There was no cultish worship of the Führer in the early days of the NSDAP. Indeed, the term “Führer” first occurred in the Völkischer Beobachter in December 1921, and for a time it remained an exception. On posters or newspaper advertisements for events, the party chairman was usually referred to as “Herr Adolf Hitler” or “party comrade Hitler.” That practice changed after Mussolini’s “March on Rome.” Hitler was now styled into a charismatic Führer and the future saviour of the nation.172 In the autumn of 1922, the University of Munich held a contest for the best essay on the topic “What qualities will the man have who leads Germany back to the top?” Rudolf Hess won first prize for his encomium to the coming political messiah. In one passage, Hess wrote:
Deep knowledge in all areas of the life of the state and its history, the ability to learn lessons from them, belief in the purity of his own cause and in ultimate victory, and an untamable strength of will give him the power of captivating oration that make the masses celebrate him…Thus we have a picture of the dictator: sharp in intellect, clear and honest, passionate yet under control, cool and bold, daring, decisive and goal-oriented, without qualms about the immediate execution of his plans, unforgiving towards himself and others, mercilessly hard yet tender in his love for his people, tireless in his work, with an iron fist clothed in a velvet glove, capable of triumphing over himself. We still don’t know when he will intervene to save us all, this “man.” But he is coming. Millions sense that.
In a February 1923 letter to Karl Alexander von Müller, from whom he was taking classes, Hess confirmed that he had Hitler in mind. Hess sent Müller the manuscript of his essay with the words: “Some of what is contained in the enclosed document is wishful thinking. But in many respects it is indeed the picture I have after being around Hitler, often on a daily basis, for two and a half years.”173
Dietrich Eckart and Alfred Rosenberg, too, continually projected messianic expectations onto Hitler, praising him as the strong hand that would liberate Germany from its humiliation and shame and lead it into a new golden age. The first high point of the new Führer cult came on Hitler’s thirty-fourth birthday on 20 April 1923. The Völkischer Beobachter ran a banner headline reading “Germany’s Führer,” and the lead article was a poem by Eckart that ended with the couplet: “Open your hearts! Who wants to see, will see! / The strength is there, before which the night must flee!” In the same issue, Rosenberg also celebrated Hitler’s influence, which was “growing from month to month” and becoming “more captivating.” Throngs of desperate people longing for a “Führer of the German people,” Rosenberg asserted, were looking “ever more expectantly to the man in Munich.” This was a manifestation of “that mysterious reciprocal influence between the Führer and his followers…which has become so characteristic of the German liberation movement today.”174
Hitler did indeed receive a number of birthday congratulations from ordinary people who treated him as the coming “national messiah.” A letter from Breslau (today’s Wrocław) read: “The eyes of all tormented Germans are today looking towards your Führer figure.” One supporter wrote in the name of “all loyal followers in Mannheim”: “We will persist and, if necessary, die in the fight in which you are our Führer and role model, the fight to free our fatherland from humiliation and shame.”175
According to the sociologist Max Weber, the power of a charismatic politician depends on his having a community of followers who are convinced that he possesses extraordinary abilities and has been called by destiny.176 For Hitler, this group had crystallised in 1922, and they went on a publicity offensive in November that year with the aim of building a cult of the charismatic Führer. Historian Ludolf Herbst is correct when he writes of the “invention of a German messiah.”177 Conversely, the attempt to inflate the chairman of the NSDAP into a long-awaited national saviour would not have been successful if Hitler had not possessed several extraordinary political skills, above all his talent as an orator and an actor. The charisma ascribed to him and the charisma he projected fed off one another, and this symbiotic relationship alone can explain why the idea of Hitler as the “Führer of a Germany to come” could have such mass appeal.178
Did Hitler already see himself in the role in which his admirers saw him? As late as May 1921, he had still admitted to the editor-in-chief of the pan-Germanic Deutsche Zeitung newspaper, Max Maurenbrecher, that there were limits to his abilities. “He was not the Führer and statesman who could save the fatherland from sinking into chaos,” Maurenbrecher reported Hitler saying, “but the agitator who could gather the masses…He needed someone bigger behind him, whose commands he could orient himself around.” Likewise in June 1922, he told the advocate of the “conservative revolution,” Arthur Moeller van den Bruck: “I’m just a drummer and a gatherer.”179 But his self-image seems to have changed in the autumn of 1922 as a result of being deified by those around him. “We need a strong man, and the National Socialists will produce him,” Hitler declared in December 1922, leaving little doubt that he meant himself.180 The idea was reinforced by the first portrait Hoffmann took of Hitler. It showed Hitler in what would become his familiar Führer pose: his posture stiff and manly, his arms folded or his left hand pressed firmly against his hip, his brows knitted and his lips pressed thin under his neatly trimmed moustache. Hitler’s body language and facial expression were intended to communicate will-power, decisiveness and strength.181
