Hitler and the Nazi Cult of Celebrity (5 page)

Hitler was detailed to an ‘enlightenment squad’ at Lechfeld camp for returning soldiers, where he gave speeches in which he was able to share their sense of disillusionment and feeling of betrayal. They responded to his condemnation of the Versailles Treaty, which he called ‘the shame of Versailles’, and he was able to wrap all the country’s ills inside a ‘Jewish–Marxist world conspiracy’.
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He was learning the art of oratory to remarkable effect,
discovering
that he finally had a talent which not only made him stand out from the crowd, but could well be the tool by which he fulfilled his Wagnerian destiny and which led to his ultimate goal of being famous. He didn’t have anything remarkably new to say, stringing
together ideas and sayings he had heard or read and presenting them as his own, but his reputation as an orator soon spread, and in September 1919 he accepted an invitation to join the board of the German Workers’ Party (
Deutsche Arbeiterpartei
– DAP), the forerunner of the Nazi Party.

Responsible for recruitment and propaganda, he gave his first public oratory for the DAP on 16 October, at a public meeting where he stood for thirty minutes giving a speech that grew ever more furious. By the end, ‘the people in the small room were electrified’. In that moment he made a remarkable discovery: ‘I could speak.’
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What had impressed him so much was not his own ability, which he had been developing and would continue to evolve into the skill that would mould him into the
Führer
, but the resulting ovation, the excitement, the acceptance and the adulation that was suddenly his. That experience was, for him, the most stimulating and exciting sensation of his life, which had to be repeated often, taking him to a physical and emotional exhausting peak, possibly becoming almost a form of sexual release.

He began promoting himself as the ‘drummer’, paving the way for the Germanic messianic knight who would lead the oppressed people in their struggle against the Bolshevists and the Jews. He lacked the confidence to envelop himself completely in his Wagnerian fantasy by becoming the knight, but was comfortable being the voice crying in the wilderness like a modern-day John the Baptist and promoting a new cult of providence.
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He gave countless speeches in beer cellars and on the streets of Munich, and revelled in the applause. He was no longer the outsider who had been callously rejected by the bourgeois. People paid attention to him now. Awkward and often bumbling when trying to express his ideas in private, speaking to the masses gave him a sense of being involved.

Speaking at the
Festsaal
in the
Hofbräuhaus
before almost 2,000 people on 24 February 1920, he condemned the Versailles Treaty, the government, the profiteers, the usurers and the Jews. A week
later the DAP changed its name to the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (
Nationalsozialistiche Deutsche Arbeiterpartei
– NSDAP) and adopted the swastika as its symbol. From the word
Nationalsozialistiche
was to come the abbreviation ‘Nazi’.

On 1 April 1920, Hitler left the army and devoted himself to seizing the leadership of the NSDAP and so shaping the party according to his own dogma. It would be a gamble, but he felt he had nothing to lose. It was to be all or nothing, as was often the case throughout his career, which was now becoming political, and he in the process was developing a cult of personality –
his
personality
. As his fame increased, so did his confidence. Among his early followers were Rudolf Hess, a recipient of the Iron Cross Second Class and a pilot with the rank of lieutenant, former air force pilot Hermann Göring, and army captain Ernst Röhm, who became head of Nazi paramilitary organisation the
Sturmabteilung
– the SA, known more commonly as stormtroopers – which protected Hitler and other party speakers at meetings, as well as literally attacking political opponents. Also drawn by Hitler’s speeches was General Erich Friedrich Wilhelm Ludendorff, a hero of the First World War who received the Grand Cross of the Iron Cross and the Pour le Mérite. He had turned to National Socialism, convinced that the German army had been betrayed by Marxists and republicans, and became the party’s heroic leader.

From 1922 Hitler often held as many as twelve rallies in a single evening, and was always the principal speaker. He had become a star in his own right, and the masses came to these rallies because they wanted to see and hear Herr Hitler.

Prior to each speech, onlookers and participants were
overwhelmed
by the parades of banners, the communal singing and the general histrionic atmosphere, all designed to whip up the people in preparation for the appearance of their new Messiah. His love of grand opera was the inspiration for the spectacle of these rallies, with touches of church ritual. For hours the people would wait for his arrival in the hall, entertained, stirred and captivated by the marching music. There would be short speeches by lesser people,
while everyone waited impatiently for the star of the National Socialist Party to arrive. Whispers were purposely to insinuate there might be some reason for his failure to arrive, making tension mount to fever pitch.

