December 2018 - Page 3 of 4 - History of the West

In Disaster

Signed by Emperor Wilhelm II on July 31, 1914

From the files of the OSS: Secret Report on Hitler 1943

In Disaster

Our header picture shows General William J. Donovan, Wartime Head of the Office of Strategic Services – forerunner of the CIA. Please click on the pic or the link below to see the PDF – File in a new window!

Link to PDF – Document

The Love Goddess

In Adolf Hitler

Geheimnisse des Dritten Reichs – Hitler und die Frauen

Video: We have unearthed – courtesy of ZDF (Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen) and YouTube a snippet of a documentation which features Stefanie in 1975, reporting on her recollections of the unknown admirer (starting at 2:56 running time):

This story takes place at Urfahr, a little township at the Danube River, which is today a part of Linz, the capital of Upper Austria. Mentioned in documents from 1492 on, it was at the time (1882 – 1919) an independent little town, connected to the capital by a wooden, after 1872 an iron bridge.

Let us now discuss the subject properly. When we consider Adolf Hitler’s strange personality, it might not surprise us that the relation to the girl he idolized through puberty in Linz – Stefanie Rabatsch née Isak (28 December 1887 into the 1970s) – was based solely on a form of telepathic contact he claimed he shared with her. As far as we know he never spoke to her, but talked about her at length to his boyhood chum August Kubizek.

Kubizek reported in his memoirs: “One evening in the spring of 1905, as we were taking our usual stroll, Adolf gripped my arm and asked me excitedly what I thought of that slim blonde girl walking along the Landstrasse arm-in-arm with her mother. ‘You must know, I’m in love with her,’ he added resolutely.”

Adolf declined to approach her, telling August he would do so “tomorrow“. In the meantime, he sent his friend on intelligence-gathering missions about Stephanie. Kubizek was able to report that she came from a solid middle-class family, living in the Urfahr quarter of Linz, that her father had been a public servant before his death and that she was “a distinguished-looking girl, tall and slim. She had thick fair hair, which she mostly wore swept back in a bun. Her eyes were very beautiful”.

Every evening she strolled, on the arm of her mother, around Landstrasse in Linz, where the young girls could trade looks through the store windows with the young men who orbited them, flutter their eyelashes, or acidentally drop a handkerchief.

As the author pointed out in “The Little Drummer Boy”: “Many societies know forms of organized yet unofficial courtship, essentially, like the Spanish paseo, essentially concourses d’elegance, and Imperial Austria had made a science out of it. Even nowadays the annual Wiener Hofball, the Vienna Court Ball, introduces the debutantes of the better families into society, with a lot of ado and white frills on the former royal dance floor. Adolf, however, was not the man to address his longings directly; he pointed out that he had not been introduced to her.”

“When August, in a sudden attack of practical thought, suggested that becoming introduced to her might expedite matters, Adolf chickened. ‘What am I to say if the mother wants to know my profession?’ Indeed, what could he say? That he was an unemployed painter or architect-to-be, a rural hayseed, compared to the young men who orbited Stefanie, being officers, or heirs to shops or factories?”

“Adolf’s condition was serious. Not only did he suffer from an acute attack of adolescent adoration of a pretty pair of legs and a shapely bosom; according to Gustl’s report he instantly developed a neurosis. His sense of reality, which was not his strong suit in the first place, abandoned him completely. He declined to talk to her, or send a letter; he never even waved to her when he saw her in the street; his exertions were limited to sending her enquiring glances. “

Yet then one day the“The Miracle” occurred. Kubizek reports:

“For Adolf came that happiest of days in June 1906, which I am sure remained in his memory as clearly as it did in mine. Summer was approaching and a flower festival was held in Linz. As usual, Adolf waited for me outside the Carmelite church, where I used to go every Sunday with my parents; then we took up our stand at the Schmiedtoreck. The position was extremely favourable, as the street here is narrow and the carriages in the festival parade had to pass quite close to the pavement. The regimental band led the string of flower-decked carriages, from which young girls and ladies waved to the spectators.

Schmiedtoreck at the Carmelite Church – where the Miracle occurred

But Adolf had neither eyes nor ears for any of this; he waited feverishly for Stefanie to appear. I was already giving up hope of seeing her, when Adolf gripped my arm so violently that it hurt. Seated in a handsome carriage, decorated with flowers, mother and daughter turned into the Schmiedtorstrasse. I still have the picture clearly in my mind.

The mother, in a light grey silk dress, holds a red sunshade over her head, through which the rays of the sun seem to cast, as though by magic, a rosy glow over the countenance of Stefanie, wearing a pretty silk frock. Stefanie has adorned her carriage, not with roses as most of the others, but with simple, wild blossoms – red poppies, white marguerites and blue cornflowers. Stefanie holds a bunch of the same flowers in her hand. The carriage approaches – Adolf is floating on air. Never before has he seen Stefanie so enchanting. Now the carriage is quite close to us. A bright glance falls on Adolf. Stefanie sends him a beaming smile and, picking a flower from her posy, throws it to him.

Schmiedtoreck as painted by Hitler, around 1911 – 13

Never again did I see Adolf as happy as he was at that moment. When the carriage had passed he dragged me aside and with emotion he gazed at the flower, this visible pledge of her love. I can still hear his voice, trembling with excitement, ‘She loves me! You have seen! She loves me!'”

