Hitler's Women & Joseph Goebbels (Part 10)
54:46 Share

It's summer 1926, in the small spa town of Berchtesgaden, deep in the Bavarian Alps. In the afternoon sun, against the spectacular mountain backdrop, two young women play with their dog, a German shepherd called Marco. Off the leash, Marco runs around the grass of a public park, the Kurgarten. He's soon joined by another dog, the same breed. The animals chase each other, frolicking, barking playfully.

From across the green, the second dog's owner watches the young woman intently. He stands alone. He wears knee-length boots and carries a riding whip. It's all a little odd. But the girls know who he is. They've seen him at the hotel. The nearby Deutsche Haus. Their family owns the clothes shop across the street. Eventually, he comes over. He makes small talk. His dog is called Prince, he tells them. German Shepherds. Alsatians.

They are the noblest of all canines. The closest one can get to the animal in its natural state. To a wolf. The man seems harmless enough. They take to a bench. He's here on an extended vacation, he explains. Down from Munich. They are locals, they reply. Their names are Annie and Maria Reiter. Theirs is a sad tale. Their mother died only two weeks ago. Cancer. Things have been tough these past months.

Maria, the younger of the two, has had to come home from boarding school to help keep the shop going. The man asks them if they'd like to accompany him to a concert sometime, or maybe to his hotel later on. He's giving a talk to some friends. They'd be most welcome. They decline politely, but ask him his name. He tells them, Mr. Wolf. Mr. Wolf seems quite taken with Maria, or Mitzi as everyone calls her.

She's blonde, she oozes youth and vitality. Though aged just sixteen, with him thirty-seven, this does not seem a healthy attraction. Annie warns her of him. But over the summer, Mitzi and Mr. Wolf grow close. He's funny, she thinks, and very self-assured. He delights in taking his whip to Prince, thrashing his dog for her pleasure, demonstrating the art of obedience.

They take jaunts in his new red, open-topped Mercedes, chauffeured by his discreet manservant. Mitzi will later detail how, on a walk in the woods, Mr. Wolf pushes her up against a pine tree and kisses her passionately. She is his woodland spirit, he tells her. He talks of wanting babies. Mr. Wolf is an alias, of course. The man uses it on his travels. His real name is Adolf Hitler. With autumn looming,

Their dalliance concludes. He must return to his work, though he continues to write to Mitzi from Munich, assuring her that "Her Mr. Wolf is always thinking of her." The besotted Mitzi is heartbroken. She was already in a vulnerable state after her mother's death. Within months, she will try to hang herself, using a clothesline tied to a door. Her brother-in-law finds her, cuts her down.

After the war, Mitzi will describe how she and Hitler did reunite briefly in 1931, and how Hitler had dispatched Rudolf Hess to fetch her. Though a married woman by this point, they had sex in Hitler's Munich apartment, she claims. I let him do what he wanted. I was never so happy. That summer, 1926, as a parting gift from Berchtesgaden, Mitzi gives Hitler some sofa cushions she's embroidered for him.

That Christmas, he sends her a leather-bound copy of Mein Kampf, and they say Romance is dead. This is the Hitler story, and this is Real Dictators. In the final days of 1924, Hitler is out of jail. He's spent 13 months behind bars for his part in the failed coup attempt known as the Munich or Beer Hall Putsch. Hitler, however, has been fortunate. He has friends in high places.

Despite the charge of high treason, his sentence was almost laughably lenient. Just a short stint in Landsberg Fortress. More country club than hardcore prison. Released in December, he spent the festive season with his wealthy friends, the Hamstengels, at their swanky new mansion in Munich's Herzog Park district. As he returns to his own modest one-bedroom flat back across the river Isar, Hitler is not in the best of spirits.

On a personal level, he's not in great shape physically. The previously emaciated Austrian is now overweight. As a New Year's resolution, he's vowed to quit eating meat and stop drinking alcohol. Not that he, even as a soldier, was much of a boozer. When addressing the crowd in the beer hall on the night of the infamous Putsch, Putsi Hamstengel had to thrust a stein of lager into Hitler's hand to make him appear authentic.

