Hitler

by Peter Longerich

  During 1922–23, an important role in securing Party donations was played by a Berlin pharmacist, Dr Emil Gansser. A friend of Eckart’s and a Party supporter, Gansser would invite potential donors to a confidential meeting at which they were addressed by Hitler.75 In his speech of 29 May Hitler emphasized that, while there was a certain amount of agreement with the right-wing parties about ‘the nationalist aim of liberating Germany’, when it came to winning over the workers they were totally incapable of ‘competing’ with the ‘Marxist parties’. He insisted: ‘We can only win power and revive Germany on a completely new social and political foundation, not in parliament and on a democratic basis, but only through the violent assertion of our healthy national energies and by bringing together and preparing our youth for this task’. A nationalist dictatorship must then reorganize Germany’s political, economic and social constitution, excluding the fateful influence of Jews, Freemasons, and political Catholicism. In contrast to the other right-wing parties, he claimed the NSDAP was free from their influence.76 His second speech, which took a similar line to the first, was attended by the influential industrialist, Ernst von Borsig, who subsequently arranged a meeting with Hitler designed to provide him with the financial means to expand his party into north Germany. Given his commitment to concentrating on Munich and Bavaria, Hitler’s response was no doubt ambivalent. Borsig was supported in his efforts by Karl Burhenne, the administrator of the Siemens social fund, who had already been introduced to Hitler by Gansser in March 1922. Burhenne also had a meeting with Hitler and, after the meeting, Gansser strongly recommended further support for Hitler.77 Borsig and Burhenne then tried to drum up donations for Hitler among Berlin industrialists, evidently to little effect.78 However, in summer 1922, Class appears to have transferred 150,000 RM to the NSDAP.79

  His speeches in the National Club had also opened the doors of the Bavarian Industrialists’ Association to Hitler, a contact that was arranged through Hermann Aust, the managing director of a Munich company, who had attended them. Subsequently, Hitler had two meetings with representatives of the association and gave a speech to a large audience at the Munich Merchants’ Club. Aust declared at Hitler’s trial in 1924 that he had transferred several donations from businessmen to Hitler.80

  On 12 October Hitler was once again in Berlin, as is clear from Nazi records that state he had talks with ‘north German nationalist circles’, in particular with the Vereinigte Vaterländische Verbände, the Stahlhelm [Steel Helmet] veterans’ organization, the Deutsche Handlungsgehilfenverband [a white-collar union] and the Deutschbund.81 A few days after his stay, he penned a memorandum on the ‘Expansion of the National Socialist Workers’ Party’, which was obviously intended for potential donors. It stated that the main aim of the NSDAP was ‘the annihilation and extermination of the Marxist world view’ to be achieved through an ‘incomparable, brilliantly organized propaganda and indoctrination machine’ and through an ‘organization marked by the most ruthless force and the most brutal determination’ (i.e. the SA). In other words, Hitler was once again adopting his distinction in principle between ‘propaganda’ and ‘organization’. Spelled out in concrete terms, he wanted to turn the Völkischer Beobachter into a daily paper, improve the equipment of and partly motorize the SA, and acquire a new headquarters. In total, he worked out, he needed the sum of 53,240,000 RM (equivalent to 95,000 pre-war Marks).82

  We do not know whether or from whom Hitler received such a substantial sum; in practice, however, his wishes were largely fulfilled. In autumn 1922 the Party acquired three vehicles, a motor car – an open-topped, four-seater touring car, a Selve – for Hitler’s personal use, as well as two lorries (provided by a Reichswehr cover organization under Röhm’s control) for transporting Party members.83 From February 1923 onwards the Völkischer Beobachter appeared as a daily. During the summer of 1923, the Party headquarters moved into rooms belonging to the Völkischer Beobachter in Schellingstrasse 39/41 and, shortly afterwards, Hitler was already inspecting Schellingstrasse 50. The Party did not, however, open its new headquarters here until 1925, on account of the ban on the Party following the failed putsch of November 1923.84

