The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History
of Nazi Germany
National Book Award Nonfiction Winner, 1961
BIRTH OF THE THIRD REICH
On the very eve of the birth of the Third Reich a feverish tension
gripped Berlin. The Weimar Republic, it seemed obvious to almost everyonse,
was about to expire. For more than a year it had been fast crumbling.
General Kurt von Schleicher, who like his immediate predecessor, Franz
von Papen, cared little for the Republic and less for its democracy,
and who, also like him, had ruled as Chancellor by presidential decree
without recourse to Parliament, had come to the end of his rope after
fifty-seven days in office.
On Saturday, January 28, 1933, he had been abruptly dismissed by the
aging President of the Republic, Field Marshal von Hindenburg. Adolf
Hitler, leader of the National Socialists, the largest political party in
Germany, was demanding for himself the chancellorship of the democratic
Republic he had sworn to destroy.
The wildest rumors of what might happen were rife in the capital that
fateful winter weekend, and the most alarming of them, as it happened,
were not without some foundation. There were reports that Schleicher, in
collusion with General Kurt von Hammerstein, the Commander in Chief of
the Army, was preparing a putsch with the support of the Potsdam
garrison for the purpose of arresting the President and establishing a
military dictatorship. There was talk of a Nazi putsch. The Berlin storm
troopers, aided by Nazi sympathizers in the police, were to seize the
Wilhelmstrasse, where the President's Palace and most of the government
ministries were located. There was talk also of a general strike. On
Sunday, January 29, a hundred thousand workers crowded into the Lustgarten
in the center of Berlin to demonstrate their opposition to making Hitler
Chancellor. One of their leaders attempted to get in touch with
General von Hammerstein to propose joint action by the Army and organized
labor should Hitler be named to head a new government. Once before, at the
time of the Kapp putsch in 1920, a general strike had saved the
Republic after the government had fled the capital.
Throughout most of the night from Sunday to Monday Hitler paced up and
down his room in the Kaiserhof hotel on the Reichskanzlerplatz, just
down the street from the Chancellery. Despite his nervousness he was
supremely confident that his hour had struck. For nearly a month he had
been secretly negotiating with Papen and the other leaders of the
conservative Right. He had had to compromise. He could not have a purely Nazi
government. But he could be Chancellor of a coalition government whose
members, eight out of eleven of whom were not Nazis, agreed with him on
the abolition of the democratic Weimar regime. Only the aged, dour
President had seemed to stand in his way. As recently as January 26, two
days before the advent of this crucial weekend, the grizzly old Field
Marshal had told General von Hammerstein that he had "no intention
whatsoever of making that Austrian corporal either Minister of Defense or
Chancellor of the Reich."
Yet under the influence of his son, Major Oskar von Hindenburg, of Otto
von Meissner, the State Secretary to the President, of Papen and other
members of the palace camarilla, the President was finally weakening.
He was eighty-six and fading into senility. On the afternoon of Sunday,
January 29, while Hitler was having coffee and cakes with Goebbels and
other aides, Hermann Goering, President of the Reichstag and second to
Hitler in the Nazi Party, burst in and informed them categorically
that on the morrow Hitler would be named Chancellor.
Shortly before noon on Monday, January 30, 1933, Hitler drove over to
the Chancellery for an interview with Hindenburg that was to prove
fateful for himself, for Germany and for the rest of the world. From a
window in the Kaiserhof, Goebbels, Roehm and other Nazi chiefs kept an
anxious watch on the door of the Chancellery, where the Fuehrer would
shortly be coming out. "We would see from his face whether he had succeeded
or not," Goebbels noted. For even then they were not quite sure. "Our
hearts are torn back and forth between doubt, hope, joy and
discouragement," Goebbels jotted down in his diary. "We have been disappointed too
often for us to believe wholeheartedly in the great miracle."
A few moments later they witnessed the miracle. The man with the
Charlie Chaplin mustache, who had been a down-and-out tramp in Vienna in his
youth, an unknown soldier of World War 1, a derelict in Munich in the
first grim postwar days, the somewhat comical leader of the Beer Hall
Putsch, this spellbinder who was not even German but Austrian, and who
was only forty-three years old, had just been administered the oath as
Chancellor of the German Reich.
He drove the hundred yards to the Kaiserhof and was soon with his old
cronies, Goebbels, Goering, Roehm and the other Brownshirts who had
helped him along the rocky, brawling path to power. "He says nothing, and
all of us say nothing," Goebbels recorded, "but his eyes are full of
That evening from dusk until far past midnight the delirious Nazi storm
troopers marched in a massive torchlight parade to celebrate the
victory. By the tens of thousands, they emerged in disciplined columns from
the depths of the Tiergarten, passed under the triumphal arch of the
Brandenburg Gate and down the Wilhelmstrasse, their bands blaring the old
martial airs to the thunderous beating of the drums, their voices
bawling the new Horst Wessel song and other tunes that were as old as
Germany, their jack boots beating a mighty rhythm on the pavement, their
torches held high find forming a ribbon of flame that illuminated the
night and kindled the hurrahs of the onlookers massed on the sidewalks.
From a window in the palace Hindenburg looked down upon the marching
throng, beating time to the military marches with his cane, apparently
pleased that at last he had picked a Chancellor who could arouse the people
in a traditionally German way. Whether the old man, in his dotage, had
any inkling of what he had unleashed that day is doubtful. A story,
probably apocryphal, soon spread over Berlin that in the midst of the
parade he had turned to an old general and said, "I didn't know we had
taken so many Russian prisoners."
A stone's throw down the Wilhelmstrasse Adolf Hitler stood at an open
window of the Chancellery, beside himself with excitement and joy,
dancing up and down, jerking his arm up continually in the Nazi salute,
smiling and laughing until his eyes were again full of tears.
One foreign observer watched the proceedings that evening with
different feelings. "The river of fire flowed past the French Embassy," André
François-Poncet, the ambassador, wrote, "whence, with heavy heart and
filled with foreboding, I watched its luminous wake."
Tired but happy, Goebbels arrived home that night at 3 A.M. Scribbling
in his diary before retiring, he wrote: "It is almost like a dream...a
fairy tale...The new Reich has been born. Fourteen years of work have
been crowned with victory. The German revolution has begun!"
