In August 1919, Hitler, who had apparently stood out as a particularly enthusiastic participant on the course,51 was selected by Mayr’s department as a propaganda speaker.52 In Lechfeld camp near Augsburg a so-called enlightenment commando made up of two dozen soldiers was deployed to politically indoctrinate soldiers returning from prisoner-of-war camps in order to inoculate them against revolutionary tendencies. For the Munich Reichswehr commanders believed the situation in the camp was explosive. The head of the section responsible for recruiting soldiers to serve in the post-war Reichswehr was reporting that he had obtained a very ‘unfavourable impression’ of the mood in the camp: the soil there had been ‘already contaminated with Bolsheism [sic!] and Spartakism’.53
It is clear from the available reports of the indoctrination, which in fact was directed not at returning soldiers but at soldiers on guard duty,54 that, apart from the commanding officer of the commando, it was above all Hitler who had distinguished himself with a series of lectures and contributions in the discussion. In general, his talent as a ‘born popular speaker’ was emphasized, and his lively and easily understood lectures had had a positive impact on the soldiers. According to the report, Hitler had talked about ‘Peace Conditions and Reconstruction’ and ‘Social and Economic Slogans’. However, his performance led to a discussion among the organizers as to whether it was tactically advisable for him to be so overtly anti-Semitic in his statements, if they were to avoid the accusation of ‘anti-Jewish rabble-rousing’. The commander of the guard unit responsible for the lectures then felt obliged to issue an order requiring the exercise of more caution on this issue and ‘as far as possible to avoid too overt references to this race that is foreign to the German people’. However, in his report to his superiors the same officer emphasized his agreement with the content of such tirades; it was thus merely a question of whether Hitler’s overtly anti-Semitic language was opportune.55 In fact, the ‘enlightenment’ of the troops, in the form in which it had taken place in Lechfeld, was discontinued, as it was judged by the Reichswehr and indeed by Mayr himself to have been ineffective.56
The Reichswehr’s view of anti-Semitism as an essential component of their ‘enlightenment programme’ is particularly evident from a letter that, at Mayr’s instigation, Hitler wrote after the conclusion of the course to a participant, Adolf Gemlich, who had requested further clarification of the ‘Jewish question’. Hitler replied in detail and in his letter of 16 September compared various forms of hostility to the Jews. He advised against anti-Semitism as a ‘purely emotional phenomenon’. Rather, ‘anti-Semitism as a political movement’ must be determined by ‘the recognition of facts’. Hitler then spent the following pages outlining some of these ‘facts’. Jewry was ‘definitely a race and not a religious community’ and, what is more, a race that had preserved its characteristics through ‘thousands of years of inbreeding’, so that now living ‘among us’ was a ‘non-German, foreign race’ that differed markedly from the Germans and yet possessed the same rights. Jewish ideas and actions, Hitler continued, were determined solely by the desire for material possessions; Jewish power, therefore, is ‘the power of money, which in the form of interest effortlessly and endlessly accumulates in their hands and burdens the nations with that dangerous yoke. . . . Everything that prompts humanity to strive for higher things, whether religion, socialism, or democracy’, was for ‘the Jew’ merely a ‘means to the end of satisfying his desire for money and power’. From this Hitler concluded: ‘His activities will infect the nations with racial tuberculosis’. His central message was contained in the following paragraph: ‘Emotional anti-Semitism’ will ‘find its ultimate expression in the form of progroms’ (Hitler did in fact spell the word wrongly); ‘rational anti-Semitism, on the other hand, must [lead] to the planned legal combatting and removal of Jewish privileges’, in other words to ‘legislation for foreigners’ aimed at the Jews. The final goal of this ‘rational anti-Semitism’ must, however, ‘irrevocably be the removal of the Jews altogether’. However, the current government was incapable of carrying out such steps, indeed rather was compelled ‘to seek support from those who have exploited and are continuing to exploit the new situation in Germany and who, for this reason, were the driving forces of the revolution, the Jews’.
