By contrast, Hitler was profoundly concerned about German separatism, especially in Bavaria. In January 1920, in one of his earliest major speeches, Hitler hammered not merely separatism but Bavarian ‘particularism’, that is, more moderate federal aspirations. These, he argued, could only benefit those who wished to ‘demolish’ the Reich in Munich, Berlin, Paris and London; they were part of a policy of ‘encirclement’. Hitler condemned anti-Prussian feeling, which was widespread across the political spectrum in Bavaria. Moreover, he saw the differentiation between separatism and federalism, much insisted on by many in Bavaria, as a distinction without a difference. The Rosenheimer Tagblatt complained that ‘Hitler made an outrageous attempt to distract the audience by declaring federalism to be more or less synonymous with separatism.’
Rhetorically, Hitler rejected the alternative of a ‘unitary or federal state’ in favour of a ‘state united against the outside world’ to protect the Fatherland from being swamped by racial enemies. In the same spirit, he condemned the idea of a ‘Danubian Confederation’ which he claimed would make Bavaria dependent on Czech and French coal. ‘Better a Bolshevik Greater Germany,’ Hitler thundered at a party meeting, ‘than south Germany dependent on the French and Czechs.’44 It was a revealing statement, which showed that he regarded Bavarian particularism as a much greater–or at least more immediate–threat than communism. Hitler was clearly a supporter of a unitary state. His absolute rejection of federalism distinguished the NSDAP from not only much of the more moderate right, but also many who were close to National Socialism in almost every other respect. In a letter to the Austrian National Socialist, but opponent of Anschluss, Dr Walter Riehl, he set out his position in some detail. Unlike other parties, Hitler placed ‘greatest emphasis on the complete unification of all German tribes without consideration for the previous citizenship’. Only this, Hitler claimed, would give ‘the German people the status in the world which their numbers and culture warranted’. This required, Hitler continued, ‘an agreed central point of the entire organization and administration of the state’.45
Also largely absent from Hitler’s thinking at this time was any serious Slavophobia, at least in his contemporary recorded remarks.46 To be sure, he shared the patriotic outrage against the claims of the new Polish state.47 He condemned the Polish nationalist leader Korfanty as a ‘robber chief, Polish cutthroat and eyegouger’ and his followers as ‘Polish bandit scum’.48 ‘The entire Polish policy of the Bethmann-Hollwegs,’ he claimed with reference to the pre-1918 approach, ‘was impaled on its failure to understand Polish national hatred. The establishment of the Polish state was the greatest crime against the German people.’49 Hitler’s remarks in that connection were based on national not racial considerations, just as his alleged concern about Czechs in Vienna–based purely on his own subsequent claims in Mein Kampf–were couched in national rather than racial terms. Interestingly, he refused to allow NSDAP members to join the anti-Polish uprisings in Upper Silesia,50 which he evidently regarded as a distraction. For now, Hitler regarded the Slavs as the victims of Jewish capitalism, a fate they shared with the Germans, and hoped for the restoration of the ‘true’ Russian spirit in the Soviet Union. There was no sign yet of any territorial ambitions in the east. Pity, not hostility, was Hitler’s main sentiment towards Russians at this point.
At the end of March 1920, Hitler took off his army uniform for good. By then, some of the main outlines of his world view, expressed consistently in private correspondence, public meetings and newspapers articles alike, were clearly visible: fear of the western allies, especially Britain, a profound demographic anxiety about the United States, a violent hostility to international capitalism, a sense of the subversive effects of socialism and communism, and, of course, a virulent anti-Semitism. None of these sentiments were visible before 1914. Fear of Britain and the ‘world of enemies’ was first expressed at the start of the conflict. The rest were a response not to defeat as such, or even to the revolution, but to the consequences of defeat. It was the Versailles settlement which brought home the meaning of November 1918. This was the subject of his first known political speech and its consequences dominated his later thinking. Unlike for most nationalists, territorial losses were the least of Hitler’s concerns: as we have seen, he was far more worried about the long-term impact of perpetual debt bondage, the continued blockade and a resulting surge in emigration. In other words, it was not the war that made Hitler, or even the revolution, but the peace.
