Hitler and his God

RIP

Some students of Hitler’s life and of Nazism, who know about the decisive role played by Dietrich Eckart, are of the opinion that Hitler more and more distanced himself from his mentor in the course of 1923. One sign, they say, is the fact that Eckart was replaced by Alfred Rosenberg as editor of the Völkische Beobachter. This argument is not convincing because Eckart’s health problems had become very serious and because he was not the kind of steady worker to run the Beobachter, which had become a daily newspaper.

Another argument is the passage in Ernst Hanfstängl’s autobiographical book The Missing Years, where he writes that Eckart told him one night in Berchtesgaden: “You know, Hanfstängl, something has gone completely wrong with Adolf. The man is developing an incurable case of folie de grandeur. Last week he was striding up and down in the courtyard here with that damned whip of his and shouting: ‘I must enter Berlin like Christ the Temple of Jerusalem and scourge out the moneylenders’, and more nonsense of that sort. I tell you, if he lets his Messiah complex run away with him, he will ruin us all.” 222 Another symptom of a possible change in the Eckart-Hitler relation was Eckart’s reflection to Hanfstängl: “I am fed up with this toy-soldier stuff of Hitler’s. Heaven knows the Jews are behaving badly enough in Berlin and the Bolshevists are an even worse lot, but you cannot build a political party on the basis of prejudices alone. I am a writer and a poet and I am too old to go along with him any more.” 223

It is nevertheless demonstrable that Eckart went along with Adolf till the very end. When the NSDAP held its first Parteitag, on 27 and 28 January 1923 in Munich, Eckart stood in the place of honour, one pace behind Hitler, to review the parade marching through the snow. This was also the day on which the first SA standards were consecrated, all of them carrying the slogan Deutschland erwache! (Germany awake), a battle cry coined by Eckart as the last line of both stanzas of his “Storm Song”. Plewnia reproduces a facsimile of this song written during a nocturnal session by the author in the guest book of the Bratwurstglöckl on 18 January 1923; Eckart has illustrated the song with a drawing of Hitler striking a martial pose as a flag-bearer, and both have signed the masterpiece. 224 On 20 April, Hitler’s birthday, the Beobachter published a poem by Eckart with the title “Führer of Germany”, announcing that that Führer had come: “Who want to see, can see! / The Force is there, causing the night to flee!” 225

When in April 1923 Eckart had to go into hiding because there was a warrant of arrest out against him for libel against President Ebert, he withdrew incognito into the mountains above Berchtesgaden. “Eckart’s contact with the NSDAP was not interrupted during the period of his exile. Drexler, Amann, Weber, Esser and Hitler stayed with him as visitors.” 226 Eckart returned to Munich when the warrant was withdrawn and spoke two times at NSDAP meetings. During the November Putsch he met Hitler at the Bürgerbräukeller just before the march on the Feldhernhalle set off. After the putsch he tried for a while to keep the dispersed Nazi movement together, collaborating to this end with Rosenberg. But he too was arrested and wrote, in Stadelheim prison, a scathing poem on the Germans for deserting their Führer in his bid to save the fatherland: “Cowardly people! You despise anyone who faithfully cared for you! … You are born for the yoke of the slaves and think of nothing but gorging yourselves!” 227 Surely, this last instance shows that the tie between Eckart and Hitler was still there. Plewnia also quotes the words of a friend of Eckart’s, a certain Reid, who would have heard from Eckart’s mouth in the summer of 1923: “If there is a man whom Destiny has chosen to save Germany, then that man is Adolf Hitler, and no other.” And even after the November Putsch Eckart would have confided to Reid that “he continued to believe in Hitler, because he was under a Star”. 228 But the strongest confirmation of the unbroken tie between the mentor and his disciple are the numerous ways in which the Führer honoured Eckart’s memory once he had come to power, and the tears which came to his eyes whenever he remembered him. This was truly exceptional for a character like Hitler’s, who never forgot or forgave the least personal slight.

Dietrich Eckart was dismissed from Landsberg prison because of serious heart trouble. Hanfstängl writes that he collapsed during an alarm exercise. He died in Berchtesgaden on 26 December. Towards the end of his life he is supposed to have said: “Follow Hitler. He will dance, but it is I who wrote the tune. We have given him the means to communicate with Them … Do not mourn for me, for I will have influenced history more than any other German.” 229 Historical or not, hyperbolical or not, these words contain a great deal of truth.