What did Stephanie think of the whole affair? “Franz Jetzinger was able to track down the flower festival committee, found Stefanie in their files, and contacted her. The Love Goddess had eventually married one of the officers, and showed considerable surprise at being interviewed about a boy she barely remembered, and professed not to have any idea of the young man’s infatuation. But after some time she remembered a small but instructive detail: in this summer she had received a letter from an admirer, who had not only declared his undying love but also informed her that he was going to study at the Academy of Arts in Vienna. After his graduation he would return to Linz and ask for her hand. Unfortunately, the letter was not signed, and so she had remained ignorant of the suitor’s identity.”

As it was perhaps to be expected, some “psychohistorians” found ground for speculation based on her birth name, Isak, whom they purported to be Jewish and fabulated on theories that the doomed love affair was instrumental in creating Hitler’s anti-Semitism. Unfortunately, Stefanie was not Jewish (there was no Jewish population worth mentioning in Linz and her father, who was a higher government official, could not have gained the post if he were Jewish) and Hitler at that time expressed no anti-Semitism – hence the bottom fell out of such speculation for good.

We know that Stefanie remained in his thoughts at least until the summer of 1906 when Adolf visited Vienna for the first time and mentioned her – under the codename “Benkieser” – in a postcard to his friend August Kubizek.

When Hitler finally returned to Linz about four weeks later, he was melancholy and depressive, and at times wandered around town alone. He seemed conflicted about the direction his life was to take, and for a few weeks, Gustl was unable to help his friend. Even the renewed sight of Stefanie failed to introduce a rapid healing, for Adolf at length seemed to accept a quantum of reality. He told Gustl that “If I introduce myself to Stefanie and her mother, I will have to tell her at once what I am, what I have and what I want. My statement would bring our relations abruptly to an end.”

The year 1907 was taken up – family wise – by Klara’s suffering from breast cancer. She died December 21, and after all the subsequent affairs were set, Adolf left to live in Vienna in February 1908. His relations to Stefanie thereafter are lost in the mists of time.

Why Revolutions devour their own children …

In Bourgeoisie

Lenin during a pre-revolutionary speech at Sverdlov Square in Moscow – Leon Trotsky (in uniform), the hero of the subsequent revolution was later declared a non-person, and until 1991 deleted from all versions of this photo …

“The revolutionaries of today are the conservatives of tomorrow.” © Gerald Dunkl (* 1959), Austrian psychologist and aphorist

Article on famous and recent "Unpersons" — Article on famous and recent “Unpersons”

“With all his fibres, person M. participated in the revolution. Only when he felt the new shackles, he breathed with relief. “© Martin Gerhard Reisenberg (born 1949), librarian and author

La Liberté guidant le peuple - Painting by Eugene Delacroix — La Liberté guidant le peuple – Painting by Eugene Delacroix – The icon of modern revolution – the French Revolution of 1789 – ended in the Napoleonic Wars

Politics is a field of carefully groomed yet nastily imprecise definitions – none the least because it is the habit of its practitioners to steer clear of commitments, pronouncements or determinations which may face the need of reinterpretation tomorrow or the very next minute. On the cheap term “freedom” alone, long books have been written. Here we want to address a different terminology.

“Conservative” or “Conservatism” is one of the most popular catch phrases in the political vernacular – yet we might have a closer look at its etymology, inherent relativism and, indeed, rotative meaning as opposed to the more superficial use in common parlance.

It derives, naturally, from Latin “conservare”. “Servare” is the root word for “servus”, the servant, and basically means “to use” in the transitive way – something to be used, as in the English word “serviceable”. The prefix “con” has the basic meaning of “together” (“together with”, more precisely) and we could essentially translate it as “something that serves (well) with”, an idea which quickly developed into the notion of something that serves well hence it should be retained.

This is the more superficial way it is used generally as to denote – in the political domain – an existing structure which should be retained because of its merits.

This is the classic argument of the possessor – not the aspirer – and here we see that there is indeed a basically rotative connotation.

For the revolutionary of every kind – as soon as he, she or they have accomplished the goal, must turn to the preservation of the new achievement and immediately become a “conservative” him-, her- or theirselves.

Thus revolutionaries in due time always become conservatives – we may remember that the industrial conservatism of our time once was a revolution against the feudal system – liege-lords and manors.

Therein lies the reason for the old adage that all revolutions devour their own children – see Trotsky, Danton, Robespierre and all the others.

Thereafter, a new – post revolutionary – status quo is established, against which opposition arises. This is why each and every revolutionary movement necessarily creates its own counter-revolutionary movement – as inescapable as the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

On the resulting – logically consequent – reverse instrumentalization of terror by the new “conservatives”, F. Fürstenberg wrote in 2007 in the New York Times [“Bush’s Dangerous Liaisons” (PDF here)], in connection with the French Revolution – upon the etymology of the word “terrorist”as well:

“… The word was an invention of the French Revolution, and it referred not to those who hate freedom, nor to non-state actors, nor, of course, to ‘Islamofascism’. A ‘terroriste’ was, in its original meaning, a Jacobin leader who ruled France during La Terreur.”

