A Part of the German Future

I would have burst out laughing if anyone had predicted to me that this was the beginning of a new era in history.

Konrad Heiden, looking back on his student years in Munich

 

No other city in Germany had been so shaken by the events and emotions of the revolution and the first postwar weeks as excitable Munich. On November 7, 1918—two days before anything happened in Berlin—the zeal of a few leftists had toppled the thousand-year-old Wittelsbach dynasty. To their own surprise the insurgents found themselves in power. Under the leadership of Kurt Eisner, a bearded bohemian and theater critic of the Münchener Post, they had tried—in all too complete faith in Woodrow Wilson’s statements—“to prepare Germany for the League of Nations” by a revolutionary change of conditions and “to obtain a peace which will save the country from the worst.”

But whatever chances Eisner may have had were nullified by the weakness and inconsistency of the American President and by the hatred of the rightists. Their vilification of the “foreign, racially alien vagabond” and “Schwabing Bolshevist” has lived on to this day.¹ In fact neither he nor a single one of the other new leaders was Bavarian by birth; they were conspicuous types of the antibourgeois and often Jewish intellectual. And in racially conscious Bavaria that sealed the fate of the revolutionary government. Moreover, the barrage of naive spectacle with which Eisner treated the populace, the incessant demonstrations, public concerts, parades of flags, and inspiring speeches about the “realm of light, beauty and reason” did little to consolidate his position. The way he carried out his office evoked as much ridicule as bitterness. Eisner certainly did not win the affection he had hoped for from his “government by kindness.” His utopian promises expressed in broad philosophical terms, which seemed so good on paper, proved hollow at the first puff of reality.

Though he took issue with the extremist leaders of the Spartacists and other such agents of world revolution as Lewien, Eugen Levine, and Axelrod, though he repudiated the anarchistic ravings of the writer Erich Mühsam, and made at least verbal concessions to the separatist sentiments so widespread in Bavaria, none of these moves to the middle could improve his situation. At a socialist conference in Berne he was so impolitic that he spoke of German guilt for the outbreak of the war, and at once found himself the target of an organized campaign. There were loud cries for his elimination and dark threats to the effect that time was running out for him. A staggering electoral defeat shortly afterward forced him to resign. On February 21, as he was on his way to the Landtag to declare his resignation, he was shot in the back and killed by a twenty-two-year-old count, Anton von Arco-Valley.

It was a senseless, superfluous, and disastrous crime. Only a few hours later, during a memorial service for the victim, a radical leftist butcher and waiter named Alois Lindner forced his way into the Landtag and, firing wildly, shot down three persons, including a government minister. The horrified assemblage scattered in panic. But public opinion now took a great swing to the left. Coming so soon after the assassinations of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, the murder of Eisner appeared to be the act of reactionary conspirators bent on regaining their lost power. A state of emergency was imposed on Bavaria, and a general strike proclaimed. When part of the student body hailed Arco-Valley as a hero, the university was closed. Large numbers of hostages were taken, a rigorous censorship introduced, banks and public buildings occupied by Red Army men. Armored cars drove through the streets, swarming with soldiers who blared through bullhorns “Revenge for Eisner!”

For a month executive power was wielded by a Central Council (i.e., soviet) under Ernst Niekisch. Then a parliamentary government was formed. But at the beginning of April news came from Hungary that Bela Kun had seized power and proclaimed the dictatorship of the proletariat. Here was evidence that revolution could succeed outside Russia. Once more the uneasy stability of Bavaria was shaken. A minority of radical leftist enthusiasts, without a mass basis and against the clear will, traditions, and feelings of the public, cried, “Germany is next!” and proclaimed a soviet republic. The poets Ernst Toller and Erich Mühsam, in a decree all too revealing of their romanticism, unworldliness, and weakness as leaders, announced the transformation of the world “into a meadow full of flowers in which each man can pick his share.” Work, subordination, and legalistic thinking were to be abolished. The newspapers were to print poems by Hölderlin or Schiller on the front page alongside the latest revolutionary decrees. The government retreated to Bamberg; Ernst Niekisch and most of the ministers resigned; and the leaderless state was left to the muddled gospel of the poets, who soon found themselves supplanted by a group of hard-boiled professional revolutionaries. Chaos and terrorizing of the citizenry followed.