The Third Reich which was born on January 30, 1933, Hitler boasted,
would endure for a thousand years, and in Nazi parlance it was often
referred to as the "Thousand-Year Reich." It lasted twelve years and four
months, but in that flicker of time, as history goes, it caused an
eruption on this earth more violent and shattering than any previously
experienced, raising the German people to heights of power they had not known
in more than a millennium, making them at one time the masters of
Europe from the Atlantic to the Volga, from the North Cape to the
Mediterranean, and then plunging them to the depths of destruction and
desolation at the end of a world war which their nation had cold-bloodedly
provoked and during which it instituted a reign of terror over the conquered
peoples which, in its calculated butchery of human life and the human
spirit, out-did all the savage oppressions of the previous ages.
The man who founded the Third Reich, who ruled it ruthlessly and often
with uncommon shrewdness, who led it to such dizzy heights and to such
a sorry end, was a person of undoubted, if evil, genius. It is true
that he found in the German people, as a mysterious Providence and
centuries of experience had molded them up to that time, a natural instrument
which he was able to shape to his own sinister ends. But without Adolf
Hitler, who was possessed of a demonic personality, a granite will,
uncanny instincts, a cold ruthlessness, a remarkable intellect, a soaring
imagination and -- until toward the end, when, drunk with power and
success, he overreached himself -- an amazing capacity to size up people
and situations, there almost certainly would never have been a Third
"It is one of the great examples," as Friedrich Meinecke, the eminent
German historian, said, "of the singular and incalculable power of
personality in historical life."
To some Germans and, no doubt, to most foreigners it appeared that a
charlatan had come to power in Berlin. To the majority of Germans Hitler
had -- or would shortly assume -- the aura of a truly charismatic
leader. They were to follow him blindly, as if he possessed a divine
judgment, for the next twelve tempestuous years.
THE ADVENT OF ADOLF HITLER
Considering his origins and his early life, it would be difficult to
imagine a more unlikely figure to succeed to the mantle of Bismarck, the
Hohenzollern emperors and President Hindenburg than this singular
Austrian of peasant stock who was born at half past six on the evening of
April 20, 1889, in the Gasthof zum Pommer, a modest inn in the town of
Braunau am Inn, across the border from Bavaria.
The place of birth on the Austro-German frontier was to prove
significant, for early in his life, as a mere youth, Hitler became obsessed with
the idea that there should be no border between these two
German-speaking peoples and that they both belonged in the same Reich. So strong
and enduring were his feelings that at thirty-five, when he sat in a
German prison dictating the book that would become the blueprint for the
Third Reich, his very first lines were concerned with the symbolic
significance of his birthplace. Mein Kampf begins with these words:
Today it seems to me providential that fate should have chosen Braunau
am Inn as my birthplace. For this little town lies on the boundary
between two German states which we of the younger generation at least have
made it our life-work to reunite by every means at our disposal....This
little city on the border seems to me the symbol of a great mission.
Adolf Hitler was the third son of the third marriage of a minor
Austrian customs official who had been born an illegitimate child and who for
the first thirty-nine years of his life bore his mother's name,
Schicklgruber. The name Hitler appears in the maternal as well as the paternal
line. Both Hitler's grandmother on his mother's side and his
grandfather on his father's side were named Hitler, or rather variants of it,
for the family name was variously written as Hiedler, Huetler, Huettler
and Hitler. Adolf's mother was his father's second cousin, and an
episcopal dispensation had to be obtained for the marriage.
The forebears of the future German Fuehrer, on both sides, dwelt for
generations in the Waldviertel, a district in Lower Austria between the
Danube and the borders of Bohemia and Moravia. In my own Vienna days I
sometimes passed through it on my way to Prague or to Germany. It is a
hilly, wooded country of peasant villages and small farms, and though
only some fifty miles from Vienna it has a somewhat remote and
impoverished air, as if the main currents of Austrian life had passed it by. The
inhabitants tend to be dour, like the Czech peasants just to the north
of them. Intermarriage is common, as in the case of Hitler's parents,
and illegitimacy is frequent.
On the mother's side there was a certain stability. For four
generations Klara Poelzl's family remained on peasant holding Number 37 in the
village of Spital. The story of Hitler's paternal ancestors is quite
different. The spelling of the family name, as we have seen, changes; the
place of residence also. There is a spirit of restlessness among the
Hitlers, an urge to move from one village to the next, from one job to
another, to avoid firm human ties and to follow a certain bohemian life in
relations with women.
Johann Georg Hiedler, Adolf's grandfather, was a wandering miller,
plying his trade in one village after another in Lower Austria. Five months
after his first marriage, in 1824, a son was born, but the child and
the mother did not survive. Eighteen years later, while working in
Duerenthal, he married a forty-seven-year-old peasant woman from the village
of Strones, Maria Anna Schicklgruber. Five years before the marriage,
on June 7, 1837, Maria had had an illegitimate son whom she named Alois
and who became Adolf Hitler's father. It is most probable that the
father of Alois was Johann Hiedler, though conclusive evidence is lacking.
At any rate Johann eventually married the woman, but contrary to the
usual custom in such cases he did not trouble himself with legitimizing
the son after the marriage. The child grew up as Alois Schicklgruber.
Anna died in 1847, whereupon Johann Hiedler vanished for thirty years,
only to reappear at the age of eighty-four in the town of Weitra in the
Waldviertel, the spelling of his name now changed to Hitler, to
testify before a notary in the presence of three witnesses that he was the
father of Alois Schicklgruber. Why the old man waited so long to take
this step, or why he finally took it, is not known from the available
records. According to Heiden, Alois later confided to a friend that it was
done to help him obtain a share of an inheritance from an uncle, a
brother of the miller, who had raised the youth in his own household. At
any rate, this tardy recognition was made on June 6, 1876, and on
November 23 the parish priest at Doellersheim, to whose office the notarized
statement had been forwarded, scratched out the name of Alois
Schicklgruber in the baptismal registry and wrote in its place that of Alois
From that time on Adolf's father was legally known as Alois Hitler, and
the name passed on naturally to his son. It was only during the 1930s
that enterprising journalists in Vienna, delving into the parish
archives, discovered the facts about Hitler's ancestry and, disregarding old
Johann Georg Hiedler's belated attempt to do right by a bastard son,
tried to fasten on the Nazi leader the name of Adolf Schicklgruber.
