Adolf Hitler in Photographs

ADOLF HITLER'S PATH FROM MEN'S HOSTEL TO REICH

By Joachim Fest, a synopsis of his "The Face of the Third Reich."

 Victor and Vanquished

Torn this way and that between choleric elation and exhaustion, Hitler lashed out savagely in all directions, threw his armies over ever new frontiers, ceaselessly conquering fresh territories, none of which was large enough to satisfy his egomania. Anyone probing the root cause of the war and the manner of waging it is continually led back to considerations of Hitler’s character; for, much as the war looks like a predatory excursion necessitated by the Third Reich’s ruinous economic policy, great as was the influence of outdated nationalist, ideological or missionary motives, it was the purely hegemonic aims that overlay all others. The urge to dominate Europe, and ultimately the world, although backed by ideological and racial arguments, was at bottom nothing more nor less than the desire to exercise sovereignty. “The question,” Hitler himself once laconically put it, “is not the fate of National Socialist Germany, but who is to dominate Europe in the future.”

Once it had been discovered, the recipe for success remained almost unvaried, based chiefly on the advance of massed tanks straight through the enemy lines, followed by a pincer movement and encirclement. The German superiority lay less in a preponderance of men or materials than in unswerving application of the principle of the rapid mobile operation which, combined with sudden air attacks and commando and paratroop assaults behind the front, had the effect not so much of `defeating' the enemy in the classical sense as of so confusing him that he became incapable of fighting and ready to capitulate.

"The idea of treating wars as anything other than the harshest means of settling questions of very existence," he once said, "is ridiculous. Every war costs blood, and the smell of blood arouses in man all the instincts which have lain within us since the beginning of the world: deeds of violence, the intoxication of murder, and many other things. Everything else is empty babble. A humane war exists only in bloodless brains." In such maxims the primitive fascination of a consciousness stuck fast in its own formative period survives in crude analogies of the right of the stronger. Their effect was to ensure approval in the highest quarters for the policy of suppression now being practiced with increasing savagery. They also lent support to demands for the ruthless use of the German forces themselves. When the loss of young officers was pointed out to Hitler, he replied uncomprehendingly, "But that's what the young men are for!"

While his foes, who since the active intervention of the United States had over 75 percent of the world’s manpower, industrial capacity and sources of raw materials at their disposal, overran the outer bastions of his empire - North Africa, Sicily and the Ukraine - gained mastery of the air, and forced the collapse of the German U-boat campaign, Hitler buried himself in the solitude of his headquarters. There in almost manic impersonality, with security zones, barbed-wire and lines of outposts which on both Jodl and Goebbels produced the impression of a concentration camp, an embittered man, visibly deteriorating physically and in his own words tortured by melancholy, ever more deeply entangled in the hatreds and complexes of his early years, organized between attacks of compulsive screaming and pathological rage the continued prosecution of the war and the frenzied murder of whole peoples.

Soon after the unsuccessful Ardennes offensive, which had come to grief in a thousand incompetencies, Hitler returned to Berlin, to the bunker under the Reich Chancellery. Here, protected by twenty-six feet of concrete as much from reality as from enemy bombs, to the accompaniment of attacks of rage, senseless orders to attack, and convulsive weeping, he once more constructed his world of delusions, which included miracle weapons, ultimate victory, and great buildings to go up after the war. His body ruined by drugs, at the mercy of the storms of his temperament, and tortured by distrust, he looked by all accounts like a figure from the kingdom of the shades. He gestured wildly over maps, planned attacks, directed with a trembling hand armies that no longer existed, and as an encirclement began described to his entourage the joy of the battle before the gates of Berlin which was going to decide the war. During the night-long brooding monologues, which reflected both the final stage of his intellectual decay and his bitterness at the “cowardly failure” of the German people, he spoke “almost exclusively of the training of dogs, questions of diet, and the stupidity and wickedness of the world.” Almost daily he took counsel from the horoscopes of an astrologer, and while attacking Russian armies were already clashing with the hastily assembled remnants of the shattered German forces, fantastic hopes flickered again from the conjunction of planets, ascendants and transits in the square. Only when the ring had closed around the government district, and he ruled over nothing but a few million cubic yards of rubble, did he begin to give in.

On the night of 29 April, after he had begun the process of ending his existence with a scene of macabre pedantry and married his companion of many years, Eva Braun, he dictated his political testament. It contained protestations of his own innocence, accusations of foreign treachery and of undeserved disloyalty, and in its repetition of the old formulas demonstrated his lifelong inability to learn. He had never outgrown his first prejudices, hatreds and complexes, and remained to the end fixed in a monotonous sameness of thought and feeling. . . .

The following afternoon, with Russian troops only a few blocks from the Reich Chancellery, Hitler prepared to take his life. “He sat there,” an orderly officer wrote later, “apathetic and distractedly brooding, indifferent to everything going on around him, tormented, lifeless, a man dying slowly and with difficulty who was bound indissolubly to his destiny and was now being strangled by it. Then I knew that this was the end!” Shortly after 3 p.m. he retired with Eva Braun to his private rooms. . . . A single shot rang out. The commander of the SS guard, Rattenhuber, who had been waiting with a few others in the corridor, went in and found Hitler lying on the sofa, which was soaked in blood. Beside him lay Eva Braun, an unused revolver in her lap; she had taken poison. Rattenhuber had the two bodies taken into the garden, and petrol poured over them, then sent for the mourners: Goebbels, Bormann, General Burgdorf, Hitler’s valet Linge, and a few others. A burst of Russian firing drove them back into the bunker, and one of those present threw a burning rag on the bodies. As the flames shot up they all stood to attention with hands raised in the Nazi salute. A member of the guard who passed the spot half an hour after the ceremony couldn't recognize Hitler because he was already pretty burnt. pp 101-102

Only respect for the dead and the ruins he left behind forbid us to dismiss this life as no more than a nauseating, vulgar and bloody horror story, which fundamentally is all it amounts to; not without justice the epoch of his rise and power has been called “the age of the demonic nonentities.” The historian who studies this figure is continually up against the difficulty “of making the catastrophic magnitude of the events tally with the inconceivable commonplaceness of the individual who set them in motion.”

ADOLF HITLER'S PATH FROM MEN'S HOSTEL TO REICH

By Joachim Fest, a synopsis of his "The Face of the Third Reich."

The Fuhrer

The break forced on him by the failure of 9 November 1923 and his imprisonment at Landsberg helped Hitler to find himself - to find faith in himself and his mission. . . . .

From now on he adopted the consciously distant, icy front which no smile, no casual gesture, no self-forgetful attitude ever breached. More and more he struck the rigid, statuesque pose in which he found the style for his conception of greatness and leadership. A striking repetition of the dark past - he was to rise once more from anonymity by winning over the masses and gaining the favour of those in power, before once again gambling everything on a single insane decision and losing everything, as in 1923.

His first concern, after his return from [imprisonment at] Landsberg on 20 December 1924, was the removal of the ban on the party. The quick success of his negotiations was partly due to the adroitness with which he worked his way back into the “front of the parties standing for law and order,” employing, according to circumstances, protestations of respect for legality, anti-Marxist, pro-Catholic, or monarchist attitudes.