Then he would enter with his retinue, and the crowd would erupt with shouts of ‘
Heil! Heil!
’

All his speeches were structured to open with the denunciation of the government and their actions since 1918. He called those who signed the armistice of 11 November 1918 ‘November
criminals
’, and he condemned them and the republic for bringing this humiliation upon them; many Germans were in complete
agreement
. Thousands who were dissatisfied with the republic came to hear him. He launched a verbal attack on whatever group or race seemed appropriate, but his targets were usually Jews and Bolshevists. He had learned how to work up the crowd into a frenzy by this point, and their elated cheering and applause would lift him to a tremendous state of excitement that continued until he had delivered his triumphant call for unity with which he always finished his speech.

His techniques were pure theatre. He learned to seize and
interpret
the atmosphere and sensations of each occasion. His skill as an orator was such that while he vilified those who had betrayed Germany and condemned all who threatened its racial purity, he had little of substance to offer them by way of solutions, and he used rhetoric that promised more than it could deliver. But he did it all with consummate skill. His body language spoke as loudly as his voice. The wild gesticulating familiar from newsreels was not the physical reaction to apparent mad ranting but carefully choreographed gestures, each the gesture of a character he had seen at the opera.

At some point he even had some tutorage from an actor, not necessarily for the speeches but for all the personas he developed over time, from the serious politician, to the surprisingly witty man in private, to the suddenly furious and raging madman against whom nobody was going to argue. The ranting was often, though
not always, an act to ensure that he got his way. As a child he managed this by throwing temper tantrums, which his mother invariably gave in to. By this technique, he came to dominate her, and it worked for him on virtually everyone around him.
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Some of his closest associates felt that he induced these rages simply to frighten those about him. Hermann Rauschning
recognised
his ‘technique by which he would throw his entire entourage into confusion by well-timed fits of rage and thus make them more submissive’.
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But there were also some genuine rages of a man who would not be questioned, contradicted or argued with, and furthermore would not stand for anything not being the way he wanted or needed it to be. Karl von Wiegand, the German-born journalist who moved to America, reported that among Hitler’s staff there was a tacit understanding: ‘For God’s sake, don’t excite the Fuehrer [
sic
] – which means do not tell him bad news – do not mention things which are not as he conceives them to be.’
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Frederick Augustus Voigt, a British journalist of German descent, observed, ‘Close collaborators for many years said that Hitler was always like this – that the slightest difficulty or obstacle could make him scream with rage.’
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Those were the kind of rages that he seemed to have no control over, and which became far more frequent in later years, but in earlier years – certainly before the Second World War – he often maintained complete control over his sudden and fierce outbursts.

The rumour among those in German theatre and cinema of the 1930s and 1940s was that he had taken lessons, though no one ever admitted being his drama teacher. There were probably a number of such teachers, but none of them, especially when the Nazi reign was coming to an end, wanted to be named,
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which was wise because after the war, actors, directors, writers and artists who had worked for the Third Reich’s theatre and film industry were all punished according to the seriousness of their crimes and paid the price for profiting from Hitler’s celebrity cult.

On one occasion, some years after he had come to power, Hitler
was lunching at the Film Institute. Film director Alfred Zeisler recalled that Hitler flew into a rage at someone at the
neighbouring
table who mentioned the word ‘Jew’, ranting on for about ten minutes, much to the embarrassment of all the people there. Zeisler’s impression of Hitler’s tirades was that in the course of such a rage he worked himself into a trance-like state in which he lost contact with his surroundings and enjoyed the uninhibited
expression
of his feelings. Zeisler believed that Hitler went out of his way at times to find cause to rant and rave, and when he found it he worked hard at increasing its intensity in order to attain this trance-like state.
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Those close to him, especially those with musical knowledge, recognised that Hitler understood Wagner’s use of leitmotivs, employing repetition, thundering crescendos, and rhythm in his speech which mesmerised audiences. Ernst Hanfstaengl, who played piano for Hitler, wrote that when he played the
Meistersinger
prelude, he noticed that ‘whole interweavings of leitmotifs, of embellishments of counterpoint, and musical contrast and
arguments
, were exactly mirrored in the patterns of his speeches, which were symphonic in construction and ended in a great climax, like the blare of Wagner’s trombones.’
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Hanfstaengl also observed that Hitler’s arm movements during his speeches were similar to a conductor using his baton.

