Through an analysis of the writings and ideas of people, Brigitte Hamann is able to demonstrate just how much Hitler’s ideology owed to his life in Vienna. Even his earliest confidants noticed this, sometimes in a negative way, lamenting how little like a German Hitler sometimes sounded.
Hamann does not hide the culpability of Christians and Catholics in the development of Hitler’s views. Lueger, who was personally very influential on Hitler, made Christianity a central organizing principle of his anti-Semitic program:
- “We must fight against the suppression of Christians and against the replacement of the old Christian Empire of Austia by a new Palestine.”
The idea that Jews pose a political threat to the existence of Christian nations was just one of the common Catholic themes which Leuger picked up and used for his own purposes (which is not to say that he didn’t really believe the arguments made by the Catholic Church — he simply used those arguments for his own political goals). Others included labeling Jews “Christ killer people,” identifying Jews as the enemies of anticapitalist and antiintellectual forces (i.e., “money and stock exchange Jews”), and more.
Because religious leaders used the same words and similarly compared Jews to animals, no one was bothered by Leuger’s rhetoric and began to feel comfortable harassing these “godless ones.” Even Josef Scheicher, prelate and member of parliament for the Christian Social party, called Jews a “swarm of migratory locusts” and placed them deliberately outside the human race.
But curiously, from what records remain, there is little to indicate that Hitler held any anti-semitic views at this time. He certainly had ample opportunity to express them if he harbored them, but he never did. Instead, Hitler had mainly Jewish friends while living in a men’s hostel in 1909, and he even benefited from Jewish social institutions like public ‘Waermestuben’ (soup kitchens) and Jewish citizens’ donations to homeless shelters.
No one book can fully explain “why” Hitler became the monster he was, and this is no exception. But Hamann’s study does provide us with some very interesting and unusual information which must play a role in whatever we think about him.
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