By early 1920, Hitler had found two new homes. On leaving the army, he found lodgings as a sub-tenant of Ernst and Maria Reichert in Thierschstrasse no. 41, in the inner Munich suburb of Lehel. It was a very modest berth in a working- and lower-middle-class neighbourhood. Hitler was an easy-going resident, who never locked his doors and allowed the Reicherts to use his gramophone and books during his frequent absences. We do not know what exactly he read, but the best-thumbed surviving volumes from his collection relate to history and art, whereas those on race and the occult gave the impression of being unread.51 Hitler took his baths in the nearby Müllersches Volksbad. One of his neighbours was Hugo Erlanger, a Jewish First World War veteran, who ran a men’s clothing and sports shop on the ground floor. He bought the entire house eighteen months later, effectively becoming Hitler’s landlord.52 The two men ran into each other frequently and exchanged polite greetings; Erlanger–who was later expropriated by the Third Reich–subsequently could not recall any hostility on Hitler’s part. This casts an interesting light on Hitler’s politics and his personality. There was clearly something abstract about his visceral anti-Semitism, which did not prevent him from having cordial personal relations with individual Jews, not an uncommon phenomenon among anti-Semites then and since, of course.
His new professional and political home was the DAP, which was renamed the ‘National Socialist German Workers’ Party’ (NSDAP) in the course of 1920. Hitler was by now a recognized quantity on the local right-wing scene. In mid March 1920, while still technically in army service, Hitler flew at May’s behest to Berlin at the height of the Kapp Putsch, where he was introduced by Dietrich Eckart to Erich Ludendorff, the legendary World War One general. There is no evidence that Hitler planned to take over the party at this stage, or that he saw it as a vehicle for the seizure of power. The growth of the NSDAP after he joined it was noteworthy, to be sure, and its social composition was remarkably heterogeneous,53 but the overall figures were still modest. Regional expansion was slow: the first party presence outside Munich was established in Rosenheim in April 1920 and then four months later (August 1920) at Starnberg. There were only 195 members at the end of 1919. In July 1920, there were 1,100 and more than 2,000 at the end of the year. This was not nearly enough to have made any electoral impact, and in any case, Hitler abjured any attempt to enter parliament for ‘moral and financial reasons’.54
Hitler believed political organization without propaganda was pointless.55 His main concern at this point was to use the party as a platform to disseminate and elaborate his ideas. He was involved in the drafting of the twenty-five-point NSDAP (technically DAP) programme in February 1920, though it is unclear whether he can claim sole authorship.56 The first four related to national integrity, foreign policy and territorial expansion; the next four concerned race, mostly strictures against the Jews. Hitler turned Wilson’s idea of ‘self-determination’ back on the Allies with his call for ‘the unification of all Germans in a Greater Germany on the basis of the right of peoples to self-determination’.57 More than that, he demanded ‘Land and soil (colonies) to feed our people and to settle our surplus population’, the first unambiguous documented articulation of what subsequently became the Lebensraum concept. The geographic location of these future ‘colonies’ was not specified but at this time Hitler seems to have had overseas territories in mind. Later points attacked ‘debt slavery’, called for the breaking up and nationalization of large, cartelized industries, the expansion of old age welfare payments, l
and reform including expropriation for the public good and a strong central power for the Reich, with unlimited power for the Reichstag to legislate for all the regions. Internally, the main target of the programme was the Jews, capitalism and German separatism, rather than communism per se. Externally, the programme took aim not so much at the Soviet Union, as at the western powers, with its demand for living space, not in the east, but in overseas colonies, from which Germany was now shut out.
