Clemens von Lengsfeld - Adolf Hitler

“Soldiers of the 8 tharmy! The many days of fierce battles on the fields between Allenstein and Neidenburg have come to an end. You have gained a devastating victory over 5 army corps and 3 cavalry divisions. More than 90,000 prisoners, countless artillery and machine guns, multiple flags and many other items, which are the spoils of war, have fallen into our hands. […] I hope to be able to let you have a few days of well-earned rest. But then we’ll move on again with fresh strength with God for our Emperor, King and Fatherland until the last Russian has left our dear, stricken province of the homeland and we have carried our victory-accustomed flags right into the enemy’s home territory. Long live His Majesty, the Emperor and King. Hurrah!” 38 is what Paul von Hindenburg had drummed into his soldiers after the battle of Tannenberg at the time.

Kaiser Wilhelm II (centre) during the discussion of the situation with Field Marshall Paul von Hindenburg (left) and First General Quartermaster Erich Ludendorff on 8 January 1917.

In the manner of Goethe’s sorcerer’s apprentice it could have been said: The spirits we called up ... we couldn’t get rid of them . They now obtained support from the ranks of conservatively minded editors and business leaders, right-wing Freikorps teams and the now spiritually rootless soldiers back from the Front, who were no longer able to settle to anything in civilian life. Nearly all layers of the German population were affected by the deep mistrust of democracy. Not a few wanted the Kaiser back because they were attached to a long outworn authoritarian idea of a leader and they missed a clear cut hierarchical order, in which everyone had his set place. Freedom and democracy could not be imposed upon this. Decades of imprinting with traditional convictions could not just simply be shrugged off like an old coat.

Someone, who was part of the influential military establishment and who made plenty of profit from it, was Waldemar Pabst. He came from an arts-loving family and as a graduate of the main Prussian officer cadet institution in Berlin, he had without further ado and without questioning, pursued a military career and fought at the bloodbath of Verdun. After the November revolution he made himself useful in fighting the Communist opposition and notably played a part as First General Staff Officer of the Guard-Cavalry- Rifles-Division, a free corps, in the defeat of the Spartacist uprising and the murder of its leaders, Karl Liebknecht und Rosa Luxemburg.

Rosa Luxemburg (1871 – 1919, murdered) during her speech at the International Socialist Congress in Stuttgart, August 1907.

It was Ernst Röhm, one of the later founding members of the NSDAP and likewise a Freikorps man, who recommended one of his acquaintances to Waldemar Pabst for support purposes in matters to do with propaganda. He spoke of him as “his best street speaker”. It was not unusual for them to recommend staff to each other: people just knew each other in certain circles. However, the person thus praised made little impression on the arrogant and cool officer, who only respected people who had a certain pedigree or belonged to a certain old boys’ network. Pabst showed the applicant the door: “The way you look and talk, people will just laugh at you.” 39 The person thus ridiculed was Adolf Hitler. And if his showman-like and acting talent did not have the desired effect this time, his hour would soon come.

The muffled furore

Historical research has still today not explained unequivocally when Hitler’s enmity towards the Jews started and what caused this. As in legal cases there does exist an overwhelming body of evidence, but the conclusive and convincing piece evidence is not there. We only know when the finished anti-Semite was there. He neither become such in his time in Vienna under the influence of Jewish life in the Austrian capital – at the start of the 20th century there were 150,000 Jews living in Vienna – nor was it the result of his war experiences, thus born of the defamatory and increasingly rampant view that the German Empire had only lost the war because the Jews had first of all poisoned the people from within and then betrayed them. What is certain is that Hitler, later the top official in the NSDAP, was still not an ideological anti-Semite and racist up to 1918. What he did do, however, was to repeat parrot-fashion, without reflecting, the prevailing barroom chatter of the right-wing press and nationalist politicians. The military, which dominated public opinion, had also underpinned this through the “knife-in-the-back myth” it had propagated. This was released into the world shortly before the imminent defeat in order to deflect the blame from those responsible. In this the talk was of an army undefeated at the front, attacked from behind by the homeland through peace initiatives, left-wing political agitation, strikes and acts of sabotage. Hitler first saw the pamphlets of German nationalist publishers in Munich, who blamed the defeat in the war on the Jews as they were said to have taken advantage of the German soldiers through their avarice, warmongering, nepotism and shirking their duty at the front. 40These pamphlets of course did not mention the series of diplomatic failures on the part of the German Kaiser, Wilhelm II, his unfortunate naval arms race with Great Britain and his jingoism backed by military leaders along the lines of “ Deutschland, Deutschland über alles” . The real inflammable material for a population worn down by wartime winters, starvation 41and impoverishment was provided by slogans about Jewish war profiteers, who were said to have earned billions through the wartime economy.

They were also said to have staged the revolution, which in reality was started by the sailors in Kiel in November 1918 and then spread to the rest of the country at lightning speed, in order to deflect attention from the actual causes.

German ideology was never free of a certain fundamentalism, which was characterised by a deep longing for a national identity and, at the same time, resisted foreign ideas and ways of life. The idealisation of rural idylls and of a purely natural life far away from destructive civilisation was a recurring theme that had already achieved significance in the German Romantic period. From its outset German nationalism had also nurtured a phobia against Jews. That economic and political facts, which threatened the old elites and their sinecures respectively, could so easily and without question have been covered up with hostile anti-Semitic explanations, strengthened their influence.

On 21 February 1919 the socialist Bavarian Prime Minister was assassinated. The bloody deed was committed by an anti-Semitic right-wing fanatic, Anton Graf von Arco auf Valley, and triggered a wave of violence from both left and right. The government legally elected after Eisner’s assassination under the Social Democrat Johannes Hoffmann could not hold on for long. It saw itself threatened by a leftist revolutionary council, which rejected collaboration with the despised Berlin “Ebert–Scheidemann–Noske–Erzberger” government and ultimately claimed power for itself. Shortly afterwards, on 7 April 1919, the “ Bavarian Soviet Republic” was declared and Hoffmann fled to Bamberg together with his cabinet. From there he now beseeched Gustav Noske, in his role as Reich Defence Minister, to send armed troops to Munich. Noske, who was later given the self-explanatory name “Bloody Noske”, was determined to put an end to this “ Carnival of Madness” 42 with all the arbitrariness at his command. This he ultimately succeeded in, and did so brutally, with the aid of militia and Reichswehr units. One month after the Munich blood bath the military were in charge there before Hoffmann returned to his office in August 1919 43. He was however only to hold it until his retirement in March 1920. The reactionary forces of the nobility were at the same time ranked against the extreme left. Now it was the turn of the counter-revolutionaries from the right-wing corner, the von Kahrs, the von Lossows and those from the von Knilling clan, who ganged up and took over control of Bavaria in March 1920. In the circle around their national conservative Prime Minister, Gustav Ritter von Kahr, they brandished big speeches: “We don’t mean: Leave Berlin! We are not separatists. For us this means: off to Berlin! For two months we have been lied to by Berlin in an unbelievable manner. But nothing else is to be expected from this Jewish government at the head of which is a mattress engineer. I said at the time: in Berlin everything has been screwed up by Ebert, and I also maintain that today.” 44 The author of these words, Baron von und zu Aufsess, for once, exceptionally, did not use the disrespectful term of saddler’s apprentice – Ebert had served an apprenticeship as a saddler – but, by vilifying Prime Minister Ebert with the term “mattress engineer”, he was trying to improve his own position. In the “Free State of Bavaria” one viewed the Berlin government of the Reich with complete contempt.