by Thomas Weber
To defuse the political situation in Munich and elsewhere, the District Military Command 4 and the government in Bamberg had decided as early as May to institute Volkskurse (classes for the people) to appeal directly to those seen as potentially attracted to renewed Communist experiments. The plan was to hold a series of six evening lectures at the university, targeted at workers. But it did not work out as anticipated, as the targeted audience had no interest in the series. As Heinrich Wölfflin, who had been recruited to teach one of the classes, reported to his sister on June 13, “The workers’ lecture on the 11th was a fiasco. It was well attended, but only in a very small measure by the people for whom the event was intended.” The fiasco continued: “The lecture hall was filled to capacity, but what was in evidence were frocks, not workers’ smocks.”29
Even though the Volkskurse were a failure, District Military Command 4 decided that the situation was so dire that classes should also be set up for members of the army. The aim was to train soldiers as speakers who would subsequently spread counterrevolutionary ideas among the rank and file of military units as well as civilians across southern Bavaria. As a military decree of June 1, 1919 stated, the lectures were meant as “anti-Bolshevik training” aimed at fostering “civic thinking.” The task of organizing them, as well as more broadly monitoring political activities in Bavaria and carrying out antirevolutionary propaganda, was put in the hands of Abteilung Ib (Department Ib) of District Military Command 4, commonly known as the Intelligence, Education, and Press Department. Within the department, it fell to Captain Karl Mayr, the head of the propaganda subdepartment (Abt. Ib/P), to set up and conduct the courses.30
As a sign of how important this work was deemed, Mayr—who defined himself as Bavaria’s “top intelligence man”—was given the most elegant hotel, which prided itself as being the most modern in Europe, as his base of operation. From Room 22 of the Regina Palasthotel, Mayr plotted how he would drive Communist ideas out of Bavaria. His goal was to use the propaganda courses to instill in participants “an acceptance of the necessity of the state’s activities, and a new sense of political morality.” His aim was not “to train and send out finished orators into the land and to the troops.” Rather, he believed that “much will already have been achieved, if the opinions that we teach in these classes are taken up by people well disposed toward our homeland and our soldiers, and these honest people go forth and spread such ideas among their circle.”31
Mayr struggled to find what he had in mind as suitable participants for his propaganda courses, complaining to an associate of his on July 7, when two of his courses had already been completed, “You would not believe how few skilled, educated men there are with the common touch, who can talk to the people, but without party slogans. One cannot stop them from spouting jargon.”32
One of the few men who did fit Mayr’s bill was a member of the Investigation and Decommissioning Board of the Second Infantry Regiment: Adolf Hitler. Probably nominated for admission by his regimental commander, Oberst Otto Staubwasser, he attended the third of Mayr’s propaganda courses, which took place between July 10 and 19 in Palais Porcia, a baroque mansion. The parallel course for officers, which was to take place at the same time, would include as participants Alfred Jodl, Hitler’s future chief of the operations staff in the High Command of the Wehrmacht, and Eduard Dietl, who would become Hitler’s favorite general in the Second World War.33
The course provided Hitler with yet another lifeline in the army. A regimental order dated May 30 had made clear that Hitler would escape decommissioning only as long as he was needed on the investigation board of his unit.34 Had it not been for the opportunity to take part in one of the propaganda courses, he would have had little choice but to leave the army. The course at Palais Porcia not only gave him another lifeline in the army, but provided the future leader of the Third Reich with his first known formal political education. Even more important, it is intimately linked to his sudden politicization in mid-1919.
