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It's January 1930. From the epicenter of New York City, the shockwaves of the Wall Street Crash ripple out across the globe. It will take time for the full impact of the financial earthquake to hit. But when it does, it will cause devastation. Millions across the world will lose their jobs, their savings, their homes, their lives. People will suffer and starve. Crime and corruption will soar. Unemployment will go through the roof.
Welcome to the Great Depression. In the past decades, there's been a growing interdependence between nations. Between the great financial hubs, where shares are traded on international exchanges. When New York sneezes, London catches a cold, as the saying goes. And as with Berlin, the Wall Street crash will ultimately render this patient terminal. There's a cruel irony here, for despite the crippling war reparations imposed by the Treaty of Versailles,
The new post-war Weimar Republic, against all odds, had begun to claw its way back. It was resembling the old German powerhouse of yore. It had even been readmitted to the international club, joining the League of Nations. But there's a harsh reality to Germany's revival. The recovery has been underwritten by massive American loans. Under the Dawes plan, then the Young plan, the bottom line is:
that Germany is in hock to the US for $7 billion, a staggering $112 billion in today's money. There's been little thought given as to how or when these debts might be repaid. It's a can that's been kicked down the road. Gustav Stresemann, the revered German statesman who died on the eve of the Wall Street crash, had warned of the fragility of the arrangement, the potential for ruination should America suddenly withdraw its short-term credits.
And now, abruptly, it has. From Neuser, this is Real Dictators. Professor Thomas Weber. The Wall Street crash is impacting Germany much more than a lot of countries. I mean, things in a lot of countries are bad enough, but in Germany, things are particularly bad. Unemployment soon surges to more than 40%. The crucial difference is
The pre-existing problems in Germany, they could still somehow be managed before then, but it really now only needed one major crisis for everything to collapse. And it is through the Wall Street crash that Germany can no longer deal with all these fragmentations and tensions and disagreements within its system.
It is now that there is suddenly a stage, a new stage for people on the radical right and on the radical left who promise to find a totally different answer. Who's just saying, look, obviously this crisis was happening in America, but the reason why this is hitting us so badly is just because our entire
political, economic and moral system is corrupt. We don't need incremental change, but we need a totally new Germany. German industrial production will fall by half from 1929 to 1932. Within months, one of the country's biggest lenders, the Darmstadt Nationalbank, will collapse, the first of many such institutions. As boom turns to bust,
The scale of German profligacy is laid bare. Across the land there have been vast sums squandered on vanity projects, grand municipal buildings, ornate theatres, elaborate swimming baths, there to cement prestige rather than generate wealth. A significant core of German society has remained sceptical throughout. They've maintained that the Weimar Republic's willingness to get into bed with old foes has come at too high a price.
At its peak, the depression will affect every second family in Germany. Up to 20 million of its population will become dependent on state handouts. The recent Weimar Republic of motor cars, telephones and booming consumerism will swiftly become a fatherland of dole queues, soup kitchens and bread lines. As in 1918, Germany will again be a nation that is poor, desperate and at the mercy of foreign powers.
It will be a nation with a grievance, one crying out for a savior. At this very moment in time, the Nazi Party has yet to fully comprehend this, let alone be in a position to exploit the economic situation. Life in Berlin, in Hamburg, in Munich, in Cologne, goes on as normal. The calm before the storm, before the stormtroopers.
For Adolf Hitler, early 1930 is more about consolidating his party's position. Those quiet years when he was banned from speaking were spent wooing businessmen, cultivating a middle-class backing for the Nazi Party. There are huge inroads yet to be made with the electorate. The November Reichstag elections have given the Nazis 12 seats, a toehold in the corridors of power. But this is still essentially a fringe party. Nonetheless,
there is a sense of momentum. Hitler has had a makeover. In public he is now the slick politician, dressed in a suit. He has toned down the anti-Semitic rhetoric, presenting himself as a reasonable business-like conservative. On a national level, the party is now well organized. Hitler has brought his old rival, Gregor Strasser, in from the cold. Before their falling out, Strasser had worked miracles, spreading the Nazi message while Hitler was locked up in prison.
He is once again doing a sterling job, licking the rank and file into a lean, mean, vote-winning machine. Party membership sits now at over 130,000. Meanwhile, the propaganda chief, Joseph Goebbels, is extending the party's tentacles into everyday German life, normalising what it is to be a Nazi.
As the depression hits, there will be Nazi welfare societies, Nazi job seeker clubs, Nazi trucks rolling down every street distributing Nazi loaves, possibly even Nazi fishes. Professor Nicholas of Shaughnessy. When we speak about Nazi policies and beliefs and so forth, we should remember that they're making it up as they go along.