The French Revolution remains the classic example of a revolution that discarded their own founders and agents. Its reign of terror began, after a transitional phase, with the execution of the nobility and the king. Then the circle expanded upon thousands of suspects suspected of hostility to the revolution. The years of the monarchy finally ended with the execution of the king and the proclamation of the secular French Republic.

Executive power was transferred to a Public Security Committee, of whom Maximilian Robespierre, the leader of the Jacobins, was appointed headman. Within a period of not more than seven weeks, the commendable body managed to send some 1300 people to the guillotine. It must be admitted, however, that , in poetic justice, Robespierre and his enemy Danton lost their heads there as well.

The Crushing of the German Revolution 1849

Execution, of course, was the effective means of denying the physical existence of the adversary, but the nemesis of his or her remembrance remains. The ancient Romans already knew “Abolitio nominis” – the “abolition of the name” – today usually called “Damnatio memoriae” – the demonstrative eradication of a person’s memory.

Interestingly enough, we know the names of practically all persons who succumbed to “damnatio memoriae” – indicating the unfitness of the procedure. The same thing happened to the USSR and its imitators … but the basic problem remains – the radical change of interests of the revolutionary to maintain the new status quo … by terror …

“Revolution: in politics, this is a sudden change in the form of misrule.” Ambrose Gwinnett Bierce (1842 – 1914), called Bitter Pierce, American journalist and satirist; Source: Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary (The Cynic’s Word Book), 1906 (1909 as Devil’s Dictionary in Collected Works, Vol. 7)

The Map that started WW II

On December 20, 2018

In Disaster

Narkomindel (Russian Foreign Office) Map, published in the Soviet newspaper Izvestia on September 18, 1939

The map pictured below was signed by Joseph Stalin and German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop on August 23, 1939, when the USSR and Nazi Germany agreed to attack, conquer and divide Poland between themselves. It shows the planned border between Russian and German zones of occupation. It is derived from the Secret Protocol of the Hitler-Stalin Pact, often called Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, in which the USSR and Nazi-Germany agreed to split Eastern Europe.

Ribbentrop-Molotov Map of 1939 — Original

According to the protocol, Romania, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia and Finland were divided into German and Soviet “spheres of influence“. In the north, Finland, Estonia and Latvia were assigned to the Soviet sphere. Poland was to be partitioned in the event of its “political rearrangement”: the areas east of the Pisa, Narev, Vistula and San rivers would go to the Soviet Union, while Germany would occupy the west. Lithuania, adjacent to East Prussia, would be in the German sphere of influence, although a second secret protocol agreed to in September 1939 reassigned the majority of Lithuania to the USSR. According to the protocol, Lithuania would be granted its historical capital Vilnius, which was under Polish control during the inter-war period. Another clause of the treaty stipulated that Germany would not interfere with the Soviet Union’s actions towards Bessarabia, then part of Romania; as a result, not only Bessarabia, but Northern Bukovina and Hertza regions too, were occupied by the Soviets, and integrated into the Soviet Union.
Wikipedia

Last Page of the Secret Protocol (Russian Version)

The attack started at 4:45 am on September 1, 1939, on the German front – the Russians followed two weeks later, for logistical difficulties.

Official German Proclamation, September 25, 1939

Official Meeting of Russians and Germans at Lublin, Poland, September 22, 1939

While the pact came as a rude shock to the world, it is widely unknown that it had been secretly prepared for many months by the Auswärtiges Amt, the German Foreign Office. While they wanted – after the war – to present the legend they had been only doing their job and were certainly not Nazis, their efforts are well documented and I have located them at the Avalon Project at Yale Law School and University. They will be the subject of a subsequent post.

Here an excerpt from the Avalon files, Ribbentrop’s telegram to the German Ambassador Schulenburg in Moscow from August 14, 1939, informing Stalin of his desire for a meeting.

Adolf Hitler’s Boyhood Friend

In Adolf Hitler

Deine Zauber binden wieder
was die Mode streng geteilt,
alle Menschen werden Brüder
wo dein sanfter Flügel weilt.

Joy, your miracles unite
what customs irately divide,
to love one’s brother never fails,
where your gentle sway prevails.

Friedrich Schiller “Ode an die Freude” [Ode to Joy], Str. 2

Not only does Schiller’s poem combine the universal themes of joy and friendship in perfect harmony, immortalized in the fourth movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, it also demonstrates practical insight. Man is a social animal: not by accident is the harshest penalty barbarism can inflict upon a detainee the state of solitary confinement; proscribing social interaction, negating human dignity.
A proper friend often appears as if he were the complementary piece of a puzzle that has belatedly been found, the missing segment of a duality sought unconsciously by the soul; a remedy for feeling incomplete. On any road, Bob Hope was not complete without Bing Crosby, nor was Stan Laurel without Oliver Hardy, and where Walter Matthau showed up, Jack Lemmon could not be too far. It seems that female friendship may occur in triplicate, as with the Graces, or in groups, as with the Muses or the Pleiades. The joy of companionship was acknowledged even by the Gods: on Mons Olympus, Zeus paid homage to the human and, perhaps, also divine need of companionship by giving Castor and Polydeukes, the Dioscuri, an eternal place in the night sky and in human memory as the constellation Gemini, the Twins.

