Hitler and the Nazi Cult of Celebrity E-Book

Michael Munn

• Herausgeber: The Robson Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Seitenzahl: 511

Beschreibung

Hitler believed himself to be as much an artist as a politician, and his rise to power owed a great deal to the creation of myth around his own personality. In his Germany politics and culture became one, the cult of celebrity nurtured and driven by Hitler and his acolyte Joseph Goebbels. In their version of Hollywood there were scandals, starlets, secret agents, premieres and the infamous 'casting couch'. But one of the actresses was a Soviet agent who held the key to killing the Führer. Hitler and the Nazi Cult of Celebrity probes the correlation between art and ambition, shows how films were used as weapons, and uncovers the sexual predilections of the Nazi hierarchy. It also brings to light previously unpublished information about the 'Hitler film' Goebbels saw as 'the greatest story ever told', which was in the planning even as Hitler himself was heading for his own Wagnerian finale.

Leseprobe

HITLER AND THE NAZI CULT OF CELEBRITY

MICHAEL MUNN

CONTENTS

Title Page

Introduction

Chapter 1. Celebrity, Sex and Death

Chapter 2. In That Hour

Chapter 3. Impurity of the Blood

Chapter 4. His Greatest Role

Chapter 5. God’s Gift

Chapter 6. Hitler’s Publicist

Chapter 7. The Holy Family of the Third Reich

Chapter 8. Merchandising Adolf

Chapter 9. Seven Chambers of Culture

Chapter 10. Exodus

Chapter 11. Sleeper Star

Chapter 12. The Will to Triumph

Chapter 13. Leading Ladies of the Third Reich

Chapter 14. The Singing Spy

Chapter 15. The Depths of Hell

Chapter 16. The Führer Versus the Phooey

Chapter 17. A Reflection of Hitler

Chapter 18. Killing Hitler

Chapter 19. Time is Broken

Chapter 20. The Price

Chapter 21. The Fall

Chapter 22. The Final Cut

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Plates

Copyright

INTRODUCTION

The Nazis had a cult for almost everything. Not every cult was necessarily given a name or was recognised as Nazi policy, but Joseph Goebbels acknowledged that cults were a fundamental element of Nazism. To celebrate the occasion of the end of a heroic life, they had a cult of death. To maintain mystical and symbolic rituals Hitler felt were essential to Germanic culture and history, there was the cult of the blood banner. Hitler, identifying with the Roman emperor Nero, indulged in a cult of fire. One might even suggest a cult of suicide existed although most others were unwilling to be a part of it. And to elevate Hitler to the Führer, the party embraced the cult of personality.

Hitler was a product of his own making who created his own cult of personality using the forms of media available to him at the time, which, combined with judiciously formulated propaganda, produced and promoted a carefully honed heroic and almost divine public image. By the beginning of the twentieth century the divine right of kings who held their office by the will of God was quickly giving way to other forms of government, some democratic and some dictatorial, and from the latter rose the cult of personality, which took advantage of all the technical accomplishments of the modern world such as photography, sound recording, film and mass publications. Hitler was, alongside Stalin, one of the first to dominate the political stage through technology. But Hitler went further than Stalin in communicating his image because unlike Stalin, Hitler didn’t set out to be a politician. He simply wanted to be famous. He tried his hand at being an artist, then a playwright, then a composer of opera. In the end he found he had just one talent – oratory.

It was through his love of art, music, film, theatre and, most of all, opera, and his enthralment with the idea of almost hypnotising his audience with sounds and sights that were inspired by the culture – often very lowbrow – he embraced, that he developed the techniques which resulted in the great geometrical rallies, the night-time torchlight parades, and the Nazification of the German film industry. There was even a Hitler film in the offing, and for a while he intended to play himself. He was, he once confessed, an actor, and he learned to play the part of the Führer – how to talk, to stand, to move, to perform. Everything in his public life, and often in his private life as he came to believe his own publicity, was stage-managed. Even the war. He wanted to play the role of a general, and when he tried writing his own script of World War Two, he bombed.

By design rather than as a by-product of his image-building, out of the cult of personality grew his cult of celebrity. He knew no other way to become dictator than by performing. Fame was more important to him than governing, although in his mind they became one and the same thing. Culture and art became politics. Even suicide was a macabre element to his celebrity, his legend and his sense of immortality, which were all irrevocably connected to the final act of his life-long drama; he would write his own ending.

Hitler completely absorbed himself in his cult of celebrity, and his most favoured actors, musicians, writers and other artists could be absorbed into his cult and become great celebrities themselves. All they had to do was promote Nazi ideology. Those that did were permitted to work, and some were pampered and preened into stars, and the public were virtually expected to pay to see the great stars. Artists who didn’t support Hitler’s ideas were, at best, denied work and, at worst, sent to the camps. Jews never had the luxury of either option. The ‘Jewish question’ is one of the most deplorable aspects of Hitler’s claim to fame.

The German film industry in particular was encapsulated by this cult of celebrity because it was the modern medium of the age. Under the Nazis, cinema became a weapon. Entertainment became policy, and the greatest movie celebrities were advocates for everything Hitler stood for. The extermination of an entire race, played out against the magisterial music of Richard Wagner, whose works were the inspiration for Hitler’s new world, became the backdrop for Hitler’s own reality show, in which his name was above the title and every celebrity in Germany was a guest star.

The cult of celebrity became the cornerstone of Hitler’s Nazism – and Hitler loved celebrities, as did his publicist Joseph Goebbels, who ran the German film industry. Despite all their assertions and pretensions about art and culture, these arbiters of taste used their cult for their own sexual obsessions. Starlets and beautiful actresses were as much a sexual commodity in Nazi Germany as they were in Hollywood.

In Aryan Germany, Hitler governed with theatrical tricks. In ancient Rome the emperors gave the people the spectacle of the games to make them love the Caesars, and, taking his cue from them, Hitler gave his people the spectacle of Nazi culture and became their beloved Führer. At the heart of his style of government, backed by military and paramilitary might, was his Nazi cult of celebrity. He had nothing else to offer. In the end his obsession with fame led him into grand illusions that were merely delusions, and resulted in the deaths of around sixty million people.

