History Unfolded: US Newspapers and the Holocaust

Headline: A Housepainter on Throne [sic] of the Mighty Rules Germany
Sub-Headline: A Story of Adolf Hitler

Publication Date: Sunday, April 9, 1933
Historical Event: Nazis Boycott Jewish Businesses
This database includes 4,061 articles about this event
Tags: Gannett full page downloadable; Early Acts of Persecution
Article Type: Other
Newspaper: The Des Moines Register
Location: Des Moines, Iowa
Page Section and Number: J3
Author/Byline: Robert Moorefield
Article Text: TAKE Germany in 1919.

Allied guns on the western front had pounded out the death rattle that ended the reign of the Hohenzollerns.

Like a bloody apparition defeat stalks across the land. All the land lies prostrate. For the scars of war age sighs in regret, youth cries out in disillusionment.

It is as though the very light has gone out of the soul of Germany.

On the west is a bulwark of bayonets already thrown up by France. Protection! Russia on the east steps gingerly through the blood of revolutionary slaughter and gropes toward what later is to be a five-year plan of social and economic reconstruction.

Austria is uneasy nor is there any comfort in England.

At Doorn in Holland the kaiser broods and saws through his woodpile. He had forsaken his country in the hour of her greatest need. Off the Dutch coast on the bleak island of Wieringen the crown prince in despair gnaws at his fingers.

Now go to Munich and Bavaria. To a dreary, stale bedroom. . . . .

In a corner of this bedroom two mice nibble at a slab of sugar.

It is put out for them every morning. You can almost set your watch by it. What would happen if these two mice bite the hand that feeds them?

But watch out! They would bite the hand of Adolf Hitler. It is Hitler who puts out the piece of sugar for their breakfast every morning.

Hitler is an Austrian. But he had gone through the world war as a soldier in the Imperial German Army. Perhaps history winked as it repeated itself and made him a corporal. Only with Bonaparte mice were left to fend for themselves.

In the war Hitler had been gassed. He had been wounded. He had been the very devil of a soldier, eternally volunteering, and had received the Iron Cross, first class, for meritorious conduct on the field of action.

All right then. There you have Hitler and the background of 1919.

So. In this Munich bedroom six other men sit with Adolf Hitler. But these other men have no mind for the sugary breakfasts of mice. Instead, they scribble names across the first seven membership cards of the German Labor party. Card No. 7 goes to Hitler.

Bravo! He is an ardent man. His associates elect him Chief of Propaganda. Anyway, while mice are left to nibble, a new government is born. It was the French revolutionary leader Mirabcau who said that governments like salads should never be seen in preparation.

A new government is born but its eyes are scarcely open. But in a few days they are. Hitler collects 130 men from the four corners of Munich. For 20 minutes he harangues them and himself into a fury.

Now jump five years, to 1924, but remain in Munich.

Barbed wire is up in the streets. Bayonets glisten with blood. A mob yells, "Hail Ludendorff! Hail Hitler!"

A general and a corporal had joined hands in the famed Munich Beer Hall putsch, or coup d'etat. But they had failed, at a cost of 18 lives.

Hitler and Ludendorff are tried for high treason. Ludendorff is acquitted. Hitler is convicted. By now he is leader of the party begun in 1919 and which now is called not the German Labor party but the Nazi party.

The word Nazi is an abbreviation of Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartie, or National Socialist German Workers' party. It is not a purely Teutonic word. An English phonetic approximation is not-see.

And Hitlers' mind now is on larger game than mice. Thirty thousand men are his followers.

He turns on his judges. His soft and white, effeminate hands make wild gestures. His comedian's mustache twitches. He says:

"I know your sentence! But that high court above will not ask us, 'have you committed high treason?' That court will judge us all: the quartermaster general of the old army (he is referring to Ludendorff), his officers and soldiers, who have wanted to do their duty as Germans for the people of the Fatherland, who wanted to fight and die!

"You may doom us a thousand times and yet the Goddess of the Eternal Court of History will tear to pieces the indictment of the state prosecutor and the sentence of this court! Her verdict will be acquittal!"

The man can talk. He has a mania for words. Think of William Jennings Bryan, Aimee McPherson, a press agent. There you have Hitler making a speech.

But here the Goddess of the Eternal Court of History goes blotto and Hitler goes to Jail. His 10-month incarceration is devoted to 800 pages of bombastic, egotistic writing: the book is called "My Struggle."

When Hitler leaves his prison his jailer turns to him and says, "I, too, Herr Hitler, am now a Nazi."

Now for another jump, to Berlin, capital of Prussia and Germany, on the River Spree, in 1932.

Hitler is 43 years old. He stands before old, gruff President Paul von Hindenburg. As leader of the Nazi party, largest party in the reichstag, Hitler throws out a conceited chest. Listen.

Von Hindenburg: Herr Hitler, are you willing that you or some other qualified person of the National Socialist movement should enter a government headed by the present chancellor? (The present chancellor is smooth, grey Franz von Papen.)

Hitler: I am not willing, nor are my associates. We wish on the contrary to request the president to entrust us with leadership of the government of the reich and with the entire state apparatus in full measure.

Von Hindenburg: And what power exactly do you imply in that request?

Hitler: Precisely the same power that Mussolini exercised after the march on Rome!

Von Hindenburg: Before my own conscience and in the light of my duty to the Fatherland I will not entrust such power to a party which intends to make use of it so one-sidedly! You are to be then in opposition! I trust you will oppose in a way that will be chivalrous, and I enjoin you in your future course to keep always in mind your duty to the Fatherland and your responsibility to the German people.