For a few years in the first decade of the twentieth century, Adolf Hitler was not complete without August Kubizek.

One late autumn night in 1904, around All Saints’ Day, Adolf visited the Linz Opera House, as it was his wont if he could get one of the few but cheap tickets to the Standing Area. He came early so as the get a spot on one of two wooden columns, where one could prop one’s back up and still have a full view of the stage. On this evening, he observed another young opera buff that had availed himself the use of the second pillar. (1) He may have seen the young man before, perhaps they had exchanged a word or two during an intermission, or on the staircase; at any rate, on this evening they began a conversation. In these years, Adolf’s attempts at extra familiar communication were often awkward or ambiguous: his way was either gloomy sullenness or exultant monologues: silence or tirades. Something about the other boy must have induced his trust. August Kubizek was the son of an upholsterer and worked as apprentice in his father’s shop, an occupation he truly despised, and complained that:

“It is a repulsive job to re-upholster old furniture by unravelling and remaking the stuffing. The work goes on in clouds of dust in which the poor apprentice is smothered. What rubbishy old mattresses were brought to our workshop! All the illnesses that had been overcome – and some of them not overcome – left their mark on these old beds. No wonder that upholsterers do not live long.” (2)

The surviving photographs show a sensitive young man with an artist’s forehead, huge eyes, and a somewhat unreal air of innocence, or perhaps unworldliness. Gustl’s [the southern-German diminutive of his name August] interests centred on music: he had begun to play the violin with nine and a few years later entered the respected local school of music where he was taught by Professor Dessauer. In the course of the lessons he added the viola, trombone and trumpet to his repertoire, and aspired to become an orchestra player, preferably with the Vienna Philharmonic. He was a busy student, gifted, dreamful, and naive. Adolf was dreamful as well, but certainly not naive and questionably gifted. Soon they were inseparable and visited every opera performance they could afford or, if they were broke, took long walks together.

Adolf’s knowledge of music at that time had been solely obtained by listening to operatic scores over and over, but great music does not give up her secrets all too easily, and he could not yet analyse what he had heard. He had not received musical education for some time and was happy to have found a patient instructor in August, who summarized his task as follows:

“Hitler’s musical education was very modest. Aside from his mother, pride of place goes to Father Leonhard Gruner of the choir of the Benedictine monastery at Lambach, who trained Adolf as a chorister for two years. The boy was eight when he joined, and therefore at a highly receptive age. Those who know the culture level of these old Austrian institutions will appreciate that there was scarcely a better musical training to be had than that in a well-led choir: The boy’s primary school reports were always endorsed ‘outstanding’ for singing, but the Realschule offered no musical instruction at all. Whoever wished to pursue it had to pay for private tuition or go to music school. Because he spent more than two hours daily on the trek between Leonding and the Realschule, Adolf would have had no time for private musical tuition even if his father had been in favour of it.” (3)

Soon they established a routine. Since August was still working in his father’s shop, Adolf would collect him there around five in the afternoon, and they would be off to “saunter through the city like a pair of conspirators taking secret notes and calculating to a hairbreadth the exact degree of absurdity reached by the inhabitants.” (4) Hitler did not understand the relaxed way in which the Austrian bourgeoisie faced the future; to his earnest, if slightly hypocritical, mind, idle entertainment was a sin. Kubizek remarked that “when we passed by the Café Baumgartner he would get wildly worked up about the young men who were exhibiting themselves at marble-topped tables behind the big window panes and wasting their time in idle gossip, without apparently realizing how much this indignation was contradicted by his own way of life.” (5) For when Kubizek was still busy in his father’s shop, and the more so on his own in later years in Munich and Vienna, Hitler was the first to enter the coffee house to read the international newspapers; that is, if he could afford the twenty Heller that were charged for a cup of coffee. In the beginning, the friends’ discussions invariably orbited around art and music, hence foremost around the opera. Adolf was not one to talk much about his inner self, and listening was Gustl’s forte in any way. Kubizek described their rapport as follows:

“Nevertheless, it was at first a difficult friendship because our characters were utterly different. Whilst I was a quiet, somewhat dreamy youth, very sensitive and adaptable and therefore always willing to yield, so to speak a ‘musical character’, Adolf was exceedingly violent and highly strung. Quite trivial things, such as a few thoughtless words, could produce in him outbursts of temper which I thought were quite out of proportion to the significance of the matter. But, probably, I misunderstood Adolf in this respect. Perhaps the difference between us was that he took things seriously which seemed to me quite unimportant. Yes, this was one of his typical traits; everything aroused his interest and disturbed him – to nothing he was indifferent.” (6)

Since Gustl was a gentle soul, collisions with the strong-willed Hitler were the exception; usually the orator-to-be and the one-man-audience harmonized well. They promenaded endlessly through Linz and its bucolic surroundings, visited every slightly famous place or building at least twice and climbed the towers of the churches and the hills that formed the backdrop of the town. A frequent target of excursions was the famous Baroque monastery of St. Florian, where Anton Bruckner was laid to rest, and the ruins of Kürnberg Castle, where the boys tracked the origins of the Song of the Nibelungs.

