Reinhold Hanisch

Reinhold Hanisch (born January 27, 1884 in Grünwald near Gablonz in Bohemia ; † February 2, 1937 in Vienna / date of death disputed: see text passage Death ) was an Austrian casual worker and a temporary business partner of the young Adolf Hitler .

Hanisch, who published various writings about Hitler, with whom he had lived for a while in 1910 in "wild companionship" ( Joachim Fest ), is one of the few witnesses of Hitler's years in Vienna , along with August Kubizek . However, Hanisch's publications should be viewed with caution with regard to their truthfulness.

biography

Early years (1884 to 1909)

Reinhold Hanisch attended elementary school in his home country. He later hired himself out as a casual laborer and house servant . In Berlin he was employed as a servant . There Hanisch was sentenced to three months in prison in 1907 for theft and in 1908 to six months in prison.

In autumn 1909 he came from Berlin to Vienna as a wanderer. In the home for the homeless in Meidling , where he lived until December 21, 1909, he said he met Hitler. From December 21, 1909, Hanisch again worked as a housekeeper and lived at Hermannsgasse 16 in Vienna's 2nd district ( Leopoldstadt ). From February 11, 1910 he was registered at Herzgasse 3 in Vienna's 10th district ( Favoriten ).

Acquaintance with Adolf Hitler (1909 to 1912)

From 1910 Hanisch lived with Hitler, whom he took under his wing at the time, in the men's dormitory on Meldemannstrasse . In the first months of 1910 Hitler and Hanisch formed a kind of working group: While Hitler was painting postcards and pictures, mostly watercolors , Hanisch took over the sale of them. The income thus obtained was divided equally between the men.

Later both went in the dispute apart after Hitler Hanisch had accused that the latter had (a very carefully crafted view of the Vienna parliament) of his pictures embezzled and the profit he had made from the sale, keep for themselves alone. Hanisch rejected this accusation all his life. In order to secure a new source of income, Hanisch now began to paint himself. As a competitor to Hitler, he supplied shops such as that of the frame dealer Jakob Altenberg with pictures and postcards he had painted himself .

On August 4, 1910, Hanisch was reported to the police by a shared male resident, Siegfried Löffner, who had meanwhile acted as Hitler's salesman. Since the investigation of the matter by the Viennese police authorities revealed that Hanisch was registered in Vienna under the false name Fritz Walter, he was sentenced to seven days in prison on August 11, 1910 by a Viennese court.

In 1912, an anonymous person reported to Hitler for his unauthorized use of the title "academic painter" and the police warned him not to use it in the future. In research it is assumed that the painter Karl Leidenroth, who also lived in the men's home and was friends with Hanisch, filed this complaint on Hanisch's behalf. According to the report by the so-called Brno Anonymus , a male colleague of Hitler and Hanisch who published his memories of the incident in a Czech daily newspaper in 1936, Hitler also suspected Leidenroth as the informer .

According to the entries in the Vienna registration archive, Hanisch lived in Landgutstrasse 15/5 in the Xth district (Favoriten) from August 25, 1910. From October 6, 1911 he was in the Rauschergasse in the XX. District ( Brigittenau ) and since March 18th he was - officially in the profession of a draftsman - resident in the 2nd district.

Later years (1912 to 1937)

On August 5, 1912, Hanisch left Vienna to return to Gablonz. From 1914 to 1917 he took part in the First World War. On July 4th, 1918 he returned to Vienna with his fiancée Franziska Bisurek, married her on July 22nd, 1918 and lived at Rauschergasse 19, in the XX. District. The house belonged to the parents of the federal railway conductor Franz Feiler, a picture collector with whom Hanisch made various picture deals in the following years.

On July 20, 1923, Hanisch was sentenced to three months' imprisonment by Regional Court I in Vienna for theft. Hanisch's marriage was divorced on April 17, 1928. After 1930 he resumed his work as a painter and produced watercolors, which he sold as alleged works by Hitler from their time in Vienna. Hanisch also often painted flower pictures in the style of the painter Olga Wisinger-Florian , which he also passed off as Hitler originals. In order to secure the fraud, he asked Leidenroth, with whom he was still in friendly contact, to issue “ expert reports ” that were supposed to prove the “authenticity” of the forgeries.

In 1932, Hanisch again came into conflict with the law. On May 7, 1932, he was sentenced to three days in prison. After various changes of residence in Vienna, he was convicted of fraud again on July 6, 1933 in a court case by the Vienna Regional Court.

With Hitler's appointment as Chancellor in the spring of 1933, Hanisch also received increased attention from various sides. The Bavarian journalist and Nazi opponent Konrad Heiden , who was working on Hitler's first scientific biography at the time, turned to Hanisch as the only known witness from Hitler's time in Vienna. Hanisch willingly gave Heiden information and, for his statements, accepted the ones in Heiden's book Adolf Hitler. The age of irresponsibility flowed in, pay well. In the years that followed, Hanisch, who in 1935 had the job title of etcher , earned money not only with fake Hitler pictures, but also with numerous interviews with domestic and foreign newspapers in which he spoke about Hitler. A longer memorial report of the time together with Hitler, written by Hanisch - and probably revised by Heiden - appeared posthumously in 1939 in the American newspaper The New Republic .

