Hitler

by Peter Longerich

  On 16 March, Eckart, a long-time supporter of Kapp,75 acting under instructions from Mayr, who was also a political ally of Kapp,76 flew to Berlin in order to make contact with the right-wing putschists. He was accompanied by Hitler and they both travelled in a plane supplied by the Reichswehr. (The pilot was Lieutenant Robert Ritter von Greim, whom twenty-five years later Hitler was to appoint as his last commander-in-chief of the Luftwaffe.) However, by this time the affair was hopeless and, on 18 March, the two emissaries returned to Munich without having achieved anything.77

  Although the Kapp putsch had failed at Reich level, in Bavaria it resulted in a further shift to the right: The commanders of the Einwohnerwehren [home guard], the police president of Munich, Ernst Poehner, and the provincial governor of Upper Bavaria, Gustav von Kahr, pressured the commander of the Reichswehr units stationed in Bavaria, Arnold von Mohl, to declare a state of emergency, allegedly in order to prevent the putsch from reaching Bavaria. The Social Democrat Prime Minister, Johannes Hoffmann, then resigned, making way for a new cabinet under the right-wing Conservative, von Kahr. His government was subsequently confirmed in office in the state elections of June 1920.78

  Kahr took a strongly anti-Semitic, anti-Socialist and anti-Reich government line and the political radicalization that had gripped Bavaria in 1918/1919, intensified. Under Kahr Bavaria became a ‘cell of order’ [Ordnungszelle], in other words the nucleus of a new ‘regime of order’ directed against the Left and against democratic ideas, and intended to ‘restore to health’ the whole Reich. Through the close cooperation of the army, the police, the administration, and the judiciary, and protected by the continuing state of emergency, Bavaria became a secure base and assembly point for right-wing extremists and anti-Republican elements. Thus, after the failure of the Kapp putsch, Ludendorff, in particular, the most important figure in the anti-Republican–völkisch scene, moved from Berlin to Munich, taking a whole crowd of assistants and supporters with him. From his new base he attempted to spin a web of contacts among nationalist forces in Austria, Hungary, and elsewhere, in order to establish a ‘White International’ with the aim of overthrowing the post-war order created by the Allies and radically reshaping the map of Europe. Finally, with the aid of his new allies and the Russian emigrés in Munich, he planned to overthrow the Bolshevik regime in Russia.79 Captain Hermann Ehrhardt, the commander of Naval Brigade II, the core unit involved in the Kapp putsch, and his staff set up the headquarters of the Organisation Consul in Munich. This was a secret organization, which, among other things, planned the assassination of leading democratic politicians and, despite the existence of a warrant for Ehrhardt’s arrest, was under the protection of Munich police headquarters. Thus, the völkisch–right-wing extremist scene in Munich was greatly strengthened, receiving even more support from state agencies and right-wing conservative organizations than hitherto. Not only that: right-wing establishment conservatives and right-wing extremists moved much closer together. The reduction of politics to a friend–enemy mindset, the permanent threat of violence against political opponents, and the militarization of politics, all of which were being practised in the Ordnungszelle, contributed greatly to this development.80

  The Kahr government received significant support from the Bavarian Order Bloc,81 which was established after the Kapp putsch as the ‘union of all patriotically-minded German elements on the basis of the idea of the Reich as a federal state and of a Christian-German-völkisch world view’.82 The Bloc operated as an umbrella organization for roughly forty organizations, including the Pan-German League, the Bayerische Heimat- und Königsbund, the Bund Bayern und Reich, and the NSDAP. The Order Bloc sought to win over the public with mass meetings, leaflets, and pamphlets and, from summer 1920 onwards, was chaired by Paul Tafel, an early supporter of the DAP.