Against a background of wild cheering from the crowd of four thousand, who jumped on to the tables and embraced one another, a reconciliation took place between the warring members of the party. . . . Hitler was henceforth invariably known as ‘der Fuhrer.’ This success lent force to his decision to purge the party, which was refounded at this same meeting, of all the democratic relics of its early period and to give it the tightly authoritarian character of a party with a single leader - himself.

Once more he demonstrated his gift for tactical maneuvering and the upshot was the elimination of his only two serious rivals. While the activities of Gregor Strasser were diverted to North Germany, the embittered Ernst Rohm found himself, without any explanation, expelled.

He rapidly set up numerous offices and institutions which, in addition to their potential for keeping power within the party divided, also served to contest the competence and legality of the state institutions in the name of the true representatives of the supposedly unrepresented people. The departments of the shadow state came into being in parallel with the structure of ministerial government; for example the NSDAP had its own foreign, agricultural and defence offices. Provincial and district leaders increasingly laid claim to the status of ministers and local presidents; at public meetings the SA and SS took over police duties; and Hitler had himself represented at international conferences by his own ‘observers.’ Similar aims lay behind the party symbols: the swastika provided the shadow state's national emblem, the Horst Wessel Song its national anthem, while the brown shirt, orders and badges created a sense of solidarity in opposition to the existing state and rationalized the fondness for “decorations that were a profession of faith.”

He arrived at them [his methods] with an unwavering logic in which every detail was important and nothing left to chance: the size of the gathering, the precisely calculated composition of the crowd, the time of day, or the artificially delayed appearance of the speaker while tension was worked up by theatrically arranged processions of banners, military music, ecstatic shouts of ‘Heil!’ Suddenly, to the accompaniment of a blaze of light, he would emerge before a crowd systematically whipped up in its excitement to see him and primed for collective rapture. The “elimination of thought,” the “suggestive paralysis,” the creation of a “receptive state of fanatical devotion”: this culminating psychological state, the preparation of which Hitler had expressly described as the purpose of a mass meeting, had here become the aim of its stage-managing and the speech itself served no other purpose - the style, the arguments, the calculated climaxes, the modulation of the voice as well as the carefully practiced threatening or imploring gestures. “The masses are like an animal that obeys instincts,” he declared. In accordance with this principle, he prescribed the maximum primitiveness, simple catchphrases, constant repetition, the practice of attacking only one opponent at a time, as well as the dogmatic tone of the speeches, which deliberately refused to give “reasons” or to “refute other opinions.” All this amounted, as Hitler put it, to “a tactic based on the precise calculation of all human weaknesses, the results of which must lead almost mathematically to success.”

On 30 January 1933 Hindenburg bestowed on him the Chancellorship, the key position for the acquisition of that power which, once in his possession, as he had publicly stated, he would never allow to be taken from him again, “so help me God.” “It all seems like a fairy story,” noted Goebbels in his diary.

The Reich Chancellor

Hitler appeared on the political scene on 30 January 1933 with all the triumphal ceremonial of the historical victor. The grandiose setting with mass marches and torchlight processions was out of all proportion to the constitutional significance of the occasion, which technically speaking had merely brought a change of government. However, the public duly noted that the nomination of Hitler as Reich Chancellor was not like cabinet reshuffles in the past, but a new departure.

Hitler left no doubt that this was his promised hour, the hour of his will and his power. Even the first signs of terrorism could not mute the jubilation but rather added to it. The brutal behaviour with which the regime celebrated its entry into office was widely seen as merely the expression of an energy that was striving to manifest itself as much on the governmental plane as in the street, and hence earned respect and even trust; for public feeling, perverted by a mood of depression, valued even brutal activity higher than the state's past inaction. Once again it was proved that in revolutionary times public opinion is easily won over and perfidy, calculation and fear carry the day.

The fast vanishing minority of those who did not succumb to the urge to embrace the new, which was spreading like an epidemic, found themselves isolated, hiding their bitterness, their lonely disgust, in the face of a defeat manifestly inflicted upon them “by history itself.” Violence for opponents, and for supporters the great experience of a new sense of solidarity - these were the most striking features of this phase.

Hitler’s path to absolute power, which has since been variously imitated, remains in its several phases the classic model for the totalitarian capture of democratic institutions from within, that is to say with the assistance of, not in opposition to, the power of the state. Briefly, the technique consisted in the tactic of so linking the processes of revolutionary assault with legal actions that a screen of legality, dubious in individual cases and yet convincing as a whole, hid the illegality of the system from view.

The public was confused not only by this brilliantly applied technique for concealing the facts but also by the breakneck speed at which, one after the other, opponents’ positions were captured, leaving them no time to gather and regroup their in any case small and discouraged forces. Hitler later stated that it was his intention “to seize power swiftly and at one blow.” From the decree `for the protection of the German People' of his first week as Chancellor, the action against the Land of Prussia taken a few days later, and the so-called Reichstag Fire Decree, which established a permanent state of emergency, through the Enabling Law to the unparalleled decree declaring the murders carried out in connection with the Rohm affair to have been legal - which concluded the process of seizing power - each step was a consequence of the one before, and created the factual, technical preconditions for the next.

The state, over which he held absolute power, quickly took the shape of his own personality in countless respects: the naked dependence on power in relationships with people and things, coupled with a growing deterioration in all fields not connected with power; the boastful brutality of public manifestations of his will; the degradation of law; the theatrical and grandeur-seeking coldness which characterized all public announcements and all buildings representative of the state; the rigid constraint, followed from time to time by sudden discharges of energy; and finally the lack of relaxation and self-control. The special German form that all this took was not so much the expression of characteristics inherent in totalitarian systems as much as the faithful reflection of the mind of a psychopath in the institutions of state and society.

He was determined to “compel the German people, who are hesitating before their destiny, to walk the road to greatness.” Peace, which in September 1938 had once more been preserved, a year later had no chance left. For in the meantime the world felt itself challenged to the limit by the so-called Crystal Night (on which windows of Jewish shops were smashed throughout Germany) and the swallowing up of Czechoslovakia, by the spectacle of Hitler’s tearing up the Munich Agreement before the ink was dry. As though intoxicated, alternately pursuing his actions and being dragged along by them, seeking refuge in rhetorical delirium before the masses and with his judgement clouded by emotional exaltation, Hitler diligently arranged the preconditions for the catastrophe. “Our opponents are little worms,” he scoffed. “I saw them in Munich.” And he refused to believe they would take risks. When, at the end of August 1939, Goring tried to halt his insane behaviour and asked him to abandon his desperate gamble, Hitler replied excitedly that he had gambled desperately all his life.

Years before he had said in one of his bloody and misanthropic prophecies to Hermann Rauschning: "We must be prepared for the hardest struggle that a nation has ever had to face. Only through this test of endurance can we become ripe for the dominion to which we are called. It will be my duty to carry on this war regardless of losses. The sacrifice of lives will be immense. We all of us know what world war means. As a people we shall be forged to the hardness of steel. All that is weakly will fall away from us. But the forged central block will last forever. I have no fear of annihilation. We shall have to abandon much that is dear to us and today seems irreplaceable. Cities will become heaps of ruins; noble monuments of architecture will disappear forever. This time our sacred soil will not be spared. But I am not afraid of this." In these few sentences lies the epitaph of almost fifty million people.

