Letters to Hitler

letters to EDITED BY HEN RI KED ERLE /.1 J / ))J / j / ENGLISH EDITION EDITED BY VICTORIA HARRIS TRANSLATED BY STEVEN RENDALL LETTERS TO HITLER EDITED BY HENRIK EBERLE ENGLISH EDITION EDITED, AND WITH AN INTRODUCTION, BY VICTORIA HARRIS TRANSLATED BY STEVEN RENDALL polity First published in Gennan as Brieft fin Hitler (ed. by Henrik Eberle) © Verlagsgruppe Liippe GmbH & Co. KG, 2007. All rights reserved. This English edition © Polity Press, 2012 Polity Press 65 Bridge Street Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK Polity Press 350 Main Street Malden, MA 02148, USA All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any fonn or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. ISB~-13:978-0-7456-4873-6 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Typeset in 10.75 on 14 ptJanson Ten by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire Printed and bound in Great Britain by MPG Books Group Limited, Bodmin, Cornwall The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate. Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition. For further infonnation on Polity, visit our website: www.politybooks.com CONTENTS Acknowledgements IX Introduction Victoria Harris 1 Part I The 'Time of Struggle': 1924-1932 1 Hitler and the Nazi Party 13 2 Veneration and Advice 30 3 Wishes for the N ew Year 44 4 Rage and Hope 50 Part II Worship, Protest and Consent: 1933-1938 5 Recognition, Gratitude and Veneration 71 6 Private Petitions and Political Requests 110 7 Dissent 122 8 Expressions of Loyalty 142 9 The Highpoint of Hitler's Popularity 159 VIII CONTENTS Part ill Crisis and War: 1938-1945 10 Jubilation and Concern 177 11 The Calm Before the Storm 187 12 At War 205 13 The End 249 Further Reading 261 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS VICTORIA HARRIS (ENGLISH EDITOR) I would like to thank Polity Press for commissioning me to do the English edition of this remarkable collection and for all their hard work throughout this process. In particular I would like to thank Sarah Lambert for her continued support throughout the process of putting the English edition together. I would also like to thank the translator Steven Rendall for his hard work and assistance, as well as his patience with what was often rather tricky Gennan prose and poetry. Richard Evans kindly read various drafts, offering advice and corrections. So too did Peter Chetwynd. Finally, many thanks to David Wheeler for helping with the maps and for patiently discussing the project with me, often rather late at night. HENRIK EBERLE (GERMAN EDITOR) First of all, I would like to thank the staff of the fonner Special Archive in the Russian State Military Archive. Its deputy director, Vladimir Korotaiev, allowed me access to its holdings. But this book is also indebted to the support of the Gennan Historical Institute in Moscow, whose support made it possible. Its staff, especially Andrei Doronin and Matthias Uhl, helped me overcome many problems. x ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Sebastian Pannwitz, the creator of the private Internet site www.son derarchiv.de, willingly answered many questions. The staff of the Federal Archives in Koblenz and Berlin also deserve thanks, not only for providing easy access to the archival materials col lected there, but also for what people call 'service'. Above all, lowe thanks to their decades-long efforts to open up the National Socialist regime's files and thereby make clear the gaps in the German collec tions. I have received encouragement, support, and expert criticism from colleagues and alumni of my Alma Mater, Martin-Luther-Universitat in Halle-Wittenberg. I mention in particular Dirk Wesenberg, Sabine Haseler, Stefan Schafer, Jana Wiistenhagen, Dietmar Schulze and Thomas Pruschwitz. Financial questions were dealt with by Thomas Karlauf, with vigilance and understanding, as always. Unfortunately, I do not know the names of the many members of the staff of the Liibbe Verlag who worked on this project. I thank Elmar Klupsch, Inge Leo and Christian Stiiwe as their representatives. Michael Eberle, Andreas Wittig and Michael W. Thiede must also be mentioned here. They know why. In particular, I would like to thank my mother, Sabine Ludewig. It is high time that I expressed my grati tude to her. INTRODUCTION Victoria Harris Popularity, wrote Hitler in his political treatise My Struggle (Mein Kampf), is the first foundation for establishing authority. The second is force. It is force which we usually connect with totalitarian dicta torships such as Germany's Third Reich. To