Hitler

by Volker Ullrich

  The Thule Society provided a platform for counter-revolutionary activities. It used the swastika as its symbol and had its own newspaper, the Münchener Beobachter. It did not just restrict its appeal to middle-class circles, but also reached out to blue-collar workers. One of its founders, the sports journalist Karl Harrer, was charged with establishing contact with the locomotive mechanic Anton Drexler, who had made a name for himself during the war as a follower of the nationalist German Fatherland Party and who had founded the “Free Workers’ Committee for a Just Peace” in March 1918.61 Together Harrer and Drexler established a “political workers’ circle,” out of which the DAP was born on 5 January 1919. Drexler became the chairman of the Munich chapter, and Harrer took over the office of “Reich chairman”—a pompous title considering that the newly formed party had only thirty members and would remain a fringe group in the months to come.62

  A grand total of forty-one people attended the DAP meeting at the Sterneckerbräu tavern on 12 September. Feder spoke on the topic “How and by what means can we get rid of capitalism?” Hitler was already familiar with Feder’s ideas, so he spent the time observing the audience. “The impression it made on me was neither good nor bad,” Hitler would write in Mein Kampf. “It was just another one of many newly formed associations.” After the lecture, when Hitler was about to leave, one of those in attendance, a Professor Baumann, vigorously argued that Bavaria should break away from Prussia and join the Republic of Austria. Hitler felt he had no choice but to speak out and rebuff the “educated gentleman” in no uncertain terms, whereupon Baumann left the tavern “with his tail between his legs.”63 But Hitler’s version of events does not square with reality—the name Baumann only appears on the attendance lists a couple of months later.64 It seems more likely that Hitler spoke, as he had in the Lechfeld camp, in an attempt to impress those around him. After the meeting, Drexler followed Hitler and gave him a copy of his pamphlet “My Political Awakening.” “That one’s got quite a mouth on him! We could use that!” the party chairman was supposed to have remarked.65

  The next day Hitler read Anton Drexler’s pamphlet and recognised a number of details from his own “political awakening.” What seems to have impressed him most, though, was the idea of fusing nationalism and socialism, of freeing the working classes from the “false teachings” of Marxism and winning them over for the nationalist cause. To his surprise, Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf, a week later he received a postcard informing him that he had been accepted as a member of the DAP and inviting him to take part in the party’s next committee meeting. But what he experienced in a shabby tavern in Herrnstrasse exceeded his most pessimistic expectations: “It was clubby small-mindedness…Notwithstanding a couple of general ideas, they had nothing. No political programme, no pamphlet, nothing at all printed up, not even membership cards or one lousy stamp. All they had was faith and goodwill.”66

  Why did Hitler join a political party that he himself described as a “mixture of a lodge and an early evening drinking club”?67 The rudimentary nature of the group seems to have been part of the appeal. “Such a ridiculously small entity with a couple of members,” Hitler wrote, “had not yet ossified into an ‘organisation’ but rather remained open to each individual finding something to do.”68 In other words, the DAP offered Hitler the opportunity to get ahead quickly and shape the party according to his own ideas.

  With his characteristic fondness for superlatives, in Mein Kampf Hitler described his decision to join the DAP as the “most decisive resolution” of his life.69 Some have pointed out that as a member of Germany’s new armed forces, the Reichswehr, Hitler was prohibited from joining a political organisation, but this is incorrect: Hitler was, in fact, still a member of the old German army.70 Nor was he the seventh member of the DAP, as legend had it, but the seventh member of the committee Drexler had asked him to join as a general recruitment specialist. As of February 1920, the party began to maintain an alphabetical membership list, which began with the number 501 to give the impression that it had more members than it did; Hitler’s membership number was 555.71