  However, the most important basis for the Kahr regime was probably provided by the ‘self-defence’ organizations, which had been established throughout the Reich during the revolutionary period and which, in the case of Bavaria, were represented by the very tightly organized Einwohnerwehren, now with some 300,000 members. They served not only as an instrument for maintaining order, but also as a military reserve in the event of war. This meant that they were bound to raise suspicions among the Allies. When, in March 1920, the Allies demanded the disbanding of the self-defence organizations within four weeks, the Reich government initially adopted delaying tactics, but then agreed to their abolition. Kahr, however, was determined to oppose this. The conflict between the Bavarian government, the Reich government, and the Entente lasted a whole year until finally, in June 1921, the Allies issued an ultimatum forcing Bavaria to disband the paramilitary organizations. This represented a major defeat for Kahr, from which radical forces such as the NSDAP, demanding a hard line on the matter, were to profit. Hitler described the disarming as ‘self-emasculation’ and equated it to the ‘start of the Jewish dictatorship’.83

  This example shows that the political atmosphere in Kahr’s cell of order provided the NSDAP with excellent opportunities to progress. Apart from their receiving crucial support from various quarters – we shall look at this in detail – the fact that Kahr’s policies were addressing precisely the same issues on which Hitler and the NSDAP were concentrating proved exceptionally advantageous for the Party: much of what the Party was demanding seemed to be being legitimized by the Bavarian government’s own policies, but with the NSDAP pursuing them more systematically.

  Propaganda for the NSDAP

  Between the ‘founding meeting’ of the NSDAP in February 1920 and the end of the year Hitler spoke at over sixty meetings, most of them in Munich; he was the Party speaker who was most in demand. In September and October he was involved in an election campaign in Austria; apart from that, he spoke a dozen times outside the state capital.84

  The topics that Hitler addressed in these speeches, usually in front of several hundred, occasionally a crowd of several thousand people,85 were always the same: usually he began with a comparison between Germany’s pre-war position and the current unenviable one, which he described as dramatically as possible; he dealt in detail with the origins of the war (for which he blamed the Allies), with the defeat and the revolution, with the injustice of the Versailles Treaty and the government’s helplessness when faced with the humiliations imposed by the victors. The blame for all of this lay primarily with the Jews. Inspired by Feder’s criticism of ‘finance capital’, Hitler attacked ‘international Jewish big capital’,86 which was directing the Allied war policies, and the Jewish ‘black marketeers’ and ‘profiteers’,87 who were mainly responsible for the economic distress and, moreover, were dividing the fatherland and dragging it ever deeper into the abyss.88

  During these speeches, Hitler kept emphasizing the unbridgeable differences that existed between Germany and the western powers, dominated as they were by ‘the Jews’. France was the ‘hereditary enemy’,89 but at this time Britain too was for him an ‘absolute opponent’.90 ‘It’s Britain that’s mainly to blame for wars,’ he exclaimed in June 1920.91 This assessment prompted the notion of seeking close cooperation with Russia, but a Russia that had been liberated from ‘Jewish Bolshevism’. This idea appeared in several of Hitler’s speeches in the summer of 1920, for example in a speech in Rosenheim in July: ‘Our salvation will never come from the West. We must seek contact with nationalist, anti-Semitic Russia, but not with the Soviets.’92 This theme came up in his speeches until spring 1922. It was due not least to the influence of the Baltic German emigrés (of whom there were a considerable number in Munich) associated with Alfred Rosenberg and Max Erwin von Scheubner-Richter, a subject to which we shall return.93

  In addition to ‘international Jewish big capital’, from spring 1920 onwards, Hitler increasingly emphasized94 the ‘Jewish’ character of Russian ‘Bolshevism’,95 at the same time positing the German and international labour movements as instruments of a Jewish conspiracy.96 Indeed, these tropes gave him the great leitmotif that inc
reasingly shaped his speeches from summer 1920 onwards: the ‘Jewish question’ as the key to understanding Germany’s international situation and its domestic and economic plight.97 It is clear that, in developing his by now multifaceted anti-Semitic world view, he had borrowed ideas from his mentor Eckart, an ‘educated’ anti-Semite.98 Thus, on 13 August 1920, in a three-hour speech in the Hofbräuhaus, Hitler was ready to present his anti-Semitic prejudices as an apparently coherent ‘theory’, one that was dotted with numerous historical ‘facts’ and extensive observations on politics, economics, and culture. Jews, according to Hitler, did not generally have a positive attitude to work, had been weakened by centuries of incest, and lacked ‘inner spiritual experience’. For these three reasons they were incapable of ‘building a state’ and, instead, corrupted the existing state structure. To ward off this threat, anti-Semitism, together with Socialism and ‘nationalism’, formed ‘the core elements of our programme’.99

