Hitler, It Seems, Loved Money and Died Rich

THE NEW YORK TIMES: Hitler died wealthy.

According to a new [new in 2002] German television documentary, Hitler liked money, both for the luxuries it bought him and the loyalties it ensured, and he amassed a lot of it.

In all the continuing fascination with Hitler since his suicide on April 30, 1945, in his Berlin bunker as the Soviet Army closed in, little attention has been paid, until now, to his personal finances.

Abstemious in his public image, Hitler liked to live grandly. He paid much attention to his income from his own writing and from the copyright fees for his photographs, said Ingo Helm, a 47-year-old freelance journalist and filmmaker, who spent over a year making ''Hitler's Money,'' which will be shown later this month on a state-owned station, ARD.

''Hitler saw himself as an unrecognized genius, and in order to change this situation he was very interested in power, money and social advancement,'' Mr. Helm said in an interview today, after word of his film was made public in German media. ''All this was balsam for the tortured soul of the unrecognized genius.''

Hitler himself described at great length his poverty and hardship as a struggling artist in Vienna before World War I, although he had a small inheritance. His poverty embarrassed him deeply. In ''Mein Kampf,'' from which he would make millions, he emphasized the hard struggle for existence of the ''upstart'' who had risen ''by his own efforts from his previous position in life to a higher one,'' that ''kills all pity'' and destroys ''feeling for the misery of those who have remained behind.''

…

Last year [2001], there was another flurry of attention, this time to a more serious work of history trying to make the case that Hitler was gay. The book, ''The Hidden Hitler,'' by Lothar Machtan, suggests that Hitler ordered the killing of several high-ranking Nazis to protect his secret, including Ernst Röhm, the head of the Sturmabteilung, or Brownshirts.

Röhm was gay, and Mr. Machtan writes that he tried to blackmail Hitler by threatening to reveal his sexuality, one reason that Hitler supposedly ordered ''the night of the long knives'' in 1934, when he purged more than 100 of his most embarrassing and threatening followers.

Even the Nazi persecution of gay men, many of whom were sent to concentration camps, was a function of Hitler's self-hatred and effort to disguise his own sexual preferences, Mr. Machtan argues. » | Steven Erlanger* | Thursday, August 8, 2002

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* Steven Erlanger is the chief diplomatic correspondent in Europe for The New York Times, a position he assumed in 2017. He is based in Brussels.