Alfred Rosenberg was born 1893 in Tallinn (Reval), Estonia, and had studied engineering and architecture in Riga and Moscow. He fled the Bolshevik October Revolution and emigrated first to Paris, then moved to Munich. He was a fanatic pro- German, anti-Soviet, anti-Catholic and anti-Semitic theorist from a small-bourgeois background comparable to Adolf Hitler. It was his opinion that the Russian October Revolution was the result of a Jewish-Capitalist-Bolshevik conspiracy, and did his best to convince the burghers of Munich of imminent danger. Upon making his nightly rounds in the pubs, cafés and tavern of the town, he heard about an author and poet who was believed to share many of his dreams and prejudices. Rosenberg strove to make his acquaintance.
This man was Dietrich Eckart, a sanguine beer-garden and coffee-house philosopher, who often sat in taverns drinking for hours while reciting poems in Attic Greek. He came from a family of some means in the Upper Palatinate, former court-counselors and civil servants, and although his early years as poet and playwright in Leipzig, Berlin and Regensburg were less successful than he wished, the contacts of his family made him, on the occasion of his return to Munich in 1915, the pet poet of the aristocracy. His easy access to the salons of the nobility would later come in handy for Hitler. He was a multi-faceted man; on the one side he was a morphine addict and had spent time in a few mental institutions, on the other side, his new translation of Ibsen’s “Peer Gynt” was given at the Royal Theatre in Berlin and became his great artistic success, considered the standard for many years to come. He was a nonconforming anti-Semitist and Pan-Germanist and published his own weekly political magazine AUF GUT DEUTSCH [“In True German”, ¶] since December 1918. At its heights, the paper had a respectable circulation of about 30,000 copies, which made it one of the most influential anti-Semitic, anti-Catholic and Pan-German newsletters in Bavaria. One day in the summer of 1919, he received a visitor.
Rosenberg appeared, without introduction, at Eckart’s apartment. The poet was impressed by what he saw in the doorway; an intense, dead-serious young man. Rosenberg’s first words were: “Can you use a fighter against Jerusalem?” Eckart laughed. “Certainly!” Had he written anything? Rosenberg produced an article on the destructive forces of Judaism and Bolshevism on Russia. It was the beginning of a relationship that would affect the career of Adolf Hitler. Eckart accepted Rosenberg as a “co-warrior against Jerusalem” and soon his articles on Russia began appearing not only in Eckart’s paper but in another Munich weekly, DEUTSCHE REPUBLIK [“German Republic”, ¶]. The theme of these articles was that the Jew stood behind the world’s evils: the Zionists had planned the Great War as well as the Red Revolution and were presently plotting with the Masons to take over the world. [John Toland,Adolf Hitler, Anchor Books 1992. ISBN 0-385-42053-6. pp. 78-79]
But even Rosenberg’s aid could not surpass the real problem that Eckart as well as other nationalists, anti-Semitists and Pan-Germanists in Munich and Germany shared, the fact that the right-wing was hopelessly atomized in a multitude of little parties, clubs and fraternities; the lack of someone able to address the broad masses was felt most critically. One of these tiny political groups in Munich was a fellowship formed by a man called Anton Drexler.
Anton Drexler was one of those rather simple-minded workmen who believe that the poor, the exploited, and the oppressed will always be vindicated in the end. His father was a Social Democrat, and he remembered vividly being taken on May Day to a Social Democrat outing in the woods near Munich when he was a child. In those days the names of Ferdinand Lassalle and August Bebel were still revered by German workingmen, who remembered that it was the Social Democrats who had wrested from Bismarck the highly developed social legislation that was the envy of workingmen all over the world. Drexler came out of the soil of Social Democracy as a plant grows out of the earth. He belonged to the working class, and it would never have occurred to him that there was any other class worth belonging to. [Robert Payne, The Life and Death of Adolf Hitler, Praeger Publishers 1973, Lib. Con. 72-92891, p.134]
After his journeyman years, he returned to Munich and was employed in October 1902 by the Royal Bavarian Central Railway Repair Works as a blacksmith and toolmaker. He volunteered for the Bavarian Army in August 1914, but the railroad office refused to release him for service. The war awakened his political conscience, and on March 7, 1918, he founded a “Workers’ Council for a Good Peace”. In the fall of the same year, Drexler met Karl Harrer, a sport reporter of the “München-Augsburger Abendzeitung“, a local newspaper. The two decided on the foundation of another little club, the “Political Workers’ Circle“, which met once or twice a week to discuss solutions for the world’s major issues. Harrer, politically better connected than Drexler through his membership in the Thule Society, insisted that the topics of their weekly discussions were duly recorded for posterity, including the names of the attendees. The protocol for December 1918 to January 1919 read:
Meeting on 12/05/1918, Topic: “Newspapers as the Tools of Politics”, Speaker: Harrer. 12/11/1918, Topic: “The Jew, Germany’s greatest Enemy”, Speaker: Harrer. 12/17/1918, Topic: “Why the War Happened”, Speaker: Harrer (Harrer, Drexler, Lotter, v.Heimburg, Girisch, Kufner). 12/30/1918, Topic: “Who Bears the Guilt for the War?”, Speaker: Harrer (Harrer, Drexler, Girisch, Brummer, Sauer, Kufner). 01/16/1919, Topic: “Why we had to Win the War”, Speaker Harrer (Harrer, Drexler, Girisch, Kufner, Brunner). 01/22/1919, Topic: “Were we able to Win the War?”, Speaker: Harrer (Harrer, Drexler, Girisch, Kufner). 01/30/1919, Topic: “Why was the War Lost?”, Speaker: Harrer (Harrer, Drexler, Girisch, Brummer).
[Anton Joachimsthaler, Hitler’s Weg begann in München 1913 -1923, F.A. Herbig, München 2000. ISBN 3-7766-2155-9 , p. 249]
Drexler quickly realized that Harrer’s omnipresence, so to say, and his penchant for intimate audiences was not very likely to awaken the workers’ interest in the circle’s political agenda. He resolved that a regular party must be founded.
“One week before Christmas 1918, I explained during a circle meeting that the salvation of Germany was unlikely to be found within such a small circle as we were; that we needed a new party, a ‘German Socialist Workers’ Party,’ without Jews Thus it came to the decision to go public and form a new party (GermanSocialist Workers’ Party). The word ‘socialist’ was then dropped. The bylaws and guidelines of the ‘German Workers Party‘ were written by me.” [Joachimsthaler, p.250]
Thus it came to pass that on Sunday, January 5, 1919, Drexler and Michael Lotter, the circle’s record keeper, founded the “German Workers’ Party” in a room of the Munich tavern “Fürstenfelder Hof”. Drexler brought twenty-four prospective members, chiefly colleagues from the railway repair shop, to the constitutive session and was elected steward of the new party’s Munich chapter. Karl Harrer was appointed – perhaps in his absence, the sources contradict each other – national chairman of the fledgling organization, and the assembly unanimously voted for the adoption of the party statutes as composed by Drexler. The same then gave the new party’s inaugural address, which showed his humanitarian impulses: the party should strive to end the divisive class warfare and internationalism promoted by the Bolsheviks in favour of a national and patriotic socialism. Details were to follow.
There had been a bit of a problem regarding the christening of the new party; the original proposal of “German National Socialist Party” was popular, but another party with similar teachings had chosen exactly this name a few months earlier in Bohemia, and, incidentally, the Bohemians’ emblem featured a swastika. Hence the epithets “national” and “socialist” were dropped, and the name “Deutsche Arbeiter-Partei” (DAP, German Workers’ Party, ¶) adopted. Drexler explained his liking for the name as an integrative statement: himself a slightly higher educated member of the working class, he proposed that skilled workers should not be considered simple workmen anymore but should have a legal right to be counted among the aspiring middle classes. The middle classes themselves should be enlarged, at the cost of the “capitalists”. Drexler was an incurable romantic.
Although Drexler and many of his work colleagues were anti-Semitic, the only reference in the statutes and bylaws that pointed in this direction was a declaration that “religious teachings contrary to the moral and ethical laws of Germany should not be supported by the state.” This was, comparatively, rather tame. In the wake of the foundation, Drexler wrote a small pamphlet summarizing his political thought, called “Mein Politisches Erwachen” – My Political Awakening – which he distributed at party meetings and among his colleagues in the railway shop.
For a time, Harrer’s original circle remained in existence, although an executive council was established which acted simultaneously as the new party’s presidium. Still, the attractiveness of the party to Munich’s workers remained modest – a report of the general meeting of July 12, 1919, lists twenty-one persons present, the one of August 14 thirty-eight. The meetings of the executive circle continued in the intimacy of the usual five or six participants.
It is not entirely clear, however, how Captain Mayr‘s unit I b/P came into the possession of a typewritten invitation, dating of September 3, to a meeting of the DAP on September 12, 1919, 7:30 pm, to be held at the “Sterneckerbräu” tavern near the Isartor, one of Munich’s old town landmarks. The flyer announced that Engineer Gottfried Feder, our old acquaintance from the university lectures, would speak on his favourite theme of the breaking of the interest slavery, in particular of “How and by which means can we eliminate Capitalism?”
On the evening of September 12, 1919, Adolf Hitler set out to visit a meeting of the recently formed DAP. What turn would history have taken had Hitler visited, on this day, a different group on Mayr’s list, perhaps the “Society of Communist Socialists” or the “Block of Revolutionary Students”? No one knows. But it was to the Sterneckerbräu that Hitler directed his steps. The tavern was one of the smaller beer halls in Munich, and the side room, in which the meeting took place, the “Leiberzimmer”, could seat perhaps fifty or sixty people. The protocol of September 12 lists twenty-five party members and eighteen guests present, one of them Adolf Hitler. The scheduled speaker of the day had been Dietrich Eckart, who fell ill, and had to be replaced by Gottfried Feder. Hitler and most likely everybody else in the room knew Feder’s lecture from earlier occasions. Drexler recalled:
“Dietrich Eckart fell ill and our meeting had to be postponed. Then Gottfried Feder spoke, and subsequently Professor Baumann, a guest. Baumann was a democrat. … Baumann said that Tyrolia should unite with Bavaria, but not with Germany!
To this Hitler responded sharply, and gave a short but intense reply in favour of a Greater Germany, which excited me and all of us so much that I thanked him very much for his contribution and asked him to take home a copy of my pamphlet ‘Mein Politisches Erwachen’, to read it … and, if he agreed with it, to come back in a week and work with us, because we could dearly use people like him.” [Joachimsthaler, p.252]
Famous became Drexler’s line “This Austrian’s got a gob! We need him!” Hitler’s depiction of the evening, characteristically, does not reflect on Feder’s or, for that matter, Baumann’s theories; enraptured, Hitler noted that “… I realized that I could speak!” He claimed that he remembered only two scenes from his visit: that Baumann left the room like a wet poodle and that he still had no big impressions of the party. But then he presents a meticulous description in “Mein Kampf” of the events that presumably happened early the next morning. Lying on his barracks cot, he watches mice hunting for the crumbs of bread that he threw on the floor.
[Hitler] had gotten into the
habit of passing the hours before dawn “watching the droll little beasts
chasing around after these choice morsels. I had known so much poverty in my
life that I was well able to imagine the hunger, and hence also the pleasure,
of the little creatures.”
At about five that morning he was still awake on his cot following the antics of the mice, when he remembered the pamphlet that Drexler had forced upon him. Hitler was surprised to find himself enthralled from the first page. “Involuntary I saw my own development come to life before my eyes.” The ideas and phrases of the little book kept intruding into his thoughts the following day. He was struck by the phrases “National Socialism” and “new world order”, as well as the prediction that a new political party would capture the disillusioned and disinherited among not only the workers but civil servants and the solid lower middle class.But his interest waned quickly and he was surprised to receive a postcard informing him that he had been accepted as a member of the German Workers Party. He was requested to attend a committee meeting the following Wednesday. He had no intention of joining a ready-made party since he wanted to found his own and he was about to send off an indignant refusal when “curiosity won out” and he decided to have another look at the queer little group. [Toland, p.87]
It is intriguing, and a bit peculiar, how Hitler
describes his initial unwillingness and lack of interest, only to submit, as he
suggests, to providence; it was Germany’s destiny that made him return. He also
goes through some pain to point out that, unlike Drexler’s, his political views
were not founded upon a worker’s perspective of the world: he, Hitler, was an
artist, a member of the highest class.
The date and place of the committee meeting that saw Hitler’s second visit and presumed party entry is usually given as September 17, 1919, in the “Altes Rosenbad”, although Drexler later dated it to November 16 in the “Helenen- Bad” inn. Since this was a meeting of the party’s venerable ‘Executive Committee’, and not of the whole party, Hitler was perhaps not too surprised to find only four people sitting on a table in the corner. Drexler enthusiastically welcomed Hitler and explained that the chairman, Karl Harrer, was to arrive any minute.
