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A central motif running through almost all of Hitler’s speeches was his declaration of war on the Jews. From the very beginning, he treated this topic in the most radical of terms. One vivid example was his speech “Why are we anti-Semites?,” given in the Hofbräuhaus on 20 August 1920 in front of 2,000 people. It is the only speech from Hitler’s first year as a political propagandist that has been preserved in its entirety.66 It contains all of the anti-Jewish stereotypes Hitler had picked up in his autodidactic study of works such as Richard Wagner’s “Judaism in Music” (1850), Houston Stewart Chamberlain’s Foundations of the Nineteenth Century (1899), Theodor Fritsch’s Handbook on the Jewish Question (1907) and Adolf Wahrmund’s The Law of the Nomad and Today’s Jewish Domination (1887).67 All in all, the speech was a murky mixture of pseudo-scientific and vulgar anti-Semitic clichés.
Hitler began his address with the contention that, unlike the northern European Aryan races, Jews were incapable of any productive work and cultural achievement. Because they had never been able to form a state, they had no alternative but to live as “nomads…parasites on the bodies of other peoples…as a race within other races and a state within other states.” Driven by their two most prominent racial characteristics, “Mammonism and materialism,” they had accumulated enormous wealth “without putting in the sweat and effort required of all other mortals.” With that, Hitler arrived at his favourite subject, international “interest and stock-market capital,” which dominated “practically the entire world…with sums of money growing beyond all measure and—what’s worst—with the effect of corrupting all honest work.” The National Socialists, Hitler claimed, had come forth to combat this destructive force by “awakening, augmenting and inciting the instinctual antipathy of our people for Jewry.” As he had previously argued in his letter to Adolf Gemlich in September 1919, Hitler defined his ultimate, unchangeable goal as “the removal of Jews from our people.”
The police report noted that Hitler was rewarded with lengthy applause and calls of approval at this juncture. All in all, he was interrupted fifty-six times during his two-hour speech by positive audience outbursts. It seems that he had precisely tapped into the anti-Semitic mood that had spread like a highly contagious fever through the Bavarian capital after the demise of the soviet republic. A reporter sent to the event by the Social Democratic Münchener Post newspaper wrote: “You have to grant Hitler one thing: he’s the cagiest of the rabble-rousers plying their unholy trade in Munich at the moment.”68
It was a small step from global “stock-market and interest capital” holding Germany in its vice-like grip to the nightmare of a “worldwide Jewish conspiracy.” With the publication in German of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion in 1919, conspiracy theory had become a stock element of ethnic-chauvinistic German propaganda. This pamphlet, which soon ran through 100,000 copies, contained fake reports about alleged secret meetings at the first Zionist Congress in Basle, Switzerland, in 1897, which had supposedly yielded strategies for establishing global Jewish dominance. In his notes for a meeting on 12 August 1921, Hitler mentioned the Protocols for the first time.69 A report on a speech Hitler gave on 21 August 1921 in Rosenheim, where the first NSDAP chapter outside Munich had been founded on 18 April 1920, also read: “Hitler shows from the book The Elders of Zion…that establishing their rule, by whatever means, has always been and will always be the Semites’ goal.”70
By 1920 at the latest, the supposed Jewish drive to rule the world had become a fixed part of Hitler’s world view. “The only Jewish goal—global domination,” Hitler noted in early December. By September 1921, he was jotting down: “The question of questions, Jewry’s struggle for world domination, it’s a new crime.” The conclusions Hitler drew from this idea were unambiguous, and he repeatedly and unmistakably shared them with his audiences: “The German people can only be free and healthy if it is liberated from Jewish bandits.” The “resolution of the Jewish question” was “the main issue” for National Socialists.71 Thus even in the early 1920s, no resident of Munich who had attended a Hitler speech or read about one in the newspapers could have been in any doubt about what Hitler intended to do with the Jews. But hardly anyone seems to have disapproved. On the contrary, storms of applause greeted precisely the most anti-Semitic passages of Hitler’s speeches, strongly suggesting that they were the source of much of the speaker’s appeal. When he demanded that Jews be “removed” from Germany by some unspecified means, therefore, Hitler and his audience were on the same wavelength. Both were carried away by the racist wishful thinking of a fully homogenous ethnic community.
