The Nizkor Project: Remembering the Holocaust (Shoah)

Shofar FTP Archive File: people/h/hitler.adolf/oss-papers/text/oss-sb-heiden-02



00010440.GIF  Page 5

A pale, gaunt man with a pointed beard was making a 
speech to half a dozen comrades.
(Hitler-Heiden-p. 43)

That was Adolf Hitler's business. And now we know what 
he had been during the Munich Soviet regime--a spy.

This occupation did not apparently inspire him with any 
horror. " There will be no peace in the land until a body 
is hanging from every lamp-post," he frequently remarked.
(Hitler-Heiden-p.52)

Anyone acquainted with the unhappy life of this lonely 
man knows why hatred and persecution mania guided his 
first political footsteps. In his heart he nursed a grudge 
against the world, and he vented it on guilty and innocent 
alike. His croaking voice, his jerky gait, his sawing gestures 
expressed a hatred of which all who saw him were conscious. 
He was lashed on by the craving to persecute: "I went, filled 
with loathing"--with this sentiment did he part from his 
fellow-laborers at the building-site in Vienna. "In these 
nights there grew in me a hatred, hatred of the authors of 
the revolution." That was the result of the winter in Treunstein.
(Hitler-Heiden-p.53)

After the war the position suddenly changed. Anti-Semitism 
immediately became a mass movement, even before Hitler. 
The Prussian Minister of War, General von  [unreadable], 
published statistics by which he tried to prove that the German 
Jews had not made as many sacrifices in the World War as 
the other sections of the population. In reply it was pointed 
out that the German princely houses had not lost a single prince...
(Hitler-Heiden-p.59)

"As I always woke up before five in the morning, I had 
formed the habit of amusing myself by strewing on the 
floor a few pieces of stale bread or crusts for the mice 
which had made their home in the little room, and of 
watching the droll little animals scurrying about after 
these tidbits. I had already suffered so much distress 
in the course of my life that I could picture only too well 
the hunger and consequently the delight of these little 
creatures. I could not go off to sleep again, and I suddenly 
recalled the previous evening and remembered the pamphlet. 
So I began to read."
(Hitler-Heiden-p. 68)

00010441.GIF page 6

Then some ingenious brain conceived the brilliant idea of 
inserting an advertisement in an anti-Semitic weekly, 
the Munchener Beobachter.  A miracle happened: eighty 
people arrived!
(Hitler-Heiden-p. 69)

Rohm developed something like a genuine affection for 
the queer soldier, but in Hitler too Rohm's frank, brutal 
energy seemed to inspire a blissful [unreadable] of security.
(Hitler-Heiden-p. 71)

Then Hitler came forward; the audience became restless; 
the speaker did not appeal to them. Hitler began to expound 
his program, and the audience became more attentive. From 
time to time there were exclamations of approval. When 
Hitler left the platform, he was convinced that he had 
achieved a great success.
(Hitler-Heiden-p. 75)

On a summer afternoon of the year 1919, a few people 
collected before the steps of the new [unreadable] in 
Munich. A pale gaunt man with a pointed beard had 
mounted the balustrade...
(Hitler-Heiden-p.76)

Eighteen months later the same man again stood on a 
raised platform before the Munich public. He no longer 
wore a beard. The people knew his name.
(Hitler-Heiden-p. 76)

It must not be imagined that the first National Socialist 
meetings were outwardly very  different from any other 
political meeting. Hitler spoke; a discussion was opened; 
someone ventured a contradiction, and Hitler patiently 
refuted the contradiction.
(Hitler-Heiden-p. 81)

As to Hitler's voice there are different opinions. Some 
think it fascinating, others revolting. Certain it is that 
the extraordinary power of this organ, which even on a 
stormy mountain-height loses little of its volume and 
only at excited
(Hitler-Heiden-p.85)

00010442.GIF  page 7

(Hitler-Heiden-p. 85 cont.)

