The Shadow Hitler, His “Primitive Hatred,” and the “Strange Bond”
In which the author explores his own lost safe-deposit box
Before conceding defeat in my effort to resolve definitively the riddle of Geli Raubal’s death, there was one more carton of documents I felt I had to get to the bottom of: a carton I’d come to think of as my own personal lost safe-deposit box—one I began to realize served a similar function for me as those folkloric safe-deposit boxes in Switzerland that were said to have held (or still hold) crucial lost documents that might somehow explain what was otherwise inexplicable about Hitler: the Pasewalk case notes, the Fritz Gerlich exposé, the Austrian secret-police dossier on Hitler’s ancestry. Documents that embodied the very inaccessibility of Hitler’s inwardness that they purported to explain—because we’ve lost the account number, the key to unlock their inwardness.
The carton reposing so long in a corner of my office was not strictly speaking inaccessible. Far from it, it was, rather, one whose depths I had been strangely reluctant to plumb to the very bottom, blocked, I suppose I should say, for nearly three years for reasons that were for some time obscure to me. The contents of the carton were a thousand or so pages of printouts from microfilms I’d obtained from the National Archives, microfilm copies of the raw files of what’s known as the “OSS Sourcebook” on Adolf Hitler, what I’d come to think of as the lost safe-deposit box of the Shadow Hitler realm.
The Shadow Hitler. I take the term from Thomas Powers, from his book Heisenberg’s War—an attempt to find the locus of Werner Heisenberg’s inwardness, to divine from ambiguous clues just what the brilliant German physicist’s intentions were in his role as director of Hitler’s atomic-bomb development program. (Did he deliberately stall it or dutifully, if unsuccessfully, advance it?) Powers evokes the subterranean world of rumor, myth, and speculation about Heisenberg’s intentions, the cloud of uncertainty that cloaked the truth about the position of the author of the Uncertainty Principle. A nimbus of doubt that nonetheless was, or became, a fact of history, because the Allies had to make decisions about those inaccessible intentions—decisions such as the one to send an agent to attempt to assassinate Heisenberg.
If we want to know the truth, Powers writes in a chapter entitled “What Happened?” at the close of his five-hundred-page investigation, “if we want to know what Heisenberg actually thought about the bomb at the time, we must turn to the shadow history of the war—what he and his friends said to each other in the small hours of the night, as recorded in memoirs, private letters, diaries, remembered conversations and the files of intelligence services” (emphasis added).
The shadow history of the war: Powers’s definition of the nimbus of shadow surrounding Heisenberg can be extended to a similar Cloud of Unknowing, a cloud of fact, fiction, and contradiction that surrounded the elusive figure of Adolf Hitler and the inaccessible truths about his inwardness. The Shadow Hitler was embodied in fragmentary rumors, second- and third-hand hearsay, whispered speculations and slander, questionable documents, counterfeit anecdotes, the fevered imaginings of suspect sources.
But unlike the Shadow Heisenberg Powers had to painstakingly re-create from recovered fragments, in the case of the Shadow Hitler we are fortunate (and in some ways unfortunate) to have what amounts to a historic snapshot, an X ray, or, if you prefer, a frozen fossil record of the Shadow Hitler at a certain crucial moment: a raw file that culled and sampled the visible evidence of the Shadow Hitler, both fact and apocrypha, as it existed in 1943, drawing on sources that ranged from intelligence reports and confidential diplomatic memoranda to the debriefing of a suspect Austrian “princess” in a Texas detention camp. One that includes documents exfiltrated from Germany (such as the report by Hitler’s parole officer in 1924, warning against his early release for fear of his inevitable return to rabble-rousing politics) and transcripts of cozy chats in wartime Hollywood with émigré directors who recalled tales told by Berlin actresses about nights in the Reichschancellery with Hitler. All collected and preserved in unevaluated and apparently indiscriminate order under top-secret seal until the late 1960s on spools of microfilm in the OSS section of the National Archives in the “Hitler Sourcebook” file.
The Sourcebook should not be confused with the more widely known, book-length analysis, The Mind of Adolf Hitler, the one psychoanalyst Walter Langer prepared, largely based upon the Sourcebook materials, the Shadow Hitler universe. Although both figure and ground, so to speak, have been declassified, only the Langer book has been published. Some who have written about the Langer analysis have assumed that Langer’s work is a distillation of the Sourcebook, but in fact it’s rather a distortion of it, in that Langer has reduced all ambiguity, collapsed all contradiction in order to lash the numinous Shadow Hitler to a Procrustean couch of Freudian significance. While indicating only mild awareness of the dangers of trusting his sometimes dicey sources, Langer falls headlong for the two great temptations of Hitler explainers: the alleged “undinism” perversion story and the alleged Jewish grandfather/Jewish blood legend. But Langer neither exhausts nor reflects accurately the more protean shape-shifting of the Shadow Hitler in the Sourcebook.
Physically, the Sourcebook is very raw material. When I had the microfilm spools (which I purchased from the National Archives) printed out, the result was a thousand-page-plus file of poorly typed extracts from blurry photostats of documents that vary widely in source and value. The indiscriminate and haphazard catchall quality of the Sourcebook is captured by this excerpt from the somewhat casual index, under the heading of WOMEN: Hitler
. . . relation to
. . . not attracted by
. . . abstinence
. . . immune to human weakness
. . . no proof Hitler ever slept with one
. . . accused of excessive intercourse.
That last index couplet—“no proof Hitler ever slept with one” followed by “accused of excessive intercourse”—fairly well sums up the state of unresolvedness characteristic of the Shadow Hitler, an unresolvedness that persists today.
There are many reports, rumors, and speculations about Geli Raubal in the Sourcebook, of course. So familiar did she become to the OSS analysts compiling the index for the Sourcebook that they rather casually list her alphabetically under G for “Geli” rather than by last name as Hitler’s other rumored paramours are.
