Konrad Heiden

Konrad Heiden

Konrad Heiden, the son of a union organizer, was born in Munich, Germany, on 7th August 1901. While at the University of Munich he led protests against Adolf Hitler and the National Socialist German Workers Party (NSDAP). The historian, Richard Overy, has pointed out: "Heiden was a young socialist student in Munich when he first saw Hitler speak. It was 1923, the year of inflation and political chaos in Germany. Heiden was not impressed by what he saw: a self-centred demagogue at the head of what he calls the army of uproated and disinherited." Heiden later recalled: "In 1923, as the leader of a small democratic organization in the University of Munich, I tried, with all the earnestness of youth, and with complete lack of success, to annihilate Hitler by means of protest parades, mass meetings, and giant posters."

Konrad Heiden and Hitler

After leaving university he became a journalist and worked for Frankfurter Zeitung and the Vossischen Zeitung. He was also a member of the German Social Democrat Party (SDP) and remained an active opponent of Hitler. In 1932 he published History of National Socialism. In the book he claimed that Henry Ford gave money to the NSDAP. In the book he recorded he first time he met Hitler. "He came... in a very decent blue suit and with an extravagantly large bouquet of roses, which he presented to his hostess as he kissed her hand. While he was being introduced, he wore the expression of a public prosecutor at an execution. I remember being struck by his voice when he thanked the lady of the house for tea or cakes, of which, incidentally, he ate an amazing quantity. It was a remarkably emotional voice, and yet it made no impression of conviviality or intimacy but rather of harshness. However, he said hardly anything but sat there in silence for about an hour; apparently he was tired. Not until the hostess was so incautious as to let fall a remark about the Jews, whom she defended in a jesting tone, did he begin to speak and then he spoke without ceasing. After a while he thrust back his chair and stood up, still speaking, or rather yelling, in such a powerful penetrating voice as I have never heard from anyone else. In the next room a child woke up and began to cry. After he had for more than half an hour delivered a quite witty but very one-sided oration on the Jews, he suddenly broke off, went up to his hostess, begged to be excused and kissed her hand as he took his leave. The rest of the company, who apparently had not pleased him, were only vouchsafed a curt bow from the doorway."

Geli Raubal

On the morning of Saturday, 19th September, 1931, Geli Raubal, the niece of Adolf Hitler, was found on the floor of her room in the flat. She had been killed by a Walther 6.35 pistol that was owned by Hitler. Konrad Heiden was one of those journalists who suggested that Hitler had murdered Geli. Heiden was one of the first to suggest that Hitler was having a sexual relationship with Geli: "One day parental relations to his niece Geli ceased to be parental. Geli was a beauty on the majestic side ... simple in her thoughts and emotions, fascinating to many men, well aware of her electric effect and delighting in it.... Her uncle's affection, which in the end assumed the most serious form, seems like an echo of the many marriages among relatives in Hitler's ancestry in its borderline incestuousness." He also claimed that Hitler was a "sexual pervert" and obtained pleasure from undinism.

Konrad Heiden expelled from Nazi Germany

In his book, History of National Socialism (1932), Heiden tried to explain why Hitler became so popular in Germany: "His utterly logical way of thought is Hitler's strength. There seems to be no other German politician of the present day who has the moral courage that he possesses to draw the inevitable conclusions from any given situation, to announce them despite the mockery of those who think they know better, and above all, to act on them. It is this gift of logic which makes Hitler's speeches so convincing."

It was later claimed that Heiden was a propagandist. The New York Times reported: "To the leaders of the Third Reich. Heiden was a hated and sought-after enemy. One of the Nazis' acts upon taking over a country was always to ban and burn his books. The writer was a propagandist of a special kind-one who used objectivity and documents to destroy the object of his derision.... In 1932 his first book, History of National Socialism was publicly burned by the Nazis, who were then on the brink of gaining power. When they took over... In 1933, he fled."

Heiden also attempted to explain why Hitler was so popular with the German people: "The true aim of political propaganda is not to influence, but to study, the masses. The speaker is in constant communication with the masses; he hears an echo, and senses the inner vibration. In forever setting new and contradictory assertions before his audience, Hitler is tapping the outwardly shapeless substance of public opinion with instruments of varying metals and varying weights. When a resonance issues from the depths of the substance, the masses have given him the pitch; he knows in what terms he must finally address them. Rather than a means of directing the mass mind, propaganda is a technique for riding with the masses. It is not a machine to make wind but a sail to catch the wind. The mass, however, is a phenomenon of deepest world importance - this levelled conglomeration of fools and wise men, heroes and cowards, proud and humble, the unusual and the average. This mass, with its anonymous intellectual pressure, its unexpected moods and unconscious desires, mirrors and echoes the commanding force of prevailing conditions; it embodies and personifies the necessities and resistances of the objective world; it expresses the silent command of Fate in a mysterious murmur. It is the art of the great propagandist to detect this murmur and translate it into intelligible utterance and convincing action. If he can do this, his utterances and actions may be full of contradictions - because the contradictions lie in the things themselves; they may be deceptive and misleading. The lies of propaganda reveal the deeper truth of the whole world's cynicism and dishonesty. By his lies the great propagandist involuntarily shows himself to be an honest, self-revealing prophet of the Devil."