With Gustl as the straight man, Adolf fabulated non-stop about God and the world. Kubizek did not mind the monologues, for they “made me realize how much my friend needed me.” (7) He soon understood, from his friend’s less than amused reaction to a few aberrant opinions, that Adolf courted approval, not critique. This approval August duly provided, amazed by the intensity of his friend’s soliloquies.

Linz, “Landstraße” (Main Street), around 1918

“These speeches, usually delivered somewhere in the open, under trees on the Freinberg, in the Danube woods, seemed to be like a volcano erupting. It was as though something strange, other-worldly, was bursting out of him. Such rapture I had only witnessed so far in the theatre, when an actor had to express some violent emotions, and at first, confronted by such eruptions, I could only stand gaping and passive, forgetting to applaud. But soon I realized that this was not play-acting. No, this was not acting, not exaggeration, this was really felt, and I saw that he was in deadly earnest. It was not what he said that impressed me at first, but how he said it. This to me was something new and magnificent. I had never imagined that a man could produce such an effect with mere words.” (8)

When rain or heat obstructed their outside activities, they reposed to locations suited to yield motives for Adolf’s drawing and watercolours. From the painting of the favourite buildings of Linz, Adolf soon graduated to fantasies of tearing down and rebuilding them – according to the plans he had designed. One of these was a blueprint for the villa he would build for Gustl and him, where the internationally renowned conductor August Kubizek and the famous architect and painter, Adolf Hitler, could reside in status-conscious splendour. It was to be a birthday present.

“On my eighteenth birthday, 3 August 1906, my friend presented me with a sketch of a villa. … By good luck, I have preserved the sketches. They show an imposing, palazzo-like building, whose frontage is broken up by a built-in tower. The ground plan reveals a well-thought-out arrangement of rooms, which are pleasantly grouped around the music room. The spiral staircase, a delicate architectural problem, is shown in a separate drawing, and so is the entrance hall, with its heavy beamed ceiling. The entrance is outlined with a few brisk strokes in a separate sketch. Adolf and I also selected a fitting site for my birthday present; it was to stand on the Bauernberg.” (9)

The palace would be paid for by the money the friends were going to win in the town lottery. Adolf asked August for a contribution of five crowns to the ten crowns the ticket was to cost, and took him to the lottery office to witness the ceremonial selection of the important certificate. After some time scrutinizing the available tickets, Adolf chose one: “‘Here it is!’ he said, and put the ticket carefully away in the little black notebook in which he wrote his poems.” (10) Yet when Hitler calculated the amounts necessary to build Gustl’s birthday present, he suffered an attack of thrift and proposed to his friend that they should instead rent an apartment they could fit to their needs. The boys went hunting, and after careful inspection of the town they agreed on the second floor apartment of Kirchengasse # 2 in Urfahr. They snuck in clandestinely and Adolf made a grounds map. He proposed, reasonably enough, that their respective studios were to be on opposite ends of the floor, so that his drawing would not be disturbed by August’s piano or viola practice.

“Although simplicity was the keystone of our home, it was nevertheless imbued with a refined, personal taste. Adolf proposed to make our home the centre of a circle of art lovers. … A refined lady should preside over our home and run it. It had to be an elderly lady, to rule out any expectations or intentions which might interfere with our artistic vocation. … This image remained with me for a long time to come: an elderly lady, with greying hair but incredibly distinguished, standing in the brilliantly lit hall, welcoming on behalf of her two young, gifted gentlemen of seventeen and eighteen years respectively, the guests who formed their circle of select, lofty-minded friends. During the summer months we were to travel. The first and foremost destination was Bayreuth, where we were to enjoy the perfect performances of the great master’s music dramas. After Bayreuth, we were to visit famous cities, magnificent cathedrals, palaces and castles, but also industrial centres, shipyards and ports. ‘It shall be the whole of Germany,’ said Adolf.” (11)

When the publication of the lottery results in the newspaper evidenced the whole extent of the government conspiracy that denied the boys first prize, or any other, Adolf “screamed and cursed.” (12) Not only was the lottery an obvious fraud, designed to exploit the humble citizen, the state itself, this hodgepodge of Slavic minorities gnawing on the German Oak, was in cahoots with the abusers of credulity who “insulted good artists by taking their money.” (13) It took weeks until Adolf resurfaced from the depths of his frustration.

Kubizek’s account of his friendship delivers a fascinating view of the future Führer as a work in progress, even if some of the more colourful episodes have to be taken on faith. Illuminating, and sometimes involuntarily funny, are Kubizek’s descriptions of the boys’ gradually germinating awareness of the opposite gender (as we will find out in the subsequent article). Puberty reaches our protagonists, the sudden influx of strange sensations.

Much of what we know about Hitler’s life during those years comes from Kubizek. He made notes for the Nazi Party archive and in 1951 published an extended version under the name “Adolf Hitler, mein Jugendfreund” (‘The Young Hitler I Knew, Arcade Books 2011, ISBN 978-1-61145-058-3) through the Leopold Stocker Verlag. Although several errors in his notes have been pointed out, it is the only source for these years that we have.