Hitler paid close attention to the iconography underpinning the message. A black swastika of his design on a white circle with red background was first flown as the official party emblem at a meeting in Salzburg in August 1920.58 In one of his very few excursions into the occult, Hitler praised the swastika–as a ‘symbol of the sun’ which sustained a ‘cult’ of light among a ‘community based on Aryan culture’, not only in Europe, but in India and Japan as well. The use of the old imperial black, white and red colours was a calculated affront to the black, red and gold of the Weimar flag. ‘The red is social,’ he later explained, ‘the white is national, and the swastika is anti-Semitic.’59 By mounting the symbol diagonally, Hitler cleverly conveyed a sense of dynamism and movement.60 Four months later, he oversaw the purchase of the Völkischer Beobachter newspaper and the Franz Eher Verlag, financed in part by a loan from a Reichswehr slush fund guaranteed by Dietrich Eckart, which gave the party a media platform with a print run of 8,000–17,000 appearing three times a week; after many ups and downs, the Völkischer Beobachter became a daily on 8 February 1923.61 As the main organ of the NSDAP, the paper carried news of party activities, but it was also the main direct vehicle of communication between Hitler and the rank and file, which he could use to rehearse and enforce his ideological message.62 The party also promoted Hitler as a ‘charismatic’ leader, who was destined to lead Germany out of its subjection.63
Over the next fifteen months, Hitler engaged in an intense programme of speeches in the major Munich beer halls; he practised his poses in front of a mirror. By the end of the year, he had made twenty-seven appearances in Munich, and twelve outside, including Bad Tölz, Rosenheim and even Stuttgart. The audiences ranged in number from 800 to about 2,000. During late September and the beginning of October 1920, Hitler made repeated trips to Austria and to support the National Socialist Party in neighbouring Württemberg in their election campaign. In early 1921, a speech on Versailles at the Zirkus Krone was heard by about 5,600 people. One eyewitness, his first biographer Konrad Heiden, recalled that the secret of the success of his speeches was that the audience became ‘participants’ rather than ‘listeners’.64
There were some missteps. Hitler’s opportunistic attempt to address a Munich crowd of 20,000 or so uninvited at a general rally outside the Feldherrnhalle in February 1921 was drowned out by the massed bands who struck up as he began to speak.65 It is also worth remembering that many members had never seen or heard Hitler in person.66 In general, though, his profile grew steadily, and he began to overtake the best-known orators, such as Gottfried Feder and Dietrich Eckart, as the public face of the party. Despite his somewhat mysterious aura–Hitler refused to allow any photograph of him to be taken–he had become a recognizable ‘name’ in Bavarian politics. His relationship with the Reichswehr in Bavaria, which had effectively incubated him, remained good even after he had left the ranks. In mid May 1921, Hitler met with the prime minister, Gustav von Kahr, marking his political recognition by ‘official’ Bavaria.67 He had ‘made it’.
Hitler had joined an existing party, not established a new one. This meant that he had to work with others and within structures which he did not as yet control, or even dominate. The collegial basis of the party was laid down by Hitler himself, who had drafted the Standing Orders in December 1919. ‘The aims of the party are so extensive,’ he wrote, ‘that they are only to be achieved through an organization which is as tight as it is flexible.’68 He argued that the governing committee could only hope to work effectively if it had the confidence of the mass of the membership, and the trust of each other. ‘The first,’ he said, ‘requires the election of all members of the committee, including its chairman, by the membership in open assembly.’ ‘The second,’ Hitler continued, ‘excludes for all any form of control through a superior or parallel government, be it as a circle or a lodge.’ In other words: discipline yes, dictatorship, no. The early organizational form of the party was thus quasi-democratic, not least because the law of associations which regulated the governance of all such associations in Germany gave Hitler and his colleagues no choice in the matter.
During this period Hitler collaborated with a range of figures, not all of whom were party members, in an informal and often non-hierarchical way. His closest associate was Rudolf Hess, a First World War veteran who had grown up in Egypt; the date of their first encounter (which was probably in May 1920) is disputed, but we know for a fact that he joined the NSDAP in July 1920.69 A key interlocutor was the Reichswehr officer Ernst Röhm, whose meetings are documented from early 1920, though the first contacts may have taken place a lot earlier.70 Hitler had frequent dealings with the staff of the Völkischer Beobachter, especially its executive editor, the playwright Dietrich Eckart, and his deputy Alfred Rosenberg, a Baltic German refugee from the Russian Revolution, who would influence Hitler’s view of the Soviet Union;71 the editor was his old regimental comrade Hermann Esser. In a rare gesture, Hitler explicitly acknowledged his debt to Eckart for his help with the Völkischer Beobachter, and to Rosenberg for his ‘theoretical deepening of the party programme’.72 In late 1920, Hitler met Max Erwin von Scheubner-Richter,73 who had witnessed and been appalled by the massacre of the Armenians as a German consul in the East Anatolian town of Erzurum during the First World War. It was probably from him that Hitler got his determination that the Germans should not become a ‘people like the Armenians’, that is, the butt of foreign oppressors.74 At around the same time, Hitler first encountered Gregor Strasser, an apothecary from Landshut. The only significant dispute was with Karl Harrer, one of the original leaders of the DAP, who wanted the party to remain a sect, unlike Hitler and Drexler, who wanted to create a mass movement. In early 1920 Harrer was sidelined, and he was completely excluded by the end of the following year.