There are many weird twists of fate in the strange life of Adolf
Hitler, but none more odd than this one which took place thirteen years
before his birth. Had the eighty-four-year-old wandering miller not made his
unexpected reappearance to recognize the paternity of his
thirty-nine-year-old son nearly thirty years after the death of the mother, Adolf
Hitler would have been born Adolf Schicklgruber. There may not be much
or anything in a name, but I have heard Germans speculate whether Hitler
could have become the master of Germany had he been known to the world
as Schicklgruber. It has a slightly comic sound as it rolls off the
tongue of a South German. Can one imagine the frenzied German masses
acclaiming a Schicklgruber with their thunderous "Heils"? "Heil
Schicklgruber!" Not only was "Heil Hitler!" used as a Wagnerian, paganlike chant
by the multitude in the mystic pageantry of the massive Nazi rallies,
but it became the obligatory form of greeting between Germans during the
Third Reich, even on the telephone, where it replaced the conventional
"Hello." "Heil Schicklgruber!"? It is a little difficult to imagine.
Since the parents of Alois apparently never lived together, even after
they were married, the future father of Adolf Hitler grew up with his
uncle, who though a brother of Johann Georg Hiedler spelled his name
differently, being known as Johann von Nepomuk Huetler. In view of the
undying hatred which the Nazi Fuehrer would develop from youth on for the
Czechs, whose nation he ultimately destroyed, the Christian name is
worthy of passing mention. Johann von Nepomuk was the national saint of
the Czech people and some historians have seen in a Hitler's being given
this name an indication of Czech blood in the family.
Alois Schicklgruber first learned the trade of shoemaker in the village
of Spital, but being restless, like his father, he soon set out to
make his fortune in Vienna. At eighteen he joined the border police in the
Austrian customs service near Salzburg, and on being promoted to the
customs service itself nine years later he married Anna Glasl-Hoerer,
the adopted daughter of a customs official. She brought him a small dowry
and increased social status, as such things went in the old
Austro-Hungarian petty bureaucracy. But the marriage was not a happy one. She was
fourteen years older than he, of failing health, and she remained
childless. After sixteen years they were separated and three years later,
in 1883, she died.
Before the separation Alois, now legally known as Hitler, had taken up
with a young hotel cook, Franziska Matzelsberger, who bore him a son,
named Alois, in 1882. One month after the death of his wife he married
the cook and three months later she gave birth to a daughter, Angela.
The second marriage did not last long. Within a year Franziska was dead
of tuberculosis. Six months later Alois Hitler married for the third and
The new bride, Klara Poelzl, who would shortly become the mother of
Adolf Hitler, was twenty-five, her husband forty-eight, and they had long
known each other. Klara came from Spital, the ancestral village of the
Hitlers. Her grandfather had been Johann von Nepomuk Huetler, with whom
his nephew, Alois Schicklgruber-Hitler, had grown up. Thus Alois and
Klara were second cousins and they found it necessary, as we have seen,
to apply for episcopal dispensation to permit the marriage.
It was a union which the customs official had first contemplated years
before when he had taken Klara into his childless home as a foster
daughter during his first marriage. The child had lived for years with the
Schicklgrubers in Braunau, and as the first wife ailed Alois seems to
have given thought to marrying Klara as soon as his wife died. His
legitimation and his coming into an inheritance from the uncle who was
Klara's grandfather occurred when the young girl was sixteen, just old
enough to legally marry. But, as we have seen, the wife lingered on after
the separation, and, perhaps because Alois in the meantime took up with
the cook Franziska Matzelsberger, Klara, at the age of twenty, left the
household and went to Vienna, where she obtained employment as a
She returned four years later to keep house for her cousin; Franziska
too, in the last months of her life, had moved out of her husband's
home. Alois Hitler and Klara Poelzl were married on January 7, 1885, and
some four months and ten days later their first child, Gustav, was born.
He died in infancy, as did the second child, Ida, born in 1886. Adolf
was the third child of this third marriage. A younger brother, Edmund,
born in 1894, lived only six years. The fifth and last child, Paula,
born in 1896, lived to survive her famous brother.
Adolf's half-brother, Alois, and his half-sister, Angela, the children
of Franziska Matzelsberger, also lived to grow up. Angela, a handsome
young woman, married a revenue official named Raubal and after his death
worked in Vienna as a housekeeper and for a time, if Heiden's
information is correct, as a cook in a Jewish charity kitchen. In 1928 Hitler
brought her to Berchtesgaden as his housekeeper, and thereafter one
heard a great deal in Nazi circles of the wondrous Viennese pastries and
desserts she baked for him and for which he had such a ravenous appetite.
She left him in 1936 to marry a professor of architecture in Dresden,
and Hitler, by then Chancellor and dictator, was resentful of her
departure and declined to send a wedding present. She was the only person in
the family with whom, in his later years, he seems to have been close
-- with one exception. Angela had a daughter, Geli Raubal, an
attractive young blond woman with whom, as we shall see, Hitler had the only
truly deep love affair of his life.
Adolf Hitler never liked to hear mention of his half-brother. Alois
Matzelsberger, later legitimized as Alois Hitler, became a waiter, and for
many years his life was full of difficulties with the law. Heiden
records that at eighteen the young man was sentenced to five months in jail
for theft and at twenty served another sentence of eight months on the
same charge. He eventually moved to Germany, only to become embroiled
in further troubles. In 1924, while Adolf Hitler was languishing in
prison for having staged a political revolt in Munich, Alois Hitler was
sentenced to six months in prison by a Hamburg court for bigamy.
Thereafter, Heiden recounts, he moved on to England, where he quickly
established a family and then deserted it.
The coming to power of the National Socialists brought better times to
Alois Hitler. He opened a Bierstube -- a small beerhouse -- in a
suburb of Berlin, moving it shortly before the war to the
Wittenbergplatz in the capital's fashionable West End. It was much frequented by
Nazi officials and during the early part of the war when food was scarce
it inevitably had a plentiful supply. I used to drop in occasionally at
that time. Alois was then nearing sixty, a portly, simple,
good-natured man with little physical resemblance to his famous half-brother and
in fact indistinguishable from dozens of other little pub keepers one
had seen in Germany and Austria. Business was good and, whatever his
past, he was now obviously enjoying the prosperous life. He had only one
fear: that his half-brother, in a moment of disgust or rage, might revoke
his license. Sometimes there was talk in the little beerhouse that the
Chancellor and Fuehrer of the Reich regretted this reminder of the
humble nature of the Hitler family. Alois himself, I remember, refused to
be drawn into any talk whatsoever about his half-brother -- a wise
precaution but frustrating to those of us who were trying to learn all we
could about the background of the man who by that time had already set
out to conquer Europe.
