The Crack of Dawn

Volume #460

9/16/23

Newsletter #460

The Crack of Dawn

I had no idea that this was such a complicated story when I began writing it.  OK, so the first iteration of my Hitler story was in a farmhouse with Capt. Harry Truman, Lt. George Patton, and the freshly gassed, Cpl. Adolf Hitler.  That version was historically impossible, and I dropped it.  About fifteen years later I picked it back up.  This time I wrote it as a boy and his dog story, calling it, Hitler’s Dog Fuchsl.  I spent a few years writing and rewriting that version until I finally gave up in drunken, flustered, despair. 

About six more years went by.

All the while, somewhere in the back of my brain I was thinking, “How do I logically tell this tale in the first person of Hitler?”  I continued to read about Hitler’s youth, and the best book by far is Hitler by John Toland.  Then I thought, “What if Hitler wrote a first draft of his autobiography, Mein Kampf, that was rejected for being too true and artsy-fartsy, and not sufficiently propagandistic?  Or even an opening section that was cut.  Either way, it would get me into the first person, which was where I wanted to go.  OK. So then I should read Mein Kampf.”  Although I had tried reading it years before in high school (they had a copy in the library), I had gotten nowhere. My memory was that it wasn’t very well-written. However, perhaps now that I was older and wiser it would easier. 

Meanwhile, it’s not so easy getting a copy of Mein Kampf these days.  The book is actually illegal to sell in several countries, specifically Germany.  Well, to make it unavailable in Germany, Amazon has simply made it unavailable everywhere.  What’s a little creepy is that ban includes used copies.  I finally did locate a new version that was published in Argentina.  It was fifty dollars for a paperback, and it took over a month to get here.  It arrived weirdly wrapped in brown paper and covered with a lot of stamps.  But it’s a professionally published version, unabridged (meaning it contains both volumes), and a reasonably scholarly-looking edition (with no notes).  Anyway, I promptly spilled a cup of coffee on it and fucked it up, although it’s still perfectly readable.  That is, it would be perfectly readable were it not the worst autobiography ever written.  Adolf Hitler had a fascinating youth, as I describe in my book, but it’s not in his book.  His book is pure Antisemitic, anti-French, anti-Slav propaganda that doesn’t tell his early story at all.  It’s too bad that the book wasn’t useful for research, not to mention the spilled coffee, but it got me interested in how and when it was written.

After attempting an insurrection in 1923 called the Beer Hall Putsch, Hitler served ten months in Landsberg Prison, which is when he wrote Mein Kampf.  As I researched that – which is wrongly represented in every other account – I came across an article written in South America.  The article was very well-written, clearly well-researched, and explained in detail how Mein Kampf was written. Unlike every other account that says Hitler mostly dictated the book to Rudolph Hesse; this article explained how Hitler received an early typewriter as a gift, taught himself to type, then wrote the book himself, which is how it reads.  Also in this article was a reference to another South American – this time, Brazilian – article about Adolf Hitler’s confinement to a military psychiatric hospital while he was blinded by mustard gas in the last 31 days of World War I.  I’d read all of the literature available on Hitler, and none of it mentioned this.  Every book and account said that he went to the hospital and in a month regained his sight.  Some accounts said that he regained his sight, heard about the surrender, lost his sight again, then regained it again. None of them, however, mentioned that it was in a psychiatric hospital called Pasewalk Military Psychiatric Hospital located in German Pomerania, near the Baltic Sea.  This lengthy article had the names and photographs of the psychiatrists who had attended him, and a lot of details, but didn’t specify which treatments he went through.

First of all, why would a blinded enlisted corporal be transferred by train 700 kilometers, from the French/Belgian border in Ypres, Belgium, to northern Germany in Pomerania?  During the last month of the war when Germany had run out of everything, half the population was starving, and their leader, Kaiser Wilhelm II, abdicated and fled to the Netherlands.  Now was the time they were going to display extra effort and care for a corporal?  Plus, if he was blinded by mustard gas, why did he need to go to a psychiatric hospital?  And why so remote of a hospital?

This one article from a technical journal in Brazil somehow had all of the extant information on this lost or ignored, though key, month in Hitler’s life.  And as he himself points out in Mein Kampf – without mentioning the psychiatric hospital – he never gave Jews a second thought until he was blinded by gas on October 14, 1918, and was in the hospital when he heard that Germany surrendered on November 11, 1918.  Hitler left the hospital a few days later.

OK.  What happened in Pasewalk Military Psychiatric Hospital during that month?  What methods could be brought to bear?  First for me was that a new treatment at that time was Freud’s psychotherapy.  This afforded me the logical ability of having the blind, 29-year-old, Corporal Adolf Hitler, tell his story, in the first person, to a psychiatrist. 

After twenty years of noodling around, I had finally found a way into the point of view.  That became Hitler in the Madhouse, upon which I pushed the publish button yesterday.  Apparently, it will appear for sale as a paperback in a few days.  It will also be available as an eBook. 

As the great Samuel Goldwyn once said, “I don’t care if it makes money, just so long as every man, woman and child in America sees it.”   

As Goldwyn also said, “Include me out.”

La.