  Even after his take-over of power in the Party and receiving increasing support from the upper classes, Hitler’s personal circumstances remained demonstratively modest. He lived in a furnished room in Thierschstrasse and most of the time wore shabby suits.85 His irregular, bohemian life style, his frequent and lengthy visits to cafés, where he surrounded himself with strikingly mixed company – his entourage – aroused the mistrust of both internal and external opponents. What was Hitler living off? they were asking, now that he had been discharged from the Reichswehr. He was being called the ‘King of Munich’, an image that Hitler ‘did not particularly want to go into’.86 His opaque financial circumstances had already become an issue during the 1921 summer crisis.87 He declared that he did not receive any fees for his speeches for the Party, but was supported ‘in a modest way’ by Party members; apart from that, he lived off his income as an ‘author’. That can really only refer to his regular articles in the Völkischer Beobachter, for which he presumably received payment. In addition, he may have received fees for occasional speeches unconnected with the NSDAP.88 It is plausible that he personally received money from one or more Party donors (who hoped thereby to acquire influence), but this cannot be proved.

  4

  The March to the Hitler Putsch

  In summer 1922 the conflict between Bavaria and the Reich broke out again with renewed bitterness. The murder of Reich Foreign Minister, Walther Rathenau by members of the Organization Consul, on 24 June 1922, prompted the Reich to pass a ‘Law for the Protection of the Republic’, which seriously impinged on the responsibilities of the federal states. The Bavarian government responded by replacing the Reich law with a state decree, whereupon the Reich President demanded the withdrawal of the decree. When Prime Minister Lerchenfeld subsequently worked out a compromise with the Reich and, in August, finally withdrew the decree, he found himself confronted with a broad front of right-wing groups accusing him of having sacrificed Bavarian interests. Anti-Prussian and anti-socialist sentiments were being exploited once again.1 During the following months Hitler was able to profit from these bitter conflicts.

  The agitation against the Reich government and Lerchenfeld’s policy came to a head on 16 August with a major demonstration of the right-wing leagues on the Königsplatz in Munich. The NSDAP took part in this event as a distinct formation, with Hitler, the second speaker, receiving warm applause from the crowd.2

  Another major demonstration, arranged for only a few days later, was banned by the police because of rumours about a putsch. In fact, Pittinger, who was trying to unite the most important paramilitary leagues under the umbrella of his organization Bayern und Reich, wanted to use this opportunity to proclaim Kahr dictator. However, Georg Heim, the Bavarian peasant leader, as well as a number of Reichswehr officers who were in the know, refused to join in prompting Pittinger to approach Hitler. In the event, relatively few demonstrators came to the Königsplatz (most of them were Nazis) and the police cleared the square, forcing Pittinger to cancel the operation.3 Finally, instead of the demonstration taking place on the Königsplatz, around 5,000 demonstrators made their way to the Kindlkeller, where Hitler found he had no alternative but to follow police instructions and order his followers peacefully to disperse. The evening had turned into a fiasco for Hitler. One thing had become clear: the more the NSDAP became involved in the complicated relationship between government, army, and paramilitary leagues, the greater the danger of being used by others for their own purposes.4 Hitler interpreted the botched ‘Pittinger putsch’ as confirmation of his previous policy of maintaining the NSDAP’s independence at all costs.

  These highly fraught political confrontations were taking place against the background of an increasingly precarious economic situation brought about by the rapid devaluation of the currency. For during the summer of 19
22 the steady deterioration in the value of the Mark that had been going on since the war turned into hyperinflation. A memorandum from the Bavarian state government to the Reich Chancellor from September 1922 stated: ‘The wave of price increases that is currently sweeping through the country, which in size and extent far exceeds all previous ones, has created a situation that poses a threat to the economy, to the state, and to society in equal measure.’5