There is not any pre-existent refrigerated set of ideals and ideologies to use. They actually said at one point, we don't want high bread prices, we don't want low bread prices, we don't want bread prices to stay the same. We want national socialist bread prices. In other words, the whole thing was actually an empty canvas. The evangelistic zeal is a force to be reckoned with.
Soon, there will be old ladies sporting swastika brooches, housewives doing stiff armed salutes. The party's burgeoning boy scout movement, the Hitler Youth, will indoctrinate a whole generation into the ways of National Socialism. At the business end, wealthy sponsors have started throwing pre-crash cash at Hitler and co. Hitler's true home will always be his alpine retreat, the Berghof.
But this recent upturn in personal fortunes has also offered Hitler a new property in downtown Munich, a nine-room apartment in the swanky district of Bogenhausen. If he has pretensions to a role as a political leader, he's got to look the part. The professionalism will continue as the Nazi party itself moves into new surrounds, a grand old building with high ceilings and huge windows, looking out onto Munich's Königsplatz.
The new HQ is known simply as "The Brown House". Hitler has a nice office inside, an oak-panelled room bedecked with a portrait of Frederick the Great. There sits too a tribute to Hitler's fanboy crush, a bust of Benito Mussolini, the ancient and the modern. That said, Hitler's natural habitat being the café rather than the office, he spends more time in the Brown House dining hall. Here he kicks back at the so-called Fuhrer table.
beneath a portrait of his deceased morphine-addled mentor, Dietrich Eckart. If there's any doubt as to who is the boss around here, then it's dispelled by the Brown House's strict no-smoking policy. Hitler cannot abide the habit. This is just about the only building in the whole of Germany, possibly the whole of Europe, that forbids it. Hitler's omnipresence is evident too in a new prescribed greeting. He is to be addressed, purely and simply, as Führer.
All other interchanges within the party's HQ are to be preceded by the salutation "Heil Hitler" and that's an order. Despite the sense of discipline, there remain those in private who express concern as to whether Hitler has what it takes to be a top-ranked politician. For one whose mantra is order, he is personally quite dysfunctional. He sleeps late. He misses meetings. No one knows where the hell he is after time.
Keeping people waiting is his stock in trade. He's honed his act to a degree, toning down the volume amid polite society. But he still has a way to go. He's a profuse sweater. He trembles. He has stomach cramps. He's prone to hysteria. And he's a hypochondriac, obsessed with avoidance of cancer. Outside Nazi walls, his opponents have already cottoned on to Hitler's histrionic tendencies.
The campaigning journalist, Karl von Ossietzky, calls Hitler a half-mad, deadbeat, cowardly, effeminate pajama character. He is one of a number to feminize the Führer. Otto Braun, the social democratic prime minister of Prussia, refers to Hitler as the Pied Piper of Braunau. An eminent Catholic denounces him as a pagan worshipper of Woden, the Norse god. At Nazi Central, they're struggling too.
There is no notion of committee meetings, agenda, minutes or memoranda. This is a party whose entire future rests inside Hitler's head. What thoughts he does share are privy only to his inner circle of yes-men: Putzi Hamstengel, Heinrich Hoffmann, Max Amann and Julius Schreck, Professor Mariam Mufti,
He had a very unbureaucratic style of rule. There is very little documentation. He was very vague on policy. He was uncooperative and sullen in almost all the meetings that he had with his staff people. And he very carefully created chaos so that he would come off as being indispensable to the entire mission.
He was therefore the ultimate arbiter and source of unity. This was very, very carefully cultivated by him because of his chosen leadership style of embedding chaos in everything. When a party exists as a cult of personality, it cannot survive that personality's downfall. Gregor Strasser in particular has reservations about Hitler's personal life. In his new Munich pad,
Hitler has installed Maria Reichert, his former landlady, to act as housekeeper. She moves in along with her mother. No real problem there. That's the way things are done in fashionable society. But there is another resident, Hitler's niece, daughter of his half-sister Angela, the now 21-year-old Geli Raubow. The pair are seen out frequently.
Often at one of Hitler's favorite coffee shops, the Café Heck, where he likes to hold court in the late afternoon. They go to the theater, even out shopping. Hitler tags along like a devoted puppy dog as Geli hits the clothes boutiques, poring over the dresses and the latest fashions. Tall, with long brown hair, leggy, Geli likes to go swimming in low-cut swimsuits, getting her protective uncle rather hot under the collar.
She fails to tempt Uncle Adolf into the water on every occasion. Hitler has the good sense to know that no self-respecting leader should be seen dead in a pair of trunks. As we've discussed previously, the nature of their relationship is open to question. At worst, it's an incestuous love affair, at best, that of a doting uncle, unnaturally beguiled by his young relative.