Adolf Hitler's Biographer

Heiden was forced to flee from Nazi Germany after Hitler gained power. While he was in exile in Switzerland he published Birth of the Third Reich (1934) and Hitler: A Biography (1936). In his book, One Man Against Europe (1937) Heiden argued: "He (Hitler) is a mirror of our time, for his strange personality, with its contradictions of pathos and unbridled passion, revolt and submission, greatness and depression, is the extreme type of modern man; technically, highly developed; and socially, profoundly unsatisfied."

Heiden then moved to Paris where he published The New Inquisition (1939). After the invasion of France in May 1940 he fled to Lisbon before finally settling in the United States where he published Der Führer – Hitler's Rise to Power (1944). Richard Overy has argued that the book is a masterpiece: "His (Hitler) account of the seizure of power and the Nazi economic revival and political consolidation is remarkably modern in tone... Heiden's biography is not intended to be an academic account of the life of Hitler. It has about it an extraordinary literary power, reflected with exemplary success in the translation. Few accounts of Hitler can match the vivid imagination and metaphorical richness of Heiden's text."

Konrad Heiden died in New York City on 18th June, 1966.


Primary Sources

(1) Konrad Heiden, History of National Socialism (1932)

His utterly logical way of thought is Hitler's strength. There seems to be no other German politician of the present day who has the moral courage that he possesses to draw the inevitable conclusions from any given situation, to announce them despite the mockery of those who think they know better, and above all, to act on them. It is this gift of logic which makes Hitler's speeches so convincing.

(2) Konrad Heiden, Hitler: A Biography (1936)

Hitler had sent word to his hostess that he had to attend an important meeting and would not arrive until late: I think it was about eleven o'clock. He came, none the less, in a very decent blue suit and with an extravagantly large bouquet of roses, which he presented to his hostess as he kissed her hand. While he was being introduced, he wore the expression of a public prosecutor at an execution. I remember being struck by his voice when he thanked the lady of the house for tea or cakes, of which, incidentally, he ate an amazing quantity. It was a remarkably emotional voice, and yet it made no impression of conviviality or intimacy but rather of harshness. However, he said hardly anything but sat there in silence for about an hour; apparently he was tired. Not until the hostess was so incautious as to let fall a remark about the Jews, whom she defended in a jesting tone, did he begin to speak and then he spoke without ceasing. After a while he thrust back his chair and stood up, still speaking, or rather yelling, in such a powerful penetrating voice as I have never heard from anyone else. In the next room a child woke up and began to cry. After he had for more than half an hour delivered a quite witty but very one-sided oration on the Jews, he suddenly broke off, went up to his hostess, begged to be excused and kissed her hand as he took his leave. The rest of the company, who apparently had not pleased him, were only vouchsafed a curt bow from the doorway.

(3) Konrad Heiden, Hitler: A Biography (1936)

Suddenly this man, who looked awkward while he was standing around, has begun to speak, filling the room with his voice, riding over interruptions or contradictions by his domineering manner, sending cold shudders down the backs of everyone present by the savagery of his manner.... Awed, the listener feels that something new has come into the room. This thundering demon was not there earlier; this is not the same shy man with contracted shoulders.

(4) Konrad Heiden, Der Führer – Hitler's Rise to Power (1944)


The true aim of political propaganda is not to influence, but to study, the masses. The speaker is in constant communication with the masses; he hears an echo, and senses the inner vibration. In forever setting new and contradictory assertions before his audience, Hitler is tapping the outwardly shapeless substance of public opinion with instruments of varying metals and varying weights. When a resonance issues from the depths of the substance, the masses have given him the pitch; he knows in what terms he must finally address them.

Rather than a means of directing the mass mind, propaganda is a technique for riding with the masses. It is not a machine to make wind but a sail to catch the wind. The mass, however, is a phenomenon of deepest world importance - this levelled conglomeration of fools and wise men, heroes and cowards, proud and humble, the unusual and the average. This mass, with its anonymous intellectual pressure, its unexpected moods and unconscious desires, mirrors and echoes the commanding force of prevailing conditions; it embodies and personifies the necessities and resistances of the objective world; it expresses the silent command of Fate in a mysterious murmur. It is the art of the great propagandist to detect this murmur and translate it into intelligible utterance and convincing action. If he can do this, his utterances and actions may be full of contradictions - because the contradictions lie in the things themselves; they may be deceptive and misleading. The lies of propaganda reveal the deeper truth of the whole world's cynicism and dishonesty. By his lies the great propagandist involuntarily shows himself to be an honest, self-revealing prophet of the Devil.