It was an experience that could not be forgotten. The arbitrary confiscations, the practice of seizing hostages, the curbs on the bourgeoisie, revolutionary whim, and increasing hunger accorded all too well with recent horror stories of the October Revolution in Russia and made so deep an imprint on the popular mind that the bloody atrocities committed by the units of the Reichswehr and Free Corps, which advanced on Munich at the beginning of May, faded into oblivion by contrast. The rightists murdered fifty released Russian prisoners of war near Puchheim, slaughtered a medical column of the soviet army near Starnberg, arrested twenty-one innocent members of a Catholic club in their Munich clubroom, took them to the jail on Karolinenplatz and shot them all down, likewise lined up and shot twelve innocent workmen from Perlach. In addition, there were the leaders of the soviet experiment who were beaten to death or shot: Kurt Eglhofer, Gustav Landauer, Eugen Levine. About these victims little was ever said. On the other hand, eight hostages—members of the conspiratorial radical rightist Thule Society—had been held in the cellar of the Luitpold Gymnasium. A minor functionary, reacting to the crimes of the rightist troops, had them liquidated. For years their memory was repeatedly invoked as an example of the horrors of the Red regime. Wherever the Reichswehr and Free Corps troops appeared, a contemporary diary notes, “the people wave cloths, applaud; everyone looks out the windows; the enthusiasm could not be greater. . . . Everyone is cheering.”² Bavaria, the land of revolution, now became the land of counterrevolution.

 

For certain bourgeois groups the experiences of the early postwar months brought a new sense of confidence. For the short-lived revolution revealed the impotence and want of ideas of the German Left, which obviously had more revolutionary enthusiasm than revolutionary courage. The Left as represented by the Social Democrats had proved a force for order; but the leftists who attempted to introduce soviet rule in Bavaria proved to be visionaries who knew nothing about power and nothing about the people. During those months the bourgeoisie, or at any rate the calmer portion of it, for the first time realized that its fears were unjustified, that it could well hold its own beside the supposedly invincible but really naive German working class.

The army officers of middle rank, action-hungry captains and majors, led the way in infusing new spirit into the bourgeoisie. They had enjoyed the war like a wine and were still intoxicated. Although they had often faced superior forces, they did not feel themselves defeated. Called to the aid of the government, they had tamed rebels and refractory soldiers’ councils and crushed the Bavarian soviets. On the unsecured eastern border of Germany they had stood guard against the Poles and Czechs. Then, as they saw it, the Versailles Treaty cutting the army down to 100,000 men had cheated them of their future, reduced their social status, and disgraced their nation. A combination of self-assurance and haplessness sent them into politics. Many of them clung to the glorious freedom of the soldier’s life or hated to give up the profession of arms and the company of males. With their knowledge of organization and the planned application of violence, they now set about combatting the revolution—which had long since been destroyed by the nation’s fears and craving for order.

The private military bands that appeared everywhere soon transformed the country into a bivouac of brutish soldiery who wore the nimbus of political militancy and patriotism. Secure in the possession of machine guns, hand grenades, and cannon kept in an extensive network of secret arms depots, they profited by the impotence of the political institutions and claimed for themselves a considerable share of power—although the size of the share differed in the various regions. In Bavaria, in reaction to the traumatic experiences of the soviet period, they were able to pursue their ends almost unhindered. During the rule of the soviets, the Social Democratic government had called for “organizing the counterrevolution by all possible means.” With such official encouragement, the paramilitary movements sprang up alongside the Reichswehr, intertwined with it in various obscure ways. Colonel (later General) von Epp organized the free corps called the Einwohnerwehr (militia). There were also the Bund Oberland (Oberland League), the officers’ association Eiserne Faust (Iron Fist), the Escherich Organization, the Deutschvolkische Schutz-und Trutzbund (Defense and Defiance League of the German Race), the Verband Altreichsflagge (Flag of the Old Reich Association), the Bayreuth, Wurzburg, and Wolf Free Corps, and a variety of other organizations. Taken together, they represented an ambitious politico-military autonomous power averse to any return to normality.

In addition to the support of the administration and the government bureaucracy, these associations also enjoyed the favor of much of the population. In a society with a military tradition, cross-grained individuals acquire enormous credibility on moral and national issues as soon as they appear in uniform and march in step. Given the chaotic background, the military association appeared to be an exemplary counterpoise, representing a concept of life and order dear to everyone’s heart. Sternly erect, faultlessly in step, the units of Epp’s Free Corps had paraded down Ludwigstrasse, along with units of the Ehrhardt Brigade. The latter had brought back from its battles in the Baltic regions an emblem loudly proclaimed in the unit’s marching song: “With swastika on steel helmet.”

These military groups appealed to the imagination of the public; they embodied something of the glory and security of previous times that were now only nostalgic memories. Bavarian Group Command IV was only expressing prevailing opinion when it issued a directive in June, 1919, referring to the Reichswehr as the “cornerstone” of any “meaningful reestablishment of all domestic affairs.” The parties of the Left made the naive mistake of thinking that the soldiers who had borne the brunt of the suffering shared their own hatred for war. The Right, however, began working on the soldiers’ injured pride and disappointed expectations. They launched a vigorous campaign to this effect.