It's become something of a private joke in Nazi circles that when the sweet-toothed Hitler does indulge in a rare glass of wine, he stirs in a spoonful of sugar. And then there are his finances. Due to legal bills and loss of earnings, Hitler is in debt. He's hoping that the publication of Mein Kampf will pacify his bank manager. Keep the wolf, as one might put it, from the door. And as for matters political, winter looks bleak.

On the one hand, going into 1925, Hitler is now a public figure, the man who captured the nation's attention with his stunning court rumoration during his trial. But that was nearly a year ago now. The reality is that his National Socialist German Workers' Party is now banned, as is its newspaper, the Völkischer Beobachter, as are the Nazi stormtroopers, the Sturmabteilung, or SA.

Driven underground, different units of the SA are having to masquerade as sporting societies and glee clubs. The prospect of his thugs singing songs for little old ladies at coffee mornings will prove too much for Ernst Röhm, the SA's founder. The old bruiser will cash in his chips, heading off to Bolivia of all places, where he's been offered a job as a military advisor. A consequence of Hitler's sentence is that he is the subject of a gagging order,

Officially, he'll not be permitted to speak in public again until 1927, two years away. He's in danger of losing momentum. In Hitler's absence, the Nazis have been forced to contest Germany's avalanche of regional and national elections under a flag of convenience: the National Socialist Freedom Movement, headed nominally by General Ludendorff. As a result of the disastrous putsch, Hitler and the general can't stand each other.

Hitler does have one able deputy, Gregor Strasser, an ex-army officer, someone who's been working flat out to keep the Nazi flame burning. Along with his brother Otto, Gregor has been marshalling the ghost Nazis from his base in Berlin, expanding the movement from a Bavarian faction to a national organization. Strasser seems a bit too capable for Hitler's liking. He also has a slightly different idea of what Nazis should be.

Germany, like many countries, is riven by regional differences. It has a north-south divide that mirrors its religious split. The north is Protestant, the south largely Catholic. In essence, Prussia versus Bavaria. In the Prussian north, the Nazis are evolving as a workers' movement, emphasizing the socialism over the nationalism. In the Bavarian south, where the Nazi party was founded, it's the other way around.

There's even talk of the northern Nazis jumping into bed with the communists, the infernal Reds. This is so heretical to Hitler's mind that the mere mention of it can send him into a frothing rage. The new northern approach is the brainchild, in part, of a Strasser underling, a party devotee named Joseph Goebbels. The same excitable young man who wrote gushing fan mail to Hitler when he was in jail.

To Goebbels' mind, Adolf Hitler is too soft a sellout. He even demands that Hitler be expelled from the party. Helen Roche is Associate Professor in Modern European Cultural History at the University of Durham.

There's this great quote from Goebbels, basically talking to Gregor Strasse and saying, you know, Hitler, he really isn't radical enough. He's far too bourgeois. Do we really want him as the leader kind of thing? And Goebbels and Bernhard Rust, who later became the Reich education minister, saying, yeah, we really want to be more on this socialist side of the camp and maybe Hitler's not the right person.

Dr. Paul Moore is a lecturer in modern European history at the University of Leicester. It's ultimately Hitler, of course, that wins out and he rejects this approach and Goebbels falls into line as a loyalist to Hitler. But some of these sort of internal debates never quite go away. The Nazi movement is never an entirely monolithic organization. There's always differences on policy, differences on strategy. The failure of the Munich Putsch has taught Hitler that violent revolution is not the way forward.

He must game the political system. As he puts it: "The Nazis must outvote rather than outshoot the opposition. Landowners and industrialists are to be courted, not smashed. The middle classes and the business sector must be wooed. They must be reassured that the Nazi Party is a reasonable, safe choice at the ballot box. The dominance of moderate center parties in the German parliament, the Reichstag, only underscores Hitler's reading of the national mood.

Plus, there is a newly elected President of the Weimar Republic, Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg. Germany's former war leader, now aged 78, is an old-school arch-conservative. He's the nearest Germany can get to a resurrected Kaiser. Many, especially the old Prussian nobility, still feel dismay at Kaiser Wilhelm's abdication and exile in the last days of World War I.

They yearn for Hindenburg's brand of strong, traditional leadership. There seems to be no real appetite for an overthrow of the state.