be sure, Hitler and his Nazi Party constantly utilized force - from removing their early rivals, to cementing their authority, to waging war on much of Europe. Against the violent dominance of the National Socialists, the opinions of individual Germans or Europeans might seem irrelevant. But as Hitler himself aclmowledged in My Struggle, without the backing of the population, it was impossible to act forcefully. And the search for popularity was most certainly a two-way street. In establishing a suc cessful dictatorship, Hitler needed his people. And needed to establish a dialogue with them. Ifhe was to convince them that he had the answers for Germany, in return he had to listen to their problems, accept their advice, and respond to their concerns - or at least appear to. The secret to the Third Reich's success during its height in the 1930s and early 1940s was Germans' sense that they could engage in a conversation with their leader, and that he was in some way listening. This book chronicles Hitler's relationship with his people and the rise and fall of his popularity, using a selection of the thousands ofletters he received between 1925, when the Nazi Party began its rise to power, 2 VICTORIA HARRIS and 1945, when the regime collapsed at the end of the Second World War. Most of these letters, which were kept in the Chancellor's Office in Berlin during the Third Reich, were seized by the Soviet Anned Forces immediately after the war. The letters were found together with thousands of other documents used by the Allies to convict major Nazi perpetrators of war crimes during the Nuremberg Trials. But the vast majority of private letters were of no use for detennining guilt, seemingly trivial as they were. As a result they sat uncategorized in the Moscow archives. Further letters sent to Hitler on his birthday in 1945, which never made it to Berlin, were eventually located in Germany's Federal Archive in Koblenz, where they had been deposited after being found by American soldiers. * The true worth of these collections of letters was only recently recognized, when Henrik Eberle analysed and published them in a large collection, together with his commentary, in 2007. In bringing the letters to an English audience, Eberle's original collection has been abridged and further contextualizations have been added. The letters which appear here are emblematic of the thousands of letters that Hitler received each year, and a representative selection from each era of his political life have been included, covering the full range of themes about which Germans wrote to him. Some minor editorial changes have been made in order to make some of them more accessi ble. The modem day geographic locations of the many cities and towns in Hitler's expanding Reich have been inserted, and this, together with the map at the front of this book will help readers to visualize the wid ening influence Hitler enjoyed. While full biographies of significant individuals in the regime would have distracted from the flow of the text, relevant details about their lives are included to help give a flavour of the many types of people involved in writing and responding to these letters. Thanks to the Internet, further information about many of them is available online. At the end of the book there is a short selection of further reading which may be of interest to those readers who wish * The letters can be found in the following archival files: Russian State Military Archive (RGWA) Record Groups: 519, 1235, 1355, 1413, 1525; Bundesarchiv (BA) Koblenz NS 6/106. Further information can be found in the original German edition of this text: Henrik Eberle (ed.), Briefe an Hitler: Ein Volk Schreibt seinem Fuhrer. Unbekannte Documente aus Moskauer Archiven - zum ersten Mal verOffentlicht (Lubbe: 2007). INTRODUCTION :1 to learn more about these individuals, the Third Reich, and Germany's recent history. The rich and varied tone of the correspondence has been master fully captured by translator Steven Rendall. In certain cases, where the particularities of the German language have made a fully literal transla tion difficult, some editorial licence has been taken to approximate the sense of the German as closely as possible. The many poems and songs sent to Hitler each year presented a particular challenge. Ordinary Germans, obviously, were not great poetic talents, and preserving the rhyming schemes often made the poems either nonsensical in the English or involved making them 'better' than they might have been in the original.

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