Among the various activities organized by the propaganda department of the Group Command under bustling Captain Mayr was that course in “civic thinking” which Hitler had been sent to after he had done so well as an informant for the military tribunal. The classes were held at the university and were conducted by reliable nationalists. The object was to indoctrinate a select group of participants with certain historical, economic, and political theories.

In his consistent effort to deny or underplay any influences upon his thinking, Hitler would later imply that this course was important for him not so much for the information it provided as for the contacts he made. “For me the value of the whole affair was that I now obtained an opportunity of meeting a few like-minded comrades with whom I could thoroughly discuss the situation of the moment.” But he admits that in the field of economic theory he learned something new. He attended the lectures of Gottfried Feder, a rightist engineer, and “for the first time in my life I heard a principled discussion of international stock exchange and loan capital.”³

In the strict sense, however, the real importance of the lecture course lay in the effect Hitler made with his vehemence and his particular cast of mind. Up to now his audience had consisted only of ignorant chance listeners. One of the teachers, the historian Karl Alexander von Müller, has described how at the end of the lecture, while the hall was emptying, he found his way blocked by a group that “stood fascinated around a man in their midst who was addressing them without pause and with growing passion in a strangely guttural voice. I had the strange feeling that the man was feeding on the excitement which he himself had whipped up. I saw a pale, thin face beneath a drooping, unsoldierly strand of hair, with close-cropped mustache and strikingly large, light blue eyes coldly glistening with fanaticism.” Called up to the platform after the next lecture, the man came up “obediently, with awkward movements, in a kind of defiant embarrassment, so it seemed to me.” But “the dialogue remained unfruitful.”

Here we already have a picture of the two faces of Hitler: powerfully convincing when carried away by his own rhetoric, bumbling and insignificant in personal confrontation. According to his own story, he had his first, never-to-be-forgotten oratorical triumph when “one of the participants felt obliged to break a lance for the Jews.” Muller had already called Captain Mayr’s attention to the natural orator he had discovered among his students. Now Hitler found himself detailed to a Munich regiment as the “liaison man” of District Command. Shortly afterward, his name appeared on a list of appointees for an “enlightenment squad” attached to the Lechfeld camp for returning soldiers. The squad was there to exert influence on the men, indoctrinating them with nationalistic, anti-Marxist ideas. In addition, the assignment was meant as a “practical course in speaking and agitation” for the squad members.⁴

In the barracks of Camp Lechfeld Hitler developed his gift for oratory and practical psychology. Here he learned to apply his ideological obsessions to current events so that the principles seemed to be irrefutably confirmed and the incidents of the day swelled to a portentous vastness. Some of the opportunistic features that later became incorporated into National Socialist ideology can be traced to this stage of Hitler’s career. As a beginner he was somewhat insecure and had to try out his various obsessions, discovering those that would strike a public response. He soon found what was most effective. “This theme kindled particular interest among the participants; that could be read in their faces,” a camp report on one of Hitler’s talks states. Hitler shared the powerful sense of disillusionment among the returning soldiers, who after years of war saw themselves cheated of everything that had lent greatness and importance to their young lives. They were now seeking explanations for so much wasted heroism, so many squandered victories, so much betrayed confidence. And Hitler offered them a concrete image of the mysterious enemy. His speaking style, we learn from other reports, was marked by “a popular manner,” an “easily comprehensible presentation,” and a passionate “fanaticism.” At the heart of these early speeches were attacks on the group whom he later, in a phrase that was to become a byword, called “the November criminals.” There were bitter denunciations of the “shame of Versailles” and corrupt “internationalism.” Linking it all up was the thesis that a “Jewish-Marxist world conspiracy” was operating in the background.

His aptitude for stringing together bits of ideas from things he had read and half digested and for presenting the result as his own without the slightest intellectual embarrassment, proved its value. One of his talks in Lechfeld repeated “in a very fine, clear and rousing” manner things which he had only recently learned from the class with Gottfried Feder on the relationships between capitalism and Jewry. His intellectual appropriations were as violent as they were lasting. From this period dates Hitler’s first written statement on a specific political question that has come down to us. The subject, significantly, was “the danger Jewry constitutes to our people today.” A former “liaison man” of Munich District Headquarters, Adolf Gemlich, had asked Captain Mayr for a position paper on the subject, and Mayr passed the latter on to his subordinate for reply—addressing him as “My Dear Herr Hitler,” an unusual salutation from a captain to a corporal. Hitler went into the subject at length, beginning with a condemnation of that emotional anti-Semitism which could be based only on chance personal impressions. The kind of anti-Semitism that aspired to become a political movement, he wrote, presupposed “knowledge of facts.”