CHAPTER ONE

CELEBRITY, SEX AND DEATH

If Hitler had nothing better to do, and usually he didn’t, he could be found at Berlin’s Universum Film AG – better known as UFA, Germany’s largest film studio at Babelsberg, which was just outside Berlin, near Potsdam – mingling with the stars. A film director at UFA, Alfred Zeisler, recalled that Hitler visited the studio very frequently. He loved to watch scenes being filmed, and he asked about new plots and new talent, and also about the technical aspects of film-making. Zeisler said that Hitler had a very good grasp of the film-making process and asked extremely intelligent questions about some of the technical problems involved. Hitler also enjoyed coming to the studios to have lunch or dinner in the restaurant of the Film Institute, where actors and actresses gathered.1

It wasn’t as though Hitler didn’t have enough to occupy his mind in 1933, having, that year, become Germany’s Führer, but he cared nothing for politics, or for governing Germany. He had ministers to do all that. Hitler was obsessed with celebrities. And he knew that of them all, he was the greatest celebrity.

The most important thing he could do every day was satisfy his starstruck craving by being among his favourite film stars, and if it so happened that he couldn’t escape from the Reich Chancellery, he would get on the phone to the studio, as Zeisler recalled, to find out about films being made, and the actors in them, or just for general news about what was happening at the studios. Zeisler often wondered when Hitler had the time to devote himself to affairs of state because he spent so much time either at the studios, or on the telephone, or looking at films – there seemed little time left for anything else.

At the Berghof, Hitler’s mountain retreat, his young mistress Eva Braun was left to her own devices while he was away working, or so he claimed, though he did very little real work as Chancellor of Germany. Eva was a good actress and might have actually been happy if Hitler had allowed her to actually be an actress, but he forbade her that pleasure. ‘I heard she wanted to be in films. Hitler said no,’ recalled German actor Curd Jürgens. ‘He didn’t want his girlfriend to be a film star, but he wanted to have film stars to be his girlfriends.’2

Fringe benefits came with being the Führer. It was well known among the film community, where secrets were kept through fear, that he enjoyed the company of beautiful starlets. Hitler frequently called Alfred Zeisler at the UFA studio to ask for young starlets to keep him company in the Reich Chancellery. Zeisler duly sent them along, often in pairs, and was naturally very curious about what actually happened in the Reich Chancellery between Hitler and the pretty young women he sent, so one day in 1934 he asked two chorus girls he had procured for the Führer what had taken place the previous evening. They told him all that happened was that Hitler sat and bragged the whole evening, telling them how he was going to annex Austria and was going to build up the biggest army in the world and then reinforce the Rhineland. The girls said they thought Hitler ‘extremely odd’. Zeisler concluded that Hitler’s only intention was to impress the girls with his greatness and power.3

Zeisler’s claims that he provided Hitler with female stars for company are given some credence by Walter C. Langer,4 who in his famous psychological study of Hitler said Hitler often requested the studios to send over actresses whenever there was a party in the Chancellery. He seemed to get ‘an extraordinary delight’ in fascinating these girls about what he was going to do in the future, and he also reeled out ‘the same old stories’ of his past. He enjoyed impressing the girls with his power by ordering the studios to give the girls better film roles. Like a real movie mogul, he often promised them that he would personally see to it that they were given starring roles. Langer reported that men who, like him, have associations with ‘women of this type’ did not go beyond that point; i.e., to have sexual intercourse with them.5

These encounters with stars and would-be stars, at the studio or in some secret room in the Reich Chancellery, would seem to indicate that Hitler veered erratically from being a starstruck fan to some kind of impotent despot who wanted to impress and scare little girls; he was certainly known to form attachments to much younger women than himself who were vulnerable and whom he could dominate.

It all came down to power. Just having lunch with the stars was more than him being a fan having fun – which was certainly part of it – but it was a demonstration of his power; Germany’s biggest stars – and this also applied to musicians, writers and other artistes – for whom millions would kiss the ground they walked on all demonstrated their devotion to him, either through sincere admiration or out of fear, and their endorsement of him helped enormously to win the endorsement of the country long before John F. Kennedy was being elevated to the White House in 1961 by Frank Sinatra and his Rat Packers and other celebrities. Since then the world of politics has become a platform for celebrities, and the politicians themselves have become celebrities. In 1933, Hitler was doing all that. He had only to command celebrities to attend massive public events where he was the star attraction, or to functions where he could impress or bore them with one of his famous monologues about his latest plans, and they duly complied. That was a price they paid for the privilege of enjoying all the perks of Hitler’s cult of celebrity.

The power he had over the young starlets is apparent. And probably not as harmless as it might have seemed to the two chorus girls who only had to endure Hitler’s boastings. One famous actress endured much more, and paid the ultimate price.

In 1937 Germany was shocked by the news that actress and singer Renate Müller had died at the age of just thirty-one. Her body was found on the pavement outside a hotel on 7 October. She had fallen from the third-storey window of a hotel, and died instantly. The blue-eyed beauty had starred in more than twenty German films, including Viktor und Viktoria in 1933, which was one of her biggest successes – and was remade in 1982 as Victor Victoria with Julie Andrews. Renate Müller was regarded by the National Socialists as an ideal Aryan woman and, in light of Marlene Dietrich’s defection to Hollywood, was courted and promoted as one of Germany’s leading film actresses.

She was already a star when Hitler came to power, and was pressured by Joseph Goebbels, who, as President of the Reichskulturkammer, which presided over the German film industry, to appear in some of his personally commissioned pro-Nazi anti-Semitic films. She resisted, so he put her under surveillance by the Gestapo, who established she had a Jewish lover. She finally gave in to Goebbel’s demands, and in 1937 she starred in the blatantly anti-Semitic Togger.

Her death was officially classified a suicide. The exact details of her death and the minutes leading up to it have become a matter of much conjecture. Several Gestapo officers were seen entering the hotel shortly before she died, and it was suggested either that she was murdered by Gestapo officers who threw her from a window, or that she panicked when she saw them arrive and jumped. Goebbels wanted the public to believe she had been emotionally unstable and had a drug addiction.