On July 9, 1919, the day prior to the start of Hitler’s propaganda course, an event took place that explains the real significance of the course. That day, Germany ratified the Versailles Treaty. The ratification symbolized the end point of a radical shift in the general outlook of people in Munich that had been under way since May 7, when the victor powers of the war first published their peace terms. Up to the point of its ratification, those opposed to the peace terms could live in the hope that the Vatican would succeed in lobbying the United States to insist on a nonpunitive peace. Or at least they could hope that Germany would be both strong enough and willing to resist a punitive peace. Even Melanie Lehmann, the wife of right-wing publisher Julius Friedrich Lehmann, had noted approvingly in her diary on June 7 that Germany’s national assembly had “declared that these conditions for peace were impossible,” thus sensing or hoping that the victor powers of the First World War might not get away with a punitive peace treaty. Yet to her dismay, she came to the realization late in June that parliament was going to accept the peace conditions, upon which she concluded: “Now we really have lost everything.”35
The ninth of July changed everything for Hitler, as the ratification of the peace treaty resulted in his delayed realization that Germany really had lost the war. This was Hitler’s Damascene experience, his dramatic political conversion. It had not occurred during his time in Vienna,36 nor during the war,37 nor during the revolutionary period,38 nor through the cumulative experiences of the war and the revolution.39 Rather, it occurred through his delayed realization of defeat in postrevolutionary Munich. It was now that Hitler’s political transformation and radicalization started.40
The signing and ratification of the Versailles Treaty (see Image 7) was traumatic not just for Hitler but for people in Munich across the political spectrum. For instance, Ricarda Huch, a novelist, dramatist, poet, and writer of nonfiction of liberal-conservative convictions as well as a champion of women’s rights, would write to her best friend, the liberal member of the National Assembly Marie Baum, later that month: “The signing of the peace left a terrible impression on me, I could not quite recover. Constant feelings of needles and blows.”41
Despite Hitler’s subsequent citing for political expediency of November 9, 1918—when revolution in Berlin had finished off Imperial Germany—as the day that had supposedly “made” him, July 9, 1919, was, in reality, a far more important date in Hitler’s metamorphosis.42 His later stressing the importance of November 9 as having transformed him politically would allow Hitler to predate his political conversion and thus to put a cloak over his involvement with successive revolutionary regimes. It would allow him, in Mein Kampf, to skate over his experiences between his return to Munich in November 1918 and the fall of the Munich Soviet Republic. His account in Mein Kampf of his life during those six fateful months, totaling 189 words, would fit onto the back of an envelope. Even his account of his disagreement with his father as an eleven-year-old as to which kind of school he should attend was more than twice as long as that.43
However, his focus on November 9, 1918, was not exclusively opportunistic. For the rest of his life, Hitler would return time and time again to the same two questions: How can the defeat of Germany in November 1918 be undone? And how would Germany have to be recast so as never again to have to face a November 1918 but to be safe for all times?
For instance, during the night of July 22/23, 1941, hours after the Luftwaffe had bombarded Moscow, Hitler’s mind would be focused not on Russia itself. Rather, he would contemplate how the Russian campaign could help rebalance the relationship of Britain and Germany, thereby to undo November 1918, and create a sustainable international system in which Germany and Britain could coexist: “I believe the end of the war [with Russia] will be the beginning of a lasting friendship with England. The condition for our living in peace with them will be the knock-out blow which the English expect from those they must respect. 1918 must be erased.44 Until his dying day, Hitler firmly believed that reversi
ng the conditions that, in his mind, had made defeat in the First World War possible was the only way to eliminate the existential threat Germany was facing and to survive in a rapidly changing international environment. In hindsight, the events of November 9, 1918, thus constituted for Hitler the very core of all of Germany’s problems.
With the ratification of the Versailles Treaty on July 9, 1919, the SPD was no longer a feasible political home for Hitler. And the events of that day ensured that political Catholicism would not become his new home. Why? Although the SPD-led German government had resigned in protest at the peace terms, a new government formed by the SPD and the Catholic Center Party eventually did sign the treaty, and Reichstag deputies of the SPD and the Center Party ratified it.
Subsequent testimony of people who interacted with him in the summer of 1919 reveals the importance of the Versailles Treaty for Hitler at the time. One of his peers from his demobilization unit would state in 1932 that in the early summer of 1919, Hitler had been obsessed with the peace accord: “I still see him sitting in front of me, with the first edition of the Versailles Treaty which he studied from morning to night.” Furthermore, Hermann Esser would state in a 1964 interview that, as a propagandist for the Reichswehr, Hitler had focused primarily on speaking about the Versailles Treaty and the Peace of Brest-Litovsk, which had ended the war between Germany and Russia in early 1918. Incidentally, Hitler himself, in one of his early speeches, on March 4, 1920, would state that initially people had believed that Woodrow Wilson’s promise of a peace among equals would materialize: “We Germans, the vast majority of us who are good-natured and honest believed Wilson’s promises of a conciliatory peace, and were so bitterly disappointed.”45
As Hitler thoroughly destroyed any traces from his time during the revolution and its aftermath once he was in power, any evidence that the delayed impact of defeat was his “road to Damascus” must be primarily contextual. All of Hitler’s early speeches would ultimately be concerned with making sense of Germany’s loss in the war. They would not simply rail at Germany’s enemies. Rather, they would attempt to understand the reasons for defeat and attempt to draw up a blueprint for the creation of a Germany that would never again lose a war.
As there had been no real awareness in Munich and in Traunstein of Germany’s having lost the war until May 1919, Hitler’s pivot toward explaining the reasons for defeat and devising plans for building a different Germany that would survive future shocks intact is unlikely to have occurred before then. In the absence of that realization, there had been no need for fantasies about a victorious Germany that had been stabbed in the back and for devising plans to prevent future defeats. There is a high likelihood that Hitler, just like the people around him, had imagined that the war had ended in a sort of tie, maybe not one very favorable to Germany but not one that equaled defeat.