 

And the facts are: First, Jewry is unequivocally a race and not a religious community. By thousands of years of inbreeding, frequently undertaken in the narrowest circles, the Jew in general has preserved his race and its peculiarity more keenly than many of the peoples among whom he lives. And thus results the fact that among us a non-German, alien race lives, not willing and also not able to sacrifice its racial peculiarities, to deny its own way of feeling, thinking and striving, and which nevertheless possesses all the political rights we do ourselves. If the Jew’s feelings move in purely material realms, even more so does his thinking and striving. . . . Everything that prompts man to strive for higher things, whether religion, socialism, democracy, all that is to him only a means to the end of satisfying his craving for money and dominance. The consequences of his activity become the racial tuberculosis of nations.

And from this the following results: Anti-Semitism on purely emotional grounds will find its ultimate expression in the form of pogroms. The anti-Semitism of reason, however, must lead to the planned judicial opposition to and elimination of the privileges of the Jews. . . . Its ultimate goal, however, must absolutely be the removal of the Jews altogether. Only a government of national power and never a government of national impotence will be capable of both.⁵

 

Four days after receiving this statement, on September 12, 1919, Captain Mayr ordered Hitler to visit one of the small parties among the bewildering array of radical associations and cliques that formed and fell apart with great rapidity, only to coalesce in new groupings. Here was a vast, unused reservoir of response for one seeking a following. The often weird doctrines of these groups showed the blind readiness of the petit bourgeois masses to seize on anything that let them vent their hatreds and promised some way out of social crisis.

 

A key center of conspiratorial and propagandistic activities, as well as a meeting ground for right extremists, was the Thule Society. Its headquarters was the luxury hotel Vier Jahreszeiten, and it had connections throughout Bavarian society. At times it counted some 1,500 influential members, and it, too, used the swastika as its symbol. Moreover, it controlled its own newspaper, the Münchener Beobachter. Its head was a political adventurer with a rather unsavory past and the sonorous name of Baron Rudolf von Sebottendorf, which he had acquired through adoption by an Austrian nobleman stranded in the Orient. Early in his life Sebottendorf had come under the influence of radical ideologues such as Theodor Fritsch and Lanz von Liebenfels, whose racist mania had also affected young Hitler. His Thule Society, founded in Munich at the beginning of 1918, was a successor to the racist anti-Semitic leagues of the prewar period and followed many of their traditions. Its name, in fact, went back to the Teutonic Thule Sect established in Leipzig in 1912, whose members had to be of “Aryan blood.” That group, rather like a lodge in its procedures, required candidates for admission to answer questions on the hirsuteness of various parts of their body. Candidates also had to present a footprint as evidence of their racial purity.

Sebottendorf’s new Thule Society began its life by launching into violent anti-Semitic propaganda denouncing the Jews as the “mortal foe of the German people.” This was in January, 1918, while the war was still in progress. Later the Society could claim that the bloody and chaotic events of the soviet period were proof of its thesis. Its extravagant slogans contributed greatly to creating that atmosphere of obscene hatred in which racist radicalism could flourish. As early as October, 1918, groups within the Thule Society had forged plans for a rightist uprising. It instigated various assassination attempts against Kurt Eisner, and on April 13, 1918, attempted a putsch against the soviet regime. The Society also maintained connections with the Russian émigré circles that had made Munich their headquarters. A young Baltic student of architecture named Alfred Rosenberg, who had been profoundly affected by the trauma of the Russian Revolution, acted as liaison man. Almost all the actors who were to dominate the Bavarian scene in the following years belonged to the Society, including people who were to be prominent within Hitler’s party. In various connections we encounter the names of Dietrich Eckart, Gottfried Feder, Hans Frank, Rudolf Hess, and Karl Harrer.

