1924: The Year that Made Hitler

by Peter Ross Range

  Hitler not only had proved that he could speak, but also had revealed that he could be a fast-on-his-feet demagogue.53 His plain looks and modest stature, along with his exceptionally pale skin and what many remember as “luminous,” piercing blue eyes, may have lent special intensity to Hitler’s impassioned arguments.54 In any case, the German Workers’ Party cofounder, Drexler, was so impressed that he grabbed Hitler afterward and pressed upon him a copy of his own forty-page manifesto, “My Political Awakening.” Drexler invited Hitler to return. To another attendee, Drexler said: “That guy has a mouth on him! We could really use him!”

  After Hitler’s confrontational evening at the Sterneckerbräu, events moved quickly. Unable to sleep early the next morning in his army barracks because of some noisy mice, Hitler had nothing better to do than to read Drexler’s little pamphlet. With its anti-Semitic denunciation of “destructive Jewish influence” on German life, its attacks on “Big Capital,” and its belief in closing the class divide between workers and the middle class, the short screed immediately resonated with Hitler. “I saw my own development come to life again before my eyes” while reading the pamphlet, he recalled.55 But before he could decide whether or not to accept Drexler’s invitation to return, Hitler received a postcard informing him that he was now a member of the German Workers’ Party.56 Hitler spent two “tortured” days thinking about the “ridiculous” little club, as he called it, before deciding to accept. “It was the most momentous decision of my life,” he wrote. “Now there was no turning back.” Hitler now had a party affiliation, a speaking platform, and a political base that he would turn, for a few years, into the most powerful political force in twentieth-century Europe.

  For sending Hitler to his first party meeting, Captain Mayr later liked to claim that he was Hitler’s spiritual godfather, the man who made it all possible. But the true role of intellectual inspiration fell to someone else, a hard-living, highly acclaimed intellectual named Dietrich Eckart. Hitler met Eckart through the German Workers’ Party, and Eckart’s influence on him would be profound. Considered the party’s one-man brain trust, Eckart was a bohemian, poet, and sometime journalist whose translation and production of Henrik Ibsen’s Peer Gynt in Germany had made him famous and prosperous. A raving anti-Semite, Eckart published an anti-Jewish weekly called Auf Gut Deutsch (In Plain German). With his bright blue eyes, high forehead, and totally bald head, Eckart cut a striking figure in the café culture of Munich’s artistic and literary quarter, Schwabing. Despite an alcohol and morphine addiction that would lead to his death at age fifty-five, Eckart was regarded as an oracle of the anti-Semitic völkisch movement. He had once said of the new political party, “We need a leader who isn’t bothered by the clatter of a machine gun.… The best would be a worker who can also speak… and who does not run from somebody swinging a chair at him. He has to be a bachelor—then we’ll get the women!”57 It seemed an almost perfect description of the fearless former message runner who was becoming interested in politics. In Hitler, Eckart began to think he had found his man.

  As Hitler would later remark, Eckhart quickly became the “polar star” of his intellectual development, refining his anti-Semitic beliefs and introducing him to both the bohemian and high-society worlds of Munich. Eckart dragged Hitler along on the budding politician’s very first airplane ride—to Berlin—and he took the future dictator to meet, among others, the renowned and rich piano manufacturer Edwin Bechstein and, more important, his wife, Helene. Frau Bechstein became an enthusiastic financial backer and, later, when Hitler was in Landsberg Prison, a frequent visitor (“I wish he were my son,” she once said).58 She also presented him with a leather dog whip, one of three that he would eventually receive from various female admirers and carry with him as he moved around Munich.

  While Hitler was making his first moves into party politics, he had another chance to flex his newfound rhetorical muscles on paper. In September 1919, Captain Mayr received a letter from Adolf Gemlich, a former student in the University of Munich course. Gemlich asked Mayr for more guidance on “the Jewish question.” Mayr gave the letter to Hitler (still serving as an army private) to answer.

  Hitler packed a lot into his nearly one-thousand-word response. He expressed, for the first time in writing, his deep-seated anti-Semitism, and laid out some of the key elements that would become the basis of his anti-Jewish policies all the way through his political ascension, the Third Reich, the Holocaust, and right into Hitler’s final “political testament,” written in 1945 just days before his suicide in his Berlin bunker.

