Rare testimony of a woman whose childhood Hitler hosted in her home sheds new light on the mourner • Historian Thomas Webber says that trauma with Jews may have affected him

• Leans on anti-Semitism as an explanation for Germany's weakness. Hitler (seated on the right) with his comrades in the Bavarian Reserve Battalion during World War 1

Elizabeth Popp (later Greenbauer) was 8 when two young boys from Vienna rented a room in her parents' apartment in Munich in May 1913. Almost a year before the outbreak of World War I, the two sought to build a new life for themselves in the German Reich, which they had foreseen a great future — in contrast to the Austro-Hungarian Empire from which they came. Elizabeth remembered that one of them was very neat and clean, pleasant to read many books into the night, and though he had almost no money, he declined every invitation to a meal. 

When his roommate decided to leave because he could not sleep while his friend was sipping books he borrowed from the municipal library, Elizabeth's father decided to allow the strict and curious Austrian to stay with the family without raising his rent. The young tenant - who remained with the Pop family until he was granted permission to join the German army after the war broke out - did not forget this gesture. 

That young man's name was Adolf Hitler, and after becoming the leader of Nazi Germany and Elizabeth's father, made sure to give the Pop family a generous monthly allowance from the publisher who published his bestselling book "Main Campf".

The obsession with Jews

Elizabeth passed away in 1999, when she was 94. Five years earlier, she was able to document her memories of those days in conversation with Karl Hupke - a writer and publisher, in those days close to German nationalist circles, who collected hundreds of interviews with people who were in one way or another with Hitler . Last summer, the collection of interviews came into the hands of German historian Thomas Webber, who specializes in Hitler's beginnings. Elizabeth's testimony immediately drew his attention. "You don't understand what you have in your hands here," he quips, "it's a historical treasure." 

The eyes of Weber, 46, who teaches at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland, traced Elizabeth's testimony to the content of the political conversations Hitler had with Elizabeth's father, a successful tailor who owned his own shop. In these talks, Hitler expressed his complete hostility towards Austria and his desire to serve in the German army. 

"He always complained that Austria controlled a camp that was inappropriate for him," Elizabeth told Hupke, "and that he would never serve in the Austrian army because Austria was too 'Jewish'. It was a central issue for him. He said Vienna in particular and Austria in general were so Jewish, That was why he left and that he would never fight for them. He repeated it. He would come to my father's shop often, the arguments would last for hours, and it wasn't always pleasant to Dad, who had to work. Hitler's anti-Semitism did not stand out. He let it feel when he said the Jews were exploiting people. "

"A multidimensional figure." Hitler in 1923

"This interview is important, as it gives information about the origin of anti-Semitism and its roots in Hitler," Webber says in a conversation with "Israel this week." "In recent years, it was assumed that anti-Semitism appeared to him in the post-World War I era, and here we have evidence that he had such ideas even before that war. This does not mean that she did not formulate the anti-Semitism we know and led to the Jewish genocide, but it appears that Mutant to exterminating anti-Semitism. 

"Still, a mutation can only occur in something that already exists. This discovery is important to understand how Hitler became anti-Semitic in 1919 which we know. In his post-war politicization and radicalization, he seeks out the reasons for the German defeat, and provides insights into what could make it To a strong empire forever. Anti-Semitism in its extreme version convinced him and gave him an explanation for Germany's weaknesses. It is important to understand why he decided to choose this explanation rather than another. "

The disappearing year

Hitler moved to Vienna in 1907, after his mother's death from cancer. He was 18, hoping to develop an artistic career as a painter but found himself living in a homeless men's home. In the early 20th century, there was a prosperous and influential Jewish community alongside a society that incorporated ideas of Catholic religious and "new", racist anti-Semitism. Considered one of Hitler's ideal ancestors was Vienna Mayor Karl Luger, who was able to mobilize these moods for his political needs. 

"For the past 20 years, the ruling opinion among scholars has been quite unequivocal," Webber emphasizes, "Hitler was aware of the anti-Semitic arguments that were common in Vienna, without adopting and agreeing to them. There were studies that showed Hitler was Jewish friends in those years, which Jews helped. It is believed that he became acquainted in Vienna with Lugar's anti-Semitic ideas and the politicians who supported the idea of ​​Great Germany - Georg von Schnerer and Karl Harman Wolf - but did not identify with them. Elizabeth's testimony first shows that Hitler politically identified with these anti-Semitic anti-Semitic ideas in Austria ', Which was then accepted in Germany and also in Beer "In but a political component".

What, then, made Hitler anti-Semitic? Adoption of anti-Semitism by him probably occurred in the year before his arrival in Munich, 1912. This year in the biography of a man who would become the Fuhrer of the Nazi Reich, mysterious. In fact, it does not exist. Hitler claimed to have moved to Munich as early as 1912. Pop-Greenbauer's testimony refutes this lie. In the years when he built himself a political career in Germany, he avoided, even in the company of the people most closely related to him, to tell of his recent years in Vienna, in particular, with regard to the "missing year" in his life history.