A lot of them were looking for a leader to replace Wilhelm II, who they thought had basically totally let them down. He should have been killed in battle. There were even some plans that these high-up nobles in the military had to kind of get William at the end of the First World War to kind of commit harakiri by going into the front and getting killed so he would actually die a hero's death. Hitler has added motivation for his new legitimate approach. He's still on parole.

He must keep his nose clean. It's not just a return to prison that hangs over him, but the threat of deportation. As an Austrian citizen, still, he could get booted out of the fatherland altogether. A fatherland that's doing rather well without him. It's only a few years since the Weimar Republic's inception, but we are now in what's known as its golden years. The rise of the new Germany is due in no small part to a statesman named Gustav Stresemann.

As German Chancellor, then Foreign Minister, Stresemann has had a huge impact on the country, both domestically and internationally. His expertise as an economist has helped drag Germany out of the era of hyperinflation, those infamous days when a wheelbarrow of cash was needed just to buy a loaf of bread. He's come up with a constructive means to facilitate Germany's war reparations, chiefly through receipt of aid via an American loan scheme, the Dawes Plan,

For the moment, everyone seems happy. The welfare state is up and running. There's a massive public works program. New public housing. Crime is falling. Unemployment drops to just 650,000. Wages are up 12%. Slowly, Germany is easing out of its post-war gloom. There is demand for radios, telephones, cars. Industrial output is now the highest in Europe.

for the Nazi Party. A stable, prosperous society is anathema. Hitler especially thrives on misery. Rubbing salt in the wound, Berlin is fast emerging as the world's new capital of culture. This is the era of the Bauhaus, of modernist architecture, expressionist paintings, the Berlin of jazz and cabaret. In Hitler's eyes, it's a seething cesspool of decadence.

Even in the provinces, the masses are flocking less to beer halls and street fights, but rather to boxing bouts, car racing and football matches.

Actually, there were lots of potentialities for Weimar to have continued on this line. When we look at the 14 years of the Weimar Republic, you know, it survived longer than the Third Reich and the way it ended was not a foregone conclusion. I think there were a lot of people who began to see that the Republic had things to offer, that there was this upturn, that there were new consumer opportunities. The

The fact that women were entering the workforce, there were far more female parliamentarians in the Weimar parliament than in the British parliament. At this time, Weimar was doing quite well and a lot of people were perfectly happy to go along with that and kind of see what was going to happen. This new Germany now has friends too. In October 1925, Stresemann negotiates the terms of the Treaty of Locarno, fixing Germany's western borders.

She's swallowing her medicine, accepting her lot as the designated loser of the Great War. In Geneva, there are preliminary talks on disarmament. Germany is earmarked to join the new League of Nations. Stresemann, for his efforts, will win the Nobel Peace Prize. For Hitler, this is turning into a horror show. He believes the judgment of Versailles was an abomination, and that the restitution of German glory depends on military might.

But those angry little Nazis with their silly uniforms and flags are fast becoming yesterday's news. Hitler's seeming irrelevance does gift him an opportunity. On February 26th, 1925, the national state of emergency that's existed since the putsch is lifted. The authorities in Bavaria relax the ban on Hitler and his party. As Heinrich Held, the state president, puts it:

This wild beast is checked. We can afford to loosen the chain. Hitler heads straight to the Burgerbräukeller, scene of his failed putsch attempt, returning as it were to the scene of the crime. On the night of February 27th at 8pm, he gets straight back into his stride as his old tub-thumping self, working himself up into a frenzy of oratory before three thousand drunken devotees. There are reportedly two thousand more locked outside.

It's quite the scene. People clamber onto tables. Some weep in ecstasy. Hitler is now beseeched publicly for the first time as "Lieder", "Führer". Though, pointedly, the leading lights among the Nazi leadership all stay away. The Nazis are not a happy camp. Eventually, Gregor Strasser and his northern Nazi faction will capitulate. At a heated showdown meeting in the town of Bamberg, they will fall into line.

Hitler though has a long memory when it comes to those who have crossed him. Strasser in due course will pay dearly. The Volker Schibbeer back the newspaper, back in business again, relishes the new mood, the new freedom. It declares it a new beginning, but this is a tad premature. Hitler is clearly still dangerous. Bans are swiftly re-imposed. The Hitler of the mass rally must wait.