Except in Mein Kampf, where the sparse biographical material is
often misleading and the omissions monumental, Hitler rarely discussed
-- or permitted discussion of in his presence -- his family background
and early life. We have seen what the family background was. What was
the early life?
THE EARLY LIFE OF ADOLF HITLER
The year his father retired from the customs service at the age of
fifty-eight, the six-year-old Adolf entered the public school in the
village of Fischlham, a short distance southwest of Linz. This was in 1895.
For the next four or five years the restless old pensioner moved from
one village to another in the vicinity of Linz. By the time the son was
fifteen he could remember seven changes of address and five different
schools. For two years he attended classes at the Benedictine monastery
at Lambach, near which his father had purchased a farm. There he sang in
the choir, took singing lessons and, according to his own account,
dreamed of one day taking holy orders. Finally the retired customs
official settled down for good in the village of Leonding, on the southern
outskirts of Linz, where the family occupied a modest house and garden.
At the age of eleven, Adolf was sent to the high school at Linz. This
represented a financial sacrifice for the father and indicated an
ambition that the son should follow in his father's footsteps and become a
civil servant. That, however, was the last thing the youth would dream
"Then barely eleven years old," Hitler later recounted, "I was forced
into opposition (to my father) for the first time....I did not want to
become a civil servant."
The story of the bitter, unrelenting struggle of the boy, not yet in
his teens, against a hardened and, as he said, domineering father is one
of the few biographical items which Hitler sets down in great detail
and with apparent sincerity and truth in Mein Kampf. The conflict
aroused the first manifestation of that fierce, unbending will which
later would carry him so far despite seemingly insuperable obstacles and
handicaps and which, confounding all those who stood in his way, was to
put an indelible stamp on Germany and Europe.
I did not want to become a civil servant, no, and again no. All
attempts on my father's part to inspire me with love or pleasure in this
profession by stories from his own life accomplished the exact opposite.
I...grew sick to my stomach at the thought of sitting in an office,
deprived of my liberty; ceasing to be master of my own time and being
compelled to force the content of my whole life into paper forms that had to
be filled out....
One day it became clear to me that I would become a painter, an
artist...My father was struck speechless.
He doubted my sanity, or perhaps he thought he had heard wrong or
misunderstood me. But when he was clear on the subject, and particularly
after he felt the seriousness of my intention, he opposed it with all the
determination of his nature....
"Artist! No! Never as long as I live!"...My father would never depart
from his "Never!" And I intensified my "Nevertheless!"
One consequence of this encounter, Hider later explained, was that he
stopped studying in school. "I thought that once my father saw how
little progress I was making at high school he would let me devote myself to
my dream, whether he liked it or not."
This, written thirty-four years later, may be partly an excuse for his
failure at school. His marks in grade school had been uniformly good.
But at the Linz high school they were so poor that in the end, without
obtaining the customary certificate, he was forced to transfer to the
state high school at Steyr, some distance from Linz. He remained there
but a short time and left before graduating.
Hitler's scholastic failure rankled in him in later life, when he
heaped ridicule on the academic "gentry," their degrees and diplomas and
their pedagogical airs. Even in the last three or four years of his life,
at Supreme Army Headquarters, where he allowed himself to be
overwhelmed with details of military strategy, tactics and command, he would take
an evening off to reminisce with his old party cronies on the
stupidity of the teachers he had had in his youth. Some of these meanderings of
this mad genius, now the Supreme Warlord personally directing his vast
armies from the Volga to the English Channel, have been preserved.
When I think of the men who were my teachers, I realize that most of
them were slightly mad. The men who could be regarded as good teachers
were exceptional. It's tragic to think that such people have the power to
bar a young man's way. -- March 3, 1942.
I have the most unpleasant recollections of the teachers who taught me.
Their external appearance exuded uncleanliness; their collars were
unkempt...They were the product of a proletariat denuded of all personal
independence of thought, distinguished by unparalleled ignorance and
most admirably fitted to become the pillars of an effete system of
government which, thank God, is now a thing of the past. -- April 12,
When I recall my teachers at school, I realize that half of them were
abnormal....We pupils of old Austria were brought up to respect old
people and women. But on our professors we had no mercy; they were our
natural enemies. The majority of them were somewhat mentally deranged, and
quite a few ended their days as honest-to-God lunatics!...I was in
particular bad odor with the teachers. I showed not the slightest aptitude
for foreign languages -- though I might have, had not the teacher been
a congenital idiot. I could not bear the sight of him. -- August 29,
Our teachers were absolute tyrants. They had no sympathy with youth;
their one object was to stuff our brains and turn us into erudite apes
like themselves. If any pupil showed the slightest trace of originality,
they persecuted him relentlessly, and the only model pupils whom I have
ever got to know have all been failures in after-life. -- September
To his dying day, it is obvious, Hitler never forgave his teachers for
the poor marks they had given him -- nor could he forget. But he could
distort to a point of grotesqueness.
The impression he made on his teachers, recollected after he had become
a world figure, has been briefly recorded. One of the few instructors
Hitler seems to have liked was Professor Theodor Gissinger, who strove
to teach him science. Gissinger later recalled, "As far as I was
concerned, Hitler left neither a favorable nor an unfavorable impression in
Linz. He was by no means a leader of the class. He was slender and
erect, his face pallid and very thin, almost like that of a consumptive, his
gaze unusually open, his eyes brilliant."
Professor Eduard Huemer, apprently the "congenital idiot" mentioned by
Hitler above -- for he taught French -- came to Munich in 1923 to
testify for his former pupil, who was then being tried for treason as the
result of the Beer Hall Putsch. Though he lauded Hitler's aims and said
that he wished from the bottom of his heart to see him fulfill his
ideals, he gave the following thumbnail portrait of the young high-school
Hitler was certainly gifted, although only for particular subjects, but
he lacked self-control and, to say the least, he was considered
argumentive, autocratic, self-opinionated and bad-tempered, and unable to
submit to school discipline. Nor was he industrious; otherwise he would
have achieved much better results, gifted as he was.
There was one teacher at the Linz high school who exercised a strong
and, as it turned out, a fateful influence on the young Adolf Hitler.
This was a history teacher, Dr. Leopold Poetsch, who came from the
southern German-language border region where it meets that of the South Slavs
and whose experience with the racial struggle there had made him a
fanatical German nationalist. Before coming to Linz he had taught at
Marburg, which later, when the area was transferred to Yugoslavia after the
First World War, became Maribor.