ADOLF HITLER'S PATH FROM MEN'S HOSTEL TO REICH

By Joachim Fest, a synopsis of his "The Face of the Third Reich."

The Drummer

In the seething beer cellars, heavy with smoke, the agitator who had now risen to be the party's ‘recruiting chief’ slowly talked his way upward; the record of a meeting in October 1920 states that there were almost five thousand listeners. It was probably at this time that Hitler decided to become a politician.

The party's name was changed; it was now called - on the basis of existing groups, but also in response to an as yet inarticulate, but widespread need - the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei: NSDAP). By the end of 1920 it numbered some three thousand members, and six months later the prolonged and bitter struggle for the leadership ended with total victory for Hitler. On 7 December 1921 the Volkische Beobachter for the first time called him the “leader of the NSDAP.”

The poet Dietrich Eckart, who had joined Drexler's party before Hitler and had contacts with all the rightist circles, introduced him to Munich society, and the half curious, half repellent figure had its effect in the traditionally liberal stratum with its weakness for oddities. All accounts describe Hitler as awkward, fawningly polite, “noteworthy for his hasty greed when eating and his exaggerated bows.” His lack of confidence remained for a long time, and his sometimes eccentric efforts to show off mirrored the irreparably disturbed relationship to polite society of the former occupant of the charity ward and inmate of the men's hostel. He is reported to have made a habit of arriving late and leaving early; loud, ostentatious outbursts against Jews or political opponents alternated abruptly with phases of introspective withdrawal.

It was in Munich society that he made the acquaintance of a large proportion of his closest followers, among them Hermann Goring, the last commander of the Richthofen Fighter Squadron; the stiff, admiration-hungry Rudolf Hess, the Baltic German architect Alfred Rosenberg; and Max Erwin von Scheubner-Richter, who died on 9 November 1923, outside the Feldherrnhalle; all of these, and the many adherents of the second rank, were not workers, as the party's name implied, but representatives of an intellectual Bohemia, members of a middle class economically affected or mentally disorientated by the war.

The country's growing misery helped his rise, and he was already a leading figure in Bavarian politics when, in 1923, Germany was overwhelmed by crises. In North Germany there was a quickly repressed military putsch; in the Rhineland the separatist movement gained fresh impetus; in the Rhur, France's narrow-minded policy provoked a struggle for that region; Saxony and Thuringia came increasingly under the influence of the radical left; and as the value of the mark plunged hunger riots broke out everywhere. A revolutionary situation had arisen, charged with the moods and expectations of civil war.

In the mistaken belief that Kahr was ready to strike, he [Hitler] attempted a dramatic coup on the evening of 8 November, seeking to place himself at the head of all antirepublican groups in the Bavarian capital. Brandishing a pistol, he burst into the midst of a gathering of dignitaries, leading politicians and picked citizens of the province, who had been invited by Kahr to the Burgerbraukeller. After firing a shot into the ceiling he announced the National Revolution, declared the Bavarian government deposed, and proclaimed a provisional Reich government under his own leadership.

But the attempt failed. Hitler was torn between rage, despair and nervous breakdown. His sequence of hysterical moods foreshadowed the later convulsions and fits of frenzy of the defeated war leader and clearly demonstrated the failure of a basically unstable neurotic in a critical situation. . . .

On the following day (9 November) he placed himself, together with Ludendorff, at the head of a growing crowd that finally numbered several thousands. In the Odeonplatz, directly beside the Feldherrnhalle, there was an exchange of fire with a numerically weak police cordon. Hitler and the majority of his companions in the front rank fell or threw themselves to the ground; only Ludendorff, trembling with rage, walked on with heedless heroism and was arrested. Hitler then fled, leaving behind a few thousand followers and sixteen dead. The legend, obviously put about later by himself, that he had carried a helpless child out of the firing line - he even produced the child in support of his statement - has been proved false. . . .

The course of the ensuing trial, which began on 25 February 1924, was determined by the tacit agreement of all those taking part not to “touch upon the ‘essence’ of those events,” so that the hearing was reduced to a farce in which Hitler unexpectedly ceased to be the accused and became the accuser.

The verdict of the Munich people’s Court, as has been aptly remarked, corresponded almost exactly to the heavenly verdict predicted by Hitler. The president of the court had the greatest difficulty in persuading the three lay judges to find him guilty at all.

They agreed only on his assuring them that Hitler would unquestionably be granted an early pardon. The sentence, the preamble to which once more emphasized the accused’s “purely patriotic spirit and noblest intentions,” was the minimum punishment of five years' imprisonment with the prospect of serving the term on probation after six months in prison. . .  After this Hitler showed himself to the cheering crowd from a window of the law courts.

This failure [the failure of November 1923] was the starting point for a struggle for power in entirely new conditions and by new methods. Of decisive importance in this struggle was Hitler’s realization that force was not the way to capture the modern state apparatus, that power could be seized only on the basis of the Constitution itself. This certainly did not mean that he accepted the Constitution as a binding limitation on his future efforts; it meant that he resolved, and rigorously held to his decision throughout the rest of his struggle for power, regardless of dissensions within the party and revolts by the impatient, to steer towards illegality under the protection of legality.

The unsuccessful putsch marked the end of Hitler’s political apprenticeship. The understanding of power that enabled him to rise during the following years was based on an ability to adapt to those in power, adroit handling of tactical compromises, and growing familiarity with the techniques of psychological domination and the principles of party organization. This last he increasingly directed towards his own person, elevating himself from the role of drummer to the pseudometaphysical concept of the `Fuhrer.'

LEADING UP TO VERSAILLES, WEIMAR AND THE BEER HALL PUTSCH

To most men in the victorious Allied lands of the West, the proclamation of the Republic in Berlin on November 9, 1918, had appeared to mark the dawn of a new day for the German people and their nation. Woodrow Wilson, in the exchange of notes which led to the armistice, had pressed for the abolition of the Hohenzollern militarist autocracy, and the Germans had seemingly obliged him, although reluctantly. The Kaiser had been forced to abdicate and to flee; the monarchy was dissolved, all the dynasties in Germany were quickly done away with, and republican government was proclaimed.

But proclaimed by accident! On the afternoon of November 9, the so-called Majority Social Democrats under the leadership of Friedrich Ebert and Philipp Scheidemann met in the Reichstag in Berlin following the resignation of the Chancellor, Prince Max of Baden. They were sorely puzzled as to what to do. Prince Max had just announced the abdication of the Kaiser. Ebert, a saddler by trade, thought that one of Wilhelm’s sons – anyone except the dissolute Crown Prince – might succeed him, for he favored a constitutional monarchy on the British pattern. Ebert, though he led the Socialists, abhorred social revolution. ”I hate it like sin,” he had once declared.

But revolution was in the air in Berlin. The capital was paralyzed by a general strike. Down the broad Unter den Linden, a few blocks from the Reichstag, the Spartacists, led by the Left Socialists Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, were preparing from their citadel in the Kaiser’s palace to proclaim a soviet republic.

