. The terms are more or less self-explanatory, but as usual Hitler took several pages to explain them. “The theorist must set the goals for a movement, the politician must implement them,” he wrote. “One is guided by eternal truths, the other by current practical realities.” The theorist should be the “polar star of curious humanity,”
insists Hitler.
⁵⁴
As examples of such great men, Hitler mentions Frederick the Great, Martin Luther, Richard Wagner, and the “founders of religions,” which could include Jesus Christ and Muhammad. Without saying it, of course, Hitler was elevating himself into their company.

More important, Hitler saw his appearance on the world stage as something like a millennial coming. “At long intervals of human history,” he wrote, “it may occasionally happen that the practical politician and the political philosopher are one. The more intimate the union, the greater are the political difficulties. Such a man does not labor to satisfy demands that are obvious to every small-minded person; he reaches for goals that only a few can see.” Such a moment, Hitler implied, had now arrived.

Fobke could not know it—maybe even Hitler did not know it in mid-August—but one of the most revealing sections of
Mein Kampf
had just been composed and discussed. Nowhere else in the book does Hitler more blatantly display his exponentially growing “self-belief,” sense of divine calling, and hardening infallibility. His gifts as a politician are manifest, he believes. Nobody else has his combination of practical and philosophical talents.

If there were a single month, a critical pivot point, a precise moment that can be said to be the one that made Hitler in 1924, this was it. It was from this point forward that Hitler “acquired that fearless faith, that optimism and confidence in our destiny that absolutely nothing could shake afterwards,” as he put it.
⁵⁵

With his claim to the mantle of philosopher-politician—a latter-day “philosopher-king”—Hitler had inserted the keystone into the psychological arch he was building. Like one of his heroes, Napoleon, crowning himself emperor in 1804, Hitler had effectively anointed himself as the great man of his age. Having touched the sword to his own shoulders, Hitler could now make himself the
undisputed and unchallengeable leader of his movement—a one-man show uniquely unfettered by advisers’ inputs and restraints. From that model grew the Führer myth, the unique form of non-collegial dictatorship with which he later ruled and ruined Germany.

In August, Hitler was rushing to finish his book. Chapter eleven, Hitler’s long disquisition on race and Jews—entitled “Nation and Race”—may have been put together out of three different pieces produced at different times.
⁵⁶
His high-handed description of the “Path of the Jews,” for example, had appeared in earlier speeches—but now it went from three basic steps (“court Jew,” “people’s Jew,” “blood Jew”) to eleven developmental stages covering eighteen printed pages. This chapter was a critical one in
Mein Kampf,
forming a cornerstone of Hitler’s race theories and what eventually led to the Holocaust. With this chapter, Hitler was trying to pull off a massive subterfuge, according to analysts Beierl and Plöckinger. Having first come to rabid anti-Semitism, Hitler was now inventing an elaborate race theory in which to embed his hatred of Jews. Even though the anti-Semitism preceded the generalized theories, “he tried in
Mein Kampf
to make it look the other way around,” they write.
⁵⁷

In “Nation and Race,” Hitler bared for all to see his conviction that “the stronger must dominate and not blend with the weaker.” Combined with his belief in perpetual struggle as the route to national and racial health, Hitler had his fundamental justifications for war, a renewing and cleansing force that sorted the wheat from the chaff. “Those who want to live, let them fight, and those who do not want to fight in this world of eternal struggle do not deserve to live,” he wrote.
⁵⁸
Foreshadowing his future eliminationist eugenics policies, Hitler added: “All who are not of good race in this world are chaff.”
⁵⁹

Such brutal racial judgments—and worse—can be found all over
Mein Kampf.
At least six hundred words, lines, or sections of
the book are driven by hatred of Jews.
⁶⁰
Yet Hitler also claimed, in his Vienna chapter, that he arrived at his anti-Semitism only after long “inner soul struggles.” He even talked about it with Hess, who described the conversation in a letter to his friend, Professor Haushofer. “I had no idea that [Hitler] wrestled his way to his present position on the Jewish question only after a hard inner battle,” wrote Hess. “He kept having doubts about whether or not he was doing the right thing, and he said that even today he expresses himself differently in small groups of educated people than in front of a mass audience, where he has to take the most radical position.”

If Hitler at this point was still willing to moderate his anti-Semitism “in small groups of educated people,” that would certainly change soon. When a Czech Nazi named Kugler came to visit Hitler a few weeks later, the Czech asked the leader if being in prison and writing a book had in any way affected his position on fighting the Jewish threat. “Oh, yes,” replied Hitler. “I have in fact changed my view on how to combat Jews. I’ve seen that so far I’ve been too mild!” Working on his book, he said, had shown him that in future “the harshest weapons” must be used to fight the Jews, because, after all, “Judaism is the pestilence of the world!”
⁶¹

Hitler’s transformation from hotheaded revolutionary to long-view political player was a work in progress. Earlier that spring he had told Kurt Ludecke, a Nazi supporter and world-traveled fund-raiser who visited Hitler in Landsberg, “We must follow a new line of action.… Instead of working to achieve power by an armed coup, we shall have to hold our noses and enter the Reichstag against the Catholics and Marxist deputies. If out-voting them takes longer than out-shooting them, at least the results will be guaranteed by their own constitution.”
⁶²
Ludecke called Hitler’s change of direction a shifting “from the true north of idealism to the magnetic
north of realism.”
⁶³
This moment “truly marked the turning point for the Party,” wrote Ludecke in 1938.
⁶⁴

These developments were a toxic shift to some of Hitler’s followers. Hitler soon assured Hermie Fobke that he was “still fighting against participation in elections but that he had learned a lot from events.”
⁶⁵
The dutiful Fobke communicated this muddled and ambiguous sentiment to his contacts among the North German Nazis. By the autumn, Hitler was becoming more explicit, writing into the final pages of the first volume of
Mein Kampf
his new dictum: parliament is a terrible thing, but we must join it to kill it. “Our movement is antiparliamentary, and even our participation in a parliamentary institution can only serve the purpose of destroying and removing it.”
⁶⁶
In the 1930s, Hitler was true to his word.

As he completed volume one of
Mein Kampf,
Hitler’s confidence was soaring. He extolled the power of the skilled propagandist to sway both the intelligentsia and the “lower strata” with “primitiveness of expression.” “Among a thousand speakers there is perhaps only a single one who can manage to speak to locksmiths and university professors at the same time in a form which… actually lashes them into a wild storm of applause.”
⁶⁷
It is obvious whom Hitler had in mind.

His belief in himself as the one and only person capable of reviving Germany was catching—at least in Landsberg Prison. The men, some of them young, were caught up in his persuasive power on the occasions when Hitler joined in group dinners and garden walks. “You can’t believe what huge strength and thrilling passion emanates from Adolf Hitler, and the glowing love and respect we all have for him,”
⁶⁸
wrote prisoner Paul Hirschberg after spending two hours over tea and conversation with Hitler on the young man’s twenty-third birthday. Even Hess, who had worked closely with Hitler long before the putsch, admitted that “I’ve only really gotten
to know him here” in prison. “I now have the unique feeling that I’m walking side by side with Germany’s ‘coming man,’” he wrote.
⁶⁹
Not everyone, of course, thought Hitler’s messianic style and influence on the young men was such a great thing. Prisoner Hans Krüger received an admonishing letter from his father, warning him against the Hitlerian gospel. “You’ll see things differently, once you get out and can listen to some other people. It’s unbelievable that the court incarcerates you guys with a type like Hitler. He ought to be cooped up somewhere all by himself.”
⁷⁰