The Making of Adolf Hitler: The Birth and Rise of Nazism

504 Pages·1997·2.04 MB·English

by  Eugene Davidson

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title : The Making of Adolf Hitler : The Birth and Rise of Nazism
author : Davidson, Eugene.
publisher : University of Missouri Press
isbn10 | asin : 0826211178
print isbn13 : 9780826211170
ebook isbn13 : 9780826260277
language : English
subject Hitler, Adolf,--1889-1945, Heads of state--Germany--
Biography, Germany--Politics and government--1918-
1933, Germany--Politics and government--1933-1945,
National socialism.
publication date : 1997
lcc : DD247.H5D38 1997eb
ddc : 943.086/092
subject : Hitler, Adolf,--1889-1945, Heads of state--Germany--
Biography, Germany--Politics and government--1918-
1933, Germany--Politics and government--1933-1945,
National socialism.
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The Making of Adolf Hitler
The Birth and Rise of Nazism
Eugene Davidson

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Page iv
Disclaimer:
Some images in the original version of the book are not available for inclusion in the netLibrary eBook.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the Macmillan Publishing Company for permission to quote from Reck-
Malleczewen's Diary of a Man in Despair and to S. Fischer Verlag to quote from the German edition of his
Tagebuch eines Verzweifelten.
Copyright © 1977 by Eugene Davidson
First published by Macmillan in 1977.
First University of Missouri Press paperback edition, 1997.
University of Missouri Press, Columbia, Missouri 65201
Printed and bound in the United States of America
All rights reserved
5 4 3 2 1 01 00 99 98 97
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Davidson, Eugene, 1902
The making of Adolf Hitler: the birth and rise of Nazism / by
Eugene Davidson.
p. cm.
Originally published: New York: Macmillan, c1977.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-8262-1117-8 (alk. paper)
1. Hitler, Adolf, 18891945. 2. Heads of stateGermany
Biography. 3. GermanyPolitics and government19181933.
4. GermanyPolitics and government19331945. 5. National
socialismGermany. I. Title.
DD247.H5D38 1997
943.086'092dc21
[B] 96-37316
CIP
This paper meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library
Materials, Z39.48, 1984.
Cover Designer: Kristie Lee
Typesetter: BOOKCOMP
Printer and binder: Thomson-Shore, Inc.
Typefaces: Friz Quadrata, Caledonia

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For
Suzette Morton Davidson

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Contents
Acknowledgments ix
1. Austria 1
2. Germany: The Promised Land 30
3. The War and the Corporal 67
4. The Desert of Defeat 103
5. "The Enemy Is on the Right" 150
6. Silver Streaks on the Horizon 201
7. "Over GravesForward!" 242
8. The Time of the Crooked Cross 273
9. The Seizure of Power 312
10. Conclusion: The Happening 364
Notes 379
Sources Cited 389
Index 397

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Acknowledgments
It is a pleasure to express my gratitude to Fritz T. Epstein who despite the most adverse circumstances read the
typescript of The Making of Adolf Hitler. Professor Epstein's knowledge of the time with which this book is
concerned is that not only of a scholar but of one who experienced it at first hand and his criticisms have been
invaluable.
I am indebted to my secretary, Maria Abbadi, for transcribing the complexities of the original manuscript and to
Richard Meier of the University of Chicago for his careful checking of the references and notes. Fred Honig and the
copy editors at Macmillan have been most helpful as have the staffs of the Regenstein Library at the University of
Chicago and of the Institut für Zeitgeschichte in Munich.

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Chapter 1
Austria
"In 1920 I met him, a strange oddball, at the home of my friend Clemens zu Franckenstein, who was then living in
the Lenbach villa. According to the butler, Anton, the man simply would not go away and had been waiting for an
hour. And there he was! He had gotten into Clé's house (Clé, up to the time of the Revolution, had been general
manager of the Royal Theater) by saying he was interested in operatic scene designing, which he apparently thought
was related to his former profession of decorator and paperhanger. A still completely unknown outsider, he had
arrived, so to speak, en pleine carmagnole, dressed up for his visit to the home of a man he had never met in riding
leggings, a riding whip, and a slouch hat and accompanied by a shepherd dog. He looked, as a result, among the
Gobelins and cool marble walls, very much like a cowboy who had thought it proper to appear in leather pants,
enormous spurs, and a Colt to take a seat on the steps of a baroque altar. So, looking haggard and even a little
starved, he sat there with the face of a stigmatized head-waiter, as delighted as he was inhibited to be in the presence
of a real live Herr Baron, so awed he dared to sit uneasily on only half of his ascetic backside, snapping at the
kindly but cool, incidental remarks of the host the way a starving cur goes at a piece of meat thrown to him. After
some random talk he took over the conversation and began to preach like a division chaplain. Without any kind of
argument from us, apparently in unconscious memory of the acoustics of the Zirkus Krone, he attained such a
volume of bellowing that finally Franckenstein's household personnel, fearing a scene between host and guest,
converged on the room to protect my friend. After he left, we sat together silently,