After His Excellency appeared, an evening transpired typical of every small club: the minutes of the previous meeting in the Sterneckerbräu were recited, and the assembled honoraries accepted a report from the treasurer declaring that the present wealth of the party, in cash at hand, amounted to seven marks and fifty penning. Letters from like-minded groups were read and discussed, and replies composed.
Hitler was shocked. He wrote: “Terrible! Terrible! This was club life of the worst manner and sort. Was I to join this organization?” [Toland, p.88]
After the formal part of the evening had passed, Hitler
asked a few questions, specifically how the party planned to acquire new
members. Was there a program? Did the party print leaflets? Did it advertise?
The answer to all these inquiries was a timid negative. No organization
existed, no stationary, not s single rubber stamp; but a lot of good
intentions. Hitler wrote that he left uncommitted – perhaps – and went pregnant
for two days pondering the all-important question whether to join or not.
He clearly perceived the DAP for what it was, a pathetic club of
middle-aged men caressing their intolerances and nursing their prejudices; it
had no similarity to the efficiently
organized political machine of the future. But practical aspects recommended
the German Workers Party, for some of its weaknesses might as well turn out
blessings in disguise: the total absence of form and structure allowed Hitler
to forge his imprint upon the
nascent movement with ease; the very fact of the party’s incompleteness
guaranteed him the necessary malleability.
The smallness of the party was its charm, Hitler finally decided. The DAP was only one of many groups attempting to amalgamate nationalism with socialism, but Hitler quickly realized that persons like Drexler and Harrer weren’t fighters, unable to oppose a determined attempt at a takeover. If he were able to attract new members, the old guard could be outvoted and retired, and the party could be shaped according to his own image.
Illustration of the assassination of Archduke Francis Ferdinand in the Italian newspaper La Domenica del Corriere 12 July 1914
At 6 p.m. on the evening of Thursday, July 23, 1914, the Austrian Ambassador to Belgrade, Baron Wladimir Giesl, presented an important note from the Austrian to the Serbian government to the Serbian Minister of Finance Lazar Pacu, who was Prime Minister Nikola Pasić‘s deputy and temporary replacement.
The legate handed Pacu and Gruić, the
Secretary General of the Serbian Foreign Ministry, the Austrian demarche, two
pages of an annex, and a brief introductory note. The reply, he said, was
expected by 6 p.m. on Saturday, July 25, forty-eight hours hence, and he was
instructed, should no answer be received or were it unsatisfactory, to leave
the capital with his staff immediately and return to Vienna.
The note read:
“On 31 March 1909,
the Serbian Minister at Vienna, on the instructions of his Government, made the
following declaration to the Imperial and Royal Government:
‘Serbia recognizes that her rights have not been affected by the fait accompli created in Bosnia-Herzegovina and that consequently she will conform to such decisions as the Powers may take in conformity with Article XXV of the Treaty of Berlin. In deference to the advice of the Great Powers, Serbia undertakes henceforward to renounce the attitude of protest and opposition which she had adopted with regard to the annexation since last autumn and she further engages to modify the direction of her present policy with regard to Austria-Hungary and to live henceforward with the latter on a footing of good neighbourliness.’
The history of recent
years and in particular the painful events of 28 June have demonstrated the
existence in Serbia of a subversive movement the aim of which is to detach from
the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy certain parts of its territories. This movement,
which had its birth under the eye of the Serbian Government, has gone so far as
to manifest itself beyond the territory of the Kingdom by acts of terrorism, by
a series of outrages, and by murders.
The Royal Serbian Government, far from fulfilling the formal pledges contained in the declaration of 31 March 1909 (in a diplomatic note to Austria, Serbia had to recognize the Bosnian annexation and promise to maintain friendly relations with Austria), has done nothing to repress these movements; it has tolerated the criminal machinations of various societies and associations directed against the Monarchy, unrestrained language on the part of the press, glorifications of the perpetrators of outrages, participation of officers and officials in subversive agitation, unwholesome propaganda in public education; in short, tolerated all the manifestations of a nature to inculcate in the Serbian population hatred of the Monarchy and contempt for its institutions.
This culpable tolerance on
the part of the Royal Government of Serbia had not ceased at the moment when
the events of 28 June last revealed its disastrous consequences to the whole
world.
It is shown by the depositions and confessions of the criminal authors of the outrage of 28 June that the Sarajevo murders were planned in Belgrade, that the arms and explosives with which the murderers were found to be provided had been given them by Serbian officers and officials belonging to the Narodna Odbrana and finally that the passage into Bosnia of the criminals and their arms was organized and effectuated by chiefs of the Serbian frontier service.
The results here mentioned
of the preliminary investigation do not permit the Imperial and Royal
Government to pursue any longer the attitude of expectant forbearance which
they have for years observed towards the machinations concentrated in Belgrade
and thence propagated in the territories of the Monarchy; the results on the
contrary impose on them the duty of putting an end to the intrigues which
constitute a permanent threat to the tranquillity of the Monarchy.
It is to achieve this end
that the Imperial and Royal Government sees itself obliged to demand from the
Serbian Government the formal assurance that it condemns the propaganda
directed against the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, that is to say the aggregate of
tendencies, the ultimate aim of which is to detach from the Monarchy
territories belonging thereto, and that it undertakes to suppress by every
means this criminal and terrorist propaganda.
In order to give a formal character to this undertaking, the Royal Government of Serbia shall cause to be published on the front page of the Official Journal of the 26/13 July the following declaration:
‘The Royal Government of
Serbia condemns the propaganda directed against Austria-Hungary, i.e. the
aggregate of tendencies, the ultimate aim of which is to detach from the
Austro-Hungarian Monarchy territories which form part thereof, and it sincerely
deplores the fatal consequences of these criminal proceedings.’
‘The Royal Government regrets that Serbian officers and officials have participated in the above-mentioned propaganda and thereby compromised the good neighbourly relations to which the Royal Government had solemnly pledged itself by its declaration of 31 March 1909.’
‘The Royal Government, which disapproves and repudiates all idea or attempt of interference with the destinies of the inhabitants of any part whatsoever of Austria-Hungary, considers it its duty formally to warn the officers, officials and all the population of the Kingdom that henceforward it will proceed with the utmost rigor against all persons who may render themselves guilty of such machinations which it will use all its efforts to forestall and repress.’
This declaration shall
simultaneously be communicated to the Royal Army as an order of the day by His
Majesty the King and shall be published in the ‘Official Bulletin of the Army’.
The Royal Serbian
Government further undertakes:
1. To suppress any publication which incites to hatred
and contempt of the Monarchy and the general tendency of which is directed
against its territorial integrity;
2. To dissolve immediately the society styled Narodna
Odbrana, to confiscate all its means of propaganda, and to proceed in the same
manner against the other societies and their branches in Serbia which engage in
propaganda against the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy; the Royal Government will
take the necessary measures to prevent the dissolved societies from continuing
their activities under another name and form;
3. To eliminate without delay from public instruction in
Serbia, both as regards the teaching body and the methods of instruction, all
that serves or might serve to foment the propaganda against Austria-Hungary;
4. To remove from the military service and the
administration in general all officers and officials guilty of propaganda
against the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy and of whom the Imperial and Royal
Government reserves to itself the right to communicate the names and deeds to
the Royal Government;
5. To accept the collaboration in Serbia of organs of the
Imperial and Royal Government in the suppression of the subversive movement
directed against the territorial integrity of the Monarchy;
6. To take judicial proceedings against the accessories
to the plot of 28 June who are on Serbian territory; Organs delegated by the
Imperial and Royal Government will take part in the investigations relating
thereto;
7. To proceed without delay to the arrest of Major Voija
Tankosić and of a certain Milan Ciganović, a Serbian State employee implicated
by the findings of the preliminary investigation at Sarajevo;
8. To prevent by effective measures the cooperation of
the Serbian Authorities in the illicit traffic in arms and explosives across
the frontier; to dismiss and severely punish the officials of the Sabac and
Loznica frontier service guilty of having assisted the authors of the Sarajevo
crime by facilitating their crossing of the frontier;
9. To furnish the Imperial and Royal Government with
explanations regarding the unjustifiable utterances of high Serbian officials
both in Serbia and abroad, who, notwithstanding their official position, have
not hesitated since the outrage of 28 June to express themselves in interviews
in terms of hostility towards the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy [and] finally
10. To notify the Imperial
and Royal Government without delay of the execution of the measures comprised
under the preceding heads.
The Imperial and Royal Government expects the reply of the Royal Government at the latest by Saturday 25 of this month at 5 p.m (this was crossed out and replaced by “6”).
[A memorandum dealing with
the results of the preliminary investigation at Sarajevo with regard to the
officials mentioned in Points 7 and 8 is annexed to this Note]
Annex:
The criminal investigation
opened by the Sarajevo Court against Gavrilo Princip and associates on the
count of assassination and complicity therein, in respect of the crime
committed by them on 28 June, has up to the present led to the following
conclusions:
1. The plot having as its
object the assassination of the Archduke Francis Ferdinand on the occasion of
his visit to Sarajevo was formed at Belgrade by Gavrilo Princip, Nedeljko Cabrinović
and one Milan Ciganović and Trifko Grabez with the help of Commander Voija
Tankosi6.
2. The 6 bombs and 4 Browning pistols with ammunition with which the malefactors committed the outrage were delivered to Princip, Cabrinović and Grabez at Belgrade by a certain Milan Ciganović and Commander Voija Tankosić.
3. The bombs are hand grenades from the munitions depot of the Serbian Army at Kragujevac.
4. To assure the success of the outrage, Ciganović instructed Princip, Cabrinović and Grabez in the use of grenades, and, in a forest near the rifle-range at Topcider (Park), gave Princip and Grabez shooting practice with Browning pistols.
5. To enable Princip, Cabrinović and Grabez to cross the frontier of Bosnia-Herzegovina and to smuggle in clandestinely their contraband arms, a secret system of transport was organized by Ciganović. As a result of this organization the introduction into Bosnia-Herzegovina of the criminals and their arms was effected by the frontier captains of Sabac (Rade Popović) and Loznica, and the customs official Rudivoj Grbić of Loznica with the aid of various individuals.”
This document, it has been said, marked the end of the nineteenth century. Its terms were harsh, yet not entirely without precedent, and certainly more lenient than the conditions the Treaty of Versailles would impose five years hence on Germany, which empowered an Allied Control Commission to roam the length and breadth of the country in search of contraband in addition to imposing reparation payments and giving German territory to every neighbour state except Switzerland and Austria. The demands inflicted on Belgrade in 1914 might also be compared – favourably, as Christopher Clark points out – to the ultimatum of Rambouillet the NATO addressed to the Serbian government in 1999 to stop the genocide of non-Serbs in Kosovo. The Rambouillet memorandum commanded that NATO forces “shall enjoy, together with their vehicles, vessels, aircraft and equipment free and unrestricted and unimpeded access through the Former Republic of Yugoslavia, including associated airspace and territorial waters,” and gave the troops the right of manoeuvre in and the utilization “of any areas or facilities as required for support, training and operations.”
In comparison, the Austrian demands of 1914 almost appear quaint. It is true that Points 5 and 6 impeded Serbian sovereignty, but some of the evidence was unimpeachable – the hand grenades, say – and Austria had good reasons to doubt the efficiency of Serbian law-enforcement. “Vienna,” Christopher Clark diagnosed, “did not trust the Serbian authorities to press home the investigation without some form of Austrian supervision and verification. And it must be said that nothing the Serbian government did between June 28 and the presentation of the ultimatum gave them any reason to think otherwise.” Certainly the possibility of subsequent negotiations on the more intrusive points was not excluded per se, and all that Belgrade had to do in this respect would be to send a few suspected conspirators abroad or into Russian exile for some months until the affair had died down. What real harm could a few more Austrian detectives do, when Dr. Wiesner had already been in Belgrade since July 10 and the heavens had not fallen?
It is not clear, however, whether the Austrians realized that Belgrade’s problem was not the conspiracy in itself or the identity of the true conspirators – that is, the Black Hand instead of the Narodna Odbrana – but the fact that its extent reached into Belgrade’s highest places and neither Pasić’s civilian government, nor, of course, the Black Hand itself could allow their mutual relations to see the light of day. But the carefree absence of rationality in Balkan politics pretty much guaranteed that Serbia would reject the note, which was exactly the outcome Austria sought to achieve. Vanity, they knew, would prevail in Serbia, as vanity had prevailed in 1870 when Napoleon III declared war on Prussia over a telegram that seemed to infringe on France’s Imperial self-esteem. In comparison, Austria had a reasonably valid reason for war.
The naval program of Tirpitz and Wilhelm II had earned the irritation and subsequently the enmity of England’s admiralty, and the search for the proper response became a continuous issue of British politics between 1890 and 1914, second only to the Irish question. Great Britain’s survival policy was never to let any single power dominate the continent, and in particular, the Channel ports, and thus the Royal Navy’s supremacy of the oceans must never be jeopardized. Hence, Britannia’s strategy was always to oppose the powers-that-be on the continent and side with the lesser nations. To support the “underdogs” also made for excellent political propaganda.
