Becoming Hitler

by Thomas Weber

  The meeting of the DAP executive that Hitler attended took place, according to testimony of those present, sometime between September 16 and 19 in a restaurant in Munich. At the meeting, Hitler told Drexler that he would accept his invitation to start work for the party and would join the party.67

  According to Hitler’s own account in Mein Kampf, he did not join quite as eagerly and as quickly as the surviving evidence suggests. He claimed to have been hesitant about the party, portraying himself as a man who only made big decisions as a result of long deliberation, and as someone in full command of himself and the people around him. In doing so, Hitler skirted the fact that he had joined the party head over heels, with no guarantee of how senior a role he would play in it. He stated that over a number of days he had come to the conclusion that the very fact that the party was ill-organized and small would allow him to take it over and mold it in his own image. He wrote that even after attending the meeting of the party executive, he had mulled over two days as to whether to join the party, before finally doing so on Friday, September 26, 1919.68

  It is not entirely clear how big the DAP was by the time Hitler joined it. When the party began to assign membership numbers in early February 1920, they started with “501” to mask how pitifully small the membership really was. Hitler was assigned number 555, indicating his real membership number was actually 55. This does not mean that he was, chronologically speaking, the fifty-fifth member of the party. Initially, the numbers were assigned alphabetically by surname, rather than by the date members joined. Anton Drexler, for instance, became party member 526, despite being the DAP’s founding chairman. Thus, Hitler was the fifty-fifth name on an alphabetical list of 168 party members.69

  Surviving evidence suggests that the membership of the party at the date of Hitler’s joining stood at a few dozen. Yet, as having joined the party when a substantial number of other people had already done so would not have suited Hitler’s story in the years to come—according to which he had joined a party in its very infancy and that it was he, and he alone, who built up the party—he would claim he joined the party as its seventh member. In Mein Kampf, he wrote that he had joined a “six-man party.” Nazi propagandists would scratch his real membership number, 555, off Hitler’s original membership card and replace it with the number 7. Hitler did not pull this alternative membership number out of thin air. The number refers not to the total membership of the party, but to that of its executive committee. He indeed accepted Drexler’s invitation to join the executive committee, the Arbeitsausschuss of the party, which now de facto included seven men. Legally, he would only join the party executive in the summer of 1921. Naturally, the portfolio Hitler was given, due to the needs of the party identified by Drexler, was that of propagandist.70

  What shines through Drexler’s eagerness to recruit Hitler is a belief that the party had not succeeded sufficiently in appealing to new members. What the DAP needed was someone with both supreme rhetorical ability and propaganda skills. For the time being, it had not managed to get a hearing in Munich outside sectarian circles. For instance, Auf gut Deutsch, the weekly magazine of Dietrich Eckart, the leading man of ideas in the party at that time, had remained an obscure publication. As a former participant of one of Karl Mayr’s propaganda courses complained in early October, “It is a pity that their circulation is so low. What is also very remarkable is how such publications are passed over in almost complete silence by the press.”71

  Hitler was now a member of a crossbreed political grouping. It was a worker’s party as well as a party with an appeal across social classes. At least 35 percent of its members were of working-class background. Yet the real figure of workers among its membership was considerably higher than that. That 35 percent, for instance, does not include Anton Drexler and his fellow workers from the railway works at Donnersberger Brücke, who formed the very nucleus of the party and who set the tone of the German Workers’ Party. Even though they self-identified as workers, and even though their line of work clearly put them in the working-class camp, they were classified for statistical purposes as members of the middle class because they were state employees.72 Yet in making sense of the party, the self-identification of members and the tasks they performed clearly should take precedence over the way they were classified according to the intricacies of German labor law.