Very well then for the time being.

Six months later, early In 1933, Herr Hitler is made chancellor of the reich. With Von Hindenburg's assent. The time is fast ripening.

The harvest (how much grain, how much chaff?) is prepared for reaping the first of March. Germany is at his feet. For how long is a debatable question.

"I am the sole voice. I alone am responsible for policies," says Hitler. "I am the party!"

But is he? for he seems to be easily influenced by others. And others have put a punch into his Iron fist. Iron fist? Only figuratively. For Hitler's hands are soft and white, like the lazy hands of a spoiled woman.

His voice is a high tenor. It fairly screeches, like a woman's, in the passion of his words. In his addresses he generally begins in a calm voice: a cat cannot purr more soothingly. He speaks with a broad Austrian dialect. But in 15 minutes you have a different picture.

His effeminate air leaves him. His gestures are awkward, even undignified, but still compelling. His dark grey eyes have a peculiar shine. Like that you see in the eyes of genuises, alcoholics, and hysterics, one observer has said.

His words leap pell mell. There is little doubt about it: he is perhaps the greatest orator in Germany. But he appeals less to reason than to emotion and faith. His speech is rich in such expressions as Honor, Fatherland, Loyalty, Revenge.

And what a flare for inflammatory language!

"If a people but desire freedom weapons will grow in their hands!"

"Germans, arise! You have nothing to lose but your chains!"

Mussolini has the same gift. And Hitler Iong has cocked his head toward II Duce. A picture of Mussolini is on his writing desk. He scowls like Mussolini. He even has copied the Italian's diction. B

Truth often bows her head when Hitler speaks. He openly asserts that the function of speech making is not a telling of the truth. In his book he says:

"It was false to treat the war guilt question from the standpoint that Germany alone should not be made responsible for the outbreak of the catastrophe. We should have shifted the entire guilt upon the shoulders of others, even if the truth were not so."

Again to turn to his book:

"One must judge a public speech not by the sense it makes to scientists who read It next day but by the effect which it has made upon the masses."

A defense mechanism? Conceivably. Read his speeches in print and see how silly some of them are.

But give the man his dues. He knows mass and mob psychology from a to z. He seldom speaks to less than 10,000 persons.

He hates the Jews and he and his Nazi followers never lose an opportunity to insult them. Recently the Hitlerites inaugurated a wholesale anti-Semitic boycott that included curtailing of school attendance by children in Jewish families.

Take anti-Jewism out of Hitler's program and the whole thing collapses.

The world protests. Hitler smiles. He quotes the words of great Germans:

Frederick the Great: We command that the Jews in the smaller towns, especially those which lie in the country, and which can be harmed most by Jews, be sent away.

Wagner: The Jew is the plastic demon of the decline of mankind.

Bismarck (history calls him the Iron Chancellor): I will give the Jews every right, except that of holding a high office in a Christian state.

The founder of Christianity was less finicky.

Hitler has Mussolini's sense of dramatic timing. His emotional instability readily lends itself to theatrical treatment.

In moments of extreme emotion he weeps. As a child in his native Austrian province he wept because he had been born after the great wars for freedom. (Near-sighted youth!) Sometimes he weeps today in the emotional exhaustion that follows a particularly flamboyant speech.

His father was a petty official and Hitler still has the snobbery of a petty official's family. He is arrogant and insolent to the subordinates who work under him. His outbursts of rage are the very essence of theatrical fanfare.

You can hardly call him a statesman. A pedagogue, an opportunist, and agitator, yes. But not a statesman. For the life of him he cannot sit down and think things out to a logical conclusion. There is slight wisdom if there is wisdom at all in his policies of national scope. A clever, catch-all politician. But nothing more.

The tragedy of Hitler's life seems to be that he has risen too high. In the seats of the mighty he remains a midget.

For those interested in the niceties of biographical detail.

Hitler was born of Roman Catholic parents. By 1924 he was uninterested in if not actually opposed to the tenets of Christianity.

An earlier ambition was to be an artist. At Vienna an attempt to join a painting academy was frustrated. Hitler next turned to architecture but a school of architecture also turned him down.

He later became a house painter.

Once he donned velveteens and painted the walls at the Munich Nazi headquarters. The frustrated artist at work!

Like the former kaiser he dislikes anyone who tells him a truth he would rather not hear.

He neglected the political maneuver of becoming a German citizen until last year.

So much for the man himself, this golden-tongued, theatrical propagandist of jumbled social and economic doctrine.

What then of the doctrine itself?

Well, a hodge-podge of fascism, anti-Semitism, and muddled socialism. A peasant movement. The Nazi party was formed in the beginning by unorganized, confused, unhappy Germans, many of them unskilled workmen, petty officials, unimportant tradesmen.

Today millions swear by the swastika, the Nazi party symbol. You have seen it on thousands of arms in newspaper pictures and in the newsreels. It is of ancient origin.

How many swear by the tenets of the Nazi party would be hard to say. Hitler himself confounds these tenets. They seem to be as inconsistent as Hitler himself.

At least two things are certain, though, in the Nazi program: treaty-breaking and Jew-baiting.

Front page headlines recount their day-to-day story of terrorism.
History Unfolded Contributor: Ashley O.
Location of Research: Newspapers.com (https://www.newspapers.com)