Becoming Hitler

by Thomas Weber

  Even though Drexler’s and Hitler’s activities in the wake of the ouster of Harrer started to pay off fairly quickly, the two men had no intention of only gradually building up the profile of the party and recruiting new members one at a time. Rather, they wanted to go out into the public with a grand entrance. To that end, the executive committee drew up a new program and took the gamble of renting the Festsaal, the biggest venue inside the Hofbräuhaus, Munich’s most famous beer hall, for February 24, 1920. Trying to fill a hall that could hold up to two thousand people was a huge risk for a party whose meetings had only attracted a few dozen people less than half a year earlier.53

  Posters announcing the event began to go up five or six days in advance. This was the first time that the DAP hung posters in Munich. Drexler and Hitler meanwhile lived in nervous anticipation as to whether their gamble would pay off. In Mein Kampf, Hitler reflected on the risk the party had taken: “I myself had at that time only one anxiety: Will the hall be filled, or will we have to speak to an empty hall?” He added, “I anxiously looked forward to that evening.” Yet advertising the event had worked, as Hitler reported: “At 7.30 the opening was to take place. At 7.15 I entered the banquet hall of the Hofbrauhaus at the Platzl in Munich, and my heart nearly burst with joy. The enormous room, for then it appeared to me like that, was overfilled with people, shoulder to shoulder, a mass numbering almost two thousand. And above all those people had come to whom we wished to appeal.”

  In Mein Kampf, Hitler would make it sound as if a sense of anticipation as to the shape that the party’s new program would take was what had filled the venue. He only mentioned in passing that another speaker addressed the crowd before him, without even giving that speaker’s name. But it had been that speaker, rather than any curiosity about the DAP’s party platform, that had drawn in the crowds. In fact, the red poster put up all over the city had mentioned neither the party program nor Hitler. It had announced only that, that night, Johannes Dingfelder, a physician, völkisch activist, and above all a crowd-pleaser, would speak at the Hofbräuhaus.54

  The apparent tactic of the DAP, as a still fairly obscure party unlikely to draw crowds with the promise of the release of a new party program, was to use a bait-and-switch approach for its February 24 meeting. It used Dingfelder as bait to fill the Hofbräuhaus before exposing the assembled audience to the party and its new platform.

  Once Dingfelder had completed his speech, it was Hitler, as the party’s most talented speaker, who announced the party program. Even though he had risen quickly in the DAP, at that point he was nevertheless first and foremost the party’s primary “salesperson.” Thus it seems unlikely that Hitler, even though presenting the program, had been its chief architect. In fact, according to Hermann Esser, who had been close to both Drexler and Hitler, “Hitler had no part at all in the wording of the platform.” Indeed, it is likely that Hitler’s role in drawing up the party platform was limited to helping Drexler edit, hone, and beef up its points.55 Had Hitler himself been one of the primary authors of the program, given his utterances about Jews since the previous summer and his heavy emphasis on Jews in his remarks prior to and following the issuance of the program, there should have been an explicit focus on Jews, which was not the case.

  The program, which came in the form of a list of twenty-five points or demands, included several items with a cross-party appeal: the call for the establishment of a meritocracy, the demand that all citizens have equal rights and duties, as well as demands for the development of old-age insurance and the prohibition of child labor. Beyond that, it balanced nationalist and socialist demands.

  Its nationalist demands included the establishment of a “union of all Germans in a Greater Germany on the basis of the right of national self-determination.” In other words, the demand was for the creation of a state that would encompass Austria and all other German-speaking territories outside Germany’s current border. To that end, the program called for a revocation of the Versailles Treaty. It also advocated for German citizenship to be given only to ethnic Germans, for the replacement of Roman law with Germanic law, and for an end of immigration of non-Germans.56

  The program’s socialist demands went hand in hand with its other points. They reiterated all the demands that had been a core feature from day one of the party; they were not merely a tactical, insincere ploy to appeal to workers.57 They included the call for the breaking of “the slavery of interest,” the abolition of incomes unearned by work, the targeting of war profiteers and confiscation of their assets, the nationalization of trust companies (i.e., the breaking-up of monopolies through nationalization), land reform, the prohibition of speculation in land, the expropriation of land for communal use without compensation, and the introduction of the death penalty for usury and profiteering.

  The program was deeply illiberal in that it championed collectivism and targeted individualism, arguing, for instance, that the common interest should always go before the self-interest. The program’s final point demanded “the creation of a strong central state power at the Reich level” so as to put all the other points of the program into effect. In that, the DAP restated its drive to quash Bavarian sectionalism and defined itself in opposition to mainstream Bavarian centrist and right-wing politics. The platform also demanded territorial expansion beyond territories inhabited by German-speaking people. However, unlike in the years to come, there were no demands for the annexation of non-German-speaking territories in Europe. Rather, the demand was for colonial territories overseas “to feed our people and to settle our surplus population.”