Theories for her possible murder include her lack of cooperation with Goebbels, her love affair with a Jew, and the regime’s fear that she was going to turn traitor and leave Germany as Dietrich had done. What is certain is that there was a cover-up about her death. The absolute truth will never be known, and her death remains as much of a mystery in the annals of the German film world as Marilyn Monroe’s has in Hollywood. Renate’s sister Gabriele always maintained that her death was due to post-operative complications on her knee, but that never explained how her body came to be on the pavement.

Almost the moment Renate Müller’s body was discovered, Goebbels realised he had a public relations disaster on his hands. The first story that went out over the radio was that the cause of her death was epilepsy and that she had fallen from a window of a hospital. At some point, this hospital became a hospital for the mentally sick, suggesting Müller was mentally ill, or had had a breakdown. Goebbels spread rumours that she had become addicted to morphine, and was an alcoholic. The true story, of the fall from the hotel window, was only revealed later.

Goebbels saw to it that her funeral at the Parkfriedhof Lichterfelde on 15 October was held in private, and her adoring public was barred. Her possessions were confiscated and sold even though her parents and her sister were alive. Some years later, according to unconfirmed reports, they were all buried in the same grave as Renate, suggesting the family were all silenced.

Without resorting to possible murder, terrorisation and extortion, Goebbels acted much in the same way as Hollywood mogul Adolph Zukor once did when one of his top directors at Famous Players, William Desmond Taylor, was found murdered in 1922. Zukor ordered a cover-up so that the police were unable to ever charge anyone because Zukor knew that the identity of the killer – which became an open secret in Hollywood – would reveal facts about Taylor’s life which he wanted to keep from the public because of the shocking scandal it would cause. It seems likely that, for similar reasons, Joseph Goebbels, playing the part of the amateur movie mogul, did the same when Renate Müller died; she might have known some of Hitler’s most deviant secrets.

The full truth about her last years and death has never been fully uncovered, and there has been much unconfirmed information and clearly designed misinformation, as was the case with Monroe. Müller might have had a breakdown in 1933 due to the stress of trying to keep her weight down, and illness might have interrupted filming in 1934 – it was said to be epilepsy – but despite reports that her career was sporadic from then on due to whatever illness she might have had, she actually starred in four films during 1935 and 1936, and her last film in 1937, Togger, commissioned by Joseph Goebbels.

Albert Zeisler knew of Müller’s secret. On one occasion when Hitler called and asked Zeisler for the company of a pretty actress, possibly in 1935, or before, he sent Renate Müller. Quite why Zeisler chose her isn’t clear but it is very likely that Hitler asked for her. Whether she went under duress or from sheer admiration for Hitler isn’t obvious; according to Zeisler, she was prepared to have sexual relations with Hitler.

At the Reich Chancellery, Hitler took great delight in telling her that he had made a thorough study of medieval torture methods and was modernising them with the intention of introducing them to Germany. He described these methods to her – methods which were later adopted by the Gestapo – in such explicit detail that she was horrified to the point where she felt her ‘flesh creep’.6

Renate did her best to seduce him without success; she told Zeisler that he seemed uninterested in sex. However, on another occasion, he seemed to become excited and she thought they would finally make love, but instead he jumped to his feet, raised his arm in the Nazi salute and bragged that he could hold his arm that way for an hour and a half without tiring, unlike Göring, who, Hitler said, could not hold out his arm even for twenty minutes.

She arrived one morning at the studio in a very depressed state and when Zeisler asked her what was troubling her she told him she had been with Hitler at the Reich Chancellery that night and she had been sure they were going to have sexual intercourse. They had got as far as undressing, but then Hitler fell to the floor and begged her to kick him. She resisted but he pleaded with her and condemned himself as unworthy and grovelled on the floor in an agonising manner. As disgusted as she was, she gave in and kicked him, which excited him. He begged for more and, masturbating, said it was better than he deserved and that he was not worthy to be in the same room as she. When he was satisfied, he suggested they got dressed, and he thanked her warmly for a pleasant evening.7

This tale has been often regarded as pure fiction by some historians because Zeisler hated Hitler for making him leave Germany after he refused to make films that would promote Nazi ideology. While it certainly appears to be almost too sensational, presenting a clichéd image of a mad dictator who can only enjoy perverse sex, Hitler did struggle with a compulsion to completely degrade himself whenever he felt some kind of affection for a woman. Nazis Ernst Hanfstaengel, Otto Strasser and Herman Rauschning all reported that whenever Hitler was smitten with a girl, even in company, he tended to ‘grovel at her feet in a most disgusting way’.8

Like almost all the girls Hitler was attracted to, Renate Müller was blonde. Zeisler recalled ‘another tall blonde called Loeffler’ who became involved with Hitler, but after a while she ran off with a Jewish man and lived in Paris, which upset Hitler so much that for some time he did not even bother calling the studio to ask for girls.9

For years, Hitler’s sexuality has been a matter of debate and disagreement. Suggestions that Hitler was homosexual appear to be unfounded but may well have been based on what was observed as his feminine characteristics – his gait, his mannerisms and even his choice of art as a profession were once interpreted as feminine manifestations. With the possible exception of Heinrich Hoffmann, the Nazi Party’s official photographer, and Hitler’s personal adjutant, no one knew the nature of his sexual activities, causing much conjecture in party circles, with some believing that he was sexually ‘normal’ while others suggested that he was immune to sexual temptation. Others thought he was homosexual because many of the party’s inner circle in the early days were known homosexuals. Rudolf Hess was known as ‘Fraulein Anna’. For a long time Hitler ignored the fact that many in the SA leadership were homosexuals, including Ernst Röhm. Röhm was well aware that Hitler was attracted to the female form, and one time remarked in Hitler’s presence, ‘He is thinking about the peasant girls. When they stand in the fields and bend down at their work so that you can see their behinds, that’s what he likes, especially when they’ve got big round ones. That’s Hitler’s sex life.’10

Hitler preferred to look rather than touch, and he also enjoyed the pornography his official photographer Heinrich Hoffmann made available to him. Ernest Pope claimed Hitler frequently visited TheMerry Widow, in which an American actress played the lead. ‘I have seen Hitler nudge his Gauleiter and smirk when Dorothy does her famous backbending number in the spotlight.’ Hitler watched through opera glasses and sometimes had command performances for his private benefit.11

What is clear is that Hitler was unable to have a normal relationship with women. It seems almost too clichéd to suggest that the man who delighted in the sadistic torture of his enemies and had not an ounce of compassion for those he sent to their deaths was also a voyeur and a masochist in need of punishment from pretty girls.

