In reality, Esser had every reason to distance himself from his hate-filled screed, which among other things explained the allegedly evil “racial character” of the Jews using falsified passages from the Old Testament and the Talmud. Right in the introduction, it declared that it was time to say “Enough” to “certain more or less intellectual types with their tearjerker morality always talking about the ‘poor,’ ‘persecuted’ Jews.” The Jews were actually “enemies of the world and of humanity,” and a “Reich under National Socialist government” would necessarily “stand against the Jewish world plague as a deadly enemy.”149 Esser’s book was thus among the early works of National Socialist literature justifying the murder of the German and European Jews, whom Esser stigmatized as the true originators of racism. Esser claimed in Nuremberg—of course—to have heard about the “gassing” of the Jews only after the end of the war.150
With this testimony, Esser was trying, like so many of Hitler’s close followers after the collapse of the Nazi state, to escape responsibility and save his own life and livelihood in the new era. Two months before his interrogation, the International Military Court in Nuremberg had passed sentence on the twenty-two main war criminals of the Nazi regime and condemned ten of them to death. Numerous other organizations and groups were still under suspicion, including the leadership of the NSDAP, ministers, and high government officials. The trials would drag on into the spring of 1949. Esser, who was in Nuremberg only as a witness, therefore went underground until September 1949, just to be safe.151
In truth, Esser absolutely did not withdraw from politics or distance himself from Hitler after 1935. The old comrade-in-arms continued to be among the regular guests on the Obersalzberg.152 On January 10, 1937, for example, he inspected a model of the House of German Tourism, together with Hitler, Goebbels, Reich press chief Otto Dietrich, Fritz Todt (later General Commissioner for the Regulation of the Construction Industry), and Albert Speer. The foundation stone for the building was laid on June 14, 1938, in Berlin,153 and it would be the first and only construction project to be mostly completed from the “World Capital Germania” as conceived by Hitler and Speer. Hermann Esser’s posh seat of office was to have been in the center of Berlin (approximately where the New National Library [Neue Staatsbibliothek] is today), if the course of the war had not necessitated the halting of construction projects in 1942; his offices were therefore located in the nearby Columbus House at 1 Potsdamer Platz, one of the last buildings from the era of “New Construction.”154 Esser’s position was not, it is true, a particularly political one like that of Max Amann (president of the Reich Press Chamber) or that of Alfred Rosenberg (Reich Minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories), but there is no question of his having disappeared from Hitler’s environs.155 Rather, he remained quite close to Hitler personally, and his later important positions—president of the National Tourism Committee after 1936, and state secretary for tourism in the Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda—show no signs of any distance between Esser and the Nazi regime, nor of his departure from its inner circle of power.156
By the time Esser rose to join the National Tourism Committee, all private tourist organizations had already been “coordinated” and nationalized—that is, placed under the Ministry of Propaganda’s direct control—as per the “Reich Law Concerning the National Tourism Association” of March 28, 1936. Three years later, Esser was one of three state secretaries under Goebbels in charge of the tourism division in his ministry. His responsibilities included deciding who would fill the top management positions of all the state tourism associations. The Nazi regime wanted to ensure what they called “tight, goal-focused conduct” in the encouraging of foreign tourism. Above all, vacations and leisure time were to be instruments of propaganda, playing no small part in the legitimization of National Socialist rule. In the interest of creating a “nation of workers united in a Volksgemeinschaft,” individuals were to be channeled into groups and managed as groups, even during their leisure hours. In short, the regime promoted politically organized People’s Tourism and Social Tourism.157
Following government orders, tourism within the borders of the German Reich was given an increasingly anti-Semitic bent. The goal was to create “Jew-free sites.” Jewish and non-Jewish guests were ordered to be separated in spas, especially in the popular vacation spots that profited from group tourist trips organized by the German Workers’ Front (Deutsche Arbeitsfront, or DAF): Bavaria, the North Sea baths, and the Baltic Sea baths, where so-called spa anti-Semitism was widespread even before 1933.158 “Power Through Pleasure” (Kraft durch Freude, or KdF), the extremely popular leisure organization of the DAF, made it possible for the first time for the lower social classes to take vacations, thereby winning enormous prestige for the Nazis.159 The annual spectacle of the Party convention in Nuremberg, destination for up to 450,000 visitors a year between 1933 and 1938, was another tourist gold mine. The management of domestic tourism continued even during the early years of the war, although accommodations were increasingly used for military purposes. Finally, in September 1944, the Tourism Department of the Ministry of Propaganda ceased operation. Until that point, Hermann Esser had pursued the politics of tourism according to Nazi ideology; his office was in no way merely an apolitical management position.
More important, however, Esser continued to have high personal status in Hitler’s eyes. Otherwise it would be very difficult to explain how his private problems—a divorce from his first wife—could have turned into a fairly major political issue.160 Esser’s separation was extremely complicated, and it occupied not only Hitler’s time and attention in 1938 but also that of Justice Minister Franz Gürtner and Reich Minister Lammers, head of the Reich Chancellery. Hitler, to whom it was apparently very important to bring the chaos of his friend’s family life to an end, ordered Lammers in fall 1938 to report to him on the Obersalzberg about the state of Esser’s divorce proceedings. Lammers asked the Justice Minister for the files concerning Esser’s divorce, which filled seven volumes by that point, and had them sent to Berchtesgaden on October 29, 1938. Gürtner added, in explaining Esser’s difficult situation to Lammers, that Esser’s wife, whom he had married on July 5, 1923, and with whom he had two children, did not agree to the divorce that he had been pushing for for years. Esser had already tried in vain more than once to dissolve the marriage—in 1933 and again in 1935—but all of his efforts came to nothing, since, according to the divorce laws then in effect, from the Civil Law Code (Bürgerliches Gesetzbuch, or BGB) of 1900, divorce was permitted only by reason of culpable matrimonial offenses on the part of a spouse.161 Divorce required the innocent party to file proceedings against the guilty party, and at least one of four “findings of fact”—adultery, intention to kill, malicious abandonment, or grave dereliction of marital duties—had to be proven. In this case, Hermann Esser had been living with another woman for many years and had another two children with her.162 So he himself was guilty of adultery under the law and could not win a divorce.