From opera, from music and from cinema, Hitler learned how to perform as the
Führer
. It was his greatest role.

L
ike all who worshipped Wagner, Hitler had to make a
pilgrimage
to the Bayreuth Festival, which Wagner himself had
instituted
as a showcase for his own operas; Hitler made his first visit there on either 30 September or 1 October 1923. The Bayreuth
Festspielhaus
contained many architectural innovations to accommodate the large orchestras and allowed Wagner the scope he needed to stage his epic works. Since the festival opened in 1876 with a performance of
Das Rheingold
, it had become the
destination
for all Wagner pilgrims.

After Wagner's death in 1883, his son Siegfried hosted the festival, aided by his English-born wife Winifred. They had married in 1915 when he was forty-five and she seventeen. He had not wanted to marry at all, but his parents needed their son to provide heirs to the Wagner dynasty, and he carried the genes of genius, being a composer himself who actually wrote more operas than his father had. However, not only was he not the genius his father was thought to be, but marriage was not convenient for his bisexual lifestyle. In the end he gave into his parents' demands, if only to protect himself from journalist Maximilian Harden, who openly accused several public figures of homosexuality, including Prince Philipp of Eulenburg-Hertefeld, who was a friend of Kaiser Wilhelm II. With further names about to be exposed, Siegfried agreed to meet Winifred at the Bayreuth Festival in 1914.

Winifred Marjorie Williams was born in Hastings on 23 June 1897 to writer John Williams and wife Emily. Both parents died before Winifred was two, and she was raised in a series of homes until she was adopted by a distant German relative of her mother, Henrietta, and her husband Karl Klindworth, a musician and
friend of Richard Wagner. Winifred was brought up on Wagner and by her mid-teens she knew all of his operas – and she forgot England. Gottfried Wagner said of his grandmother, ‘She became 150 per cent German and also 150 per cent Wagnerian. She grew up with that whole ideological world view and that's what she always represented strongly to the outside world.'
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Winifred was chosen to become Siegfried's wife, and they married on 22 September 1915. For her, it was the veritable fairytale dream come true: in seventeen years she had gone from being a penniless orphan to being mistress of Bayreuth – that was almost like being a German princess, because the Wagners were royalty to many of the German people, living in a grand mansion, Villa Wahnfried. ‘The attitude of the people of Bayreuth to the Wagners was like that of the English to the Windsors,' recalled one of Winifred's neighbours, Pinchas Joeli. ‘By Bayreuth standards, Villa Wahnfried was Buckingham Palace. The Wagner family was
the
family of Bayreuth.'
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Following their marriage, they had four children in rapid
succession
: Wieland (born 1917), Friedelind (1918), Wolfgang (1919) and Verena (1920). To the public eye they were a happy family, but for years Siegfried and Winifred had been living their separate lives as Siegfried went back to his old ways, seeking out men. This deeply hurt his wife, who took sole charge of the children. Her rejection by Siegfried and the pressure of running the house and raising the children left their mark on her – and little room for feelings. ‘She wasn't warm or tender,' said granddaughter Daphne Wagner. ‘I can't remember her ever hugging me.'
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When Hitler first visited the Wagners at Villa Wahnfried in Bayreuth he was warmly greeted by Richard Wagner's 86-year-old widow Cosima, who embraced and kissed him. The whole Wagner family welcomed Hitler with open arms, with the exception of Siegfried. Winifred was a frustrated wife, kept in her place by four children, a host of aunts and her mother-in-law, so she was especially warm towards Hitler, who was still young and someone Winifred could easily idolise. He in turn was flattered. Winifred
later said, ‘I must admit my first impression of him was excellent. His eyes in particular were incredibly attractive. Very blue, large and expressive eyes.'
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Also there to welcome Hitler was British author and racial
theorist
Houston Stewart Chamberlain, who was married to Cosima's daughter Eva. Houston had devoted his life to studying and
writing
about the work of Richard Wagner. In 1889, the year Hitler was born, Houston had arrived in Germany from England and remained, becoming a German citizen. He immersed himself in the racial theories Wagner preached, which confirmed his own theory that the Roman Empire was brought down by racial impurity. He wrote of the opposition between an Aryan race and a
destructive
Jewish race, and his 1899 book
Foundations of the Nineteenth Century
expressed his racial theory of the destiny of the superior Aryans to rule inferior races, which had been embraced by Wagner and Cosima. Winifred embraced it too. She was, said her grandson Gottfried Wagner, ‘an absolutely militant anti-Semite. She was anti-Semitic and racist with everything that entailed.'
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Chamberlain quickly concluded that Hitler was ‘God's gift to Germany', and wrote, ‘With one blow you have transformed the state of my soul … that Germany, in the hour of her greatest need, brings forth a Hitler is proof of her vitality.'
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Winifred considered Hitler to be the Messiah of Wagner's prophecy, but Siegfried saw him as ‘a fraud and an upstart'.
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Hitler was now a star, but only within the Nazi Party. He wanted to be
the
star of the party, and more than that, the star of Germany. Adopting as his maxim ‘All or nothing', he and General Ludendorff led the Munich Putsch on 9 November 1923. It was intended to be the start of a revolution. Winifred Wagner was in Munich on that day to see history being made. Gottfried Wagner recalled, ‘My grandmother was well aware there was going to be a putsch. She told me many times that she wanted to take a pistol with her and be actively involved.'
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With three thousand stormtroopers, Hitler, Ludendorff and Göring marched to the centre of Munich, confident that the
army would not open fire on legendary General Ludendorff. But when they came up against a column of police in the narrow Residenzstrasse, a shot rang out – it isn't known who fired the first bullet – and the shooting began. It took just around one minute for the putsch to be crushed. The biggest gamble of Hitler's life up to that point had failed, and it looked like his political career had been brought to an unexpected and humiliating end.