  Unsurprisingly, the party that Hitler joined was overwhelmingly male. Nevertheless, 13.5 percent of members were female, which, relatively speaking, makes the DAP initially a much more female party than it ever would be after its refoundation in 1925. Hitler, at age thirty, was slightly younger than the average party member. The average age of party members stood at thirty-three in 1919, which still made the DAP a very young, almost youthful party. What made the party most unusual, however, was its high share of Protestant members. In 1919, 38.3 percent of DAP members were Protestant, compared to 57 percent who were Catholic. In absolute terms, there was, of course, a Catholic majority in the party. Yet what makes the Protestant share so astonishing is the fact that only approximately 10 percent of the population of Munich was Protestant. This means that a Protestant resident of Munich was about ten times more likely to join Hitler’s new party than was a Catholic one. There is also a high likelihood that the DAP was disproportionately a party of migrants who, like Hitler, had made Munich their home.73

  Hitler also was now a member of a party that, by its very name and through the wartime membership of its Munich chairman in the Fatherland Party, saw itself as a defense against the growing wave of Bavarian sectionalism—in other words, the heightened devotion to the interests of Bavaria—and separatism. The rise of secessionism in Bavaria had deep roots in history but had been fed first by the enormous growth of anti-Prussian sentiment during the war, and then by outrage about the new German constitution that had been drawn up over the summer.

  In the eyes of a majority of Bavarians, the new constitution of Germany, which had come into being over the summer, no longer allowed Bavarians to be masters in their own house. Even though the number of secessionists who pushed for an outright break between Bavaria and the rest of the new Germany was considerable, an even larger number of Bavarians had hoped for a constitution that stood in the tradition of the prewar constitution of Imperial Germany. Both prewar and postwar Germany were federal states, but there was nevertheless a world of a difference between Imperial Germany and the Weimar Republic. One was, of course, a monarchy; the other, a republic. Yet the form of government was not what Bavarians most cared about. The real issue was with whom sovereignty lay.

  In prewar Germany, as far as they were concerned, on setting up the German Empire in 1870/1871, Bavaria and Germany’s other states, excluding Austria, simply had pooled their sovereignty. According to this conceptualization of sovereignty, the new German Empire was the equivalent to a city wall that was erected around several houses, one of which was Bavaria. In short, conceptually, Bavarians had remained masters in their own house. By pooling their sovereignty, power had been delegated up to the Reich but it ultimately remained with Bavarians.

  According to the perception of a large number of Bavarians, the postwar German constitution of 1919 was the polar opposite of the prewar constitutional settlement. Sovereignty now lay with the Reich, some of which merely was delegated back to Bavaria. In other words, there no longer was a Bavarian house of which Bavarians were their own masters. Rather, there was only one German house, in which Bavarians inhabited merely a room and in which Bavarians had to answer to their masters living upstairs.74

  The DAP, despite its rejection of the postwar German constitution on many other counts, had no problem with this conception of a new Germany. If anything, the party wanted to create an even stronger German central state than the one set up by the new constitution. Hitler was thus now a member of a party that stood in open opposition to the Bavarian establishment and arguably to the views of a majority of Bavarians in 1919. Yet for him that was just fine, as a firm belief in the ne
ed to establish a united Germany—by destroying the houses that had been inhabited by individual German states and building instead one single German house with walls that would withstand anybody and anything—was his oldest political belief. This is why joining a party standing against mainstream Bavarian views was natural for Hitler, as he wanted to help change those views.

  A rejection of separatist movements in any German-speaking territory and a desire for the establishment of a united Germany was indeed maybe the only political constant that ran all the way from Hitler’s adolescence to his dying day. Indeed, when in 1922 Hitler would be sent to jail for the first time in his life, it was not because of an anti-Semitic act. He would be convicted and sentenced to a three-month prison term (of which he would serve only one month and three days) for disrupting violently a political meeting of Otto Ballerstedt, the leader of the separatist Bayernbund, whom he would have killed in the wake of the Night of the Long Knives in 1934. His disdain for Bavarian separatism would also find its expression in the fact that from 1934 onward, no state institutions in Bavaria would fly the Bavarian flag after Hitler had stated his dislike for the flag.75

