Becoming Hitler by Thomas Weber

Author:Thomas Weber
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2017-10-07T04:00:00+00:00

As Hitler had not managed by 1921 to charm his way into the houses of the rich and influential of Bavaria’s capital city, his route to success would bypass the salons of Munich’s upper-class society, running instead through the smoked-filled beer halls and restaurants of the city. And with the Völkischer Beobachter, the NSDAP now could carry its message directly into the homes of its sympathizers.

One of the immediate changes visible in the line taken by the Völkischer Beobachter after becoming the official biweekly newspaper of the NSDAP was its approach to Turkish affairs. Previously, it had not taken much of an interest in Asia Minor. If anything, it had reported negatively about the state of affairs in Anatolia, even though, or because, its previous owner, Rudolf von Sebottendorff, was an Ottoman citizen.14 With the purchase of the paper by the NSDAP, all this changed overnight and Turkey became as prominent a topic as it already had been in newspapers and magazines elsewhere across the German political spectrum.

Turkish affairs were much on the mind of Germans in the aftermath of the First World War. Although liberal and left-wing public opinion hotly debated the fate of the Armenians at the hands of Ottoman authorities during the war, which had resulted in up to 1.5 million deaths, Turkey was of high importance to right-wingers for a different reason: they admired and took inspiration from the refusal of Turkey to accept the punitive terms of the Treaty of Sèvres—the peace treaty between the victor powers of the First World War and the Ottoman Empire—as they viewed it to be of the same character as the Versailles Treaty. They also admired the defiance displayed by Turkey’s new leader, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, and his emerging political movement toward the allied occupation of Turkey, and advocated that Germans take inspiration from Atatürk as to how best to respond to the victor powers of the First World War.15

Now that the NSDAP owned the Völkischer Beobachter, the paper started to celebrate Turkey’s “heroism” and presented the country as a role model both for defying the victor powers of the First World War and for setting up a state from which Germans had much to learn. For instance, on February 6, 1921, the newspaper stated, “Today the Turks are the most youthful nation. The German nation will one day have no other choice but to resort to Turkish methods as well.”16

Turkey interested early National Socialists not just because of Kemalist actions in the wake of the war, but also because a surprising number of people who moved within the party’s orbit—including Hitler’s erstwhile paternal mentor, Karl Mayr, and Rudolf von Sebottendorff—had recently had firsthand exposure to Turkey. The seniormost early National Socialist with firsthand experience of Asia Minor was Max Erwin von Scheubner-Richter, who had served as German vice consul in Erzurum in eastern Anatolia during the war. While serving in Erzurum, he had witnessed the ethnic cleansing, with genocidal consequences, of Armenians. He had been so shocked by

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