There is a further, previously unknown indication that Hitler’s hateful anti-Semitic tirades were not just a populist strategy but reflected the core of his political convictions. In August 1920, Hitler received a visit from a young Munich law student, Heinrich Heim, who would later go on to be a ministerial counsel and an adjutant of Martin Bormann, responsible for taking notes during Hitler’s monologues in his headquarters. Hitler had made an “extraordinarily good” impression on him, Heim reported in a letter. He had been “friendly and earnest, a deep, distinguished character blessed with the strongest will.” As far as the “Jewish question” was concerned, Heim describes Hitler’s views as follows:
One has to root out the bacterium in order to restore the body’s natural defences. As long as the Jew remains active it will not be possible to break down the masses into rational individuals…and make them immune to his influence. He utterly rules out a Germanification of Jews in a larger or smaller sense. As long as Jews remain with their pernicious effects, Germany cannot convalesce. When it comes to the existence or non-existence of a people, one cannot draw a line at the lives of blinkered ethnic comrades and even less so at the lives of a hostile, dangerous, foreign tribe.72
Hitler would cling to his conviction that his battle against Jews was a matter of life or death right up until his suicide in his bunker in Berlin in late April 1945. In Vienna he had got to know anti-Semitic clichés and prejudices without identifying with them. Imperial Germany’s military defeat, which nationalist circles explained by scapegoating Jews in particular, no doubt also reinforced Private Hitler’s anti-Semitic leanings. But it was the experience of left-wing revolution and right-wing counter-revolution in Munich in 1918 and 1919 which vehemently radicalised anti-Jewish resentment in the Bavarian capital and made Hitler into what he would remain for the rest of his life: a fanatic anti-Semite whose primary political mission was to expunge a “dangerous, foreign tribe.”
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Even after Hitler was discharged from the military in late March 1920, Captain Mayr kept supporting his protégé wherever he could. In September 1920, Mayr wrote to Wolfgang Kapp, the unsuccessful leader of the putsch who had fled to Sweden, that the NSDAP should “provide the basis for the strong assault troop we envision.” The party’s programme, he conceded, was “somewhat amateurish and full of holes,” but it would get better, and he had assembled a number of “very capable young men,” above all Hitler, who was “a motivational force” and a “first-rate popular speaker.” Mayr concluded his letter by pointing out that the National Socialists’ Munich chapter now had 2,000 members, compared to fewer than a hundred in the summer of 1919.73
In late March 1920, Mayr had arranged for Hitler and the right-wing journalist Dietrich Eckart to fly to Berlin to support the provisional government declared by the putsch, but they arrived after the attempted coup d’état had already collapsed. “The way you look and talk—people are going to laugh at you,” was the alleged reaction of Captain Waldemar Pabst, one of the men behind the murders of Communist leaders Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht in January 1919 and a co-organiser of the 1920 putsch, when he saw Hitler and Eckart.74 Pabst would not be alone in underestimating Hitler. Indeed, the fact that the conservative elites often failed to appreciate Hitler’s ability to influence people and get his way was a major factor in his success.