Though Dr. Poetsch had given his pupil marks of only "fair" in history,
he was the only one of Hitler's teachers to receive a warm tribute in
Mein Kampf. Hitler readily admitted his debt to this man.
It was perhaps decisive for my whole later life that good fortune gave
me a history teacher who understood, as few others did, this
principle... -- of retaining the essential and forgetting the nonessential...In
my teacher, Dr. Leopold Poetsch of the high school in Linz, this
requirement was fulfilled in a truly ideal manner. An old gentleman, kind but
at the same time firm, he was able not only to hold our attention by
his dazzling eloquence but to carry us away with him. Even today I think
back with genuine emotion on this grayhaired man who, by the fire of
his words, sometimes made us forget the present; who, as if by magic,
transported us into times past and, out of the millennium mists of time,
transformed dry historical facts into vivid reality. There we sat, often
aflame with enthusiasm, sometimes even moved to tears...He used our
budding national fanaticism as a means of educating us, frequently
appealing to our sense of national honor.
This teacher made history my favorite subject.
And indeed, though he had no such intention, it was then that I became
a young revolutionary.
Some thirty-five years later, in 1938, while touring Austria in triumph
after he had forced its annexation to the Third Reich, Chancellor
Hitler stopped off at Klagenfurt to see his old teacher, then in
retirement. He was delighted to find that the old gentleman had been a member of
the underground Nazi S.S., which had been outlawed during Austria's
independence. He conversed with him alone for an hour and later confided
to members of his party, "You cannot imagine how much I owe to that old
Alois Hitler died of a lung hemorrhage on January 3, 1903, at the age
of sixty-five. He was stricken while taking a morning walk and died a
few moments later in a nearby inn in the arms of a neighbor. When his
thirteen-year-old son saw the body of his father he broke down and wept.
His mother, who was then forty-two, moved to a modest apartment in
Urfahr, a suburb of Linz, where she tried to keep herself and her two
surviving children, Adolf and Paula, on the meager savings and pension left
her. She felt obligated, as Hitler remarks in Mein Kampf, to
continue his education in accordance with his father's wishes -- "in other
words," as he puts it, "to have me study for the civil servant's
career." But though the young widow was indulgent to her son, and he seems
to have loved her dearly, he was "more than ever determined absolutely,"
he says, "not to undertake this career." And so, despite a tender love
between mother and son, there was friction and Adolf continued to
neglect his studies.
"Then suddenly an illness came to my help and in a few weeks decided my
future and the eternal domestic quarrel."
The lung ailment which Hitler suffered as he was nearing sixteen
necessitated his dropping out of school for at least a year. He was sent for
a time to the family village of Spital, where he recuperated at the
home of his mother's sister, Theresa Schmidt, a peasant woman. On his
recovery he returned briefly to the state high school at Steyr. His last
report, dated September 16, 1905, shows marks of "adequate" in German,
chemistry, physics, geometry and geometrical drawing. In geography and
history he was "satisfactory"; in free-hand drawing, "excellent." He felt
so excited at the prospect of leaving school for good that for the
first and last time in his life he got drunk. As he remembered it in later
years he was picked up at dawn, lying on a country road outside of
Steyr, by a milkmaid and helped back to town, swearing he would never do
it again. In this matter, at least, he was as good as his word, for he
became a teetotaler, a nonsmoker and a vegetarian to boot, at first out
of necessity as a penniless vagabond in Vienna and Munich, and later
out of conviction.
The next two or three years Hitler often described as the happiest days
of his life. While his mother suggested -- and other relatives urged
-- that he go to work and learn a trade he contented himself with
dreaming of his future as an artist and with idling away the pleasant days
along the Danube. He never forgot the "downy softness" of those years
from sixteen to nineteen when as a "mother's darling" he enjoyed the
"hollowness of a comfortable life." Though the ailing widow found it
difficult to make ends meet on her meager income, young Adolf declined to help
out by getting a job. The idea of earning even his own living by any
kind of regular employment was repulsive to him and was to remain so
throughout his life.
What apparently made those last years of approaching manhood so happy
for Hitler was the freedom from having to work, which gave him the
freedom to brood, to dream, to spend his days roaming the city streets or
the countryside declaiming to his companion what was wrong with the world
and how to right it, and his evenings curled up with a book or
standing in the rear of the opera house in Linz or Vienna listening enraptured
to the mystic, pagan works of Richard Wagner.
A boyhood friend later remembered him as a pale, sickly, lanky youth
who, though usually shy and reticent, was capable of sudden bursts of
hysterical anger against those who disagreed with him. For four years he
fancied himself deeply in love with a handsome blond maiden named
Stefanie, and though he often gazed at her longingly as she strolled up and
down the Landstrasse in Linz with her mother he never made the slightest
effort to meet her, preferring to keep her, like so many other
objects, in the shadowy world of his soaring fantasies. Indeed, in the
countless love poems which he wrote to her but never sent (one of them was
entitled "Hymn to the Beloved") and which he insisted on reading to his
patient young friend, August Kubizek, she became a damsel out of Die
Walkuerie, clad in a dark-blue flowing velvet gown, riding a white
steed over the flowering meadows.
Although Hitler was determined to become an artist, preferably a
painter or at least an architect, he was already obsessed with politics at
the age of sixteen. By then he had developed a violent hatred for the
Hapsburg monarchy and all the non-German races in the multinational
Austro-Hungarian Empire over which it ruled, and an equally violent love for
everything German. At sixteen he had become what he was to remain till
his dying breath: a fanatical German nationalist.
He appears to have had little of the carefree spirit of youth despite
all the loafing. The world's problems weighed down on him. Kubizek later
recalled, "He saw everywhere only obstacles and hostility...He was
always up against something and at odds with the world...I never saw him
take anything lightly..."
It was at this period that the young man who could not stand school
became a voracious reader, subscribing to the Library of Adult Education
in Linz and joining the Museum Society, whose books he borrowed in large
numbers. His young friend remembered him as always surrounded by
books, of which his favorites were works on German history and German
Since Linz was a provincial town, it was not long before Vienna, the
glittering baroque capital of the empire, began to beckon a youth of such
ambition and imagination. In 1906, just after his seventeenth
birthday, Hitler set out with funds provided by his mother and other relations
to spend two months in the great metropolis. Though it was later to
become the scene of his bitterest years when, at times, he literally lived
in the gutter, Vienna on this first visit enthralled him. He roamed
the streets for days, filled with excitement at the sight of the imposing
buildings along the Ring and in a continual state of ecstasy at what
he saw in the museums, the opera house, the theaters.