If it is true what Zeisler claimed about Renate Müller being coerced into inflicting pain upon Hitler, it would appear to shed light on her death. What is also apparent is that she had been seeing Hitler for around two years because Zeisler, who had effectively pimped for Hitler by sending her to him, left Germany in 1935, two years before she died, although she might have ended her association with Hitler, or attempted to, during or before 1937. But whether she killed herself because she was literally driven insane by being forced to indulge in his S&M games, or because she had to be done away with to keep her from going public with revelations of her bizarre association with him – in Hitler’s Germany super-injunctions were usually imposed with deadly force – her death can also be theoretically linked to Hitler because of the history of Hitler’s women committing or attempting suicide, or even murder. But what was it about Hitler that did this to the women closest to him?

He was deranged – that is without question. To be drawn into close proximity with him in any kind of emotional or physical way must have caused people who were vulnerable or dependent upon him in some way to lose their sense of normality and even become severely unbalanced. He certainly was not sexually conventional, and, by inflicting sexual activities so extreme upon others as he appeared to do to Renate Müller – and must have done to others – he must have contributed to them being driven to the edge of their own limits of normality and sanity. There also remains the possibility that some of these women, knowing of his sexual deviances, were a threat to him, and murder can’t be completely discounted, especially in the case of Renate Müller.

In Hitler’s cult of celebrity, as in showbusiness anywhere in the world, celebrity and sex went hand in hand. But in his case, celebrity also went hand in hand with terror and death. His cult of celebrity was like a vortex into which anyone wanting success in their chosen field, whether it was drama or music, painting or writing, was sucked without mercy. It’s known that Hollywood can be cruel, but Hitler’s cult of celebrity was devastating for all, including Hitler himself. It was as though he couldn’t control it or himself; he was driven by one overwhelming and unhinged desire – to get to the top.

CHAPTER TWO

IN THAT HOUR

One evening in the autumn of 1905, in Linz, the third biggest city in Austria, sixteen-year-old Adolf Hitler met August Kubizek, older by nine months. Their friendship was formed by their mutual love of music and opera, and, dressed in their finest clothes, they went almost every evening together to the opera or the theatre. As well as sharing a love for the opera, they also shared an ambition to be famous; Kubizek dreamed of becoming a great musician. Hitler had come to Linz in the hope of being accepted for a place at the city’s Academy of Fine Arts.

When it came to pop music, the teenage Adolf Hitler was a fan of the operettas of Johann Straus and Franz Lehár, and in later years he would enjoy Liszt, Brahms, Beethoven and Bruckner,12 but he considered Richard Wagner to be the supreme artist, a genius, someone to emulate.13 Hitler was simply wild about Wagner.

Kubizek and Hitler saw operas by the Italian masters Donizetti, Bellini and Rossini, and the works of Puccini and Verdi, but Hitler considered the music inferior in every way because they were not German. ‘For him, a second-rate Wagner was a hundred times better than a first-class Verdi,’ said Kubizek, who did not agree but always gave in to Hitler’s insistence that they forgo Verdi at the Court Opera to see Wagner at the more lowbrow Popular Opera House. ‘When it was a matter of a Wagner performance,’ wrote Kubizek, ‘Adolf would stand no contradiction.’14

In death, Richard Wagner remained the most popular composer of the era, and Hitler was just one of thousands who flocked to hear the works of the master of Bayreuth performed at the Hofoper in Vienna during the early years of the twentieth century. Hitler and Kubizek went to all of Wagner’s operas that were performed at the Court Opera in Linz, one of the best opera houses in Europe. During Hitler’s time in Vienna, from 1905 to 1913, Wagner’s operas were performed at the Court Opera no fewer than 426 times.15

When one day Hitler and Kubizek heard a piece by Verdi being played by a street organ-grinder, Hitler told his friend, ‘There you have your Verdi. Can you imagine Lohengrin’s Grail narration on a barrel organ?’16 Wagner’s Lohengrin was the first opera Hitler ever saw, and he had been caught up in the saga of the mysterious knight of the grail sent to rescue the condemned maiden Elsa, only to be ultimately betrayed by her. Lohengrin always remained one of his favourite Wagner operas.17

Seeing a Wagner opera was not just a visit to the theatre for Hitler but ‘the opportunity of being transported into that extraordinary state which Wagner’s music produced in him, that escape into a mystical dream-world,’ said Kubizek.18 Hitler recalled, ‘When I hear Wagner, it seems to me that I hear rhythms of a bygone world.’19 American journalist Frederick Oechsner, after meeting Hitler years later, reported that when Hitler listened to Wagner’s music, he saw ‘grimaces of pain and pleasure contort his face, his brows knit, his eyes close, his mouth contract tightly’.20

It was not merely the music that inspired and shaped Hitler. He was aroused by the drama of the opera, and by the heroes he dreamed of becoming. To be able to identify with a hero of drama, whether in opera, books or films, has always been a factor in successful creative and artistic works, from Homer to Harry Potter. To create an identity between an audience and a James Bond or a Shirley Valentine or a Billy Elliot is part of what makes drama work on its most basic level, by drawing an audience into its story and compelling them to suspend disbelief. But Hitler became increasingly unable to break off from that disbelief when the curtain fell, and very quickly he came to believe that it really could all become reality and that Wagner was telling him he had some predestined role to play in the future.

Wagner conjured up the sounds and images of Germanic myth, of gods and of the monumental struggle for deliverance and salvation, of death and triumph. Wagner’s heroes – Siegfried, Rienzi, Stolzing and Tannhäuser – were all outsiders in conflict with the unbending status quo governed by tradition. Hitler was enthralled by the themes common to Wagner, sacrifice, betrayal, redemption and heroic death. Wagner’s heroes overcame all adversity to achieve greatness, and that appealed to Hitler, who fantasised that he could live like a Wagnerian hero,21 but more than that, he wanted to become a new Wagner; that is, a supreme artistic and philosophical genius, which was his view of Wagner.