It's quite clear that Hitler felt absolutely attracted to torture and that would have just been as taboo at the time as it is now. It really doesn't make a difference whether or not this was the daughter of his sister or his half-sister. This would have still been seen as taboo. Their inseparability, their devotion to each other has the whiff of deep oddness about it. It's a scandal just waiting to happen. But for the moment...
What redeems Hitler, as it does every time, is his sheer magnificence as a speaker. His ability to spellbind thousands of people from the podium. When Hitler is in full flow, all can be forgiven. If the Nazi Party is Adolf Hitler, then for the time being, and for all Hitler's faults, so be it. The political landscape Hitler is venturing into is a complicated one.
Since the ousting of the Kaiser at the end of World War I, Germany has been a republic. Central power resides in Berlin, but there is also a federal arrangement. There are 17 states or Länder, each with its own provincial government. The most powerful, Prussia and Bavaria, function almost as independent nations. The most powerful figure in the republic is the president, but post-elected on a seven-year basis.
It is currently occupied by the elderly military leader, Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg. Each election, 577 deputies are elected to the national parliament, the Reichstag. A cabinet is formed under a chancellor. Chancellors are appointed, not elected, hired and frequently fired by the president, who enlists them to do his bidding. The chancellor wrangles his cabinet together by horse-trading the senior posts between the main parties.
The system, when functioning, is a collaborative process designed to please everybody. Though it has certain built-in flaws. The first is that due to the nature of coalition governments, it's possible to attain key cabinet seats, even to become chancellor itself, without one's party having a majority in the Reichstag. The second flaw is a fatal one. Due to the succession of national crises that have enveloped the Weimar Republic,
The President, in cahoots with his Chancellor, is empowered to suspend Parliament altogether and rule by emergency decree. The cabinet is then permitted to govern without the consent of the Reichstag. It becomes, in effect, a constitutional dictatorship. Dr Paul Moore,
So a great deal depends on the character of the president and how he wants to govern. Hindenburg's predecessor, Friedrich Ebert of the Social Democrats, had used the emergency decrees, but it's much stepped up under Hindenburg. You know, Hindenburg has a much more authoritarian mindset. He has a much more activist role in governing through the emergency decrees.
So the role of the chancellor is in a sense defined partly by how the president chooses to govern. And the chancellors are coming thick and fast in the late period of the Weimar years. So it's a very personalized form of government. A lot of decision making is taking place in personal discussions, you know, around the dining table in the president's villa, for example, just as much as in cabinet. These are weaknesses to be exploited by Hitler. If not now, then soon.
For if there is one thing guaranteed in the Weimar Republic, it's that new elections will always be around the corner. Sure enough, in March 1930, with the economy beginning to nosedive, a dispute over labour laws sees Chancellor Hermann Müller turfed out of office. The role goes to Heinrich Brüning of the Zentrum, Centre Party. The good news for the Nazis is that Brüning is about as weak and ineffectual a Chancellor as they could possibly have wished for.
True to form, Brüning caves under pressure. The Reichstag is dissolved. Under Article 48 of the Weimar Constitution, a protocol that will become very familiar to Adolf Hitler, Brüning empowers the president to rule through him by decree. Yet more elections are set for September 1930. Hitler prepares to pull out all the stops on the campaign trail. Meanwhile, Joseph Goebbels sets out his program for a summer of agitation.
Aside from any personal skeletons in Hitler's cupboard, the main issue for the man on the street is concern over that personal storm-trooping army of his, the SA, the brown shirts. Hitler professes to be a man of peace, but at the same time his goons are out cracking communist skulls. The optics are not good.
Hitler's new bodyguard corps, the Schutzstaffel or SS, seem to spend as much time scrapping with their own SA as they do protecting their boss. But Joseph Goebbels has already got that covered. It's typical of Hitler's consummate spin doctor to retrieve the situation with a stroke of publicity genius. He will make stormtroopers sympathetic. He will turn Hitler's hooligans into victims and one of them into a martyr.
Enter stage right, a young man named Horst Wessel. Wessel is a 22-year-old brown shirt, a gifted scholar. He had shocked his family by rebelling against his comfortable upbringing and dropping out of university. He's since gone off to live in the roughhouses of Berlin, shacking up with a prostitute. Unable to pay his rent, constantly in trouble, his landlady's patience is wearing thin. She tries to evict Wessel, unsuccessfully.
With her connections to the Communist Party, she calls upon some local Reds to act as muscle to turf Wessel out into the street. The exact details of what happens next are unclear, but when the Communist heavies turn up to confront Wessel, there's a scuffle. He is shot in the stomach at point-blank range, mortally wounded, though still clinging onto life as he's carted off to hospital.
Fellow Nazis discover that Wessel was, underneath it all, a law student who had been secretly writing poetry. Goebbels seizes his opportunity. This was no bruiser, killed in a squalid brawl, he proclaims. This was the flower of German youth, cut down in his prime. Among Wessel's writings is a peen to patriotism called Raise High the Flag.