  In October 1922, Hitler accepted an invitation from the Schutz- und Trutzbund for his Party to attend the German Day in Coburg, a gathering of völkisch supporters from all over the Reich. It was the first time that Hitler had mobilized his Party supporters in any numbers for an event outside Munich. It is claimed that 800 SA men travelled on 14 October to the town in Upper Franconia in northern Bavaria. Despite a police ban, they marched through the town in tight formation with flags flying and a band playing. The provocation had the desired effect. There were numerous fights with socialist counter-demonstrators, culminating in a street battle. By the end, the SA had provided an exemplary demonstration of how to conquer the streets.6 A few days later, Hitler achieved another triumph, this time in Middle Franconia. On 20 October, the members of the Nuremberg branch of the Deutsche Werkgemeinschaft (mainly previous supporters of the DSP) were ceremoniously received into the NSDAP. At the beginning of the month, after a row with Otto Dickel, the founder and leader of the Werkgemeinschaft, the branch leader, Julius Streicher, who was a school teacher and rabid anti-Semite, had agreed to throw in his lot with Hitler. The fact that the Munich Party was prepared to take on his newspaper, the Deutscher Volkswille, and pay off its debts, which were in his name, provided an additional incentive. By the end of 1922, the march through Coburg and Streicher’s joining the NSDAP with his supporters had significantly increased the Party’s support in Middle and Upper Franconia.7

  In total, by the end of 1922, 8,000 people had joined the Party since its foundation, of whom half had joined during the second half of 1922, although, in view of the high degree of fluctuation, the actual number of members was probably significantly lower.8 Moreover, the number of local branches had markedly increased. Their number rose from 17 at the beginning of 1922 to 46 by the end of the summer and, finally, to 100 at the end of the year. This also shows that the NSDAP’s expansion occurred mostly during the last months of 1922.9 The main focus of the Party organization continued to be Bavaria, where its presence could no longer be ignored. Whereas the NSDAP was banned in Prussia in November 1922, the political situation in Bavaria moved in the Party’s favour. Lerchenfeld was replaced as prime minister in November, and his successor, Eugen von Knilling, who was a right-wing conservative, once more tried to link the extreme right-wing forces more closely to the government. Knilling’s attitude to the NSDAP was ambivalent. He tried to limit its extremism, but believed the Party’s potential could be utilized for a nationalist initiative coming from Bavaria. Thus, in November, only a few days after Knilling’s arrival in office, the NSDAP was included in the re-founded Vereinigte Vaterländische Verbände, a relatively broad umbrella organization, containing both civilian and paramilitary, moderate and radical right-wing groups. Apart from the Nazis, it included Pittinger’s Bayern und Reich, the Bayerische Ordnungsblock, the Wehrverband Reichsflagge, the Verband der Vaterländischen Bezirksvereine Münchens as well as the Pan-German League and the Schutz- und Trutzbund.10

  At the same time, the Party demonstrated that it was quite capable of acting on its own. In November 1922, rumours were circulating that Hitler was planning a putsch, rumours that increased during January.11 They seemed to be entirely justified by the NSDAP’s aggressive behaviour, for, before the end of the year, the SA engaged for a second time in a massive operation outside Munich. In December 1922 a large group of SA men turned up in Göppingen in Württemberg and engaged in a bloody confrontation with socialist opponents.12 Moreover, on 13 December, the NSDAP organized ten mass meetings running in parallel in Munich, with the slogan ‘Jews and Marxists: the True Gravediggers of the German Nation and the German Reich’.13 A few days later Hitler held an SA parade in the Munich Hofbräuhaus. In front of an audience of – the police estimated – 2,800, Hitler, referring to the violent events in Göppingen, demanded that the SA show ‘loyalty unto death and beyond, as the Führer himself also pledges loyalty unto death’.14

  From ‘drummer’ to ‘Führer’

  The growth in support for the NSDAP in autumn 1922 marks the point at which the image and self-image of Hitler as ‘Führer’ began to develop within the Party. During the post-war period, the call for a ‘Führer’ was common within the German Right, but not only the Right. In politics, literature, journalism, the humanities, the youth movement, and also within the Protestant Church there was a widespread longing for an exceptional personality, the ‘one’, to appear and lead the nation out of its humiliation and back to honour and national glory. This call from multiple voices was religiously, or rather pseudo-religiously, charged to a high degree. For many this anticipated hero could only be one sent by God. The longing for a national saviour figure was so ubiquitous and so intense that, for many, the numerous prophecies of a messianic redeemer had almost become a certainty.15

  Such expressions of anticipation of a ‘Führer’ can also be shown to have been present in the milieu within which Hitler gradually emerged as ‘Führer’ between 1919 and 1923. In September 1919, in other words at the moment when Hitler first attended a DAP meeting, Scheubner-Richter’s newsletter, Aufbau, published a poem by Emanuel Geibel (‘German Laments from the Year 1844’),16 which contains the following lines:

  We need a man, a scion of the Nibelungs,

  To take control of our madly galloping age

  With iron fists and thighs.