  As noted, the party program did not explicitly focus prominently on Jews. In the words of Hermann Esser, the “Jewish question” was dealt with “in a fairly restrained manner and with the utmost caution.” Of course, many of the program’s points were driven by the DAP’s anti-Semitism.58 However, only two of the twenty-five points explicitly mentioned Jews: one focused on Jews themselves; the other targeted ideas that were supposedly Jewish in character but might be shared by non-Jews. Thus it is unclear whether Jewish bodies or a “Jewish spirit” was the central concern of the party’s anti-Semitism. Point 4 stipulated that no Jew might hold German citizenship; Point 24 called for “the Jewish-materialist spirit within and without us” to be combated.59

  In Mein Kampf, Hitler made it sound as if the presentation of the party platform had been a huge triumph, describing how the many Communists and Independent Socialists who had come to challenge the speakers at the event initially had the upper hand as he started giving his introductory remarks. Yet, according to Hitler, once he started to read out the party program, left-wing protests were drowned in the roaring and enthusiastic support for the twenty-five demands of the party: “And when finally I presented, point by point, the twenty-five points to the masses and asked them personally to pronounce judgment upon them, one after the other was accepted with more and more joy, again and again unanimously, and as thus the last thesis had found its way to the heart of the mass, I was confronted by a hall filled with people united by a new conviction, a new faith, a new will.”60

  Nazi propaganda would subsequently claim that all that had been needed to end the “Communists’ attempts to interrupt the event” was “a handful of Hitler’s old comrades from the war, who guarded the venue.” This would be part of the attempt to present Hitler’s regiment, and by extension the entire German army, during the First World War as a Volksgemeinschaft (people’s community) that gave birth to National Socialism.61 Hitler himself claimed in Mein Kampf that, as the venue emptied at the end of the evening of February 24, 1920, “a fire had been lighted, and out of its flames there was bound to come someday the sword which was to regain the freedom of the Germanic Siegfried and the life of the German nation.” He added: “And side by side with the coming rise, I sensed that there walked the goddess of inexorable revenge for the perjured act of the 9 of November, 1918. Thus the hall became slowly empty. The movement took its course.”62

 
The reality of what happened in the wake of Dingfelder’s speech was rather different. Left-wing supporters were never drowned out and Hitler’s presentation of the party program was followed by a heated discussion. As the Social Democrats and Communists present at the event finally rose and left the venue, they loudly chanted slogans in support of the Communist International. Dingfelder had been told on entering the Festsaal that as many as four hundred left-wing activists were present. As Dingfelder was subsequently to find out, in the run-up to the event, a Communist had threatened to kill both Hitler and the main speaker at the event.63

  Newspapers covering the event focused neither on the party’s program nor on Hitler in the days that followed February 24. The Münchener Zeitung, for instance, provided a detailed account of Dingfelder’s speech but only mentioned in the last paragraph, in passing, that “after the speech, committee member Hitler expounded the party program of the German Workers’ Party.” The newspaper coverage of the event is also telling, as it reveals how little known the DAP still was, for newspapers referred to the DAP as the “newly founded German Workers’ Party,” seemingly oblivious to the party’s existence for more than a year. The Münchner Neuesten Nachrichten did not even mention Hitler by name, reporting only that during the discussion following Dingfelder’s talk, “a speaker expounded the party program of the German Workers’ Party while making extraordinarily sharp attacks against Erzberger, against Jewry, against usury and profiteering etc.”64

  Yet even if the presentation of the party program had not been the big event Drexler and Hitler had had in mind, overall its bait-and-switch tactic had been a qualified success: The party’s tactic of slipping in its unannounced speaker had worked. The DAP had had a hearing in front of two thousand people who went home that night and started spreading the word about the spirited performance of Hitler they had just experienced. It had become clear at the Hofbräuhaus on the evening of February 24 that things would never get boring at an event featuring Hitler.

  The meetings that followed, at which Hitler spoke, attracted unusually big audiences. Through his performances, the new star of the party managed to sustain the growth of interest in the DAP. Throughout 1920, between 1,200 and 2,500 people would attend each event, compared to the few dozen who had frequented meetings the year before.65

  The first mass event of the DAP marked the end of the family dispute within the party about its nature and direction. Harrer’s Thule-style vision of the DAP as a secret society run by Pan-German notables who remained in the shadows had been thoroughly defeated. Drexler and Hitler’s vision had prevailed. All that remained to be liquidated of Harrer’s vision was the party’s name. When first setting up the party with Drexler, Harrer had rejected the suggestion to call it a national socialist party. A few days after February 24, the DAP changed its name to Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (National Socialist German Workers’ Party, or NSDAP). According to dentist Friedrich Krohn, an early leading member of the party, the rationale in changing the name was to make it immediately clear to anyone that the party was not an internationalist Marxist workers’ party. It is curious, however, that the term “National Socialist” had not featured a single time in the party’s program issued on February 24. Legally, the party would not really exist under its new name until the end of September 1920, when the Nationalsozialistischer Deutscher Arbeiterverein (e.V.) (National Socialist Workers’ Association) was founded.66