It was perhaps characteristic of Hitler that he never mentioned his friend in the autobiographical chapters of “Mein Kampf” or in conversation until they met again on 9 April 1938 in Linz. In 1939 and 1940, Hitler invited Kubizek to the Richard Wagner Festivals in Bayreuth. In 1942, when the tide of war had turned against the Third Reich, Kubizek finally joined the NSDAP.

Kubizek was arrested by U.S. troops in the winter of 1945 and jailed until 8 April 1947 without ever being accused of, or much less indicted of, breaking any law. The publication of his book in 1953 allowed a view of young Hitler’s life the public had not been aware of.

He died on 23 October 1956, aged 68.

The Triple Alliance

In The Road to War

The Congress of Berlin had not only addressed questions of the Balkans but many other points of interest_; and one of its results had been that Bismarck and Disraeli had granted France “a free hand in Tunis,” for they much favoured to keep France busy in the Mediterranean instead of courting Russia. Licence for France, however, irked Italy, which felt a need to acquire new possessions; why exactly, nobody knew, for she was rather underdeveloped and would be expected to do her homework first, but she seemed to labour from a case of the aforementioned psychological desiderata of successful imperialism.

In 1880, France invaded Tunisia and established a protectorate over the region, but because at this time Gladstone and the liberals were in power in England, far more sceptical to French acquisitions in Africa than Disraeli and Lord Salisbury had been, Italy thought she might enlist British aid for her own designs on Tunisia. But England was loath to replace a French threat to her Mediterranean position with a potentially worse Italian one and Rome got nowhere. Having arrived there, only an understanding with Germany could help, but then Bismarck was no friend of Italy, which he accused of pursuing a “jackal policy”. Thus it took another eighteen months of horse-trading before, on May 20, 1882, Germany,Austria and Italy signed the First Treaty of the “Triple Alliance“, valid for five years.

The contract began with the assurance that the parties “have agreed to conclude a Treaty which by its essentially conservative and defensive nature pursues only the aim of forestalling the dangers that might threaten the security of Their States and the Peace of Europe.” Because it was exactly such conservative, peaceful and defensive agreements that proved unable to stop the conflagration of 1914, we shall have a look at a few of its clauses, summarized by Luigi Albertini:

The High Contracting Parties mutually promised peace and friendship, pledged themselves to enter into no alliance or engagement directed against one of their States and to exchange views on political and economic questions of a general nature that might arise, [and] promised mutual support within the limits of their own interests (Article I).
Austria and Germany undertook in the case of unprovoked attack by France to go to the help of Italy with all their forces. The same obligation was to devolve upon Italy in the case of an aggression by France on Germany without direct provocation (Article II).
If one or two of the High Contracting Parties, without direct provocation on their part, should chance to be attacked and engaged in war with two or more Great Powers not signatories of the treaty, the casus foederis would arise simultaneously for all the High Contracting Parties (Article III).
In the case that one of the three allies was forced to make war on a Great Power, not a signatory to the Treaty, which threatened its security, the two others would maintain benevolent neutrality, each reserving to itself the right, if it saw fit, to take part in such a war at the side of its ally (Article IV). (28)

The attentive reader will have identified two problems: the first in the clause that applies if one of the signatories is “… forced to make war …“ which entirely leaves open the question under which conditions this might be the case. Second, some scenarios were left out; for example, the contract would not apply if Austria would be attacked by Russia alone. The alliance was, of course, directed against France; Bismarck, whose opinion of the Italians had not much improved, saw the purpose of the Triple Alliance less in winning Italy but in preventing her from associating with France [and when exactly that happened in 1915, Bismarck’s voice thundered from the grave “I told you so!”, ¶]. By 1888, Romania had essentially joined the Triple Alliance, and the situation at this time is often regarded as Bismarck’s new, post-1871, continental equilibrium: France was isolated, and Bismarck himself would ensure that the interests of Russia and Austria on the Balkan would not collide. Great Britain’s interests would profit from a stabilization of the continent as well and Russia’s aspirations on the Straits were, for the moment, impeded by Romania.

But Italy remained a complicated customer; she had hoped to gain a seat on the highest table with her signature on the Triple Alliance but had to find out that the “Dreikaiserbund” courts, Berlin, Vienna and St. Petersburg, debated Balkan affairs, in which Rome believed to have a voice, without her. Yet despite the Dreikaiserbund, Austro-Russian tensions developed over Bulgaria, in whose affairs Austria wanted to retain an interest that Russia was not willing to grant her.

After some mending of socks, the Triple Alliance was renewed on February 20, 1887, on identical terms, except for the addition of an Austro-Italian protocol that attempted to regulate the parties’ interests in the Balkan, and a German-Italian agreement in which Italy reassured herself of German assistance in the case of a clash with France in central or western North Africa.

