Free Hitler by Ian Kershaw

time to shabbier accommodation in nearby Sechshauserstraße 58, it was certainly not as a devotee of Lanz von Liebenfels. Nor, anti-Jewish though he undoubtedly already was as a Schönerer supporter, is it likely that he had yet found the key to the ills of the world in a doctrine of racial antisemitism.
    Hitler stayed in Sechshauserstraße for less than a month. And when he left, on 16 September 1909, it was without filling in the required police registration form, without leaving a forwarding address, and probably without paying his rent. During the next months, Hitler did learn the meaning of poverty. His later recollection that autumn 1909 had been ‘an endlessly bitter time’ was not an exaggeration. All his savings had now vanished. He must have left some address with his guardian for his orphan’s pension of 25 Kronen to be sent to Viennaeach month. But that was not enough to keep body and soul together. During the wet and cold autumn of 1909 he lived rough, sleeping in the open, as long as the weather held, probably in cheap lodgings when conditions forced him indoors.
    Hitler had now reached rock-bottom. Some time in the weeks before Christmas 1909, thin and bedraggled, in filthy, lice-ridden clothes, his feet sore from walking around, Hitler joined the human flotsam and jetsam finding their way to the large, recently established doss-house for the homeless in Meidling, not far from Schönbrunn Palace. The social decline of the petty-bourgeois so fearful of joining the proletariat was complete. The twenty-year-old would-be artistic genius had joined the tramps, winos, and down-and-outs in society’s basement.
    It was at this time that he met Reinhold Hanisch, whose testimony, doubtful though it is in places, is all that casts light on the next phase of Hitler’s time in Vienna. Hanisch, living under the assumed name of ‘Fritz Walter’, came originally from the Sudetenland and had a police record for a number of petty misdemeanours. He was a self-styled draughtsman, but in reality had drifted through various temporary jobs as a domestic servant and casual labourer before tramping his way across Germany from Berlin to Vienna. He encountered a miserable-looking Hitler, down at heel in a shabby blue check suit, tired and hungry, in the hostel dormitory one late autumn night, shared some bread with him and told tales of Berlin to the young enthusiast for all things German. The hostel was a night-shelter offering short-term accommodation only. A bath or shower, disinfection of clothes, soup and bread, and a bed in the dormitory were provided. But during the day the inmates were turned out to fend for themselves. Hitler, looking in a sorry state and in depressed mood, went in the mornings along with other destitutes to a nearby convent in Gumpendorferstraße where the nuns doled out soup. The time was otherwise spent visiting public warming-rooms, or trying to earn a bit of money. Hanisch took him off to shovel snow, but without an overcoat Hitler was in no condition to stick at it for long. He offered to carry bags for passengers at the Westbahnhof, but his appearance probably did not win him many customers. Whether he did any other manual labour during the years he spent in Vienna is doubtful. While his savings had lasted, he had not been prepared to entertain the prospect of working. At the time he was in most need of money, he was physically not up to it. Later, evenHanisch, his ‘business associate’, lost his temper over Hitler’s idleness while eking out a living by selling paintings. The story he told in
Mein Kampf
about learning about trade unionism and Marxism the hard way through his maltreatment while working on a building site is almost certainly fictional. Hanisch, at any rate, never heard the story at the time from Hitler, and later did not believe it. The ‘legend’ probably drew on the general anti-socialist propaganda in the Vienna of Hitler’s day.
    Hanisch had meanwhile thought of a better