The microfilm printouts were fascinating to read though difficult to trust, and at a certain point—about 650 pages into the thousand or so total—I found I had to stop. Cumulatively, the experience of reading the Sourcebook was to pile Pelion on Ossa, rumor upon speculation upon hearsay, leaving one, if anything, less certain about any assertion about Hitler, because for any assertion (“no proof Hitler ever slept with one”) there was likely to be an equal and opposite contradictory speculation (“excessive intercourse”). One can still find in much of the current Hitler literature second-, third-, and fourth-generation traces of anecdotal adumbrations that had their origins in the Shadow Hitler, a kind of evidentiary game of Telephone played with historical reality.
But there was another reason, I believe, I’d been putting off getting to the bottom of the box. A variation on the lost-safe-deposit-box syndrome that has haunted the search for Hitler: the temptation to believe that Hitler could be explained if only we could get our hands on some lost or locked-away cache of documents, the location of or key to which is forever beyond our reach. It’s a vision that, while despairing on the surface, represents, I’d come to believe, in folkloric form, a kind of epistemological optimism: Hitler at least might have been explicable at one time if we had that lost document, that missing piece of the puzzle now just beyond our reach.
My reluctance to reach to the bottom of that carton of OSS microfilm printouts could be attributed to the same dynamic: By refraining from reaching the bottom, some primitive prerational part of me could preserve the illusion that there might still be some previously overlooked clue, some fragmentary piece of testimony in there whose potential significance had gone unnoticed by others, some observation, conversation, some intimation that might make sense of the Geli Raubal riddle—the answer to the questions that surround the circumstances of Geli Raubal’s death—or to the larger questions that surround the nature of Adolf Hitler’s life. On some level, I think I knew that by actually plunging into the unread material, that illusion would probably be dispelled, and I might be compelled to confront an even more chilling inexplicability.
But, finally, I knew I’d have to complete that task. And so, I retrieved those 350 pages and began dutifully searching through them.
There was, in fact, some Geli Raubal material I hadn’t seen before. For one thing, there was another nominee for the role of spectral seducer, the shadowy fiancé boyfriend or putative impregnator of Geli, a figure said to be the source of Hitler’s final fatal jealous quarrel with her. In most other accounts, the man who purportedly cuckolded Hitler tends to be an unnamed “drawing master from Linz,” a “Jewish music teacher from Vienna,” a Viennese voice coach, or a “Jewish art student.” Here, however, for the first time I’m aware of in the literature we are given a name: Emil Baumann, described as “a Munich student who’d become Geli’s fiancé until Hitler heard about it and broke up the relationship.” And broke up her plans to run away with him—at least according to the fairly suspect-sounding tabloid-tinged 1940 book by one Felix Gross entitled Hitler’s Guns, Girls and Gangsters, which the OSS analyst duly (and heavily) excerpts. Gross, of course, cites the usual suspect sources like Otto Strasser, and further appends the chilling (if true) detail that the “mutilated body” of the hapless Baumann was found dumped in the street, dead, just days after Hitler’s 1933 accession to the chancellorship.
Another fairly useless rumor, it appeared. If you believed everything in the OSS Sourcebook, Geli Raubal’s time was so ceaselessly engaged in getting engaged, in planning elopements with multiple partners in Vienna and Munich, she could not have had a moment to spare to participate in the fairly time-consuming perversion she was also supposed to be engaged in after-hours with Adolf Hitler.
But there was, of course, far more in the Sourcebook than Geli Raubal rumors. Much seemed unreliable on its face, but there were certain items that had acquired a kind of semilegendary stature in the life of Shadow Hitler intrigues. And so it was fascinating to see that some were quite real. There was, for instance, a copy of the extremely curious article that appeared in Hearst’s New York American on November 30, 1930, entitled simply “Adolf Hitler” and bylined “Alois Hitler.” It’s the manifest visible product of the Hitler family film noir, the product of the collaboration of Adolf Hitler and his half-brother Alois, who manufactured a distancing, counterfeit cover story about their relationship for the Hearst press.
It’s an article the black-sheep nephew William Patrick Hitler had initially tried to peddle to Hearst before Hitler summoned him to Munich and demanded that he deny any blood relationship with his Uncle Adolf, demanded he even tell Hearst that he (the nephew) had mistakenly fingered the “wrong Hitler” for his relative.
Once William Patrick was bought off—at least for a while—Alois Jr., the half brother of Adolf and father of William Patrick, was rushed into the breach to give Hearst something. What I hadn’t realized until I dug the clipping out of my carton was that Alois had further collaborated with Adolf in subtly but deftly downplaying their blood relationship.
Buried in the apparently innocuous prose of Alois’s loving evocation of Adolf’s rise from poverty in Vienna to popularity in German politics is the false assertion Alois makes that he is “the son of a cousin of Adolf’s father,” when in fact he is the son of Adolf’s father himself (by an earlier wife). Seeing the petty counterfeit in print was fascinating, the slippery small-time-crook aspect of Hitler at its most deviously detail oriented.
What struck me more forcefully, however, were two longer documents deeper down in the carton: the OSS analyst’s memorandum of a debriefing session with a suspect adventuress who called herself Princess Stephanie von Hohenlohe, and extracts from the memoirs of an American correspondent in Berlin for United Press, one Frederick Oechsner. The anecdotes therein ranged from the trivial (Hitler’s alleged nose job) to the potentially profound (the “strange bond” of intimacy that may help explain the nature of Hitler’s “primitive hatred”).
Consider first certain moments in the six-page single-spaced OSS “Interview with Princess Stephanie von Hohenlohe, June 28, 1943, at Alien Detention Camp Seagoville, Texas.” Although she comes across in her own account as a figure out of a fictional spy adventure, Princess Stephanie was, in fact, a figure of very real interest to American intelligence agencies in the three years before her detention. FBI and army intelligence files reflect heavy surveillance of her activities in the United States. J. Edgar Hoover himself was convinced, not without reason and evidence, that she and her paramour, Captain Fritz Wiedemann, the German consul in San Francisco, were high-level operatives of Nazi intelligence detailed to America to make contact with influential Hitler sympathizers among the American elite who were conspiring to keep the United States out of the war in Europe.
Princess Stephanie appears to have been born a half-Jewish woman named Richter who insinuated herself first into the Austrian princely house of Hohenlohe, then into the grace and favor of British press baron Lord Rothermere. It was as his personal representative to Hitler’s court that she managed to become intimate with certain figures very close to Hitler—most particularly with a very significant figure in Hitler’s life, Captain Wiedemann. And, according to several observers within that court, with Hitler himself.