At the behest of the Thule Society, Karl Harrer, a sports journalist, together with a machinist named Anton Drexler, had, in October 1918, founded a “Political Workers Circle.” The group described itself as “an association of select persons for the purpose of discussing and studying political affairs.” In fact, it was intended as a bridge between the masses and the nationalistic Right. For a while the membership was limited to a very few of Drexler’s fellow workers. He himself was a quiet, square-set, rather strange man, employed at the Munich workshops of the Federal Railways. As early as March, 1918, this sober, bespectacled machinist had on his own initiative organized a “Free Workers Committee for a Good Peace,” whose program called for fighting usury and rallying the working class behind the war. He had turned against Marxist socialism for its failure to resolve the “national question” either in practice or theory. This, at any rate, was the theme of an article he published titled, “The Failure of the Proletarian International and the Shipwreck of the Idea of Fraternization.” The enthusiasm with which the socialists on both sides had supported the war in August, 1914, had certainly exposed this flaw. A similar perception had led to the founding, in 1904, of the German Workers’ Party (Deutsche Arbeiterpartei—DAP) by German-Bohemian workers in Trautenau. Now Anton Drexler revived that name and founded a party of his own. Its charter members were workmen from his own shop, and its first meeting took place on January 5, 1919, in the Fiirstenfelder Hof. A few days later, on the initiative of the Thule Society, another meeting was held in the Hotel Vier Jahreszeiten, and a national organization for the party was created. Karl Harrer appointed himself “National Chairman.” It was an ambitious title.

Actually, the new party, which hereafter met once a week in the Sternecker beer hall, was very small potatoes. Drexler did occasionally manage to procure a few prominent racists or nationalists as speakers—such as Gottfried Feder or the writer Dietrich Eckart. But the tone of the „ group remained at a dreary, beer-drinking level. Significantly, it did not address itself to the public at all. It was less a political party in the proper sense than a combination, typical for the Munich of those years, of secret society and locals gathering at the pub for their evening pint. A dull and embittered craving for exchange of opinions had brought them together. The lists of participants mention between ten and forty persons. Germany’s shame, the trauma of the lost war, anti-Semitic grumblings, complaints concerning the downfall of order, justice, and morals—these were the themes of the meetings. The “directives” Drexler had read at the initial meeting reveal heartfelt if awkwardly worded resentments toward the rich, the proletarians and Jews, the price gougers and the rabble-rousers. The program called for annual profits being limited to 10,000 marks, for parity representation of the different states in the German Foreign Office, and the right of “skilled workers with a legal residence. . . to be counted in the middle class.” For happiness lay not “in talk and empty phrases in meetings, demonstrations and elections, but in good work, a full cookpot and a fair chance for the children.”

However philistine and intellectually confused the character of the party as a whole must appear, the first sentence of the “directives” contains an idea that embodied historical experience and a widespread need among the people. It shows that clumsy, crotchety Anton Drexler had grasped the spirit of the age. For the DAP defined itself as a classless “socialist organization led only by German leaders.” Drexler’s “inspired idea” was to reconcile nationalism and socialism. He was neither the only man, nor even the first, to attempt this, and his concern about children and cookpots was a simplistic notion that certainly could not compete with the impressive Marxist systems of historical interpretation. But the moment in which Drexler seized on the idea—in the midst of the emotional crisis of a defeated, insulted country challenged by revolution—and the fact that he happened to meet Adolf Hitler, placed both the idea and the backroom political party which espoused it squarely on the stage of world history.

 

At the meeting of September 12, 1919, Gottfried Feder addressed the group on the subject: “How and by what means can capitalism be eliminated?” Among the forty-odd persons in the audience was Adolf Hitler, who was there on Captain Mayr’s instructions. While Feder was expatiating on his familiar theses, the guest noted that here was one more of those newly founded groups “like so many others” stifling “in their absurd philistinism.” Accordingly, “when Feder finally stopped talking, I was happy. I had seen enough.”

Nevertheless, Hitler waited for the discussion period, and when one of the visitors urged the separation of Bavaria from the Reich and her union with Austria, he rose in indignation: “I could not help demanding the floor.” He attacked the speaker so passionately that Drexler whispered to the locomotive engineer Lotter, who was sitting beside him: “Man, he has a big mouth; we could use him.” When Hitler, immediately after talking, turned to leave this “dull club,” Drexler hurried after him and asked him to come back soon. He pressed upon Hitler a pamphlet he had written titled My Political Awakening. Hitler has described how, lying in his bunk at the barracks early the following morning and watching the mice go after some crusts of bread he had thrown down for them, he began to read the pamphlet. In Drexler’s accounts of his life he recognized elements in his own experience: exclusion from jobs by union terrorism; earning a wretched living by semiartistic work (in Drexler’s case playing the zither in a night club); and, finally, the great illumination accompanied by feelings of intense anxiety—recognition of the role of the Jewish race as corrupters of the world. These parallels aroused Hitler’s interest, even though the person involved was a worker, as Hitler constantly reiterates.⁶

A few days later he received in the mail an unsolicited membership card bearing the number 555. Partly amused, partly annoyed, partly not knowing quite how to react, he decided to accept the invitation to attend a committee meeting. At the Altes Rosenbad tavern in the Herrenstrasse, “a very rundown place,” he found at a table in the back room “in the dim light of a broken-down gas lamp” several young people. While the tavernkeeper and his wife and one or two guests sat gloomily around in the other room, the group read the minutes “like the presiding committee of a Skat club.” They counted the club treasury (cash on hand: seven marks and fifty pfennigs). They approved the reports and drafted letters to similar associations in North Germany. All in all, “this was club life of the worst manner and sort.”

