Becoming Hitler

by Thomas Weber

  Hitler openly acknowledged the influence of Feder in Mein Kampf, which is little surprise as Hitler’s brand of anticapitalism would mirror closely the anticapitalism of Feder: “For the first time in my life I now heard a discussion, in principle, of the international exchange and loan capital.” He was exposed to Feder for an entire day on the sixth day of the course, on July 15, 1919, when Feder lectured at the propaganda course in the morning, followed by a seminar-style session in the afternoon.51

  Hitler was taken by both: “In my eyes, Feder’s merit was that he outlined, with ruthless brutality, the character of the stock exchange and loan capital that was harmful to the economy, and that he exposed the original and eternal presupposition of interest,” he would write in Mein Kampf. “His arguments were so correct in all fundamental questions that those who criticized them from the beginning denied less the theoretical correctness of the idea but rather the practical possibility of its execution. But what in the eyes of the others was a weakness of Feder’s arguments was in my eyes their strength.”52

  Feder enjoyed the experience of speaking to the participants of Hitler’s course. He wrote in his diary later that day that he “was quite content” about how things had gone. Little did he know, however, how deeply his ideas about international capitalism and finance had left an imprint on thirty-year-old Adolf Hitler.53

  What Feder and Hitler had in common went beyond their shock and dismay about the peace conditions—Feder had written in his diary on the day that they had become public: “finis Germaniae [the end of Germany].” After the war, both men were developing and honing their political convictions about the role of the state, social and economic theory, and social justice, which did not easily fit onto a left-wing to right-wing political continuum. It is thus no surprise that, just like Hitler, Feder had displayed an active willingness to go along with revolutionaries after the fall of the old order in late 1918 and 1919; yet when he had offered his economic ideas and expertise to the left-wing revolutionary regime, to his disappointment, it had shunned him.54 Now, after the fall of the Munich Soviet Republic, he had moved from the extreme left toward the extreme right, which was facilitated by overlapping, but certainly not identical, ideas about the role of the state, economics, and social justice among supporters of the extreme left and the extreme right in Munich. Even though Feder’s ideas were not original, it was through him that Hitler was exposed to them at the very moment when he was looking for answers as to why Germany had lost the war.

  Hitler never openly acknowledged the influence of the other speaker in his course who left a deep impact on him, Karl Alexander von Müller, Feder’s brother-in-law, who unlike Feder was a Bavarian Conservative in a more traditional sense. However, Müller, who lectured to Hitler and the other course enrollees on German and international history, talked about his encounter with Hitler in his memoirs: “After the end of my lecture and the ensuing lively debate I met, in the now almost-empty hall, a small group who detained me.” Müller recalled, “They appeared in thrall to a man in their middle who spoke to them unceasingly in a strangely guttural voice and with growing fervor.” The professor of history added: “I had the peculiar feeling that their excitement was his work, and that at the same time it gave him his voice. I saw a pale, gaunt face under an unsoldierly lock of hair, a trim moustache and strikingly large, pale blue eyes with a cold fanatic gleam.”55

  Müller was curious as to whether Hitler would participate in the discussion following his next lecture. Yet just as after Müller’s first talk, Hitler did not. Müller thus alerted Mayr, who was present, to Hitler’s talents: “Are you aware that you have a talented natural orator among your instructors?” he asked Mayr. “It just seems to flow once he gets going.” When Müller pointed to Hitler, Mayr responded: “That is Hitler, from the List Regiment.” Mayr asked Hitler to step forward. As Müller recalled of the occasion, “He came obediently once called to the podium, with awkward movements and an as it were defiant embarrassment. Our exchange was unproductive.”56

  Based on Müller’s account, it has become common practice to believe that Mayr’s propaganda course mattered to Hitler because it was there that he realized that he could speak and that he was provided, for the first time, as one prominent Hitler scholar has put it, with “some form of directed political ‘education.’”57 Yet, in reality, Hitler had already come to the realization that he could speak and lead, having twice been elected a representative of the men of his unit that spring. By the time he took his course, he had already made the switch from awkward loner to leader. Instead, Müller mattered for Hitler for two different reasons: First, he conveyed to Hitler how to apply history to politics and statecraft. And second, he identified the relationship of Germany with the Anglo-American world as providing the key to understanding why Germany had lost the war and how Germany had to reorganize itself to be safe for all times.58

