HITLER A Chronology of his Life and Time This wicked man, the repository and embodiment of many forms of soul-destroying hatred, this monstrous product of former wrongs and shame … (Churchill on Hitler) I follow my course with the precision and certainty of a sleepwalker (Hitler to his secretary Traudel Junge) Also by Milan Hauner INDIA IN AXIS STRATEGY WHAT IS ASIA TO US? E. BENES: FALL AND RISE OF A NATION (CZECHOSLOVAKIA 1938–41) EDVARD BENES: MEMOIRS 1938–45 (in Czech) HITLER A Chronology of his Life and Time Second Revised Edition MILAN HAUNER © Milan Hauner 1983, 2005, 2008 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First edition 1983 Second edition 2005 First published in paperback 2008 Published by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N. Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN 978-0-230-20284-9 ISBN 978-0-230-58449-5 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/9780230584495 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufactur- ing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Hauner, Milan. Hitler: a chronology of his life and time / Milan Hauner.–2nd rev. ed. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Hitler, Adolf, 1889–1945–Chronology. 2. Heads of state–Germany– Biography. I. Title. DD247.H5H3237 2005 943.086′092–dc22 [B] 2005050043 10987654321 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 Contents Preface and Acknowledgements vi Glossary of German Terms and Abbreviations Used in the Text xii Bibliographical Abbreviations xiv Chronology 1 Bibliographical Note 211 Bibliography 214 Index 221 v Preface and Acknowledgements ‘We are not finished with Hitler yet’1 Thousands of books have been written about Adolf Hitler, and yet more will be written. But despite the steady output of books, films and videos, a brief guide to Hitler’s life, based on solid printed sources and first-hand accounts of reliable witnesses, has not been available for a long while. This volume is a revised second edition of Hitler – A Chronology of his Life and Time, which should provide a comprehensive guide to Hitler’s life and to serve the needs of both amateur and professional students of history. The first edition (1983) has been out of print for some time; but the dual anniversary in 2005 of both the end of the Second World War and Hitler’s death has prompted me to revise the volume. I am, therefore, indeed thankful to Palgrave Macmillan for their support in producing this second, revised edition. Whatever view we may hold on the role of personality in history, Hitler remains a great challenge. In the opinion of John Lukacs, Hitler was ‘the most extraordinary figure in the history of the 20th century’.2 Why? Because of the unique manifold function he occupied and fulfilled as an ideologue, the Führer, the political and military leader in one person, to the ultimate detriment of his country and people. How can we explain the extraordinary success of this genuine ‘nobody’ (as the famous Viennese writer Karl Kraus once com- mented about Hitler: Mir fällt zu Hitler nichts ein as to Hitler, nothing comes to mind …)? Hitler was no external tyrant imposed on Germany. His political party turned out to be the strongest in the elections, he was legally appointed to the post of the Reich Chancellor, and between 1933 and 1940 became the arguably most popular head of state in the world.3 And as John Lukacs again reminds us, Hitler ‘may have been the most popular revolutionary leader in the history of the modern world … because Hitler belongs to the 1. Schreiber (1984), p. 335. 2. Lukacs (1998), pp. xi, 262–8. 3. Kershaw (1998), p. xxix. vi Preface and Acknowledgements vii democratic, not the aristocratic age of history. He is not properly comparable to a Caesar, a Cromwell, and a Napoleon. Utterly dif- ferent from them, he was, more than any of them, able to ener- gize the majority of a great people, in his lifetime the most educated people of the world, convincing them to follow his lead- ership to astonishing achievements and extraordinary efforts and making them to believe that what they (and he) stood for was an antithesis of evil. He led them to prosperity and pride, inspiring in them a confidence with which they conquered almost all of Europe, achieving a German hegemony soon lost because he over- reached himself. His Reich, which was to have lasted a thousand years, ended after twelve; yet he had an enormous impact and left a more indelible mark upon this century than any other dictator, a Lenin or a Stalin or a Mao.’4 That is why his place in the history of the world will be pondered by people for a long time to come. And that is also why this chrono- logical guide might confirm its usefulness. This chronology and reference guide traces the career of an obscure Viennese bohemian, who had a talent for drawing and dreamt of becoming an architect. He loved music but never learnt to play an instrument; and he experienced enormous difficulties in striking up and maintaining intimate friendships. In spite of his notorious evasion of military service before the outbreak of the Great War (1914–18), he nevertheless was to enlist as a German vol- unteer, become a brave soldier and fight to the bitter end. The end of the war found him lying in a hospital, temporarily blinded. This personal traumatic episode merged with Germany’s surrender and the outbreak of revolution, and compounded to create probably the most important turning point in Hitler’s life. Hitler himself wrote in Mein Kampf that his miraculous recovery from blindness was a sign of Providence and turned him into a politician. This must be read as an exaggerated self-stylization. In fact, he still had a long way to go. But even in retrospect this must have been the watershed. Diagnosed as a ‘hysterical psychopath’, Hitler was allegedly cured and his personality changed by a combination of shock therapy and hypnosis by Dr Edmund Forster, the chief psychiatrist at the mili- tary hospital in Pasewalk. This moment has been seized repeatedly by psycho-historians such as Rudolph Binion, who also emphasized the shattering impact that the death of Hitler’s mother Klara had 4. Lukacs (1998), p. 50. viii Preface and Acknowledgements had on the eighteen-year-old Adolf. A convincing explanation of Hitler’s personality has yet to be written. My task, however, has been not to interpret, but simply to provide guidance from the cradle to the deathbed, and to underline perhaps some of the important benchmarks. Even the most restrained among Hitler’s biographers are com- pelled to admit that, in November 1918, a turning point occurred in Hitler’s life and that thereafter a different Hitler was to enter history. Thus, at the age of thirty, a previously shy Hitler, having been refused military promotion because of a complete lack of authority and incapacity to command, discovers gradually that he had an unknown gift of vulgar rhetoric that could keep large audi- ences in thrall to his hypnotizing words and gestures on a variety of emotional topics ranging from the lost war to anti-Semitism. In 1923 he felt confident enough to lead the renamed National Socialist German Workers’ Party in an abortive coup that ended in trial and imprisonment. Released from prison within a year, Hitler’s political ambitions appeared to be tempered, but step by step, he was able to build up his repertoire of speech topics, which gradually encompassed both the real and imaginary anxieties of his co- citizens: from systematic attacks against the Versailles Treaty, foreign occupation, economic inflation, to Germany’s national revival. Hitler saw the latter not only as a political and economic turnaround, but also conceived it as an act of health improvement and of racial purification by getting rid of the Jews, whom he saw as being the bearers of the main bacillus of social decadence and phys- ical degradation in the life of the German nation. At this stage Hitler thought of himself as a ‘drummer’ of collective anxieties and expec- tations, which he could raise through his inexhaustible oratory, as he was said to possess a ‘fantastic talent to represent the feelings of others’.5 The Hitler chronology displays documentary evidence that virtu- ally all his views on solving the problems of German society, his racial views and his foreign policy projections originated in the verbal utterances made during his political campaigns in the 1920s.