It is, to any sane critic, a piece of dog-roth, all about comrades being shot by Reds, about millions looking upon the swastika full of hope. Goebbels arranges for it to be set to music, borrowing the tune from an old German folk song. The Nazis have themselves an instant hymn, a theme tune. On January 14th, 1930, while young Horst is still wheezing on his deathbed, the Horst Vessel Song,
is debuted at a party rally in Berlin's Sportspalast. The words are belted out with trembling emotion by the 14,000 gathered. When Wessel is finally laid to rest on March 1st, the Communists rain stones down upon the funeral cortege and lob missiles at the burial party over the cemetery wall. But Goebbels knows what he's doing. He has demonstrated perfectly well to moderate Germans just who exactly are the thugs.
At Goebbels behest, Horst Wessel is interred with full Nazi honours. 30,000 people turn out to pay tribute. As Little Joe gives his shrieking graveside eulogy, the film cameras roll, turning the events into a key Nazi propaganda stunt. In Nazi Germany, the Horst Wessel song will become, alongside Deutschland über alles, the official national anthem. It will be compulsory to raise one's right arm while warbling it,
In 1933, with the Nazis fresh into power, the young communist who shot Wessel will be dragged from prison and summarily executed. As polling day looms, Hitler remains all too aware of the division between the two big workers' movements: the Nazis and the Communists. It's bad politics to have your proletariats split into two opposing camps. They should, in theory, form one organic electoral mass.
He makes a strategic move to pitch his party's message at workers across the board. He's hoping that those of a left-wing persuasion will be drawn, if not to the national, then to the socialist part of his agenda. There are, after all, broad similarities between the Nazis and their left-wing rivals. Hitler even talks in vaguely Marxist terms of workers throwing off their chains. Hitler's claim to be the common man's champion only increases.
Chancellor Brüning, ruling unchecked, continues to make a hash of things, underlining the need for strong and stable governance. As the campaign hots up, once again Goebbels excels. He organizes a staggering 6,000 Nazi meetings across the country in stadiums, halls, and huge tents, accompanied by torchlight parades and all kinds of pageantry. He prints two million leaflets to be distributed to German households.
To a new generation of first-time voters, 4 million of them. The Great War means less than it did to those who came before. German restoration is less about revenge. It's about cleaning up the almighty mess in the Reichstag.
The Nazi party and Hitler in particular was not making any material promises. He was not saying, here is what we will do and this is going to be our policy agenda. He is not programmatic in his speeches. What he does so very, very effectively is to speak in terms of renewing pride, restoring honor, morality, struggle, unity, greatness, idealism, hatred, oppression.
of Marxism, imbuing fear. That's what he was good at. August Wilhelm, the youngest son of the exiled Kaiser, soon pledges his allegiance to the Nazis. This only increases the feeling of respectability for swing voters. Increasingly, they are being convinced that casting one's ballot for the Nazis is a safe move, not a risk. Professor Helen Rosch,
for many people, perhaps particularly in the middle classes, there's this feeling that we've already lost everything.
And the fact that Germany has been reduced in this way, that it's subject to these foreign powers financially, is a kind of festering wound that later on leads people who might be just ordinarily conservative or even not conservative kind of left wing in some ways to kind of turn towards Nazism because they see it as something new, something fresh that can offer them a way out.
Hitler goes on an exhaustive six-week summer tour. He kisses babies, he eats with the workers in their canteens. In these troubled times, Hitler is the one to heal the nation, he proclaims. A uniter, not a divider.
At one and the same time, he's presented as this superhuman figure, you know, sent by Providence to lead Germany back to greatness. But at the same time, Nazi messaging is also trying to present him as a man of the people, as someone who understands the struggles of the common man, who has known poverty, who has known the need to do a hard day's work on a building site himself. On Sunday, September the 14th, there are long lines at polling stations, a sense of fevered anticipation.
By the time of their close, it's evident that there have been 35 million ballots cast, 4 million more than in the last election in 1928. For the Nazis, such a high turnout is a promising sign. Back at HQ, the mood is cautiously optimistic. According to the pollsters, it is conceivable that the Nazis could up their number of Reichstag seats from 12 to maybe 50, perhaps even 60.
which would be an extraordinary achievement. But in the early hours, as the returns come in, it's obvious that even the most fanatical optimist has grossly underestimated. At final count, the Nazis have won over 6.4 million votes, 18% of the total, a staggering eightfold increase on their previous outing. With an astonishing 107 seats, they are now the second biggest party in the Reichstag.
If there is a slight niggle, it's that the communists have also upped their share of the vote, squeezing the middle. But this result is off the scale. Hitler and his party are now major players. Even the Führer cracks a smile amid the euphoria and the popping of champagne corks. Not that Hitler will touch the stuff. He offers his pal Putzi Hamstengel the job of Nazi international press chief. Shortly after the election, Hitler is back in court again.
