Hitler and his God

Persisting Memories

Hitler’s mind was certainly not a tabula rasa when, after the war, Captain Mayr picked him out, aged thirty, for the course at Munich University. He had lived through many very strong experiences, stronger than those of an average person, especially in turbulent, overcrowded, decaying Vienna and in the unending hell of the trenches. His authoritarian father, whom Adolf hated but who as a customs inspector was a uniformed official (in that society a matter of importance), may have communicated to him his fanatical preference for all things German, although the customs inspector always remained faithful to his supreme superior, the Austrian Emperor. “Racial hatreds dominated politics in the Hapsburg Empire, where both Hitler and Adolf Eichmann spent their formative years. From 1882 through 1914 constant demonstrations and riots were mounted by ethnic groups fighting for power within the multinational Austrian state. Already in 1848 Catholic anti-Semitism flourished among Austro-Germans … In 1911, the last election before 1914, two-thirds of all Austro-Germans voted for anti-Semites. It is not surprising that Austro-German participation in the Holocaust was higher than that of Germans in general.” (John Weiss 138)

The pages in Mein Kampf written on Georg von Schönerer and Karl Lueger, mayor of Vienna, bear testimony to the influence both men had on Hitler. Karl Lueger (1844-1910), mayor of Vienna, impressed Hitler because of his oratory skill and his power over the masses, capacities which appealed to Hitler’s own, as yet latent, capabilities. Lueger was not only the mayor, he was also “the Lord of Vienna”, an uncrowned king powerful enough to stand up to Emperor Franz Joseph. It was not so much Lueger-the-politician and his party, the Christian-Socialists – by 1895 the most powerful anti-Semitic party in Europe – who attracted Hitler, as his towering personality, an example of what young Hitler dreamed of becoming.

More concrete was the influence of Georg von Schönerer (1842-1921), the proclaimed Führer of the Austrian Pan-Germans, who strove for unification of their country with Germany. “Schönerer held no brief for either Catholicism or the Empire. Leader of the Austrian pan-German movement, a racist pure and simple, supporter of Anschluss [the joining of Austria with Germany] and an enemy to the death of both Slavs and Jews, he would become Hitler’s ideological model.” 139 A failure Hitler would never make, though, was Schönerer’s open belligerence against the Catholic Church in anti-Semitic but predominantly Catholic Austria. Schönerer’s “Away from Rome” movement cost him the adherence of so many supporters that he fell from power.

A young vagabond like Adolf Hitler during his Vienna years could never meet with a rich and revered pan-German Führer, but “the young Hitler experienced with certainty the cult of the idol of the Pan-Germans, especially in the newspapers of their party”. 140 Schönerer’s speeches, moreover, were printed as brochures, and the terror exerted by the Pan-Germans against Jews and Czechs in the streets of Vienna was a fact of everyday life. Schönerer had become “the idol of German shopkeepers, artisans and clerks, his photo was displayed in countless shops, his paper was available for reading in nearly every pub. A brisk business was done in watch chains with images of hanged Jews … The party program was depressingly familiar: Jews must not teach or serve in the army or the civil service, and there should be quotas in law and medicine … Artisans and peasants must be protected [against the Jews] and Jews kept out of the empire; those already there were to be treated as aliens with special legal and tax burdens.” 141 “It is indeed beyond question that Hitler not only took over Schönerer’s political principles, but that he nearly copied them,” writes Hamann. 142

Another pronounced influence on Hitler’s mind, preceding the role of Schönerer and Lueger, was that of his history teacher Leopold Pötsch at the Linzer Realschule (gymnasium), which young Adolf left without finishing his studies. The beloved history teacher made an indelible impression on Hitler – headstrong and rebellious towards the other members of the teaching staff – so much so that he dedicated to his memory no less than two and a half pages of Mein Kampf. “To study history means to search for and discover the forces that are the causes of those results which appear before our eyes as historical events … Perhaps my whole future life was determined by the fact that I had a teacher of history who understood, as few others understand, how to make this viewpoint prevail in teaching and in examining. This teacher was Dr Leopold Pötsch, of the Realschule in Linz. He was the ideal personification of the qualities necessary to a teacher of history in the sense I have mentioned above. An elderly gentleman with a decisive manner but a kindly heart, he was a spellbinding speaker and was able to inspire us with his own enthusiasm.” 143