He also inquired about entering the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts, and a
year later, in October 1907, he was back in the capital to take the
entrance examination as the first practical step in fulfilling his dream
of becoming a painter. He was eighteen and full of high hopes, but they
were dashed. An entry in the academy's classification list tells the
The following took the test with insufficient results, or were not
admitted...Adolf Hitler, Braunau a. Inn, April 20, 1889, German, Catholic.
Father civil servant. 4 classes in High School. Few Heads. Test drawing
Hitler tried again the following year and this time his drawings were
so poor that he was not admitted to the test. For the ambitious young
man this was, as he later wrote, a bolt from the blue. He had been
absolutely convinced that he would be successful. According to his own
account in Mein Kampf, Hitler requested an explanation from the rector
of the academy.
That gentleman assured me that the drawings I had submitted
incontrovertibly showed my unfitness for painting, and that my ability obviously
lay in the field of architecture; for me, he said, the Academy's School
of Painting was out of the question, the place for me was at the School
The young Adolf was inclined to agree but quickly realized to his
sorrow that his failure to graduate from high school might well block his
entry into the architectural school.
In the meantime his mother was dying of cancer of the breast and he
returned to Linz. Since Adolf's departure from school Klara Hitler and her
relatives had supported the young man for three years, and they could
see nothing to show for it. On December 21, 1908, as the town began to
assume its festive Christmas garb, Adolf Hitler's mother died, and two
days later she was buried at Leonding beside her husband. To the
it was a dreadful blow...I had honored my father, but my mother I had
loved...[Her] death put a sudden end to all my highflown plans...Poverty
and hard reality compelled me to take a quick decision...I was faced
with the problem of somehow making my own living.
Somehow! He had no trade. He had always disdained manual labor. He had
never tried to earn a cent. But he was undaunted. Bidding his relatives
farewell, he declared that he would never return until he had made
With a suitcase full of clothes and underwear in my hand and an
indomitable will in my heart, I set out for Vienna. I too hoped to wrest from
fate what my father had accomplished fifty years before; I too hoped to
become "something" -- but in no case a civil servant.
"THE SADDEST PERIOD OF MY LIFE"
The next four years, between 1909 and 1913, turned out to be a time of
utter misery and destitution for the conquering young man from Linz. In
these last fleeting years before the fall of the Hapsburgs and the end
of the city as the capital of an empire of fifty-two million people in
the heart of Europe, Vienna had a gaiety and charm that were unique
among the capitals of the world. Not only in its architecture, its
sculpture, its music, but in the lighthearted, pleasure-loving, cultivated
spirit of its people, it breathed an atmosphere of the baroque and the
rococo that no other city of the West knew.
Set along the blue Danube beneath the wooded hills of the Wienerwald,
which were studded with yellow-green vineyards, it was a place of
natural beauty that captivated the visitor and made the Viennese believe that
Providence had been especially kind to them. Music filled the air, the
towering music of gifted native sons, the greatest Europe had known,
Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert, and, in the last Indian-summer
years, the gay, haunting waltzes of Vienna's own beloved Johann Strauss.
To a people so blessed and so imprinted with the baroque style of
living, life itself was something of a dream and the good folk of the city
passed the pleasant days and nights of their lives waltzing and wining,
in light talk in the congenial coffeehouses, listening to music and
viewing the make-believe of theater and opera and operetta, in flirting
and making love, abandoning a large part of their lives to pleasure and
To be sure, an empire had to be governed, an army and navy manned,
communications maintained, business transacted and labor done. But few in
Vienna worked overtime -- or even full time -- at such things.
There was a seamy side, of course. This city, like all others, had its
poor: ill-fed, ill-clothed and living in hovels. But as the greatest
industrial center in Central Europe as well as the capital of the empire,
Vienna was prosperous, and this prosperity spread among the people and
sifted down. The great mass of the lower middle class controlled the
city politically; labor was organizing not only trade unions but a
powerful political party of its own, the Social Democrats. There was a
ferment in the life of the city, now grown to a population of two million.
Democracy was forcing out the ancient autocracy of the Hapsburgs,
education and culture were opening up to the masses so that by the time
Hitler came to Vienna in 1909 there was opportunity for a penniless young
man either to get a higher education or to earn a fairly decent living
and, as one of a million wage earners, to live under the civilizing spell
which the capital cast over its inhabitants. Was not his only friend,
Kubizek, as poor and as obscure as himself, already making a name for
himself in the Academy of Music?
But the young Adolf did not pursue his ambition to enter the School of
Architecture. It was still open for him despite his lack of a
high-school diploma -- young men who showed "special talent" were admitted
without such a certificate -- but so far as is known he made no application.
Nor was he interested in learning a trade or in taking any kind of
regular employment. Instead he preferred to putter about at odd jobs:
shoveling snow, beating carpets, carrying bags outside the West Railroad
Station, occasionally for a few days working as a building laborer. In
November 1909, less than a year after he arrived in Vienna to "forestall
fate," he was forced to abandon a furnished room in the Simon Denk
Gasse, and for the next four years he lived in flophouses or in the almost
equally miserable quarters of the men's hostel at 27 Meldemannstrasse
in the Twentieth District of Vienna, near the Danube, staving off hunger
by frequenting the charity soup kitchens of the city.
No wonder that nearly two decades later he could write:
To me Vienna, the city which to so many is the epitome of innocent
pleasure, a festive playground for merrymakers, represents, I am sorry to
say, merely the living memory of the saddest period of my life.
Even today this city can arouse in me nothing but dismal thoughts. For
me the name of this Phaeacial city represents five years of hardship
and misery. Five years in which I was forced to earn a living, first as a
day laborer, then as a small painter; a truly meager living which
never sufficed to appease even my daily hunger.
Always, he says of these times, there was hunger.
Hunger was then my faithful bodyguard; he never left me for a moment
and partook of all I had...My life was a continual struggle with this
It never, however, drove him to the extremity of trying to find a
regular job. As he makes clear in Mein Kampf, he had the petty
bourgeoisie's gnawing fear of sliding back into the ranks of the proletariat,
of the manual laborers -- a fear he was later to exploit in building
up the National Socialist Party on the broad foundation of the hitherto
leaderless, ill-paid, neglected white-collar class, whose millions
nourished the illusion that they were at least socially better off than the
Although Hitler says he eked out at least part of a living as "a small
painter," he gives no details of this work in his autobiography except
to remark that in the years 1909 and 1910 he had so far improved his
position that he no longer had to work as a common laborer.