If Hitler was by now probably the best-known member of the party, there was no sign yet that he aspired to lead it. This may be because of the lengthy timetable he envisaged for the seizure of power in Germany, the revival of national dignity and strength, and then the reassertion of the Reich’s authority on the international stage. Given the abject condition of the country immediately after Versailles, recovery would be a slow process. The pressing need of the moment, therefore, was not for political organization but for fundraising and propagandistic work, developing and disseminating the message as widely as possible. This, rather than any attempt to force the party to accept his unfettered leadership, is probably the reason why, in December 1920, he declared his ‘permanent resignation from the [governing] committee of the party’ and (less obviously) from its ‘Press Committee’.75 Hitler said he was prepared to continue speaking on behalf of the party wherever required. The idea that he might take over absolute control of the party seems to have come from others rather than himself. Drexler, for example, wrote in mid February 1921 that ‘every revolutionary movement must have a dictatorial head and for that reason I consider especially our Hitler the most suitable candidate for our movement’.76 So for the first eighteen months or so of his political career, Hitler’s position was rather indeterminate. He became the party’s principal speaker and fundraiser, and its public face, but he was not its chief and some of the time he was not even a member of its ruling committee.
It was the threat to the ideas and programme of the party, rather than his personal position, which drove Hitler to seize the leadership of the movement.77 Anton Drexler and many others believed that the best way forward in the crowded radical nationalist milieu of the time was to merge with like-minded groups. Hitler op
posed all such attempts, mainly because they threatened to compromise what he regarded as the party’s greatest asset: its ideological coherence. The casus belli was Drexler’s desire to join forces with the Deutsch-Sozialistische Partei (DSP), whose geographical centre of gravity lay far to the north, and which would theoretically give the NSDAP a much greater reach within Germany. Drexler discussed the modalities with the DSP at their party congress in Zeitz in Thuringia in late March 1921, and a few months later with the leader of the Franconian DSP, Julius Streicher. He also entered into negotiations with the radical nationalist ideologue Otto Dickel, head of the ‘Deutsche Werkgemeinschaft’, NSDAP member and occasional party speaker, who was trying to fuse all the anti-Semitic and radical nationalist associations.78 Hitler violently objected, not least because the DSP had turned him down for membership two years earlier,79 and after his attempts to head off the merger failed, he resigned from the party altogether on 11 July 1921, setting out his reasons at some length a few days later.80
The NSDAP, he claimed, had been established on ‘the basis of an extreme racial outlook and rejects any form of parliamentarism’, including its present-day incarnation. It was intended to be quite different from all other ‘so-called national movements’, and so constructed that it would best serve to wage ‘the battle for the crushing of the Jewish-international domination of our people’. The NSDAP was also a ‘social or rather a socialist party’, whose statutes laid down ‘that the seat of its leadership was Munich and must remain Munich, now and for ever’. This programme, Hitler continued, had been agreed as ‘immutable and inviolable in front of an audience of a thousand people, and invoked as a granite foundation in more than a hundred mass meetings’.81 Now, Hitler claimed, these principles had been violated by plans to merge with another party, by the agreement at Zeitz to move the headquarters to Berlin and by the prospect that they would be abjured in favour of the programme of Otto Dickel, which he condemned as a ‘meaningless, spongy [and] stretchable entity’. Specifically, Hitler objected to Dickel’s belief that Britain was emerging from under the thumb of the Jews and to his admiration for the Jew Walther Rathenau. He was interested in propaganda, not organization, and the power of ideas, not bureaucratic power.
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