Great Britain was a sea power, and thus the strategic view of her admiralty upon possible conflicts with European land powers was one tied upon the evolution of naval warfare in the Belle Époque. The Royal Navy had dominated the seas since Nelson’s victory over the French and Spanish fleets at Trafalgar in 1805. The British Empire, unlike, say, Russia, depended upon the maintenance of naval pre-eminence for its economical and political survival: power over the oceans supplied cheap transport, preserved the trade and communication lines and provided the defence of the colonies and the home waters. These were the classic duties of the ships which flew the White Ensign.
In the last decade of the 19th Century, a cabal of German nationalists, history professors and other assorted lunatics convinced Kaiser Wilhelm II to build the “Hochseeflotte” or “High Seas Fleet“, a gigantic armada-at-sea which would equal or even surpass the might of the Royal Navy. Since there was simply no strategic reason for the eccentric undertaking, Great Britain could not interpret it as anything but a maritime challenge, as evidence of hostile intentions. These were all too real, considering Wilhelm’s hate for his English mother.
The equilibrium of the global battle fleets, or “ships of the line”, as they were called, had been completely upset in 1906 by the Royal Navy’s presentation, to an astonished world, of the new battleship Dreadnought, a design that immediately rendered all other capital warships obsolete. Her builders had rejected the amalgamate of small-, medium-, and large-calibre guns traditionally carried by capital ships in favour of outfitting her with only a single class of artillery, the biggest available. Thus, Dreadnought’s principal armaments were ten 12-inch [305 mm, ¶] guns, in five twin turrets.
HMS Dreadnought
The importance of the calibre, the diameter of the gun’s bore, lies in the fact that, with identical propellants, the effective radius of a ship’s artillery depends on the first order on its calibre; the greater the calibre, all other things being equal, the further the projectile flies, and thus the greater the radius in which the ship can bring her fire to effect. In other words, the shells of a 12-inch gun fly farther than those of a 10-inch gun, and the ship with the bigger guns can sink the opponent from a safe distance without being exposed to return fire.
The second peculiarity of Dreadnought’s revolutionary design was the thickness and the distribution of her armour: by avoiding to spend armour on non-essential systems of the ship, the constructors were able to use plates up to eleven inches thick covering the most important sections, an arrangement which became known as “all-or-nothing” armoury. The drawbacks of the massive metal coverings and the colossal guns were, of course, their contribution to the ship’s immense weight and the consequent reduction of her speed. The Dreadnoughts were rather slow for modern men-of-war, their maximum speed hovering around the twenty-knot mark. The whole conception of the Dreadnought class rendered them supremely fit for the slugfests of battling other capital ships; their low speed disabled them, however, from being used in the other half of naval warfare, the economic or cruiser war.
The word “cruiser” was coined in the 18th Century and originally denoted any warship on detached duty as a commerce raider. In the second half of the 19th Century, following the improvements in steam engines and gun technology, cruisers began to be outfitted with armour: if the ship in question had an armoured deck but no side armour she was called a “protected” cruiser, if she had both, she was called an “armoured” cruiser. The importance of cruiser warfare lies, of course, in the impediment of the flow of the opponent’s war supplies; the cruisers preferred prey were fat merchants, coal ships, or oilers. Yet, the indispensable need for speed, to chase the prey but to escape superior ships, limited the weight of armour and the size of guns available in cruiser design.
In the first decade of the 20th Century, the Royal Navy’s engineers conceived a compromise in design which at length became the so-called “battlecruiser“. A proper battle cruiser, so the idea, was to combine the guns of a Dreadnought, albeit a lesser number of them, to save weight, with as much armour as possible while retaining high speeds. The first British battle cruiser was commissioned in 1907, only a year after “Dreadnought“, and, quite modestly, named “Invincible“.
HMS Invincible (1907)
Human genius has frequently attempted to combine the advantages of two types, or designs, of weapons, while simultaneously striving to avoid their peculiar weaknesses. The creation of the battlecruiser was such an exercise in genius. Robert Massie explains (Dreadnought, Ballantine Books 1992, ISBN 978-0-345-37556-8, pp. 491 ff.):
France – still the
potential enemy [pre-1890, ¶] – had provoked Admiralty concerns by suddenly
launching a series of big cruisers capable of 21 knots. These ships were the
brainchild of a school of French admirals who, despairing that France would
ever be able to match Britain battleship for battleship, concluded that the
best way to bring down the maritime colossus was to unleash a pack of swift,
deadly cruisers and torpedo boats that could attack and cripple Britain’s
vulnerable overseas merchandise trade. British admirals grasped the threat.
Their reaction was to produce the anti-cruiser cruiser, a ship even faster,
stronger and more heavily gunned, to hunt down and sink anything the French
sent out.
These ships, designed to fight, not simply to shadow and report, were given more armour and called armoured cruisers. Class after class was designed, launched and sent to sea… In all, there were thirty-five of these British armoured cruisers, some of them as big, or bigger, than the Royal Sovereign or Majestic class battleships. Yet no matter how big they got or how impressive they looked, they were never expected to fight battleships. …
Tirpitz
Sir John “Jackie” Fisher
This was Fisher’s understanding and purpose too, at least in the beginning. [Admiral Fisher headed the design committee of the Royal Navy which was to draw up “Dreadnought” and other ships, ¶] His first battlecruisers were intended to be the ultimate in armoured cruisers, so fast and heavily gunned that they could overtake and destroy any other cruiser in the world. … Fisher wrote to Lord Selbourne [First Sea Lord, in March 1902, ¶] that he was working with Gard, the Chief Constructor of the Malta Dockyard, on a design for an armoured cruiser which would make all existing armoured cruisers obsolete.
Fisher called the hypothetical ship H.M.S. Perfection, and at the top of the list of her design characteristics he put “Full Power Speed of 25 Knots.”… The Sea Lords’ response was not everything Fisher had hoped. They authorized the Warrior and Minotaur classes, big ships with 9.2-inch guns and a speed of 23 knots, two knots beneath that what Fisher had demanded for Perfection.
Meanwhile, other admiralties were experimenting. Towards the end of 1904, word reached London that Japan was lying down two large, 21-knot armoured cruisers, each carrying four 12-inch guns and twelve 6-inch. In Italy, four Cuniberti-designed ships carrying two 12-inch and twelve 8-inch guns and capable of 21 knots were on the way. Foreigners were creeping on Perfection.
In February 1905, once Fisher’s design committee had completed the plans for Dreadnought, Perfection appeared. No longer did Fisher have to urge his projects on the Admiralty; now he was the Admiralty. [He had become First Sea Lord in 1904, ¶] And in the Fisher era, he immediately made clear, British commerce was to be protected not by scattering armoured cruisers around the world, but by building a few, immensely fast, powerful ships which could hunt down and destroy enemy cruisers wherever they fled – if necessary, “to the world’s end.”
By then, of course, the potential threat had changed nationality; it was not French cruisers that worried the Admiralty, but German ocean liners, the huge, swift, blue-water greyhounds of the North-German Lloyd and Hamburg-Amerika Lines, being constructed with a capacity to carry 6-inch guns. Designed to whisk passengers across the North Atlantic in five or six days, they could easily outrun any existing British cruiser.
Speed, then, was the preeminent requirement; speed to overtake the enemy and speed also for the new ship’s own defence: she must be able to keep out of range of battleship guns. Fisher fixed the minimum absolute margin at four knots, and, since he was building the Dreadnought to steam 21 knots, H.M.S. Perfection must be able to steam at 25 knots. Fisher also wanted maximum firepower. The biggest guns available were 12-inch, already being installed on new armoured cruisers and fast battleships by the Italians and Japanese. Having successfully argued the case for the all-big-gun battleship, Fisher now demanded an all-big-gun armoured cruiser.
Once again, the faithful and imaginative Gard gave the Admiral what he wanted. Perfection, which was to become the Invincible-class battle cruiser, came off the drawing board with eight 12-inch guns in four twin turrets. Fisher was overjoyed. With 25-knot speed and eight 12-inch guns, here was a warship capable of destroying any vessel fast enough to catch it, and fast enough to escape any vessel capable of destroying it. She could “mop up” a whole squadron of enemy cruisers with the greatest of ease, using her speed to establish her range and her long-range guns to sink the enemy without exposing herself to return fire.
She had only a single flaw: her armour was too light. Like Sleeping Beauty, for whom life was serene as long as she stayed away from spindles, the Invincible and her sisters could lead happy lives as long as they stayed away from battleships. Her speed was a precious, expensive commodity, and had been purchased at a heavy price.
The three vital characteristics of a warship – guns, speed and armour – are interrelated. A designer could not have everything: if heavy guns and heavy armour were required, then speed had to be curtailed; this was the compromise built into most battleships. If a higher speed was demanded and heavy guns retained, armour had to be sacrificed. This was the case with the Invincible and her sisters. To gain four precious knots of speed, the Invincible gave up one turret and two twelve-inch guns of Dreadnought’s armament.
This saved two thousand tons, which could be invested in propulsion machinery. A more dangerous sacrifice was made in armour. The Dreadnought, intended to steam through a cataclysm of shell bursts, was fitted along her belt amidships with armour plate eleven inches thick, enough to stop a plunging heavy shell. Over the Invincible’s vital midship spaces, the belt armour was only seven inches thick. If the battle cruiser’s mission was to scout or to engage enemy cruisers, seven inches of armour would keep her safe. But if she were to be deliberately taken within range of enemy battleships, seven inches were not enough. … Some naval experts saw the potential danger. Brassey’s Naval Annual said: “… [The problem with] vessels of this enormous size and cost [is that] an admiral having Invincibles in his fleet will be certain to put them in the line of battle where their comparatively light protection will be a disadvantage and their high speed of no value.” In short, because she looked like a battleship and carried a battleship’s guns, sooner or later Invincible would be expected to fight like a battleship.
Since no good deed goes unpunished, the Germans adopted the hermaphroditic concept and built their own battlecruisers.
Because the two nations had built capital ships at frantic speed and with enormous cost for fifteen years, everybody expected a thunderous clash to occur within the war’s opening months. But the first two years of the conflict only saw minor engagements. On August 28, 1914, Admiral Sir David Beatty’s squadron of battle cruisers cornered a mixed German flotilla of cruisers and destroyers in the Heligoland Bight and sank three respectively one of them. In January 1915, an encounter between Beatty’s fleet and a few German battlecruisers at the Dogger Bank led to the loss of the German “Blücher” and severe damage to the “Seydlitz“, while the British “Tiger” and “Lion” suffered lesser impairments.
The Germans had scored big in October 1914 when a single mine sunk the brand-new British battleship Audacious. Somewhat smaller successes were achieved by the U-boats [“Unterseeboot”, i.e. submarines, ¶]. U 9 sank three old British cruisers, the “Aboukir“, “Hogue“ and “Cressy“, in September 1914 and U 24 sank the older battleship “Formidable” on January 1, 1915. [See Post The Lethal Submarines]
Audacious being abandoned …
Lack of action in the North Sea ended when the German Admiral Reinhard Scheer was invested with the command of the High Seas Fleet in January 1916. In a quest for a solution to the numerical superiority of the Royal Navy, he concentrated on Beatty’s battlecruiser division, which was by now stationed at Rosyth near Edinburgh. If he played his cards well, he thought it possible to lure Beatty’s ships into a trap and destroy them before the Home Fleet, anchored at Scapa Flow in the Orkney Islands, could come to their rescue. Scheer’s plan took into account that the Grand Fleet was bigger than the High Seas Fleet by about 40%, but the multitudes of duties she had to perform necessarily meant that she was spread over the oceans. If he could bring momentarily superior forces against a smaller part of the Grand Fleet, he could overcome the numerical deficit and victory might be possible.
One tactical variable in his plan remained a question mark to him as well as to his opponents on the British side: it was the uncertainty of how the battlecruisers would fare if they faced battleships. On another tactical variable he had to trust his luck, in regard to how early or late British naval intelligence would discover his sortie. In May 1916, his plans condensed in a scheme to lure Beatty’s squadron, composed of six battlecruisers and four battleships anchored in Rosyth, southward, by dangling before Beatty’s eyes a bait of a few German battlecruisers. Since these ships were too fast for the British Dreadnoughts harboured at Scapa Flow, only Beatty’s flotilla had a chance to catch them. As soon as Beatty was informed about the German vanguard and set out to intercept it, the German battlecruisers would turn south and lead the British ships into the trap, the guns of Scheer’s battleships.
Franz von Hipper
Sir David Beatty
In the event, the vanguard consisted of five German battlecruisers under the command of Admiral Franz von Hipper, plus assorted escorts, which sailed northward along the western coast of Denmark on the morning of May 31, 1916. Scheer followed about fifty miles further south, but his luck was not up to date. British signal intelligence had intercepted and decoded German radio transmissions regarding Scheer’s plans for a major operation as early as mid-May and informed Admiral John Jellicoe, commander of the Grand Fleet. Scheer had barely passed Heligoland when Beatty’s battlecruisers were sent on their way south, followed, at a distance of perhaps seventy miles, by the battleships from Scapa Flow. The Brits had reversed the role of trapper and bait.
