Hitler and his God

“Fortunate Wolf”

“Hitler liked to be called ‘Wolf’ in his intimate circle”, we read in Fest. “The name, he decided, was the primitive Germanic form of Adolf. It accorded, moreover, with his jungle image of the world and suggested the qualities of strength, aggressiveness and solitariness. He also used ‘Wolf’ as a pseudonym occasionally and later gave it to the sister who ran his household.” 196 And Toland writes: “Hitler was living up to his own name, for Adolf was derived from the Teutonic word meaning ‘fortunate wolf’.” 197 (Another source says that “Adolf” means Adelwolf, noble wolf.) Could it be a coincidence that the H in Hitler’s signature, with the nick in the horizontal bar, resembles the rune Wolfsangel?

Hitler used his pseudonym quite frequently. Everybody on the Obersalzberg knew him as Herr Wolf before it became clear that it was the famous politician Adolf Hitler who had purchased Haus Wachenfeld, probably with money from the Bechsteins, and who was rebuilding the house into what would become the famous villa Berghof. “Wolf” was also his usual pseudonym in Bayreuth, where to Winifred and Siegfried’s children he was “Uncle Wolf”. Some of his headquarters in the field were called Wolfsschlucht (Wolf’s Gorge), Wolfsschanze (Wolf’s Lair) and Werwolf. The town where the Volkswagen, designed by Hitler together with Ferdinand Porsche, was to be build was called Wolfsburg, and has retained the name to this day. And so on.

It was on Hitler’s birthday, 20 April, in 1922 that one of his bodyguards, Christian Weber, presented an overjoyed Hitler with a German shepherd dog. (Hitler’s best friend during the war had been a small English fox terrier, “Foxl”. “The bastard who has stolen him doesn’t know what he has done to me!” he would say one night in the Wolfsschanze.) The shepherd was christened “Wolf” after his new master and became Hitler’s “constant companion … He was faithful and devoted. The Führer took the dog always with him on his walks and also to the meetings.” 198 The dog can be seen on some photos taken when Hitler was reviewing a parade or making an open air speech. He will be the first of a series of Hitler dogs, till the last one in the Berlin bunker, Blondi, will be used to try out the poison with which Hitler and Eva Braun are supposed to have ended their life.

Another constant companion of Hitler in the early years was his dog-whip. At a certain moment he seems to have had three whips! “Hanfstängl introduced Hitler to Frau Elsa Bruckmann, the wife of the publisher Hugo Bruckmann, a pan-German sympathizer and anti-Semite … Hitler’s ingratiating manners and social naivety brought out the mother instinct in her. Whether it was the wish to afford him some protection against his enemies that persuaded her to make him a present of one of the dog-whips he invariably carried around, is not clear. Oddly, his other dog-whip – the first he possessed – had been given to him by a rival patroness, Frau Helene Bechstein, while a third heavy whip, made from hippopotamus hide, which he later carried, was given to him by Frau Büchner, the landlady of the Platterhof, the hotel where he stayed on the Obersalzberg.” (Ian Kershaw 199)

What may at first sight seem shallow details and anecdotes are indicative of an element that, as mentioned above, was inherent in Nazism, which took it as it were by mimicry from its supreme role model, the Führer: violence, terror, cruelty. (Sebastian Haffner saw the top Nazis, whisperingly called Goldfasane, “gold pheasants” because of their showy, bemedalled uniforms, strut around with their whips. “They had”, he writes, “this revolting way of playing with a whip without ever having sat on a horse”. 200 The first to follow Hitler’s example in this was the half-mad pervert Julius Streicher.

It looked like a remarkable coincidence that so many of the top Nazis, actors in the great German drama, converged at the same time on the Munich scene. “Men, whose encounter would start a new political and philosophical structure, destined to promote a civilization completely different from ours, began to converge toward Munich … All principal members of the future high governing strata of the Third Reich happened to be on the same stage.” 201 It has struck many that not even a perceptive person would have been able, at the time of the rise of the movement, to pick them out from among the average members of German society. After all, Hess was an honoured war pilot, student and friend of Professor Haushofer and winner of the prize for the first flight around the Zugspitze; Streicher was a teacher; Rosenberg was an architect; Himmler was an agricultural engineer; Hanfstängl was a former Harvard student and art dealer; Gregor Strasser was a pharmacist; Frank was a lawyer; Goebbels was a doctor in Germanic languages; Göring, last ace pilot to command the Richthofen squadron, had been awarded the highest German military decoration, Pour le mérite… Joseph Serpico wrote in his book on the first Nuremberg trial: “It would be hard to pick out most of these men as war criminals from a gathering of Rotarians or accountants.” 202

But when you saw those people together, once they had made it, at “a peaceful, petty bourgeois coffee circle of Party comrades from places here and there in the country, in the company of the Chancellor of the great German people, then the subject of their conversations was: killing, insurrection, imprisonment, murder, robbery!” 203 Both Strasser brothers had belonged to that successful gang. In fact, Gregor was around 1930 seen by many as Hitler’s rival for the leadership of the NSDAP. Otto will write when in exile: “Göring is a brutal egoist who cares nothing for Germany as long as he becomes something. Goebbels is a limping devil and basically two-faced. Röhm is a pig. This is the old guard of the Führer.” 204 And Gregor said, shortly before he too would be murdered in “The Night of the Long Knives”: “From now on Germany is in the hands of an Austrian [Hitler] who is a congenial liar, a former officer [Göring] who is a pervert, and a clubfoot [Goebbels]. And I tell you the last is the worst of them all. This is Satan in human form.” 205

“The only thing they all had in common were their petty rivalries and jealousies”, writes Hanfstängl, who as an old supporter, adviser and – he presumed – friend of Hitler thought he could continue to be frank with him once he had become Chancellor, but had to flee for his life. “Too many of us realized too late that the regeneration of the national life and economy was only part of the goal. Hitler and a majority of his followers really believed their anti-clerical, anti-Semitic, anti-Bolshevist, xenophobic catch-phrases and were prepared to keep the whole country in uproar in order to put them into practical effect.” 206