Dietrich Eckart was more
than Hitler’s travelling companion: he was one of the most important mentors of his early political career. Eckart was twenty years Hitler’s senior, and Ernst Hanfstaengl remembered him as “a perfect example of an old-fashioned Bavarian with the appearance of a walrus.”75 Eckart had unsuccessfully tried to make a career for himself as a playwright in pre-war Berlin but his only success had been a translation of Ibsen’s Peer Gynt. In 1915, he moved to Munich and joined the city’s pan-Germanic and nationalist circles. Beginning in December 1918, with the support of the Thule Society, he began publishing the magazine Auf gut deutsch (In Plain-spoken German), which soon became a platform for anti-Semitic authors. In August 1919, he gave a lecture to the members of the DAP, although he never joined either that party or the NSDAP. He met Hitler sometime in the winter of 1919–20 and liked what he saw, although it is no doubt a legend that the first time Eckart encountered Hitler, he proclaimed, “That’s Germany’s next great man—one day the whole world will talk about him.”76 But he did immediately appreciate Hitler’s extraordinary rhetorical gift and his immense appeal to the masses. Testifying to the Munich police after the Beer Hall Putsch in November 1923, Eckart said that he had recognised right from the start that Hitler was “the right man for the whole movement.”77
The two men developed a close, almost symbiotic relationship. As Joachim Fest noted, Eckart was “the first person from an educated, upper-middle-class background whose presence Hitler could tolerate without his deep-seated complexes breaking out.”78 Eckart helped the 30-year-old, who was eager to learn and still malleable, write his first print articles. “Stylistically I was still an infant,” Hitler would later admit.79 Eckart also encouraged his anti-Semitic convictions and opened the doors to wealthy Munich personages. Last but not least, he supported Hitler and the NSDAP financially. In December 1920, Eckart allowed the party to use his house and property as security for a 60,000-mark Reichswehr fund loan in order to acquire the Völkischer Beobachter.80 Hitler was effusive in his expressions of gratitude: “Without your helpful intervention, this would not have worked. Indeed, I believe that our prospects of acquiring a newspaper would have been postponed for many months. I am so attached to the movement in body and soul that you can hardly imagine how happy I am at achieving a goal we have desired for so long.”81 In October 1921, after he had been made editor-in-chief of the Völkischer Beobachter, Eckart reciprocated with a copy of his Peer Gynt translation dedicated to his “dear friend” Adolf Hitler.82
Their relationship dramatically cooled in the course of 1922, however. The more confident and composed Hitler became, the less need he had for a political mentor. In March 1923, Hitler transferred the editorship of the Völkischer Beobachter to Alfred Rosenberg. Nonetheless, Hitler maintained fond memories of his friend, who died of a heart attack in late December 1923. The second volume of Mein Kampf concludes with an elegy to the man, “who was one of the best and who devoted his life to awakening his and our people with his writing, his thinking and, finally, his deeds.”83 Years later, Hitler confided to his secretary Christa Schroeder that he had never again found a friend with whom he felt so deeply connected in “a harmony of thinking and feeling.” His friendship with Eckart was “one of the best things he had experienced in the 1920s.”84 In his monologues, Hitler deemed Eckart’s services “imperishable,” honouring him as “a guiding light of the early National Socialist movement.”85
Dietrich Eckart was the man who introduced Hitler to Alfred Rosenberg. Born in 1893 in Russian Reval (today’s Tallinn) as the son of a merchant, Rosenberg completed a degree in architecture in Moscow during the war. In November 1918 he moved to Munich, where he became part of the so-called “Baltic Mafia,” alongside Riga-born Max Erwin von Scheubner-Richter and the illustrator of chauvinistic pamphlets Otto von Kursell.86 In Moscow Rosenberg had experienced the Russian Revolution first-hand and considered it the work of Jews. The first article he wrote for Eckart’s Auf gut deutsch bore the headline “The Russian-Jewish Revolution.” One of his first works, Russia’s Gravediggers, began with a passage programmatically entitled “Jewish Bolshevism” which clearly defined the enemy with which Rosenberg was obsessed and which he continued to attack in countless publications. His 1922 book Plague in Russia explicitly aimed at opening his contemporaries’ eyes to the gruesomeness of the “Jewish-Bolshevik experiment.”
Rosenberg’s nightmare scenarios had a huge impact on Hitler. Beginning in the summer of 1920, Hitler’s speeches clearly reveal that he began to see revolutionary Russia through the lens of Rosenberg’s writings and with reference to the idée fixe of a global Jewish conspiracy. “Russia has been completely abandoned to starvation and misery,” Hitler proclaimed in June 1920, “and no one is to blame but the Jews.” By the end of that month, Hitler was arguing that Bolshevism actually brought about the opposite of what it promised: “Those who are on top in Russia are not the workers but, without exception, Hebrews.” Hitler spoke of a “Jewish dictatorship” and a “Moscow Jew government” sucking the life out of the Russian people and called on the NSDAP to become “a battering ram of German character” against the “dirty flood of Jewish Bolshevism.”87 Hitler’s anti-Semitism had initially contained a strain of anti-capitalism. Now it acquired an additional, anti-Bolshevist dimension. With that, the later German dictator’s world view was essentially complete.