Reinhard Scheer
Sir John Jellicoe
In terms of tonnage and weaponry, the engagement that was to occur became the biggest of naval history yet. The High Seas Fleet had mobilized sixteen Dreadnoughts, six older battleships, five battlecruisers, eleven light cruisers and sixty-one destroyers (99 combat ships). Jellicoe’s combined fleets comprised twenty-eight Dreadnoughts, nine battlecruisers, eight armoured cruisers, twenty-six light cruisers, seventy-eight destroyers, a seaplane carrier and a minesweeper (151 combat ships).
Contact occurred at 2 p.m. when both sides’ destroyer screens chanced to investigate the same neutral merchant ship and thus ran into each other. Their radios alerted the battlecruiser fleets of Hipper and Beatty which now turned on a collision course. Beatty’s five battlecruisers, sailing ahead of the battleships, sighted Hipper’s flotilla at around 4 p.m. and opened fire. In the battle cruiser duel, the shortcomings of the design were cruelly exposed. Beatty’s own flagship, “Lion“, was heavily damaged by hits from “Lützow“, Hipper’s flagship, but things got worse:
HMS Indefatigable exploding …
“Indefatigable“, duelling with the German “Von der Tann“, suffered an internal explosion which literally tore her asunder; only minutes later, “Queen Mary” exploded and sank after having received a salvo from “Derfflinger“. Only eight men survived. German ships showed much less vulnerability to the impact of British shells – whether it was better armour or a problem with the English fuses is still much discussed.
HMS Queen Mary blows up in the Battle of Jutland
The post-battle investigation established that the German shells had penetrated the weak armour belt protecting the propellant storerooms, where the essentially unstable charges were stockpiled in the open, to be forwarded to the gun turrets. The explosion of the shell subsequently caused the detonation of the ship’s main magazine. Beatty’s first line was thus quickly reduced, but the elation aboard Hipper’s ships was of short duration. When the four British battleships emerged from the clouds of smoke and palls of rain, it was Hipper’s time to reverse course, Beatty in pursuit.
Half an hour later, the British vanguard recognized Scheer’s battleships coming up on the horizon as expected, and now it was their turn to reverse northwards, to lead Scheer into the direction of the ambush, Jellicoe’s Grand Fleet, which closed in swiftly. The slugfest continued through all these entertaining chases, and now favoured the British, who could bring the fire of their battleships’ new 15-inch guns to bear. Several hits severely damaged “Seydlitz”, again, after her unfortunate experience at the Dogger Bank and proved at least that German battlecruisers were just as vulnerable to well-aimed shells as were the British ones. “Seydlitz”‘s troubles caused disarray in Scheer’s battle formation at the exact moment when, in a confused situation, a German salvo found “Invincible”. She blew up, and her fragments joined her younger sisters in their North Sea grave. That was, however, the last lucky pot-shot for Scheer who faced an increasing curtain of 15-inch gun shells. At around six in the evening, overpowered, he decided to pull out of the game.
There might have ended, inconclusively, an already unsatisfactory encounter [from the British point of view, ¶]. Scheer, however, then decided to turn back, perhaps to come to the assistance of the damaged light cruiser “Wiesbaden” which had been left behind, perhaps because he judged that he could pass astern of Jellicoe’s fleet as it continued its advance towards the Heligoland Bight, while he made his escape through the Skagerrak into the Baltic. Jellicoe, however, once again reduced speed, with the result that the German Dreadnoughts, heading north-east, encountered the British heading south-east, and steering to pass their rear so as to cut them off from safety.
HMS Warspite and Malaysia in action
At the moment of encounter moreover, the British were deployed in line abreast, the Germans in line ahead, a relative position, known as “crossing the enemy’s T,” that greatly favoured the British. More of their guns could be brought to bear than could those of the German fleet, ranked one ship behind the other, which thus also presented an easier target. Ten minutes of gunnery, in which the Germans suffered twenty-seven hits by large-calibre shells, the British only two, persuaded Scheer to turn away again into the dark eastern horizon, leaving his battle cruisers and lighter ships to cover his retreat in a “death ride.”
Damage on SMS Seydlitz
The torpedo threat they presented caused Jellicoe to turn away also – for which he has ever afterwards been reproached – and, by the time he turned back, Scheer had put ten miles between his dreadnoughts and the pursuit. Many German ships remained to cover Scheer’s flight, including his squadron of vulnerable pre-Dreadnoughts, and in a series of dusk and night actions, they suffered losses. So, too, did the British cruisers and destroyers that remained in contact. By the morning of 1 June, when Scheer had his fleet home, he had lost a battlecruiser, a pre-Dreadnought, four light cruisers and five destroyers. Jellicoe, though remaining in command of the North Sea, had lost three battlecruisers, four armoured cruisers and eight destroyers; 6,094 British sailors had died, 2,551 German.
HMS Lion
As far as tactical issues were concerned, the “Battle of Jutland,” as the Royal Navy called it, or “Battle of the Skagerrak”, as it became known in Germany, was a success for the young High Seas Fleet: both German armour and ammunition had proven superior to the British armaments. In terms of strategy, however, the advantage of controlling the North Sea and hence the approaches to the Atlantic Ocean remained with Great Britain; for the rest of the war, the German fleet remained at anchor and ceased to be a threat to the Empire. The international press described the encounter at Jutland as an “attack on the gaoler, followed by a return to jail.” The German ships’ peaceful rusting in port was only disturbed in 1919 when a clause of the armistice commanded the fleet’s internment at Scapa Flow. The crews sailed the ships to the Orkney Islands as ordered but scuttled them after arrival, so that they would not fall into British hands.
The true casualties of Jutland were the battlecruisers which vanished from the arsenals of the modern navies as quick as they had appeared.
Austrian Telegram to Serbia declaring War on July 28, 1914
As we see, Austria declared war on Serbia on July 28, but it took her another eight days, until August 5, to declare war on Russia, on account of her obligations to Germany under the Dual Alliance treaty. But she could not get her act together: in a case of truly exceptional schlamperei, she forgot to declare war on Great Britain and France. After waiting until August 12, these two countries took it upon themselves to correct the Austrian oversight and declared war on Vienna, via telegram to her ambassador in Switzerland.
Residency Card from Sechshauserstrasse # 56, Summer 1909
Sometimes a man feels as if the very fortunes of his life are hinged upon a fragile pendulum, which follows wholly foreordained yet enigmatic movements. It is a mystery, the more confusing since we cannot determine, at any given time, our own position on this cosmic scale without invariably changing the oscillation’s period or direction. In other words, we may find out where we presently are, but not whether we are moving up or down on the scales of fortune, for each of our actions or omissions has an impact on our future that we cannot truly calculate. When Adolf Hitler quit on his friend August Kubizek in the fall of 1908 and disappeared in the capital’s anonymous crowds, he challenged Fortuna by personal defiance.
Robert Payne portrays the impact of being on one’s own in a big town:
When a man sinks into poverty and misery in a vast city, many strange things happen to him. If he is without family or friends and has no roots, he very quickly becomes the prey of delusions.
Mysterious voices speak to him, a stranger suddenly glancing at him in the street will fill him with panic, and he believes that a scrap of newspaper blown by the wind to his feet conveys a message from some higher powers.
In his loneliness and terror, he learns that he has entered a savage country of strange customs and inexplicable cruelties, a country in which he is a foreigner possessing no right or privileges, at the mercy of everyone and most of all at the mercy of officials, a hunted creature who feels no security even when he is alone at night in the darkness of his own room.
We know much more about these lonely, alienated people than we did fifty years ago, perhaps because modern society creates more of them. We know the complicated contrivances they invent to maintain a sense of human dignity, and we can trace step by step how the shreds of human dignity are torn from them or salvaged in unpredictable ways.
Panhandling Veterans
Such men are on the mercy of the seasons, for warm days give them spurious courage and winter reduces them to shivering incoherence. They talk interminably to themselves and cling desperately to their fantasies. The blue stain on the wall, the stone picked up long ago, the string tied around the middle finger, all these become fetishes without which life would become unendurable.
We know too, that poverty has its own in-built compensations. In “Down and Out in Paris or London”, George Orwell describes the strange, dull euphoria that comes with extreme poverty.
Vienna around 1900
A lot seller
“You discover boredom and mean complications and the beginnings of hunger, but you also discover the great redeeming future of poverty: the fact that it annihilates the future.
Within certain limits, it is actually true that the less money you have, the less you worry. When you have a hundred francs in the world you are liable to the most craven panics. When you have only three francs you are quite indifferent, for three francs will feed you till tomorrow, and you cannot think further than that.
The subterranean homeless asylum “Die Gruft”, Mariahilfer Street, Vienna, in the year 2000 – little has changed since Hitler’s days …
You are bored, but you are not afraid. You think vaguely, “I shall be starving in a day or two -shocking, isn’t it?” And then the mind wanders to other topics. A bread and margarine diet does, to some extent, provide its own anodyne.
But there are many consolations to poverty, and even apathy becomes exhausting in time. For a nineteen-year-old youth [Hitler] who dreamed of becoming a great artist, the consolation was more likely to be found in fantasies of his own towering eminence in the arts, to the discomfiture of all those who had hindered his progress.” (1)
Market
Ringstraße
Winter
Sleeping in the Canal
After having participated in the autumnal manoeuvres of his regiment, August Kubizek (Adolf´s only friend then) returned to Vienna in late November 1908. He had, of course, informed his friend of his arrival and thus was baffled when Adolf never showed up at the train station. Gustl concluded that only something of utmost importance, without doubt, some sort of emergency, could have compelled his friend’s absence and rushed to Stumpergasse.
Vienna’s Academy of the Fine Arts, which rejected Hitler twice, in 1907 and 1908, possibly a third time in 1910 or 1911
Frau Zakreys, the landlady, had no idea where Adolf was. He had given her notice on November 18, paid up the rent until the end of the month and disappeared without leaving a forwarding address or message. She had already taken in another lodger. Gustl found a new domicile, in a nearby inn, and heard nothing more from his friend for many years to come. When he was in Linz over the Christmas holidays, he visited the Raubals, but Angela (Adolf´s half-sister) almost brusquely informed him that they had no idea where Adolf lived and blamed August for supporting Adolf’s artistic dreams. After this Kubizek had no more contact with the Hitler family until, twenty-five years later, his boyhood pal had become the new chancellor of Germany.
Angela Hitler and her first husband Leo Raubal
At this time, and still today, every change in address had to be brought to the attention of the police [FN1] – essentially as a means to keep track of the men of military age. Adolf registered his new address with the police on November 19, 1908, as Room # 16, Felberstrasse 22, c/o Frau Helene Riedl, in the XVth District, right at the Westbahnhof, where he lived until August 21, 1909, as a “Student”. (2)
[FN1] Franz Jetzinger et al. have argued that Gustl could have easily found out Adolf’s new address via the Meldeamt, the Registration office. This is not entirely accurate, because these files were not public and generally available only to the police, courts and the military. Cf. Jones, J. Sydney, p. 291 [Infra]
Western Railway Station and Felberstraße around 1900
It was obvious that the second Academic rejection had put Hitler in a funk, and it is quite possible that he simply did not have the nerve to tell Gustl of the repeated failure. One thing about the move, however, remains a mystery: the new room was bigger and thus more expensive than the habitat at Frau Zakreys. It has been speculated that the sudden flight from the Stumpergasse was pursued to hide something or someone from Gustl, perhaps a girl. But for a dearth of proof, we can only hypothesize about Hitler’s reasons, as we must when we face the question of whence the money came for the higher rent.
This is the period in Hitler’s life we know least about. Something decisive must have occurred in addition to the second Academy fiasco. We do know that he spent about eight months in the Felberstrasse room, including his twentieth birthday on April 20, 1909. Decades later, a few of his neighbours have come forward with dim memories of a polite young man who appeared somewhat distant, occupied with his own affairs. There was a café nearby he used to visit, the Café Kubata, and from there we have some vague indicators that he may have spent some time in female company. Maria Wohlrab, née Kubata, said that she saw him often in the company of a girl which was, perhaps, named “Wetti” or “Pepi”. Frau Christa Schröder, from the 1920s on Hitler’s long-time secretary, insisted that her chef had mentioned to her, more than once, that he had a “beloved” at that time in Vienna named “Emilie”. The cashier at the Café Kubata later remembered that she liked the young man because “he was very reserved and quiet, and would read books and seemed very serious, unlike the rest of the young men.” (3)
The cost of the Felberstrasse apartment, whether he used it alone or not, may have put too much of a strain on Hitler’s finances, which were by now most probably limited to the twenty-five crowns orphan assistance he still received each month. He moved again, on August 21, 1909, this time as a “Writer”, to Sechshauserstrasse 56, 2nd Floor, Room 21, c/o Frau Antonie Oberlechner, in the XIVth District. It was very close to the Felberstrasse but probably cheaper, for the Sechshauserstrasse was a thoroughfare with lots of street noise and trolley traffic. (4)
On the move – November 1908 until September 1909
Things did not improve, it seems. Less than four weeks later, on September 16, 1909, he left Sechshauserstrasse without registering a forward address. He must have been close to the end of the rope: for about three months his tracks are lost within the multitudes of Vienna’s poor, in the anonymity of the homeless and indigent.