  From the very beginning Hitler’s goal was to turn what was a sect-like regulars’ table at a tavern into an effective political party. In October 1919 a DAP office was set up in a side room at the Sterneckerbräu. It contained a typewriter used to compose flyers for meetings. Hitler told later of distributing the flyers himself, and of the number of listeners gradually rising “from eleven to thirteen, then seventeen, twenty-three and thirty-four.”72 By the middle of the month, the party gambled on attracting a larger audience. When it published an ad in the Münchener Beobachter for an event in the city’s Hofbräuhaus, more than a hundred people turned up. Hitler was the second speaker of the evening. For the 30-year-old, his first public speech was a watershed, and his memories of it in Mein Kampf nearly repeat the passage about the episode in the Lechfeld camp: “I talked for thirty minutes, and what I used to sense internally without really knowing it was now confirmed by reality: I could speak well.”73

  These lines were written five years after the fact, but they still communicate the euphoria Hitler must have felt when he discovered his great gift. The positive response of his audience gave him the validation that made up for the many disappointments of his early years. Max Amann no longer recognised Hitler when he ran into him around this time. “There was an unfamiliar fire burning in him,” Amann recalled after the war. “I was at two or three of his meetings…He yelled and indulged in histrionics. I’d never seen the like of it. But everyone said, ‘This fellow means what he says.’ He was drenched in sweat, completely wet. It was unbelievable.”74

  More and more people began attending DAP events, and in no time, Hitler advanced to become the party’s star speaker. On 13 November 1919, before an audience of 130 in the Eberlbräu beer cellar, Hitler used his strongest language yet to condemn the Treaty of Versailles, which had been signed at the end of June. “As long as the earth has existed,” Hitler thundered, “no people have ever been forced to declare themselves willing to sign such a shameful treaty.” The person who wrote up a report of the event for the Munich police noted someone yelling out “The work of Jews!” at this point. Hitler combined his criticism of the treaty with scabrous personal attacks on Reich Finance Minister Matthias Erzberger, who had signed the armistice agreement in the woods of Compiègne on 11 November 1918. Hitler bellowed that he was certain that “the man who had hung such a treaty around our necks would not be in his post for much longer and would not even be a schoolteacher in Buttenhausen (cry from the audience: He’ll get it like Eisner).”75 Indeed, Erzberger would be forced by right-wing nationalists to resign in 1920, and he would be murdered in 1921. The Münchener Beobachter reported that “repeated frenetic applause greeted Hitler’s graceful speech.”76

  Hitler’s rise within the DAP did not escape the notice of the Reichswehr. In late October 1919 a position as an assistant to the educational officer was created for him in the staff of the 41st Rifleman’s Regiment at Prinz Arnulf Garrison. Hitler later described himself as an “educational officer,” which was impossible since as a private he would never have been allowed to hold an officer’s position.77 While maintaining his connection to Karl Mayr in the intelligence department of the Group Commando, he increasingly shifted his focus to propaganda activities for the DAP. On 10 December, he spoke in the Deutsches Reich restaurant. The title of his talk was “Germany as it faces its worst humiliation.” He made no bones about who he considered responsible for military defeat and revolution: “the Jews, who alone are profiting from it and don’t shy away from inciting civil war with their rabble-rousing and base agitation.” Hitler insisted on the idea of “Germany for Germans!”78 He was even more outspoken at a meeting on 16 January 1920. “We refuse to tolerate our destiny being ruled by a foreign race,” Hitler thundered. “We demand a stop to Jewish immigration.”79 Any intimation that Hitler moderated his anti-Semitism at the beginning of his political career is completely mista
ken. From the very start, he appeared as a radical anti-Semite—and this was precisely why he seems to have appealed to his audience. The anti-Semitism boiling over in Munich in the autumn of 1919 ensured that Hitler’s speeches would resonate with his listeners.