In order to confer authority on the position adopted by Hitler, Mayr enclosed an accompanying letter in which he declared that he basically agreed with the views of his speaker. There was only one point, Mayr made clear, on which his views differed from those of Hitler: in his opinion the ‘interest problem’ was not, as Hitler, basing his views on his indoctrination lecturer, Feder, had written, the result of Jewish machinations, but rather essentially the consequence of a ‘healthy instinct for acquisition’. It was thus only necessary to combat its ‘excesses’, which were of course caused by Jews. However, by indicating this difference in view, Mayr was in effect underlining his agreement with Hitler on the other central points.57 Thus, this first anti-Semitic statement by Hitler that we possess should not be read simply as documenting the anti-Jewish attitude that he was developing during these months. In the first instance, it represents an official statement by the Munich Reichswehr’s Information Department, outlining the stance it was adopting towards anti-Semitism. The letter, therefore, throws light on what kind of indoctrination Hitler had been receiving during this period.
The arguments that Hitler used in this letter were not at all original but are expressed in very similar terms in contemporary anti-Semitic literature.58 Thus with his distinction between ‘P(r)ogrom’ and ‘rational anti-Semitism’ Hitler had adopted a trope that was current during these weeks and months. The concept of a pogrom, which before the war had almost solely referred to violent attacks on Jews in Eastern Europe, now, in 1919, was increasingly also being used as a synonym for a radical ‘solution’ to the ‘Jewish question’ in Germany.59 In August the well-known Leipzig anti-Semite Heinrich Pudor had published an article in the pamphlet series Deutscher Volksrat in which he maintained that the state had missed the opportunity to limit the alleged dominance of the Jews by legal means; in view of this situation, there could be ‘no objection to pogroms if they fulfilled their purpose’.60 In the Münchener Beobachter of 29 October 1919 there appeared an article signed ‘Hartmut’, which rejected the ‘solution of the Jewish question’ through pogroms and instead demanded that Jews be stripped of their civil rights. Thus, with his comments in the so-called Gemlich letter Hitler was very much au fait with the discussions going on within the anti-Semitic movement.
Thus, Hitler’s growing interest in politics and the initial shaping of his ideology took place within the context of the crushing of the revolution and his indoctrination by the Reichswehr. There is no reliable contemporary evidence that Hitler had been politicized at an earlier stage: no written statements of his, no memoirs of comrades, no references in the army files. His efforts in Mein Kampf to date his gradual politicization from 1916 and to declare the revolution to have been the key event is part of an obvious attempt at creating a self-image. More than that, Hitler’s politicization in spring 1919 was not the result of his own initiative (in the sense of: ‘I decided to become a politician’), but rather occurred through a job involving political topics which he was given by the Reichswehr as part of its attempt to prevent its soldiers from participating in revolution. He had proved himself in the eyes of his superiors through his work in the counter-revolutionary investigation commission and had become involved in Mayr’s propaganda activities: it was through him that Hitler received a real political education.61
The role of propagandist and agitator in turn offered Hitler the only opportunity of maintaining his status as a soldier. That is what he had been trying to achieve for months. For what other opportunities did he have? As far as his family was concerned, he only had relatives with whom he had broken off contact. He had no educational qualifications and the thirty-year-old lacked the financial means and the school leaving certificate t
hat would enable him to embark on the course of study to which he had aspired in the past. Was he going to have to resume selling his painted postcards and water colours round about the Munich Frauenkirche?
Moreover, the counter-revolutionary programme that Mayr had tried to drum into the soldiers – anti-socialism, nationalism, anti-Semitism – was entirely compatible with the basic convictions Hitler had acquired in the course of his youth. As we have seen, he came from a ‘German Nationalist’ milieu in old Austria and since his school days had developed increasingly strong ‘Pan-German’ sympathies. For him it was obvious that the Austrian Germans should join a powerful German Reich. Now, after the collapse both of the Habsburg Monarchy and of the ‘little German’ Kaiserreich, these ideas seemed to be about to be fulfilled; it looked as if the greater German solution, the national unity of all those with a German heritage and of German origin, was now on the table as a serious option. It offered new perspectives for Germany’s severely damaged national consciousness. Indeed, on 12 February 1919 a large majority of the German national assembly voted in favour of such a union, as had the Austrian parliament in Vienna. But it was blocked by the victorious Allies.