Another important contact person for Hanisch in the 1930s was Franz Feiler, the son of Hanisch's former landlord. Although he was on friendly terms with Hanisch, Feiler acted as Hitler's emissary in Vienna from 1933 , on whose behalf he gathered up actual and fake Hitler pictures in Vienna, bought them up and brought them to Germany. There they were either destroyed or handed over to the party archive of the NSDAP in Munich. At Easter 1933, Feiler visited Hitler in Berchtesgaden and gave him some of the pictures Hanisch had bought. Hitler recognized these alleged "Hitler pictures" as falsifications, whereupon he instructed Feiler to file charges against Hanisch for fraud. Feiler obeyed and reported him on July 6, 1933. Hanisch then spent a few months in custody; after his release from prison, he continued his fraudulent activity.

As a result, Hanisch was arrested again on November 16, 1936. When his room was searched, manuscripts about Hitler and other forgeries were found. On December 2, 1936, he was sentenced again to prison by the Vienna Regional Court for fraud. He probably died in custody in January 1937 (see section on the death of Hanisch ).

Feiler summed up Hanisch's life in 1938 by stating that it was “not flawless”, “but despite his poverty and hardship he was a distinguished character and I am deeply saddened by his death. He was once a friend of our Führer and I am not ashamed of the friendship with Reinhold Hanisch either. "

Hanisch's image forgeries kept Hitler's employees busy for years after his death. On October 21, 1942, for example, Heinrich Himmler ordered, on Hitler's instructions, three Hitler pictures forged by Hanisch, together with affidavits by Hanisch and Leidenroth from 1935, to be destroyed.

Hanisch's statements about Hitler

Hanisch certifies that Hitler was noticeably reluctant to work during the time in the men's home. In particular, Hanisch denies the assertion made by Hitler in Mein Kampf - and largely assessed as a functional legend in research - that Hitler temporarily earned his living in Vienna as a "worker":

“I have never seen him do any heavy lifting, nor did I hear him ever work as a construction worker. Construction companies only employ strong and vigorous people. "

According to Hanisch, in contrast, the failed artist's passion for politics was already very strong back then. In lengthy speeches, Hitler had repeatedly taken a stand against Social Democracy and, unlike the rest of the home residents, always sided with the state in discussions.

Hanisch also emphasizes that Hitler had a good relationship with the Jews in the men's home. During this time, Hitler even dealt almost exclusively with Jews and his best friend in the men's home was the Jewish copper cleaner Josef Neumann. Since Hanisch mentions names, it is easy to prove the truth of this statement with the help of the Vienna registration archive. In this way, the historians Anton Joachimsthaler and Brigitte Hamann in particular were able to identify many of the Jewish "Hitler friends" named by Hanisch. The one-eyed locksmith named Robinsohn named by Hanisch, who often helped Hitler as a disability pensioner, was, as Hamann has shown , the Jewish locksmith's assistant Simon Robinsohn, who came from Galicia (born in Lisko in 1864), who on January 19, 1912 until November 27, 1913 lived with interruptions in the men's home.

With the crook Josef Greiner, in turn, Hitler pursued obscure projects: For example, the two tried to collect paste residues and sell them as homemade antifreeze - but only in the summer so that the fraud would not be exposed.

Hanisch death

Werner Maser claims in his biography of Hitler that Hanisch was arrested and murdered in 1938 after the annexation of Austria on behalf of Hitler and on the instructions of Martin Bormann . August Priesack again speaks of Hanisch's death in a concentration camp .

This contradicts a confidential memo from Martin Bormann from 1944, in which it says, "After the takeover of Austria, Hanisch hanged himself." This information is probably just as incorrect as the one mentioned above, but it proves that Maser's claim that Bormann had Hanisch can be arrested, so in all probability cannot apply - unless Bormann had lied in his confidential note and deliberately misinformed the addressee. Regardless of Bormann's motives (lack of information or the deliberate misstatement) for writing this, the content of his letter is in all probability inaccurate: Hanisch was almost certainly already dead at the time when, according to Bormann, he was supposed to have hanged himself, and this is probably over natural reasons - not suicide. The apparent misinformedness of Bormann suggests that he considered Hanisch to be of little importance - otherwise he would have been better informed about him.

According to the files of the Vienna authorities, Hanisch died of heart failure on February 2, 1937 in prison in Vienna after two months in prison. On May 11, 1938, Franz Feiler also spoke in a letter to Ernst Schulte Strathaus, his confidante in the NSDAP main archive, that “... Hanisch died a year and a half ago”. Unlike the official death certificate , however, Feiler speaks of pneumonia as the cause of death.

Feiler blamed the Austrian police and the Schuschnigg government for Hanisch's death:

“I know how to deal with a poor devil - especially if he is badly dressed - in the police and in court. If such a person is still far superior in spirit to all those in whose power he is, then I can think about his completely unexpected death. "

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Did Hitler ever live in a homeless shelter? In: Wiener Zeitung , February 27, 2010 (accessed November 22, 2013).
2. ^ Brigitte Hamann: Hitler's Vienna. 1998, p. 226.
3. ^ Brigitte Hamann: Hitler's Vienna. P. 242.
4. ↑ Werner Maser: Hitler. P. 89.
5. ^ Billy F. Price (ed.): Adolf Hitler as a painter and draftsman. A catalog of works of oil paintings, watercolors, drawings and architectural sketches. P. 161.
6. ↑ Bormann's memorandum of February 17, 1944, NSDAP main archive, file 40, roll 2.
7. ↑ NSDAP main archive, HIMC, file 1741, roll 86.
8. ↑ NSDAP main archive, file 64, roll 3.