  Channeling stereotypes and clichés of the anti-Semitism that was widespread in Europe—and especially in völkisch thinking in Bavaria—Hitler gave his arguments an analytical gloss and extremism that set his letter to Gemlich apart. Hitler rejected an “emotional anti-Semitism” that, he said, was purely personal, led only to pogroms, and was therefore not politically useful, and chose instead an “anti-Semitism of reason” that was “fact-based” and intended to shape policy. Judaism was not a religion, he claimed, but a race. And the Jewish race functioned as a “leech” on the majority cultures in which it lived, since its entire raison d’être was the “dance around the golden calf” for the purpose of amassing fortunes. The Weimar Republic leadership, he claimed, was in thrall to Jewish money, which financed the unjust fight against “the anti-Semitic movement,” meaning nationalist and völkisch (racist) parties. “[The Jew’s] power is the power of money that in his hands constantly grows in the form of interest, forcing other peoples under the most dangerous yoke.” In the earliest written record of his tendency to equate Jews with disease and parasites, Hitler described Judaism as “a racial tuberculosis.” A reason-based response to this threat must inevitably lead to “a systematic and legal struggle and cancellation of the Jews’ privileges,” he wrote.

  Germany, Hitler continued in his long letter, needed a “rebirth,” but it could not move forward with an “irresponsible press,” meaning Jewish-owned newspapers. Only through the ruthless efforts of “a leadership personality” would Germany reawaken, Hitler claimed, providing a glimpse of his emerging Messiah complex. He offered a simple solution to “the Jewish question” that chillingly foreshadowed events to come more than two decades later: “The final goal [of anti-Semitism] must be the irrevocable and complete removal of all Jews.”

  In its viciousness and candid brutality, the letter to Gemlich shows how fully Hitler’s anti-Semitism was already developed by late 1919. Even before he had an official political platform, the letter pointed to the radical measures Hitler contemplated if he ever reached power. Now already thirty, Hitler was ready to embark on that quest.

  CHAPTER TWO

  The Charmed Circle

  “From now on I will go my way alone.”

  —ADOLF HITLER, 19221

  “I must have a crowd when I speak,” Hitler once told a friend, “in a small, intimate circle I never know what to say.” In October 1919 on the night he made his debut as a speaker in the German Workers’ Party, the turnout was only one hundred people, but they were sufficient to trigger Hitler’s oratorical juices. Though Hitler was not the main attraction, his fiery words that autumn night dramatically boosted fund-raising, cementing his emerging role as a propagandist. From now on, he would speak; he would propagandize; he would be a “drummer,” as he liked to put it, for “the movement,” as he preferred to call it. At this point, Hitler did not yet see himself as the leader of a political force, but rather as its noisemaker and tent barker, building support for someone else who would emerge as the chosen strongman, a dictator for Germany. “Our task is to give to the dictator, when he comes, a people that is ready for him,” he said.2

  In February 1920, Hitler had his coming-out as a serious mass rabble-rouser. Later glorified in his overwritten manifesto, Mein Kampf, as a heroic Siegfriedian moment, the event in Munich’s celebrated Hofbräuhaus beer hall was a bit more prosaic than that. Again the meeting was centered around another speake
r; Hitler’s name was not even mentioned on the party’s flyers. But as an unannounced backup speaker, Hitler stirred the crowd of about two thousand listeners to a high pitch of enthusiasm. Even while presenting the party’s banal if quirky twenty-five-point program, Hitler evoked cheers from supporters and jeers from a couple hundred Socialist opponents who had turned out for the speeches, transforming the gathering into a heated political rally; people climbed onto chairs and tables to harangue one another.3 After some near-clashes between Nazis and Socialists, listeners left the beer hall arguing loudly in the streets, talking about Hitler, the speech, the issues. A defiant group of Communists and Socialists sang the “Internationale,” the anthem of the Left. Hitler had accomplished exactly what he wanted—he had put the party on the map. “It makes no difference whatever whether they laugh at us or revile us,” he wrote later. “The main thing is that they mention us.”

