by Thomas Weber
It was indeed the responses to Feder’s ideas among the participants of Mayr’s courses that most brought the political heterogeneity of the courses to the fore. Another attendee of Esser’s propaganda course, a Herr Bosch, loved Feder’s writings so much that he sold them without permission to other participants of the course, while an enrollee in one of the other propaganda courses took the opposite view and wrote to Mayr to complain about the inclusion in the course of Feder and his ideas. In fact, even Mayr had mixed feelings about Feder, who was to become one of the most important early influences on Hitler. Although Mayr had decided to include him in the course, he stated at least twice in letters written to former participants of his courses that he disagreed with Feder’s ideas about “breaking the chains of interest slavery,” which he considered as being be too radical and as bringing ruin if implemented. Still, in a typical Mayr fashion, he fluctuated politically in his assessment of Feder. He seemed to be unable quite to make up his mind about Feder, who is one of the Nazi Party’s intellectual founding fathers, as evident in a letter that he sent to another one of his former propagandists: “Concerning the speeches of Herr Feder,” he wrote, “I should like to recommend that you buy and peruse his ‘Manifesto on abolishing interest slavery,’ and you will see that it contains many a valuable suggestion.”74
As the heterogeneity of both instructors and participants of his propaganda course at Palais Porcia suggest, Hitler’s politicization and radicalization were not driven merely by frustration and anger in response to Germany’s loss in the war.75 His subsequent speeches, writings, and utterances strongly point in a different direction. They indicate that Hitler picked and chose large chunks from the buffet of ideas expressed by the speakers, when and if he felt that they helped him to find his own answers to Germany’s defeat and on how to set up a state unreceptive to external and internal shocks. Yet he did not make his selection indiscriminately; rather, he created his own model by rejecting some ideas and retaining others. The dish that Hitler had assembled during his propaganda course in 1919 would dominate the menu of his political ideas and fuel him for the next twenty-six years, which is why the course was so important in driving a radicalization that would affect the fate of hundreds of millions of people in the 1930s and 1940s.
It would be mistaken to argue that ideas were unimportant to Hitler and to his eventual success. Equally, it would be mistaken to argue that it would matter less what Hitler said than how he said it.76 He was a man who defined political questions for himself and who sought his own answers to them, which is, however, not to say that his answers were truly original. What started to emerge in the summer of 1919 was a man of ideas. Soon he would also start to emerge as a political operator who had an astute grasp of political processes. He would soon begin to master the art of translating ideas into policy, as well as the art of connivance and manipulation. From his time in the war, when he had studied German and enemy propaganda in great detail, he understood the importance of creating narratives that were politically useful, even if they were lies. This is why in his speeches and in Mein Kampf, he would create a mythical account of his genesis—an account according to which he had already developed his political ideas in prewar Vienna, and according to which the war and the outbreak of revolution had turned him from the personification of Germany’s unknown soldier into the country’s future savior.
Although by no means dishonorable, Hitler’s wartime service had been politically useless for what he wanted to achieve. His real actions and experiences between the end of the war and the collapse of the Soviet Republic were not just politically useless, but harmful for his political career and the pursuit of his eventual political goals. This is why Hitler invented a fictional account of his genesis that was codified in Mein Kampf. It was powerfully and cleverly constructed that it would survive the fall of the Third Reich by decades. He created it purposefully to shield his true genesis—from the loner who was perceived by many soldiers of his wartime unit as a “rear-area pig,” to being an opportunist with mild left-leaning sympathies who served successive revolutionary regimes before becoming a turncoat, eventually being politicized and radicalized only once a delayed realization of Germany’s defeat had set in in the summer of 1919.
For the next few years, Hitler would remain remarkably flexible as he changed and refined his political ideas and plotted his way up. Although Nazi propaganda would present Mein Kampf as the New Testament of the new German messiah, he would write, change, and discard many drafts of that “new testament” before its publication. For some time to come, he would continue to search for answers as to how a new, sustainable Germany could be established.