Along with his increasing self-styling, Hitler also started concealing himself. As early as July 1921, his internal party critics had noted that he flew into a rage every time he was asked about his previous occupation.182 Hanfstaengl remarked that Hitler immediately closed up “like an oyster” whenever the conversation turned to his past—he was like Lohengrin whom Elsa von Brabandt was not allowed to ask the forbidden question.183 Hitler’s inflated self-image was difficult to square with his considerably less than impressive career before 1914, which is why, even before sitting down to write Mein Kampf, he started revising his past to make it conform with his sense of being on a national mission. In an initial biographical sketch he composed in late November 1921 for a certain “Herr Doktor” within the NSDAP, most likely Emil Gansser, he already depicted himself as an autodidact from a humble background who had become an anti-Semite after going through the school of hard knocks in Vienna, before finding a suitable political “movement” in 1919 in the “seven-member German Workers’ Party.”184
In early November 1922, the Munich correspondent for the Cologne newspaper Kölner Anzeiger wrote: “It is today a given that none of the biggest halls in Munich, not even Zirkus Krone, is large enough to accommodate the storm of people when Hitler speaks. Thousands have to go home after failing to be admitted.” The correspondent for the conservative but democratic paper went on to describe how he himself had been captivated by the speaker’s “overwhelming strength of conviction.”185 In late January 1923, Karl Alexander von Müller attended a talk by Hitler and was dumbfounded by how much he had changed since the time he had been in Müller’s audience:
He passed me closely by, and I could see he was a different person than the fellow I encountered here and there in private homes. His gaunt, pale features seemed to have been pinched together by an obsessive rage, and cold flames darted from his eyes, which seemed to glance right and left for enemies to be put down. Was it the masses that gave him this mysterious power? Or did it flow from him to them?186
A woman from Munich who attended a hopelessly overfilled event a few days later in the Löwenbräukeller offered one answer to Müller’s questions. He had so warmed to and spoken so passionately about his subject that his speech couldn’t leave anyone unaffected, she wrote to Hitler the very next day: “For us…those hours were a wonderful experience and constantly reminded me of the days when our troops marched out of Berlin in August 1914. Hopefully we will experience such hours once again.”187
Hitler’s increasing significance was not lost on foreign observers. Britain’s consul gen
eral in Munich, William Seeds, who had dismissed Hitler as a bit player in April 1922, reported in December: “During the last few months…Herr Hitler has developed into something much more than a scurrilous and rather comic agitator.” An observer from the British embassy in Berlin, John Addison, advised that it was unwise “to treat him as if he were a mere clown.” The British Foreign Office instructed Seeds to keep Hitler under close observation in future.188
In the space of only four years, Hitler had gone from an unknown soldier in the First World War to a popular public speaker who was a main attraction in Munich and who had begun to capture the imagination of people beyond Bavaria. He owed his phenomenal rise to the particular social and political crises of the post-war period, which provided an unusually advantageous situation for a right-wing populist of his ilk. On the other hand, his success was also down to his highly developed sensitivity to the unique chance that had opened up to him in the extremely anti-Semitic political climate in Munich. Initially uncertain and clumsy in his personal behaviour, he grew step by step into the role of the party leader who dispatched all his competitors for power and collected a horde of blindly loyal followers. Hitler refined his rhetorical and acting repertoire until he was comfortable that his posturing would produce the desired effect. The more intoxicating his triumphs in the large arenas of the Bavarian capital became, the more confident he grew in the role ascribed to him by his disciples. He was no longer the “drummer,” but rather the “saviour,” called to rescue Germany from its “humiliation and misery,” and lead it to new heights, much as the national saviour Rienzi had done for Rome.