  While no account of the lectures that Müller gave in Hitler’s propaganda course has survived, articles that Müller wrote in 1918 and early 1919 and that had had the same brief as his lectures have survived. Ever since his two-year stint as a Rhodes scholar at prewar Oxford,59 Müller had been preoccupied with Britain and its role in the world. In January 1918, he wrote an article for the Süddeutsche Monatshefte entitled “How the English Win World Wars,” in which he presented Germany’s role and position in the world as resulting from Britain’s role in the world, and identified Britain as Germany’s main enemy. In another article from the same year, “To the German Worker,” Müller lashed out, as subsequently Hitler would do time and time again, at Anglo-American finance capitalism, asking whether the “German people want to hand over the entire Earth to Anglo-American high finance.” Then in February 1919, he penned an article about the threat of “Anglo-Saxon world dominations.”60

  Thus, the lectures by Müller, Feder, Bothmer, and possibly also Michael Horlacher, on agriculture—which seems to have focused on the nexus of food security and national security—provided Hitler with answers to the two questions he had set himself as a result of his Damascene conversion. However, he did not soak up like a sponge everything that came close to him during his propaganda course. It is no surprise that Franz Xaver Karsch is a little-known figure today. Hitler certainly did not feel inspired by his economic ideas, which centered on notions of world peace and the avoidance of war. Nor did he ever display sympathy for Bothmer’s belief that a strong, unitary German state would be the source for insecurity in Europe or his conclusion that therefore Bavaria and German-speaking Austria should set up a monarchical state, separate from the rest of Germany.61 Neither did the course provide him with a homogeneous set of political ideas. As the speakers of Hitler’s course did not all preach more or less the same ideas, Hitler’s subsequent emerging ideology cannot possibly be described as merely being the sum of their ideas.62

  To understand his sudden political metamorphosis in 1919, it is thus just as telling to examine which ideas would not resonate with Hitler, as well as those that would inspire him, at the very moment that he was starting to become the man known by everyone to the present day.

  When Mayr’s propaganda courses were first set up, Mayr and Bothmer picked speakers from the intellectual and family networks of Müller, whom Mayr had known since they attended the same school as boys. The early courses, as well as some of the talks that Mayr had organized to be given to other audiences, featured Müller, Josef Hofmiller, and journalist Fritz Gerlich, three regular writers for the Süddeutsche Monatshefte, the conservative journal published by Nikolaus Cossmann, a Jewish convert to Catholicism. Feder, meanwhile, was Müller’s brother-in-law and in the past had written for the Monatshefte, too. Furthermore, Bothmer wrote articles for the weekly paper of Feder’s collaborator Dietrich Eckart, who was to play a prominent role in Hitler’s life.63 Although later courses, including the one attended by Hitler, were augmented by other speakers, the core of the speakers’ group still came from Müller’s networks.

  Yet for all th
eir similarities and their overlapping social networks, the speakers in Mayr and Bothmer’s propaganda courses were far from being a homogeneous group of like-minded right-wing ideologues. All speakers certainly converged on a rejection of Bolshevism and on some of the principles that Bothmer had laid out in his memorandum. Beyond that, however, their ideas about politics and economics were extremely varied. For instance, some lecturers were dyed-in-the-wool German nationalists, whereas others had Bavarian sectionalist leanings. Furthermore, although both Gottfried Feder and Walter L. Hausmann were highly critical of finance, the conclusions they drew from their rejection of finance were radically different.