  The bigger the crowd, it seemed, the better Hitler performed. He had now discovered his knack for connecting with the masses, sensing their moods, speaking their language. “A great speaker… lets himself be carried by the masses in such a way that he develops a feel for the words that reach their hearts,” Hitler wrote. “He can read on their faces… whether they are convinced.”4 The masses stimulated him with their attention and adulation. It was a reciprocal relationship—the relationship—that would define Hitler’s political life. Sometimes “I spoke before two thousand people and eighteen hundred of them were looking at me through enemy eyes,” he recalled. “Three hours later I beheld a surging mass filled with indignation and wrath” over the political outrage that Hitler had described.5 Although he was a spin artist of the highest order, reports of his big-speech successes make this claim at least plausible.

  Before the pivotal Hofbräuhaus gathering, there had been bitter debate in the German Workers’ Party about the advisability of booking such a large hall. Party cofounder Harrer feared half the seats would be empty; the event would look like a failure. Hitler had argued the opposite, and now he had been proven right. After his success, the party would no longer shy away from mass meetings in huge halls, and Hitler would be the featured speaker wherever he appeared. His very name on the posters suggested excitement, political entertainment, and possible conflict. Returning to the Hofbräuhaus time after time, Hitler regularly attracted large crowds. In autumn 1920, he delivered to a packed house a frenzied speech called “Why Are We Anti-Semites?” The two thousand listeners interrupted him more than fifty times with applause.6

  In his role as “drummer,” Hitler stood outside the regular leadership structure of the German Workers’ Party. But it was fast becoming obvious that propaganda was the heart of the party’s activity. The party contested no elections, offered no candidates, sat on no commissions or official bodies. It simply made noise. Propaganda was its reason for being. And Hitler had become its chief propagandist.

  As Hitler’s star rose, Karl Harrer’s dimmed. Stung by the newcomer’s success in a venue where he had expected failure, Harrer resigned from party leadership. At Hitler’s instigation the party’s name was expanded: the German Workers’ Party became the National Socialist German Workers’ Party—NSDAP was the German acronym. By adding “National Socialist” (Nationalsozialistisch) to the party’s name, Hitler aimed to give it resonance beyond its initial identification with workers. He sought a nationalist redefinition of socialism in contrast to the internationalist concept of Marxist socialism. He rejected the Communist concept of class struggle—he wanted to foster a national sense of community without class divides—and defended private property while thundering at the ravages of “Big Capital,” a favorite whipping boy. In Hitler’s mind, “national” and “social” were “two identical communitarian concepts.” Hitler explained, “To be ‘national’ means above all to act with a boundless and all-embracing love for the [German] people.… To be ‘social’ means… that every individual acts in the interests of the community [and] is ready to die for it.”7 (Though “Nazi” is a natural abbreviation in German for Nationalsozialistisch—like “Sozi” for the Socialists—the Nazi nickname was not used until several years later and mainly by people abroad or enemies of the NSDAP. “Nazi” is employed throughout this book for its convenience and familiarity to readers.)

  With Harrer gone, only Anton Drexler, the other party cofounder, stood between Hitler and the top leadership job in the NSDAP, and within a little more than a year after Harrer’s departure, that was Hitler’s, too, though not without drama and histrionics. In a bitter disagreement over a possible merger with another party, Hitler stormed out of a leadership meeting in July 1921 and, three days letter, sent a letter of resignation. Stunned, Drexler and other leaders realized they were losing not only their biggest draw but also their cash cow. The star of the Nazi mass meetings and magnet for mass donations was bolting. As if to make his point even louder, Hitler—acting on his own name alone—had within days filled the Circus Krone, Munich’s largest indoor venue, with six thousand eager listeners.

  Hitler’s showdown worked. A week later, Drexler and other party leaders begged him to return to the Nazi fold, caving to his all-or-nothing demands for sole party leadership “with dictatorial powers.” He had staged an internal putsch and won. A complete personal victory for Hitler, the decision also represented a strategic shift toward the Führerprinzip, the undiluted leadership principle that would dominate the Nazi Party and all of Nazi Germany throughout the Third Reich. This principle made the leader’s word first, final, and infallible, eliminating any democratic internal processes or collegial controls. Ideas and initiatives were not always discussed or argued through: often they were put to Hitler and came back as fixed decisions. This power shift in summer 1921 marked the beginning of Hitler’s reshaping of the Nazi movement into a Führerpartei—a leader-dominated party. It was also the first step toward the Hitlerian cult of personality. Unmarried and single-minded, obsessive, consumed with his own sense of mission, Hitler had no other life than politics.