This time he is speaking in defence of three army officers who broke the rules on political neutrality by pledging open support for the Nazi party. Again he assures that the Nazis are about peace and legitimacy. His statement, known as Hitler's oath of legality, will turn out to be one of the greatest contrix ever pulled. His appearance at the Ulm trial, as it is known, further enhances his credentials as a man of principle.
meet and drink for the likes of Hamstengel, who is now charged with selling the Hitler message not just at home, but abroad. Hamstengel, a well-connected art publisher who studied at Harvard and speaks fluent English, starts pulling the strings. He has little difficulty in getting exposure. There are Hitler enthusiasts right across Europe. In Britain, Lord Rothermere, owner of the Daily Mail, hails the election as the rebirth of the German nation.
With no shortage of demand, Hamstengel arranges for Hitler to do an interview with another popular British newspaper, the Sunday Express. In it, Hitler discusses the injustices of Versailles and demands the return of the Polish Corridor, the land that now connects Poland to the Baltic, severing East Prussia from the rest of Germany.
There was this massive amount of rhetoric everywhere in lectures, in newspapers, in magazines, in scholarship about Germany being a body that had been mutilated, that was bleeding because these territories had been cut out of it.
I think Stresemann did a great deal to help in this stabilisation, things like the League of Nations and so on. But there's a sense in which some sectors of German society, that almost wasn't good enough. Germany should be leading the world rather than being part of a concert of powers. That's something that becomes more mainstream. Hans Stengel follows up with the power with the Times of London.
in which Hitler assures the world that he would never act in anything other than a strictly legal manner. He is a man you can do business with. Next up comes the mighty American media. Hamstengel hits up his contacts in the vast Hearst publishing empire. They seem particularly willing to eulogize this new German sensation. Meanwhile, on October 13th, the Reichstag reopens for business. The 107 new Nazi deputies march in and take their seats.
They're dressed in SA brown shirt uniforms. As the parliamentary roll is called, each barks notification of their attendance. "Present: Heil Hitler." Outside on the streets of Berlin, there was an orgy of violence, culminating in the smashing up of Jewish owned shops. The SA get away with it. On this occasion they were ordered to disguise themselves in plain clothes.
The sudden flurry of media attention prompts some strange creatures to crawl out of the woodwork. In one of the most bizarre episodes, Hitler gets a visit from a 19-year-old London office worker. The young man, it turns out, or so he claims, is the son of Hitler's half-brother. He is Adolf Hitler's nephew, he says. His name is William Patrick Hitler. As we know from earlier episodes on Hitler's early years,
The Hitler family history is one scarred by violence, abuse, drunkenness, illegitimacy, even incest. In a not-untypical scene from Meet the Hitlers, Hitler's brother Alois Jr. had fled the family aged 14 after a violent confrontation with Alois Sr., both his and Adolf's father. Rendered penniless, he'd ended up in Ireland, working as a waiter in Dublin's Shelbourne Hotel. He was in and out of trouble with the law.
On two occasions he was imprisoned for theft. In Dublin in 1909, Alois Junior met a local girl, Brigitte Elizabeth Dowling. They got married, then settled in Liverpool, where in 1911 their son William Patrick was born. After running a small restaurant, then a boarding house, ventures which failed, Alois Junior returned to Germany where he became a razor blade salesman, abandoning his wife and child in the process.
He's since remarried. He keeps secret the fact of his other family in England. The appearance of Adolf Hitler in the British newspapers has clearly pricked the interest of Bridget. Having never received any child maintenance from Alois Junior, she sniffs an opportunity to shake down his newly famous half-brother for some quick cash.
News reaches Germany that Brigitte has pushed William Patrick into a series of press interviews in which he is set to announce himself as the Fuhrer's long-lost British nephew. Adolf Hitler acts quickly. He sends his would-be relatives a ticket and summons them to Germany forthwith. In Munich, a meeting is arranged between Brigitte, William Patrick and Adolf Hitler. Also in attendance are Alois Junior and Angela,
Hitler's half-sister, Geli Raubel's mother. The clan gathering is a heated affair. Hitler is in a rage. Not only is his brother a bigamist, but moreover these shameless foreigners have the audacity to put the squeeze on him. "They need not think they can climb on my back and get a free ride to fame," he yells. "It could destroy his career." For good measure, he denies that they share blood at all. He demands that Bridget and son kill the story.
They should return to England "as quickly as possible" and disclaim all relationship in the present and in the future. He offers to pay them 2,000 US dollars for their trouble, along with the money for the passage home. The pair agree terms and beat a retreat. Though as it turns out, they will never see a dime. Alois Junior simply pockets the cash for himself. With the potential for scandal greater than ever, Hitler summons his lawyer, Hans Frank.