Wiedemann had been close to Hitler longer than almost anyone else in Germany—as far back as 1914, in fact, when Hitler was then a twenty-five-year-old immigrant from Austria who’d enlisted in the German army as soon as the war broke out. Wiedemann was Private Hitler’s superior in the List regiment and apparently took a liking to the somewhat strange soldier with the Austrian accent and the air of a bohemian artist. Hitler, in turn, became attached to Wiedemann, according to fellow soldiers.
In 1934, shortly after Hitler’s accession to power, he summoned Wiedemann to Berlin to serve as his personal adjutant. As such, he became part of the gossipy inner circle of Hitler aides and intimates. Wiedemann even seems to have been enlisted (with the connivance of Princess Stephanie and her British contacts) as a secret emissary from Hitler to Britain’s foreign secretary, Lord Halifax, at the height of the Czechoslovakian crisis.
But according to Princess Stephanie, Hitler took a more-than-diplomatic interest in her, becoming so enamored, in fact, that in order to have her for himself alone he abruptly exiled Wiedemann to San Francisco. (She subsequently followed Wiedemann to America, and some intelligence analysts believed the Hitler-jealousy exile story was a cover for his spy mission to America.)
But buried in the Princess’s somewhat defensive, somewhat self-promoting account to the OSS of her experience in the Hitler court are certain observations that struck me as worth rescuing from the Shadow Hitler realm. She starts out by protesting a bit too much that her inside information on Hitler was gleaned in an official capacity, not as some glorified groupie. She goes on at length, the OSS analyst noted, declaring that “as Lord Rothermere’s personal representative in his dealings with many European statesmen, a position she held for a period of seven years, she was called upon to interview Hitler several times, as well as Göring, Ribbentrop and other leading Nazis.”
The anonymous OSS interviewer notes, “This differs markedly from the Hanfstaengl account of the relationship,” according to which the Princess “was one of Hitler’s favorites—in fact so much so that Hanfstaengl had to caution him about his association with her on the grounds that . . . the Princess was half Jewish.” Hanfstaengl also appears to believe the claim that Hitler “became insanely jealous” of the Princess’s relationship to Wiedemann and sent him to San Francisco in order to get him out of the way. The OSS analyst notes that it seems “reasonable to suppose that her contact with Hitler had a social as well as an official side. How far the social went it is difficult to say.” The analyst says her information about Hitler “corroborates much of the material obtained from numerous other sources,” but a few incidents in particular deserve attention because they “throw further light on [Hitler’s character].”
Some of the stories the OSS analyst singles out are less than illuminating. I’ll mention one as an example of the curious tenor of Princess Hohenlohe’s intimacy with the Hitler inner circle, her value-neutral way of characterizing Hitler and Göring as two men who Can’t Express Their Feelings to Another Man.
Hitler at one point confesses to her, the Princess says, his profound and deep devotion to Göring, a devotion that extends to him worrying that Göring drives too fast because “It would be too dreadful to think . . .” he begins, but can’t go on, so choked is he with emotion at the idea of a Göring car crash. It turns out, she says, the two men “are probably tongue-tied when they try to say to each other what they think of each other”—afraid to share their feelings. Because when she reports the Führer’s sentiments to Göring, it causes “a veritable explosion of joy” in Göring; he’s “thrilled to the core. . . . His radiance and delight shows such words from Hitler mean more to him than even uniforms and jewels”—which means they meant a lot to the uniform- and jewel-obsessed Göring. “The Bavarian braggart and brute disappeared and a proud little boy came to the surface.”
However touched we might be by this display of shy mutual hero worship that daren’t speak its name, it is an observation of another relationship the Princess’s OSS debriefing sheds light on—a relationship in some ways more intense and sinister than Hitler’s relationship with Göring, one that precedes it in time and intensity—that struck me as far more significant:
“In spite of all this”—she says, meaning in spite of Göring and Hitler’s shy mutual hero worship, they “have never reached the intimate stage of brüderschaft where they address each other with the familiar ‘du’”—the second-person singular German pronoun for “you”; an intimate form of address reserved for only the most intimate of friends, the equivalent in English of the archaic “thou.”
“Göring was always very jealous because [Rudolf] Hess had this privilege,” the Princess goes on. “There is only one Nazi besides Hess who has been granted that privilege and that, of all people, is Julius Streicher, editor of Der Stürmer. This, too, is a most peculiar relationship about which we know very little. It is quite certain that Streicher is one of the most hated of all the Nazis by all the other Nazis and yet Hitler has steadfastly resisted all pressure to remove or demote him. A strange bond seems to hold these two together” (emphasis added).
The strange bond with Streicher: It’s referred to with the same mixture of wonder and dread that Hitler’s strange bond with Geli Raubal evoked in some observers. But here, in the strange bond of brüderschaft, might be a far more significant locus of Hitler’s nicht natürlich nature. I might perhaps have been less inclined to make too much of the report, buried as it is in the debriefing of a suspect adventuress (despite the OSS analyst’s belief that her closeness to Captain Wiedemann gave her account credibility), had I not come upon another reference to the strange bond between Hitler and Streicher in another document in the Sourcebook.
The second reference appears in a passage excerpted from a memoir by Frederick Oechsner. Oechsner arrived in Germany in 1929 as Berlin correspondent for the New York Sun. He became Berlin bureau chief of United Press in 1933 and stayed on until 1942, condemned to spend the last six months of his stay in Gestapo-supervised detention with a number of other American journalists and diplomats who’d been interned shortly after Hitler’s December 1941 declaration of war against the United States.
In any case, after a kind of hostage exchange in 1942, which permitted Oechsner and his colleagues to return to the United States (where he went to work for the OSS psychological-warfare division), he began preparing a memoir of Hitler and his cronies that he’d begun in Nazi detention. Oechsner had had several personal encounters with Hitler in the thirties, when the Führer was still courting American public opinion through correspondents for American papers; he was also tuned in to the rumor mill of the Shadow Hitler.
