One of Hitler’s friends who visited him in jail and kept him abreast of recent developments in the United States was Ernst “Putzi” Hanfstaengl, a six-foot-seven-inch German-American patrician graduate of Harvard University who was descended from a Union army general who had helped to carry Abraham Lincoln’s coffin. Hanfstaengl’s family owned an art-publishing house in Munich and belonged to the German and American aristocracies.88 When Hanfstaengl wasn’t entertaining his friend with his piano playing, he stimulated Hitler’s imagination with stirring accounts about American skyscrapers, gangsters, and college football chants. Hitler had been gassed and temporarily blinded while serving as a dispatch runner at the front during the war, so he already knew that gas was an ugly, painful, and unpredictable weapon, and he disdained its use on the battlefield. He would have been keenly interested to hear about what the Americans had done in Nevada.
Hitler’s trial began on February 26, 1924, only eighteen days after Gee Jon’s execution. Convicted and sentenced to five years in prison on April 1, 1924, he was taken to cell number seven at Landsberg Am Lech Fortress Prison, where he proceeded to read everything he could lay his hands on, including piles of publications that his friends supplied.89 “Landsberg was my college education at state expense,” he would later say. Hanfstaengl often came by to translate and read to him from British and American newspapers. During his confinement Hitler also read several books about eugenics and racial supremacy, including the two-volume Menschliche Erblichkeitslehre und Rassenhygiene (The Principles of Human Heredity and Race Hygiene) by E. Baur, E. Fischer, and F. Lenz, which collected references to Dugdale’s The Jukes, Popenoe’s Applied Eugenics, and work by New York blueblood Madison Grant. A number of works he read had been written by Americans, including Henry Ford’s The International Jew, as well as Grant’s Der Untergang der grossen Rasse: Die Rassen als Grundlage der Geschichte Europas (The Passing of the Great Race, or the Racial Basis of European History).90 Hitler called Grant’s book “my Bible.”91
During his imprisonment Hitler commenced composing his own political creed, which he at first titled Eine Abrechnung (Settling Accounts) but later would call Mein Kampf (My Struggle). In it he calls upon Germans to restore their nation to greatness by overthrowing the Weimar Republic, removing the Jews from Germany, and defying the Versailles Treaty. From time to time Hitler would dictate some of these thoughts to one of his fellow prisoners; to Emil Maurice, his chauffeur and bodyguard; or to another close follower, Rudolf Hess.
On December 20, 1924, Hitler was released from confinement after serving only nine months, and a New York Times correspondent described him as “a sadder and wiser man” due to his imprisonment.92 At first he stayed briefly with Hanfstaengl, who gave him a copy of Ford’s autobiography, Mein Leben und Werk (My Life and Work), and then he headed up to Berchtesgaden for an Alpine holiday.93 A friend made available a one-room cottage with a deck overlooking the Obersalzberg for Hitler to continue his dictation. A visitor approaching on the dirt path could hear a series of sharp verbal cracks like gunshots that sometimes continued in a long volley like bursts from a machine gun, coming from inside the cottage. On one of the walls inside Hitler had hung up a picture of his idol, Ford.94 He paced the floor in a white shirt and lederhosen, barking out orders and sometimes swinging a dog whip to punctuate his phrases.95 Hess hunched over a Remington typewriter, taking down Hitler’s words.
“The spider was slowly beginning to suck the blood out of the people’s pores,” Hitler said. “The Jewish doctrine of Marxism” rejects the “aristocratic principle of Nature…. It is Jews who govern the stock exchange forces of the American Union…. [O]nly a single great man, Ford, to their fury, still maintains full independence.” In another key passage, Hitler said, “If at the beginning of the War and during the War, twelve or fifteen thousand of these Hebrew corrupters of the people had been held under poison gas, as happened to hundreds of thousands of our very best German workers in the field, the sacrifice of millions at the front would not have been in vain.” Decades later, a historian of the Holocaust, Lucy S. Dawidowicz, would wonder about this statement: “Did the idea of the Final Solution originate in this passage, germinating in Hitler’s subconscious for some fifteen years before it was to sprout into practical reality?” she asked.96
Another biographer would write, “Hitler’s concept of concentration camps as well as the practicality of genocide owed, so he claimed, to his studies of English and United States history. He admired the camps for Boer prisoners in South Africa and for the Indians in the Wild West, and often praised to his inner circle the efficiency of America’s extermination—by starvation and uneven combat—of the red savages who could not be tamed by captivity.”97 Hitler learned about the American enslavement of blacks and Jim Crow laws enforcing racial segregation, about the shipment of Native Americans to faraway prisons via boxcars, and recent court rulings upholding the involuntary sterilization of the unfit. Mein Kampf also displayed Hitler’s “keen familiarity with the recently passed U.S. National Origins Act, which called for eugenic quotas,” another historian has noted.98
Historians have not yet turned up any evidence that Hitler’s thinking was influenced by the first gas execution, which would have been in the news during his life-changing trial, imprisonment, and writing of Mein Kampf. But it was then, during the crucial period of 1924 and 1925, that the seeds of some of Hitler’s most genocidal ideas took root.
During the same period, in the years immediately following the Nevada gassing, several delegations of German officials, criminologists, and legal scholars toured the American penal system, closely inspecting its prison conditions and methods of punishment and exchanging information with their American counterparts. Those results, too, were widely circulated in Germany. So it is likely that some Germans may have brought back news about the Nevada gassing. Executives of certain German chemical companies must have also noted the news from Nevada. After all, cyanide was their business.
CHAPTER 5
“LIKE WATERING FLOWERS”
In the few years following Gee’s and Jukich’s executions, Nevada officials were in no hurry to gas another prisoner. Doing it right would require extensive improvements.
In 1929 prison officials tore down the original death house and built a more elaborate structure using convict labor. The new stone and cement death house contained two cells, each facing a nine-foot corridor and meant to hold a condemned prisoner who was awaiting execution. Each cell was equipped with a toilet, washstand, and steel bed. The building also had a space for guards. The building was steam-heated and equipped with a shower and hot- and cold-water faucets. A separate room housed the execution equipment.