There has been a further letter, he concedes, a threat to pursue what Hitler describes as "this disgusting blackmail plot." It concerns a subject that will always spook Hitler: a long-held rumor. As we learned in Hitler's early years, the possibility hangs even if only as an anecdote that Adolf Hitler is secretly one-quarter Jewish. Recent evidence suggests that the claim is unlikely to be true, but, as Hans Frank will discover,
Quashing any trace of the rumour will become Hitler's paranoid obsession. At the very least, the fact that Hitler will never be able to produce the documentary proof of an Aryan background that he demands of others is one of history's twisted ironies. Despite the goings-on in his private life, for Hitler, the year 1931 is looking good. Even the sails of Mein Kampf are picking up. Meanwhile, as a politician, he goes on a triumphant speaking tour
eulogising the Nazi gains at the ballot box to an increasingly adoring public. There will be more elections around the corner. They mustn't rest on their laurels. This time, Goebbels organises 70,000 party meetings across the country. Unfortunately, despite the martyrdom of Horst Wessel, the brown-shirt problem has reared its ugly head again.
In Berlin there has even been a minor revolt, where the local SA, tired of their subordinate role, have pushed for recognition as a standing army in waiting. This is a serious issue. Membership of the SA is now pushing one million, ten times the size of Germany's actual army, which is limited by the terms of Versailles. To control the SA is to control Germany's true martial might. On the streets, the brawling has been getting out of hand.
During 1931 there will be 50 brownshirts killed in the fighting, and more than 4,000 trials related to the political violence. Reining in the brownshirts is a tough job, but it is crucial for Hitler that he commands their utmost loyalty. Cue the return of a familiar face, another old sparring partner, Ernst Röhm. Röhm, a ruffled bruiser. The SA's founder seems the perfect man for the job.
If anyone can bring the stormtroopers to heel, he can. Rome and Hitler had a parting of the ways after the Beer Hall Putsch. Rome went off to Bolivia, where he served as a military advisor in a brutal war against Paraguay. But that was then. Overtures are made to Rome. In January 1931, he's welcomed back into the Nazi ranks. Hatchet buried. Commissioned to keep those errant brown shirts in check.
As with Gregor Strasse, Hitler is up to something Machiavellian here, keeping his friends close, his enemies closer still, presenting himself as benevolent, merciful, while scheming behind their backs. Whether he comprehends it fully himself, Ernst Röhm is seen as a serious threat by Hitler. If he chose to go rogue, he could perhaps command the SA as his own. Better to keep Röhm on side, and on a short leash.
Of all Hitler's allies from this period, Rome is perhaps the most intriguing, with his barrelled body and grizzled face scarred from battle. He's in his mid-forties, ancient by Nazi standards. He is one of the Alterkampfer, as they style themselves, the Nazi party's old fighters.
An army captain, a war hero, a recipient of the Iron Cross, first class. Ernst Rohm's soldiering on the Western Front was characterized by a wanton disregard for danger. It saw him badly wounded at Verdun. Rohm was at the forefront of Hitler's attempted 1923 uprising. On this score, his credentials are impeccable. But there's something else about this veteran that marks him out from the others. He is also gay, quite openly so.
In Germany at this time, homosexuality is illegal. According to Nazi doctrine, it's a deviancy of the lowest form. It's astonishing that Rome is tolerated within Hitler's circles at all. Not only that, Hitler even goes to great lengths to defend Rome's sexuality. He repeats that a man's private life is his own business.
Rome is such an alpha male that his homosexuality, in particular his penchant for sleeping with fellow soldiers, only makes him appear more masculine. Rome is a really fascinating figure. Perhaps for Hitler as opposed to Himmler or some of the more virulent homophobes in the Nazi party, this kind of...
What you'd call hyper-virile homosexuality that Röhm was into wasn't seen as necessarily going against German military martial ideals. You find in the Russian cadet schools there's quite a lot of homoerotic stuff going on sometimes.
So Ernst Röhm very much sees himself as a man of action. He's very popular with his stormtroopers. There's a great deal of loyalty to him. The Social Democrat Party run quite strongly with focusing on Röhm and using his homosexuality to try to discredit the Nazi Party as a whole, essentially saying, German mothers, would you want your boy in the stormtroopers? You know what they get up to, this kind of thing.
But Hitler, of course, is well aware of Rome's private life and it's certainly not an issue, doesn't seem to be an issue for Hitler before 1934. For now, Rome's main problem is that he fails to regard Hitler with the same awe as the rest of the Nazi acolytes. Rome will have none of this Heil Hitler or Führer nonsense. He even addresses Hitler by the familiar German U-form, Du. He's simply not scared of Hitler.
