Explaining Hitler (Ron Rosenbaum, 1998), The Poison Kitchen pp51-2
I should perhaps note that I’m not arguing that blackmail and counterfeiting are in any sense Hitler’s worst crimes, that they compare to the serial political murders his party committed in Munich and elsewhere in Weimar Germany or the mass murder he would commit after 1939. Rather, they were in some way signature crimes, signatures of something essential about Hitler’s psyche, reflecting some truths about his mind and his method. And beyond that, I have a feeling that in their focus on these particular crimes, the reporters of the Poison Kitchen were aware that the blackmail and counterfeiting were crucial accessory crimes, the ones that made the larger crimes possible.
I think this is particularly true in their obsessive animus against counterfeiting – the counterfeiting not so much of currency but of history, of the past – against “political counterfeiters” as they recurrently called Hitler and the Hitler Party. It was something I began to grasp more deeply this obsession with counterfeiting, after spending some harrowing days scrolling through microfilm of the final nine weeks of the Munich Post’s existence and experiencing with the Poison Kitchen reporters, day by day, those sickening last weeks that began with Hitler seeming like a politician on the wane (still suffering from an electoral setback in November). Until the last week – indeed, the last day – of January, when a collusion among corrupt and stupid right-wing party leaders, division on the left, and the maneuverings of amoral intriguers such as Franz von Papen with the acquiescence of the Hindenburgs suddenly and unexpectedly brought Hitler to power. I scrolled on, into the desperate final five weeks after the Hitler takeover when the Post continued to fight on futilely against the onrushing darkness, until March 9, when the Nazis banned the last opposition papers still publishing, and turned the Munich Post offices over to an SA squad to pillage.
I had, perhaps unwisely wanted to try to recapture what it was like to experience those last weeks through the eyes of these tragic eyewitnesses. I say unwisely because even at one or several removes, through the scrim of the microfilm, it was a nightmarish experience to suffer with the courageous writers of the Post the shocking, crushing realization that despite their best efforts, their sacrifices, the years of struggle against Hitler, the ridicule, the exposés, the crimes, the death toll they‘d pinned on him, Hitler had won – and all he’d threatened was about to come horrifically true.
The first thing one notices in the papers from the first two weeks of January 1933 is the way the drumbeat of political murder dramatically steps up its tempo. Beneath a banner headline radiating New Year’s bravado in the January 3 issue – “It’s Our Duty to Beat Hitler in the Coming Year” – the inside pages of the paper chronicle the grim and growing toll: “Feme Murder Comes to Parliament” (the murder of a socialist Reichstag deputy), “Police and Feme Murders” (lenient treatment for Nazi death-squad killers), “Feme Murder Comes to Frankfurt,” “Feme Murder in Thuringia,” the list goes on, and to document its magnitude they inaugurate a weekly “political murder summary.”
These murders – political assassinations, really – became too frequent, too often, too awful for the Post to report on in detail. Instead, I was intrigued by the way they chose to focus on the continuing chronicle of one individual murder in particular to epitomize the depredations of the death squads they had taken to calling, with understandable stridency, “Hitler’s murder beasts.”
I was puzzled at first about why they’d chosen this case, the Hentze case, for intensive coverage; it was anomalous in the sense that the victim was not an anti-Hitler activist, as so many of the daily toll of feme murder victims were, but rather a teenage SA recruit named Herbert Hentsch who was murdered by SA thugs for some alleged deviation from party discipline – murdered, the Post reported, by executioners who “shouted ‘Heil Hitler‘ ” as they beat him to death.
“What Have You Done Hitler?” was the headline for a follow-up report on the Hentsch murder, the plaintive headline question coming from the slain boy’s stricken mother.
What have you done Hitler: embedded in that question is, I believe, the larger reason for the close focus on this particular case. The naive youth seduced by Hitler’s propaganda into becoming a follower and then beaten to death by the “murder beasts” he’s fallen in with – he’s a stand-in, young Herbert Hentsch, for all Germany, all Germans who have fallen under Hitler’s spell, and a kind of harbinger of the destruction Germany and Germans will suffer for having fallen for and unleashed the chief murder beast, Hitler himself.
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