Hitler's Last Hostages Read online

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  Nevertheless, an unfavorable verdict soon arrived: the academy deemed Adolf and the majority of the other applicants inadequate candidates. It admitted only twenty-eight students.23 “I was so convinced of my success that the announcement of my failure came like a bolt from the blue,” Hitler noted.24

  The academy’s director met with a devastated Adolf, advising the young man that while he utterly lacked talent as a painter, his rigid, regimented measurements in drawing would suit him well as an architectural draftsman. Yet, having failed nearly all his classes and dropped out of school, Hitler lacked the necessary academic background to pass an architectural exam.

  Angry and adamant that he had been wrongfully rejected by the academy, Adolf returned home in late October only to discover that his mother had terminal cancer, diagnosed by Linz’s respected Jewish doctor, Eduard Bloch, a few months after he had removed a tumor from Klara’s breast. Within six days, Klara was bedridden and too weak to move.25 In early November, Dr. Bloch started prescribing her morphine and placing cloths containing iodoform on Klara’s open wounds with the intention of “burning out” the cancer, then a standard practice. Klara submitted stoically, barely showing signs of the searing pain.

  Klara knew she would be leaving behind eleven-year-old Paula and her mentally handicapped sister Johanna, but she told Dr. Bloch that she was most concerned for Adolf. Her eldest son tended to her devotedly and accompanied her to the iodoform sessions even though he would openly squirm at seeing the treatment applied to his mother’s skin. Dr. Bloch wrote in his notes that it was unusual for a boy Adolf’s age to come to such a session with his mother and that, in decades of medical experience, he had never seen a mother and teenage son so codependent. “To a very large extent this boy lived within himself. What dreams he dreamed I do not know,” Bloch observed.26

  Klara Hitler died on 21 December 1907. She was forty-seven years old. Adolf felt rudderless, furiously sketching his mother before the undertakers removed her body. They buried her a few days later in an expensive polished coffin with metal ingots that Hitler had chosen. The elderly Bloch was accustomed to witnessing mourning, but Hitler’s behavior stood out. “In all my career, I have never seen anyone so prostrate with grief as Adolf Hitler,” he noted.27 On Christmas Eve, Adolf and Paula visited Dr. Bloch at his home to thank him for trying to save their mother. Hitler followed up by painting a Catholic monk in watercolor and sending it to Bloch with the inscription “My very best wishes for the New Year. With Eternal Gratitude, Yours, Adolf Hitler.”28

  On hearing of Klara’s death, the post office in Linz offered the now orphaned Adolf a secure job with a solid salary. He rejected it, however, explaining that he was going to become a world-famous painter. When the postal workers pointed out that he did not have the financial means, he retorted, “Makart and Rubens also worked themselves up from impoverished conditions!”29

  One local resident felt so moved by the teenager’s earnestness that she wrote to a friend in Vienna who knew Alfred Roller, a famous stage designer at the opera, who also taught at the Arts and Crafts Academy. On being asked to meet with Adolf, who would soon be returning to Vienna,30 Roller swiftly wrote back, “Do tell young Hitler to call on me and bring some of his works so I can see how he is doing,” listing the best times to call.31 Hitler was thrilled, aware that Roller’s powerful connections within the art world could open doors for him. Yet he was deeply shy and prideful. Back in Vienna, the eighteen-year-old loitered in front of Roller’s office with the prestigious man’s letter of invitation in his hand and dithered over whether to cross the threshold. He went into the building once, then turned around. He went in again—all the way to the staircase—before dashing outside. He went in a third time, and someone approached to ask if he needed help. Hitler mumbled an inaudible excuse and left, never to return.32

  Thereafter, Adolf determined that he should limit his human fraternization to a bare minimum so that he could focus on his art. He cut off contact with his sister, Paula, who eventually assumed he had died. “I’m an entirely non-familial being, a non-socializing man by nature,” Hitler asserted. “I only belong to the German people.”33

  While Hitler’s sense of his own national identity was intensifying, the position of Jews in the racial politics of the day began to come into question. By the time Hitler moved to Vienna in 1908, Jewish Viennese were integrating and prospering more than ever before, thanks in large part to an 1867 edict from Emperor Franz Joseph giving Jewish Viennese citizens equal rights. Though some highly conservative Jewish Austrians still maintained noticeably separate lives in parallel societies, most lived bourgeois lifestyles, routinely married into established Catholic families, and heavily influenced the Austrian art world by sponsoring artists and buying their works.