And failure to fear the Fuhrer, for any German, will soon turn out to be the biggest sin of all. Quietly, Himmler, head of the SS, dispatches one of his security officers to compile a dossier on Röhm. Selected for the task is a former naval officer, tall, ice-blooded. His name is Reinhard Heydrich. Heydrich will come to earn his own place in infamy just a few years from now.
as the architect of the final solution: the Holocaust. Gregor Strasser's fears that the Geli Raubel situation could blow up in Hitler's face have never gone away. Through the summer of 1931, while Hitler is preparing the Nazi party for the next stage of their offensive, Strasser watches. The relationship, seemingly, has reached new psychotic levels of jealousy, obsession and control.
Hitler has helped Geli get into university and has paid for singing lessons with the finest operatic voice coaches. But she has not proven to have much focus or much talent. Opinions on Geli differ. A naive girl with dreams of a career on the stage. Some recall her as a plain-looking spoiled brat, while others view her as a charming ingenue. Putzi Hamstengel dismisses her as an empty-headed little slut. But the end result is the same.
She is the bird in the gilded cage. And if Hitler cannot please her, then he will make damn sure no one else does. On her days alone, every time she leaves the house, Hitler arranges for chaperones. Max Amann and Heinrich Hoffmann stick to her like glue. There is a strict 11pm curfew.
Gellie is not immune to jealousy herself. She reportedly detests it when Hitler holds court in the cafes. His female admirers fawning over him, kissing his hands. This is a situation that can only be managed for so long.
Up in Berlin, Gregor Strasser's brother Otto, the black sheep of the family, has been cast out of the Nazi fold. He is keen to get his own back. He has been planting scurrilous stories in the gutter press, suggesting that Hitler and Geli's relationship is, indeed, a sexual one. Soon it emerges that Geli has finally ditched Hitler to seek out a new partner, someone her own age.
News breaks that the love rival is none other than Emil Maurice, Hitler's dumb dog's body. All hell breaks loose. Whether he catches them in bed, as has been suggested, or simply becomes aware of the affair, the Fuhrer is furious. He flies into a rage. Emil Maurice is dismissed from service. Told that he should be shot like a dog, he is extremely lucky that no one follows through on it. In the autumn, there is another suitor on the scene.
This time, a young musician from Linz, Austria. He has proposed to her, Geli tells Hitler. She wishes to leave Munich and return to Vienna. Hitler, predictably enough, forbids it. He even stops Geli visiting her own mother in Berchtesgaden, lest she make a break for the border. Though there will be another twist to this tale. On September 18th, Hitler and his niece lunch at their Munich apartment. On the menu, spaghetti, Hitler's favourite.
Shouting can be heard from the dining room. That evening, as Hitler leaves the building, set to travel to Hamburg, where he is giving a speech, Geli is witnessed yelling down the street after her uncle. The new chauffeur, Julius Schreck, drives his Fuhrer away, Heinrich Hoffmann alongside Hitler in the back. Hitler confesses to an uneasy feeling. Later, Hitler's housekeeper will recall Geli going through Hitler's pockets.
pulling out then ripping up a letter written on blue paper. It's a thank you note to Hitler, a response to a recent invitation to the theatre. It's been written by a new player in this drama, a young woman named Eva Braun. It was a Friday afternoon in October 1929, around the time Geli was moving into their apartment, when Hitler had stopped by Heinrich Hoffmann's photoshop. Eva Braun, Hoffmann's new assistant, was up a ladder,
filing documents on a high bookshelf. She was unaware of the identity of her boss's friend who had come to visit, but was intrigued by him, she recalled, with his big Macintosh raincoat, felt hat, and funny little moustache. Hoffman had noticed Hitler's eyes wander up towards his new employee's stockinged legs. "'Herr Wolf,' he said, "'meet our good little Fräulein Eva.'"
That day, they closed up early and went for a late lunch, beer and sausages, though no beer of course for Hitler. As they were leaving the restaurant, Hoffman pulled Eva to one side. "Don't you know who that is?" he whispered. "Adolf Hitler." Like Geli, Eva is a modern girl. She likes jazz, movies, sports. Like Geli, she is also unworldly, the product of a convent school. Notably, both women are just seventeen when Hitler meets them.
Neither understands the nature of relationships or the pull of a sugar daddy. Hitler, as per the script, has once again been entranced by a woman less than half his age. He will often drop in at Hoffman's studio with flowers and chocolates. "For my lovely Siren," as he calls Eva. Over the months, a bond develops. There are secret outings.
If we actually really look at Eva Brown's self-image, for instance, from her photo albums, we see someone who is kind of quite a modern woman who is fascinated with Hollywood, as Hitler is, who is fascinating with celebrity, who is fascinated with fashion. The relationship between Adolf Hitler and her was far more important in terms of companionship and in terms of a kind of emotional bond.