For two days Hitler pondered, and as always when he reminisced about decisive situations in his life, he spoke of the strain of the decision and emphasized the “hard,” “difficult,” or “bitter” mental effort it cost him. It ended with his entering the German Workers’ Party as board member number 7, responsible for recruitment and propaganda. “After two days of agonized pondering and reflection, I finally came to the conviction that I had to take this step. It was the most decisive resolve of my life. From here there was and could be no turning back.”⁷

On the one hand, this is an example of Hitler’s trick of throwing a bit of dramatic lighting on turning points in his own career that only later became apparent as such. If the moment lacked any outward drama, he could at least portray the decision as the product of solitary, painful struggle. On the other hand, all available sources show him consistently, up to the very end, displaying a singular indecisiveness, a deep-seated fear of fixing on any one course. His later associates describe him as going through a wearing process of vacillation and changes of mind on many questions until he was so exhausted that he finally left things to chance and a toss of a coin. His cult of fate and Providence was a device to rationalize his indecisiveness. It might be said that all his personal and even some of his political decisions were nothing more than evasions, ways to escape alternatives he felt to be threatening. In any case, throughout his life, from his leaving school, his moves to Vienna and Munich, and his volunteering for the army, up to his step into politics, it is not hard to detect the escape motivation. The same is true for much of his behavior during the following years, right down to the hapless postponements of the very end.

The desire to evade the oppressive demands of duty and order in the respectable world, to put off the feared discharge into civilian life dictated all his actions as a returned soldier and gradually led him into the wings of the Bavarian political stage. He looked upon politics as the vocation of one who was without a vocation and wanted to remain so. Now at last he had a field of action that demanded no qualifications other than those he possessed: passion, imagination, organizational talent, and demagogic gifts. In the barracks he wrote and typed away indefatigably at invitations to meetings, which he then delivered personally. He asked for lists of names and addresses and spoke with the persons mentioned. He sought out connections, support, new members.

The results were meager at first. Every unfamiliar face that turned up at meetings was eagerly noted. Hitler’s success was due in considerable part to his being the only one in the organization with unlimited time at his disposal. His prestige rapidly increased in the seven-man party committee, which met once a week at a corner table in the Café Gasteig—later the object of worshipful veneration. The fact was that he had more ideas, was more adept and more energetic than the others in the executive committee.

The other members had been at home in their small-time situation and were perfectly content to remain there. They were stunned when Hitler began pushing the “dull club” into the public view. October 16, 1919, proved a decisive day both for the German Workers’ Party and the new man on its executive committee. At the first public meeting, with 111 persons present, Hitler took the floor as the second speaker of the evening. For thirty minutes, in an ever more furious stream of verbiage, he poured out the hatreds that ever since his days in the home for men had been stored up within him or discharged only in fruitless monologues. As if bursting through the silence and human barriers of many years, the sentences, the delusions, the accusations came tumbling out. And at the end “the people in the small room were electrified.” He had found “what before I had simply felt within me, without in any way knowing it.” Jubilantly, he made the overwhelming discovery: “I could speak!”⁸

That moment signified—if any specific moment did—the breakthrough to himself, the “hammer-stroke of fate” that shattered the “shell of everyday life.” His sense of release is palpable in the ecstatic tone of his memories of that evening. To be sure, he had tested his oratorical powers repeatedly in the past several weeks, and had become acquainted with his own ability to persuade and convert. But this was the first time he experienced the subjective force of his oratory, the triumphant self-abandonment to the point of sweating and reeling with exhaustion. And as everything with him turned to excess—his fears, his self-confidence, or even his rapture at hearing Tristan for the hundredth time—he henceforth fell into a veritable oratorical fury. Aside from or alongside of all political passions, from now on it was this newly awakened craving for vindication on the part of the “poor devil,” as he calls himself in his recollections of the period,⁹ that drove him again and again to the speaker’s platform.

 

Soon after his entrance into the DAP Hitler set about transforming the timid, static group of club members into a noisy publicity-conscious party of struggle. He met opposition chiefly from Karl Harrer, who was wedded to the secret-society notions inherited from the Thule Society and would have liked to continue running the DAP as a little discussion circle. From the start Hitler thought in terms of a mass party. Partly, he could not think otherwise, because he had never been able to accept reduced circumstances, but partly also because he understood why the old conservative parties had failed. Harrer’s views were a survival, on an absurd scale, of that tendency to exclusiveness which had been the weakness of the bourgeois parties of notables during the Wilhelmine era. By now such an attitude had alienated the masses of the petty bourgeosie, and the working class as well, from the conservative position.