  Within this social context, Hitler began grappling with three questions: What defined the pan-German race? What type of culture should pan-Germans produce? What specifically—if anything—made certain races inferior or even dangerous to others?

  The intensification with which Hitler and right-wing intellectuals began contemplating these questions in 1908 was particularly galvanized by the work of Charles Darwin.

  In 1859, Darwin had published On the Origin of Species in English. A German translation followed the next year. Darwin postulated that through natural selection, homo sapiens had evolved from other species. Inspired by Darwin’s research, a growing number of Europeans began espousing “social Darwinism,” the belief, predicated on Darwin’s scientific studies, that certain ethnic groups, or races, were intellectually, culturally, and physically superior to—more evolved than—other races and cultures. Though not supported by Darwin himself, the ideology gained traction because the movement’s interpretation of the revered scientist’s research, however misguided, gave it an air of scientific respectability.

  Theories circulated throughout western Europe as to how to identify “degenerate” strains of humans and what should be done about them. In France, for example, increased mobility led young women from the countryside to migrate to Paris in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in search of better lives. Some prospered, but many failed and took up prostitution. The wave was so great that these women filled streets and brothels to an extent unseen elsewhere in Europe. French social Darwinists began asserting that economically supporting these women or providing them with other jobs was futile because they belonged to “degenerate,” or inferior, strains and were thus predisposed to engage in “abhorrent” behavior such as sex work. Social Darwinists also noted how Darwin had observed that different breeds within the same animal species compete with each other for space and resources. Consequently, they posited, different races of humans would compete so that one race—with its particular customs and culture—would ultimately dominate and eventually eradicate the others.

  When European artists began to portray the French prostitutes in their artwork, reflecting the social reality around them, social Darwinists began to argue that their art was “degenerate”—that like the women it depicted, it was lower and less evolved. Deliberating this became particularly popular in Hitler’s Vienna due to the writings of Max Nordau, who had been the Paris correspondent for Austria’s respected Neue Freie Presse newspaper. Nordau argued that so-called Degenerate Artists posed as great a threat to superior human races as disease-infested, possibly violent criminals.

  Viennese-based artists at this time, including Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele, were highly sexual and fond of creating boldly erotic art. At times their techniques were measured and precise, but often they used jagged lines and crude brushstrokes to evoke primal feelings in viewers. “They draw and paint like children,” wrote Nordau damningly.

  The best art, Nordau preached, should be uplifting, wholesome, and aesthetically gentle. He protested that Degenerate Artists were abusing the freedom that came with modern society. Nordau stopped short of advocating for formal censorship, however, arguing that Degenerate Artists should be discouraged throu
gh social pressure and the refusal of upstanding citizens to purchase their works. Moreover, as a Jewish journalist, Nordau rejected the belief held by many social Darwinists that the “Jewish race” was a degenerate strain of humankind.34

  Nevertheless, anti-Semitic art critics took up the phrase “Degenerate Art,” which Nordau had made popular. Houston Stewart Chamberlain, a Briton who had moved to Vienna the year Hitler was born, lectured that European history was primarily one of racial struggle. If pure-blooded Europeans allowed inferior races to reproduce with them, European culture, including Austria’s vaunted art scene, would become tainted and eventually extinct.35 Chamberlain’s British nationality was not problematic for those who believed in a racial pecking order. A Viennese right-winger named Guido List told the members of his eponymous List Society that God had revealed to him the mystical secrets of the race superior to all others, Aryans, which he said comprised Germans, Danes, Swedes, Norwegians, Brits, and the Dutch. The success of the Jewish Viennese signaled a crisis, argued List, who preached that Jews possessed a toxic combination of inferior racial makeup and cunning craftiness for breeding with superior races in order to sabotage them and their cultures.36 Hitler and List never met, but Hitler followed List’s writings and particularly admired his society’s eye-catching symbol: the swastika.