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helplessly, in no way amused but with the painful feeling one might have when the sole fellow traveller in a railroad
compartment has turned out to be insane. We sat there a long time before we began to talk again. Finally, Clé stood
up, opened one of the huge windows, and let in the foehn-warm spring air. I won't say that the dreary guest was
unclean and in the country fashion of Bavaria had fouled the air. All the same, after a few deep breaths we were free
of our depressing impressions. It was not an unclean body that had been in the room but rather the unclean spirit of a
monster." 1
This was the harsh and not entirely accurate judgment (Hitler had never been a decorator or paperhanger) of one
contemporary of Adolf Hitler's, but many others who saw and heard him in those early days of his political life had a
similar revulsion. Men of letters, soldiers, and politicians of both the Left and the Right expressed it, as did almost
all the newspapers of the Reich with the exception of a few papers regarded by most Germans to be as crackpot as
the National Socialist party paper, the Völkischer Beobachter. Even in 1928, after Hitler had been preaching his
gospel of hate and salvation for nine years, the German electorate gave his party less than three percent (2.63
percent) of the total vote in the elections for the Reichstag. How then did this man who looked, as one observer said,
like a beach photographer at some shabby resort, with little formal education and slim financial resources, come
within a few years to be the mightiest man in Germany and, for a time, in the world? The answers to this question
cannot be found in the character of the man alone or in some perverse kind of German miracle, and despite all that
has been written, they are worth continuing investigation, because the riddle remains unexplained.
Adolf Hitler was born in one of the most provincial parts of a Germanic community that was itself a congeries of
provinces. In writing of his father in Mein Kampf, Hitler described him as a man of the world, but the Austrian
customs officer who had risen to middle-class officialdom from the shoemaker's trade was as far from that as were
most of his neighbors. They were insular country people who lived in tight ethnic enclaves in the midst of a polyglot
state and who looked with instant suspicion on anything or anyone who differed from them. They rejected not only
Jews but all outsidersProtestant Germans along with the Catholic Italians who shared Austria's high Tyrolean
mountains, as well as the other regrettable nationalities who made up part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire: Poles,
Czechs, Ladins, Slovenes, Croats, Serbs, Slovakians, Ruthenians, Walachians, and the rest.
The Dual Monarchy was made up essentially of a loose association of tribes, each inwardly territorial, bristling at
any sign of another nationality's pretensions to power, which could only come about at the expense of one's own
integrity and self-esteem. The peoples of Austria-