Even before the end of 1919 the German Workers’ Party, at Hitler’s insistence, set up its headquarters in a dark, vaultlike cellar room in the Sternecker beer hall. The rent was fifty marks; in co-signing the lease Hitler again gave his occupation as “painter.” A table and a few borrowed chairs were placed in. the room, a telephone installed, and a safe obtained for the membership cards and the party treasury. Soon an old typewriter was added, and a rubber stamp to go with it: when Harrer noticed these beginnings of a veritable bureaucracy, he called Hitler a “megalomaniac.” At the same time Hitler had the executive committee expanded to, first, ten, later, twelve and more members. He brought in a number of followers personally devoted to him; quite often these were fellow soldiers whom he had won over in the barracks. Soon he was able to replace the party’s humble handwritten notes by printed invitations. At the same time the party began advertising in the Münchener Beobachter. Recruiting pamphlets and leaflets were left in the taverns where the party met. And Hitler in his propaganda tactics now began displaying that entirely unfounded selfassurance, all the more challenging because backed by no reality at all, which would frequently produce his successes in the future. He ventured something totally unusual—he began charging admission to the public meetings of this tiny, unknown party.

His growing reputation as a speaker solidified his position inside the party. By the beginning of the next year he had succeeded in making the refractory chairman, Harrer, resign. Soon afterward, the executive committee, though skeptical and worried about making itself ridiculous, followed the biddings of its ambitious propaganda chief and appealed to the masses. The party issued a call for its first mass meeting, to be held in the Festsaal of the Hofbräuhaus on February 24,1920.

The bright red poster announcing the meeting did not even mention Hitler’s name. The principal speaker of the evening was a true-blue nationalist spokesman, Dr. Johannes Dingfelder, a physician, who wrote in racist publications under the pseudonym of Germanus Agricola. He had developed an economic theory whose twistings bizarrely reflected the shortages of the postwar period. Nature would be going on a production strike, he pessimistically predicted; her yields would diminish, vermin would consume the remainder. Consequently, humanity was on the verge of doom. There was only one way out, a return to racial and national principles. That evening he conjured up this hope again, “quite objectively and often imbued with a profound religious spirit.” Thus the report of the Munich Political Intelligence Service.¹⁰

Then Hitler spoke. To take advantage of this unique opportunity of publicizing the ideas of the German Workers’ Party to a large audience, he had insisted that a program be worked up. He began by inveighing against the Versailles Treaty and the cowardice of the government, then against the general craving for amusement, the Jews, and the “leeches,” namely profiteers and usurers. Then, interrupted frequently by applause or catcalls, he read the program aloud. At the end “some heckler shouted something. This was followed by great commotion. Everyone standing on chairs and tables. Tremendous tumult. Shouts of ‘Get out!’ ” The meeting ended in a general uproar. Some members of the radical Left subsequently tramped, loudly cheering the International and the Soviet Republic, from the Hofbräuhaus to the Rathaustor. “Otherwise no disturbance,” the police report stated.

Apparently such turbulence was commonplace, for even the nationalist-racist press took scarcely any notice of the meeting. Only recent finds of source material have made it possible to reconstruct the course of the meeting. Hitler’s own myth-making account turned it into a dramatic occasion beginning with a brawl and ending with wild acclaim and mass conversion: “Unanimously and again unanimously” each point of the program was accepted, “and when the last thesis had found its way to the heart of the masses, there stood before me a hall full of people united by a new conviction, a new faith, a new will.” Typically, Hitler reverted to his memory of operatic performances and proclaimed that “a fire was kindled from whose flame one day the sword must come which would regain freedom for the Germanic Siegfried.” He could already hear striding forth “the goddess of inexorable vengeance for the perjured deed of November 9, 1919.” Meanwhile, the nationalist Münchener Beobachter merely noted that after Dr. Dingfelder’s speech Hitler had “set forth some pointed political ideas” and then announced the program of the DAP.

Nevertheless, in a higher sense the author of Mein Kampf was right. For with that mass meeting there began the evolution of Drexler’s beer-drinking racist club into Adolf Hitler’s mass party. To be sure, he himself had once again had to play a subordinate role. Nevertheless, there had been almost 2,000 persons present, filling the great hall of the Hofbräuhaus. The crowd had been exposed to Hitler’s political doctrines, and many had accepted them. Henceforth, more and more, it was his will, his style, his direction that propelled the party and decided its success or failure. Party legend later compared the meeting of February 24, 1920, to Martin Luther’s nailing his theses to the door of the church in Wittenberg. In both cases tradition has had to paint its own historically quite dubious picture, because true history tends to scant man’s craving for drama and sentimental recollection. But there was some justification for hailing the meeting as the true birthday of the movement, even though no such momentous act had been planned.