"By this time," he says, "I was working independently as a small
draftsman and painter of water colors."
This is somewhat misleading, as is so much else of a biographical
nature in Mein Kampf. Though the evidence of those who knew him at
the time appears to be scarcely more trustworthy, enough of it has been
pieced together to give a picture that is probably more accurate and
certainly more complete.
That Adolf Hitler was never a house painter, as his political opponents
taunted him with having been, is fairly certain. At least there is no
evidence that he ever followed such a trade. What he did was draw or
paint crude little pictures of Vienna, usually of some well-known
landmark such as St. Stephen's Cathedral, the opera house, the Burgtheater,
the Palace of Schoenbrunn or the Roman ruins in Schoenbrunn Park.
According to his acquaintances he copied them from older works; apparently he
could not draw from nature. They are rather stilted and lifeless, like
a beginning architect's rough and careless sketches, and the human
figures he sometimes added are so bad as to remind one of a comic strip. I
find a note of my own made once after going through a portfolio of
Hitler's original sketches: "Few faces. Crude. One almost ghoulish face."
To Heiden, "they stand like tiny stuffed sacks outside the high, solemn
Probably hundreds of these pitiful pieces were sold by Hitler to the
petty traders to ornament a wall, to dealers who used them to fill empty
picture frames on display and to furniture makers who sometimes tacked
them to the backs of cheap sofas and chairs after a fashion in Vienna
in those days. Hitler could also be more commercial. He often drew
posters for shopkeepers advertising such products as Teddy's Perspiration
Powder, and there was one, perhaps turned out to make a little money at
Christmas time, depicting Santa Claus selling brightly colored candles,
and another showing St. Stephen's Gothic spire, which Hitler never
tired of copying, rising out of a mountain of soap cakes.
This was the extent of Hitler's "artistic" achievement, yet to the end
of his life he considered himself an "artist."
Bohemian he certainly looked in those vagabond years in Vienna. Those
who knew him then remembered later his long black shabby overcoat, which
hung down to his ankles and resembled a caftan and which had been
given him by a Hungarian Jewish old-clothes dealer, a fellow inmate of the
dreary men's hostel who had befriended him. They remembered his greasy
black derby, which he wore the year round; his matted hair, brushed
down over his forehead as in later years and, in the back, hanging
disheveled over his soiled collar, for he rarely appeared to have had a
haircut or a shave and the sides of his face and his chin were usually
covered with the black stubble of an incipient beard. If one can believe
Hanisch, who later became something of an artist, Hitler resembled "an
apparition such as rarely occurs among Christians."
Unlike some of the shipwrecked young men with whom he lived, he had
none of the vices of youth. He neither smoked nor drank. He had nothing to
do with women -- not, so far as can be learned, because of any
abnormality but simply because of an ingrained shyness.
"I believe," Hitler remarked afterward in Mein Kampf, in one of
his rare flashes of humor, "that those who knew me in those days took
me for an eccentric."
They remembered, as had his teachers, the strong, staring eyes that
dominated the face and expressed something embedded in the personality
that did not jibe with the miserable existence of the unwashed tramp. And
they recalled that the young man, for all his laziness when it came to
physical labor, was a voracious reader, spending much of his days and
evenings devouring books.
At that time I read enormously and thoroughly. All the free time my
work left me was employed in my studies. In this way I forged in a few
years' time the foundations of a knowledge from which I still draw
In Mein Kampf Hitler discourses at length on the art of reading.
By "reading," to be sure, I mean perhaps something different than the
average member of our so-called "intelligentsia."
I know people who "read" enormously...yet whom I would not describe as
"well-read." True, they possess a mass of "knowledge," but their brain
is unable to organize and register the material they have taken in...On
the other hand, a man who possesses the art of correct reading
will...instinctively and immediately perceive everything which in his opinion
is worth permanently remembering, either because it is suited to his
purpose or generally worth knowing...The art of reading, as of learning,
is this:...to retain the essential, to forget the
nonessential....Only this kind of reading has meaning and purpose...Viewed in this
light, my Vienna period was especially fertile and valuable.
Valuable for what? Hitler's answer is that from his reading and from
his life among the poor and disinherited of Vienna he learned all that he
needed to know in later life.
Vienna was and remained for me the hardest, though most thorough,
school of my life. I had set foot in this town while still half a boy and I
left it a man, grown quiet and grave.
In this period there took shape within me a world picture and a
philosophy which became the granite foundation of all my acts. In addition to
what I then created, I have had to learn little; and I have had to
What, then, had he learned in the school of those hard knocks which
Vienna had so generously provided? What were the ideas which he acquired
there from his reading and his experience and which, as he says, would
remain essentially unaltered to the end? That they were mostly shallow
and shabby, often grotesque and preposterous, and poisoned by outlandish
prejudices will become obvious on the most cursory examination. That
they are important to this history, as they were to the world, is
equally obvious, for they were to form part of the foundation for the Third
Reich which this bookish vagrant was soon to build.
THE BUDDING IDEAS OF ADOLF HITLER
They were, with one exception, not original but picked up, raw, from
the churning maelstrom of Austrian politics and life in the first years
of the twentieth century. The Danube monarchy was dying of indigestion.
For centuries a minority of German-Austrians had ruled over the
polyglot empire of a dozen nationalities and stamped their language and their
culture on it. But since 1848 their hold had been weakening. The
minorities could not be digested. Austria was not a melting pot. In the 1860s
the Italians had broken away and in 1867 the Hungarians had won
equality with the Germans under a so-called Dual Monarchy. Now, as the
twentieth century began, the various Slav peoples -- the Czechs, the Slovaks,
the Serbs, the Croats and the others -- were demanding equality and at
least national autonomy. Austrian politics had become dominated by the
bitter quarrel of the nationalities.
But this was not all. There was social revolt too and this often
transcended the racial struggle. The disenfranchised lower classes were
demanding the ballot, and the workers were insisting on the right to
organize trade unions and to strike -- not only for higher wages and better
working conditions but to gain their democratic political ends. Indeed a
general strike had finally brought universal manhood suffrage and with
this the end of political dominance by the Austrian Germans, who
numbered but a third of the population of the Austrian half of the empire.