Having been away from Germany for years, Sebottendorff seems not to have followed the events there attentively, and badly misread Hitler’s character. He published Before Hitler Came a few months after the Nazi Chancellor had taken office. The title attracted attention, in the first place of the Bavarian political police. There is little doubt that Sebottendorff wrote the book to present Hitler with the bill of formerly rendered services, and that he thought he might claim his share in the success of the movement he had aided to launch. Soon after the Munich Republic of Councils, when the Thule had been at its most active and several of its members had been executed, he recalled, the society started on its downward slide and began to disintegrate. “Heavy inner struggles began which would mean the end of the Society. It had accomplished its goal; it had to disappear in order that new things could come about which stood already on the threshold. A few weeks after Sebottendorff’s departure [he is writing in the third person], Adolf Hitler entered the rooms of the Thule, and he participated in the great propaganda days when under the leadership of Dannehl [Sebottendorff’s successor] the whole of Munich was covered with leaflets and posters.” 230

This was not the kind of memories Hitler liked to be reminded of. “Hitler felt it as a personal offence when somebody, struck by the similarity of Hitler’s thought with that of others, drew his attention to precursors or like-minded thinkers. Hitler wanted to have thought out everything by himself and without examples. He considered it a diminution of his greatness when one pointed out analogous ideas.” 231

Nor will he have liked the idea that it was Sebottendorff’s disappearance which had made his appearance possible: “Sebottendorff had to sacrifice himself”, writes Sebottendorff, “he had to go not to smother the frail plant” – of National Socialism, that is. 232 The former Master of Thule made matters worse by trying to relaunch the Society, perhaps envisioning a place of honour in the Third Reich for himself and his former adherents. “Today is fulfilled what those seven [executed members of Thule] and the Thule as a whole looked forward to … We recognize the greatness and the merit of Adolf Hitler. He has created what we longed for; we gathered the elements, he led to the goal! … It was to members of Thule that Hitler first came, and Thule members were the first who allied themselves with Hitler.” 233 Another grave mistake by Sebottendorff was that he called on the anti-Semitic ex-Jesuit Bernhard Stempfle to help resuscitate the Thule Society, for Stempfle, one of the readers and correctors of the Mein Kampf manuscript, had hurt Hitler, probably in the murky Geli Raubal affair, and would become another victim of the “Night of the Long Knives”.

The reader may remember that Sebottendorff, after his arrest by the Gestapo, was saved by former Thule-Brother Rudolf Hess. “Almost all collaborators of Hitler [in the Munich years] had to do with the Thule Society in one way or another, if they were not members themselves”, asserts Hermann Gilbhard. 234 The list of links between Hitler’s NSDAP and the Thule Society is indeed significant. The DAP was founded by Thule-Brother Harrer and “guest” of Thule Drexler; the swastika was Thule’s emblem; the Völkische Beobachter had been one of Thule’s publications before it was purchased by the NSDAP; many members of Thule’s Free Corps entered the SA (“the [Thule] Free Corps Oberland is the backbone of the present-day SA Hochland and anyway of the first SA units” 235); there was, through Eckart, a direct connection between Thule’s ideology of German nationalism and anti-Semitism and Hitler; and many Nazis once belonged to the Thule Society or its affiliated circles.

“Rudolf von Sebottendorff’s life after 1934 has remained a mystery in spite of all kinds of speculations and rumours”, writes Gilbhard. “There are several unproved versions of his destiny, especially those originating in circles of the German secret service which were active in the Orient during the Second World War.” Herbert Rittlinger, biographer of Rudolf von Sebottendorff, alleges “without producing any proof that Sebottendorff was pulled dead from the Bosporus on 9 May 1945, and concludes from this fact that the founder of the Thule committed suicide.” 236 The date mentioned was V-E Day, the day the armistice with Germany was signed.

The November Putsch marked a turning point in Hitler’s life as well as in the history of the Nazi movement. What had for the most part been Bavarian history would now become German and world history. This may therefore be the point to take leave of another of the men who made Hitler possible, in this case the one who actually discovered him: Karl Mayr. He had been promoted to major and left the Army in March 1920, when Hitler became a civilian (on 31 March) because his backer in the Army was no longer there. Reuth has it that Mayr was discharged dishonourably. 237 He does not mention the reason, but says that Mayr used to act on his own to a remarkable degree. It may be that the social-democratic authorities finally caught up with the machinations of the rightist officer.

Yet, most amazing is the fact that Mayr made a complete turnabout and became a leader in the German Socialist Party and its paramilitary corps, the Reichsbanner (not to be confused with Röhm’s Reichsflagge), where a man with his capacities and experience was welcomed; he was also an editor of their journal for some time. When Röhm got in serious trouble because of his circle of homosexuals and some scandalous letters were published by the Munich Post in 1932, it was to Mayr that he turned for help. Heiden says that Röhm proposed to detach the SA from the Hitler Party and work towards a brotherly collaboration of all uniformed workers. This is not improbable in the light of what we have learned before. Mayr’s cynical but clairvoyant comment on this proposal was: “Would you like me to tell you the name of your future murderers?” 238 He meant Hitler and his henchmen, of course. And right he was.

When Hitler came to power, Mayr, like many others, fled the country into France. But his name was on Hitler’s black list because of his betrayal of the cause – and possibly still more because of an anonymous article of his, later on published in the American review Current History under the title “I was Hitler’s Boss – By a former Officer of the Reichswehr”. It was in this article that Mayr compared the Austrian corporal in the first months after the Great War to “a worn out stray dog” who would accept a crust of bread from anyone who wanted to be his master, even from a Frenchmen or a Jew. Mayr was caught and handed over to the Germans. He died in the Buchenwald concentration camp on 9 February 1945. 239