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Hungary lived in an atmosphere of fierce tribal loyalties and conflicts, in a monarchy called Kaiserliche and
Koenigliche; both an empire and a kingdom, since the emperor of Austria was also the king of Hungary, as well as
the king of Bohemia, Dalmatia, Croatia, Slovenia, Jerusalem, and many other territories and the sovereign of over a
dozen resident ethnic and religious minorities.
Austria had a long history of mixed peoples. Four hundred years before the birth of Christ, Celts had migrated there
from Spain; Romans, Germans, a Tartar people called the Avars, and Slavs had all settled there and had left their
imprint on the country and its later population even when they moved on. The German name for the Roman invaders
was Walsch, or Welsch, and names like Walgau, Walchensee, and Seewalchen are related to what were Roman
settlements. Slavic names are preserved in Feistritz (from Bistrica "fast water"), Fladnitz (from Blatnica "swamp
water"), Liesing (from Lesnica ''wood brook"), Görach (from Gora "mountain"), and Görtschak (from Gorcia
"hill"). A Roman name like Anula became Anif; Lentia became Linz; Janiculum, Gnigl; and Cucullae, Kuchl.
Salzburg was still known in the eighth century by its Latin name Juvavia as well as by its Germanic name. Vienna
was called by the Romans Vindobona, from a similar Celtic name, and by the ninth century it was called Wenia, or
Venia.
The villages in Lower Austria that the Hitlers, or Hiedlers, or Müttlers (this name, too, had a number of variants)
came from, along with the Schicklgrubers (meaning hedge diggers) and Pölzls on Hitler's maternal side, were, like
most of the Austrian settlements, outwardly homogeneous: although non-Germanic elements were present, they
were neither numerous nor conspicuous in comparison with the overwhelmingly German-speaking majority. But in
these provinces, too, non-Germanic peoples had either intermarried with the Germans or, in a few cases, remained as
undigested foreign bodies.
In Upper Austria, riots had occurred in Innsbruck when Adolf Hitler was fifteen years old. An Italian faculty had
been approved for the law school of the University of Innsbruck (until the end of the eighteenth century, when it was
replaced by German, Latin had been the language of instruction in Austrian universities); Italian students had met at
an inn to celebrate the occasion; and in the course of counterdemonstrations, many of the Italians had been arrested
and forty revolvers had been taken from them. 2 The German Austrians were always convinced of the need to
defend their language and culture against the aliens around them even though they were often related to them.*
* The Salzburger Lokal Anzeiger, for example, on July 7, 1902, reported on "a devilish plan" to establish a
Czech university in Brünn in Bohemia and on the Czechs' attempts to slavify the Alpine provinces. The
Deutsche Tiroler Stimmen on March 27, 1907, published some verses of "The Song of the Germans in
Austria":
(footnote continued on next page)

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Adolf Hitler had a great-uncle, who was perhaps a grandfather on both his maternal and paternal sides, named
Nepomuk,* and the name Hitler is possibly of Czech origin, Germanized from Hidlar or Hidlarcek *. And although
Adolf Hitler and thousands of his countrymen would always cherish the image of the tall, blond, blue-eyed German
as the archetype of the Teutonic family to which they belonged, not very many of them resembled this reverenced
figure. Hitler was what the anthropologists of his time described as an Alpine type, of obviously mixed blood, with
brown hair and of medium stature; only his blue eyes matched the idealized Urbild.

Hitler's father, Alois, had come a long way up the social and economic scale by the time his children were born.
Alois Hitler was the illegitimate son of Maria Anna Schicklgruber, a native of the tiny village of Strones, who bore
him when she was forty-two years old. She was a hardworking woman who supported herself by doing domestic
work. Neither she nor her husband, Johann Georg Hiedler, whom she married when she was forty-seven years old,
ever lived in a house of their own, although Maria Anna was not impecunious. At the time of Alois's birth, her small
inheritance from her mother came to 168 gulden, a little less than half the money it took to buy a small farm, and her
parents' farmstead was worth the considerable sum of 3,000 gulden. Johann Georg Hiedler, a millworker, however,
was impoverished all his life. Why he married Maria Anna five years after she bore her (and perhaps his) child,
whom he never legally acknowledged or cared for in his lifetime, leads to interesting speculation. At any rate, Alois
remained illegitimate during the lifetime of Johann Georg Hiedler and long after his alleged father's death; and
although illegitimacy in Austria and southern Germany, as in other parts of the Roman Catholic world, did not have
the stigma attached to it in more puritanical regions (40 percent of the children born in Lower Austria at the time
were illegitimate and were usually legitimatized at a later date), it was a condition that seldom of itself led to
communal preferment.** Alois Hitler, or Schicklgruber, as he remained until his fortieth year, had a long, hard road
to take before he became a respected official of the Customs Service of the Kaiserliche and Koenigliche monarchy.
At nineteen he had managed, with only an elementary school education, to leave a shoemaker's apprenticeship that
(footnote continued from previous page)
"We brought morality to this land / Against Welsch, Czechs, Poles we remain on guard."
* A name taken, by many Germans of the region.
** Alois himself was the father of an illegitimate son, born to Franziska Matzelsberger in 1882. He married her
a year later, and she died a year after that, in August 1884. Adolf Hitler's mother, Klara Pölzl, a relation of
Alois's who had joined the household during Franziska's illness to help with the chores, was probably also
pregnant by Alois before they were married in 1885.

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