The excerpts
below (1,000 words) include the first two paragraphs and sections on "Were Germans Too,
Hitler's Intended Victims?" and "Hitler's Homosexuality."
Sections not included in this post
Hitler's
Anti-Semitism
Hitler's Lebensraum
Hitler Finds a
Career
The Wobbly Weimar
Republic
The Beer Hall Putsch
Rare Opposition to
Hitler Noted
Parole for Hitler and
Escaping Deportation
Effect of Hitler's Homosexuality on His Policies
Another Book
***
(Complete footnotes
are provided with the full text.)
Despair and Triumph in Hitler's First Miracle Year:
A Review-Essay on Peter Ross Range's 1924
December 2016 by Ronald
Bleier
.
I was agreeably surprised to find that my modest
expectations for a book dealing with a single year of Hitler's life were more
than exceeded by Peter Ross Range’s 1924: The Year That Made Hitler (Little,
Brown; 2016). I regard Range’s book as one of the most important works on
Hitler's political development. Range's lucid and
well-paced narrative details the critical events during the thirteen months
between November 1923 and December 1924. By the end of 1924, at the age of
thirty-five, Hitler rose from the ashes of his failed Munich beer hall putsch,
emerging from prison unbowed and confident, poised to pick up the reins of his
Nazi Party and drive it to its next level.
Range's focus on Hitler's consequential year also
opens the way to examining some of the elements that will figure for the
remainder of Hitler's career: his key
anti- Semitism and lebensraum
watchwords; his homosexuality and his fateful plans for Germany, Europe, and
the whole world.
…
Were Germans, Too, Hitler's Intended Victims?
Jews of course were not Hitler's only victims. Among
the 60 million WWII deaths were also eight million Germans.[ Were
the Germans who died merely collateral damage, or were they also Hitler's
intended victims? Joachim Fest, one of Hitler's German biographers,
tellingly wrote in 2004 of Hitler's "hatred of the world and his thirst for extermination."[1]
In
March 1945, a month and a half before ending his life, Hitler issued his
scorched-earth orders for Germany, similar to the orders he issued as his
troops retreated from occupied territory. (Hitler had ordered the destruction
of Paris, but mercifully his orders were not carried out.) But when it came to
similar orders for Germany, Albert Speer, Hitler's senior minister for
armaments, objected, arguing that Hitler had no right to doom Germany's
future.
Risking
his life, Speer spoke up forcefully, actually upbraiding Hitler for his demonic
plans: "No one," said Speer, "has the right to take the
viewpoint that the fate of the German people is tied to his personal fate. . .
. At this stage of the war it makes no sense for us to undertake demolitions
which may strike at the very life of the nation."
Hitler's
reply (as reported by Speer) was as cold as ice. Since Germany had fallen to
its eastern enemy, asserted Hitler, she didn't deserve a future.
If the war is lost, the people will be lost also. It
is not necessary to worry about what the German people will need for elemental
survival. On the contrary, it is best for us even to destroy these things. For
the nation has proved to be the weaker, and the future belongs solely to the
stronger eastern nation. In any case, only those who are inferior will remain
after this struggle, for the good have already been killed.
Hitler's last testament, written shortly before he
committed suicide, can also be read as a disguised acknowledgement that by
engaging in war, he was responsible for the destruction of Germany. In his
testament he wrote that the Jews were “the real people to blame for this murderous
struggle," calling upon Germany and the Germans "to observe the
racial laws precisely and to resist pitilessly the world-poisoner of all
peoples, international Jewry."
Hitler used the device of his last public
pronouncement, typically a special moment of sincerity, to deflect blame away
from himself onto the Jews. One clue is his use of the meaningless intensifier
"real" when he wrote: "the real
people to blame would be the Jews!" The real person to blame was of
course himself. Ever the ultimate cynic and con-man extraordinaire, Hitler attempted to obscure his use of Allied
personnel and Allied weaponry as his means of killing his own people and
destroying his country. His last testament, was indirectly his sardonic boast
that he was going to his death knowing that he had accomplished much more of
his agenda of destruction, suffering, and death than he could have expected to
fulfill ten years earlier.
Hitler's Homosexuality
German professor Lothar Machtan's exposé in The
Hidden Hitler (2001)
has convinced many “by the sheer weight of direct and circumstantial evidence,"[5] that Hitler was a homosexual -- of the type that could not bear the slightest
intimacy with women. (Hitler's homosexuality is not addressed in Range's book.)
In Machtan's view, Hitler was able to conceal his sexual nature because he
relentlessly pursued and destroyed whatever evidence he could find. He was also
determined to silence, even by means of murder, those who could expose him.
When he became Chancellor of Germany he made a point of confiscating the
six-volume file kept on him by the Munich police.[Similarly, in 1938, when Germany absorbed Austria into Greater Germany in the
Anschluss, Hitler sent agents to confiscate the files that the Vienna police
had compiled, presumably because in
addition to whatever else, it contained records of his sexual contacts.
In Explaining Hitler (1999), Ron Rosenbaum
stresses that Hitler was a frequent target of blackmail attempts. Machtan
asserts that it was the threat of exposing his sexuality that spurred much of
the blackmail efforts, some apparently successful. Along similar lines, Machtan
provides a revisionist angle to at least part of the motivation for Hitler's
bloody purge of June 30, 1934, known as the "Night of the Long
Knives." Among the hundreds Hitler ordered murdered was his mentor,
friend, and perhaps lover, Ernst Rohm, leader of the SA, the Sturmabteilung, Hitler's paramilitary wing.
Doubtless others were also murdered during that time due to their knowledge of
Hitler's sexual activity.
During
his time at Landsberg prison, Hitler and his fellow conspirators enjoyed relaxed
special treatment. Machtan reports that in the so-called Feldherren wing, Hitler and Hess and others took pleasure in
sporting contests, rowdy evenings, and hot baths in the "modern bathroom
reserved for us alone."[The prison governor had to restrain their unruly behavior from time to time
with such messages as: "Nudity outside the fortress living room . . . is
not allowed. The proprieties have to be observed everywhere, especially when
several fellow inmates share a room with you."
1Peter Ross Range, 1924: The Year That Made Hitler (New
York: Little, Brown, 2016), p. 224-225.
R
