Hitler

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If the Nazis were a group that hung around in high school, Ernst “Putzi” Hanfstaengl would have been the dorky rich kid who tried to fit into gang, but really didn't and was tolerated because the gang could always borrow his car.

This is an interesting story that offers insight into the Nazi party in its early days. Hanfstaengl was German-American. His forebears included the Sedgwicks, who provided several generals in the Civil War. He was born in Germany and identified as German, although he went to Harvard, where he met Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and spent all of World War I in America as an enemy national. He was quite the social butterfly and he used his piano playing skills to great effect in developing his popularity in Harvard and beyond.

After World War I, Hanfstaengl returned to defeated Germany, where the currency and economy was wrecked and the signer of the 1918 armistice had been assassinated. Hanfstaengl was invited to listen to a speech by Adolf Hitler by an American military attache. He was smitten with the enthusiasm of Hitler's pro-German views. This passage is a fascinating account of Hitler's speech that confirms something that I had seen in [[ASIN:B01ERPCBUK The Vanquished: Why the First World War Failed to End]] but have never seen anywhere else, namely that Hitler modeled himself on Ataturk as well as Mussolini:

“He scored his points all round the compass. First he would criticize the Kaiser as a weakling and then he rounded on the Weimar Republicans for conforming with the victors' demands, which were stripping Germany of everything but the graves of her war dead. There was a strong note of appeal to the ex-serviceman in his audience. He compared the separatist movement and religious particularity of the Bavarian Catholics with the comradeship of the front-line soldier who never asked a wounded comrade his religion before he sprang to help him. He dwelt at length on patriotism and national pride and quoted approvingly the rôle of Kemal Ataturk in Turkey and the example of Mussolini, who had marched on Rome three weeks earlier.”

Hanfstaengl also observed that Rosenberg – usually relegated to obscurity in most histories of the period – played a substantial role in Nazism during its first decade:

“I soon found that he was deeply under the spell of Rosenberg, who was far more the Party theoretician than the mere press-agent to whom Truman-Smith had introduced me. He was the anti-Semitic, anti-Bolshevist, anti-religious trouble-maker, and Hitler seemed to have a very high opinion of his abilities as a philosopher and writer. Until Goebbels appeared on the scene, which was some years later, Rosenberg was the principal antagonist in my attempts to make Hitler see reason. At a very early stage, probably during the same talk, I warned Hitler of the dangers of Rosenberg's racial and religious diatribes. I am a Protestant myself, but I knew the deeply ingrained Catholic sense of Bavaria and told Hitler he would make no headway as long as he continued to offend it. He always professed to see the strength of my arguments, but there was never any way of telling whether he was going to act on them or not.”

Hanfstaengl defined himself as in opposition to Rosenberg on a number of issues. He also highlights the anti-Catholicism of early Nazism:

“I was even more worried about Rosenberg's anti-clerical diatribes, especially in Catholic Bavaria. It seemed to me suicidal to go out of the way to offend such a vast majority of the population. I took Hitler aside one day and tried to make him see the danger by explaining it in his own terms. I had come across some figures somewhere and told him that more than 50 per cent of the holders of the Iron Cross were Catholics, although they only formed a third of the total population. “These people are good soldiers and good patriots,” I insisted. “Just the sort of supporters we need to get on to our side.” I had also met, accidentally, a Benedictine abbot named Alban Schachleiter. I had sat next to him in a tram and brought down the point of my umbrella on his sandalled foot. He bore me no ill will and as I found that he was a fellow Bayreuth enthusiast we got on famously. He had been evicted from Czechoslovakia and, although he had a certain amount of sympathy for Hitler's general political line, deplored the Party's anti-clericalism. I met him again at the house of my sister Erna, and we arranged to lunch there together with Hitler. They got on very well and Hitler listened and nodded and appeared to be impressed by the abbot's arguments. I was delighted, convinced that I had brought a useful influence to bear, but the contact did not last long. In a way I was myself the cause of the break, which was a by-product of the shooting of Leo Schlageter.”

Whenever people point to pictures of all the Catholic clerics who supported the Nazis, the picture is usually that of Schachleiter. Hanfstaengl suggests that Schachleiter's connection to the party was more tenuous than the pictures suggest. Following the funeral of Schlageter, Rosenberg's anti-Clericalism/anti-Catholicism drive a wedge between Schachleiter and the Nazi party:

“I had had the further idea of getting Schachleiter to bless the standards of the S.A. formations taking part in the Schlageter demonstration and had been very pleased when I got Hitler to agree to it. After the speeches – Hitler spoke last and scored one of his greatest successes – they marched in formation to the church of St. Boniface, behind the Königsplatz, where the remains of Ludwig I of Bavaria lie, and the banners were blessed with holy water after Schachleiter had preached a pretty inflammatory sermon about ‘this great freedom movement', and so on. What happened a couple of days later? Rosenberg came out in the Beobachter with another of his really offensive anti-clerical leaders, with stupid insults about Christ and taunts against the Catholics. It was really too much. Poor Schachleiter was not only furious, but had to leave the living at St. Boniface not long after because of the storm which had been aroused. I took Hitler to task, telling him that Rosenberg was spoiling everything, but as usual he found excuses, said he would talk to Rosenberg and in the end did nothing.