To these developments Hitler, the fanatical young German-Austrian
nationalist from Linz, was bitterly opposed. To him the empire was sinking
into a "foul morass." It could be saved only if the master race, the
Germans, reasserted their old absolute authority. The non-German races,
especially the Slavs and above all the Czechs, were an inferior people.
It was up to the Germans to rule them with an iron hand. The Parliament
must be abolished and an end put to all the democratic "nonsense."
Though he took no part in politics, Hitler followed avidly the
activities of the three major political parties of old Austria: the Social
Democrats, the Christian Socialists and the Pan-German Nationalists. And
there now began to sprout in the mind of this unkempt frequenter of the
soup kitchens a political shrewdness which enabled him to see with
amazing clarity the strengths and weaknesses of contemporary political
movements and which, as it matured, would make him the master politician of
At first contact he developed a furious hatred for the party of the
Social Democrats. "What most repelled me," he says, "was its hostile
attitude toward the struggle for the preservation of Germanism [and] its
disgraceful courting of the Slavic 'comrade'...In a few months I obtained
what might have otherwise required decades: an understanding of a
pestilential whore, cloaking herself as social virtue and brotherly love."
And yet he was already intelligent enough to quench his feelings of
rage against this party of the working class in order to examine carefully
the reasons for its popular success. He concluded that there were
several reasons, and years later he was to remember them and utilize them
in building up the National Socialist Party of Germany.
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."
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
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.
I understood the infamous spiritual terror which this movement exerts,
particularly on the bourgeoisie, which is neither morally nor mentally
equal to such attacks; at a given sign it unleashes a veritable barrage
of lies and slanders against whatever adversary seems most dangerous,
until the nerves of the attacked persons break down...This is a tactic
based on precise calculation of all human weaknesses, and its result
will lead to success with almost mathematical certainty...
I achieved an equal understanding of the importance of physical terror
toward the individual and the masses...For while in the ranks of their
supporters the victory achieved seems a triumph of the justice of their
own cause, the defeated adversary in most cases despairs of the
success of any further resistance.
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,
antisocialism, 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."
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
Losvon-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."
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
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."
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
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."
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.
The power which has always started the greatest religious and political
avalanches in history rolling has from time immemorial been the magic
power of the spoken word, and that alone.
The broad masses of the people can be moved only by the power of
speech. All great movements are popular movements, volcanic eruptions of
human passions and emotional sentiments, stirred either by the cruel
Goddess of Distress or by the firebrand of the word hurled among the masses;
they are not the lemonade-like outpourings of the literary aesthetes
and drawing-room heroes.
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."
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."
"Then," says Hitler, "I came to Vienna."
Preoccupied by the abundance of my impressions...oppressed by the
hardship of my own lot, I gained at first no insight into the inner
stratification of the people in this gigantic city. Notwithstanding that Vienna
in those days counted nearly two hundred thousand Jews among its two
million inhabitants, I did not see them...The Jew was still
characterized for me by nothing but his religion, and therefore on grounds of human
tolerance I maintained my rejection of religious attacks in this case
as in others. Consequently the tone of the Viennese anti-Semitic press
seemed to me unworthy of the cultural tradition of a great nation.
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
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."
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."
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
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.
Probably he left Austria to escape military service. This was not
because he was a coward but because he loathed the idea of serving in the
ranks with Jews, Slavs and other minority races of the empire. In Mein
Kampf Hitler states that he went to Munich in the spring of 1912,
but this is an error. A police register lists him as living in Vienna
until May 1913.
His own stated reasons for leaving Austria are quite grandiose.
My inner revulsion toward the Hapsburg State steadily grew...I was
repelled by the conglomeration of races which the capital showed me,
repelled by this whole mixture of Czechs, Poles, Hungarians, Ruthenians,
Serbs, and Croats, and everywhere the eternal mushroom of humanity -- Jews,
and more Jews. To me the giant city seemed the embodiment of racial
desecration...The longer I lived in this city the more my hatred grew for
the foreign mixture of peoples which had begun to corrode this old
site of German culture...For all these reasons a longing rose stronger and
stronger in me to go at last whither since my childhood secret desires
and secret love had drawn me.
His destiny in that land he loved so dearly was to be such as not even
he, in his wildest dreams, could have then imagined. He was, and would
remain until shortly before he became Chancellor, technically a
foreigner, an Austrian, in the German Reich. It is only as an Austrian who
came of age in the last decade before the collapse of the Hapsburg Empire,
who failed to take root in its civilized capital, who embraced all the
preposterous prejudices and hates then rife among its German-speaking
extremists and who failed to grasp what was decent and honest and
honorable in the vast majority of his fellow citizens, were they Czechs or
Jews or Germans, poor or well off, artists or artisans, that Hitler can
be understood. It is doubtful if any German from the north, from the
Rhineland in the west, from East Prussia or even from Bavaria in the
south could have had in his blood and mind out of any possible experience
exactly the mixture of ingredients which propelled Adolf Hitler to the
heights he eventually reached. To be sure, there was added a liberal
touch of unpredictable genius.
But in the spring of 1913 his genius had not yet shown. In Munich, as
in Vienna, he remained penniless, friendless and without a regular job.
And then in the summer of 1914 the war came, snatching him, like
millions of others, into its grim clutches. On August 3 he petitioned King
Ludwig Ill of Bavaria for permission to volunteer in a Bavarian regiment
and it was granted.
This was the heaven-sent opportunity. Now the young vagabond could
satisfy not only his passion to serve his beloved adopted country in what
he says he believed was a fight for its existence -- "to be or not to
be" -- but he could escape from all the failures and frustrations of his
"To me," he wrote in Mein Kampf, "those hours came as a
deliverance from the distress that had weighed upon me during the days of my
youth. I am not ashamed to say that, carried away by the enthusiasm of
the moment, I sank down on my knees and thanked Heaven out of the
fullness of my heart for granting me the good fortune of being permitted to
live in such a time...For me, as for every German, there now began the
most memorable period of my life. Compared to the events of this gigantic
struggle all the past fell away into oblivion."
For Hitler the past, with all its shabbiness, loneliness and
disappointments, was to remain in the shadows, though it shaped his mind and
character forever afterward. The war, which now would bring death to so
many millions, brought for him, at twenty-five, a new start in life.
Copyright © 1959, 1960 by William L. Shirer
Copyright renewed © 1987, 1988 by William L. Shirer
Afterword copyright © 1990 by William L. Shirer
Picture of William L. Shirer, Credit: Arnold Newman,
Click on the name to read essays
Baldwin photo credit: Sandra Wavrick