  Hausmann, who in his talk for Hitler’s course covered political education as well as macroeconomics, had made his name with a book on “the gold delusion.” In his book, Hausmann put forward the idea that the use of gold in international trade and finance was the origin not just of an ill-functioning economy but also of all wars as well as of social misery. Hausmann believed that in the twentieth century, wars would only happen for economic reasons, generated by envy and the drive for new markets. He thus was of the opinion that the establishment of a new and different economic world order, purged of its reliance on gold, would render future wars unnecessary and would produce “world peace.”64 As would become clear over time, the goal of Feder and the party to which he belonged, the German Workers’ Party, was certainly not the establishment of world peace through the avoidance of war. And Hitler would most definitely not take away from the course a Hausmann-like belief in world peace through the avoidance of war.

  The subsequent lives of some of the speakers also remind us that no obvious political trajectory ran from Hitler’s propaganda courses to the future, even though the ideas of some of them would be of pivotal importance to him. Although Feder would serve Hitler as a junior minister and Müller would ultimately become a convert to National Socialism, Horlacher, who spoke at Hitler’s course about agriculture and what he saw as Germany’s economic strangulation, would be incarcerated in a concentration camp. Mayr and Gerlich would both die in concentration camps.

  The case of Fritz Gerlich is of particular significance in making sense of the political direction of Karl Mayr’s propaganda courses, for Gerlich had been Mayr’s preferred choice to head them with him. It had only been due to Gerlich’s being too busy to accept the invitation to head the courses that Mayr had turned to Bothmer, whom Gerlich had recommended to Mayr in his place. While Gerlich and Bothmer both were fervent anti-Communists, in Gerlich’s approach to Jews there was a world of a difference between him and some of Mayr’s other speakers. Gerlich did not support anti-Semitism. He rejected specifically the existence of a nexus between Bolshevism and Judaism. As Gerlich was so vigorous in his rejection of anti-Semitism, Hitler would have been exposed to a very different course at the very moment he was trying to understand what held the world together, had Mayr’s preferred choice to lead the course been less busy. Gerlich was concerned that “the hounding of our Jewish fellow citizens was running the risk of turning into a public danger and of strengthening further those elements that were tearing the people and the state apart.”65 And yet, Gerlich had been Mayr’s preferred choice in running the propaganda courses of the Military District Command 4, and he did continue to carry out propaganda for Mayr.

  Furthermore, while the pamphlets Mayr handed out to his propagandists and distributed widely among troops in southern Bavaria were all anti-Bolshevik, beyond that they differed considerably in their political outlook. They included a pamphlet titled What You Should Know About Bolshevism, which in the words of one of Mayr’s propagandists “proves that the leaders of Bolshevism are chiefly Jews who ply their dirty trade.” Yet other pamphlets Mayr distributed included Fritz Gerlich’s Communism in Practice, which one of Mayr’s Munich-based propagandists hailed, despite its absence of anti-Semitism, as “clearly revealing the dark side of communism.” Another pamphlet, Der Bolschewismus—deemed by one of Mayr’s propagandists to “merit to be distributed widely”—was published by a Catholic publishing house associated with the Catholic Bavarian People’s Party (BVP). Mayr also distributed a pamphlet that his propaganda department deemed to have “roughly a SPD outlook.” Furthermore, he advised a propaganda officer of a regiment in the Swabian city of Augsburg to get copies of the conservative-leaning Süddeutsche Monatshefte and of the Social Democratic Sozialistische Monatshefte alike, telling him, “You can whet people’s interest with these and, in doing so, further our interests.”66

  It is quite difficult to pin down Mayr’s personal political views, as some of the people close to him hated one another bitterly. For instance, he was close not just to Gerlich but also to Dietrich Eckart, to become Hitler’s most influential mentor in the early Nazi party. And yet, Eckart attacked Gerlich so fiercely for his political views in print in his weekly Auf gut Deutsch (In Plain German) that Gerlich would eventually take him to court.67 Despite his very public clash with Gerlich, even Eckart was not intermingling exclusively with politically like-minded people. In the summer of 1919, people still talked to one another across political divides. For instance, at the regular table that Eckart presided over at the Bratwurst-Glöckl, an inn adjacent to Munich’s cathedral, “people gathered together from a number of different political groups,” as Hermann Esser would write, Esser being a young hot-blooded journalist and future propaganda chief of the Nazi party who frequented the table. According to Esser, at Eckart’s regular table “it was possible to converse with one’s political adversary” in “an atmosphere where different views and opinions met.”68 At the moment when Hitler’s political metamorphosis was about to commence, the future leader of the Nazi Party was thus exposed to a fairly heterogeneous set of political ideas.