PART II
NEW TESTAMENTS
CHAPTER 5
A New Home at Last
(Mid-July to September 1919)
After completing his propaganda course, Hitler was introduced to General Arnold von Möhl. The commander of the District Military Command 4 was so impressed by the recent graduate of Karl Mayr’s course that he decided Hitler would serve as propagandist for Mayr’s intelligence department.1
His new position enabled Hitler to have frequent interaction with Mayr at a time when the newly minted propagandist continued to seek answers to the question of how Germany should be recast so as to be sustainable in a rapidly changing world. Soon after Hitler started to work for him, Mayr, who was only six years his senior, began to play the role of paternal mentor to Hitler, as he did for a number of other propagandists. It was Mayr’s and Hitler’s interactions in 1919 that would set in motion the most destructive train the world had ever seen. That train would only crash in 1945, when the two men would die, one of them in the Buchenwald concentration camp and the other in the bunker of the Reich Chancellery in Berlin.2
As Karl Mayr would play such an important role in Hitler’s life, it is worth getting to know him better. Born in 1883 into a Catholic middle-class family in Mindelheim in Bavarian Swabia, Mayr was the son of a judge. After completing his schooling, young Mayr embarked on the career path of a professional soldier and officer. During the First World War, he saw active service on the western front (where he was severely wounded by a shot in his right leg), on the alpine front, and in the Balkans, followed by a stint on the general staff of the German Alpine Corps. Late in the war, he served, as did so many other men who would become important in the Third Reich, in the Ottoman Empire, first with the German Military Mission in Constantinople, then with the Army Group East (Halil Pascha) and the Islamic Army of the Caucasus. By the end of the war, his superiors viewed him as a “highly talented, versatile officer of extraordinary intellectual vitality.”
After his return to Germany in October 1918, he first served in the Ministry of War in Munich and in other posts in Bavaria’s capital, then as a company commander of the First Infantry Regiment, but on February 15, 1919, he was put on leave until further notice. Like Hitler, he stayed in the city during the days of the Munich Soviet Republic. Yet, unlike Hitler, Captain Mayr actively fought against the Communist regime from within. From April 20 to May 1, he headed a clandestine unit that aimed to bring the Soviet Republic down. After the fall of the Soviet Republic, he was thus an obvious choice to help head the anti-Communist restoration in Munich. Mayr’s and Hitler’s fateful interactions of the summer and autumn of 1919 almost did not occur, for Mayr was ordered to make his way back to the Middle East and serve in the Military Mission to Turkey. However, the order was subsequently revoked. Soon thereafter, Mayr became the head of the propaganda department of the Military District Command 4.3
Mayr’s outward appearance was anything but imposing. (See Image 8.) He was a short man, with a clean-shaven, broad face that made the thirty-six-year-old officer look even younger than he was. Yet behind his boyish face lurked an imposing character and a big ego. Through his propaganda courses, Mayr was trying to mold a group of people whom he could run as a conductor directs an orchestra. To create his “orchestra,” he had picked the kind of people who accepted h
is vision and who consented to go along with being minted by him. He saw himself as both a mentor and a teacher to the men serving under him, as was evident in a letter that he would write in September 1919 to a noncommissioned officer who wanted to work for him:
Knowledge accumulated through one’s own hard work will only become a valuable asset once order is brought to it. Your writing style is quite satisfactory. Clarity and simplicity are essential. As Shakespeare said, “Brevity is the soul of wit.” And, incidentally, this Briton is worth more than Tolstoy, Gorky and tutti quanti. Only for one thing must I play the schoolmaster and reprove one of your expressions: “ein sich in Urlaub befindlicher” [someone being on vacation] is a participle, while “sich befindlicher” is not (it is an adjective). But chin up! You’ll be all right.4
The parallels in the backgrounds of Mayr’s correspondent, Max Irre, and Hitler reveal that Mayr was looking for men whom he could still form. The parents of both Irre and Hitler had died early; both men had been adrift for a while—Hitler staying in a homeless shelter, Irre in an orphanage; the passion of both lay in drawing, and both had been war volunteers who had served for the entire war.5
In choosing his employees, Mayr also displayed a liking for political converts. When Hitler walked in and out of Mayr’s department, which was now housed in the back wing of the Ministry of War right next to the Bavarian State Library, he regularly encountered Hermann Esser, the young journalist, who in early 1919 was working on the staff of a radically left-wing newspaper. Esser, too, had joined Mayr’s staff, where he now worked as a civilian employee in the press office.6 Mayr is likely to have employed political converts other than Hitler and Esser, but these two men would be the ones to dominate jointly National Socialist propaganda until the putsch of 1923.