  DAP Reich Chairman Harrer viewed Hitler’s aggressive public stance with unease. He would have preferred to continue running the party as a secret sect like the Thule Society. But in December 1919, using a new set of rules that tied down the seven-man party committee to certain principles, Hitler succeeded in stripping Harrer of practically all his power.80 Harrer resigned from his post on 5 January 1920, and together with Anton Drexler, who succeeded Harrer, Hitler began to work on a party programme to be announced at the next mass meeting in February 1920. The twenty-five points the two men hammered out in Drexler’s apartment on Burghausener Strasse 6 contained no original ideas. On the contrary, they were a cross section of ideas in currency among ethnic-chauvinist and anti-Semitic circles at the time. At the top of the agenda (Point 1) was the demand for all ethnic Germans to be united within a greater Germany. This was followed by demands for the revocation of the Treaty of Versailles (Point 2) and the return of Germany’s colonies (Point 3). Point 4 clearly expressed the party’s anti-Semitic orientation, reading “Only an ethnic comrade [Volksgenosse] can be a citizen. Only someone who is of German blood, irrespective of religion, can be an ethnic comrade. Thus no Jew can be an ethnic comrade.” This was followed by the demands that Jews in Germany be treated as foreigners under the law (Point 5) and that all further Jewish immigration be halted (Point 8).

  Gottfried Feder’s influence made itself felt in demands for “the eradication of work-free, effortless income” (Point 11) and the “confiscation of all wartime profits without exception” (Point 12). Demands for the nationalisation of big business, for profit-sharing and for an expansion of the pension system (Points 13–15) were designed to appeal to the working classes. A promise to communalise large department stores (Point 16) was aimed at the middle classes, and the prospect of land reform (Point 17) at farmers. The programme also contained the slogans “communal welfare comes before selfishness” (Point 24) and “strengthening of central authority” (Point 25), combined with the pledge to fight against “the corrupting parliamentary system” (Point 6). As a whole the programme left no doubt that the aim was to get rid of the democracy of the young Weimar Republic and create an authoritarian government for an ethnic community, which would no longer have any room for Jews.81

  Drexler and Hitler chose the Hofbräuhaus as the location for announcing this programme, and the DAP advertised the event with garish red posters. Initial fears that not enough people would show up proved to be unfounded. On the evening of 24 February 1920, around 2,000 people squeezed into the Hofbräuhaus’s main first-floor hall. Hitler was the second speaker, but he was the one who really got the crowd whipped up with his attacks on the Treaty of Versailles, Erzberger and, above all, the Jews. The police transcript of the event read: “First chuck the guilty ones, the Jews, out and then we’ll purify ourselves. (Enthusiastic applause.) Monetary fines are no use against the crimes of fencing and usury. (Beatings! Hangings!) How shall we protect our fellow human beings against this band of bloodsuckers? (Hang them!)”82

  Hitler then read out the individual points of the party manifesto, whereupon numerous opponents from the political Left, who were also in attendance, raised their voices in protest. The police observer noted: “There was often great tumult and I was convinced that fights were going to break out at any moment.”83 Party legend later romanticised the meeting of 24 February into a heroic, foundational act of the Nazi movement. Hitler himself laid the groundwork for this, ending the first volume of Mein Kampf with the words: “A fire was sparked, from whose embers the sword would necessarily come which would restore freedom to the German Siegfried and life to the German nation…The hall gradually emptied. The movement was under way.”84 The mainstream Munich press paid little attention to the event: the DAP, which would rename itself the NSDAP on 24 February 1920, was still too insignificant. The thirty-seven-line report on the meeting in the Münchener Neueste Nachrichten newspaper failed to mention Hitler by name. Even the Völkischer Beobachter (as the Münchener Beobachter had been known since late 1919) restricted itself to a brief note.85

  On 31 March 1920, Hitler was discharged from the military, but he would continue to remain close to the milieu of the Reichswehr, to which he was indebted for crucial help in starting his political career.86 Over the course of just a few months, the unknown private had made himself irreplaceable as the (NS)DAP’s most effective speaker. This was the first step of his meteoric rise. Hitler’s task now was to expand the party’s base and establish himself at its head. Supported by powerful patrons, the beer-cellar demagogue was about to become a public attraction—in Munich and beyond.