When word of this reached the Socialists in the Reichstag they were consternated. Something had to be done at once to forestall the Spartacists. Scheidemann thought of something. Without consulting his comrades he dashed to the window overlooking the Koenigsplatz, where a great throng had gathered, stuck his head out and on his own, as if the idea had just popped into his head, proclaimed the Republic! The saddle maker Ebert was furious. He had hoped, somehow, to save the Hohenzollern monarchy. Thus was the German Republic born, as if by a fluke. If the Socialists themselves were not staunch republicans it could hardly be expected that the conservatives would be. But the latter had abdicated their responsibility. They and the Army leaders, Ludendorff and Hindenburg, had pushed political power into the hands of the reluctant Social Democrats. In doing so they managed also to place on the shoulders of these democratic working-class leaders apparent responsibility for signing the surrender and ultimately the peace treaty, thus laying on them the blame for Germany’s defeat and for whatever suffering a lost war and a dictated peace might bring upon the German people. This was a shabby trick, one which the merest child would be expected to see through, but in Germany it worked. It doomed the Republic from the start.

Perhaps it need not have. In November 1918 the Social Democrats, holding absolute power, might have quickly laid the foundation for a lasting democratic Republic. But to have done so they would have had to suppress permanently, or at least curb permanently, the forces which had propped up the Hohenzollern

Empire and which would not loyally accept a democratic Germany: the feudal Junker landlords and other upper castes, the magnates who ruled over the great industrial cartels, the roving condottieri of the free corps, the ranking officials of the imperial civil service and, above all, the military caste and the members of the General Staff. They would have had to break up many of the great estates, which were wasteful and uneconomic, and the industrial monopolies and cartels, and clean out the bureaucracy, the judiciary, the police, the universities and the Army of all who would not loyally and honestly serve the new democratic regime. This the Social Democrats, who were mostly well-meaning trade-unionists with the same habit of bowing to old, established authority which was ingrained in Germans of other classes, could not bring themselves to do. Instead they began by abdicating their authority to the force which had always been dominant in modern Germany, the Army. For though it had been defeated on the battlefield the Army still had hopes of maintaining itself at home and of defeating the revolution. To achieve these ends it moved swiftly and boldly. On the night of November 9, 1918, a few hours after the Republic had been ”proclaimed,” a telephone rang in the study of Ebert in the Reich Chancellery in Berlin. It was a very special telephone, for it was linked with Supreme Headquarters at Spa by a private and secret line. Ebert was alone. He picked up the telephone. ”Groener speaking,” a voice said. The former saddle maker, still bewildered by the day’s events which had suddenly thrust into his unwilling hands whatever political power remained in a crumbling Germany, was impressed. General Wilhelm Groener was the successor of Ludendorff as First Quartermaster General. Earlier on that very day at Spa it was he who, when Field Marshal von Hindenburg faltered, had bluntly informed the Kaiser that he no longer commanded the loyalty of his troops and must go – a brave act for which the military caste never forgave him. Ebert and Groener had developed a bond of mutual respect since 1916, when the General, then in charge of war production, had worked closely with the Socialist leader. Early in November – a few days before – they had conferred in Berlin on how to save the monarchy and the Fatherland.

Now at the Fatherland’s lowest moment a secret telephone line brought them together. Then and there the Socialist leader and the second-in-command of the German Army made a pact which, though it would not be publicly known for many years, was to determine the nation’s fate. Ebert agreed to put down anarchy and Bolshevism and maintain the Army in all its tradition. Groener thereupon pledged the support of the Army in helping the new government establish itself and carry out its aims.

”Will the Field Marshal (Hindenburg) retain the command?” Ebert asked.

General Groener replied that he would.

”Convey to the Field Marshal the thanks of the government,” Ebert

replied.

The German Army was saved, but the Republic, on the very day of its birth, was lost. The generals, with the honorable exception of Groener himself and but few others, would never serve it loyally. In the end, led by Hindenburg, they betrayed it to the Nazis.

At the moment, to be sure, the specter of what had just happened in Russia haunted the minds of Ebert and his fellow Socialists. They did not want to become the German Kerenskys. They did not want to be supplanted by the Bolshevists. Everywhere in Germany the Soldiers’ and Workers’ Councils were springing up and assuming power, as they had done in Russia. It was these groups which on November 10 elected a Council of People’s Representatives, with Ebert at its head, to govern Germany for the time being. In December the first Soviet Congress of Germany met in Berlin. Composed of delegates from the Soldiers’ and Workers’ Councils throughout the country, it demanded the dismissal of Hindenburg, the abolition of the Regular Army and the substitution of a civil guard whose officers would be elected by the men and which would be under the supreme authority of the Council.

This was too much for Hindenburg and Groener. They declined to recognize the authority of the Soviet Congress. Ebert himself did nothing to carry out its demands. But the Army, fighting for its life, demanded more positive action from the government it had agreed to support. Two days before Christmas the

People’s Marine Division, now under the control of the Communist Spartacists, occupied the Wilhelmstrasse, broke into the Chancellery and cut its telephone wires. The secret line to Army headquarters, however, continued to function and over it Ebert appealed for help. The Army promised liberation by the Potsdam garrison, but before it could arrive the mutinous sailors retired to their quarters in the stables of the imperial palace, which the Spartacists still held.

The Spartacists, with Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, the two most effective agitators in Germany, at their head, continued to push for a soviet republic. Their armed power in Berlin was mounting. On Christmas Eve the Marine Division had easily repulsed an attempt by regular troops from Potsdam to dislodge it from the imperial stables. Hindenburg and Groener pressed Ebert to honor the pact between them and suppress the Bolshevists. This the Socialist leader was only too glad to do. Two days after Christmas he appointed Gustav Noske as Minister of National Defense, and from this appointment events proceeded with a logic which all who knew the new Minister might have expected. Noske was a master butcher by trade who had worked his way up in the trade-union movement and the Social Democratic Party, becoming a member of the Reichstag in 1906, where he became recognized as the party’s expert on military affairs. He also became recognized as a strong nationalist and as a strong man. Prince Max of Baden had picked him to put down the naval mutiny at Kiel in the first days of November and he had put it down. A stocky, square-jawed man of great physical strength and energy, though of abbreviated intelligence – typical, his enemies said, of his trade – Noske announced on his appointment as Defense Minister that ”someone must be the bloodhound.” Early in January 1919 he struck. Between January 10 and 17 – ’Bloody Week,” as it was called in Berlin for a time – regular and free-corps troops under the direction of Noske and the command of General von Luettwitz crushed the Spartacists (A year later General Freiherr Walther von Luettwitz, a reactionary officer of the old school, would show how loyal he was to the Republic in general and to Noske in particular when he led free-corps troops in the capture of Berlin in support of the Kapp putsch. Ebert, Noske and the other members of the government were forced to flee at five in the morning of March 13, 1920. General von Seeckt, Chief of Staff of the Army and nominally subordinate to Noske, the Minister of Defense, had refused to allow the Army to defend the Republic against Luettwitz and Kapp. ”This night has shown the bankruptcy of all my policy,” Noske cried out. ”My faith in the Officer Corps is shattered. You have all deserted me.” (Quoted by Wheeler-Bennett in The Nemesis of.Power, p. 77.). Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht were captured and murdered by officers of the Guard Cavalry Division.