When Wagner’s first masterwork, Rienzi, der Letze der Tribunen (Rienzi, the Last of the Tribunes), was performed in Linz, either in 1905 or 1906, the two friends went to see it. It proved to be a turning point in the life of the young artist. Rienzi, set in medieval Rome, tells of a tribune who defeats the nobles attempting to raise a rebellion against the people’s power. The Church turns against him and he is forced to make a final stand in the capitol, which the people burn down around him.

Hitler was carried away by the sounds and sights portrayed in Rienzi. As though delivered of a personal and divine revelation through the musical genius of Wagner, he left the theatre in a state of near ecstasy and led Kubizek up the slopes of Freinberg, a mountain outside Linz, there to expound on the significance of what they had just seen. And, as if he had been charged to fulfil some kind of Wagnerian prophecy, Hitler told Kubizek ‘in grandiose, compelling images’ what his own future and that of his people was to be.

While scholars, historians and biographers dispute some of the details in Kubizek’s account, something unusual and pertinent to history certainly happened that night in Linz which set Hitler on the long as yet unforeseeable journey that would result in acts of unspeakable evil and the deaths of millions.

Part of the problem with Hitler was his inability to distinguish between reality and fantasy. When he and Kubizek bought a lottery ticket, Hitler immediately began planning the fine house he would build for himself and Kubizek on the bank of the Danube with the winnings. He spent weeks deciding on the decor and choosing furniture, and deciding their life of leisure would include a middle-aged female housekeeper; then when he didn’t win, he flew into a fury, unable to comprehend his failure to hold the winning number.22 Although he didn’t win the lottery prize, he never gave up his dream of living in luxury and being known the world over. It didn’t really matter to him what he was known for.

In the early twentieth century, fame could not be won on TV talent shows, or by living for several weeks in a televised house, or by kissing-and-telling, or by being a politician or a footballer, or just by being famous for being famous. In the twenty-first century, celebrity culture has become the obsession of the age, but the cult of celebrity that the Nazis seeded and grew began with Hitler himself. Yet in the beginning Hitler had nothing going for him but his own fantasies, fed by Wagner’s music.

All music has the potential to affect the emotions; to bring memories to the surface, stirring up both nostalgia and experiences best forgotten; to inspire artistic endeavours. When film director Quentin Tarantino listened to music from spaghetti Westerns as a youth, he envisioned new scenes, new plots to go with the music, resulting in films such as the two Kill Bill movies. Film music, like the opera, is designed to affect the senses, which is why some film actors like to have music played before and even during the filming of a scene. When making Once Upon a Time in America, Robert de Niro liked to hear Ennio Morricone’s music, already scored and recorded, played over the scene to help him find the mood and tone of the moment to affect his performance.

Film composers are also heavily influenced by Wagner. Ennio Morricone repeated Ride of the Valkyries in My Name Is Nobody, and Hans Zimmer sampled and emulated Wagner in his Gladiator score, especially in scenes which reminded him of moments from Triumph of the Will, Leni Riefenstahl’s spectacular film of the 1934 Nazi Party congress in Nuremberg, which was attended by more than 700,000 Nazi supporters.

The art of film scoring evolved directly from Wagner’s use of leitmotivs by which individual characters have their own themes, a contrivance used precisely because of its subtle emotional effect on an audience. Critic Theodor Adorno wrote that Wagnerian leitmotiv ‘leads directly to cinema music where the sole function of the leitmotiv is to announce heroes or situation so as to allow the audience to orient itself more easily.’23 It was Wagner’s use of leitmotivs which made his music so powerful, evocative and influential, on composers and listeners alike.

Music can also create fanaticism. During the late 1940s girls screamed, cried, swooned and fainted in sexual ecstasy at the sight and sound of Frank Sinatra. In the 1960s it happened all over again with the Beatles. Fans of singers, bands and musical artists of every kind can often respond with extreme fanaticism to the works of those they idolise. They come to know everything there is to know about their idols. They have images of their idols to worship. For many, it becomes almost a religion, a fact not lost on someone who observed this phenomenon from the closest vantage point: ‘For some reason celebrities of a certain kind are treated as messiahs whether they like it or not; people encapsulate them in myths that touch their deepest yearnings and needs,’ wrote Marlon Brando.24

Hitler said, ‘For me, Wagner is something godly, and his music is my religion. I go to his concerts as others go to church.’25 Wagner literally became a religious experience for Hitler.26 But even such extreme devotion does not necessarily turn the most fanatical of admirers into a Hitler. Yet that’s what happened to young Adolf.

He knew just about everything there was to know about Wagner’s life and work, and he boasted that he had read everything the master had written,27 which included all of Wagner’s anti-Semitic articles. Wagner hid behind a pseudonym when he wrote his first anti-Semitic essay, ‘Das Judenthum in der Musik’28 (originally translated as ‘Judaism in Music’ but better known as ‘Jewishness in Music’). In the article, he attacked Jewish contemporaries Felix Mendelssohn and Giacomo Meyerbeer, and claimed Jews were a destructive and alien aspect in German culture – Germans ‘felt instinctively repelled by any actual, operative contact with them’. He argued that Jews had no connection to the German spirit and so Jewish musicians were only capable of producing shallow music intended only to achieve financial success rather than be a genuine work of art. ‘Only one thing can redeem [Jews] from the burden of your curse,’ he wrote. ‘The redemption of Ahasverus – total destruction.’29

Not everyone saw anti-Semitism in Wagner’s operas, but that was because he disguised it well, so he wouldn’t offend his Jewish patrons or the Jewish conductors and performers. When he reprinted ‘Das Judenthum in der Musik’ in a pamphlet with an extended introduction under his own name in 1866, it led to public protests at the first performances of Die Meistersinger in Vienna and Mannheim when the character of Beckmesser was recognised as a mocking depiction of a Jew.30

Wagner never explicitly identified Beckmesser or any other character in any of his operas as being Jewish, but Wagner intended to create certain characters as Jewish representations, such as Klingsor in Parsifal and Mime in the Ring, a fact not lost on some of his peers. Gustav Mahler, Wagner’s Jewish contemporary and admirer, wrote, ‘No doubt with Mime, Wagner intended to ridicule the Jews with all their characteristic traits – petty intelligence and greed – the jargon is textually and musically so cleverly suggested; but for God’s sake it must not be exaggerated and overdone.’31