Hitler had been wary of the socialist workers’ movement, not least because of his lower middle-class background, and in the anti-revolutionary wave that swept through Munich in spring 1919 he did not find it difficult to move from wariness to hostility and hatred. He was bound to agree with the legend successfully peddled by the old military elite that the German army had been defeated through ‘a stab in the back’ from the home front.62
Above all, however, anti-Semitism, which spread like wildfire during the summer of 1919, provided Hitler with both a convincing explanation for the catastrophic conditions as well as a handbook for the future. Hitler was one of those who eagerly grasped the idea that the revolution had been above all the work of Jews and it was now necessary to eradicate ‘Jewish Bolshevism’. Moreover, as the Gemlich letter shows, for him the notion ‘Jew’ represented the unscrupulous and amoral greed of finance capital and so anti-Semitism (and not the socialism of the Left) was the key to removing this exploitative system. The stereotype ‘Jewish capitalism’ would also offer him an explanation in the future for the ruthless policy of the Western Allies, who, in the process of implementing their tough peace conditions, evidently wanted to ‘destroy’ Germany. This was in fact a very widespread view in post-war Germany.63
While during his time in Vienna Hitler had, as we have seen, considered anti-Semitism one among a number of ‘antis’, one factor among others that appeared to explain the impending collapse of the Habsburg empire (at that time the decisive issue in his Pan-German world view), now the whole situation had radically changed. In the shape of the dual threat posed by ‘Jewish Bolshevism’ and ‘Jewish capitalism’ Hitler felt confronted with a set of dangers that threatened not only the existing social order and the German people but the whole of the civilized world. From his distorted perspective it represented an apocalyptic threat. Thus, anti-Semitism moved from the margins to the centre of his world view. The image of the enemy that he worked out in the course of these months also enabled him to overcome the deep shame that he had felt in Pasewalk and to master the uncertainty of the months that followed. The defeat, which initially had seemed to him completely incomprehensible and undeserved, and the rapid political radicalization prompted by the revolution, in which he too had been swept up, all this could now be seen as the result of a manipulation that had been a long time in the planning.
* Translators’ note: Free Corps were paramilitary units recruited by the Reich government from volunteers in order to suppress revolution, not unlike the Black and Tans in Ireland during the same years.
† Translators’ note: The Spartakist League was a group of left-wing Socialists opposed to the decision of the majority of the SPD to participate in the First World War and committed to a proletarian revolution. In 1916 it acquired the title ‘Spartakus League’ (Spartakistenbund) from the title of its newsletters, the Spartakusbriefe. On 1 January 1919 it was subsumed into the new German Communist Party (KPD). Shortly afterwards it began an uprising in Berlin against the Socialist government, which was quickly crushed by right-wing Free Corps, who murdered its leaders Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht.
2
Joining the Party
After his return from Lechfeld Camp, Hitler, who was still with the ‘demobilization unit’ of the 2nd Infantry Regiment, carried out a number of small tasks for Mayr.1 However, as the Reichswehr had abandoned the idea of indoctrination courses such as those held in Lechfeld, Hitler was on the look-out for a new job in his role as a propagandist. He found one quite quickly after Mayr spotted the small German Workers Party (DAP) among the fifty or so political groups that had established themselves in Munich and the surrounding area.2
The story is well-known; it has been told a thousand times. On 12 September 1919, on an assignment from the Reichswehr’s Intelligence Section, Hitler attended a meeting of the German Workers’ Party in the Sterneckerbräu, a pub near the Isartor, where slightly more than forty people had assembled to listen to speeches by Gottfried Feder and a Professor Baumann.3 During the subsequent discussion Hitler drew attention to himself with a forceful contribution and was then invited by the chairman of the local branch, Anton Drexler, to become a member. After careful consideration Hitler agreed to do so and, thanks to his rhetorical gift, soon became the party’s main attraction. Under his dominant influence it rapidly expanded, consolidating its organization, until he formally took over the party leadership.4 The story represents the core of the ‘party legend’, invented by Hitler, outlined at length in Mein Kampf, referred to again and again in hundreds of his speeches, and continually repeated after 1945.5
The legend can, however, be disproved with relative ease. For a start, during the 1930s, Drexler, the chairman in 1919, understandably objected to Hitler’s claim that he joined the party as member No. 7. The only thing that is certain is that Hitler was one of the first 200 or so members who had joined the party by the end of 1919.6 But much more important is the fact that the success of the DAP, later NSDAP, in Munich was not, as Hitler later maintained, the result of his ‘decision’ to join it.