As stubbornly as he clung to his obsessive anti-Semitism, he was all the more capable of adapting when it came to fitting in with the social conventions of upper-class salons. He realised how important it was to be connected to influential patrons like the Bechsteins, Bruckmanns and Wagners, and he knew how to use them for his own ends. In this phase of intensive political apprenticeship, Hitler already possessed all the characteristics that would later typify him as a politician: the ability to overwhelm audiences rhetorically, the capacity to trick others and to disguise himself, as well as extreme tactical cleverness.
Wartime comrades encountering him again scarcely believed that this was the same quiet, nondescript man they had known as a private at the front. “My dear Hitler, anyone who has had the opportunity to follow you from the founding of the movement until now can hardly fail to express admiration,” a former member of the List Regiment wrote on the occasion of Hitler’s birthday in 1923. “You have achieved something that probably no other man in Germany could have, and we, your former comrades, are at the disposal of your will. Thousands and thousands of men think this way.”189
6
Putsch and Prosecution
“When I fell flat on my face in 1923, the only thing I thought about was getting back up again,” Hitler once tersely remarked about the failed Beer Hall Putsch of 8 and 9 November 1923.1 It was no surprise that Hitler did not enjoy talking about this event, which after his rejection by the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts represented his second-biggest failure. After four years of what seemed like an unstoppable rise to populist political prominence, Hitler suddenly plummeted back into irrelevance. His own fate and that of his movement seemed to have been sealed. The New York Times concluded that the putsch represented the certain end of Hitler and his National Socialist supporters.2
If the Bavarian judicial system had enforced the letter of the law, Hitler would have spent many years in prison for his attempted coup d’état, making a political comeback almost inconceivable. Thus the leader of the NSDAP had every reason to be grateful to his judge for giving him the minimum sentence. Moreover, he was also allowed to use his trial as a stage for self-aggrandisement, during which he styled his dilettantish attempt at armed rebellion into a heroic defeat. The failed putsch was to become a central element in Nazi Party legend. The party comrades who died in it were glorified as “blood witnesses” to the movement’s struggle, and Hitler would dedicate the first volume of Mein Kampf to them. After 1933, 8 and 9 November 1923 would become the high point of the Nazi calendar. Every year, Hitler would commemorate those events with a speech to the “old fighters” in the Bürgerbräukeller, a ceremony which ended with a ritual re-creation of the Nazis’ march from the beer hall to the Feldherrnhalle, where four policemen and fourteen Nazis had been killed.3
The year 1923 had started with a bang. On 11 January, French and Belgian troops entered the industrial Ruhr Valley region to punish Germany for falling behind in its reparations payments for the First World War. A wave of animosity arose throughout the country, and the simmering German nationalism reminded some observers of the mood in August 1914. The politically independent Reich Chancellor Wilhelm Cuno, who had led a minority government formed by the parties of the political centre since November 1922, called upon Germans to engage in “passive resistance.” Economic life along the Rhineland and Ruhr Valley pretty much came to a standstill. The French and Belgian occupiers responded by imposing harsh sanctions, arresting striking workers and taking railways and mines into their own hands. This only increased German outrage. “1923 looks as though it will be a year of destiny for Germany,” prophesied Georg Escherich, the founder of the anti-Communist Bavarian home guards. “It’s a matter of existence or non-existence.”4
Much to the surprise of his supporters, Hitler did not join the “unified front” against the French and Belgians. He was more concerned with redirecting the general hostility at Germany’s purported enemies within. On the evening of 11 January, Hitler gave a speech in Zirkus Krone in which he excoriated the “November criminals.” By “stabbing the army in the back,” Hitler raged, political leaders at the end of the First World War had left Germany defenceless and exposed to “total enslavement.” A Germany reborn vis-à-vis the rest of the world would only be possible “when the criminals are held accountable and condemned to their just fates.” The “babble about a unified front,” Hitler proclaimed, only served to distract the German people from their main task.5 Hitler thus refused to take part in a demonstration by the Fatherland Associations against Germany’s arch-enemy France in Munich on 14 January. It was a sign of how self-confident he had become in his ability to stake out political positions on his own.