Hitler's profound, rapacious, avid eye for the weakness of this intellectual age, awaiting only the man who can master it, is revealed in the natural affinity between a depersonalized soul and a depersonalized world. The more passionately Hitler harps on the value of personality, the more clearly he reveals his nostalgia for something that is lacking. Yes, he knows this mass world, he knows how to guide it by "compliance". He is like the crafty dope addict who manages to get his poison despite all efforts of his physicians and guards to prevent him. Hitler's mind directs a personality without centre, a restlessly pulsating force without constancy and firmness, oscillating like the needle of a magnet, trembling and dancing, but always finding the - momentary - north.

(5) Ron Rosenbaum, Explaining Hitler: The Search for the Origins of his Evil (1998)

Konrad Heiden, the highly respected though somewhat Suetonian biographer of Hitler who had contacts within Hitler's Brown House demimonde, will only go so far as to say that Hitler entertained perverse fantasies about Geli: only Otto Strasser goes so far as to suggest they were consummated, although he claims he heard the details from Geli herself.

Heiden places the moment of change in the relationship at a point sometime before Hitler moved into his princely new residence with Geli. Indeed, Heiden believes Hitler's approach to Geli led to an elaborate hushed-up scandal that became "one of the reasons for Hitler's change of lodgings."

Here, then, in Heiden's words is the locus classicus of the Hitler perversion legend. The story Heiden tells has had a remarkable longevity and influence; it echoes in the subcurrent of Hitler rumor and gossip that was picked up by the OSS's Walter Langer, who gave it the imprimatur of official intelligence. It's a story gloated over "like some gardener with a rare and lovely bloom" (as it was said Hitler gloated over Geli) by psychohistorians and psychoanalysts who have felt that here must be the dark, hidden, repressed truth about Hitler's psyche. It's been picked up and mythologized in the fictions of Thomas Pynchon (his Geli-like figure in Gravity's Rainbow) and Steve Erickson (Geli, the veiled central figure in Tours of the Black Clock, is a kind of Scheherazade of pornography for Hitler).

(6) Konrad Heiden, Hitler: A Biography (1936)

One day parental relations to his niece Geli ceased to be parental. Geli was a beauty on the majestic side ... simple in her thoughts and emotions, fascinating to many men, well aware of her electric effect and delighting in it. She looked forward to a brilliant career as a singer and expected "Uncle Alf" to make things easy for her. Her uncle's affection, which in the end assumed the most serious form, seems like an echo of the many marriages among relatives in Hitler's ancestry in its borderline incestuousness.

At the beginning of 1929, Hitler wrote the young girl a letter couched in the most unmistakable terms. It was a letter in which the uncle and lover gave himself completely away: it expressed feelings which could be expected from a man with masochistic coprophilic inclinations bordering on what Havelock Ellis calls "undinism" (the desire to be urinated upon for sexual gratification)... The letter probably would have been repulsive to Geli if she had received it. But she never did. Hitler left the letter lying around, and it fell into the hands of his landlady's son, a certain Doctor Rudolph; perhaps this was one of the reasons for Hitler's change of lodgings. The letter was in no way suited for publication: it was bound to debase Hitler and make him ridiculous in the eyes of anyone who might see it. For some reason. Hitler seems to have feared that it was Rudolph's intention to make it public.

(6) The New York Times (20th July, 1966)

Until other scholars began their work on Nazi documents after World War II Mr. Heiden was the best-known authority outside Germany on the party and its leaders....

To the leaders of the Third Reich. Heiden was a hated and sought-after enemy. One ofthe Nazis' acts upon taking over a country was always to ban and burn his books.

Mr. Heiden is sometimes given credit for popularizing the word "Nazi." The National Socialists were known in their earliest days by the conventional abbreviation "Naso" until Mr. Heiden, it was said. began using "Nazi"-Bavarian slang for "bumpkin" or "simpleton" in his articles....

The writer was a propagandist of a special kind-one who used objectivity and documents to destroy the object of his derision....

As a writer for the liberal Frankfurter Zeitung ... his special assignment was the Nazi party. It was said that Hitler sometimes refused to start meetings until Mr. Heiden arrived.

In 1930 he left the paper to manage an anti-Nazi newspaper syndicate in Berlin. In 1932 his first book, History of National Socialism was publicly burned by the Nazis, who were then on the brink of gaining power. When they took over... In 1933, he fled.