Bismarck saw room for further improvement of the status quo if Great Britain and Italy were to come to an understanding against France, and when Franco-British relations in regard to Egypt had taken one more dive after the French Prime Minister Freycinet publicly declared “that France could not allow Egypt to pass permanently under English rule because ‘he who is master of Egypt is in large part master of the Mediterranean,'” Lord Salisbury began to make overtures to Italy. Albertini remarks that he “had got to the point of half wishing for another Franco-German war to put a stop to French vexations.” In the spring of 1887 Italy and Great Britain signed an agreement regarding the retention of the status quo and pledging mutual support in Africa, an understanding Austria joined in late March 1887 to the chagrin of the aggressive Hungarian faction. But it seemed not to have come to Italy’s attention that her planned occupation of Tripoli, which belonged to the Ottomans, might constitute a change of this status quo, and when the Italian Foreign Minister Crispi wrote to Salisbury to inform him of the plan which would, as he said, solely anticipate a similar French plan, Salisbury made clear that British support would not extend to such adventures. He wrote back:

“The interests of Great Britain as also those of Italy do not permit that Tripolitania should have a fate similar to that of Tunisia. We must absolutely guard against such an eventuality when it threatens us. …
If Italy were to occupy Tripoli in time of peace without France having taken any aggressive measure, she would expose herself to the reproach of having revived the Near Eastern question in very disadvantageous conditions.”

On the eastern side of the Triple Alliance, Austria seemed to contemplate war with Russia over Serbia and Bulgaria. Kalnoky, the new Austrian Foreign Minister, approached Bismarck with his generals’ wish to clarify the exact conditions under which the casus foederis under the Austro-German Alliance of 1879 would arise. The problem was that the Reinsurance Treaty was secret and had to remain so and hence Bismarck had to prevaricate. The Austro-German Alliance, he replied, provided for German assistance in the case of a Russian attack on Austria, but not for an Austrian attack on Russia, as he thought to have made clear to the Austrian Ambassador in Berlin in January 1886:

“If Russia attacks Austria-Hungary, Germany will come to her assistance with all her forces, but it is not possible to let Germany play the role of auxiliary army to increase Austro-Hungarian influence on the Danube. Not a member of parliament would be found to vote even a single mark for such a purpose.”(33)

In a speech to the Reichstag on January 11, 1887, Bismarck had publicly clarified, with an eye to the Hungarian hotheads that:

“Our relations with Austria-Hungary are based on the consciousness of each one of us that the whole existence of each as a Great Power is a necessity to the other in the interests of European equilibrium; but these relations do not, as they are interpreted at times in the Hungarian Parliament, rest on the principle that one of the two nations puts itself and its whole strength and policy completely at the service of the other.
This is an utter impossibility. There exist specifically Austrian interests which we cannot undertake to defend, and there are specifically German interests which Austria cannot undertake to defend. We cannot each adopt the other’s special interests.”

Austria had become the problem in both the Triple Alliance – for perpetual Austro-Italian tensions – and the Dreikaiserbund, due to her frequent spats and spars with Russia. In the winged words of Norman Stone, “Austria-Hungary was trying to act the part of a great power with the resources of a second-rank one.” It was a sign of the respect Bismarck commanded in all European capitals that he was able to balance the diverging interests of Germany’s allies as long as he was in office.

But, as Luigi Albertini commented,

“Bismarck’s resignation in March 1890 produced a sense of dismay all over Europe. His authority and prestige, the veneration which surrounded him, the fear he inspired, were beyond compare,”and observed that “the youthful sovereign who had dropped him [Wilhelm II] had no policy of his own, and a sinister influence on German foreign relations was exercised by the tortuous Holstein who, in his hatred for Bismarck, reversed all the latter’s directives.”

All in all, the Triple Alliance never truly existed.

The Triple Entente

In The Road to War

The Reinsurance Treaty (PDF)

After 1890, Germany’s lifeline to St. Petersburg ruptured quickly. Only three months after Bismarck’s dismissal, the Russian Ambassador Shuvalov showed up in Berlin to renew the Reinsurance Treaty for another three years but encountered disinterest bordering on hostility. Still, both Tsar and the Pan-Slavs remained sceptical of Paris, the former for its republicanism, the latter because they relied on Germany to keep Austria in check on the Balkans. Yet French perseverance began to pay off. Paris offered to float numerous Russian loans at advantageous conditions, sold weapons cheaply and endeared the Tsar by arresting a few of the more obnoxious Russian anarchist émigrés that lived in France, of the sort that had assassinated the Tsar’s father Alexander II in 1881. In August 1890, the French Chief of the General Staff Boisdeffre was invited to the Russian summer manoeuvres and there was introduced to his Russian colleague Obruchev and the Minister of War. Yet again it seems that it was Italy that unblocked the mutual suspicions between Paris and St. Petersburg, when her new Prime Minister Rudini notified parliament of the 1891 renewal of the Triple Alliance “in a form which created the impression that it had been in some measure joined by England.”

This was an ominous mistake, for if it were true, Russia had no choice but to entice France, Albion’s old enemy, as a counterweight, and in this age of secret treaties one could not check whether it was a lie. Thus, Russia initiated tender diplomatic overtures to France which ended, in summer 1891, in the unheard-of invitation of the French fleet to a visit at Kronstadt, Russia’s principal naval base in the Baltic, on the doorsteps of St. Petersburg, at the occasion of which the French Ambassador Laboulaye proposed that the two nations enter an agreement to further the continental peace. A memorandum was drawn up with rather unseemly haste, and on August 27, 1891, the French government approved a letter delivered by the Russian Ambassador in Paris, which stated that the Tsar had approved the following outlines:

“1. With the aim of defining and consecrating the ENTENTE CORDIALE which unites them, and in the desire to contribute by common accord to the maintenance of peace, which forms the object of their most sincere desires, the two Governments declare that they will concert on all questions of a nature to endanger general peace.
2. In the case that this peace were actually in peril, particularly in the case that one of the two parties were menaced by aggression, the two parties undertake to concert in advance measures to be taken immediately and simultaneously if the eventuality contemplated should actually arise.”