On September 16, 1909, Hitler leaves Sechshauserstraße 56 in the XIVth District, c/o Mrs Antonie Oberlechner, where he had lived, and got lost amid Vienna’s homeless …
The days of his vagrancy forced him, alike the myriads that shared his fate, to seek shelter from the cold of the impending winter in parks, alleys, doorways and ditches. A favourite place was Vienna’s amusement park “Prater“, which was mostly inactive in winter and provided lots of benches, for which the competition was intense. He may well, as many others did, have tried to sleep in coffee houses, bars or flophouses, in the waiting rooms of train stations or the warming rooms of the city’s charities. In Mein Kampf, he admitted that “even now I shudder when I think of these pitiful dens, the shelters and lodging houses, those sinister pictures of dirt and repugnant filth and worse still.” (5) The sheer size of vagrancy in the Austrian capital was beyond belief – the journalist Max Winter bequeathed us more than 1500 articles on the phenomenon:
“ In the single week between January 10th and 16th, 1901, the six warming rooms of the Vienna Charity Association were visited in daytime by 29,202 men, 17,291 women and 39,801 children – that is, a total of 86,294 people within seven days. During night-time, 4641 men, 259 women and eleven children, together 4911 people, visited the rooms in addition.”
So arduous was his pecuniary distress that he had to sell his art materials and most of his clothing; an endeavour ill-suited to the falling temperatures. To add insult to injury, the winter of 1909/10 turned out the most frightful in decades and one day Hitler had to admit defeat to Vienna’s weather gods: one cold December evening, he showed up in the workers’ suburb of Meidling; more precisely in the long row of derelict wretches who waited for admission to the Asyl für Obdachlose, the “Asylum for the Homeless”.
The Asylum, Untere Meidlinger Street 3, built 1908
The Asylum, “which in consideration for the decent citizens was built behind the Meidlinger cemetery, far from the residents” (6) but near the southern railway station, had only been opened in 1908. Together with a similar institution in the 3rd District, it was operated by the “Shelter Association for the Homeless“, a charity which financed itself by private donations and received an annual subsidy from the city. (7) Yet the association had to fight windmills in its constant struggle against the three related issues that plagued the poor: poverty resulted in homelessness, homelessness resulted in disease, and disease resulted in a loss of employment. Imperial Vienna, we mentioned it, was at that time a metropolis of over two million inhabitants, the sixth-biggest town on earth, and certainly, more than a quarter-million of its denizens were relegated to perpetual poverty. Many of the losers came from the outer provinces of the Empire, the East or the South, and lacked a suitable command of the German language, which in turn decreased their chances of employment. Worse, they lacked the kind of survival instincts that apply to a city, as opposed to those applicable at their rural places of origin.
The Meidlinger shelter was a sturdy affair, offering refuge for about one thousand souls. Unlike other charities it allowed occupants to stay for one week only (a stipulation that could be circumvented), but it offered an advantage most other places lacked: it would take in whole families and their children, not only single men. It promoted self-help as well: everybody, health permitting, was called upon to aid in the cleaning and maintenance of the building, to keep operating costs at a minimum. The building was not too dreary, thanks to its recent pedigree; there were washing facilities, showers and numerous toilets, all of them kept spotlessly clean. Two meals a day were supplied, soup and sandwich, for breakfast and supper; the dormitories featured the usual military-style cots, lined up with the precision of a battalion on parade. During daylight hours the occupants were expected to leave the shelter, preferably in search of employment; loitering was frowned upon and could easily lead to eviction.
One of Hitler’s better efforts – a scene on a lake
Much as he disliked it, Hitler had to pass through the ritual of admission; establishing membership in the community of misery. The shiverlings began to line up outside of the main gate when darkness fell, around 5 pm, and when the doors of the institution opened, two rows of bodies filed in quietly: men to the right, woman and children to the left. Hitler received, as everybody else did, a ticket that entitled him to the statutory one week of lodging and was assigned a brass cot in one of the dormitories. It must have been exceedingly onerous for a man who was used to his privacy as much as Hitler was, to face one’s first experience with public showers and delousation procedures. His proud sense of individuality must have vanished at the latest when he joined the herd of occupants heading to the mess hall for dinner. As John Toland observed, “it would be difficult for anyone but another recipient of institutionalized charity to understand the shame suffered by a proud young man on his first day within the gates of such an establishment.” (8)
For a man so much accustomed to his freedom, the asylum certainly felt like a prison. One can imagine how he sat, completely lost, on a cot in a large hall with hundreds of strangers, each of whom was more familiar with the situation than he was. It was perhaps his impersonation of a lost kitten that convinced his cot neighbour, an on-and-off servant and waiter named Reinhold Hanisch, to take care of him and to show him the ropes. Although Hanisch by himself is a problem as a witness – when he met Hitler he had already been to jail more than once, lived habitually under false names and doctored birth certificates, and in later years counterfeited Hitler paintings – some parts of his memoir that the American magazine The New Republicprinted in 1939 – posthumously – under the title “Reinhold Hanisch: I Was Hitler’s Buddy”, ring true, among much that has been proven false or at least misleading. [FN2] Unlike Hitler, Hanisch was a professional utilizer of charity-assisted lifestyles, was familiar with the inner workings of the asylum and every other such house in Vienna and also an expert in the general survival strategies of vagrants. He proved his value instantly: one of the first tricks he taught Hitler was how to circumvent the lodging limitation; all one had to do was buy, for a few pennies, the unused portions of the admittance cards of those occupants who, for a variety of reasons, left without having used up their allotment. Thus, the first danger of having to return into the cold was banned and Hitler began to appreciate his new acquaintance.
[FN2] Brigitte Hamann provides an excellent overview about the sources on Hitler’s years in the Men’s Hostel, and discusses in which instants Hanisch can be trusted and when not (“Hitler’s Vienna“, see quotes below, p. 184 ff.).
Reinhold Hanisch came from the Sudetenland, the northern, German part of Bohemia, being born January 27, 1884, at Grünwald (Mšeno nad Nisou) near Gablenz, but had travelled extensively and thus was able to tell his new friend many stories about Germany, Adolf’s promised land. Hanisch also hedged a few dreams of becoming an artist and immediately recognized a related soul in Hitler. Hanisch had seen and could relate the tales of towns and castles, cathedrals and monasteries, mountains and rivers.
Hanisch as painted by Hitler, dated 1910
Hanisch near his death 1936
To make things more entertaining for Adolf, it turned out that Hanisch had worked in Braunau for some time, and they began to exchange reminiscences of the town. As it frequently happens, common knowledge and common interests breed trust, and soon they talked incessantly. That is, until Hanisch found a new job and moved, on December 21, 1909, to Hermanngasse 16 in the IInd District, and, on February 11, 1910, on to Herzgasse 3/4, in the Xth District. (9)
After a few days of listening to Hanisch, Hitler had memorized the basic rules of street life, and they developed a kind of daily routine. In the morning they set out on the rather long walk to St. Katherine’s Convent near Adolf’s old haunts at the Westbahnhof to queue up for the soup the nuns passed out at noon, then on to one of the warming rooms operated by the philanthropic societies or into the relative warmth of a railway station. In the afternoon, they would be trying to sneak up a snack at the Salvation Army before heading back to the asylum in time to be among the first in the waiting line. Occasionally men were sought for a day or two of work in ditch digging, snow shovelling or luggage handling at a train station, but Hanisch quickly realized that Hitler was too weak for these incidental jobs. Neither did Adolf have any talent for begging, although he acquired from an asylum comrade the addresses of “soft touches”, prospective donors. He received “specific instructions for each customer; for example, he was to greet an old lady on the Schottenring with a “Praised be Jesus Christ”, and then say he was an unemployed church painter or a woodcutter of holy figures. Usually, she gave two Kronen for such a story, but Hitler only got religious platitudes for his trouble.” (10) The nuns of St. Katherine’s were one of the few reliable addresses in town.
A la longue, Hanisch realized that, while practically all the outcasts of the capital did beg, very few did paint, and derived a plan of profiting from Adolf’s artistic abilities. We do not know exactly when the idea came up; either during the two months Hitler spent at the Asylum in Meidling or later at the Men’s Hostel in the Meldemannstrasse, but, at any rate, Hanisch convinced his friend that the best way to make some direly needed cash was to paint small scenes or postcards and sell them. When Hitler objected that he had no more painting utensils, was too shabbily dressed to sell anything and not a great salesman to boot, the plan was amended and the labour divided: Adolf would do the painting and Hanisch the selling, for a fifty per cent commission. (11)
There was the tricky issue that the two prospective entrepreneurs did not have a licence, but Hanisch assured his friend that such petty regulations could be outflanked by moving their point of sale into the dim and grey, smoke-filled taverns of the city, of which Hanisch, having worked in many, had an encyclopaedic knowledge. In regard to the painting materials, Hanisch proposed to apply to the generosity of Adolf’s family. The Cafe Arthaber, conveniently located near the Meidling train station, was known to provide pen and paper for the vagrants if they paid the universal entry fee – the price of a cup of coffee. Adolf wrote a letter, either to Aunt Johanna or to Angela, and a few days later a fifty crown note arrived poste restante. (12) “The money probably saved his life, for it gave him renewed hope at a time when he had little to hope for.” (13)
All the petty possessions he had accumulated in the preceding years had long since disappeared. It is quite possible that an irate landlady seized some in lieu of rent, but in his pitiful state of existence before the asylum, he may simply have lost most of them – out of sight, out of mind. All the books, manuscripts, paintings, sketches, maps and drawings were lost; gone were the dressy overcoat, top hat and walking stick. Had August met this destitute figure, he might not have recognized him. The young, almost elegant Bohemian had vanished; all that was left was a piece of human flotsam; the debris of the young boy that had urged his playmates to chase the redskins. Only fragments remained of the son Klara had so loved.
The crash of his dream world sent pulses, like ripples, to the outer rims of his consciousness; the remnants of his former self may have caught glimpses of unfamiliar surroundings, seeing but not realizing how he had arrived there. As if arising from hibernation, Adolf found himself in a place of perplexing strangeness and laboured to re-establish the mental cohesion of time and place. In a 1913 letter, he wrote: “The autumn of 1909 was for me an interminably bitter time. I was a young man with no experience, without financial assistance, and too proud to accept it from just anyone, let alone beg for it.” (14) The bitter feeling was real enough, but the last clause was a lie: his true problem with begging was that it did not work for him.
Yet in a sense, the marks of this winter never vanished. In the description of their friendship, August had painted the portrait of a slightly strange, somewhat exotic, a little awkward and sometimes violent young man, who was nonetheless permanently active, if only self-centred; writing, composing an opera, drawing, painting and rebuilding Linz. Now, less than twelve months later, his friend was destitute of mind and body. He had lost weight and his health was doubtful. It has been advocated and indeed seems possible that the innumerable ailments, big and small, that plagued him in later years were rooted in this cold winter, which exacerbated his earlier affliction of the lung and may have weakened his immune system as well.
But not only was he physically exhausted, but his spirit had suffered as well. For long spells he retained the stare common to visionaries and beggars; concentration was sporadic, reason elusive, his passions dull, unless something bothered him. Then he could still erupt in flames, in fierce and biting crescendo arguing, ranting, raging; only to sink back quickly into the comforting anodyne of apathy. He was on the verge of defeat when Hanisch picked him up, but he eventually adapted to the outcast life and gradually things improved.
The Meidlinger asylum, however, while having provided a safety net in the days of calamity and ire, was no place to start Hitler & Hanisch, Postcards Un-Incorporated. A location had to be found which not only allowed long-time tenure but also provided a space where Hitler could paint during the day. Hanisch identified such a place in the Männerheim, the Men’s Hostel, in Brigittenau, Vienna’s newest, the XXth District.
The Männerheim at Meldemannstraße 25 – 29, Vienna
We shall ask Brigitte Hamann (“Hitler’s Vienna”, 1st Ed. Oxford UP 1999, Tauris Parks 2010, ISBN 978-1-84885-277-8) to introduce us to the facility where Adolf Hitler was to live from February 9, 1910, to May 24, 1913. She cites from a report by Viennese journalist Ernst Kläger, who, disguised as a beggar, spent a night at the hostel and wrote an article about it. The area between downtown Vienna and Brigittenau, beyond the Danube Canal, was desolate. Finally,Kläger found the new hostel.