One of the significant things about this episode is that it calls into question Derek Hasting's [[ASIN:B0053F0PO8 Catholicism and the Roots of Nazism: Religious Identity and National Socialism]], which left me with the impression that there had been a “Catholic phase” of National Socialism with many such Catholic/Nazi religio-political actions. Instead, it seems that there was one, which was a flash in the pan.

Likewise, Hanfstaengl understood Hitler as an atheist who had rejected his Catholic faith during the Munich years:

“Of course the finest propaganda of all would be if the Pope were to excommunicate me.” I looked at him astonished, but it was a phrase I was often to hear him use later. “If you feel like that why don't you announce officially that you have withdrawn from the Church?” I asked. “Why should I deprive him of the pleasure?” Hitler answered, “let him do it.” What he meant was that if he proclaimed himself an atheist he would lose Catholic votes, but that as a mere heretic he might get away with it.”

And:

“I hope it will not appear too blasphemous when I say that he had learnt a lot from the Bible. He was to all intents and purposes an atheist by the time I got to know him, although he still paid lip-service to religious beliefs and certainly acknowledged them as the basis for the thinking of others. His pattern of looking into the past and then repeating the basis of his beliefs four times over derived directly from the New Testament, and no one can say it was not a proven method.”

Hanfstaengl's picture of Hitler is interesting. Any reader who has spent time in an organization dominated by a particular personality can see the signs that show that people spent a lot of time talking about Hitler and trying to dissect and predict Hitler and telling Hitler stories. The net effect is that somehow the person who is talked about becomes mysterious and equated with the stories that are told. So, Hanfstaengl has lots of stories about Hitler that show him being warm and human – such as playing with Hanfstangl's son, Egon – and weird – such as being overly-courteous to Hanfstaengl's wife – but we never get a real understanding of Hitler as a person.

Hanfstaengl thought that Hitler was not sexually normal due to underdeveloped genitalia. This disability prevented Hitler from having normal relationships with women, even though Hitler wanted such relationships. Hanfstaengl correlates Hitler's lapse into the demonic with the suicide of Hitler's niece/love interest, Geli Raubel. This all sounds like salacious rumor, but perhaps Hanfstaengl was on to something? (Hanfstaengl also intuited that Hitler was a repressed homosexual, which seems like speculation.)

Hanfstaengl also describes the byzantine world of party competition. Hanfstaengl hated Rosenberg and Goebbels and thought that Goring was the only normal man in the group. Rosenberg was a rival of Goebbels and vice versa. (“With the rise of Goebbels, the importance of Rosenberg as a person waned, although there was little cause for consolation in that.”) Hess was a weird young man. Von Schirach was a climber. Some of Hanfstaengl's best lines are his descriptions of the party elite. Thus, he says of Ribbentrop “detained. I took to him because he had some presence, spoke French and English and seemed a cut above most of the mental breast-stroke swimmers near Hitler,” although later on Hanfstaengl paints an unflattering picture of Ribbentrop. Of Goebbels, he says: “The evil genius of the second half of Hitler's career was Goebbels. I always likened this mocking, jealous, vicious, satanically gifted dwarf to the pilot-fish of the Hitler shark.”

That's some good writing and suggests why Hanfstaengl was the subject of a prank, or serious attempt, that forced him to flee Germany in 1937. The circumstances were bizarre in that Hanfstaengl was called to Berlin and told he was to fly to Spain. He was fitted with a parachute and then told that the pilot intended to have him jump behind Communist lines. The Nazis filmed some of this for their amusement. The part with the parachute is on the internet and it is weird to see Hanfstaengl in a business suit wearing a parachute. It was probably a prank, but Hanfstaengl knew that his “friends” had killed their enemies. In fact, after the Rohm Putsch, he was told his name was on a list. So, he fled Germany with his son.

The Rohm Putsch is also interesting from the standpoint of the easy acceptance of homosexuality in the Nazi party.