  In December 1919, Dietrich Eckart, Hitler’s mentor in the DAP, published a poem ‘Patience’, in which the last verse reads:

  He waits silently, the hero to whom we look;

  Only now and then the sword clinks in his scabbard,

  Then all around, with dreadful groans and howls

  That progeny of hell, the Huns.

  He waits in silence, his eyes fixed on one object:

  The countless crimes others have committed against us –

  Already a bright dawn seems to be breaking

  . . .

  Patience! Patience!17

  During 1922, Hitler was usually referred to as Adolf Hitler or ‘Pg. (Party comrade) Hitler’ in the announcements of his speeches in the Völkischer Beobachter. From spring 1922 onwards, however, increasingly the term ‘our leader Pg. Adolf Hitler’ is used. When, at the end of October 1922, the Italian Fascists secured Mussolini’s take-over of power with their ‘March on Rome’ this boosted the NSDAP’s prestige among right-wing groups and in particular Hitler’s role as political leader. ‘What a group of courageous men managed to do in Italy’ announced Esser in a speech on 3 November in the Löwenbräukeller, ‘we can do in Bavaria as well. We too have Italy’s Mussolini. He’s called Adolf Hitler’.18 On 6 December, the Völkischer Beobachter wrote about a meeting which had taken place a few days before: ‘Wherever Hitler went the cheering went on and on; it was for the man who through his boundless enthusiasm, determination to reach his goals, and uncompromising energy embodies what today millions long for, hope for, and indeed foresee.’19

  At the same time Rudolf Hess gave a boost to the Hitler cult in his own particular way. At the end of 1922, he won a competition organized by the University of Munich for an essay with the title ‘What kind of a man will restore Germany to greatness?’ Hess’s prize-winning essay20 did not name names, but it is clear to whom he is attributing the exceptional abilities he describes. He argued that the ‘German dictator’ – as far as he was concerned there could be no other title for the future leader – had ‘first to reawaken and train up’ national consciousness. And he continued: ‘Profound knowledge in all areas of the life of the state and of history, and the ability to learn lessons from it, belief in the rig
hteousness of his cause and in final victory, and immense will power will enable him to give thrilling speeches and win the applause of the masses. In order to save the nation he will not shrink from using the weapons of his opponents – demagogy, slogans, street demonstrations. Where all authority has vanished, popularity is the only source of authority. Mussolini has demonstrated that. The deeper the dictator is rooted in the broad mass of the people, the better he will know how to handle them psychologically. . . . He himself has nothing to do with the masses; he, like every great man, is entirely himself. Through strength of personality he radiates a certain something, a compelling quality that draws more and more people to him.’ Finally, he quoted from a poem by Eckart, published in December 1919:

  Storm, storm, storm,

  Rings the bell from tower to tower,

  Rings for the men, the old ones and young ones,

  Awakens the sleepers from their beds,

  Rings the serving girls down the narrow staircases,

  Rings the mothers away from their cribs.

  It must boom and peal through the air,

  Rush, rush in the thunder of revenge,

  Ringing the dead from their tombs.

  Germany awake!21

  Hess’s essay shows that heroic myths and effusive redemption poetry were the ingredients that in undiluted form shaped the image of the future ‘Führer’ in the eyes of those close to him.

  As the Party grew in numbers and prestige, Hitler managed to secure more sources of finance.22 This was vital because, apart from anything else, in 1923 the Reichswehr began increasingly to concentrate on transferring the payments previously made to the NSDAP to the SA.23