Oechsner’s memoir is notable for its sober, no-nonsense, unsensational tone, for his wide range of German sources, and for the unexpected details that caught his eye and ear. Among the apparently trivial ones that show up in the OSS Sourcebook is Oechsner’s report on Hitler’s alleged nose job.
He introduces the subject by remarking that
Hitler is indeed vain, perhaps this is the reason why, shortly after he became Reichschancellor he had the shape of his nose corrected by a well-known plastic surgeon. The nose had been a little bulbous at the end and fatty on the bridge, so Hitler got a Berlin medical man to recommend a colleague in Munich, and the operation was performed, the superficial flesh removed. Thereafter, he was always posed by his official photographer Professor Hoffmann to bring out the best points of his remodelled nose.
Such are the snares of the Shadow Hitler that I was almost tempted to believe the nose-job report, to believe even that Fritz Gerlich’s brilliant and caustic “Trial of Hitler’s Nose” had exacerbated Hitler’s self-consciousness enough to prompt him to have his nose done over. Oechsner is a good reporter, but unfortunately there appears to be no other corroboration in the literature for the nose-job story, and I’d suggest it’s more likely that the appearance of remodeling Oechsner perceives was a matter of mustache-contour design or redesign. As we’ve seen from Heinrich Hoffmann’s photographic outtakes over the years, that was Hitler’s way of creating the illusion of a new nose.
More to the point is a story Oechsner relays from another medical doctor, an observation about the nature of Hitler’s hatred. According to “a well-known German physician,” Oechsner tells us, Hitler’s attitude toward the Jews is “a primitive hate typical of half civilized or even uncivilized persons.” Oechsner himself then goes on to evoke the nature of Hitler’s relationship with the most inflammatory of primitive anti-Semites, Julius Streicher: “Der Führer is always greatly quickened in his anti-Jewish feelings by his contact with the notorious Julius Streicher. It is often noticeable that after he has been with Dr. Streicher for a time he is apt to come out with some new anti-Jewish measure or speech.”
What we have here is a reversal of the famous Führerkontakt effect—the often-reported experience that personal exposure to Hitler’s charismatic presence had a profound transformative effect on those so exposed. Here the Führer himself is depicted as vulnerable to what might be called Streicherkontakt. But what struck me as most significant in that paragraph was the notion of primitive hatred in itself and the linkage of primitive hatred to the Hitler-Streicher relationship.
The question of the nature and origin of Hitler’s hatred is perhaps the crucial one at the heart of the heart of the search for Hitler. And primitive hatred is a notion that the most sophisticated recent literature has shied away from. Note how the “well-known German physician” makes an effort to distance himself and presumably civilized German culture from the “half civilized” and “uncivilized persons” in whom primitive hatred is to be found. He portrays Adolf Hitler as a kind of anthropological aberration in German society. Would it were true that fully civilized people were incapable of manifesting primitive hatred: One of the things that made the Holocaust so unique and uniquely horrifying was precisely that it arose from a society widely regarded as the most civilized, in the sense of “learned” or “cultured,” and philosophically sophisticated—convinced of its own rectitude—in the world.
“Convinced of his own rectitude,” of course, was the phrase Hugh Trevor-Roper used to characterize Hitler’s hatred as “sincere,” based on rational belief. The notion of primitive hatred intrigued me as a way of embodying a missing term in the debate between Bullock and Trevor-Roper over the nature and sincerity of Hitler’s hatred.
Alan Bullock initially argued that Hitler’s hatred, his convictions about Jews, about anything, were counterfeit, or at least far less important than his ambitions: that the former served the latter, that his hatred was, if not a complete counterfeit, then a device to serve his drive for power. While Trevor-Roper contends that Hitler’s convictions, including his anti-Semitism, were not only sincerely held but the source of his ambition, the reason he wanted power. But in fact, that dichotomy doesn’t really exhaust the possible ways to construe Hitler’s hatred. Bullock came up with a more complicated vision, a dynamic in which the actor who initially counterfeits passion and conviction becomes carried away with his own act. Yet there might be another, simpler way to look at the hatred at the heart of the controversy.
When Trevor-Roper characterizes Hitler as “convinced of his own rectitude,” he is speaking of an ideologically based hatred, what one might have to call an “idealistic hatred,” however deluded the idealist, however wicked the ideals on which it is based. But there is another kind of hatred, one that is neither counterfeited for manipulating the masses nor ideologically driven and well thought-out. There is another kind of hatred that is not intellectual but visceral, personal; an irrational hatred that can assume the guise, the mantle, of an ideological antipathy but which is primitive in the sense of being prior to ideology—its source rather than its product.
A primitive hatred does not necessarily need to cloak itself in the lineament of ideals or the pose of rectitude. A primitive hatred can manifest itself as a kind of primal, unresolved, ancient enmity, immune to reason, opaque to persuasion or even pragmatism. Pure pre-rational hatred, the kind of hatred Julius Streicher was notorious for. Streicher, of course, had founded an anti-Semitic political party in Nuremberg in 1919, months before Hitler joined the fledgling Nazi Party in Munich. A schoolteacher known for his brutality to more than just his pupils, known for his savage physical as well as verbal attacks on Jews and other opponents, the thuggish Streicher nonetheless deferred to Hitler once he became Führer of the Munich-based National Socialist Party; Streicher voluntarily relinquished his own primacy to merge his party with Hitler’s and take up a subordinate position as Gauleiter (regional leader) of Franconia.
It was common for other members of Hitler’s inner circle envious of the brüderschaft, the special relationship between the two men, to disparage Streicher’s vulgar primitivism, to wonder aloud why Hitler appeared to protect and tolerate such a savage, primitive figure. To wonder aloud at Hitler’s continued devotion to Streicher’s vicious, pornographic hate sheet Der Stürmer with its compulsive focus on Jews as sexual predators upon innocent Aryan maidens. But in their efforts to distance themselves from Streicher, in trying to distance Hitler from him, they may have been ignoring or denying the possibility that the “strange bond” grew out of a deeper truth, a truth about Hitler rather than Streicher: that Streicher represented the true, unmasked face of primitive hatred that Hitler harbored.