“By this time his sexual perversion was complete, although to what extent Hitler was aware of this when he sent for him I do not know. Fellow-officers who had known Roehm during the war always maintained that he had been completely normal and even described orgies in which he had taken part in the Army brothels. He had certainly acquired a syphilitic infection during this period and this may have had some effect on his subsequent development. The scandal started soon after he had returned in October 1930. Letters from his male companions in Bolivia somehow came into the hands of third parties and the accusations started. General von Epp, who had held a high opinion of Roehm's organizational abilities before the Ludendorff Putsch, even taxed him with the rumours at quite an early stage and received Roehm's completely false word of honour that they were not true. Later, about 1932, the scandal became public, and although it was somehow glossed over, Roehm quite openly admitted his aberration to Toni Drexler, because he passed it on to me. Hitler can have had no illusions at any time and his mock horror when he found it necessary to shoot Roehm in 1934 was, of course, pure invention.”

And:

“Part of the curious half-light of his sexual make-up which was only slowly beginning to preoccupy me, was that, to say the least, he had no apparent aversion to homosexuals. I suppose it is true to say that in any male movement of this sort, with one man at its head, you are bound to have a lunatic fringe of sexual perverts. Such men admirers will always gravitate into a group which, through its very cohesion, manages to take over some of the leading posts. But the Balts and Prussians, who formed such a large proportion of the membership of these organizations, did not seem to share my misgivings. “Do not worry, these people will fight like lions against Bolshevism. It will be like the Sparta of old,” they used to say. “It becomes a sort of Liebestod for them when they fall in front of the enemy.” Hitler had a circumlocution for it. “My most enthusiastic followers must not be married men with wives and children,” he would proclaim. “No one with family responsibilities is any good for street fighting.”

Hanfstangl was involved in the Beerhall Putsch of 1923. This is one area where Hanfstaengl's knowledge of the inside game pays dividends. I had always viewed the Putsch as a comic opera affair - it seems that it is always presented as a comic opera affair - but it was deadly serious and had a fair chance to succeed. One reason for this chance was the nature of Bavaria as a Catholic, separatist region. Hanfstaengl writes:

“THE NAZIS were only one of the numerous Right Wing radical organizations flourishing in Bavaria at the time. In fact, apart from the trump card they held in Hitler, they were by no means the most numerous or important. Bavaria had become the refuge of a whole rag-bag collection of militant nationalists, some of whom were unemployed members of the former Freikorps, which had helped the Army to beat down the soldiers' Soviets that had sprung up all over Germany after the war. The reason why they were left free to plot and agitate in Bavaria was twofold. First, there was the historical antipathy of Catholic, separatist-minded Bavaria towards Protestant Berlin and its Central Government. Secondly, the Bavarians had had a sharp dose of Communism under the régimes of Kurt Eisner and Ernst Toller after the war, and after their ejection the Government had remained firmly in the hands of the Reichswehr and a succession of Conservative State cabinets. With the Central Government in Berlin predominantly Socialist, the Bavarian authorities sought actively to thwart it and encouraged for their nuisance value all the disgruntled Right Wing elements who flocked south for safety.”

The Ludendorff/Hitler Putsch was actually under the gun because of a fear that Catholic separatists would launch their own putsch:

“So that was the plan. The Bürgerbräu Keller had been booked for that evening by the ruling triumvirate for a major meeting of all the leading Bavarian personalities, to which Hitler and Ludendorff had been invited. Our informants in the ministries and the police had told us that this was to be the forerunner of the proclamation of the Wittelsbach restoration and the final break with the Socialist Government in Berlin. This was the point where Hitler and Ludendorff differed radically with their fellow-conspirators. The National-Socialists and the Kampfbund also wanted to do away with the Red Republic in the capital, but they wanted an integrated nationalist Germany under the black, white and red flag, and no part of Bavarian separatism under its white and blue banner. Even less were they prepared to listen to the plans of some Bavarians to join a Danubian federation with Austria.
Uneasy allies as the two groups had been, each had supported the other tactically as long as there seemed profit to be gained from the collaboration. Two days earlier the Kampfbund people, with Hitler, had been called to Kahr's office, where he and Lossow warned them to instigate no Putsch until the Provisional Government itself gave the signal. It was only after this meeting that Hitler learnt that the Catholic separatists had their own plans for taking the initiative. Now he proposed to unite the public ferment by a coup de main.”

When you have Catholic separatists contesting with German Nationalists, the idea of the Catholic Church being a key supporter of the nationalists seems unlikely.

Hanfstaengl also had dinner with Churchill before the Nazi seizure of power and provided briefings as a POW to Roosevelt. His son became a sergeant in the Army during World War II.

I am not sure that I accept everything Hanfstaengl says as gospel truth, but this does seem to be a worthwhile source material by an eyewitness that ought to provide some insights into the period and its players.