Hitler

Question’. It suited him to emphasize that Hitler had from Linz days hated the Jews. His suggestion that Hitler’s father (whom he had not known) had been a pronounced antisemite is probably incorrect. Alois Hitler’s own more moderate form of pan-Germanism had differed from that of the Schönerer movement in its continued allegiance to the Emperor of Austria and accorded with the line adopted by the dominant party in Upper Austria, the Deutsche Volkspartei (German People’s Party), which admitted Jews to membership. The vehemently antisemitic as well as radical German nationalist Schönerer movement certainly had a strong following in and around Linz, and no doubt included some at least of Hitler’s teachers among itssupporters. But antisemitism seems to have been relatively unimportant in his school compared with the antagonism towards the Czechs. Hitler’s own later recollection was probably in this respect not inaccurate, when he told Albert Speer that he had become aware of the ‘nationalities problem’ – by which he meant vehement hostility towards the Czechs – at school, but the ‘danger of Jewry’ had only been made plain to him in Vienna.
    The young Hitler, himself taken while still in Linz by Schönerer’s ideas, could scarcely have missed the emphatic racial antisemitism which was so integral to them. But for the Schönerer supporters in the Linz of Hitler’s day, antisemitism appears to have been a subdominant theme in the cacophony of anti-Czech clamour and trumpeted Germanomania. It certainly did not prevent Hitler’s warm expressions of gratitude in postcards and the present of one of his watercolours to Dr Bloch, the Jewish physician who had treated his mother in her last illness. The deep, visceral hatred of his later antisemitism was of a different order altogether. That was certainly not present in his Linz years.
    There is no evidence that Hitler was distinctively antisemitic by the time he parted company with Kubizek in the summer of 1908. Hitler himself claimed that he became an antisemite within two years of arriving in Vienna. Could, then, the transformation be placed in the year he spent, mainly in Felberstraße, between leaving Kubizek and becoming a vagrant? The testimony of Lanz von Liebenfels would fit this chronology. But we have seen that this is of highly doubtful value. Hitler’s descent into abject poverty in autumn 1909 might seem an obvious time to search for a scapegoat and find it in the figure of the Jew. But he had the opportunity less then than at any other time in Vienna to ‘read up’ on the subject, as he claimed in
Mein Kampf
.
    Not only that: Reinhold Hanisch, his close companion over the following months, was adamant that Hitler ‘in those days was by no means a Jew hater. He became one afterwards.’ Hanisch emphasized Hitler’s Jewish friends and contacts in the Men’s Home to demonstrate the point. A one-eyed locksmith called Robinsohn spared Hitler some small change to help him out financially from time to time. (The man’s name was actually Simon Robinson, traceable in the Men’s Home in 1912–13.) Josef Neumann, as we have seen, became, as Hanisch put it, ‘a real friend’ to Hitler. He was said to have ‘liked Hitler very much’ and to have been ‘of course highly esteemed’ by him. A postcard salesman,Siegfried Löffner (misnamed Loeffler by Hanisch), was also ‘one of Hitler’s circle of acquaintances’, and, as we remarked, took sides with him in the acrimonious conflict with Hanisch in 1910. Hitler preferred, as we observed, to sell his pictures to Jewish dealers, and one of them, Jacob Altenberg, subsequently spoke well of the business relationship they had conducted. Hanisch’s testimony finds confirmation in the later comment of the anonymous resident of the Men’s Home in the spring of 1912, that ‘Hitler got along exceptionally well with Jews, and said at one time that they were a clever people who stick together better than the Germans do’.
    The three years that Hitler spent in the Men’s Home certainly gave him every opportunity to pore over antisemitic newpapers, pamphlets, and cheap literature. But, leaving aside the fact that the chronology no longer matches Hitler’s own assertion of a transformation within two years of arriving in Vienna, Karl Honisch, we saw, makes a point of emphasizing Hitler’s strong views on ‘Jesuits’ and the ‘Reds’, though makes no mention at all of any hatred of Jews.