Hitler now no longer wore the uniform of a Gefreiter (private first class), but a gray field uniform jacket and trousers without any insignia other than the Bavarian cockade that adorned his cap. Subsequently, he would claim to have worked as an “education officer” for the Military District Command 4. Even though technically he was not an officer, his claim does not constitute an unwarranted boast. It was common practice to refer to people serving Mayr in the role that Hitler did as “education officers” or as “intelligence officers”; anyone who gave talks for the army at the time was called an “education officer,” whereas those who were instructors in one of the army’s propaganda courses were considered “instruction officers.”7
In his new task, Hitler continued to be exposed, as had been the case during his propaganda course, to politically heterogeneous milieus.8 In their day-to-day work, he and his fellow propagandists faced an uphill struggle. As one of them complained, there were still far too many people “who with admirable tenaciousness hold on to the belief that the war was Germany’s fault.” And another one of Mayr’s propagandists concluded “that only orators are able to perform effective propaganda,” since most soldiers no longer took seriously the propaganda pamphlets distributed to Bavarian troops. As the propagandist reported of the men of his unit, “Troop morale is not good. I have seldom before heard as much grumbling in the field as I do now.” The primary reason for the low morale among soldiers was, according to the propagandist, the lack and low quality of food: “Rations are—it must be said—wholly insufficient and everything but palatable. [… ] All I hear is, ‘It’s the old swindle.’” The propagandist then went on, in terms similar to those advanced by British intelligence officers in Munich, to warn about the danger of a return of Bolshevism, arguing that while Bolsheviks were in a minority, the conditions were such that if unchecked, Bolsheviks could seize power again.9
Even though Hitler and his peers thus faced many obstacles in raising the morale of southern Bavarians, the former participants of Mayr’s courses who had remained close to Mayr—an at least partially self-selected group—tried hard to change popular attitudes. In their speeches and letters, we can hear echoes of the speeches delivered during their training courses. For instance, one of them told audiences that England stood in the way of Germany’s geopolitical survival. The propagandist gave talks about how Germany had risen within a hundred years to greatness and was only stopped in its tracks by England’s decision to wipe Germany off the map. Other propagandists focused in their talks about “Juda” and “Bolshevism,” or the “peace conditions.”10
The speeches delivered by Mayr’s propagandists, even though following certain themes, still contained echoes of dissonance, reflecting the heterogeneity of speakers and participants within the confines of a broadly anti-Bolshevik worldview. While Hitler is likely for years already to have had rejected an “inner internationalism” that was directed equally against dynastic multiethnic, Catholic, capitalist, as well as Bolshevik ideas, others among Mayr’s propagandists rejected only the Communist incarnation of internationalism. For instance, in late August, Lieutenant Kaiser, a veteran of the Freikorps Schwaben, gave a talk in which he called upon people to reject “the International” but neither “cosmopolitanism” nor the creation of a “League of Nations.” Kaiser told his audience that they should forgo both a red and a golden (i.e., a Communist and capitalist) international. He opined that they should be “patriotic [völkisch] and social” in their outlook, all the while being “cosmopolitan,” and strive to establish a “League of Nations.”11