The economic consequences of “passive resistance” were disastrous. The only way the Reich could cover the costs for wages in the dormant factories, mines and companies was to print massive amounts of money. The devaluation of the reichsmark, which had already begun at the end of the war, reached a dizzying pace. Overnight, the middle and working classes saw their savings disappear, while financial adventurers and speculators exploited the chance to amass huge fortunes. The demise of the currency was accompanied by the decay of fundamental social values. Cynicism was the mood of the day. In his book Defying Hitler, Sebastian Haffner described the dramatic events his generation went through: “We had just put the great game of war and the shock at how it ended behind us, as well as a very disillusioning political lesson in revolution, and now we were treated to the daily spectacle of all rules of life breaking down, and age and experience being revealed as bankrupt.”6
One side effect of the almost apocalyptic despair produced by spiralling currency devaluation was the appearance of travelling preachers known in popular parlance as “inflation saints.” They included Friedrich Muck-Lamberty, nicknamed the “messiah of Thuringia,” who intoxicated audiences with his troupes of dancers and performers, and the former sparkling-wine manufacturer Ludwig Christian Häusser, who employed modern advertising methods to attract masses of people to his sermons.7
In Bavaria, Hitler was the one attracting the desire for religious awakening and salvation of those who had fallen down the social ladder or who feared they might be about to. The National Socialists were one of the main profiteers from Germany’s economic catastrophe. “While other political events are poorly attended due to the enormous entry fees and beer prices, the
halls are always full when the National Socialists put on one of their mass meetings,” Munich police reported.8 Crowds of people felt drawn to the NSDAP and Hitler’s tirades against capitalist and Jewish criminals and usurers: the sudden impoverishment of broad segments of the German populace made Hitler’s words seem much more plausible. In Munich the National Socialists were stronger than all the other parties on the right and in many other towns and cities the movement was flourishing too, Rudolf Hess reported in early 1923. Between February and November 1923, the party picked up 35,000 new members. By the time of the putsch, total enrollment was 55,000. Maria Endres, who worked at the party headquarters in Corneliusstrasse, recalled that so many people wanted to sign up that she could hardly process all the membership applications.9
Rumours that the National Socialists were planning a putsch had been circulating since the autumn of 1922. In early November, Count Harry Kessler reported that the diplomat and author Victor Naumann had told him that Hitler and his de facto deputy Hermann Esser had complete control over the streets. They had a “large, well-organised and armed group of followers,” capable of striking any day “against the Jews and against Berlin.” The Reichswehr, Naumann warned, would be “unable to resist.”10 On the other hand, the president of Bavaria, Eugen von Knilling (BVP), who had just succeeded Lerchenfeld-Köfering, told the American consul in Munich, Robert Murphy, in November 1922 that Hitler did not have it in him to become anything more than a populist speaker and would fail to achieve the successes of either Benito Mussolini or Kurt Eisner. “He has not the mental ability,” Knilling scoffed, “and furthermore the government is now on its guard, as was not the case in 1918.”11 Knilling was yet another person who gravely underestimated Hitler’s abilities and the danger he represented. But not all members of the Bavarian government shared the president’s estimation. In an official note from mid-December 1922, the ministerial councillor in the Bavarian Interior Ministry, Josef Zetlmeier, described the Nazi movement as “undoubtedly a threat to the state.” If the Nazis were able to realise even some of their “grim ideas” concerning Jews, Social Democrats and banking capital, Zetlmeier warned, there would be “considerable unrest and bloodshed.” Hitler had heeded none of the official admonitions to be more moderate, which was not surprising given the energy of a movement “that was aiming for dictatorship.” Zetlmeier called upon the Bavarian government to change its practice of tacit tolerance towards the NSDAP.12
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