It’s interesting to see the way Streicher figures far more forcefully in the Shadow Hitler documents of the Sourcebook than he does in more sophisticated postwar ideological analyses of Hitler’s anti-Semitism and its role in the Final Solution. Many postwar analyses emphasize Hitler’s hesitations, his distance from the Final Solution decision, the way his genocidal intentions toward Jews played a perhaps lesser role in his hierarchy of priorities than more pragmatic considerations of battlefront exigencies, say.
Even Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, who does give priority to genocidal intentions in the Nazi (and more broadly German) mind-set, postulates those intentions as the product of a relatively sophisticated ideology—“eliminationist anti-Semitism”—which, however murderous, had a sort of debased intellectual genealogy in the thought of nineteenth-century racial theorists and “scientists.” But primitive hatred, the kind manifested by Julius Streicher, the kind he perhaps shared in his strange bond with Hitler, is a different thing, not the product of thought and theory so much as unmediated emotional animus; it requires no grounding in theory and ideology but speaks, shrieks, for itself.
What’s interesting in the comment of the “German physician” who diagnosed the strange bond and in Oechsner’s observation of Streicherkontakt is the assumption that Streicher was the one who made Hitler more anti-Semitic, that Streicher was the senior partner, the more primitive hater. When, in fact, there’s no reason not to entertain the opposite view. Hitler himself seems to suggest as much in an overlooked remark he made on the real relationship between his and Streicher’s hatred of Jews. It’s a line I first came across in John Toland’s biography of Hitler, one I’d forgotten until I came upon the references to the strange bond with Streicher at the bottom of the Shadow Hitler box.
Toland frames this remark by painting the conventional portrait of Streicher as primitive: “A stocky, primitive man with bald head and gross features. . . . He had excessive appetites alike at table and in bed. . . . Like Hitler, he was rarely seen in public without a whip. . . . His speech was glutted with sadistic imagery. . . . [Der Stürmer’s] filth and virulence . . . was already a source of dismay to many of those close to Hitler.”
This, then, is the conventional portrait of the Hitler-Streicher relationship: Hitler surrounded by “moderates” reflecting his own essential moderation, certainly by comparison with the extreme primitive vulgarity of Streicher’s savage, sex-obsessed, primitive hatred which—curiously, for some inexplicable reason—Hitler would not reprove or restrain. But Toland is conscientious enough to quote a startling Hitler remark that seems to pull the rug out from under that conventional assumption, which calls into question who was the extremist and who was the moderate.
“Hitler had an unexpected answer for those who reproached Streicher for his gross exaggerations [about the hatefulness of Jews] in Der Stürmer,” Toland reports. “The truth is the opposite of what people say,” Hitler confided to one of his early party colleagues, Dietrich Eckart. In fact, to his mind, Streicher “idealized the Jew. The Jew is baser, fiercer, more diabolical than Streicher depicted him,” Hitler declared (emphasis added).
The tone of this remarkable statement is not entirely clear but it suggests something unexpected about Hitler’s hatred: that it is at once more primitive and more sophisticated than Streicher’s. It suggests that Hitler’s hatred was so primal that he could look at Streicher’s hate-filled, poison-pen, pornographic Der Stürmer vituperation—which ostensibly appalled even thuggish Nazis in Hitler’s inner circle—and call Streicher’s image of Jews unjustly “idealized,” too moderate and dainty for his taste, unwilling to go the full distance and tell the truth about how diabolical the Jews were.
So, one could say, on the face of it, Hitler is portraying his hatred as more primitive, “fiercer” (the word he uses for the Jews) than Streicher’s. But one must also acknowledge the possibility that Hitler might have been making, as well, a kind of sophisticated, knowing in-joke for those of his inner-circle cronies with ears to hear it. By speaking ironically of Streicher as “idealizing” Jews, he’s having it both ways: relegating the Jews to an even lower circle of diabolism while having a little joke on himself and Streicher for the extremity of their views. His hatred is more extreme, but he’s sophisticated enough to joke about its extremity. It’s almost like Charles Manson calling Jeffrey Dahmer “a sentimentalist,” say, with a wink and a nudge, because Dahmer claimed to have loved (“idealized”) the victims he killed and ate.
It is this combination of primitivism and knowingness that makes Hitler’s hatred so wickedly distinctive to those, like the philosopher Berel Lang and the historian Lucy Dawidowicz, who pay more than casual attention to the nature of Hitler’s hatred—something much of the current literature takes for granted or no longer finds relevant.
The “strange bond” with Streicher suggests a hatred both hot-tempered and cold-blooded, and thus all the more chilling and wicked (in the technical philosophical sense of the word wicked—as evil done knowingly rather than with a conviction of rectitude).
Why should the debate over the nature of Hitler’s hatred be of particular relevance to the search for Hitler and his place in history, and how does it relate to the Geli Raubal literature? The answer to the first question is suggested in what might be the single most significant anecdote in the Sourcebook, one buried in the final paragraph of the Princess Stephanie debriefing, one about Hitler’s role in the Kristallnacht pogrom of November 9, 1938. One that also has larger implications for how we construe Hitler’s role in the Final Solution.
The OSS debriefer—making clear his belief that Princess Stephanie’s account of the true origin of the Kristallnacht pogrom appeared to come from Captain Wiedemann, a source in a position to know, an intimate who might well have been privy to the Kristallnacht discussions—records Princess Stephanie’s assertion that “It was Hitler not Goebbels who planned and instituted the November pogrom. He looked forward to it with the greatest relish and expected it would be a howling success among the German people and attract the attention of the entire world. When he discovered that the attention was not nearly as favorable as he had expected, he gave the impression that it was Goebbels’ doing and Goebbels could do nothing but accept the responsibility to a large degree” (emphasis added).
It’s purely anecdotal but noteworthy because it goes against the grain of much postwar analysis of Kristallnacht, analyses that buy into the idea that Hitler was somehow removed from unleashing the primitive hatred of that pogrom; that Hitler was appalled at its primitivism when he learned about it; that he tried to halt the violence once it was unleashed and regretted the damage the primitive Jew-bashing did to Germany’s image; that he favored a more “rational” and “unemotional” sophisticated and systematic anti-Semitism.