  The Munich of 1919 was a city in which people were still trying to find a new political footing in a postwar, postrevolutionary world. There were even signs that Hitler’s future political mentor Karl Mayr, like so many others at the time, was still fluctuating between different political ideas. He clearly had no sympathy for postrevolutionary life in Bavaria. On July 7, 1919, he complained about “the slouchiness, indiscipline, and disorganization of our revolutionary era.” Yet beyond his anti-Bolshevism, Mayr’s political ideas were in flux. Unlike in the past, he no longer considered himself as being close to the BVP, but right-wing. And he defined himself as an anti-Semite. On one hand, he supported people who dreamed of a greater Germany; on the other, Mayr wrote a secessionist memorandum over the summer of 1919. When the memorandum was leaked in September and legal proceedings were initiated against him, he came up with an unlikely story about how he merely had pretended to be supporting secessionist ideas as a trap meant to identify secessionists.69

  The participants in Mayr’s propaganda courses were varied in their backgrounds and their political outlook, too. Indeed, the talks delivered at Hitler’s course as well as at the other courses that Mayr organized in the summer of 1919 met with a mixed reception among Hitler’s fellow propaganda trainees due to their heterogeneity. In theory, the men military units picked to be trained by Mayr were supposed to have a clearly defined profile, as a telegram sent by Mayr to military units across Munich specified: the men were required to be “mature” and “reliable,” and to have a “sharp natural intellect.”70 Yet, in reality, those who enrolled in the courses shared no obvious common profile.

  Participants included people ranging from their early twenties well into their thirties; Catholics as well as Protestants; enlisted men, NCOs, and officers; university students and men with little schooling; and veterans who had seen service on the frontline, those who had served on the home front, and Freikorps veterans. And some enrollees, like Hitler, had never left the army, whereas others had initially been decommissioned at the end of the war and had only been reactivated in early May. One stated that he had rejoined the army only in May to escape unemployment. Some men, meanwhile, were eager to attend the lectures; others were slackers. As one of the courses’ parti
cipants complained: “Regrettably many of the men, particularly the younger ones, only joined the training in order to have a good time at public expense & to have some days off from regular service.” Another man agreed: “The participants still leave much to be desired. I found there to be people present who I am sure will not turn out as desired by the organizers.”71

  The heterogeneity of their backgrounds also translated into political heterogeneity, all of course within the confines of a rejection of radical left-wing experiments. Participants included people who, like Hitler, had flirted with the political left but had become political turncoats who would soon hold deeply anti-Semitic views, as well as others who vehemently disagreed with them. For instance, Hermann Esser had still worked for a newspaper on the radical left, the Allgäuer Volkswacht, earlier in the year, yet by the summer he had metamorphosed into a deeply anti-Semitic anticapitalist on the political right. By the time he took Mayr’s fourth course, he thus had had run-ins with other participants.72

  Esser complained that another enrollee in the course took exception to his admiring support of Feder, which is very important due to the role Feder would play in the Nazi Party: “In Friday’s open discussion, I reproached the course organizers because I cannot understand why Herr Feder’s excellent writings are not available for free for the course’s participants in the way that other pamphlets are,” Esser wrote to Mayr a few days after the event. “Among other things I said, in those very words: ‘I believe that too much consideration is being given here to certain circles in whose natural interest it is that these writings, which shake the very foundations of exploitative high finance, will not reach the wider public.’ I even dared put a name to those circles, to this cancer gnawing at our German economy: it is international Jewry.” Esser added, “Another participant, who had used previous opportunities to come to the defense of those circles, believed it to be his duty to speak up for them yet again. He sought to soften the impact of my words by accusing me of tactlessness in having, as it were, passed a vote of no confidence to the course organizers in this way.”73