Elementary scrutiny, however, tells us that the interests of the prospective endorsers of the agreement were far from overlapping, and the declarations of peaceful intent cannot obscure their different motivations: France hoped to enlist the sort of Russian aid without which she could not hope to overcome Germany; yet Russia’s problem was not Germany but Great Britain, which blocked her designs on the Straits and expansion toward the Caucasus and Persia. Thus, it took an additional twenty months of haggling and bickering until the Entente Cordiale was finally signed in January 1894, and the Franco- Russian pact that Bismarck had feared was reality. Even then, the foreign policy aims of the two signatories were far from identical, and it was less the incoherent political invocations than the military agreement that became important. In the first two paragraphs, the arrangement laid out the following scenarios for outright defence or mobilization in a crisis:

“1. If France is attacked by Germany, or by Italy supported by Germany, Russia will employ all forces at her disposal to attack Germany. If Russia is attacked by Germany, or by Austria supported by Germany, France will employ all the forces at her disposal to combat Germany.
2. In the case in which the forces of the Triple Alliance or of one of the Powers forming part of it were mobilized, France and Russia at the first announcement of the event and without need of preliminary agreement will immediately and simultaneously mobilize the whole of their forces and move them as near as possible to their frontiers.”

The operative memorandum that followed the protocol laid down the number of troops that were to be committed against Germany; France would dispatch 1.3 million men and Russia between 700,000 and 800,000. In addition, the general staffs of the nations were to meet at specified intervals to harmonize operational planning and prepare troop coordination, there would be no separate peace, and the Entente would last, in strict secrecy, as long as the Triple Alliance existed.

Again, the treaty was technically defensive, but, as in the Triple Alliance, some possible scenarios made little sense or tended to provoke ill-advised complications. If, for example, Austria were to mobilize against Russia in a Balkan conflict, France would also be obliged to mobilize. Since France and Austria had no common border, this move would not only make any military sense but would lead to German mobilization, which in turn might well provoke the war that the alliance was supposed to avoid. As Luigi Albertini observed, “the French endeavoured to remedy this incongruity, but ended by resigning themselves to the consideration that, in an Austro-Russian conflict, France and Germany could not stand aside.”

This was of course all too true, as 1914 would prove, and it is exactly the smart approval of the likely scenario that makes one doubt very much the honesty of the French government’s assertions that she was driven into the war of 1914 involuntary, solely because of her treaty obligations to Russia. Essentially, the Franco-Russian alliance guaranteed that revanche would occur in the near future; all that remained was to find a suitable pretext and to determine a suitable date.⁹ What was true in 1894 was even truer twenty years later: on May 29, 1914, the American President Wilson’s envoy to Europe, Colonel House, wrote his master that “whenever England consents, France and Russia will close in on Germany and Austria.”

Whether outright war or mobilization, neither side had illusions about the decisiveness of the prospective military measures, nor were they unaware that the defensive character of the treaty might change in time.

The chauvinists of both countries expected much more from the alliance than did the Governments which concluded it. Moreover, in later years, like the Austro-German alliance, it lost its strictly defensive character to adapt itself to other ends; and the generals who negotiated the military agreement perfectly understood the consequences of the mobilizations contemplated in the agreement.

Czar Nicholas II at Franco-Russian Manoeuvres 1901

General Obruchev in the course of negotiations remarked that “to his idea, the beginning of French and Russian mobilization cannot now be regarded as a peaceful act; on the contrary, it is the most decisive act of war; i.e., would be inseparable from aggression”. Boisdeffre, likewise, said to the Tsar: “Mobilization is a declaration of war. To mobilize is to oblige one’s neighbour to do the same. Mobilization causes the carrying out of strategic transport and concentration. Otherwise, to allow a million men to mobilize on one’s frontiers without at once doing the same oneself is to forfeit all possibility of following suit; is to put oneself in the position of an individual with a pistol in his pocket who allows his neighbour to point a weapon at his head without reaching for his own.” To which Alexander III replied: “That is how I too understand it”. The importance and the consequences of this judgement were to come to the fore in July 1914 when Russia was to be the first Power to order general mobilization.

Franco-Russian Manoeuvre at Chalons 1906

While the Entente Cordiale between France and Russia was based on a hard military obligation, this was not the case underlying the relations between France and Great Britain – the “Triple Alliance” was never formulated on paper – in the words of Samuel Williamson, the two government were not committed to act in concert, solely “committed to consult”, or, in the words of Sir Eyre Crowe:

“The fundamental fact, of course, is that the Entente is not an alliance. For purposes of ultimate emergencies, it may be found to have no substance at all. For the Entente is nothing more than a frame of mind, a view of general policy which is shared by the governments of two countries, but which may be, or become, so vague as to lose all content.”

A Meeting with Consequences

In Adolf Hitler