As soon as the fighting in Berlin was over, elections were held throughout Germany for the National Assembly, which was to draw up the new constitution. The voting, which took place on January 19, 1919, revealed that the middle and upper classes had regained some of their courage in the little more than

two months which had elapsed since the ”revolution.” The Social Democrats (the Majority and Independent Socialists), who had governed alone because no other group would share the burden, received 13,800,000 votes out of 30,000,000 cast and won 185 out of 421 seats in the Assembly, but this was considerably less than a majority. Obviously the new Germany was not going to be built by the working class alone. Two middle-class parties, the Center, representing the political movement of the Roman Catholic Church, and the Democratic Party, born of a fusion in December of the old Progressive Party and the left wing of the National Liberals, polled 11,500,000 votes between them and obtained 166 seats in the Assembly. Both parties professed support for a moderate, democratic Republic, though there was considerable sentiment for an eventual restoration of the monarchy.

The Conservatives, some of whose leaders had gone into hiding in November and others who, like Count von Westarp, had appealed to Ebert for protection, showed that though reduced in numbers they were far from extinguished. Rechristened the German National People’s Party, they polled over three million votes and elected 44 deputies; their right-wing allies, the National Liberals, who had changed their name to the German People’s Party, received nearly a million and a half votes and won 19 seats. Though decidedly in the minority, the two conservative parties had won enough seats in the Assembly to be vocal.

Indeed, no sooner had the Assembly met in Weimar on February 6, 1919, than the leaders of these two groups sprang up to defend the name of Kaiser Wilhelm II and the way he and his generals had conducted the war. Gustav Stresemann, the head of the People’s Party, had not yet experienced what later seemed to many to be a change of heart and mind. In 1919 he was still known as the man who had been the Supreme Command’s mouthpiece in the Reichstag – ”Ludendorffs young man,” as he was called – a violent supporter of the policy of annexation, a fanatic for unrestricted submarine warfare. The constitution which emerged from the Assembly after six months of debate – it was passed on July 31, 1919, and ratified by the President on August 31 – was, on paper, the most liberal and democratic document of its kind the twentieth century had seen, mechanically well-nigh perfect, full of ingenious and admirable devices which seemed to guarantee the working of an almost flawless democracy. The idea of cabinet government was borrowed from England and France, of a strong popular President from the United States, of the referendum from Switzerland. An elaborate and complicated system of proportional representation and voting by lists was established in order to prevent the wasting of votes and give small minorities a right to be represented in Parliament. _

The wording of the Weimar Constitution was sweet and eloquent to the ear of any democratically minded man. The people were declared sovereign: ”Political power emanates from the people.” Men and women were given the vote at the age of twenty. ”All Germans are equal before the law . . . Personal liberty is inviolable . . . Every German has a right . . . to express his opinion freely . . . All Germans have the right to form associations or societies . . . All inhabitants of the Reich enjoy complete liberty of belief and conscience . . . ” No man in the world would be more free than a German, no government more democratic and liberal than his. On paper, at least.

- William Shrirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, pp. 49-53

Fatal Attraction of Adolf Hitler 5/5

"This BBC documentary, made in 1989, seeks to answer two related questions. How did Hitler, whose National Socialist Party never gained the votes of much more than a third of the German electorate in a free election, manage to win the support of the overwhelming majority of the German people? To what extent did they share his goals of the mass murder of the Jews and the establishment of a German Empire based on the conquest of the Soviet Union, the murder of the original inhabitants or their reduction to rightless slaves of the Third Reich? It argues that most Germans came, after January 1933, to support Hitler because of their belief that he had brought to an end the hardships of the Great Depression and the humiliations which the country had suffered at Versailles. Having fallen prey to his "fatal attraction," they were prepared, even if in some cases unwillingly, to support him in his goals of eliminating the Jews and establishing a German Empire with a population of 200 million.This "fatal attraction" explains the failure of German morale to crack under the devastating impact of Allied mass bombing in which 300,000 civilians died. Only after Hitler's suicide was the spell broken."

Fatal Attraction of Adolf Hitler 4/5

"This BBC documentary, made in 1989, seeks to answer two related questions. How did Hitler, whose National Socialist Party never gained the votes of much more than a third of the German electorate in a free election, manage to win the support of the overwhelming majority of the German people? To what extent did they share his goals of the mass murder of the Jews and the establishment of a German Empire based on the conquest of the Soviet Union, the murder of the original inhabitants or their reduction to rightless slaves of the Third Reich? It argues that most Germans came, after January 1933, to support Hitler because of their belief that he had brought to an end the hardships of the Great Depression and the humiliations which the country had suffered at Versailles. Having fallen prey to his "fatal attraction," they were prepared, even if in some cases unwillingly, to support him in his goals of eliminating the Jews and establishing a German Empire with a population of 200 million.This "fatal attraction" explains the failure of German morale to crack under the devastating impact of Allied mass bombing in which 300,000 civilians died. Only after Hitler's suicide was the spell broken."

Fatal Attraction of Adolf Hitler 3/5

"This BBC documentary, made in 1989, seeks to answer two related questions. How did Hitler, whose National Socialist Party never gained the votes of much more than a third of the German electorate in a free election, manage to win the support of the overwhelming majority of the German people? To what extent did they share his goals of the mass murder of the Jews and the establishment of a German Empire based on the conquest of the Soviet Union, the murder of the original inhabitants or their reduction to rightless slaves of the Third Reich? It argues that most Germans came, after January 1933, to support Hitler because of their belief that he had brought to an end the hardships of the Great Depression and the humiliations which the country had suffered at Versailles. Having fallen prey to his "fatal attraction," they were prepared, even if in some cases unwillingly, to support him in his goals of eliminating the Jews and establishing a German Empire with a population of 200 million.This "fatal attraction" explains the failure of German morale to crack under the devastating impact of Allied mass bombing in which 300,000 civilians died. Only after Hitler's suicide was the spell broken."

Fatal Attraction of Adolf Hitler 2/5

"This BBC documentary, made in 1989, seeks to answer two related questions. How did Hitler, whose National Socialist Party never gained the votes of much more than a third of the German electorate in a free election, manage to win the support of the overwhelming majority of the German people? To what extent did they share his goals of the mass murder of the Jews and the establishment of a German Empire based on the conquest of the Soviet Union, the murder of the original inhabitants or their reduction to rightless slaves of the Third Reich? It argues that most Germans came, after January 1933, to support Hitler because of their belief that he had brought to an end the hardships of the Great Depression and the humiliations which the country had suffered at Versailles. Having fallen prey to his "fatal attraction," they were prepared, even if in some cases unwillingly, to support him in his goals of eliminating the Jews and establishing a German Empire with a population of 200 million.This "fatal attraction" explains the failure of German morale to crack under the devastating impact of Allied mass bombing in which 300,000 civilians died. Only after Hitler's suicide was the spell broken."

Fatal Attraction of Adolf Hitler 1/5

"This BBC documentary, made in 1989, seeks to answer two related questions. How did Hitler, whose National Socialist Party never gained the votes of much more than a third of the German electorate in a free election, manage to win the support of the overwhelming majority of the German people? To what extent did they share his goals of the mass murder of the Jews and the establishment of a German Empire based on the conquest of the Soviet Union, the murder of the original inhabitants or their reduction to rightless slaves of the Third Reich? It argues that most Germans came, after January 1933, to support Hitler because of their belief that he had brought to an end the hardships of the Great Depression and the humiliations which the country had suffered at Versailles. Having fallen prey to his "fatal attraction," they were prepared, even if in some cases unwillingly, to support him in his goals of eliminating the Jews and establishing a German Empire with a population of 200 million.This "fatal attraction" explains the failure of German morale to crack under the devastating impact of Allied mass bombing in which 300,000 civilians died. Only after Hitler's suicide was the spell broken."