moments becomes a croak stirs and thrills people. The 
tone and attitude of the orator at the beginning convey 
a sense of intense earnestness and responsibility, and 
this makes the frenzied bawling which follows all the 
more impressive. At the climax of his speech he is so 
carried away that whatever he is saying, be it purest 
truth or crassest lie, is at that moment so entirely the 
expression of his nature, his mood, and his conviction 
of the profound necessity for all he does that even the 
lie echoes like truth in the ears of his audience. The 
oneness of man and word is the second secret of his 
success.
(Hitler-Heiden-p. 85)

Hitler had to get [unreadable] as best he could."You have 
no idea," he said later to Gregor Strasser, "what a problem 
it was in those days to find the money to buy my ticket 
when I wanted to deliver a speech at Nuremberg."

No one knows how he lived. As a man, he appeared a 
thorough bohemian. He was said to have no money, 
but he spent it. And there were distressing inconsistencies. 
Here is the verbal report of one of his business friends 
on the year 1923: Believe me, Hitler is personally the 
most modest man in the world and grateful for the 
smallest favor. Once, when I gave him an old blue coat 
of mine, he grasped my hand in his and the tears started 
in his eyes. The poor fellow has certainly had a hard life 
and evidently has not experienced much kindness." The 
speaker added with conviction: "You might have stood 
the Hitler of November 9, 1923 on his head in the 
Felderrnhalle, and not a copper would have fallen 
out of his pocket."
(Hitler-Heiden-p. 90)

In July 1921, discontented members of the party attacked 
him in a broadsheet which asserts: "If any member asks 
him how he lives and what was his former profession, he 
always becomes angry and excited. Up to now no answer 
has been supplied to these questions. So his conscience 
cannot be clean, especially as his excessive intercourse 
with ladies, to whom he often described himself as 'King 
of Munich,' costs a great deal of money." The actual statements 
contained in this broadsheet were derived from Anton Drexler."
(Hitler-Heiden-p. 90-91)

00010443.GIF page 8

"I also have my midday meal with various party comrades 
in turn. I am further assisted to a modest extent by a few 
party comrades."
(Hitler-Heiden-p. 91)

Certainly all those who believed the Hitler of the first years 
to be a poor devil in chronic want of money were laboring 
under a delusion. His craving for abrupt alternations between 
profound solitude and teeming society resulted, in view of 
his limited means, in a modest lodging and [unreadable] tavern 
carousals. He simply could not manage money, any more than 
he could manage his time, husband his strength, employ his 
staff economically, or arrange a speech or written composition 
architectonically. Hitler is an unbridled being, sometimes as 
insensitive to pain and toil, as though in a state of intoxication, 
and therefore capable of wonderful feats of strength, but 
incapable of prolonged self-discipline.
(Hitler-Heiden-p. 91-92)

He received few invitations [unreadable] were almost closed 
against him. Why any awkward, conspicuous for his 
exaggerated bows and the greedy haste with which he 
gobbled his food, he soon decided to be interesting at 
close quarters. Dressed not shabbily but without any 
[unreadable] of personal taste, his oiled hair parted almost 
in the middle, his scrubby mustache introducing an [unreadable] 
accent into an otherwise insipid face--the whole man gave the 
impression of a poor copy of a type existing only in the imagination.
(Hitler-Heiden-p. 93)

Hitler found a sort of home with Frau Carola Hofmann, a 
simple soul, the widow of a headmaster, who lived in the 
villa-suburb of Solln, near Munich. In 1920 she heard Hitler 
speak for the first time and immediately took a fancy to him. 
This women of sixty-one years of age became to the thirty-
year old bohemian the mother for whom he [unreadable] 
yearned.
(Hitler-Heiden-p. 93)

The first house with some pretensions to grandeur to which 
Hitler was admitted on a friendly footing was not in Munich, 
but in Berlin. It was that of Bechstein, the piano-manufacturer. 
The Bechsteins were old friends of Dietrich Eckart, and the 
latter introduced pupil to them. Frau Helene Bechstein took a 
great liking to Adolf Hitler. "I wish he were my son," she said.
(Hitler-Heiden-p. 94)



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