  Even when speaking to his entourage on January 30, 1942, ten days after the Wannsee Conference that sealed the fate of the Jews of Europe, Hitler, still obsessed by Ballerstedt and the way he had supposedly undermined German unity, would state that among all the orators he had ever encountered, Ballerstedt had been his greatest adversary. Two days later, Hitler would single out separatists as purportedly the only political opponents whom he had persecuted without any compromise. In the Wolf Lair, his military HQ in East Prussia, he would tell his entourage, “I wiped out all those who partook in separatism, as a warning, so that all knew that this is no laughing matter for us. I dealt leniently with all others.”76 However, Hitler believed that, unlike separatists, left-wing activists could be reformed. The previous month, during the night of December 28/29, 1941, he would claim that he felt confident that he could have turned even the last leader of the parliamentary group of the Communist Party of Germany before his takeover of power, Ernst Togler, into a convert to his cause, “if only I had met this man ten years earlier!” Hitler would say of him, “He was at his core a smart man.” Hitler had already expressed similar ideas in a speech he had given on February 26, 1923.77

  Since the time when General von Möhl had ordered him to work directly for Karl Mayr, Hitler had done two things: first, to try to find a new home for himself, and second, to put flesh to the answers he was seeking to explain Germany’s defeat in the war and find a recipe for how best to create a new and sustainable Germany. The Reichswehr ultimately had proved an inhospitable place for Hitler. Yet it had provided him with a training ground to try out his emerging political ideas as well as propaganda techniques. And the rich buffet of heterogeneous ideas to which he was exposed in his work in the Reichswehr allowed him to pick and choose ingredients for the new Germany he wanted to cook. It was in this context that Hitler developed an anticapitalist (rather than a predominantly anti-Bolshevik) anti-Semitism. He saw the “Jewish spirit” as the poison that needed to be extracted from Germany before it could rise. According to his emerging political ideas, the “Jewish spirit” was the single most important stumbling block that endangered Germany’s future and Germany’s survival.

  However, not until he stumbled across the DAP in his work for Karl Mayr did Hitler find a new home, both literally and politically. Here was a place into which he really fit. No more the polite ridicule to which he had been exposed during the war, when he had expressed political ideas; no more the fear of being beaten up by postrevolutionary soldiers. Here was a group of men, and of some women, who were roused by his political ideas and who cheered him on. And here was a group of like-minded people who, like him, were trying to figure out how best to build a new Germany that would be safe for all time. The only problem Hitler still faced was that some people in the DAP, unlike Anton Drexler, were not delighted at all by his joining and were unwilling to make space for him.

  CHAPTER 6

  Two Visions

  (October 1919 to March 1920)

  Karl Harrer did not share Anton Drexler’s enthusiasm for the party’s new recruit. As Hitler was to recall in 1929, “The ‘national’ chairman of the DAP was particularly strongly convinced that I lacked any and all rhetorical ability. I lack the necessary calm for public speaking. He was convinced that I spoke too hastily. I did not think enough about my sentences. My voice was too noisy and, finally, I constantly moved my hands.”1

  Harrer was reluctant to welcome Hitler into the fold chiefly because his vision for the German Workers’ Party (DAP) differed starkly from Drexler’s, a disagreement that dated back to the days of their initial collaboration during the war. Their postwar clash over the future of the DAP would determine Hitler’s prospects in the party. Harrer viewed Hitler as a lout who would be out of place in the kind of party that he envisioned the DAP to be. Over the autumn and winter, Hitler would be tested as to whether he could live up to the high expectations that Drexler had for him.

  Harrer had always imagined the DAP would become a working-class version of the Thule Society, of which he was a member. A secret society that combined an interest in bizarre Nordic occult and mystic ideas with völkisch and anti-Semitic political ideas, the Thule Society accepted as members only people of non-Jewish lineage. Members believed Thule to have been a prehistoric Nordic country, possibly Iceland or possibly a kind of Germanic Atlantis, the home of the first Germans, whose civilization had disappeared. The society’s goal was to research and resurrect the culture and religious practices of Thule so as to build a new Germany.