  Hitler had been at the center of the dispute within his newly adopted family and, together with Anton Drexler, had emerged triumphant from the struggle within the party. When Karl Mayr had first sent him to attend the September 12, 1919, DAP meeting, Hitler certainly had not had a plan in his pocket about how he would transform the party over the next five months or how he would personally benefit from that transformation. Yet success in politics rarely results from the step-by-step implementation of a long-term plan or strategy. The art of politics usually rewards those with a talent to respond quickly to unanticipated situations and to exploit them not only to their own advantage but to the advantage of the political ideas they are propagating. And it was here that Hitler had already started to excel by early 1920. He was not merely a marionette in the hands of the Reichswehr or of notables on the radical right in Munich. Yes, they used him. But he also used them. With surprising speed, he turned the tables on people who supported him, thinking that he would be their tool. Often they did not realize for some considerable time how quickly Hitler had emancipated himself from them.

  By aligning himself with Drexler, Hitler had managed to elbow Harrer out of the DAP and to kill off his Thule vision for the party, thereby helping turn the party into a force to be reckoned with. By early 1920, the DAP had become a group with a standing, a right to be heard and listened to, in Bavarian politics. In the process, by the spring of 1920, Hitler, who it is worth remembering had still been seen as an awkward loner just over a year earlier, had cleverly maneuvered himself from being a new recruit to the party to becoming its second-most-important and powerful figure, second only to DAP’s chairman, Anton Drexler.

  Hitler was well aware that at some point he might still have to rely on Harrer, the Thule Society, and the Pan-German notables who stood behind the society to further his ideas and boost his profile. Therefore, once Harrer had been pushed out, Hitler more often than not extended politeness toward the Thule Society and its backers. Yet he never attended Thule meetings himself.67 And he would deeply resent Harrer and his backers for the rest of his life. Hitler never let it go. He seems never to have forgotten how Harrer had treated him and so would never fully trust the Pan-Germans in Munich who had run the Thule Society. He always displayed concern that they might try to use him as their instrument, as was apparent in his lukewarm interactions with the leading Pan-German völkisch notable in Munich, publisher Julius Friedrich Lehmann. Hitler had very much become a master of his own destiny.68

  The different elements of Hitler’s evolving political ideas were unoriginal, yet he used them to build something that was maybe not 100 percent novel, but distinctive nonetheless. In Hitler’s speeches and interventions of this period, we see echoes of his Pan-German views—directed at bringing all ethnic Germans together under one roof—that had already existed during the war, combined with and reconfigured by his quest since the early summer of 1919 to build a Germany that would be safe for all times. He demanded the unification of Germany and Austria, implored his audience to stem emigration from Germany, attacked the Versailles Treaty, and kept on warning against internationalist Jewish capitalism.69 Along the way, together with Anton Drexler, he transformed the DAP from a party whose focus was on German workers to one that stressed National Socialism.

  Yet while Hitler had been devising policies on how to build a Germany that would never again lose a war, he was still very much an incomplete Nazi. He still did not focus prominently on Bolshevism or on “living space” in the East, and would not do so for some time to come. His persistent lack of interest in Bolshevism is curious, not least as compared to the continued deep-seated fear of Bolshevism among Bavarians. For instance, on February 17, 1920, Prince Georg von Bayern, the grandson of the late Prince Regent Luitpold of Bavaria, stated in a letter to Munich’s archbishop, Michael von Faulhaber, that “an advance of Russia’s Bolshevik armies on Central Europe is imminent.” Later that month, Faulhaber wrote to Prince Wilhelm von Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen, the deposed head of one of Imperial Germany’s smaller states, that people in Munich expected Soviet Republics to be set up in Salzburg, Innsbruck, and Vienna in March. Indeed, a spy who had been planted inside the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) had reported five days earlier: “According to statements made by KPD members, [KPD] revolts are to be expected in the next few weeks, resulting from the closest possible cooperation with Russia.” The spy also reported about a secret meeting of approximately one hundred KPD members of the Gärtnerviertel section of Munich, stating, “The general revolutionary mood is very confident of victory in
expectation of imminent actions both from the right and the left; from the left with the aid of the Russian Red Army.”70

  In early 1920, it was not yet clear how deep Hitler’s anti-Semitism ran. Although undoubtedly he was deeply anti-Semitic by that time, it still remained unresolved whether his extreme and biologized anti-Semitic rhetoric was meant in a metaphorical or in a literal sense. His central preoccupation was how to respond to Western power and Western capitalism. He would always pay lip service to explaining how Germany had to stand up to France.71 Yet his real preoccupation lay with British and American power and with Anglo-American capitalism.

  CHAPTER 7

  A 2,500-Year-Old Tool

  (March to August 1920)

  As Hitler boarded a plane for the first time in his life on March 16, 1920, he looked as if he was about to attend a masquerade ball, wearing a false beard as well as a mixture of civilian and military attire. Yet he was on a secret mission. Karl Mayr had asked Dietrich Eckart and Hitler to fly to Berlin to make contact with Wolfgang Kapp, a New York City–born politician and activist from the radical wing of the conservative German National People’s Party.1