This is not true of all postwar analysis of Kristallnacht and Hitler’s hatred. The Hohenlohe/Wiedemann account of Hitler’s instigator role in Kristallnacht corroborates the analysis of the episode by Lucy Dawidowicz, who in her The War Against the Jews argues that in Kristallnacht we can find a successful model of the deniability mechanism Hitler used to cloak his intentions, his similar prime instigator role in the Final Solution to come. It’s a charade of deniability that some serious historians, not just Holocaust deniers, still give credence to.
The notion of primitive hatred has a particular relevance to the literature on the Geli Raubal case as well, to the literature, memoirs, and the like dominated by what I’ve come to think of as the “No More Mr. Nice Guy” school of interpretation. This is the notion that until he was overwhelmed by bitter grief over the death of Geli Raubal, his only true love, Hitler wasn’t really Hitler. Adherents of this school, who include a conspicuous number of Hitler’s own closest aides and colleagues, portray him as, if not a sentimental humanist up to that point, then certainly a far more human, less hardened, less ruthless and cruel a fellow than the one he became after Geli Raubal’s death.
It is a line of thought that has persisted from the time Geli died until the current moment. It’s a temptation, I must admit, I’ve given into myself in the past because of the very absence of a more convincing candidate for a moment of metamorphosis, a point of punctuated evolution in Hitler’s life. It’s a view a remarkable number of Hitler’s Nazi colleagues promoted in the aftermath of Geli’s death—which is one reason I came to distrust it. It clearly serves their purposes to split off the later genocidal Hitler from a purportedly nicer early Hitler, the Hitler they first knew and bonded with, the Weimar Hitler, the Munich Hitler, the Hitler without (mass quantities of) victims.
Göring himself pushes this view: “Geli’s death had such a devastating effect on Hitler that it . . . changed his relationship to everyone else.” And Hitler’s photographer Hoffmann argued that “at this time the seed of inhumanity began to sprout in Hitler.”
Only then! Just a seed!
Hanfstaengl in particular flogs the “No More Mr. Nice Guy” concept: “With her death the way was clear for his final development into a demon”—which absolved Hanfstaengl from full implication in the crimes of the putative predemonic fellowship he shared with his Wagner-loving friend and Führer. Because up to that time Hitler was strange, quirky, yes, but not demonic.
Demonizing Hitler has been criticized by some historians not with a view to minimizing Hitler’s crimes so much as with an awareness that to demonize can mean to distance Hitler, in a falsely comforting way, from ourselves. In any case, the view that Hitler became a demon only after the death of Geli Raubal is not limited to old cronies of Hitler. It finds a contemporary champion in Hitler and Geli, a 1997 book by prolific British biographer Ronald Hayman. Hayman uses all three of these quotes from Hitler cronies—Göring, Hoffmann, and Hanfstaengl—to support his view that after Geli’s death (which Hayman attempts to prove Hitler caused with his own hands) “the change must have been substantial.”
Hayman goes much further; he tries to explicitly link Hitler’s loss of Geli with the genocide to come: “[Hitler’s] appetite for carnage grew monstrously after Geli’s death,” Hayman writes. He adopts for his purposes the Shadow Hitler realm’s belief in the excretory perversion Hitler supposedly practiced with Geli. And he adopts as well Hanfstaengl’s interpretation of the effect the loss of Geli had on Hitler: the abrupt loss of the fulfillment it had brought him removed the only inhibition he had to committing mass murder.
Hayman even seems to fault Eva Braun for failing to provide the crucial distraction or sublimation for Hitler’s “appetite for destruction”: Eva was “never his partner in the same sense as Geli,” Hayman tells us. “Eva could never release his nervous energy nor restrain his destructiveness. Certain subjects had never been discussed with Geli, but at least there had been some human interaction. Eva’s company never seemed to have much effect on him.”
Setting aside all the suppositions rendered as fact here—about the nature of Hitler’s small talk with Geli and the nature of his sexual relationship with Eva (which is the subject of a range of conflicting reports)—one could characterize the gist of Hayman’s argument as the assertion that if Eva Braun had somehow been able to make more meaningful small talk with Hitler, he might have had an outlet to “release his nervous energy” and restrain his destructiveness. Small talk might have substituted for genocide.
In addition, Hayman makes much of the notion that Geli was Hitler’s first murder: “If Hitler did shoot Geli, she was his first human victim. There is no evidence of his killing anyone during the First World War, in which his main job was to carry messages. But the boy who shot rats turned into the man who gassed Jews, and it looks as if Geli’s death was a stepping stone” in that transformation or evolution.
There are two problems with calling Geli Raubal Hitler’s “first human victim” in the sense Hayman uses the phase. First of all, by September 1931 the toll of dead who were, in a very real sense, Hitler’s victims had reached into the hundreds if not thousands. I’m speaking of the near-daily toll of political murders, fatal beatings, stabbings, and shootings inflicted upon opposition-party activists and other opponents by Hitler’s murderous SA thugs. Murders committed in his name, frequently accompanied by “Heil Hitler!” invocations, in fact. The toll is there in graphic detail in every issue of the Munich Post for that period. If those victims didn’t make Hitler a mass murderer yet, they certainly made him a serial killer by proxy by the time Geli Raubal died.
These murders were Hitler’s responsibility; the blood of those victims was on his hands long before the blood of Geli Raubal was spilled in his apartment. While some have argued that the death of Geli Raubal (whether she was murdered, killed herself, or was driven to kill herself by Hitler) made a crucial difference in Hitler’s psyche, it was those other murders, the political murders, that made a more important difference: those bodies paved his path to power, those murders would certainly have given Hitler the feeling that he could get away with murder, with many murders. That he could have people killed to benefit him but escape the consequences because there was no written order—just as he may have left no written order for the Final Solution (and thus would, in the minds of some, escape full responsibility for that as well). It seems silly to have to say so, but after reading the lugubrious remarks of Göring and Hoffmann that Hayman cites—about the way their gemütlich Hitler turned cold and inhuman after Geli’s death—perhaps it does need to be said that Hitler was not exactly a nice guy before the alleged “No More Mr. Nice Guy” moment.
The other problem with Hayman’s assertion that Geli Raubal was Hitler’s first victim is the literal sense in which Hayman intends that term: Hitler’s hands-on role in her murder. Hayman goes to great lengths to proffer a scenario in which Hitler and Geli are struggling for possession of his gun in her bedroom, a gun Hitler has drawn to shoot either himself or her, and which goes off in her chest as she’s trying to wrest it from his grasp.