  The Thule Society, whose sign was a swastika, was the brainchild of a maverick sent to Munich in the spring of 1918 by the leadership of the Germanic Order (Germanenorden—an anti-Semitic and Pan-German secret society founded in 1912) in Berlin, in the belief that the activities of the Germanic Order had been insufficiently successful in Bavaria’s capital. That maverick was Adam Glauer, who called himself Rudolf von Sebottendorff. Born the son of a train driver in Lower Silesia, Sebottendorff had spent many years in the Ottoman Empire, where he had become an Ottoman citizen and, in 1913, fought in the Second Balkan War. He had returned to Germany not long before the First World War but, due to his Ottoman citizenship, did not have to serve in the German armed forces during the war.

  The Thule Society functioned in Munich as a cover organization for the Germanic Order, aimed at coordinating and driving völkisch activities in the city. In its heyday in early 1919, it had approximately two hundred members and ran its activities from the rented rooms of a naval officers’ club in the upscale Hotel Vier Jahreszeiten. So as to reach as wide an audience as possible, Sebottendorff had purchased the Münchener Beobachter, a hitherto insignificant newspaper specializing in local and sports news that Hitler reportedly had started reading at Lechfeld. The society also tried to change realities on the ground. Toward that end, it had set up a paramilitary group on November 10, 1918.

  As the Thule Society’s appeal was limited to the upper and educated middle classes, some of its members had concluded that a second secret society should be set up under its tutelage, to appeal to workers. This is why Karl Harrer had made contact with Anton Drexler and the two men had teamed up to found the DAP as a working-class-style Thule Society. It was the same Thule impetus that gave birth to the German Socialist Party, the party that had shunned Hitler in early September.

  Sebottendorff later would claim that the Thule Society, rather than Hitler, had given birth to and reared the National Socialist German Worker’s Party. According to Sebottendorff, the society had provided the DAP with both political ideas and an organizational structure.2 In his eyes, Hitler had been but a gifted tool in the hands of the Thule Society. “We recognize the merit, the greatness and the strength of Adolf Hitler,” Sebottendorff would write in 1933. Yet, he argued, the work of the Thule Society was what “had forged the weapons that Hitler cou
ld use.”3 There is some truth in Sebottendorff’s statements. Harrer and the Thule Society had been instrumental in the initial founding of the DAP. Furthermore, several future leading National Socialists had been regular guests at Thule meetings, including Anton Drexler, Dietrich Eckart, Rudolf Heß (Hitler’s future deputy), Hans Frank (Hitler’s top jurist and administrator of occupied Poland), and Alfred Rosenberg (the future chief ideologue of the Nazi Party).4

  The role of the Thule Society also mattered insofar as it points to the non–Upper Bavarian, non-Catholic impetus in the establishment of the future Nazi Party. Sebottendorff’s background, as well as that of the group’s significant guests, suggests that the society disproportionately was frequented by residents of Munich who were neither Catholic nor Upper Bavarian and who had only recently made the city their adopted home. Rosenberg and Heß had been born abroad, Sebottendorff had been born in the East, Eckart had been born in the Upper Palatinate in northeastern Bavaria, and Frank hailed from the southwest German state of Baden. Heß and Rosenberg were Protestants; Eckart was the son of a Protestant father and a Catholic mother who had died when he was still a child; Frank was an Old Catholic; and Sebottendorff had broken with Christianity, being attracted to occultism, esoteric ideas, and certain strands of Islam during his time in the Ottoman Empire. Furthermore, Johannes Hering and Franz Dannehl, both cofounders of the Thule Society, came respectively from Leipzig in Saxony and from Thuringia. Similarly, the majority of the Thule members executed as hostages in the dying days of the Soviet Republic in late April had been of a non–Upper Bavarian, non-Catholic pedigree. What was said derogatively in the postwar years of those who headed the revolution in Munich in 1918 and 1919—namely that they were “landfremde Elemente” (elements foreign to Bavaria)—could equally be applied to the Thule Society. Its leading members were in their origin a right-wing mirror image of the leadership of the Munich Soviet Republic.5