Hitler, when in power, honoured Pötsch in many ways. “You have no idea what I owe that man”, he said to his entourage after having met privately with his old teacher at Klagenfurt in 1938. 144 One of the effects of Pötsch’s influence upon Hitler, together with that of his veneration for Wagner, was his love of the German myths and legends, often held to be historical fact. “The volumes of the Sagas of the German Heroes were his favourite reading which he never lent to anyone else”, remembers Kubizek. “He identified always anew with the great men of that bygone world … It remains a fact that Adolf Hitler did not find during his lifetime another ground on which he, with something like pious devotion, could dwell than the world to which the sagas of the German heroes had opened the gate.” 145

All these influences were stored in Hitler’s memory when he was “discovered” by Captain Mayr, who soon afterwards introduced him into the DAP. But the process of Hitler’s mental development in matters of pan-Germanism, nationalism and anti-Semitism seems less articulated and rectilinear than Brigitte Hamann would have it with so much certainty. If Hitler’s mental make-up had already been configured to the degree she suggests, then it would be incomprehensible that several people he was acquainted with at the men’s hostel in the Meldemannstrasse were Jews, as Hamann herself found out. She also writes: “The decisive question when anti-Semitism became for Hitler the crucial point cannot be answered from his time in Linz and Vienna.” 146

When Hitler in the hostel and in the frontline dugouts launched into one of his rhetorical outbursts, his vehemence was not directed against the Jews; he was angered because Germany and his pan-German feelings had been offended by a scathing remark sometimes expressly made to get him going. Some officers in his regiment were Jews, one of them the captain who cited him for his Iron Cross First Class. And there is also the fact that Corporal Hitler wore the red armband under Eisner and the Republic of Councils. The influence of Schönerer and Lueger, as well as that of List and Lanz von Liebenfels, must have been revived and reformulated at the time of his instruction and his activities as a propagandist. And here all the evidence converges on the well-read, well-informed, well-connected and fanatic anti-Semite Dietrich Eckart.

Before carrying on with our story, a last and rather surprising source of influence on Hitler’s mind should be mentioned: the German author Karl May, fertile writer of some seventy adventure stories for the youth. “Adi” (Hitler’s pet name) had also liked Don Quichote, Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver’s Travels, Uncle Tom’s Cabin and The Arabian Nights, but May remained his favourite author even in adulthood. “Hitler’s cult of May weathered time unscathed. It is said that even when Chancellor of the Reich he took the time to read May’s complete works. In 1943 he had, in spite of the paper shortage, 300 000 copies of a Winnetou book printed for the soldiers, this notwithstanding the undeniable fact that May’s heroes belonged to a foreign race, for they were ‘Redskins’, [American] Indians.” 147 “He might well mention Napoleon and Old Shatterhand in one sentence”, writes Speer. 148

Karl May belonged to the Christian faction of the German völkisch movement. He gave in March 1912, shortly before his death, a talk in Vienna which Hitler, if he knew about it, will not have missed. May’s subject was Empor ins Reich der Edelmenschen, 149 which means something like “Up towards the Reign of the Noble Human Beings”. Edelmensch was an often used synonym of the Arian-Nordic-German in his purest state – one of the many forms of expectation of the “superman” around the previous turn of the century. Whatever the ideology behind his literary production, Karl May’s fantasies have kept innumerable children spellbound, not only in Germany. His suggestive writings – especially about the skills of Winnetou and Old Shatterhand in dangerous situations – may have contributed to saving Hitler’s life in the First World War when he was a dispatch runner, one of the most risky assignments in battle.