That New Year's Eve, 1924, as he returns to his pokey apartment, Hitler receives a phone call from Heinrich Hoffmann, his photographer. He now runs a pictorial magazine dedicated to all things Adolf. He's having a party that night, Hoffmann says, to see in 1925. Would Hitler like to come over? In the glamorous circles of photography, there are always attractive young women. Is that not incentive enough? And so Hitler consents to go.

just for half an hour. Though she's not there that night, Hoffman must soon give an assistant's job to an aspiring young photographer named Eva Braun. Hitler will meet her for the first time when he walks into Hoffman's Photoshop. She will be seventeen, Hitler forty-one. He will introduce himself as Mr. Wolf. But we'll return to Eva Braun, the future and short-lived Mrs. Hitler, in good time. Hitler is a hit at the Hoffman party.

When he enters the room, he's greeted by one female guest with a full-on smacker on the lips. He does not appreciate it. Though he does little to engage, the ladies find him irresistible. A war hero? Wounded in action? A revolutionary? A jailbird? That fashionable moustache? And he does it all for love of his country, for the love of them. What's not to like? There's nothing, it seems, quite like a bad boy, and one with such self-belief.

Sticking to the seasonal theme, and perhaps with a little too much sugar in his wine, Hitler declares that he will translate the ideas of Christ into deeds, completing the work which Christ had begun but could not finish. The doting Nazi faithful coin another new name for him: the Redeemer. A Redeemer, however, who must bide his time. Though by professional necessity a city creature, Hitler always had a thing for the great outdoors.

Growing up in Austria, then living in southern Germany, he has an affinity with the Bavarian Alps, in particular a region of the borderland known as the Obersalzburg. In the summers of 1925 and 1926, Hitler decamps there to the town of Berchtesgaden. These are his pleasant years, as he will later refer to them. It's in the second summer, 1926, that he meets Mitzi Reiter. Hitler settles into a room at the Deutscher Haus Hotel.

the one with the writer's family clothes shop just over the road. In the clear mountain air, away from the noxious whiff of the decadent Weimar Republic, he can walk, think, read and write. It's here where he finishes volume two of Mein Kampf, elaborating upon his worldview. His friend, Putzi Hamstengel, visits him. Putzi raises pertinent questions. How can Hitler profess to a worldview when he's never traveled anywhere?

He should broaden his horizons, go to France, Britain, the United States. Puzzi can teach him English. Hitler declines. Yet to achieve literary success, Hitler's finances are in a mess. He lives a modest, almost monastic existence. But he is prone to the occasional impulse purchase. In the spring of 1925, he blows 20,000 marks on a red convertible Mercedes. It will prove useful for cruising.

Hitler likes cars but never drives. He is apparently barely capable. He will retain Emil Moritz, his Nazi dog's body, as a chauffeur. When the tax office catches up with him, Hitler will plead poverty. The flashy motor is explained away as a tax-deductible work necessity. He claims to be surviving solely on a diet of apples. One payment he makes proves a shrewd investment: the seven and a half shillings expended to rescind his Austrian citizenship.

confirmation of which comes through from Vienna on April 30th, 1925. It's granted on the basis of Hitler's war service for Germany, and his stated desire to become a German citizen. One might also suggest that the canny Austrian authorities, sniffing trouble, are happy to be shot at him. For the time being, Hitler is technically rendered stateless. He will not become a German national for another seven years, but at least he's no longer an alien.

a significant barrier to a career in German politics has been removed. The period of impoverishment does not last long. Once the Nazis come under the patronage of big political donors, once the royalties for Mein Kampf finally start rolling in, Hitler never looks back. He'll start living a somewhat extravagant lifestyle. In 1928, Hitler forgoes the Berchtesgaden Hotel to start renting a house.

He pays a knockdown 100 marks a month rent to the sympathetic widow of a Hamburg industrialist. It's called the Haus Wachenfeld, set atop what Hitler describes as his magic mountain. Hitler will later buy it outright and have it extensively remodeled with whitewashed walls, a large patio, and huge picture windows to frame the magnificent alpine view. Friends will chip in with furnishings.