Now, few would have any problem in thinking Geli Raubal was Hitler’s victim in some sense—not necessarily his first victim, not necessarily by his own hand—but certainly in the sense of having been driven to her death by his oppressive attentions, whether perverse or merely possessive in the extreme. But Hayman is intent on proving a kind of Oliver Stone scenario involving Hitler’s struggle for the gun in Geli’s bedroom and an extensive conspiracy to cover up his role, his presence when the gun went off. A conspiracy that goes so far (in Hayman’s view) that it involves concealing the body, concealing the murder for a day and a half while Hitler’s tracks are carefully covered, alibis are set up, stories are concocted by dozens of complicit conspirators to keep the secret. A conspiracy so elaborate Hayman needs to posit a missing night of murder to account for it and then a missing day to fabricate the cover-up and coin the counterfeit stories to maintain it.
Hayman follows the Shadow Hitler literature in positing, as the cause of the fatal quarrel, Geli’s relationship with a spectral (probably Jewish) seducer who posed a threat to poison her blood, father her child, expose Hitler’s perversion to the Jewish press. But where Hayman departs from the Shadow Hitler (and from everyone else in the literature) is in altering radically the chronology of Geli’s death.
I’ve come to think of Hayman’s creation of a missing day as the temporal equivalent of the lost safe-deposit box, a place, a locus of a solution that is inaccessible or unimaginable otherwise. Just to place Hayman’s missing-night gambit in the perspective of the case, let’s briefly recall the conventional chronology of Geli Raubal’s death, the one accepted by all previous commentators on the case, even those who believe Hitler murdered Geli.
On Thursday evening, the seventeenth of September 1931, Geli goes to the theater with the wife of Julius Schaub, one of Hitler’s personal adjutants. In his postwar memoir, Schaub said his wife noticed that Geli seemed upset, even tearful, that night, but “they were used to mood changes in Geli.”
On the next morning, the eighteenth, a Friday, Schaub reports in his memoir (using the third person to describe himself), “Schaub said goodbye to his wife because he had to go to Hamburg with Hitler.”
Almost all accounts have Hitler eating lunch with Geli in his apartment that Friday, with the household staff present. A lunch during which there was something of a disagreement, quarrel, or unpleasantness over Geli’s desire to make a trip to Vienna. Accounts vary as to the nature of the quarrel, but almost all accounts (including those of anti-Hitler newspapers such as the Munich Post) have Geli alive and lunching with Hitler on Friday the eighteenth. Following which Hitler took off en route to Hamburg and spent the night in Nuremberg, two hours north, at the Deutscher Hof Hotel, while Geli went to her room, never to be seen alive again. Ambiguous noises heard in her room after Hitler left have led most accounts to have her shooting herself sometime after lunch on the eighteenth, her body not being discovered until the following Saturday morning, the nineteenth.
But Hayman is determined to offer a novel solution in which Geli had been dead for nearly two days by the time her body was discovered, in which Geli had been dead all day Friday when she’d been reported lunching with Hitler, a scenario in which Geli had been murdered Thursday night, the seventeenth.
How Hitler spent the missing day, the Friday between his supposed Thursday-night crime and the Saturday-morning discovery of the body, is not clear from Hayman’s scenario. Did he go north to Nuremberg Thursday night, in which case the people at the Nuremberg hotel had to be coached to lie that he didn’t arrive till Friday night? Or did he hang around his apartment all day Friday as Geli’s body cooled and stiffened and an elaborate cover-up was concocted? And then slip out, drive north to Nuremberg so he could establish an alibi the morning the body was “discovered” (by getting a speeding ticket as he was racing back to Munich, supposedly after receiving the terrible news)?
It’s not even clear Hayman needs this missing day to give his conspiracy theory more credibility—it makes it more suspect, it seems to me. But then he proceeds to add to his account an apocryphal story from a deeply discredited source: a story about Fritz Gerlich and a late-night final quarrel between Hitler and Geli in a public place. The story is told by Bridget Hitler in her long-unpublished and much-distrusted memoir, the one that contains at least one glaring, self-promoting fabrication—that young Adolf Hitler spent a missing year of his youth with Bridget and her husband, Alois Jr. (Hitler’s half brother), in their Liverpool apartment in 1911.
Hayman uses the fabricator of a missing year to bolster his story about the murder night because Bridget Hitler purports to tell us the true story of Geli’s last night, the truth (Bridget claims) that Fritz Gerlich himself uncovered: the long-lost, never published Gerlich scoop on Geli Raubal’s death, the one Gerlich had been about to publish in his newspaper when he was dragged off by the Gestapo in 1933, the one thought lost to history or to some lost safe-deposit box.
But no, Bridget Hitler says, it might not have been lost. She doesn’t reproduce it herself, it’s not even in the Hitler documents she claims she and her son keep “in our safe deposit box at the bank.” No, she says, Gerlich’s lost scoop did get published, not in his newspaper but in a pamphlet, which she says was entitled by Gerlich J’Accuse, one in which he laid out his proof that Hitler murdered Geli. Bridget hasn’t seen it herself, she tells us, rather she just heard about it in a conversation with her son William Patrick Hitler, who claims he heard about it from Geli’s surviving brother Leo Raubal, who happened to run across Gerlich “by accident” and received from Gerlich’s own hands the purported revelatory pamphlet.
If it ever existed, no such pamphlet has surfaced. It exists only in the Shadow Hitler realm, and no other person ever reports having seen it or heard of it, but Hayman wants to adopt Bridget Hitler’s description of its contents, that “the evidence accumulated by Dr. Gerlich’s investigation pointed inevitably to just one verdict: murder.”