Hitler understood the racist overtones and was particularly inspired by the message of Parsifal, Wagner’s last opera and arguably his most racist. Hitler believed that by stripping away all the ‘Christian embroidery and Good Friday mystification’, the drama’s true context is revealed: Wagner does not praise Christian beliefs, but ‘pure noble blood’. To Hermann Rauschning – who was close to Hitler during his rise to power, especially the years 1932–1934 – he explained, ‘The king is suffering from the incurable ailment of corrupted blood.’ Corrupted blood was racial impurity. Hitler went on, ‘I have the most intimate familiarity with Wagner’s mental processes. At every stage of my life I come back to him … If we strip Parsifal of every poetic element, we learn from it that selection and renewal are possible only amid the continuous tension of a lasting struggle.’32

Hitler’s analysis corresponds with the interpretation of Paul Lawrence Rose, who wrote of the manifestations of Wagner’s racial ideology. ‘Wagner intended Parsifal to be a profound religious parable about how the whole essence of European humanity had been poisoned by alien, inhuman, Jewish values. It is an allegory of the Judaisation of Christianity and of Germany – and of purifying redemption.’ He wrote that Parsifal ‘preached the new doctrine of racial purity… In Wagner’s mind, this redeeming purity was infringed by Jews.’33 No wonder Hitler proclaimed that he made his religion from Parsifal.34

Wagner had many Jewish friends and colleagues, and he even described his friendship with the French Jew Samuel Lehrs as ‘one of the most beautiful friendships of my life.’35 Yet Wagner was influenced by the writings of racialist Arthur de Gobineau, whose An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races he read in 1880;36 in his own writings of his final years Wagner reflected Gobineau’s theory that Western society was doomed, being of miscegenation between ‘superior’ and ‘inferior’ races.

He noted in his diaries, as recorded by his wife Cosima, ‘All Jews should be burned at a performance of Nathan the Wise’,37 and wrote of ‘cursed Jew scum’.38 He wrote to Franz Liszt, Cosima’s father: ‘I have cherished a long repressed resentment about this Jew money-world, and this hatred is as necessary to my nature as gall is to blood.’39

Hitler knew well of Wagner’s outspoken anti-Semitism, and believed what Wagner said was true, and that the music he wrote was the work of a prophetic genius. Wagner’s anti-Semitism, his mantras, his music and the spectacle of the operas all played important roles in Hitler’s future Germany.

Hitler was in awe and envy of Wagner’s fame – of his celebrity. After death, Wagner lived on in his music and his fame. It was a form of immortality, and that appealed to Hitler, along with the other trappings of fame – wealth, adulation, admiration. Hitler wanted all that and became convinced that he could have it all, that it was his for the taking, that his destiny had been revealed to him by his god Wagner.

Wagner was more than a composer: he was a national hero and powerful political force. Writers, philosophers and politicians testified to his profound influence. Such was the adulation from King Ludwig II of Bavaria, he helped to finance the Bayreuth Festspielhaus, which was designed specifically by Wagner for the performance of his operas. Wagner had been thinking about a festival since 1850, and it became the world-famous Bayreuth Festival. Wagner societies were springing up everywhere and were promoted in the German-nationalistic Bayreuther Blätter. From the opening of the festival in 1876, anti-Semitism and racism were embedded in the Bayreuth opera.40

The relationship between Hitler and Wagner’s music has long been recognised as a major factor in Hitler’s life and career.

His background, the influences in his early years, and indeed his personality traits, simply gave him a particular predisposition to have his fantasies and delusions ignited by a night at the opera. He wanted to be famous, he wanted to be wealthy, he wanted to show the bourgeois he wasn’t to be rejected. Wagner’s operas, particularly Rienzi and also Lohengrin, told him, like a personal revelation – through the power of the emotion of the music and the drama and his own overwhelming idolisation of Wagner – that not only could he achieve all those things but that he was destined to bring them all to pass.

To a great degree, Wagner’s music made Adolf Hitler into the monster he became. It was the catalyst for what was to come, and the driving force throughout Hitler’s life. A vision had transformed him – one might say transfigured him in an almost religious sense. Years later, in Bayreuth in 1939, Kubizek met Hitler again and reminded him of the night they first saw Rienzi. Hitler was prompted to tell his hostess Winifred Wagner, daughter-in-law of the maestro, ‘In that hour, it began.’41

CHAPTER THREE

IMPURITY OF THE BLOOD

Music and drama alone could not create a Hitler. There had to be some form of madness that gave him a predisposition to the influence of Wagner, and to his unrealistic dreams of fame and fortune. The answer may well lie in his genes. His father was Alois Hitler, and his mother was Klara Pölzl. Klara wasn’t just Alois’s wife, but his foster daughter too. As if that were not a bizarre enough circumstance, Klara’s mother’s name was Hitler, and that was because Alois and Klara shared a common ancestor – his grandfather, her great-grandfather. Klara was a first cousin once removed to Alois.

Alois Hitler of the Austrian Finance Ministry and his first wife Anna Glassl-Hoerer (she was fifty when they married, he thirty-six) had fostered Klara when she was sixteen, after Anna became invalided by sickness and he inherited a large sum of money from his mother’s estate. Through an affair he had with Franziska Matzelsberger he had a son, Alois Junior, and a daughter, Angela, and after Anna died, he married Franziska. When she became seriously ill, Klara took care of her and the two children. Franziska died on 10 August 1884.

Alois wasted no time in seducing Klara – there is the suggestion he raped her – and she became pregnant. They married on 7 January 1885, and she gave birth to a son, Gustav, on 17 May 1885, nine months after Franziska died. A daughter, Ida, followed on 23 September 1886, or so it is alleged; there was the suspicion that Ida was an ‘imbecile’ and may have been kept hidden from public view. A third child, Otto, was born and died in 1887. According to William Patrick Hitler, the son of Adolf’s half-brother Alois Jr, another illegitimate child had been born to the couple earlier, but no record of it exists.42

On 20 April 1889, Adolf Hitler was born in Ranshofen, a village annexed to the municipality of Braunau am Inn, Upper Austria. His family moved to Kapuzinerstrasse in Passau, Germany when Adolf was three. Living in Passau for a mere two years as an infant was enough to imbue the boy with a German accent.