The six-story men’s hostel in Vienna-Brigittenau, 25 – 29 Meldemannstrasse, was among the most modern in Europe. Opened in 1905, it was funded by the private Emperor Francis Joseph Anniversary Foundation for Public Housing and Charitable Institutions, which was financed through donations, receiving significant contributions from Jewish families, particularly from Baron Nathaniel Rothschild and the Gutmann family. The hostel was administered by the City of Vienna. The first blueprints caused a stir during an exhibition in the Künstlerhaus (Artists’ House). The hostel was not to have common sleeping areas but individual compartments for each of its up to 544 guests, excellent hygienic conditions, and many social events to enhance “education and sociability.”
Brigittenau, at the outskirts of the city, had many new industrial plants, a great need for labourers, and the most rapid population growth in all of Vienna’s districts. Its population increased from 37,000 in 1890 to 101,000 in 1910. Most new residents were young single men who worked in the new factories and, because there were no cheap apartments, found places to spend the night as lodgers in overcrowded workers’ apartments.
This new men’s hostel was supposed to decrease the number of lodgers and thus protect the compromised morals of their host families. The foundation’s principal trustee, Prince Carl Auersperg, pointed this out on the occasion of Emperor Franz Joseph’s visit in 1905: “In particular, this men’s hostel seeks to give an actual example of the … chance to effectively fight the pernicious phenomenon of lodging, to offer single labourers a home instead of the dull and overcrowded emergency quarters, providing not only an affordable place to stay but also providing the opportunity to nourish body and mind.”
Rent for one sleeping place was only 2.5 Kronen per week, an amount a single handyman or craftsman with an annual income of 1,000 Kronen [doubtful, see FN1] could afford. In Vienna, the hostel was thus praised as “a miracle of a divine lodging place on earth” and “a marvel of elegance and affordability.”
[FN1] The average monthly wage in 1910 was 54 Kronen (Austrian National Bank). Werner Maser gives the following examples of salaries: “At that time a lawyer’s salary, after one year’s practice in court, was 70 crowns per month, that of a teacher during the first five years of his career, 66 crowns. A post office official earned 60 crowns, while an assistant teacher in a Vienna secondary school before 1914 received a monthly salary of 82 crowns.” (Werner Maser, Adolf Hitler: Legend, Myth and Reality, NY 1971, p.43)
View from the back …
… and the side …
“A large electric arc lamp over the gate guides those who are stumbling up the hill of dug-up soil. Compared to the other, smaller houses around and the bare factory buildings in the back, the shelter looks proud. I open the door and to my surprise find myself in a vestibule which no good hotel would put to shame. I am embraced by comfortable warm air.” The men’s hostel had both electric and gas lights and was heated by a modern, central low-pressure steam heater. At the counter, the reporter had no difficulty in obtaining a ticket for one night for thirty Kreuzers (sixty Hellers; one Krone had 100 Hellers, i.e. cents). Kläger described the dining room in the upper mezzanine: “Again I am pleasantly surprised by the elegance of the room, which is lighted by two arc lamps and whose walls are covered halfway up with pale green tiles.”
Then he tried the
dirt-cheap food and found the meals “all very good.” The occupants
spent only an average of half a Krone per day for food in the hostel – for
breakfast, dinner, and snacks – in other words, only approximately fifteen
Kronen per month.
Kläger watched the
lodgers: “The door opens constantly, and someone in a bad suit, usually a
bag under his arm, enters. One could tell that most occupants were incredibly
tired.” Because most of them worked during the day, it was quiet in the
afternoon. Yet in the evening “it was lively, gregarious, but by no means boisterous,
until around ten-thirty.”
There were kitchenettes with gas rings and kitchen utensils for those who wanted to prepare their own food. Cooking teams were formed: one of the unemployed would remain in the hostel, go shopping, and cook for some of the labourers, and in return could eat for free. Initially, Hitler tried to cook, but with little success, for according to Reinhold Hanisch, the Upper Austrian milk soup he proudly offered had curdled and turned out more like cheese.
Staircase
Kläger made his rounds through the shelter and reported: “Right next to the dining room is a large, very nicely furnished reading room with two sections, one for smokers and one for non-smokers. It has dailies and a nice library which is available to the lodgers. Most books are easy-to-digest novels and writings on popular science. There are also desks with the necessary utensils for doing one’s correspondence.” On Sunday afternoons there was entertainment plus the opportunity for continuing education through concerts and lectures. On the lower mezzanine, there were laundry and shoe-shining rooms, luggage and bicycle racks, and a cobbler and tailor room.
Hygienic conditions were exemplary: a house doctor practised for free, offering outpatients services in a “sick room” for minor illnesses. As in all shelters, there was a disinfection room for delousing the newcomers. Apart from lavatories, there were also a shaving room and a shower room with sixteen showers, twenty-five footbaths, and four bathtubs. One bath was twenty-five Heller, about a third of the price in a public bath. All this bore fruit in the cholera year of 1910; the dreaded disease spared the fully occupied men’s hostel.
The sleeping wing, comprising the four top floors, was opened at 8:00 pm and had to be vacated by 9:00 am. It consisted of long rows of tiny, separate sleeping compartments, each measuring 4.6 × 6.9 feet. There was enough room for a bed, a small table, a clothes rack, and a mirror. Permanent guests had their sheets changed every seven days, and one-night guests every day, as in hotels. As an extra convenience, each compartment had a door with a lock and a light bulb. It was probably the first time Hitler had electric light in his room. (15)
A sleeping cubicle, like Hitler’s, at Meldemannstrasse around 1930
Hitler, however, was not prone to sing the praises of the hostel in his later years, for the Führer legend had him sleeping in parks and ditches, which he had done, but only for a few months before moving into the hostel and soon doing comparatively well. For the basic difference between the asylum and the hostel was that the former was the last step, perhaps, before starving or freezing to death, while in the latter, at least in theory, a man could convince himself that he was on the way to a better future. One might be poor but still, harbour a ray of hope.
Here we must return to the problem of Reinhold Hanisch‘s veracity. He claimed that he followed Hitler into the hostel a few days later, and since Hitler had filed his new address at the Männerheim with the police on February 9, Hanisch would have to have arrived soon afterwards. We do know that Hanisch was frequently seen in the hostel, and did indeed pick up Hitler’s paintings to sell them, but he was still registered at that time at Herzgasse 3/4 in the distant Xth District. The records for Adolf are clear: with one small interruption, he stayed at the Männerheim from February 9, 1910, to May 24, 1913, thirty-nine months. He might have left on errands here and there, but for more than three years the building on Meldemannstrasse was his home – for about six Kronen food and lodging per week. Poor as the occupants undoubtedly were, the administration tried hard to keep up their dignity. The men could take correspondence courses, apply for the Social Democratic Party’s job placement program, or read the bibles provided by the Catholic Homeless Association. “Ruhe and Ordnung“, silence and order, were strictly enforced, as was a dress code. All in all, the Männerheim provided a calm, monastic atmosphere in which Hitler nicely fit in, except for some political arguments.
Whether residing in the hostel or not, Hanisch set up their business. The first step was to place Adolf and the art materials recently obtained through Angela‘s or Aunt Johanna’s charity into the reading room, non-smoker section. There was a long oak table close to the window, which provided the natural light Adolf needed. The company now supplied the “market for postcard-sized paintings to be sold in taverns or to art dealers, who acquired them not so much for their artistic value as for filling empty frames.” (16) Soon Hitler had realized which motifs were in demand, mostly local sights and nature, and his postcards and small paintings sold rather quickly.
For a few months, the partnership blossomed. Hanisch was easily able to find buyers in the maze of the backstreets, the lanes that meandered between dark taverns and paltry shops, newsstands and tobacconists, but also in the wine gardens of the Prater, and the art shops in the better quarters of the capital. The sums realized initially hovered between five and ten Kronen, which were split fifty-fifty. A business routine slowly established itself and Hitler’s life stabilized, although he still possessed only a single change of clothing.
The reading rooms were the place where the more educated occupants met, of which there were quite a few former students of the Austrian schools and colleges. They discussed politics and art, money and women, as lonely men do. Some tried to entice neophytes to whatever political cause they believed in, and workers were tolerated in the discussions if they appeared salvageable from the poison of socialism. Sometimes Hitler tried to moderate the debates, as arbiter elegantiarum; this was perhaps a family trait, for we remember his father’s obituary mentioning that Alois was wont to “pronounce authoritatively on any matter that came to his notice.” At other times he just listened, hulked over his work on the long oak table. …
After a couple of months in which the postcard operation worked as planned, something went wrong, but, alas, we do not know what truly happened. Out of the blue, one day Hanisch failed to find his associate at the oak table. Hitler had left the building accompanied by his Jewish friend Josef Neumann: rumour had it that they planned to emigrate to Germany. When they eventually returned, a week later, Hitler vowed that they had only been on a protracted sightseeing trip through the capital. It would seem possible that Hitler and Neumann had tried to open a business sideline: due to the latter’s familiarity with the Jewish side of Vienna’s art trade, Neumann might have been a better business agent than Hanisch. After a week they were back, but Hitler appeared penniless and self-absorbed as if shocked. His personal relations to both Hanisch and Neumann, who left the hostel on July 12, 1910, were to end soon. (29)
Could the incident be explored, it might offer tantalizing insights. Helene Hanfstaengl, society-sage and wife of Hitler’s first foreign-press agent Ernst Hanfstaengl – and a no-nonsense woman in her own right – reported that Hitler told her more than once that his loathing of Jews was “a personal thing“, and that the genesis of this hate occurred in Vienna. Adolf’s sister Paula later testified to her opinion that his “failure in painting was only due to the fact that trade in works of art was in Jewish hands.” (30)
Perhaps this is the proper place to inquire into the reality of Hitler’s anti-Semitism during the Männerheim years. Hanisch reports, not happily, that at least three Jewish hostel occupants were Hitler’s friends, the aforementioned Neumann, Simon Robinson, born 1864 in Galicia, a locksmith’s assistant, and Siegfried Löffner, born 1872 in Moravia, a salesman. (31) Another witness from the men’s hostel, Karl Honisch [with ‘o’, not to be confused with Hanisch] mentions another Jewish man, Rudolf Redlich from Moravia, as an acquaintance of Hitler. (32) Hanisch’s discontent was clearly based upon the fact that they all helped Hitler in selling his paintings. Even worse, Hitler soon began to sell his works directly to art dealers, and thus Hanisch was out of game and money. Many of the traders who bought Hitler’s paintings were Jewish (or of Jewish origin): Jakob Altenberg, who converted to Christianity in Vienna and eventually became a rich frame manufacturer, (33) Samuel Morgenstern, who always dealt directly with Hitler and also introduced him to the lawyer Dr Josef Feingold, who became a steady buyer, and another dealer, named Landsberger. (34) As Brigitte Hamann sums it up, it would appear that Hanisch was the anti-Semite in these years, not Hitler. It is true that from Mein Kampfonwards, Hitler knitted the legend of his early discovery of the damnable role of the Jews, and the hagiography of the Third Reich elevated this doctrine to the status of Holy Writ, but, indeed, the sources before 1919 are either silent on Hitler’s presumed anti-Semitism or actually contradict the dogma. It is true that Hitler learned from the socialists that political propaganda cannot allow for ambiguity: there must be one enemy and only one. Yet it would appear, as we will see later, that Hitler did not begin to develop a coherent anti-Semitic concept until 1919 at the earliest.
It would seem that in this autumn of 1910 Adolf gave the Academy another shot. He secured an appointment with Professor Ritschel, the curator, and brought examples of his work, but nothing came of it; either because the professor denied him entry or because Adolf did not have the funds for a renewed application. (35)
From the little we know, the third rejection perhaps did not surprise him any more, but for a time deepened his funk; he became even more of a recluse, neither liked nor disliked by the other hostel occupants, living in a dissonant universe of his own design. …
Meanwhile, he had become an institution himself, a part of the hostel’s inventory. His demeanour had changed somewhat, and he had recovered some of his old confidence: to the fellow occupants that clustered around the oak table and admired his work in statu nascendi, he confessed that he was only toying around; that he had not yet learned how to paint properly, that they should not take these efforts too seriously. In 1944, he admitted to photographer Heinrich Hoffmann that “Even today these things [i.e. paintings] shouldn’t cost more than 150 or 200 Reichsmark. It is insane to spend more than that on them. After all, I didn’t want to become an artist, I painted the stuff only to make a living and afford to go to school.” (37) If he sought artistic pleasure, he did architectural drawings, not watercolours. In some way, the work gave his life back the element of structure that it had lost when he ditched school; now he spent his days in the sort of dependability developed by men who neither fear nor hope for change.