Relatives of the great composer Wagner present a set of the maestro's manuscripts as a housewarming gift. Named the Berghof, this will become Adolf Hitler's principal residence, the only home he ever owns. He invites his widowed half-sister, Angela Raubel, to leave Vienna and become his Berghof housekeeper. She will bring along her two daughters, Hitler's nieces, Friedl and Geli,

It's Geli, 20 years old, with whom Hitler will embark on the strangest relationship of an already weird life. For her uncle, she will be the root of a deep, possessive obsession.

Professor Thomas Weber. Hitler for quite some time felt very unhealthy attraction towards his niece. I think it is also reasonable to assume there that the attraction was more than platonic. This doesn't mean that ultimately this was consummated.

But it is quite clear that this was not just a normal uncle-niece relationship, not even a close uncle-niece relationship. In rural Europe, it was kind of inevitable if you lived in a small village that the people who you were marrying were somehow related to you.

But it certainly would have been very much taboo to have any kind of close relationship or attraction towards your own niece. And that is something that Hitler very much needed to keep out of the limelight. Interestingly, records suggest Hitler's own parents, Alois and Clara, may well have been cousins once removed. He was 40, she was 16 when they met. Clara would even refer to her husband as uncle.

As we know, Adolf Hitler has often found the company of women preferable to men. He has firm and traditional ideas about the role of females in society, but he seems at ease in their presence, unthreatened, and at liberty to unburden himself. In prison, he indulged the attention of a succession of older women visitors, motherly figures, ladies who liked to do his laundry or bake him cakes, the reason for his love handles.

But Hitler has struggled to form any romantic bonds. After his failure to woo the unattainable Helene Hanfstengel, he's steered in the direction of Prutzi's older sister, Erna. Nothing really happens. Helene suggests that Hitler might up his chances if he learns to dance. Tries out some Viennese waltzes. But he dismisses the idea, on the basis that dancing is a pastime for weak effeminates.

Hitler does enjoy a camaraderie with Winifred Wagner, the composer's daughter-in-law. When he was in prison, she sent him stationery, the paper on which Mein Kampf was written. They continue their friendship on the outside. However, it's Hitler's preoccupation with young, vulnerable women that will become a notable, unsavory aspect of his private life. Young women like Mitzi Reiter, like Eva Braun, like Unity Mitford, the British socialite and Nazi sympathizer.

Another lady we shall visit later. Hitler at one point allegedly tries it on with Heinrich Hoffmann's 17-year-old daughter, though by now to command the Fuhrer's attention or have one's daughter approached by him can even be considered something of an honor. For a man with seemingly little emotional depth, the cult of personality that surrounds Hitler will forever bamboozle. He couldn't be more unlike the macho Mussolini.

The Italian fascist is a keen sportsman, happy to whip off his shirt at the first opportunity. By contrast, the only flesh ever glimpsed of Hitler's is his knobbly knees. While wearing lederhosen, Hitler is never seen as anything other than properly and fully dressed. Every day he performs chest stretches with a rubber strap, conscious of his perceived physical inadequacies, one in particular. In his medical examination for admission to Landsberg prison,

Hitler was revealed as having an undescended testicle. It's not an uncommon condition. These days it's easily correctable by minor surgery, but not then. It brings us to the famous Second World War song that Hitler had only one ball. We all always assumed that this was just a kind of banter, a kind of wartime attempt to kind of ridicule the opponent that you were fighting. But now we know that Hitler really only did have one ball.

A few years ago, the kind of prison files of Hitler re-emerged and they include Hitler's medical file from the prison. So it is perfectly possible that Hitler thought that there's something wrong with him and he wouldn't want to show himself naked in front of women and actually in front of men for that matter. I mean, even later in his life, Hitler was very reluctant even to undress in front of his own doctor. There will be all sorts of innuendo about Hitler's sex life.

Comments, even from close friends, of a general asexuality or of a suppressed homosexuality. There's one story that Hitler is terrified of siring an offspring with Jewish blood, stemming from a rumor about the true identity of his own biological grandfather. There are, on the other hand, tales of affairs, of illegitimate children, and of depraved perversions. One including a goat that supposedly bit off his manhood.

though serious historians debunk these wilder theories. Mariam Mufti is associate professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Waterloo, Canada.