Alois Jr disliked his younger half-brother, who he felt was spoiled by his mother. As adults the half-brothers were never close, and when Adolf came to power, he and Alois Jr had practically no contact with each other. Hitler did not mention Alois Jr in Mein Kampf, and he allegedly had him sent to a concentration camp in 1942, although there is no record of that happening except in a dubious newspaper report.43 However, Alois Jr’s son Heinz died in a Soviet prison in 1942 after being captured on the Eastern Front during the war, which might have led to the conclusion that it was Alois Jr who had been sent to a concentration camp. Alois Jr actually died in Hamburg in 1956.

Two more children were born to Klara and Alois – Edmund on 24 March 1894, and Paula on 21 January 1896. Edmund died of measles on 28 February 1900. Paula was said to be a little on the ‘stupid side’,44 and as an adult she called herself ‘Frau Wolf’ and was described by a neighbour as ‘very queer’.45 The family doctor, Eduard Bloch, believed that Klara and Alois had another daughter called Klara, slightly older than Adolf, whom they hid away because she was an ‘imbecile’, although Dr Bloch may have actually seen the supposedly dead Ida; in either case, there is the strong possibility that the Hitler family had at least one daughter who was mentally disabled.46

With the loss of so many children, one daughter on the ‘stupid side’, and another possible daughter an imbecile – and one who would become the personification of evil – there would seem to be what American psychiatrist Walter C. Langer classified ‘a constitutional weakness’ in the Hitler family, and a question of the ‘purity of the blood’,47 that was the result of an incestuous relationship between Alois and Klara. If there was impurity of the Hitler blood, Adolf was infected.

Adolf was the focal point of Klara’s life and she lavished all her affection on him, until Edmund was born and changed all that. Two years after that, baby sister Paula provided him with further competition for his mother’s attention and affection. Adding to his misery at home was his father’s domineering temperament which, according to William Patrick Hitler, led to beatings for all the family, including Klara. On one occasion he beat Alois Jr into unconsciousness, and another time beat Adolf and left him for dead. Alois Sr was a drunkard who spent much of his time in the taverns, returning home to beat Klara, the children and even the dog. Adolf hated his father, and became ever more dependent on his doting mother’s affection.

Adolf’s schooling suffered as his father’s work kept the family moving from one place to another. He enjoyed his time at a Catholic school in an eleventh-century Benedictine monastery cloister from the age of eight, and was so impressed and intrigued by the religious life there that he decided to become a priest. What inspired him most of all was the theatricality of worship; he enjoyed the opportunity ‘to intoxicate myself with the solemn splendour of the brilliant church festivals’.48 He was expelled when caught smoking, and he developed a hatred for the monks but retained his delight in religious ceremony, which was later manifest among all the theatrical elements of his style of leadership and government.

He constantly fought with his father and teachers, and he lost interest in his lessons. The only subjects in which he excelled were freehand drawing and gymnastics, subjects that required no preparation or thought. He was becoming the kind of person that can be found among psychiatric patients, according to Walter C. Langer, who are actually very intelligent but refuse to work, and who are bright enough to understand the fundamental principles without exerting themselves, giving the impression of knowing something without ever actually studying, and glossing over superficial knowledge with glib words and terminology.49

Hitler possessed no great intellect and read lowbrow books such Karl May’s Wild West stories. He came to school with Bowie knives and hatchets, and tried to get the other boys to play at being Indians. He always wanted to be the chief, but none of the other boys considered him someone with leadership qualities and ostracised him.50 He slipped more and more into his own fantasy world in which he was the leader. The problem was, he had no followers.

He became bitter and mutinous, and took an obsessive interest in German nationalism as a means of rebelling against his father, who was proud to serve in the Austrian government. Most who lived near the Austrian–German border considered themselves German-Austrians. Alois favoured Austria over Germany, but Adolf took the opposite view. He transferred his love for his mother to Germany, which, being young and vigorous and holding the promise of a great future under the right circumstances, became a symbol of his ideal mother. Austria became a representation of his father – old, exhausted, and decaying from within. While most Germans referred to Germany as the ‘fatherland’, Hitler often referred to it as the ‘motherland’.51 In defiance of the Austrian monarchy as well as his father, Hitler refused to join in singing the Austrian imperial anthem and sang instead the German anthem, Deutschland über Alles.

After Alois died on 3 January 1903 from a stroke, Adolf’s behaviour became more disruptive. In 1906 he was expelled from the Realschule in Steyr because he used his school certificate upon completion of his second year as toilet paper; he received a dressing down that was probably the most humiliating experience of his life.52 He vowed never to return to school and returning to live with his mother and sister Paula in Linz, he dedicated himself ‘wholly to art’; drawing, watching his first movies53 and going to the opera. He wrote that these were ‘the happiest days which seemed to me almost like a beautiful dream’54 – they were days spent in idleness, which is how he wanted to spend the rest of his life, and he thought he could achieve that by becoming an artist.

Aged eighteen, he went to Vienna for the first time, and was impressed by the architectural splendours of the bourgeois city, describing the parliament building ‘a Hellenic marble on German soil’ which he painted in watercolours. He even managed to sell some of his work. He was ‘full of confident self-assurance’55 when in October 1907 he applied to the Academy of Art. He failed because his sample drawing was graded ‘unsatisfactory’;56 the director of the academy advised him to study architecture. Hitler described this whole experience as ‘an abrupt blow’,57 but still had every intention of becoming an artist – or doing nothing at all.

On 21 December 1907, Klara died from breast cancer. Hitler returned to Linz and created a lasting impression of his beloved mother by sketching her in death. His intense grief was brightened when Magdalena Hanisch, who owned the house where his mother had lived and died, wrote a letter of recommendation to Alfred Roller, one of Germany’s finest stage designers, who worked at the Hofoper and taught at the Vienna Academy of Arts and Crafts, describing Hitler as ‘an earnest, aspiring young man’, and that he ‘has in mind a serious goal’. Roller replied that he would be happy to meet with the young man58 and, imagining that he would become a set designer for plays and operas under the tutorage of Alfred Roller, Hitler arrived back in Vienna in February 1908.