  Hitler’s leadership made itself felt mainly on the propaganda front, where his decisions were painstaking and brilliant. As a manager, he was a disaster, moving around the city as whim dictated, forgetting appointments, showing up at odd hours at his favorite cafés or at the Völkischer Beobachter (The Nationalist-Racist Observer), his newly acquired newspaper. Hitler had such a “volcanic store of nervous energy” that “you could never keep him off the streets,” remembered a close friend.8 Rising late in his modest apartment, Hitler would sometimes hold a first conference while shaving or buttering a slice of bread for breakfast at 11 a.m. “Discussions always took place standing up,” recalled Hermann Esser, an early party member who became editor of the Völkischer Beobachter. “He never offered coffee or tea. He shaved with a knife until later he had enough money to afford a single-edge shaving apparatus. He always cut himself [and] somtimes he would bleed all the way into the evening. That was well-known.”9

  Hitler was expanding his base. His message appealed not just to disenfranchised working-class people, but especially to the petite bourgeoisie who were one notch above blue-collar workers yet fearful of slipping down the ladder. He also had appeal to wealthy conservatives, especially anti-Semites—the fanatical “street public of the higher classes,” as one observer put it.10

  Adding to his speaking platform and his party newspaper, Hitler began developing other physical trappings of a real political group. With a fine feel for mass psychology and stirring symbols, he created a party identity based on the swastika, oceans of flags, and party uniforms. Drawn originally from auspicious Hindu symbolism, and used by many religions and cults over the centuries, the swastika motif had been adopted by race-minded groups like the ultra-Germanic Thule Society as an emblem of Nordic supremacy. After painstaking examination of numerous sketches and drafts, Hitler personally selected the party flag’s primary colors: a red field, a white circle, and a starkly simple, tilted black swastika in the center. Given the complex and ornate swast
ikas then in circulation, Hitler’s choice of the boldest, plainest look was a stroke of advertising genius. The Nazi flag made a strong statement, was easy to recognize, even at a distance, and, when necessary, inspired fear. Hitler explained his choices: “The red expressed the social-justice idea underlying the movement; white, the nationalistic belief. And the swastika signified the mission assigned to us—the struggle for the victory of Aryan mankind.”11 In addition, the red field was a sly provocation of the Communists and Social Democrats, who thought they owned that color. By misleading some leftists into gatherings advertised in bright red, thought Hitler, the Nazis could “demolish their positions and thus get into a dialogue with these people.”12

  Like most of the activist groups in Munich—including the Communists and the Socialists—the Nazis also had created their own version of a “hall protection unit.” These were armed roughnecks who could start and stop beer hall brawls with competitors or any other disruptive elements. Originally tagged the “Sport and Gymnastics Section” of the party, the unit’s name, after a few mutations, became the Sturmabteilung—the Storm Section, or Storm Troopers, shortened to SA in German. Carrying brass knuckles and rubber truncheons, the Storm Troopers, with Hitler participating, displayed their chops in no uncertain terms in September 1921 when they attacked the meeting of a separatist group called the Bavaria League and beat its leader, Otto Ballerstedt, to a bloody mess. He later brought charges against Hitler, who was found guilty of breach of the peace and served one month of a three-month sentence (then was paroled) in summer 1922.

  In forming the Storm Troopers, “I specially looked for people of disheveled appearance,” said Hitler, describing a rough bunch that could take on dirty work. Such recruits were not hard to find in the postwar subculture of “militant ultra-masculinity” that sprang from the German army’s rapid demobilization and the parallel growth of free-booting militias, wrote one historian.13 These “jolly rogues,” as Hitler called them, would play a critical role in the putsch that still lay more than a year in the future.14 By then, they were operating under the command of a new member of the Nazi Party, Captain Hermann Göring.