His failure merely strengthened Winifred's fanaticism. She declared publicly, ‘I frankly admit that we too are under the spell of this person, that we who stood by him in the days of his good fortune are also loyal to him in his hour of need.'
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Awaiting trial in jail, Hitler quickly fell into a depression and talked of suicide. Friends talked him out of it, and his spirits quickly rose when he realised that his trial for treason was an opportunity to make it his stage from which to deliver his ‘messianic message'.
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His friends all pleaded innocent, but he took everyone by surprise by pleading guilty and admitting full responsibility for his actions, proceeding to deliver a speech in which he proclaimed himself as the saviour of the Fatherland.

Many in the court, including the judge, were impressed. So was the Nazi Party, which immediately ejected General Ludendorff from his position as party leader and replaced him with Hitler, who, although in Landsberg Prison, was now in the position he had worked hard to attain, leader of the National Socialists. He was sentenced to five years, but his trial had turned into a personal triumph, and he hung a laurel wreath of victory in his cell. During his imprisonment he wrote
Mein Kampf
(
My Struggle
), expounding his doctrine of anti-Semitism and
Lebensraum
– the ‘living space' Hitler would choose for ethnic Germans throughout territories he would one day seize in eastern Europe – all written on stationery that Winifred Wagner sent to him along with food parcels. Writing his book on Bayreuth paper gave the book a parallel with the past – Hitler's life and struggle put down for posterity on paper from the home of the Master.

Wagner remained an overpowering influence on Hitler, right
down to his choice of title for his book. There were a number of words in Wagner's writings that Hitler used, turning them into a code. ‘
Kampf
' was one of those words, and in Hitler's eyes the word referred to his struggle against Jews and other ‘aliens'. ‘
Wolf
' was another code word, which in the
Ring
operas refers to the god Wotan. Hitler applied the word to himself, and the children of Siegfried and Winifred Wagner called him ‘Wolf'. Hitler's wartime sanctuary in Poland became known as
Wolfsschanze
– Wolf's Lair.