Vienna National Opera House by Adolf Hitler
Yet occasionally the tranquillity was interrupted. One of the reasons for Hanisch’s temporary disappearance from the hostel had been money: Hitler had finished a better than usual painting of the parliament building, which Hanisch, as usually, did sell but, inexplicably, forgot to give Hitler the share and vanished without a trace. On August 4, 1910, Siegfried Löffner, who knew about the affair, recognized Hanisch on the street, and, after attempting to convince Hanisch to pay his debt, an argument ensued. Eventually, the police arrived, and Hanisch was detained because he could not establish his identity. Löffner then filed the following statement at the Wieden, IVth District, police station:
Siegfried Löffner, Agent, XXth District, 27 Meldemannstrasse, states: “I learned from a painter at the men’s hostel that the arrested man [Hanisch] sold pictures for him and had misappropriated the money. I do not know the name of the painter, I only know him from the men’s hostel, where he and the arrested man always used to sit next to each other.” (38)
A day later, August 5, 1910, Hitler was asked to appear at the local police station in Brigittenau to give a statement. Meanwhile, the police had found forged identity papers in Hanisch’s possession that gave his name as Walter Fritz. Adolf testified:
Adolf Hitler, artist, b. 4-20-1889 in Braunau, resident of Linz, Cath., single, XXth District, registered at 27 Meldemannstrasse, states: “It is not true that I advised Hanisch to register as Walter Fritz, all I ever knew him as was Walter Fritz. Since he was indigent, I gave him the pictures I painted, so he could sell them. I regularly gave him 50% of the profit. For the past approximately two weeks Hanisch has not returned to the hostel and misappropriated my painting Parliament, worth c. Kronen 50, and a watercolour worth Kronen 9. The only document of his that I saw was his workman’s passbook issued to the name Fritz Walter. I know Hanisch from the hostel in Meidling, where I once met him. Adolf Hitler.” (39)
The trial took place on August 11. It was the first time Adolf Hitler was present in a criminal court as a witness. His beef with Hanisch, however, had been over the alleged embezzlement, not a false identity. That he did testify against Hanisch in the matter of the false papers was simple retaliation, and his testimony played a material role in the identity count of which Hanisch was convicted and received a seven-day jail sentence. But on the embezzlement charge, Hanisch had to be acquitted, perhaps because the money trail or its absence could not be proven either way, which raises the suspicion that Hitler may have lied in his statement of August 5. Summa summarum, Hitler first engagement in a court of justice included perjury and fraud, not an auspicious beginning to his relationship with the law.
Oil Painting “Karlskirche“Old Court in Munich, by Adolf Hitler
By now he sold everything he painted. His choice of subjects had always been classically conservative, some might say boring, and this taste remained with him all through his life. There are few instances in which his small bourgeois outlook on the world becomes as obvious as in his taste in art, and although he lived in a time that revolutionized the arts, he did not pay any attention. He despised or was ignorant of the Secessionist painters, Egon Schiele,Gustav Klimt, or Oskar Kokoschka; he disliked the compositions of Arnold Schönberg, Anton von Webern or Alban Berg, who introduced twelve-tone music and serialism; he never read Rilke,Zweig or Hofmannsthal. All his life he remained a captive of the artistic perceptions of the nineteenth century. Yet his taste coincided with what the good burghers of Vienna coveted, and so his paintings followed the eternal laws of demand and supply.
We do contrast here a few examples of the masters mentioned above – strikingly revealing how deep Hitler was stuck in the aesthetics of the past century.
Egon Schiele – Two WomenEgon Schiele – Female with Towel (Weiblicher Akt mit gelbem Handtuch)- 1917The Kiss, by Gustav KlimtGustav Klimt 1907, Adele Bloch-Bauer I, until 2017 the most expensive painting worldwide‘Bride of the Wind” by Oskar Kokoschka,a self-portrait expressing his unrequited love for Alma Mahler (widow of composer Gustav Mahler) 1913Oskar Kokoschka – The Prometheus Triptychon “Apokalypsis”
As one would assume, the part of the conversation in the hostel’s reading rooms that did not revolve around women centred on politics. As far as the former topic is concerned, his old flame Stefanie might still haunt his dreams, or perhaps the elusive Emilie (see below), but he had no interest to mingle in the conversations of lonely men fabulating about the women they’ve known and the monies they’ve squandered, ingredients of fading memories, solitary men mourning irretrievable losses. Politics was a different thing altogether. Since Brigittenau was a worker district, the Social Democrats commanded a clear majority and their sympathizers were well represented in the Männerheim. Yet as far as Hitler’s political ideas, if any, in Vienna are concerned, the little our sources report is contradictory, and Hitler’s assertions in Mein Kampf, again, not truly credible. He claimed to have “learned to orate less, but listen more to those with opinions and objections that were boundlessly primitive,” (41) which would seem to characterize his opinion of the socialists. But no documents suggest that Hitler was at this time truly interested in politics, and, except for his Pan-Germanism, what he truly thought of Jews and socialists we do not know.
In early 1913, a young man from Moravia, Karl Honisch, took up residence at the hostel and became acquainted with Hitler. He was approached by the NSDAP in the 1930s to write up his memories. Clearly, the result must be taken cum grano salis, for he could not allow himself to write anything negative. As it would be expected, he portrays an abundantly politicizing Hitler, yet is silent on details.
“But if finally the opinions he heard really rubbed him the wrong way, he all of a sudden had to contradict. It then frequently happened that he would jump up from his chair, throw brush or pencil across the table, and explained his views in an extremely hot-tempered way, not even shying away from strong expressions; his eyes were ablaze, and again and again he threw back his head to throw back his hair, which kept falling over his forehead.” (42)
Honisch felt called upon to point out the good sides of his then-comrade, who was now head of the government and certainly not a man one would want to affront.
“[Hitler] … used to sit in his place day by day with almost no exception and was only absent for a short time when he delivered his work, and because of his peculiar personality. Hitler was, on the whole, a friendly and charming person, who took an interest in the fate of every companion.” (43)
And further:
“Nobody allowed himself to take liberties with Hitler. But Hitler was not proud or arrogant; on the contrary, he was good-hearted and helpful … and [if a comrade needed a short-term loan] I saw him several times starting such collections with a hat in his hand.” (44)
It was perhaps in late 1912 that several circumstances caused Hitler to contemplate a change of residence. One reason was the new Austrian army law that, although reducing the obligations of new draftees to two years of peacetime service, plus ten years in the reserves, increased the yearly intake of recruits from 103,000 in 1912 to 159,000 in 1914 and thereby was likely to prompt increased activities of the local draft boards. (45) It is clear that, by moving to Vienna, Hitler had evaded his draft board in Linz since 1909, when, at twenty years of age, he had been required to present himself for military service. It is obvious that he had no intention to serve in the forces of the detested Habsburg monarchy, and it seems that in this period his plans for an eventual emigration to Germany in general and to München in particular – he had talked about such a move as early as 1910 to Hanisch and Neumann – approached maturation.
Another reason was that he was through with Vienna; he knew the city inside out, like the face of a long-time lover, from the polished elegance of the buildings along the Ringstraße to the slums of the outer districts. He saw the Sword of Damocles hanging over the Habsburg Empire, kept from dropping only by the emperor’s fragile health. But why not set out for the Holy Grail right now? Hitler had a third, excellent reason to wait; as Ian Kershaw reports, at the occasion of his twenty-fourth birthday on April 20, 1913, he became eligible to receive his patrimony.
On 16 May 1913, the District Court in Linz confirmed that he should receive the sizeable sum, with interest added to the original 652 Kronen, of 819 Kronen 98 Heller, and that this would be sent by post to the “artist” Adolf Hitler at Meldemannstrasse, Vienna. With this long-awaited and much-welcome prize in his possession, he needed to delay his departure for München no longer. (46)
In February 1913, the nineteen-year-old pharmaceutical apprentice Rudolf Häusler took up residence at the Männerheim and made Hitler’s acquaintance in the reading room. (47) Häusler was interested in music and the arts, had painted himself, and Hitler took the youth under his wings. As Adolf had, Häusler had suffered under a tyrannical father who, in the bargain, was a Customs official, as Alois Hitler had been. The sire had thrown the offspring out of his house and Rudolf could only visit his mother, whom he, like Adolf, adored, and his siblings in the old man’s absence. To these sneaky visits he eventually brought his older friend Adolf, who, it would appear, made a good impression upon the mother, as Brigitte Hamann found out:
Ida Häusler, who was fifty at the time, a self-confident, educated woman from a good family, was glad that her unruly son had found a well-bred older friend, trusted Hitler, and was supportive of their friendship. Furthermore, she generously invited the obviously destitute young man to eat with them. Häusler’s seventeen-year-old sister Milli [Emilie] soon had a crush on Adi, who liked the comfortable, clean bourgeois atmosphere which resembled that of his former home in Linz. Father Häusler remained invisible. (48)
That we knew little about Rudolf Häusler until 1999, when Brigitte Hamann located his daughter Marianne Koppler, nee Häusler, interviewed her and published her finds in the book “Hitler’s Vienna” [see below], shines the proverbial light on the completeness and reliability of our sources on the early years; all the more so for Häusler apparently was the closest friend Adolf had since August Kubizek. [FN2] Not surprisingly, the fact that Hitler met an Emilie in the Häusler household, Rudolf’s sister, has led to speculation whether this Emilie could be identical with the girl Hitler’s secretary Christa Schroeder referred to in her memoirs; when she once opined that Emilie was an ugly name, Hitler allegedly said: “Don’t say that. Emilie is a beautiful name; that was the name of my first love!” (53)
[FN2] Anton Joachimsthaler discovered the earliest record of Rudolf Häusler in articles written by Thomas Orr for the München “Revue” Magazine, vols. 37/1952 to 8/1953. (49) Orr had learned of and interviewed a few alleged witnesses in Hitler’s old München neighbourhood and mentions Häusler but did not make the connection to Frau Koppler. For reasons that are not clear until today, Hitler never mentioned Häusler, nor did the Popps, the landlords of the room in which he lived together with Hitler in München for almost nine months. This has prompted Brigitte Hamann to speculate whether the two friends and the Popps, for unknown motives, concluded a pact of silence. (50) Häusler had early contacts with the Nazis: Joachimsthaler has him as a member of the NSDAP since June 1933 [the Austrian NSDAP since September 1, 1938], (51) although Frau Hamann cites an affidavit from the Austrian Ministry of the Interior that he had only been a membership candidate from 1938 to 1944. (52) Clear is that he worked for the DAF, the Nazi labour union, from December 1938 on, and was the manager of the Vienna NSDAP office from 1940 to 1945. He died in Vienna on July 26, 1973.
A photograph purporting to show Rudolf Häusler in his Austrian army uniform.
If true, this could indicate that the relation with Emilie was somewhat more, say, substantial than his earlier infatuation with Stefanie; on the other hand, given his penchant for telepathic love affairs, conceivably any Emilie in Vienna could have been the target of his supernatural affections. Frau Koppler reported that Emilie was the shyest, quietest and most sensitive of the siblings, and “gave the impression of being fearful and in need of protection.” (54) That she, being seldom outside of the house and not making many acquaintances, developed a crush on her brother’s elder friend seems entirely possible; reportedly she asked him to draw something for her scrapbook and received, as Frau Koppler, who saw the drawing in her youth, remembers, a Germanic warrior in front of an oak tree, signed “A.H.”. (55) A few postcards by Hitler were later found in the family papers.
Two reasons, however, argue against Emilie having been Hitler’s physical lover. One, the girl would not be allowed to leave the house without a chaperone, and it seems unlikely that Hitler was to breach the trust he received from the mother. Two, the time frame seems to be the wrong one, for Frau Wohlrab’s and the Café Kubata cashier girl’s memories [supra] place the relation with the mysterious girlfriend into the time when Hitler lived at Felberstrasse, from November 1908 to August 1909, not the early spring of 1913, when he met the Häuslers.
Eventually, Adolf convinced Rudolf to accompany him to München, or, rather, Rudolf’s mother, as he had five years earlier convinced Herrn Kubizek to release August to Vienna. Around May 20 Hitler must have received the patrimony and around this time they paid a farewell visit to the Häusler family. On May 24 they informed the Vienna police of their leaving the men’s hostel, without, however, providing a forwarding address. More likely than not this was Hitler’s idea, a cautionary measure to evade the attention of his home draft board in Linz. But because he had not only not registered in the fall of 1909, but also failed to present himself for recruitment in the spring of 1910, when due, nor in 1911 or 1912, the Linz police issued a warrant for evasion of his military service duty on August 11, 1913. (56)
Westbahnhof around 1895
The next day, Sunday, May 25, 1913, Karl Honisch and a few old hands from the Männerheim accompanied the two friends to the Westbahnhof, where not only the trains to Linz originated but those to Bavaria and thus München as well. Quite probably, the two friends bought the cheapest tickets, third class, Wien Westbahnhof – München Hauptbahnhof (Vienna, Western Railway Station — München, Central Railway Station), 5 Kronen 80 Heller each. (57)
A “Westbahn” Train like that must have brought Hitler and Häusler to Munich.
Adolf Hitler left nothing and no one in the city that he felt had betrayed him, and set out for Germany – the Promised Land.