It is in this account of what we might call the Shadow Gerlich investigation that Hayman finds his missing night. He accepts the fabricator Bridget Hitler’s account of William Patrick Hitler’s account of the Gerlich investigation purportedly recalled by Geli’s brother Leo (and ignores the fact that Leo, who survived the war, made no such report to any of the authors who interviewed him). But the missing night is there in the shadow affidavit in the Shadow Gerlich investigation, in the purported affidavit of a crony of Hitler, a Herr Zentner, the proprietor of the Bratwurstglöckl, one of Hitler’s favorite restaurant hangouts. In the summary of Gerlich’s J’Accuse pamphlet in Bridget’s memoir, in the shadow of a shadow of a report Hayman relies on, Zentner “testified” that
Adolf had come to his restaurant with his niece and remained there until nearly one o’clock occupying a private room on the first story. . . . Adolf was slightly intoxicated as a result of drinking beer, an extremely unusual practice for him. . . . After Adolf and Geli left the restaurant, they returned to the apartment about one o’clock. Happy to find himself alone with her, Adolf renewed his advances, which Geli opposed. During the discussion, he threatened her with the service revolver he habitually wore. Certainly there was a struggle and during it a shot was fired.
So Hitler shoots Geli, Hayman argues, after a Bratwurstglöckl quarrel on Thursday night, shoots her back at his place, in her bedroom. Not only is this missing-night theory not even necessary—there’s no reason the Bratwurstglöckl quarrel couldn’t have occurred late Friday (as Zentner’s apocryphal affidavit has it) rather than Thursday night with less sneaking around and slipping in and out than a Thursday-night scenario requires. But Hayman has created the missing night from an extremely strained interpretation of the evidence—in what actually looks like a glaring mistake in dating the Thursday and Friday in question, a mistake in interpreting one single source: Julius Schaub’s unpublished memoir.
Even Hayman calls the reference he uses to create the missing night “ambiguous,” although one has to strain to find any ambiguity, if you ask me. For the record, here is all the evidence for the missing night, Schaub’s two-decade-later recollection that “On the day before the suicide (17.9.31) he [Hitler] left Munich in his car to hold a meeting at Nuremberg.” Hayman insists this “could mean either that Geli died on Thursday 17, September or that Hitler left Munich on 17, September.” But either way, it means Hitler left Munich before Geli died (which contradicts Hayman’s murder scenario).
It’s difficult to rule out the possibility that Hitler murdered Geli or had Geli murdered. He certainly lied about the nature of his relationship and the nature of his quarrel with her, dissembled about the source of her supposedly suicidal proclivity (the séance story). But absent the emergence of a smoking gun from the Shadow Hitler realm or the materialization of some truth Fritz Gerlich dug up, absences I suspect will persist, there is no positive proof. The missing night Hayman pulls like a rabbit out of his hat cannot make up for the missing evidence he does not have.
The missing night is a phantom of the Shadow Hitler realm, but I understand the evidentiary despair that may have caused Hayman to want to believe in it. I, too, had hoped to find in the Shadow Hitler realm, supplemented by contemporary investigation—even exhumation of Geli’s body—a solution to the Geli Raubal mystery that would pin her death directly—in a hands-on way or by personal order—on Adolf Hitler. It certainly seems he was capable of it, that he had the motive, means, and opportunity. And it certainly can be said that if he didn’t do it himself or didn’t order her murder, he was at least in some larger sense responsible for her death. But Hayman’s missing-night gambit is akin to the lost safe-deposit boxes of the Shadow Hitler Switzerland—an illusion born of the hope that the solution not just to Geli Raubal’s death but to Adolf Hitler’s psyche can be found in some inaccessible place.
Such a solution would make Hitler’s purported transformation from human to inhuman, the “No More Mr. Nice Guy” metamorphosis, explicable as a product of blood guilt over Geli as well as grief. It would suggest that killing Geli Raubal “blooded” him in some way he hadn’t been personally blooded before, exterminated the last bit of humanness within him. And that the specter of a Jewish seducer of Geli behind their fatal quarrel then set him on a course that made extermination of the Jews inevitable.
In a certain sense, this increasingly strained argument is as unjust to Geli Raubal as Simon Wiesenthal’s fantasy of a Jewish prostitute giving Hitler syphilis would be to that poor woman of the streets if she’d ever existed: appearing to place the whole weight of the Holocaust on her shoulders. More important, the whole line of No More Mr. Nice Guy speculation (which enjoys favor from sober and rational historians as well as conspiracy theorists) about Geli’s death as a great divide is contradicted by the evidence that Hitler’s primitive hatred burned with a hard, gemlike flame long before September 1931. Burned with sufficient virulence in Hitler to account for his subsequent exterminationist acts without any reference to Geli Raubal’s character or fate. The primitive hatred Hitler shared in his strange bond with Streicher, the primitive hatred Streicher manifested, a hatred that might have been the true face of Hitler’s own hatred, was in place in Hitler’s heart long before Geli Raubal moved into his apartment. And whatever emotion he felt upon her death paled in comparison to the primitive fury of the entrenched ruling emotion of his existence.
If there was any real shift in the nature of the hatred Hitler harbored, if his primitive hatred could be said to have evolved or changed, it might rather have been in the way Hitler came to acquire and deploy a kind of ironic knowingness about his primitive hatred. The way he would come to make artful little knowing jests about it, virtually chuckle over the magnitude of his hatred by telling his cronies, with a nudge and a wink, that he thought Streicher—and the notoriously, savagely primitive hatred Streicher so shockingly and nakedly displayed—was in fact practically temperate compared to his own hatred; that to him, to Hitler, Streicher “idealized” the Jews.
The wickedly artful ironic consciousness of his own primitive hatred is a signature of Hitler to some thinkers. Bullock’s notion of Hitler’s duality sees him as the cynic who becomes possessed by sincere conviction, by “true” hatred. Here, though, it’s the possessed, true hater who can be wickedly ironic if not cynical about the degree of his hate-filled possession, who can jest about his own murderousness.
The way Hitler jests, in the Table Talk, about the “rumor” he’s exterminating the Jews; the way he can jest to Christa Schroeder about feeling “clean as a newborn babe” after the Blood Purge; the way he speaks of the Final Solution in the imagery of laughter Lucy Dawidowicz picks up on (see chapter 20); the way he jests to Goebbels about the suffering of his victims throughout the war—this mirthful knowingness, the laughter and relish, is a sign and signature to the philosopher Berel Lang of the peculiar way Hitler and his cronies raised the consciousness of evil to a veritable art: created what Lang sees as an art of evil.