Along with Eckart and Rosenberg, the university student Rudolf Hess was a party member of the first hour, but he did not provide political advice or ideological slogans: he was one of the still-rare breed of Hitler disciples. Born in 1894 in Alexandria as the son of a wealthy German merchant, Hess had also volunteered for military service in 1914 and experienced the end of the war as a pilot in a fighting squadron on the Western Front. Typically for his generation, Hess had trouble readjusting to civilian life. He joined the Thule Society and helped overthrow the Bavarian Soviet Republic as part of Franz Ritter von Epp’s Freikorps. He, too, met Hitler through Eckart, and in early June 1920 he became a member of the NSDAP. While still enrolled at the University of Munich, where he studied with, among others, the professor of geography and originator of geopolitics, Karl Haushofer, he became one of Hitler’s most devoted followers. “I spend nearly every day with Hitler,” he told his parents in September 1920, and the following April he wrote to his cousin: “Hitler…has become a dear friend. A splendid person!…He comes from a humble background and has acquired a vast knowledge on his own, which I greatly admire.” Hess described what attracted him to Hitler’s political programme as follows: “His fundamental idea is to build a bridge between various classes of the people and to establish socialism on a national basis. That of course automatically includes battling against Jewry.”88
In May 1921, Hess accompanied Hitler as an NSDAP delegation was invited to exchange ideas with President von Kahr—a clear signal that the Bavarian government was beginning to take the National Socialists seriously as a political force. Hitler declared that his only mission was “to convert radical workers to a nationalist frame of mind” and asked that he be allowed to continue his work “undisturbed.” Kahr was impressed. “These warmly made and upstanding, truthful declarations,” the president wrote in his unpublished memoirs, made an “excellent impression.”89 After that meeting, without Hitler’s knowledge, Hess wrote a long letter to Kahr in which he praised the NSDAP’s propagandist as someone who combined “a rare sensitivity for the public mood, keen political instincts and enormous strength of will.” That, Hess explained, was why Hitler had so quickly become “an equally feared and respected personality in political battles and a man whose power extended much further than the public suspects.” Hess concluded his letter with the words: “He is a rare, scrupulously honourable and pure character, full of deeply felt goodness: he is religious and a good Catholic. He has only one goal: the welfare of the country.”90
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Not all of the leading members of the NSDAP shared Hess’s worshipful enthusiasm. For many, Hitler’s industriousness was a tho
rn in their sides. Some were jealous, while others feared that his activism and the blunt nature of his propaganda were leading the party down a political dead end. In the spring of 1921, tension increased within the leadership. The main issue was the NSDAP’s efforts to merge with like-minded ethnic-chauvinist parties and groups. One of the first targets was the German Socialist Party (Deutsche Sozialistische Partei, or DSP) which had been founded, also under the patronage of the Thule Society, by the mechanical engineer Alfred Brunner. Its programme scarcely differed from that of the NSDAP. The DSP also advocated the idea of a nationalist socialism to combat “Jewish” capitalism, although their anti-Semitism was less aggressive and their activity extended to northern Germany instead of being virtually restricted to Munich and Bavaria. By mid-1920 the DSP had 35 local chapters with 2,000 members. Like the NSDAP, it was little more than a fringe party on the far right; it seemed only logical for the two to join forces.91
Previously, the NSDAP had insisted on maintaining its independence and had rebuffed all attempts by the DSP to make contact. Nonetheless, in early August 1920, at a conference of national socialists from Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia in Salzburg, an agreement seemed to be in the offing. A coordination committee was established to pave the way for the merger. Hitler, who spoke at Salzburg, had apparently succumbed to the enthusiasm for unity. In any case, he carried with him a card signed by party chairman Drexler, which proudly announced “the unification of all national socialists in the German-language realm.”92 But the NSDAP’s propagandist quickly distanced himself from the Salzburg agreements. In January 1921, he summarised his reasons for opposing the fusion of the NSDAP with the DSP. By founding so many local chapters, Hitler argued, the DSP had “so splintered its strength that it’s everywhere and nowhere at once.” He also criticised it “for losing itself in the democratic principle,” because the party had been willing to participate in parliamentary elections. By contrast Hitler demanded that the NSDAP rely on radical, anti-parliamentarian mass propaganda.93
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