Hitler by Joachim C. Fest

reason “a thousand times” before he completed his metamorphosis from “a weak-kneed cosmopolitan” to a “fanatical anti-Semite.” In fact, what he calls his “greatest spiritual upheaval” was merely development from a groundless and almost elusive dislike to fixed hostility, from mere mood to ideology. The anti-Semitism of Linz had been of a dreamy sort, tending toward neighborly compromises; now it took on the sharpness of principle. It focused on a well-defined enemy. At the beginning of his stay in Vienna Hitler had sent “respectfully grateful” regards to Dr. Eduard Bloch, his parents’ Jewish family doctor. Dr. Josef Feingold, the lawyer, and Morgenstern, the picture framer, had encouraged the would-be artist by buying his small water colors. Toward Neumann, his Jewish companion at the home for men, Hitler had felt an exaggerated sense of obligation. Now, during the process of change that continued for several years, all these marginal figures of his youth started to recede into the background. Their place was taken by a vision that steadily acquired an almost mythological power, the “apparition in a long caftan and black hair locks” which once struck him “as I was strolling through the Inner City.” He forcefully described how this chance impression “twisted” in his brain and gradually began to become an obsession that dominated all his thinking:
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    Since I had begun to concern myself with this question and to take cognizance of the Jews, Vienna appeared to me in a different light than before. Wherever I went, I began to see Jews, and the more I saw the more sharply they became distinguished in my eyes from the rest of humanity. Particularly the Inner City and the districts north of the Danube Canal swarmed with a people which even outwardly had lost all resemblance to Germans.... All this could scarcely be called very attractive, but it became positively repulsive when, in addition to their physical uncleanliness, you discovered the moral stains on this “chosen people.”... Was there any form of filth or profligacy, particularly in cultural life, without at least one Jew involved in it? If you cut even cautiously into such an abscess, you found, like a maggot in a rotting body, often dazzled by the sudden light—a kike!... Gradually I began to hate them. 26
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    We can probably no longer plumb the real cause of this ever-growing hatred, which lasted literally to the last hour of Hitler’s life. One of his dubious cronies of those years attributed the hatred to sexual envy on the part of a dropout from the middle class. This crony has described an incident involving a model, the essence of Germanic femininity, a half-Jewish rival, and an attempt on Hitler’s part to rape the girl while she was posing. The story is as grotesque as it is stupidly plausible. 27 The theory that Hitler’s anti-Semitism was connected with pathological sexual fixations is supported by the whole uneven pattern of Hitler’s ideas about sexual relations, which from his boyhood oscillated remarkably between strained idealism and obscure anxiety feelings. It is supported likewise by the language and argumentation of his own account wherever the figure of a Jew enters the story. The scent of obscenity, which can be detected in all the pages of
Mein Kampf
in which he attempts to deal with his repugnance for Jews, is surely not an accidental and superficial characteristic. Nor is it merely an echo of the trashy pamphlets and periodicals to which he owed the unforgotten “illuminations” of his youth. Rather, in that obscenity his own personality and the inner nature of his resentment is revealed.
    After the war a member of the dictator’s entourage published an extensive list of the women in Adolf Hitler’s life. Characteristically, the beautiful Jewish girl from a wealthy family figures in the list. It is far more likely