Hitler also took the word ‘Barbarossa' from Wagner, derived from the words ‘barbaric' and ‘barbarian', to indicate that the German people could return to their barbarous roots, free of conscience to wage war and havoc, which was not a negative but a positive. Barbarossa would become the code word for the invasion of Russia.

As he wrote
Mein Kampf
, he listened to Wagner on the
gramophone
he was permitted in his room. At this time Winifred Wagner, recalling her father-in-law's
Die Walküre
when Siegmund pulls the sword out of the ash tree, predicted that Hitler was the man who would ‘pull the sword out of the German oak' and save Germany from Jewish corruption.
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In 1925 Hitler attended the Bayreuth Festival for the first time. He later remembered, ‘The next morning Mrs Wagner brought me flowers. I was thirty-six years old and the sky was full of violins.' The attraction was mutual. In 1934 Helga von Dolega Kozierowski was a guest at Villa Wahnfried when she saw a photo of Hitler, taken in the 1920s, hanging in the dining room. ‘How long has it been there?' she asked Winifred Wagner. ‘For ages,' Frau Wagner replied. ‘He belongs there.'
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Bayreuth was Hitler's spiritual home, the
Festspielhaus
the temple where he worshipped his god.

Hitler now resolved to avoid open violence, saying, ‘If we can't outshoot our opponents, we must overwhelm them by force of numbers. We must win support instead of spreading terror.'
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He presented himself as a respectable citizen, and began wearing dark suits and surrounding himself with children in white, emulating Jesus – ‘Suffer the little children to come unto me.' He was still working on his style, often imitating the mannerisms of the
military leaders to impress the lower ranks, and took to carrying a riding crop and wearing jodhpurs to emphasise his authority. He also had an eye for young women.

Nothing is more sexually attractive than power, and since Hitler could never have been described as a handsome man, his sex appeal lay in his power. For most older, less celebrated men, a younger woman is just a fantasy, but for those who have fame, wealth and, above all, power, it's a reality, and for Hitler, a celebrity of his own making, younger women were readily available.

He was wearing jodhpurs and carrying his crop when he met a very pretty girl, Maria Reiter, in Kurpark, a Berchtesgaden park (in 1927 or 1928). She was sixteen, he thirty-seven; he was walking his dog, she hers. They stopped and talked. He liked her ‘fresh Nordic charm'. She worked in a shop in Obersalzberg, one of Hitler's favourite retreats. He asked her out, and she said yes. She told her sister, ‘He cuts a fine figure with those riding breeches and that riding crop.'
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They began taking long rides in his Mercedes. He called her ‘Mimi', and at his request she called him ‘Wolf'. He told her that he wanted to marry her and have blond children, but first he had to save Germany. They continued to meet in his Munich apartment and dreamed about their future together.
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She later recalled how he impressed upon her that he wanted her ‘to be his wife, to found a family with her, to have blonde children, but at the moment he had not the time to think of such things. Repeatedly Hitler spoke of his duty, his mission.'
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He told her to wait, and then they would eventually be together. It was Hitler's first known love affair.

Hitler was supposedly attracted to Winifred Wagner, although whether he was in love with her is speculation. Winifred was an important person in Germany, and she had the family link to Richard Wagner. But she was not of Wagner's blood, and she was older than Maria by fourteen years. It must have been a dilemma for Hitler to choose between the two, although Winifred was politically more desirable. Marrying her would be like marrying nobility. But Maria was more attractive and much younger.

He was sexually drawn to teenage girls – as are many men who achieve celebrity status, who not only attract women much younger than themselves but are easily drawn to them
because
they make themselves available. This has been evident in the world of ‘celebrity' through the decades. Among film stars, rock stars, sports stars, and celebrities of every kind, there have always been men who, regardless of their mature years, have publicly or privately enjoyed romantic and sexual relationships with teenage girls – Charlie Chaplin, Errol Flynn, Bill Wyman and Tony Curtis are among those who have at some point in their lives shown a predilection for teenage girls. Maria Reiter was completely captivated by her older lover, but while he was flattered and excited by the attention she gave him, he ignored her for months, plunging her into a deep depression. He was spending time with other young women. One of them was Henriette ‘Henny' Hoffmann, the daughter of Heinrich Hoffmann.