He definitely did not see women as his intellectual equal. There was this German phrase, the life of a woman is restricted to children, church and kitchen. So he definitely believed in that. He seemed to be somewhat of a serial dater, so to speak, of women who were all 20 years younger than him. He had this conception of Aryan beauty, this Aryan female beauty of tall Nordic women, blonde hair tied up in a bun, blue eyes and so on. But the women that he dated were nothing like that.

His niece, Geli Raubel, becomes another impressionable young woman to add to Hitler's roster. She is seduced by the prospect of big city life and a career on the stage, as much as by the power and fame of her celebrity uncle. In 1929, when Hitler moves into a smarter Munich pied-à-terre, a nine-room apartment that occupies the entire second floor, he will install Geli as his roommate. They will become inseparable.

Scandalously, and fatally so. Any intimate relationship with Hitler is, to put it mildly, intense. All four of the younger women with whom he is known to have been involved will attempt suicide. Two successfully, with Unity Mitford dying of complications after shooting herself in the head with Hitler's pistol. Only Mitzi Reiter survives. We'll return to Geli Raubel later. Like Eva Braun, after her, she will largely be kept out in the limelight.

because Hitler was all too mindful of his growing female fanbase. Marriage is a selfish act, Hitler declares. It runs counter to the image he's carefully crafting for himself. Professor Nicholas O'Shaughnessy,

The Nazis began as a party which exclusively targeted males in their language, their imagery. They didn't think that women would be switched on by them. But they discovered over time that this wasn't the case, that women were impressed by a message which said, we can give your husband a job so that you can be homemakers, that we can look after your husband, we can look after your children.

And eventually you had a major part of the Nazi support was female. You'd have women in the front rows of Hitler rallies with tears in their eyes. He had to show himself as celibate and not as actually a misogynist.

That was very, very important as a woman hater with sadistic impulses towards them and so forth. You have these strange posters or illustrations of Hitler with Germany as his bride. He is the kind of universal celibate priest who's devoted his life to a country who cannot have a private life. Back in Munich, Hitler is still banned from public speaking, restricted in his means of venting.

He spends time in his favorite haunts, an Italian restaurant called Osteria Bavaria and the Café Neumayer, where he sits surrounded by the faithful, embarking on tirades. The conversation is all one way. In fact, there is no conversation. Hitler merely harangues his listeners, talking over them, grinding them into submission. But it's all part of the learning process. The break from public appearances allows Hitler to hone his act.

Forced to speak in salons and private meeting rooms, pitting himself against business leaders and the like, he learns to tone down the theatrics when he needs to, to present his thoughts in a coherent manner, to dial up and down the rhetoric according to his audience, to play heavy or soft with the anti-Semitism. Professor Claudia Kuhn's

Yes, Hitler was forbidden from addressing many outside rallies that might have had 1,000 or 2,000 people, but he got to know local leaders. He built confidence. He decided who could be trusted and who couldn't. Sometimes his brown shirts were forbidden from marching. Well, they took off their brown shirts, they put on white shirts, and they marched as white shirts. And if they weren't allowed to march, well, they ambled down the street.

Whatever constraint was put upon them, they found workarounds, which ultimately ended up giving them more publicity than they may have had otherwise. Finally, in January 1927, Saxony becomes the first state to formally lift its speaking ban, followed on March 5th by Bavaria. The Hitler Show is back in business.

The very next day he does a warm-up gig in rural Bavaria, before returning to Munich, where he addresses an audience of 7,000 at the Zirkus Kroner Arena. He has not lost his touch, far from it. There's a new theatricality to his performance. Banners, flaming torches and fanfares, with his resurrected SA Stormtroopers marching in ahead of him. Hitler goes down a storm, there's a new signature flourish added to proceedings.

It was originally used as a private greeting amongst the party faithful. Now it's encouraged openly as a display of loyalty. A raised right arm, modeled after Mussolini, and a cry of Heil Hitler. Hitler restricts his comeback largely to venues in Bavaria. The home crowds are whipped up into a fervor. At Munich University he speaks to 2,500 ecstatic students. Such is the adulation that a unit of bodyguards is created.