  But what was this anti-Semitism going to involve? In his speeches he repeatedly rejected pogroms and ‘emotional anti-Semitism’.100 Instead, ‘we are imbued with the ruthless determination to get to the root of the evil and exterminate it root and branch’; for this to happen ‘we must be willing to use every means, even if we have to be in league with the devil’.101 Again and again such tirades concluded with the demand for the ‘removal of the Jews from our nation’.102 His watchword was: ‘Out with the Jews’.103 At an international meeting of National Socialists in Salzburg he compared Jews with germs, which were responsible for ‘racial tuberculosis’ and so must be fought like the causes of an epidemic. ‘Jewish activities will never cease and will go on poisoning our nation until the pathogen, the Jew, has been removed from our midst’.104 A few weeks later, in a speech in Rosenheim he worked himself up into a frenzy of anti-Semitic hatred: ‘Jews are the brutal representatives of unearned income’, the ‘parasites of our economic life’, the ‘ferment of the moral decomposition of our nation’, in short, the ‘Jewish swindlers must get out of our nation’.105

  According to the notes and reports of his speeches, they were very warmly received by the majority of the audiences, being met with enthusiastic outbursts and huge applause. There is no doubt that the effect of his speeches was based on this dialogue with the public, with Hitler often working himself up into tirades lasting several hours; indeed, speeches of two or three hours were not unusual. To achieve an adequate appreciation of the effect of his rhetorical talent one has to imagine the hothouse atmosphere in his meetings; simply reading the notes and reports is not sufficient.

  The historian, Karl Alexander von Müller, who in 1919 may have been the first person to become aware of Hitler’s rhetorical gifts, described a meeting in the Löwenbräukeller four years later as follows: ‘Neither during the war nor during the revolution had I experienced on entering such a scorching breath of hypnotic mass excitement’. People were waiting in tense anticipation and then at last the speaker arrived. ‘Everybody jumped up from their seats shouting “Heil” and through the shouting crowds and the streaming flags came the one they were waiting for with his entourage, striding quickly to the podium, with his right arm raised stiffly. He passed by quite close to me and I saw that this was a different person from the one whom I had encountered from time to time in private houses: his gaunt, pale features contorted as if by inward rage, cold flames darting from his protruding eyes, which seemed to be searching out enemies to be conquered. Did the crowd give him this mysterious power? Did it flow from him to them?’106

  Writing about one of his visits to an early Nazi Party meeting, the writer, Carl Zuckmayer reported: ‘Once I managed to get a seat so close to the podium that I saw the spit spurting out of his mouth. For people like us the man was a howling dervish. But he knew how to rouse and carry away those crowds squashed together under a cloud of tobacco smoke and sausage smells: not through arguments, which during a rabble-rousing speech can never be checked, but through the fanaticism of his performance, the shouting and screaming, combined with his petty bourgeois convictions; above all, however, through the drumming force of repetition in a particular, infectious rhythm.’ He succeeded, according to Zuckmayer, ‘in putting people into a trance like a primitive tribe’s medicine man’.107

  Recalling Hitler’s early rhetorical performances, his former sergeant-major, Max Amann, wrote: ‘The man screamed, he behaved in a way that I’ve never seen before. But everyone said: “He really means what he’s saying.” The sweat ran off him, he was soaking wet, it was incredible and that was what made his reputation . . .’108 It was this eccentric style, his almost pitiable quality, his awkwardness, his obvious lack of training, and at the same time his intensity and ecstatic quality, all of these evidently conveyed to his public an impression of uniqueness and authenticity.