Joachimsthaler, Anton, Hitler’s Weg begann in München 1913 – 1923, F.A. Herbig, München 2000, ISBN 3-7766-2155-9, (4) 46 (9) 268 (49) 330, n. 277 (51) 323 (56) 27
Jones, Sydney J., Hitler in Vienna 1907-1913, Cooper Square Press 2002, ISBN 0-8154-1191-X, (11) 141 (37) 275
Kershaw, Ian, The Hitler of History, Vintage Books 1998, ISBN 0-375-70113-3, (46) 68
From the graduates of the Kriegsakademie were chosen the officer students that were to become members of this new and, for a time, unique Prussian institution, the Grosse Generalstab, the Great General Staff. It was set up as a separate department of the Ministry of War and dedicated itself solely to the study of strategies, tactics and supplies deemed necessary to develop plans for likely military scenarios. Its members, who initially numbered a dozen or so men and never exceeded one hundred, were the best and the brightest – as much as possible, for the influence of the old military families could not entirely be neutralized. The General Staff, however, did not exert military command; it made plans, devised strategies, and “shadowed” the line officers: every corps had a staff officer assigned who could supervise the execution of the given plan or effect necessary changes.
The staff’s daily bread was physics, mechanics, mathematics and statistics, but some room was given to the human factors, too – an early exercise in what would one day be called “psychology”. There had, of course, been half- hearted predecessors to the Kriegsakademie; essentially schools for military clerks, in which prospective artillery officers were taught elementary geometry and future quartermasters Accounting 101. Not only had these been mostly shabby affairs, they lacked reputation, which in turn reflected negatively on their graduates’ promotion opportunities and able officer candidates avoided these career traps.
The
spirit of the modern scientific approach evidenced itself early in the
characteristic bifurcation of the studies: one part of the curriculum was
detailed geographically – horizontally, so to say – the students were to
evaluate scenarios or devise plans for attacking France or defending East
Prussia; the other track ran vertically, as to ways and means: intelligence,
logistics and supplies, ammunition, hospitals, food etc., and every candidate
had to show proficiency in both inventories.
The
curriculum was modelled after the university syllabus of the time: first the
classics, then modern works, first menial tasks then intellectual analysis –
per aspera ad astra. Twice a year the whole academy went on “staff
rides” – on outings to old battlefields strategies were evaluated on the
very ground where they had worked or failed; new concepts, deployments and
strategies were devised and solutions approximated. Studies were written
incorporating the results and became mandatory test material. Models were built
of the locations and strategies tested by simulation; in the next summer the
results of these indoor games were translated to the manoeuvre areas and
evaluated – in short, “War Games” were born and developed. Some of
the conventions created in these games have endured into modern times and the
age of computer wars – the enemy is red, one’s own forces blue.
The names of four officers are indissolubly bound to the history of the Prussian, later the German Great General Staff, before 1914: the aforementioned Carl von Clausewitz, Helmuth Graf (Count) von Moltke [the “Elder”, ¶], Chief of Staff and author of the plans that succeeded in 1864, 1866 and 1870/71, Alfred Graf von Schlieffen, Chief of Staff around the turn of the century and author of the famous but elusive plan named for him, and Helmuth von Moltke [the “Younger”, not a count, ¶], nephew of the Count and Chief of Staff until his dismissal after the lost Battle of the Marne in September 1914.
[Our header depicts a scene from the Battle of Gravelotte, the attack of Infantry Battalion 9 from Lauenburg]
A man living, say, in the year AD 500, who travelled in H.G. Wells’ Time Machine one thousand years to the future of the High Middle Age of AD 1500. would have found that few things had changed much. Life in villages and towns was running in ways that would seem familiar to him – agriculture had not changed much, neither had transportation or war (except for the longbow). He would notice castles and cathedrals – the expressions of feudal and clerical power. Yet in the next one hundred years, he would observe how a monk and a tinkerer laid the foundation of a new age to come …
We are now closing in on the crucial years between AD 1450 and 1520, in which the mechanical invention of a Saxon tinkerer and the religious theories of a Thuringian monk at length caused the liquidation of the medieval age, together with the use of Latin as the language of church and court and the whole medieval class system. Yet even these pivotal events might have been relegated to minor importance had not the rise of the town as political unit completely upended the economical roundabout of the Middle Ages.
Every former peasant, who left the fields he did not own anyway, and on which generations of his forefathers had toiled in sweat for little gain, and spent a year and a day in the nearest officially recognized Imperial city was freed of his obligations to the liege-lord and absolved from lifelong servitude; he became, in principle, a free man. The sharecroppers flocked to the towns in great numbers and took part in the revolution of the medieval economy: towns, and with them their new and recent citizens, could and did get rich by trade, which a nobleman was prevented to do by ancient Roman law. Before long, the burghers broke the Church‘s monopoly on education; the ancient sciences were taken up by a new generation of students and experienced a rebirth, a Renaissance; a first wave of enlightenment purged the continent of many strictures of the Catholic Church.
Print Shop in the Middle Age
The rise of towns established the bourgeoisieas a political class;6 differing from the simple hierarchy of Middle Age society, towns harboured a complex multitude of peoples that defied easy categorization: cobblers and masons, artisans and merchants, doctors and lawyers,7 their helpers and assistants, and soon, philosophers and historians of both the abstract and the natural schools;8 professions the Holy Catholic Church had practically outlawed in her eternal wisdom since Justinian’s closing of the schools of Athens and Alexandria in AD 529.
This
is the appropriate place to introduce the originators of the metamorphoses.
They were two men from a land not yet called Germany; with a little help from
their friends, their pursuits were to elevate the faculties of man to unknown
heights of good and evil.
Scribes had sought a mechanical way to duplicate their efforts since the invention of writing. Around the year AD 1050, a Chinese writer named Bi Sheng came up with the first model of what we today call the movable type: he created a clay type for every character he wanted to print. But since the Chinese language requires one type for every symbol of its writing, Bi Sheng quickly faced the problem that he required so many different characters respectively symbols that his printing method proved too clumsy; not user-friendly enough, we would call it today. Eventually, the Chinese replaced the clay types with woodblocks, which worked fine but had a durability problem. They were still far ahead of Europe.
In the Occident, books were still laboriously copied by hand, usually by monks. Copying books was one of the few pastimes granted to the average monk, and a good part of the income of an abbey or cloister depended on the dexterity and dedication of its copyists. The variety and multitude of these copies, however, were humbled by a circulus vitiosus: since all books were copied by hand, they were very expensive, thus only important books were copied at all; important books, by the standards of the Church, were, of course, only such books which supported the teachings of Christianity: hence only such books were copied.
Meanwhile, in a small town of not-yet-Germany, a prospective print-shop owner named Johannes Gensfleisch combined several recent ideas of his into a device which, after protracted tinkering, introduced to a perplexed world the first viable and sturdy printing press. He had formed, much as Bi Sheng had done, separate types for each letter of the alphabet, but of cast metal, not clay, which improved their durability.
He
had, of course, the advantage to require only thirty-five or so letters and
numbers. He then assembled rows of these types, forming lines, then paragraphs,
and soon whole pages which were fixed in a frame against which ink was applied
and paper pressed. As far as the inner mechanics of the press were concerned,
rumour had it that Gensfleisch had profited from the study of the wine presses
he used for the preparation of his libations.
At any rate, a skilled worker could produce three hundred pages a day with Gensfleisch’s machine, a hundred times the daily output of a monk. It was a miracle. Of a sudden, books could be produced at a fraction of their former cost and in unlimited quantities, for instead of expensive parchment simple paper could be used, which was soon produced in bulk. Books became so cheap and ubiquitous that they were, for the first time, written in or translated into the vernacular of the common people, into Teutsch. Naturally, the first bestseller was the Christian Bible. Herr Gensfleisch meanwhile, suitably proud of his achievement, adopted the nom de plume under which he is known to posterity, Johannes Gutenberg.
Before
Gutenberg, only members of the clergy or the families of the nobility could
afford to possess their own, personal, copies of the Holy Writ: the average man
could not afford one, and even if he could buy one, he could not read it for it
was written in (a sort of) Latin. This now changed swiftly, and everybody could
either buy or at least borrow a Bible written in German and check the contents
independently.9
The Church was not truly ecstatic over the sudden development of amateur competition in Biblical exegesis, and for decades defiled printing as a satanic art; but the levee had been broken, and it was too late to turn back the clock. It was bad enough that the Bible was now accessible to the laity; that it was printed in the vernacular was worse, for every literate person could now read, for example, that Jesus had advocated poverty as the natural state of affairs for Christians, and this mandate, one would surmise, would be equally appropriate for the clergy. Yet when concerned Christians learned from the Bible that Jesus had declared not to own any earthly possessions and exhorted his apostles as well as his lesser disciples to follow his example, they dispatched embassies with dire warnings to the princes of the Catholic Church. The deputations explained that material wealth was in fact a handicap, instead of a benefit, in the acquisition of salvation, and recommended that the Church renounce its secular possessions and concentrate on the salvation of their parishioners’ souls instead of amassing worldly treasures. The Church was not amused and summarily declined the spiritually advantageous offer.
Yet the more mere mortals read the holy writings, the more the former spiritual and intellectual monopoly of Catholicism was forced to retreat. It was not only that scripture and reality were at odds: both the spiritual decay and the wealth of the Church, or rather the ways in which this wealth was accomplished, the abuses of simony and the atrocious selling of indulgences, would no longer be accepted by a new, more critical generation of Christians. Sixty years or so after Gutenberg’s invention, the crisis of the Roman Church became acute. A young monk, professor for Biblical Theology at the University of Wittenberg, set out to change the faith of Christendom forever.
Within the confines of the present volume, the complex history of Martin Luther and the Reformation can be presented only briefly. Luther composed ninety-five theses, which summed up his criticism of the orthodox, Catholic exegesis of the Bible and the conclusions he had drawn from his findings [Text, from Wikisource). These theses he had sent to the office of his superior, Archbishop Albrecht of Mainz, the Imperial Arch Chancellor, where they might have caused damage or not. But he nailed a copy of them onto the door of his home church in Wittenberg, for public discussion [November 1517]. Perhaps not the primary but certainly the most aggravating cause for Luther’s public admonition was the flagrant indulgence trade. In AD 1515, Pope Leo X approved the sale of indulgences in the archbishop’s domain around Mainz, to finance various clerical projects, one of which, and self-evidently the most sacred and distinguished, was to raise funds for the enlargement of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome. Bishop Albrecht did not sell the documents personally; he had an agent, a man named Johann Tetzel, who sold them on a commission basis. Herr Tetzel, a devout believer, explained to his prospective customers that his documents could alleviate the duration or intensity of the purgatorial punishments their sins had purchased, or, for a few dollars more, could accomplish the immediate release of their souls from the sulphurous wells of the devil’s domain. Luther directed his reformatory ire in particular upon such fraudulent practices and composed a stream of theses condemning these theological outrages, and a few other little sins the Catholic Church had allowed herself in one-and-a-half millennia of orthodox rule. Yet soon Luther found himself mired in much more treacherous terrain. James Kugel explains [How to Read the Bible, Free Press 2007, ISBN 978-0-7432-3538-0]:
Well before the early 1500’s, individual Christians had been expressing dissatisfaction with the ways of the church, and their dissatisfaction focused on a broad variety of issues. One of the things that bothered them was
what they saw as corruption within its ranks – priests’ sale of indulgences to
their parishioners, for example, or the role of money in obtaining high office
within the church hierarchy (called “simony”).
Along
with these, some Christians objected to the church’s vast holdings of land and
its evident concern for furthering its own wealth and political power
(accompanied by a lack of concern for the poor): to many, the bishops and
cardinals seemed more the servants of Mammon than of God.
In
addition to these dissatisfactions, however, were others of a more theoretical
and intellectual nature. The very idea of papal authority seemed illogical to
some; how could a reasonable person accept a priori that the rulings of the
altogether human leader of the church would always be correct?
And
why should a human institution like the church, even if its existence was
divinely authorized, play such a crucial role as intermediary between God and
the individual Christian? Lastly – but probably not last in importance – what
about the Bible?
Should the church have the unchallenged authority to say what the Bible means, especially when that meaning seemed to be derived not from the Bible’s own words as much as from old doctrines and questionable methods of interpretation?
Luther’s answer was a resounding “no”. The sole justification of faith, he argued, is the belief in the Divine Promise that Jesus died for the salvation of the sinner; and neither church nor pope are necessary paraphernalia in the achievement of this faith. Sinners, that is, every man who believes in the Biblical message, will be represented at God’s judgement by Jesus Christ and will be absolved, as Jesus is absolved. No purchase necessary.
That was the rub, as far as the Catholic Church was concerned. Orthodox dogma had held for thirteen centuries that the faithful qualify for eternal benefits by the charitable works they donate to the community or the financial endowments they dedicate to the apostolic coffers for the relief of the poor. In other words, good deeds, or equitable pecuniary considerations, open the door to preferred treatment on Judgement Day. Yet if Luther’s findings were correct, such deeds had no relevance whatsoever to redemption or salvation, and the Church’s eagerness in collecting these contributions was nothing but the sign of a parasitic organism’s avarice. Just as useless would be the strange rituals of symbolic cannibalism, performed by men only, who dressed in garish costumes and walked in clouds of frankincense. If one could indeed find redemption without these follies, independent of such ceremonial ministrations, the Church might be out of business soon.