  The right-wing newspaper Alldeutsches Tagblatt began to warn readers, of whom Hitler was one, that modern art was “Jewish through and through.”37 If pan-Germans did not fight back, they would have no one to blame but themselves. “Woe unto the nation that doesn’t have the strength to fend off the alien invasion but apathetically watches as legions of cunning Jews penetrate all areas of public life, tear the bread out of the nation’s mouth, and economically subjugate it,” a journalist for a similar paper, the right-wing Deutsches Volksblatt admonished.38

  Around this time, Hitler began realizing that Vienna was not as perfect as he initially had thought, a grim reality that became clearer as his artistic career failed to blossom. The “relentless struggle” of aspiring entrepreneurs in Vienna “kills all pity,” wrote Hitler in Mein Kampf. He described the city as a place where “glamorous wealth and repulsive poverty were mixed in sharp contrast.”39

  The Ringstraße, though sparkling with wealth at first glance, also contained nooks and crannies where thousands of unemployed Austrians lived on the street, even congregating below the Burgtor, the imperial gate on the Heldenplatz, or Hero’s Square, outside the Hofburg Palace. While Hitler was still new to Vienna, an influx of women, many ethnic minorities from across the empire, moved to the city in hopes of escaping abusive men, economic restriction, and the threat of forced marriages, much like their Parisian counterparts in previous decades. Many succeeded, but as in Paris, a large number of naïve and economically vulnerable women became trapped in low-level, forced sex work. Hitler noticed how child prostitution was also rampant: prepubescent girls realized that it was far more profitable than begging. The middle class pejoratively branded the young women as “whores” while unabashedly paying them to “educate” young men before marriage. A medical journal surveyed middle-class doctors and learned that 75 percent had lost their virginity with prostitutes, 17 percent with family maids, and only 4 percent with women they considered “marriage material.”40

  One prominent writer, Jörg Franz von Liebenfels, concluded that because the majority of poor beggars appeared to be from minority ethnicities or mixed-ethnic families, these strains of the human species must be intrinsically tainted biologically. Several journalists advocated a triage of sorts: identify and aid the fair-haired, fair-skinned beggars over their darker-skinned counterparts.41 Many members of established Viennese society responded to the wave of poverty by holding lavish balls to fund-raise for charity, using the misfortune of others as an excuse to host parties. The irony of this was not lost on journalist Emil Kläger, who observed how it was fueling the growing class disparity. Poor people would often come to the gates of the galas, hoping in vain for food. “They appeared to me like a bad dream image, those vast crowds of believers who wait out there in the barren darkness outside the bright gates of our rich life, utterly blinded by its external beauty,” wrote Kläger of such beggars.42

  As extravagant as these wealthy fund-raisers were, they were necessary because the government was too disorganized to handle the homeless crisis. The galas funded the building of Wärmestuben, shelters known as “warming stools,” where the homeless could briefly sit and rest before venturing out into the cold again. Because the Wärmestuben closed in the early evening, the poor slept on the stools by day and then wandered around by night, looking like dazed vampires. “As if under a spell, people remained motionless within the quadrangle of the benches, looking like a ghostly gallery of the dead whom someone had put one next to the other as if for some horrible amusement,” observed Kläger. A few fortunate beggars took shelter on the outskirts of Vienna in abandoned stables that had been deemed unfit for animals. It typically took several sleepless nights to adapt to the bug infestations. On squalid mattresses, babies and impoverished widows cuddled with sex workers and alcohol abusers for warmth.