What actually took place between Hitler and Roller is unknown. Their letters were carefully preserved by the Third Reich, but Hitler remained forever silent on the matter, probably because Roller most likely did little more than encourage Hitler to study and work hard, anathema to Hitler, who scorned the very idea that a man must work to live. All he really wanted to do was live the life of an artist and remain free to indulge in music and opera.

He applied to the academy again; he could only qualify for his orphan’s pension if he was engaged in a formal course of education. He also lived on his father’s inheritance and his mother’s legacy. Kubizek came to Vienna to study at the Conservatory of Music, and they shared a single dreary rented room. Hitler rarely rose from bed before noon and then spent afternoons visiting museums and libraries, and in the evenings went to the opera; he saw Tristan and Isolde up to forty times.59

He sketched buildings and wrote a thesis on his concept of an ideal German state. He studied Wagner’s life, work, philosophies and anti-Semitic proclamations. He would later recall the sensation of hearing the funeral march from Götterdämmerung for the first time, and of the anti-Semitic feelings it stirred within him:

I first heard it in Vienna. At the Opera. And I still remember, as if it were today, how madly excited I became on the way home over a few yammering Yids I had to pass. I cannot think of a more incompatible contrast. This glorious mystery of the dying hero and this Jewish crap.60

Götterdämmerung – Twilight of the Gods – is the last in Wagner’s cycle of four operas, Der Ring des Nibelungen (The Ring of the Nibelung, or sometimes just called The Ring), concluding the story of Siegfried and Brünnhilde and how she betrays him, leading him to his death the only way he can be killed – by a spear in his back. When she rides her horse into his funeral pyre, the world and Valhalla go up in flames, and all gods and heroes die in the fire – the twilight of the gods, Götterdämmerung.

Hitler was to become obsessed with the whole concept of Götterdämmerung, and how he would one day follow Siegfried into the flames that would end the world at whatever cost to all others. That’s how powerful an influence Wagner was on Hitler. Death, he concluded, was to be celebrated: his cult of death would pervade his life and career. And it would be consummated in fire, resulting in what might be called a Nero complex – a desire to see all he ruled razed by fire so he could rebuild it.

Failing as an artist, Hitler imagined he could write a Wagnerian opera; he had to emulate the man he considered the supreme artist in every way. He knew that among Wagner’s papers had been found an unfinished piece, Wieland the Smith, and Hitler announced to Kubizek that he would complete it.61 With no musical training, he created melodies by finding the notes on the piano, which Kubizek wrote down.

Wieland the Smith is an Icelandic legend about King Nidur, who is driven purely by avarice to rape his daughter, kill his sons, and drink from cups fashioned out of their skulls. Hitler wrote erupting volcanoes, Icelandic glaciers, and valkyries riding through the clouds. He considered himself to be a new Wagner, and his imagination knew no bounds, but his talent and patience did; the opera was never finished. Failing to become the new Wagner, he decided fame and fortune instead awaited him as a playwright, and he took to writing a stage drama using ideas from Germanic sagas. Kubizek noted that when writing plays, Hitler imagined ‘the most magnificent staging’, and was impressed by the ‘enormous pomp’ which put all that Wagner had ever created for the stage ‘completely in the shade’. But, like his opera, Hitler’s plays also came to nothing. His thoughts returned to painting, and in September 1908 he submitted paintings to the academy once more. Again he was rejected, and he found himself slipping into an identity crisis, fearing he could never emulate Wagner the genius and supreme artist in any way whatsoever.

Driven by his rejection at the hands of the establishment, his persona took on a new dimension. Kubizek observed that he was given to sudden and vehement fits of despair, intense aggression and an apparent unrestrained facility for hatred. Humiliated, he withdrew into isolation, without any explanation moving out of the apartment he shared with Kubizek and into one alone where he could rant inwardly at the bourgeois world that had turned against him.

He continued to frequent the opera and the theatre and, despite his growing hatred for the bourgeois, he dressed as though he were one of them, affecting an air of superiority to show the working class that they were beneath him. His bearing and care with his words were all an act, a skill he would hone to considerable effect in later years, not as an actor but as a politician, although to him the difference between the two vocations was blurred. His reason for putting on such a performance at this time was his need to belong to a better class, even though he inwardly detested such people; although he would later claim that he was, in these years, a revolutionary both artistically and politically, he did not actually decry bourgeois values but rather continued to hunger after them.

Despite his young age, he remained unswayed by and even unaware of modern trends in music, and eschewed the works of Richard Strauss and Gustav Mahler, always preferring Wagner as well as Anton Bruckner. He considered anything modern, including architecture, simply unappealing; in regard to politics he had no strong opinions, especially of the revolutionary kind; thus he avoided artistic and political oppositions of the time, and concentrated on becoming a Herr. But all he became was increasingly bitter.

The common theme in Wagner’s operas was that of the outsider, and that’s exactly how Hitler came to see himself. Like Wagner, Hitler was an academic failure, an anti-Semite and a vegetarian. Hitler came to consider that he, Wagner and the white knight were all a reflection of each other. Over the years Hitler would find even more to compare himself to Wagner. The composer held a life-long grudge against Paris for his early disappointments and envisioned the city being destroyed by flames. For Hitler, Vienna would be his city of disappointments, and when, in 1944, he was asked to provide additional anti-aircraft units to defend Vienna against Allied bombers, he refused and said that Vienna must find out what bomb warfare was like.

Hitler took inspiration from Wagner’s immovable conviction of his vocation, and he convinced himself that he and Wagner shared the same kinds of rejections. Since Wagner had overcome then, so too would Hitler. He came to believe Wagner was a prototype of himself, and was thus Wagner’s successor. He later declared, ‘With the exception of Richard Wagner, I have no forerunner,’62 and he described Wagner as ‘the greatest prophetic figure the German people has had’ and said that he was overcome by ‘a literally hysterical excitement’ when he realised his own psychological kinship with the great composer.63

Beset with a growing hatred for the bourgeois world he was so desperate to be a part of but which he considered had rejected him, he sank into a world that existed only in his mind, with a Wagner score, but which he could not contain as a simple private fantasy. For him it had to become reality, and over time his life became a creation of delusions.