Not to be confused with the SA, they are called the Schutzstaffel, known better over time as the SS. Dr. Chris Dillon

The SS emerges as a kind of a personal bodyguard for Hitler. Schutzstaffel, which means literally protection squad. You can already see some intimation or claim to being more elite than the SA in the term Staffel, which connotes squadrons in German military culture, something that's a bit more rarefied than mere infantry grunts. But the SS is a tiny, tiny formation compared to the SA and its membership probably only in the hundreds until the Great Depression.

But the SS is entrusted with the bloodied and tattered flag from the Munich Putsch, which is perhaps the most sacrosanct and hallowed artifact of early Nazi paramilitarism. So it has a status within the movement, but very little presence in the public eye compared to the SA. One of its number is a meek-looking acolyte named Heinrich Himmler. Under Himmler's future leadership,

The SS will evolve into the Nazi High Priests, an elite corps of sadists, chief perpetrators of the Third Reich's horrors. At this point though, as a number one fan, no one can beat Joseph Goebbels. He's had a dangerous flirtation with the northern branch of the Nazis, but hearing Hitler speak again has convinced him that there is only one true Fuhrer. Goebbels claims that seeing Hitler perform live is a near mystical experience.

It's the fulfilling of a mysterious longing, he writes. Goebbels is still in his twenties. His is the adulation one might reserve for a rock star. He's another to add to the gallery of eccentrics who form Hitler's inner circle. Not much over five feet tall, the limping Goebbels, born with a clubbed foot, hardly fits the bill as an Aryan superman. Behind his back, they call him the Poisoned Dwarf.

One of the things that leads many people into organizations like the Nazi movement and the stormtroopers in the interwar period is a sense of having missed out on the generation-defining experience of the First World War. Hitler, of course, is an exception to this, but many of the leading Nazis are too young to have fought in the First World War or for other reasons, you know, disability in Goebbels' case, hadn't been involved. And there's a real sense of having missed out and needing to compensate in a way for that

The Nazi movement in the Weimar Republic very much thought of itself as being a revolution of the young and virile against the old and emasculated. One of its most famous slogans the Nazi movement develops is, make way you old ones. A lot of Nazi members are very, very young.

Himmler thought at the turn of the century, Hitler born 11 years before. These are very, very young politicians compared to those who are at the helm during the Weimar Republic. So famously, Hindenburg is ancient, even by 1919 when the Weimar Republic starts, but becomes it's probably its most influential figure.

But despite their youth, the Nazi leaders often fall far short of the masculine ideals they proclaim. Goebbels, obviously, but Himmler too. Himmler forbids people in the SS in the 1930s from wearing glasses, despite the fact that he very conspicuously wears glasses in almost every photograph one can find of him.

There's this joke that goes, ah, the perfect Aryan is Nordic as Hitler, as fleet of foot as Goebbels, and as slim and fit as Goering. So even at the time, people were pointing fun at these contradictions. Hitler, who fancies himself as a writer, is mightily impressed with Goebbels. He has a doctorate in German literature. He's also the author of a rather pertinent novel, titled Michael,

It's the story of a messianic figure come to deliver Germany. A messianic figure not unlike his new boss. Hitler will fast track his new protégé, inviting him to speak at the iconic Burgerbräukeller. Later, when the Nazis start planning their shadow state, ready for the takeover, Goebbels will be appointed Gauleiter, governor of Berlin. As the future minister of propaganda, Goebbels will become arguably the most important cog in Hitler's totalitarian machine.

He will remain the ultimate devoted sidekick, right to the very end, all the way to the bunker. In the battle for hearts and minds, Hitler is winning. As he gets back into his groove, members of other fascist and nationalist groups, like the German Völkisch Freedom Party, start converting to Nazism. Hermann Göring, the aristocratic morphine-addicted ex-fighter ace, is also back on the scene. Having gone on the run after the putsch,

He spent time in a Swedish mental asylum. The Nazis are one happy, if defective, camp again. One day, Hitler's northern rival, Gregor Strasser, is injured in a car crash and ruled out of action for six months. Hitler, the benevolent, turns up at his bedside with a bunch of flowers. It's another example of what would become a personal signature, the Judas Kiss. There is only one problem. Hitler is preaching to the converted.