  “Sunshine, incidentally, will soon become one of Austria’s most favorite meals,” quipped one magazine reporter.43

  In autumn 1909, Hitler’s orphan stipend from the government and his meager inheritance from Klara both dried up. The aspiring artist, now twenty years old, became one of the homeless unfortunates himself. He often sought refuge at a shelter in the working-class Meidling district, built behind a cemetery so that locals would not protest. Since there were so few Viennese shelters, beggars lined up to stay at night, a cruel mirror of the lines to enter Vienna’s chic restaurants; there were even bouncers to deal with rejected beggars who became obstreperous. The institution, supported by the left-leaning Socialist Democratic Workers Party along with private donations, had one of the best job-placement centers among Viennese shelters. Yet, rather than seek employment, Hitler spent his days copying his own sketches of monuments and voraciously reading right-wing newspapers and tracts. Daily wear turned his only suit from blue to a dingy mauve.44

  Hitler quickly became keenly aware of the pecking order that the homeless established for themselves. Even as the rich saw themselves as superior to the homeless in their Darwinian struggle for dominance, the homeless jockeyed among themselves for power and limited resources. Young to middle-aged men crowded out single women, sex workers, mothers with children, orphans, the old, the sick, and the meek. Xenophobia was also a factor: homeless Austrians generally believed they took priority in the Wärmestuben over foreigners.

  Responding to the crisis, numerous Jewish synagogues mobilized their congregations to build additional shelters. Jewish philanthropists partnered with Vienna’s Christian Association of Soup and Tea Institutions to create Wärmestuben where soup, warm milk, and cocoa powder were distributed for free, and vegetables could be bought at cost.45 These Wärmestuben efficiently distributed small treats meant to help the homeless socialize with each other and feel human again. The homeless, including Hitler, prized these new and improved refuges.

  In February 1910, Hitler secured a spot at a privately funded hostel in Brigittenau, an industrial district. The smartly built residence at Medemannstraße 27 was lit up by a bright electric lamp. Its large foyer was heated by a modern steam system, and up the stairs was a large, clean dining hall. There were also small kitchenettes so the men themselves could cook. Each resident slept in an individual compartment measuring 4.6 by 6.9 feet, and there was a room where the men could shave.

  Two reading rooms—one for smokers, one for nonsmokers—contained pulp fiction and popular newspapers.46 In these reading rooms, debates ensued that reflected the increasingly radical political environment. Discussions centered on the high price of groceries and meat, the increasingly frequent riots, and the rising homeless population. The reading rooms at Hitler’s shelter began to host their own lively debates, which widened to broader discussions abou
t sex. Men shared stories about women as Hitler usually sat silent.

  Hitler began trying to articulate his political views through energetic speeches while simultaneously pursuing his art career.47 Typically, he painted in the corner of the men’s hostel, eavesdropping on the discussions of other residents. Whenever he disagreed, he would jump up, throw a pencil or paint brush across his table, and try to convince the others of his views by yelling, eyes ablaze. If Hitler felt his speeches extolling pan-German culture were falling flat, he would stop mid-sentence and abruptly return to his painting.

  Hitler’s speeches were not yet explicitly anti-Semitic, but he increasingly expressed admiration for Karl Lueger and Georg von Schönerer, noted anti-Semitic politicians who advocated policies for “managing Jews.”48 Nevertheless, Hitler seesawed between denigrating and admiring Jews. While he openly admired the talent of Jewish artists like the romantic composer Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy and befriended a one-eyed Jewish Austrian homeless man in the hostel, he was beginning to suspect that Jews had “a different smell” because they were a different human “breed” and began believing with increasing intensity in the pan-German movement while repeating Lueger’s view that no measure was too great to preserve the pan-German people.49 “Should the Jews threaten our Fatherland, we will know no mercy,” declared Lueger in a speech to thunderous applause, adding, “I do want to put out a warning.”50

  By the spring of 1910, one hostel resident, Reinhold Hanisch, had grown curious about Hitler’s artwork, despite the fact that holding a conversation with the future Führer was next to impossible. “He was awkward,” Hanisch would later recall.51 After Hitler said that he had attended the Akademie der Künste and would one day become a great artist, Hanisch suggested that Hitler paint postcards and sell them in local taverns, where there was a market for such cheap trinkets. After Hitler admitted that he was too shy to approach tavern owners, Hanisch proposed that he could do the footwork and take a commission while Hitler focused on his craft, and Hitler agreed.52