Plus, Hitler’s politicization is unlikely to have occurred until the German parliament ratified the Versailles Treaty, as it was only the ratification that confirmed Germany’s weakness and defeat. Prior to that, it was still possible to imagine that the German government and parliament would refuse to sign and ratify the treaty. But the most important clue that allows us to date Hitler’s political conversion and awakening is the degree to which the core of his subsequent political ideas mirrored closely many of the ideas to which he was exposed during his propaganda course at Palais Porcia. There is thus a very high degree of probability that Hitler started attending his course at the very moment that he was starting to make sense of Germany’s defeat and drawing political lessons from that defeat.
The course consisted of lectures by locally renowned speakers on history, economics, and politics, followed by seminar-style sessions and group discussions. Its central theme, as Count Karl von Bothmer—who ran the courses for Mayr—laid out in a memorandum, was the rejection of Bolshevism and of “anarchic and chaotic conditions.” It also was the championing of a new “impersonal political order” rather than of the goals of any particular party.
The speakers in Hitler’s course took an approach both to their lectures, and to politics and statecraft in general that was historical as well as idealistic. The course was built on a premise that would have been immediately appealing to the lover of history that Hitler had been since his schooldays in Austria: that historical precedent explains the world and provides tools to face the challenges of the present and the future. Further, as Bothmer’s memorandum put it, lectures were supposed to convey the message that ideas, more so than material conditions, drive the world: “First of all, German history will be used to demonstrate the connection between the world of ideas and the makeup of the state, and the insight that it is not solely material things that influence the course of history, but worldviews and ideas [Weltvorstellungen und Lebensauffassungen]—which is to say the fact that all human existence is based on idealism [Idealität]. The ups and downs will be shown in relation to the positive and negative qualities of our people and in relation to its historical development.”
As Bothmer’s memorandum also makes clear, the talks put a premium on explaining why the managing of finite food supplies and natural resources was part and parcel of the survival of states. Equally, they stressed—not unlike the Communist propagandists against whom the speakers were directing their efforts—how international capitalism and finance destroyed the very fabric of society and were thus the root problem of social inequality and suffering.46 This was a message that would resonate with Hitler more than the course’s anti-Bolshevik drive.
Finally, the talks were meant as a vehicle to stress the ethical and political dimension of work (Arbeit). According to Bothmer’s memorandum, it was work that “essentially” tells apart “man from beast… not just as a necessary means of survival, but as a source of moral strength which regards work as the force from which alone can spring ownership and property, and the privilege of work which is superior to any effortless income: work forges communities; work is a problem of conscience, the insight that making and continuing to make work respectable is the personality ideal of all laboring classes.”47
The significance of Bothmer’s memorandum about the goals of Karl Mayr and his propaganda courses is best measured by looking at its echoes in the approach to politics that Hitler would subsequently take. For one thing, Bothmer had argued that it would be wrong “to be content” with “a purely negative formulation” of one’s goals; that it was equally important to define positively what one stands for. This is how Hitler would structure his arguments for years to come. Also, for the rest of his life Hitler would approach problems historically, just as Bothmer had suggested in his memorandum, and would turn to historical precedent both for understanding the world and for devising policies for the future.
Hallmarks of Hitler’s early anti-Semitism, meanwhile, were a worship of idealism, rejection of materialism, and celebration of the ethical dimension of work, much the same as the ethical and political dimensions that Bothmer had defined. Moreover, just in the same way that Bothmer focused on the importance of the managing of finite food supplies and natural resources for the survival of states, Hitler would be obsessed for the rest of his life with food security as well as with access to natural resources and their geopolitical implications.48 Furthermore, just as Bothmer’s memorandum stressed how international capitalism and finance destroy the very fabric of society and were thus the root problem of social inequality and suffering, Hitler’s emerging political worldview would be dominated by the same brand of anticapitalism and by a rejection of international finance.
Hitler’s course featured at least six speakers. Bothmer himself lectured about the SPD as well as on the nexus between domestic and foreign policy. The other speakers were Michael Horlacher, the executive director of an agrarian lobby group; economist Walter L. Hausmann; Franz Xaver Karsch, the director of the Bavarian Workers’ Museum; engineer Gottfried Feder; and a professor of history at Munich University, Karl Alexander von Müller.49
Judging from
a comparison of the writings of the speakers in Hitler’s propaganda course and his own subsequent writings and speeches, two of the speakers in particular—Feder and Müller—provided answers to Hitler as he was trying to understand the reasons for and drawing lessons from Germany’s defeat.
A Franconian by birth, the son of a senior Bavarian civil servant and the grandson of a Greek grandmother, Feder, a Munich-based self-styled economic theorist, lectured his listeners about the supposedly disastrous impact of charging interest. The thirty-six-year-old engineer championed the abolition of capital interest and “interest slavery.” His goal was to create a world in which high finance had no place, as for him capital and interest were the sources of all evil. He advocated abolishing finance as people knew it, in which he saw only destructive capital, but to maintain as “productive capital” anything that, according to him, had objective values—factories, mines, or machines.50