The heterogeneity of the soldiers and civilians whom Mayr’s newly trained propagandists had to address made their task an impossible one, as became clear in a camp for returning POWs in late August 1919. On August 20, Hitler and twenty-five of his fellow propagandists traveled approximately 30 miles to the west of Munich. Their destination was Lechfeld, where Hitler had trained with the List Regiment for ten days back in October 1914 at the beginning of the war before being sent to the front. (See Image 9.) By the summer of 1919, Lechfeld housed a former POW camp that was now being used as a reception camp for German POWs returning home. Hitler and the other men of his deployment were to carry out a “practical training in oratory and agitation” as an exercise or “a trial duty” until August 25, thus testing how good they had become as propagandists.12
Subsequent accounts by Hitler and in Nazi propaganda claim that the propaganda carried out by Hitler and his peers at Lechfeld and elsewhere had been an unqualified success. For instance, he would state in Mein Kampf, “I thus led back many hundreds, probably even thousands, in the course of my lectures to their people and fatherland. I ‘nationalized’ the troops, and in this way I was able also to help to strengthen the general discipline.”13 The story Nazi propagandists told about Hitler’s stint at Lechfeld was meant to support the claim that he had found a new home in the army, that he had been received extremely well there, and that his political ideas were the same as the people around him.14
In fact, the commander of the camp at Lechfeld did not even trust Hitler and his fellow propagandists to talk to the great majority of soldiers at his camp.15 Throughout the summer, the camp was rampant with extreme left-wing ideas. For instance, an officer inspecting the camp in mid-July reported, “Morale [… ] in the camp [… ] made a very disagreeable impression on me a[nd] caused me to feel that its very soil has been contaminated with Bolshevism and Spartacism.… [The soldiers there] regard me in my Reichswehr uniform with looks that would, as the saying goes, have killed me if they could.”16
As the situation had not improved by late August, Hitler was not let anywhere near returning POWs. The camp’s commander had concluded that morale and discipline was so low in the camp that Hitler and his peers should only address the Reichswehr soldiers under his direct command, which unsurprisingly went well. One of his fellow propagandists subsequently praised Hitler for his “spirited lectures (which included examples taken from the life).” Another one added: “Herr Hitler in particular is, in my mind, a natural speaker for the people, whose fanaticism and popular demeanor absolutely force his listeners in a rally to pay attention to him and to follow his thoughts.”17 Yet Hitler was not even allowe
d to address those for whom propaganda would have been most necessary. In the equivalent to a preseason game in sports, in which a weak opponent has been picked so as to boost morale and self-confidence, Hitler and his fellow propagandists were asked to address only the most loyal and committed soldiers.
When Hitler was not provided with handpicked subjects for his propaganda work, things worked, to say the least, much less smoothly. As Max Amann, the staff sergeant from military headquarters (HQ) of Hitler’s wartime regiment and a future leading National Socialist, would tell his American interrogators in 1947, he had bumped into Hitler by chance over the summer. According to the transcript of the interrogation, Hitler had told him about his post as a propagandist in the army: “I give talks against Bolshevism,” Hitler had said, upon which Amann had asked him whether they interested the soldiers: “Unfortunately not,” Hitler had responded. “It’s pointless. I don’t like doing it on a continuing basis.” According to Amann, Hitler had said that officers, in particular, had no ears for his warnings about the dangers Germany was facing. “The soldiers bought more into them than the old majors, whom they didn’t interest at all.”
Clearly, Hitler must have thought that even ordinary soldiers were not particularly interested in his endeavors, as otherwise he would not have deemed his talks useless. The point he had been making to Amann was that the officers disapproved of his talks even more than ordinary soldiers did. Hitler had said, “I give talks to groups of soldiers up to the size of a battalion, [but] the majors do not enjoy them at all. They would prefer if I entertained the soldiers with a dancing bear, but that I don’t like and that is why I will leave.”18
