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 Gurtner 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. Gurtner 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 (Burgerliches 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.
Even in the Weimar Republic there had been efforts to change these regulations. But the Nazi regime was in fact the first to carry out a fundamental reform, along National Socialist lines and unopposed by the Church. It used the “annexation” of Austria as the occasion to pass a new divorce law on July 6, 1938, making the former justifications for divorce invalid and creating a system whereby a marriage was judged by its significance for the “Volksgemeinschaft.” It was entirely in this sense that “refusal to propagate” and “infertility of the spouse” now counted as valid reasons for divorce. In addition, the National Socialist legislators introduced for the first time, into Section 55 of the BGB, a general concept of irreconcilable differences, according to which a marriage could be dissolved after three years of separation without a finding of guilt. The spouse who did not want the divorce could file an appeal, but the judges would decide whether sustaining the marriage was “morally” justified.163
The new law seemed to betoken a breakthrough in Hermann Esser’s deadlocked private situation. Two days after his files arrived in Berchtesgaden, on October 31, 1938, Lammers presented the situation to Hitler at the Berghof. It was hard to predict, he said, which way the judge would rule, because the principle of determining the guilty party had not been entirely abolished by the new law, and adultery still qualified as a reason for divorce that weighed heavily. As a result, there were particular problems with remarriage, since according to Section 9 of the BGB a marriage “could not take place between a person who was divorced by reason of adultery and the individual with whom that person had had the adulterous relationship, if this adultery is determined in the divorce proceedings to have been the reason for the divorce.”164
Lammers remarked to Gurtner—in confidence, he wrote—that in the discussions about the new marriage law the issue had been, above all, how to make a divorce possible “as a consequence of the objective collapse of the marriage… without it coming down to declaring one or the other spouse guilty.” In these discussions, “the Fuhrer… had Esser’s case in mind.” If the judges refused to follow this interpretation of Section 55, Lammers threatened, “the only remaining course of action would be to consider revising the law.”165 Hitler’s interpretation was, Lammers wrote, “of special significance,” since he, as “Fuhrer and Reich Chancellor,” was in the final analysis “the sole lawgiver of the Third Reich.” If the state court’s decision was not in favor of a divorce, Lammers wrote to Gurtner, “a second hearing of the case would have to be worked toward in as expedited a manner as possible, on the Fuhrer’s instructions.”166 Clearly law and justice had little meaning at this point for the fifty-nine-year-old jurist, who had been educated before World War I and was an undersecretary in the Interior Ministry by the early 1920s. Lammers was prepared to put himself outside any legal framework as long as the “Fuhrer’s” wish demanded it—no matter how personal that wish might be. As in an absolute monarchy, Hitler alone embodied the law, in Lammers’s view.167
The district court in Berlin could not resist this pressure from the very highest places. It decided in favor of the party who was actually guilty, and put the party who was legally and morally innocent in the dock. The court’s opinion of December 23, 1938, found that the defendant—that is, Esser’s wife—lacked “the true marital attitude,” since she could not show that she had “a serious will to sustain a true marriage.”168 Esser duly thanked Lammers for his “support in the matter” in a letter that same day, and reported that the district court had “announced the expected decision… today.” As a result, he said Christmas would be “a celebration of joy” for him, too, this year.169 Still, the decision was not fully legal, since Therese Esser filed the appeal to which she was entitled. Once again, the Minister of Justice intervened. Gurtner wrote to Lammers to assure him that on January 24, 1939, he had insisted in a meeting with the Lord Justice of Appeal “that the sociopolitical and population-policy considerations which the Fuhrer put into effect by issuing this decree… be impressed upon the judges involved in the matter of this divorce.”170 The Superior Court of Justice of Berlin finally rejected Therese Esser’s appeal on March 17, 1939.
Less than three weeks later, on April 5, Hermann Esser remarried. Among the wedding guests were Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun, the Bormanns, the Morells, and Reich Treasurer Franz Xaver Schwarz and his