  5

  The King of Munich

  “It was a wonderful time,” Hitler recalled in one of his monologues. “In my memory, it was the best time of all.”1 Even long after he had become Reich chancellor, Hitler enjoyed thinking back to the early years of the NSDAP in Munich. He regarded them as the party’s heroic period, the “time of struggle,” in which he and his followers had come together as an oath-bound community and overcome monsters of all varieties. “Our old National Socialists were something wonderful,” Hitler reminisced. “Back then you had little to gain by being in the party and everything to lose.”2 Hitler largely credited himself with turning the NSDAP from a tiny sect into a player in Bavarian politics within four years. As a “complete unknown,” he boasted, he had set out to “conquer a nation.”3 Fifteen years later, he would achieve his goal. Nonetheless, the German dictator never forgot that the Bavarian capital had been the springboard for his astonishing career, and he showed his gratitude in August 1935 by granting Munich the title “capital of the movement.”4

  Without Hitler, the rise of National Socialism would have been unthinkable. In his absence, the party would have remained one of many ethnic-chauvinist groups on the right of the political spectrum. Nonetheless, the special conditions of the immediate post-war years in both Bavaria and the German Reich were also crucial: without the explosive mixture of economic misery, social instability and collective trauma, the populist agitator Hitler would never have been able to work his way out of anonymity to become a famous politician. The circumstances at the time played into Hitler’s hands, and he was more skilful and unscrupulous about using them than any of his rivals on the nationalist far right.

  In March 1920, right-wing opponents of democracy under the leadership of the East Prussian civil servant Wolfgang Kapp and the commander of Reichswehr Group Commando 1 in Berlin, General Baron Walther von Lüttwitz, made the first attempt to topple the Weimar Republic. The putsch collapsed within a few days after workers brought public life to a standstill with a powerful general strike, but in Bavaria counter-revolutionary forces thought the time was ripe to force the government under Johannes Hoffmann to resign. On 16 March, the Landtag elected the government president of Upper Bavaria, Gustav von Kahr, the new Bavarian state president.5

  Under Kahr, politics lurched dramatically to the right. Kahr was an outspoken monarchist whose express aim was to turn Bavaria into a “cell of order” in the Reich. He immediately issued an edict to stem the immigration of “Eastern Jews” to Bavaria, with which the government bent to the will of the ethnic-chauvinistic right and encouraged anti-Semitic currents within the populace.6 In the months that followed, Munich became an Eldorado for opponents of the Weimar Republic throughout Germany. Corvette Captain Hermann Ehrhardt, whose naval brigade had formed the military backbone of the Kapp–Lüttwitz putsch and who was wanted by the police, found refuge there, and in his new headquarters in Munich’s Franz-Josef-Strasse, he and some like-minded comrades founded a new secret society, “Organisation Consul,” whose purpose was to murder leading representatives of the Weimar Republic. On 9 June 1921 the USPD faction leader in the Bavarian La
ndtag, Karl Gareis, became their first victim. On 26 August 1921, the Centre Party politician and the ex-Reich Finance Minister Matthias Erzberger was also killed, and the murder of Foreign Minister Walther Rathenau followed on 24 June 1922. Bogislaw von Selchow, who saw this racist movement as an “elementary, new force” in Germany, laid part of the blame for Rathenau’s murder with the Jewish foreign minister himself. “One should not stir up the embers within the German people in such turbulent times,” he wrote, “by having a member of a foreign race represent them abroad.”7 This was not an isolated voice. The general tenor within nationalist circles was no different.

  In the summer of 1920, the man who had pulled the strings behind the failed putsch, the retired general Erich Ludendorff, also moved to Munich. His residence, a luxurious villa in the south of the city, now became a focal point for counter-revolutionary activities throughout Bavaria.8 Tolerated by the authorities, countless paramilitary organisations were permitted to lead their shady existences in the southern German state, including the citizens’ militias that had been founded after the demise of the Bavarian Soviet Republic and soon numbered 300,000 men. The presence of this counter-revolutionary private army had enormous influence on everyday life and political culture in Munich in the early 1920s. “They institutionalised Bavaria’s rejection of the Versailles settlement and its hatred for the Weimar Republic,” writes the historian David Clay Large. “Above all, they despised Berlin as Germany’s new mecca of left-wing politics, multiethnic society, and avant-garde culture.”9