Origins and Youth of Albert Speer

Taken from the book "Inside the Third Reich." Which is the memoires of Albert Speer, Hitler's Minister of Armaments. pp. 2-12

Origins and Youth

Some of my forefathers were Swabians, some came from poor peasants of the Westerwald, others from Silesia and Westphalia. They belonged to the great mass of those who live quiet, unnotable lives. There  was one exception: Hereditary Reich Marshal Count Friedrich Ferdinand zu Pappenheim 1 (1702-93), who begot eight sons with my unmarried ancestress Humelin. He does not, however, seem to have worried much about their welfare.

Three generations later my grandfather Hermann Hommel, son of a poor forester in the Black Forest, had become by the end of his life sole owner of one of the largest machine-tool firms in Germany and of a precision-instrument factory. In spite of his wealth he lived modestly and treated his subordinates well. Hard-working himself, he knew how to let others work without interfering. A typical Black Forest brooder, he could sit for hours on a bench in the woods without wasting a word.

My other grandfather, Berthold Speer, became a prosperous architect in Dortmund about this same time. He designed many buildings in the neoclassical style of the period. Though he died young, he left enough to provide for the education of his four sons. The success of both my grand- fathers was furthered by the rapid industrialization of Germany which began in the second half of the nineteenth century. But then, many persons who had started out from a better basis did not necessarily flourish.

My father s mother, prematurely white-haired, inspired in me more respect than love in my boyhood. She was a serious woman, moored fast to simple notions about life and possessing an obstinate energy. She dominated everyone around her.

I came into the world in Mannheim at noon on Sunday, March 19, 1905. The thunder of a spring storm drowned out the bells of nearby Christ Church, as my mother often used to tell me.

In 1892, at the age of twenty-nine, my father had established his own architectural firm. He had since become one of the busiest architects in Mannheim, then a booming industrial town. He had acquired a considerable fortune by the time he married the daughter of a prosperous Mainz businessman in 1900.

The upper-middle-class style of our apartment in one of his Mannheim houses was commensurate with my parents' status. It was an imposing house, built around a courtyard guarded by elaborate wrought-iron gates. Automobiles would drive into this courtyard and stop in front of a flight of stairs which provided a suitable entrance to the richly furnished house. But the children— my two brothers and I— had to use the back stairs. These were dark, steep, and narrow and ended unimpressively in a rear corridor. Children had no business in the elegant, carpeted front hall.

As children our realm extended from our bedrooms in the rear wing to a vast kitchen. We had to pass through the kitchen to enter the elegant part of the f ourteen-room apartment. From a vestibule with a sham fireplace faced with valuable Delft tiles guests were conducted into a large room full of French furniture and Empire upholstery. The glittering crystal chandelier particularly is so impressed on my memory that I can see it to this day. So is the conservatory, whose appointments my father had bought at the Paris World Exhibition in 1900: richly carved Indian furniture, hand-embroidered curtains, and a tapestry-covered divan. Palms and other exotic plants suggested an exotic world. Here my parents had their breakfast and here my father would make ham rolls for us children of the kind that were eaten in his native Westphalia. My recollection of the adjacent living room has faded, but the paneled, neo-Gothic dining room has kept its magic for me. The table could seat more than twenty. There my baptism was celebrated; there our family festivals take place to this day.

My mother took great pleasure and pride in seeing to it that we belonged socially to the leading families of Mannheim. There were surely no more—but no less-thah twenty or thirty households in the city that enjoyed comparable luxuries. A large staff of servants helped meet the requirements of status. In addition to the cook— whom for obvious reasons we children were especially fond of-my parents employed a kitchen maid, a chambermaid, a butler frequently, and a chauffeur always, as well as a nanny to look after us. The maids wore white caps, black dresses, and white aprons; the butler, purple livery with gilt buttons. The chauffeur was dressed most magnificently of all.

My parents did their best to provide a happy childhood for us. But wealth and status— social obligations, the large household, the nanny, and the servants— stood in the way of their doing as they wished in this respect. To this day I can feel the artificiality and discomfort of that world. Moreover, I often had dizzy spells and sometimes fainted. The Heidelberg physician whom they consulted, a distinguished professor of medicine, diagnosed the cause as "weakness of the vascular nerves/' This disability was a considerable psychological burden and early made me conscious of the pressure of external conditions. I suffered all the more because my playmates and my two brothers were more robust than I, so that I felt inferior to them. In their rough and tumble way they often made it clear that this was how they thought of me, too.

An inadequacy often calls forth compensating forces. In any case these difficulties made me learn how to adjust better to the world of other boys. If I later showed some aptitude in dealing with difficult circumstances and troublesome people, I suspect that the gift can be traced back to my boyhood physical weakness.

When we were taken out by our French governess, we had to be nattily dressed, in keeping with our social status. Naturally, we were forbidden to play in the city parks, let alone on the street. All we had for a playground was our courtyard— not much larger than a few of our rooms put together. It was surrounded by the backs of tall apartment houses. This yard contained two or three wretched plane trees, starved for air, and an ivy-covered wall. A mound of tufa rocks in one corner suggested a grotto. By early spring a thick layer of soot coated the greenery, and whatever we touched was bent on transforming us into dirty, dis- reputable big-city children. My favorite playmate, before my school days began, was Frieda Allmendinger, the concierge's daughter. The atmosphere of sparse simplicity and the close-knit quality of a family living in crowded quarters had a curious attraction for me.

I attended the primary grades at a distinguished private school where the children of leading families were taught reading and writing. After this sheltered environment, my first months in the public Oberrealschule (high school), amid rowdy fellow pupils, were especially hard for me. I had a friend named Quenzer, however, who soon introduced me to all sorts of fun and games. He also persuaded me to buy a soccer ball with my pocket money. This was a plebeian impulse which horrified my parents, all the more so since Quenzer came from a poor family. I think it was at this time that my bent for statistics first manifested itself. I recorded all the bad marks in the class book in my "Phoenix Calendar for

Schoolchildren/' and every month counted up who had received the most demerits. No doubt I would not have bothered if I had not had some prospect of frequently heading the list.

The office of my father’s architectural firm was right next door to our apartment. That was where the large renderings for the builders were made. Drawings of all sorts were made on a bluish transparent paper whose smell is still part and parcel of my memories of that office. My father’s buildings were influenced by the neo-Renaissance: they had bypassed Jugendstil. Later on, the quieter classicism of Ludwig Hoffmann, the influential city architect of Berlin, served him as a model.

In that office I made my first "work of art" at the age of twelve. A birthday present for my father, it was a drawing of a sort of allegorical 'life clock," in a highly ornamented case complete with Corinthian columns and intricate scrollwork. I used all the watercolors I could lay hands on. With the help of the office employees, I produced a reasonable facsimile of an object in Late Empire style.