Hitler managed to keep up this relationship with Eva Braun over a period of 16, 17 years. Back to that September night in 1931, an upset Geli locks herself in her bedroom with instructions not to be disturbed. Later, the housekeeper hears noises, including the smashing of a perfume bottle, something she assumes to be part of the general tantrum. But next morning,
With the door still jammed and with no success in rousing Geli, Frau Reichert telephones Max Amann and another of Hitler's inner circle, Franz Schwarz. Unable to force entry, they summon a locksmith. Inside, they find Geli lying on the floor next to a couch, Hitler's Walther pistol by her side. At just 23 years old, she has shot herself in the chest, dead. Hitler has overnighted in Nuremberg at the Deutsche Hof Hotel.
That morning, his Mercedes is on its way north, heading for the highway to Hamburg. Conscious of a vehicle approaching from behind closing fast, Hitler asks Schreck to put his foot down. He has enemies. It could be an assassin. They soon realize that it's a taxi giving chase. They ease off. There is a hotel messenger boy sat up front alongside the driver. He is gesticulating furiously for them to pull over. There is an urgent phone call.
Hitler returns to the Deutsche Hof Hotel. In the lobby, a booth is set aside for him, receiver off the hook. Rudolf Hess is waiting on the line. "Has something happened?" asks Hitler. There was a pause. Then, "God, how awful!" It's said this is followed by a scream. Hitler's Mercedes drives at breakneck speed all the way back to Munich. His first order of business is to summon his attorney, Hans Frank.
There are injunctions to be issued against newspapers, for there are already stories circulating, including a rumor that Geli's nose was broken. There are other speculations too, that Himmler, the master of the dark arts, has been pulling strings. Keen to make this Geli problem go away once and for all, there are whispers of a blackmail plot involving pornographic sketches Hitler had made of Geli, revealing his dark sexual inclinations.
There is a suggestion that Hitler himself pulled the fatal trigger in a fit of rage, possibly on learning that his niece was pregnant, maybe by Hitler himself. Perhaps by the new suitor who is, possibly, a Jew. And why did nobody hear the gunshot? Hitler, as it happens, has a solid alibi. So could absolve himself from direct personal involvement. But the possibility of foul play is never pursued. The police rule it as a death by suicide.
The body spirited away without comprehensive autopsy. The death of Gili Raubal, of Hitler's niece, remains a mystery to the present day.
There are some indicators that would support the view that Hitler had her killed, but I still think that it's more likely that she seems to have killed herself. There were possibly earlier thoughts about suicide. We also have got to take seriously the fact that Hitler ultimately, of course, died committing suicide.
that he also at various times in his life talked about taking his own life and possibly also once or twice earlier had tried to commit suicide. So one issue that hasn't really been explained so far in any kind of convincing fashion is about the extent to which there is something in Hitler's immediate family, in terms of depression and so on, that would explain a relatively high suicide rate within his own family.
Hitler retreats to an empty remote country cottage out on the Tegernsee lake, an hour south of Munich. There he takes refuge, hiding away from the spotlight for a full three weeks, shutting off from everyday communication. On arrival, Schreck whispers to Hoffmann that he has hidden all the guns. The Fuhrer's own self-destructive impulses are once again to the fore. Instead, Hitler paces up and down, up and down.
He calms down only slightly when a message gets through from Hans Frank, an assurance that the press aren't going to follow up on anything salacious. On September 24th, Geli's funeral takes place in Vienna. Rome attends. So does Himmler, though there is no Hitler. Officially stateless, he is now banned from entering Austria, the country of his birth. But the next day Hitler climbs into the front seat of his Mercedes, alongside Schreck,
and is driven through the night to the border. Nazi bodyguards transfer him to another vehicle and smuggle him across the frontier, carrying him all the way to the Vienna Central Cemetery. The inscription on the headstone there is a simple one: "Here sleeps our beloved child, Geli." She was a ray of sunshine. Hitler places flowers on the grave. Hitler will keep Geli's room exactly as it was, preserved effectively as a shrine.
Within 18 months, her portrait will hang in Berlin in the Reich Chancellery. According to Hermann Göring, speaking at the Nuremberg trials, Geli's death had such a devastating effect on Hitler that it changed his relationship to all other people. In the next episode of Real Dictators, turning his attention back to politics, Adolf Hitler fails in his bid to oust President Hindenburg.
Backed by a mass campaign, the Nazis recover with a stunning election landslide. They're not just a party now, but a lifestyle. Entitled to head the new government, Hitler finds himself shut out by the Prussian elite, till, via a skillful manipulation, he can grind them into submission. Finally, in January 1933, Adolf Hitler will become Chancellor of Germany. That's next time on Real Dictators.