He's not yet making inroads into the middle ground, the middle classes, the ones he's wooed in private. While Hitler was in jail, the Social Democrats, the enormous center-left party, increased their vote share by 30%. They now dominate the Reichstag. Contrast this with the electoral fortunes of the Nazi Party. By the time of the 1928 Reichstag election, the Nazis can muster just 2.6% of the vote.

800,000 out of an electorate of 31 million. Just 12 members out of 491. For all the hot air they generate, the Nazis are still a fringe party. Hitler can rail all he likes about Jews or jazz music, or the hated debts under the Doors plan, but it's not getting him anywhere. In January 1929, Germany's debts are massaged again with the more favourable Jung plan.

Despite the mobilization of the Nazis and other right-wing groups who come out in opposition, the scheme is endorsed in a national referendum. And, to cap it all, Mein Kampf is still, for now at least, a literary flop. Hitler keeps at it. Using the talents of his lawyer, Hans Frank, he manages to manipulate the party apparatus, to centralize all authority in himself, something he will later replicate at the national level, once in power.

In August 1929, he stages two massive rallies at a place that will become forever associated with him: Nuremberg. Nearly 200,000 people flock from all over Germany to witness the Hitler Spectacular. But as the young plan begins implementation, it becomes clear that Germany will be paying war reparations for a great many years to come. Crunching the numbers, the final year of payment is predicted to be 1988.

This revelation emboldens the far right. In the state of Schleswig-Holstein, in Germany's far north, angry farmers mount bomb attacks on government offices. Hitler may have publicly denounced violent revolution as a means to power, but there are hints that civil strife might be necessary to swing votes his way. Hitler is a man blessed by extraordinarily good fortune. Things just seem to happen for him.

There was the Strasser car crash, which we already mentioned, which hobbled his chief Nazi rival for a while. The very next day after Hitler's speaking comeback, in February 1925, Friedrich Ebert, first president of the Weimar Republic, died aged 54. The Social Democrat leader had gone in for a routine appendix operation. It was his death that saw Paul von Hindenburg elected, a man Hitler will soon play like a fiddle.

It is in October 1929, however, that Hitler's charmed life reaches new levels. Now comes a double whammy to upset the entire Order, to throw the Weimar Republic into turmoil. On the third of the month, Germany is stunned by the news that another distinguished German leader has met a premature end. This time, it's the sainted Gustav Stresemann, who's passed away. Aged just 51, he had quite literally worked himself to death.

felled by a fatal stroke. In life, Stresemann had emphasized that the German recovery should never be taken for granted. The economy, he reminded people, was set on incredibly shaky foundations. And he was right. New York City, October 29th, 1929, three weeks after the death of Stresemann. On Wall Street in downtown Manhattan, traders gather on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange.

Over the past few days, there has been a furious and unprecedented trading of shares. The atmosphere has been tense, fraught. There is a sense that something calamitous is about to happen. And today is that day. Throughout a few short hours, 16 million shares are traded, billions of dollars lost. Panic selling goes into overdrive. The US economy, seemingly out of the blue, is about to go into freefall.

Whole corporations will go bust. Entire life savings will be wiped out. The bottom will fall out of the market. This Tuesday is now Black Tuesday. In the global economy, a butterfly has flapped its wings. There's a ripple effect. In stock markets around the world, the financial order collapses. The roaring 20s will turn on a sixpence into the Great Depression, hitting London, Paris and other major money centers.

The Wall Street crash will devastate the industrialized market economies in particular. Tens of millions are about to lose their money, their homes, their livelihoods, some their lives. The crash will deal a sudden cruel death blow to an indebted Berlin. The American investment that's been underpinning the Weimar Republic's resurgence will dry up in an instant. Hitler has got his wish.

He knows the German people will only back the Nazi party when they are hungry and desperate, and they are about to be all over again. On hearing the news of the Wall Street crash, Hitler finds it hard to contain his joy. "Never in my life," he says, "have I been so inwardly contented." In the next episode of Real Dictators, as the German economy nosedives, Hitler prepares for the 1930 elections. On the stump, he preaches unity,

presenting himself as a healer of divisions, a savior of the destitute nation. Astonishing electoral returns elevate the Nazi party to within a grasp of government. But with Hitler's newfound fame comes the whiff of scandal and the personal tragedy that will threaten to derail everything. That's next time on Real Dictators.