The Pre-1914 Origins of Hitler's Antisemitism Revisited- Response

Abstract

It has now been about forty years since Eberhard Jäckel and Axel Kühn published the documentation Hitler – Sämtliche Aufzeichnungen, 1905–1924. It did not take much time to discover that about one-tenth of the documents published in this volume were fake – or, in other words, that even respectable historians could be deceived when it comes to information about Hitler. Indeed, thirty years after the demise of the Third Reich, biographies of Hitler were in abundance, written by both authoritative and amateur historians. But the lust for more was insatiable. This opened the gate to forgers and scoundrels like August Priesack, who supplied Jäckel with fake Hitler letters, or Konrad Kujau, who sold Hitler’s fake diaries to the respectable weekly Stern in 1983. Since then, at the latest, we – both historians and laypeople – have become extremely cautious, even suspicious, when it comes to new revelations and new documents about Hitler, especially young Hitler, since it is particularly difficult to corroborate the information about this stage of his career. Thomas Weber managed to write his two groundbreaking books about the earlier, lessdocumented chapters in Hitler’s career – Hitler’s First War (2010) and Becoming Hitler: The Making of a Nazi (2017) – apparently without falling into the pitfall of fake documents. Combining intensive research in the archives with a talent for intricate interpretations, the outcome is a coherent and unconventional story about the ‘making’ of Hitler before he became a ‘star’ in German and world politics. Some have found Weber’s findings too speculative, but not unreliable. It is worth mentioning here that the Koebner Center for German History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem published Thomas Weber’s article about Hitler in World War I in its periodical Tabur back in 2009, so Hebrew readers got a notion of Weber’s findings a year before Hitler’s First War appeared in English. One of the more intriguing lacunae in Hitler’s biography concerns his becoming an antisemite. Eberhard Jäckel, right after publishing the above-mentioned documentation, referred to Hitler’s 16 September 1919 speech as his first documented ‘outing’ as an antisemite. The mystery remained how to explain the lack of evidence about Hitler’s attitude toward antisemitism before age thirty. Neither Brigitte Hamann in Hitlers Wien (1996) nor Thomas Weber in Hitler’s First War could identify open and direct expressions of antisemitic views in Hitler. Hamann mentioned Hitler’s later reference to Otto Weininger and Arthur Trebitsch and the fact that Schoenerer and Lueger were politically active during young Hitler’s time in Vienna but solely as indirect background for his later