As we have seen, at the time when Hitler came across the DAP, an extreme right-wing and völkisch milieu, composed of a network of organizations with close links to the Munich establishment, already existed. The DAP was a well-established component of this milieu; in 1919 there were already a number of key figures in the extreme right-wing and völkisch scene who were active in the party and, before the end of the year, in other words before Hitler had become a major player, the young party had received support from various quarters. The aim was to establish, and provide continuing support for, a political party within the extreme right-wing movement that would focus its appeal specifically on the working class, in order to immunize it against socialist ideas.
The DAP and the extreme right-wing scene in Munich
The initiative had been taken, at the end of 1918, by Anton Drexler,7 a locksmith in a workshop of the Bavarian railways, and Karl Harrer,8 a sports journalist on the München-Augsburger Abendzeitung. They founded a ‘Workers’ Political Circle’ in which a handful of members – most of them railway workers like Drexler – discussed the political situation produced by the defeat and revolution. They were primarily concerned with the question of how to produce a counterweight to the dominant socialists, whom they blamed for the outcome of the war, and focused on trying somehow to introduce a social component into nationalism and anti-Semitism.
At the beginning of 1919, the ‘Workers’ Political Circle’ gave birth to the German Workers’ Party [Deutsche Arbeiterpartei]. Under Harrer’s leadership it had around two dozen members, most of them railwaymen, who were loyal to the established order and strongly nationalist. This move was evidently influenced by the Thule Society, of which both Harrer and Drexler were members. At any rate, in a book published in 1933
and quickly withdrawn by the regime, Sebottendorf claimed to have been responsible, together with Harrer and Drexler, for establishing, on 18 January 1919 in the premises of the Thule Society, a ‘national socialist workers’ association’.9 It was necessary for the DAP formally to operate as an ‘association’ [Verein] in order to satisfy the terms of the Law of Associations. In the 1930s Drexler recalled that the party had met in the premises of the Thule Society.10 Membership meetings were held, and in addition the ‘Workers’ Circle’, which initially formed the de facto leadership, met separately to discuss above all the causes of the defeat and the revolution.11 Drexler, who also wrote for the Münchener Beobachter, the mouthpiece of the Thule Society, and was highly praised by Eckart in his paper, Auf gut Deutsch,12 published a forty-page political pamphlet, claiming that the existing socialist movement was ‘simply the vehicle . . . for dominating the whole world through Jewish money and the Jewish press’.13
According to Hitler, he encountered the DAP as part of an intelligence assignment and then ‘decided’ to join. What is certain is that he attended a party meeting on 12 September 1919 and a few days later – in response to Drexler’s prompting – joined the DAP. The circumstances were, however, probably somewhat different from what he later maintained. For everything points to the fact that Mayr, the propaganda chief of the Reichswehr’s Information Department, placed his star speaker, Hitler, at the disposal of the DAP, in order to increase the party’s influence within the extreme right-wing milieu, which he was actively supporting.14 Thus Hitler had not been given an intelligence assignment but rather a purely propaganda role within the range of tasks that he performed for Mayr until March 1920, when he left the Reichswehr. From October 1919 onwards, he was employed by Mayr as an assistant to the education officer of the 41st Rifle Regiment, where he looked after the regimental library and so had the opportunity of perusing right-wing propaganda material, with which the Reichswehr was well supplied.15 In addition, during January and February 1920, Hitler also gave lectures to members of the Reichswehr16 and wrote a number of articles at Mayr’s request.17
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