"I do not know what happened then, I can only estimate," Webber clarifies, "We only know that there is this missing year for which Hitler lied systematically. Another thing we know for sure is that all references to Hitler's Jewish connections are from his first years in Vienna and not From the end of this period, the only sources of information about this period are questionable: this is a Nazi source and an anonymous article in a Czech newspaper. 

Thomas Webber // Photo: Thomas Webber

"As early as the 1920s, there was speculation about what happened at that time, both in Hitler's and his opponents' environment, and that he had a traumatic experience. About a love affair with a Jewish woman, about exploiting some business.

We only know he didn't want to talk about this year and lied about it. Helena Hapstengel - the wife of a businessman who was one of Hitler's main sponsors - with whom she dined almost every day and opened up about everything, describes that as soon as they talked about the Vienna period of his life, Hitler did not want to talk about it and gave a sense that something personal had happened that affected his development The anti-Semitic. It is important to emphasize that this experience was not necessarily objective trauma, but that Hitler experienced it as such. "

Escape to the cartoon

According to Pop-Greenbauer, Hitler's anti-Semitism before the First World War was leftist anti-capitalist. "He said that in Austria, the stock exchange - the Jews held everything," she repeated of what she heard from her parents, "they are exploitative. I personally did not attend these conversations but my parents. He only talked about that they (the Austrians) are being exploited there, and that in Germany the situation is no different." 

"Also in 1919, at the beginning of his political career in Germany, Hitler expressed anti-capitalist anti-Semitism," Weber notes, "and also in the early 1920s. It was anti-Semitism directed at Jewish financial capitalism against Jewish capital. He saw this as the main weakness of Germany and gender. Her anti-Semitism later turned increasingly against Bolshevism, an interesting fact, since in 1919, after the ouster of the German royal family and the establishment of the Communist Republic of Munich in Munich, the more popular anti-Semitic anti-Bolshevism was anti-Semitic. But Hitler has not yet used these anti-Semitic ideas, but is valid The Jewish capitalism. "

He went from left-wing anti-Semitism to right-wing anti-Semitism because of opportunism?

"It's a good question that can't be answered with certainty. I believe that Hitler's main anti-Semitic mutation occurred immediately after World War I, when it became an extreme political one. The second change takes place in the early 1920s as it expands. Hitler believes in the existence of a global Jewish plot and thus That the Bolsheviks are in fact used as tools by Jewish capitalists living in New York, Paris and London, and Nazi anti-Semitism was at the same time turned against capitalism and against Bolshevism. 

"The internal logic of this apparent contradiction is the conspiratorial anti-Semitic claim that the Bolshevists serve the Jewish capitalists, the global conspirators, and they are sent to Germany and Russia to weaken the workers. It sounds ridiculous, but it was the Nazi worldview, and they claim that the Nazi worldview is what they claim to be. , Which came to fruition in National Socialism. This concept played a role throughout the 1920s, 1930s and the first half of the 1940s. " 

Can it be said, then, that Hitler's anti-Semitism was anti-capitalist left-wing anti-Semitism?

 "In general yes. I am a little hesitant, because there is the never-ending debate about whether Nazism is left-wing or right-wing, whether it was a form of socialism or not. In my opinion, it is an unproductive argument. But the roots of Hitler's anti-Semitism were anti-financial, anti-financial. The question of whether it is right or left depends on whether Nazism was against the free-market economy or against economic capitalism, and the Nazis did not want Marxist socialism but labor socialism, where there is room for private property and markets. It was a more anti-financial approach, not necessarily to the right or left. " 

These days, the world is marking 75 years to end World War II. How is Adolf Hitler treated differently today than he was in the past? 

"There is a difference between state and state in this context. In Germany, public opinion has difficulty dealing with the issue. In recent years there has always been a concern that Hitler's preoccupation might seem apologetic, a desire to return to the 1950s where all the blame for Nazi crimes was imposed on him, which is of course very convenient. In 2015, for the first time since the end of the war, an edition of the Mein Kampf was published.

"The whole world was arguing in those days about the advent of new fascism in the shadow of the US presidential election. In Germany, they debated whether it was dangerous to read Main Campf. I do not want to say that the comparisons between Trump and Hitler are intelligent. In Germany, there was no debate about what is in the book or what can be learned from it, just how dangerous it is. For years they have been trying to produce a TV series about Hitler in Germany, which is not about war but his rise to power, but no one is ready to finance a series in which Hitler is the main character. " 

"These are two examples, I argue, that Germany still has trouble dealing with Hitler and treats him as a terrible cartoon rather than a human being. A propaganda figure has been created. Also, the footage that Hitler shows us comes almost from Nazi propaganda. So there is his one-dimensional figure, shouting and spitting. It keeps us from looking for the right warning signs of new dangers and new Hitlers. We are only looking for the Nazi character in certain characters and can't think Hitler was a multidimensional character, who not only shouted but was also a very talented politician. Really dangerous, in Israel, the discussions about Hitler are more open than in Germany We estate always rises the question of what to speak and Can humanize it. "