Before 1914 my parents kept a touring car for summer use as well as a sedan for driving around the city in winter. These automobiles were the focus of my technological passions. At the beginning of the war they had to be put upon blocks, to spare the tires; but if the chauffeur were well disposed to us, we children were allowed to sit at the steering wheel in the garage. At such times I experienced the first sensations of technical intoxication in a world that was yet scarcely technical. In Spandau prison I had to live like a man of the nineteenth century without a radio, television set, telephone, or car and was not even allowed to work the light switch myself. After ten years of imprisonment I experienced a similar rapture when I was allowed to run an electric floor polisher.

In 1915 I encountered another product of the technical revolution of those decades. One of the zeppelins used in the air raids on London was stationed in Mannheim. The captain and his officers were soon frequent guests in our house. They invited my two brothers and me to tour their airship. Ten years old, I stood before that giant product of technology, clambered into the motor gondola, made my way through the dim mysterious corridors inside the hull, and went into the control gondola.

When the airship started, toward evening, the captain had it perform a neat loop over our house, and the officers waved a sheet they had borrowed from our mother. Night after night afterward I was in terror that the airship would go up in flames, and all my friends would be killed (In 1917 heavy losses made it necessary to call off the attacks).

My imagination dwelt on the war, on the advances and retreats at the front, on the suffering of the soldiers. At night we sometimes heard a distant rumble from the great battle of attrition at Verdun. With the ardent sympathies of childhood, I would often sleep for several nights running on the hard floor beside my soft bed in order to be sharing the privations of the soldiers at the front.

We did not escape the food shortages in the city and what was then called the turnip winter. We had wealth, but no relatives or acquaintances in the countryside. My mother was clever at devising endless new variations on turnip dishes, but I was often so hungry that in secret I gradually consumed a whole bag of stone-hard dog biscuits left over from peace- time. The air raids on Mannheim, which by present-day standards were quite innocuous, became more frequent. One small bomb struck a neigh- boring house. A new period of my boyhood began.

Since 1905 we had owned a summer home in the vicinity of Heidelberg. It stood on the slope of a quarry that was said to have supplied the stone for the nearby Heidelberg Schloss. Back of the slope rose the hills of the Odenwald with hiking paths through the ancient woods. Strip clearings provided occasional glimpses of the Neckar Valley. Here every- thing was peaceful; we could have a fine garden and vegetables, and the neighbor owned a cow. We moved there in the summer of 1918.

My health soon improved. Every day, even in snowstorms and rain, I tramped for three-quarters of an hour to and from school, often at a steady run. Bicycles were not available in the straitened early postwar period.

My way to school led me past the clubhouse of a rowing association. In 1919 1 became a member and for two years was coxswain of the racing fours and eights. In spite of my still frail constitution I soon became one of the most diligent oarsmen in the club. At the age of sixteen I advanced to stroke in the school shells and took part in several races. For the first time I had been seized by ambition and was spurred to performances I would not have thought myself capable of. What excited me was more the chance to direct the crew by my own rhythm than the prospect of winning respect in the small world of oarsmen.

Most of the time we were defeated, to be sure. But since a team per- formance was involved, each individual's flaws could not be weighed. On the contrary, a sense of common action arose. There was another benefit to such training: the requirement of self -discipline. At the time I despised those among my schoolmates who were finding their first pleasures in dancing, wine, and cigarettes.

On my way to school, at the age of seventeen, I met the girl who was to become my wife. Falling in love made me more studious, for a year later we agreed that we would be married as soon as I completed my university studies. I had long been good at mathematics; but now my marks in other subjects also improved, and I became one of the best in the class.

Our German teacher, an enthusiastic democrat, often read aloud to us from the liberal Frankfurter Zeitung. But for this teacher I would have remained altogether nonpolitical in school. For we were being educated in terms of a conservative bourgeois view of the world. In spite of the Revolution which had brought in the Weimar Republic, it was still impressed upon us that the distribution of power in society and the traditional authorities were part of the God-given order of things. We remained largely untouched by the currents stirring everywhere during the early twenties. In school, there could be no criticism of courses or subject matter, let alone of the ruling powers in the state. Unconditional faith in the authority of the school was required. It never even occurred to us to doubt the order of things, for as students we were subjected to the dictates of a virtually absolutist system. Moreover, there were no subjects such as sociology which might have sharpened our political judgments. Even in our senior year, German class assignments called solely for essays on literary subjects, which actually prevented us from giving any thought to the problems of society. Nor did all these restrictions in school impel us to take positions on political events during extracurricular activities or outside of school. One decisive point of difference from the present was our inability to travel abroad. Even if funds for foreign travel had been available, no organizations existed to help young people under- take such travel. It seems to me essential to point out these lacks, as a result of which a whole generation was without defenses when exposed to the new techniques for influencing opinion.

At home, too, politics were not discussed. This was all the odder since my father had been a convinced liberal even before 1914. Every morning he waited impatiently for the Frankfurter Zeitung to arrive; every week he read the critical magazines Simplicissimus and Jugend. He shared the ideas of Friedrich Naumann, who called for social reforms in a powerful Germany. After 1923 my father became a follower of Couden-hove-Kalergi and zealously advocated his pan-European ideas. Father would surely have been glad to talk about politics with me, but I tended to dodge such discussions and he did not insist. This political indifference was characteristic of the youth of the period, tired and disillusioned as they were by a lost war, revolution, and inflation; but it prevented me from forming political standards, from setting up categories on which political judgments could be based. I was much more inclined to detour on my way to school across the park of the Heidelberg Schloss and to linger on the terrace looking dreamily at the ruins of the castle and down at the old city. This partiality for tumbledown citadels and tangles of crooked old streets remained with me and later found expression in my passion for collecting landscape paintings, especially the works of the Heidelberg Romantics. On the way to the Schloss I sometimes met the poet Stefan George, who radiated dignity and pride and a kind of priestliness. The great religious preachers must have had such an effect upon people, for there was something magnetic about him. When my elder brother was in his senior year, he was admitted to the Master's inner circle.

Music meant a good deal to me. Up to 1922, 1 was able to hear the young Furtwangler in Mannheim and after him, Erich Kleiber. At that time I found Verdi more impressive than Wagner and thought Puccini "frightful." On the other hand, I was ravished by a symphony of Rimsky- Korsakov and judged Mahler's Fifth Symphony "rather complicated, but I liked it." After a visit to the Playhouse, I observed that Georg Kaiser was "the most important modern dramatist who in his works wrestles with the concept of the value and power of money." And upon seeing Ibsen's The Wild Duck, I decided that we could not find the characteristics of the leaders of society as other than ridiculous. These people were "farcical," I wrote. Romain Holland's novel Jean Chrisiophe heightened my enthusi- asm for Beethoven.

It was, therefore, not only in a burst of youthful rebelliousness that I found the luxurious life at home not to my liking. There was a more basic opposition involved when I turned to what were then the advanced writers and looked for friends in a rowing club or in the huts of the Alpine Club. The custom in my circles was for a young man to seek his companions and his future wife in the sheltered class to which his parents belonged. But I was drawn to plain, solid artisan families for both. I even felt an instinctive sympathy for the extreme left— though this inclination never assumed any concrete form. At the time I was allergic to any political commitments. That continued to be so, even though I felt strong nationalistic feelings— as for example, at the time of the French occupation of the Ruhr in 1923.

To my amazement my Abitur essay was judged the best in my class. Nevertheless I thought, "That's hardly likely for you," when the head of the school in his farewell address told the graduates that now "the way to highest deeds and honors" was open to us.

