Hitler

Hitler certainly joined in talk about the Jews in the Men’s Home. But his standpoint was, according to Hanisch’s account, by no means negative. Hanisch has Hitler admiring the Jews for their resistance to persecution, praising Heine’s poetry and the music of Mendelssohn and Offenbach, expressing the view that the Jews were the first civilized nation in that they had abandoned polytheism for belief in one God, blaming Christians more than Jews for usury, and dismissing the stock-in-trade antisemitic charge of Jewish ritual murder as nonsense. Only Josef Greiner, of those who claimed to have witnessed Hitler at first hand in the Men’s Home, speaks of him as a fanatical Jew-hater in that period. But, as we have noted, Greiner’s testimony is worthless.
    There is, therefore, no reliable contemporary confirmation of Hitler’s paranoid antisemitism during the Vienna period. If Hanisch is to be believed, in fact, Hitler was not antisemitic at all at this time. Beyond that, Hitler’s close comrades during the First World War also recalled that he voiced no notable antisemitic views. The question arises, then, whether Hitler had not invented his Viennese ‘conversion’ to antisemitism in
Mein Kampf
; whether, in fact, his pathological hatred of the Jews only emerged in the wake of the lost war, in 1918–19.
    Why might Hitler fabricate the claim that he had become an ideological antisemite in Vienna? And, equally, why might a ‘conversion’ at theend of the war be regarded as something to be concealed by a story of an earlier transformation? The answer lies in the image Hitler was establishing for himself in the early 1920s, and particularly following the failed putsch of 1923 and his trial the following spring. This demanded the self-portrait painted in
Mein Kampf
, of the nobody who struggled from the first against adversity, and, rejected by the academic ‘establishment’, taught himself through painstaking study, coming – above all through his own bitter experiences – to unique insights about society and politics that enabled him without assistance to formulate at the age of around twenty a rounded ‘world-view’. This unchanged ‘world-view’, he was saying in 1924, provided him with the claim to leadership of the national movement, and indeed with the claim to be Germany’s coming ‘great leader’. Perhaps by then Hitler had even convinced himself that all the pieces of the ideological jigsaw had indeed fallen into place during his Vienna years. In any case, by the early 1920s no one was in a position to gainsay the story. An admission that he had become an ideological antisemite only at the end of the war, as he lay blinded from mustard gas in a hospital in Pasewalk and heard of Germany’s defeat and the revolution, would certainly have sounded less heroic, and would also have smacked of hysteria.
    However, it is difficult to believe that Hitler of all people, given the intensity of his hatred for the Jews between 1919 and the end of his life, had remained unaffected by the poisonous antisemitic atmosphere of the Vienna he knew – one of the most virulently anti-Jewish cities in Europe. It was a city where, at the turn of the century, radical antisemites advocated punishing sexual relations between Jews and non-Jews as sodomy, and placing Jews under surveillance around Easter to prevent ritual child-murder. Schönerer, the racial antisemite, had notably helped to stir up the hatred. Lueger was able to exploit the widespread and vicious antisemitism to build up his Christian Social Party and consolidate his hold on power in Vienna. Hitler greatly admired both. Once more, it would have been strange had he of all people admired them but been unaffected by such an essential stock-in-trade of their message as their antisemitism. Certainly, he learnt from Lueger the gains to be made from popularizing hatred against the Jews. The explicitly antisemitic newspaper Hitler read, and singled out for praise, the
Deutsches Volksblatt
, selling around 55,000 copies a day at the time, described Jews as agents of decomposition and corruption, and repeatedly linkedthem with sexual scandal, perversion, and prostitution. Leaving aside the probably contrived incident of the caftan-Jew, Hitler’s description of his gradual exposure through the antisemitic gutter press to deep anti-Jewish prejudice and its impact upon him while in Vienna has an authentic ring about it.
    Probably no single encounter produced his