  But Hitler was not simply a good speaker, who, as a ‘man of the people’, could instinctively hit the right note. Rather, his success must also have derived from factors that lay deep in his personality. We have already explored the fact that Hitler experienced the major upheaval of the immediate post-war period – military defeat, revolution, virtual civil war, and the substantial collapse of the economy – as a personal catastrophe. Unlike the majority of his contemporaries, who consigned these events to the abstract sphere of ‘politics’ and were able to maintain their own private life, in fact could shield themselves from the crisis as far as possible, Hitler lacked this private retreat. While many of his audience, even under the miserable post-war conditions, were able to fall in love, get married, have children, and lead a family life with its ups and downs, enjoy celebrations, and mourn their dead, Hitler felt the defeat and the challenge of the revolution with every nerve in his body as a deep inner wound and personal humiliation. But he was not prepared to confront the real reasons for this catastrophe. He could not admit that the defeat and the subsequent political chaos were self-inflicted, were the result of military weakness or of the illusions under which Germany had been living until the end of the war and which then were so abruptly shattered. He could only come to terms with them if he could regard them as the result of intrigue. And he now believed he could name those behind the scenes who were responsible: the Jews, who had used Socialism for their own ends. As part of this refusal to recognize reality Hitler developed a glorious view of the future; this concealed the miserable reality. He had a utopian vision of a national revival on a grand scale, enabling him to escape the lethargy and depression that had afflicted him in Pasewalk.

  This mixture of hurt, blind fury, and a megalomaniacal refusal to accept reality – the expression of his psychological disposition – was evidently essential to his impact as a speaker. Here was someone who was openly displaying to the astonished public how he was struggling to come to terms with his shock at the prevailing conditions. He began hesitantly, with awkward gestures, searching for words. But then he got going, using crude accusations to provide simple explanations, and finally giving hope to his listeners by opening up the prospects of a glorious future. But he gripped his audience above all through the effort that he was clearly putting into it – grimaces, exaggerated gestures, uninhibited bellowing and screaming, interrupted by interludes of sarcasm and irony, the whole performance producing vast amounts of sweat, running down his face, sticking to his hair, and soaking his clothing.

  Hitler had already impressed his friend Kubizek with his endless monologues, with his flight into an imagined world he had talked himself into believing in and which protected him from having to face his emotional inadequacies in dealing with other people. He must have felt the opportunity of speaking for hours on end to mass audiences with which he could establish direct contact, stirring them to enthusiastic applause and deep emotion, to be real compensation for his lack of feeling and inner emptiness. At the same time, this process of transformation that was taking place in front of everybody, the fact that an obviously inhibited person was succeeding, through a close bond with his audience, in rising to an ecsta
sy of emotion, was what made his speeches so fascinating. For in the intoxication of speaking and thanks to the ecstatic response of his audience, Hitler was reconfiguring reality in his own mind, and this process was an experience many listeners took with them from his speeches.

  Because of his success as the most important party speaker Hitler soon acquired the role of the DAP’s head of propaganda, a task he accorded the highest priority in the domestic political struggle. What was vital, he wrote in 1921, was to organize ‘protest after protest, in beer halls and in the streets’. They must ‘inspire a passionate wave of defiance, fury, and bitter anger . . . in our nation’. ‘We want to pour hatred, burning hatred into the souls of millions of our national comrades . . .’109 Hitler assumed that well-thought-out and cleverly delivered propaganda could have an almost unlimited impact. This very much reflected current opinion. In his influential book, The Psychology of the Masses (1895), published in German translation in 1908, Gustave Le Bon had effectively outlined how the weak-willed masses could be easily seduced. A similar line was taken in a pamphlet by the Munich neurologist, Julius R. Rossbach, with the title The Soul of the Masses: Psychological Observations on the Creation of Popular (Mass) Movements (Revolutions), which he published in 1919 and which was extensively reviewed by Marc Sesselmann in the Münchener Beobachter. Rossbach frequently referred to Le Bon and so the similarity of the views held by Hitler and Le Bon, which has long been remarked upon, may be attributable to this pamphlet.110 It appears entirely plausible that Hitler became acquainted with these ideas in the course of his training to become a propagandist during 1919.111