Since I was the best mathematician in the school, I had intended to study that subject. But my father presented sound reasons against this choice, and I would not have been a mathematician familiar with the laws of logic if I had not yielded to his arguments. The profession of architecture, which I had been absorbing naturally since my boyhood, seemed the obvious choice. I therefore decided, to my father's delight, to become an architect, like him and his father before him.

During my first semester I studied at the Institute of Technology in nearby Karlsruhe. Financial reasons dictated this choice, for the inflation was growing wilder with each passing day. I had to draw my allowance weekly; by the end of the week the fabulous sum had melted away to nothing. From the Black Forest where I was on a bicycle tour in the middle of September 1923, I wrote: "Very cheap here! Lodgings 400,000 marks and supper 1,800,000 marks. Milk 250,000 marks a pint." Six weeks later, shortly before the end of the inflation, a restaurant dinner cost ten to twenty billion marks, and even in the student dining hall over a billion. I had to pay between three and four hundred million marks for a theater ticket.

The financial upheaval finally forced my family to sell my deceased grandfather's firm and factory to another company at a fraction of its value in return for "dollar treasury bills/' Afterward, my monthly allowance amounted to sixteen dollars—on which I was totally free of cares and could live splendidly.

In the spring of 1924, with the inflation now over, I shifted to the Institute of Technology in Munich. Although I remained there until the summer of 1925 and Hitler, after his release from prison, was again making a stir in the spring of 1925, I took no notice of him. In my long letters to my fiancée I wrote only of how I was studying far into the night and of our common goal: getting married in three or four years.

During the holidays my future wife and I with a few fellow students frequently went on tramps from shelter to shelter in the Austrian Alps. Hard climbs gave us the sense of real achievement. Sometimes, with characteristic obstinacy, I managed to convince my fellow hikers not to give up a tour we had started on, even in the worst weather— in spite of storms, icy rains, and cold, although mists spoiled the view from the peak when we finally reached it. Often, from the mountain tops, we looked down upon a deep gray layer of cloud over the distant plain. Down there lived what to our minds were wretched people; we thought we stood high above them in every sense. Young and rather arrogant, we were convinced that only the finest people went into the mountains. When we returned from the peaks to the normal life of the lowlands, I was quite confused for a while by the bustle of the cities.

We also sought "closeness with nature" on trips with our folding boats. In those days this sport was still new; the streams were not filled with craft of all kinds as they are today. In perfect quiet we floated down the rivers, and in the evenings we could pitch our tent at the most beautiful spot we could find. This leisurely hiking and boating gave us some of that happiness that had been a matter of course to our forefathers. Even my father had taken a tour on foot and in horse carriages from Munich to Naples in 1885. Later, when he would drive through all of Europe in his car, he used to speak of that tour as the finest travel experience he had ever had.

Many of our generation sought such contact with nature. This was not merely a romantic protest against the narrowness of middle-class life. We were also escaping from the demands of a world growing increasingly complicated. We felt that the world around us was out of balance. In nature, in the mountains and the river valleys, the harmony of Creation could still be felt. The more virginal the mountains, the lonelier the river valleys, the more they drew us. I did not, however, belong to any youth movement, for the group quality of these movements would have negated the very isolation we were seeking.

In the autumn of 1925, 1 began attending the Institute of Technology in Berlin-Charlottenburg, along with a group of Munich students of architecture. I wanted Professor Poelzig for my teacher, but he had set limits to the number of students in his drafting seminar. Since my talent for drawing was inadequate, I was not accepted. In any case, I was beginning to doubt that I would ever make a good architect and took this verdict without surprise. Next semester Professor Heinrich Tessenow was appointed to the institute. He was a champion of the spirit of simple craftsmanship in architecture and believed in architectonic expressiveness by severely delimited means. "A minimum of pomp is the decisive factor." I promptly wrote to my fiancée:

My new professor is the most remarkable, most clear-headed man I have ever met. I am wild about him and am working with great eagerness. He is not modern, but in a certain sense more modern than all the others. Outwardly he seems unimaginative and sober, just like me, but his buildings have something about them that expresses a profound experience. His intelligence is frighteningly acute. I mean to try hard to be admitted to his "master school" in a year, and after another year will try to become his assistant. Of course all this is wildly optimistic and is merely meant to trace what I'd like to do in the best of cases.

Only half a year after completing my examination I became his assistant. In Professor Tessenow I had found my first catalyst— and he remained that for me until seven years later when he was replaced by a more powerful one.

I also had great respect for our teacher of the history of architecture, Professor Daniel Krenkler. An Alsatian by birth, he was a dedicated archaeologist and a highly emotional patriot as well. In the course of one lecture he burst into tears while showing us pictures of Strassburg Cathedral and had to suspend the lecture. For him I delivered a report on Albrecht Haupt's book on Germanic architecture, Die Baukunst der Germanen. But at the same time I wrote to my fiancée:

A little racial mixture is always good. And if today we are on the down- ward path, it is not because we are a mixed race. For we were already that in the Middle Ages when we still had a vigorous germ in us and were expanding, when we drove the Slavs out of Prussia, or later transplanted European culture to America. We are going downhill because our energies have been consumed; it is the same thing that happened in the past to the Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans. There is nothing to be done about that.

The twenties in Berlin were the inspiring backdrop to my student years. Many theatrical performances made a deep impression upon me—among others Max Reinhardt's staging of A Midsummer Night's Dream, Elisabeth Bergner in Shaw's Saint Joan, Pallenberg in Piscator's version of Schweik. But CharelTs lavishly mounted revues also fascinated me. On the other hand, I took no pleasure in Cecil B. De Mille's bombastic pomp—never suspecting that ten years later I myself would be going his movie architecture one better. As a student I thought his films examples of "American tastelessness."

But overshadowing all such impressions was the poverty and unemployment all around me. Spengler s Decline of the West had convinced me that we were living in a period of decay strongly similar to the late Roman Empire: inflation, decline of morals, impotence of the German Reich. His essay "Prussianism and Socialism" excited me especially be- cause of the contempt for luxury and comfort it expressed. On this score, Spengler s and Tessenow's doctrines coincided. But my teacher, in contrast to Spengler, saw hope for the future. He took an ironic tone toward the "cult of heroes" fashionable at the period.

Perhaps there are really uncomprehended "super" heroes all around us who because of their towering aims and abilities may rightly smile at even the greatest of horrors, seeing them as merely incidental. Perhaps, before handicraft and the small town can flourish again, there must first come something like a rain of brimstone. Perhaps nations which have passed through infernos will then be ready for their next age of flowering.  

In the summer of 1927, after nine semesters, I passed the architect's license examination. The following spring, at twenty-three, I became one of the youngest assistants at the institute. In the last year of the war, I had gone to a fortuneteller at a fair, and she had prophesied: "You will win early fame and retire early." Now I had reason to think of this prediction; for it seemed evident that if only I wanted to I could some day teach at the Institute of Technology like my professor.

This post as assistant made it possible for me to marry. We did not go to Italy for our honeymoon, but took faltboats and tent through the solitary, forested chain of lakes in Mecklenburg. We launched our boats in Spandau, a few hundred yards from the prison where I would be spending twenty years of my life.