 

The program Hitler offered that evening had been drafted by Anton Drexler, probably with some assistance from Gottfried Feder, and then submitted to the executive committee for revision. Hitler’s exact part in the framing can no longer be determined, but the sloganlike compactness of several articles shows his editorial influence. The program consisted of twenty-five points and combined in rather arbitrary fashion elements of the older racist ideology with immediate grievances and the national need to deny reality. The consistent factor throughout was strong emotional appeal. Negatives predominated; the program was anticapitalist, anti-Marxist, antiparliamentarian, anti-Semitic, and most decidedly against the way the war had ended. The positive aims, on the other hand—such as the various demands for the protection of the middle class—were mostly vague and tended to add fuel to the anxieties and desires of the little man. For example, all income not earned by work was to be confiscated (Point 11), as well as all war profits (Point 12), and a profit-sharing plan for large industries was to be introduced (Point 14). Another point called for large department stores to be turned over to the communities and rented out “at cheap prices” to small tradesmen (Point 16). Land reform was also demanded, and a ban on speculation in land (Point 17).

Despite all its opportunistic features this program was not so empty as has sometimes been represented. At any rate, there was a good deal more to it than clever demogogery. It included, at least in the germ, all the essential features of what was to be National Socialist doctrine: the living-space thesis (Point 3), anti-Semitism (Points 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 24), the harmless-sounding and widely acceptable platitudes (Points 10, 18, 24) that could ultimately be made the basis for a totalitarian state—as, for example, the maxim that the common good takes precedence over the good of the individual.¹¹ Much was made of the determination to eliminate the abuses of capitalism, to overcome the false class-struggle confrontations of Marxism, and to bring about the reconciliation of all groups in a powerfully integrated racial community. It would seem that all this possessed a special allure in a country suffering so profoundly from national and social irritations. The idea or formula of “nationalistic socialism,” linking as it did the two paramount concepts of the nineteenth century, could be found at the root of many political programs and drafts for social systems of the time. It turned up in Anton Drexler’s simple autobiographical account of his “political awakening” and in the Berlin lectures of Eduard Stadtler, who as early as 1918 had founded an Anti-Bolshevist League, with the support of industry. It was the subject of one of those enlightenment courses run by the Munich District Command of the Reichswehr and even entered the thinking of Oswald Spengler, whose essay Prussianism and Socialism treated most persuasively of the same theme. Even within Social Democracy the idea had its followers. The disappointment over the failure of the Second International at the outbreak of the war had led a number of independent minds to turn toward a combination of nationalistic and social revolutionary schemes. National Socialism, Its Growth and Its Aims was the title of a bulky theoretical work published in 1919 by one of the founders of the German-Socialist Workers’ Party, a railroad engineer named Rudolf Jung. That work hailed nationalist socialism as the epoch-making political concept that would succeed in checking Marxist socialism. To emphasize their separation from internationalist movements, Jung and his Austrian followers changed the party’s name in May, 1918, to German National Socialist Workers’ Party.

A week after the meeting in the Hofbräuhaus the DAP also changed its name. Borrowing from the related German and Austrian groups, it called itself National Socialist German Workers’ Party (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei—NSDAP) and simultaneously adopted the battle symbol of its Austrian counterparts, the swastika. Dr. Walter Riehl, chairman of the Austrian national socialists, had shortly before set up an “international secretariat” that was to serve as a liaison office for all national socialist parties. There already existed active contacts with various other such groups espousing racial-socialist programs, above all the German Socialist Party of Alfred Brunner, a Düsseldorf engineer. This party tried to be extremely leftish and boasted, “Our demands are more radical than those of the Bolshevists.” It had units in many of the larger cities. The one in Nuremberg was headed by a schoolteacher named Julius Streicher.

On April 1, 1920, Hitler finally left the army, for he at last had an alternative. He was determined to devote himself henceforth entirely to political work, to seize the leadership of the NSDAP, and to build the party according to his own ideas. He rented a room at 41 Thierschstrasse, near the Isar River. Although he spent most of his days in the cellar headquarters of the party he avoided being listed as a party employee. What he lived on was something of a mystery, and enemies within the party soon raised this question. His landlady thought the somber young man monosyllabic and seemingly very busy, a “real bohemian.”

His self-confidence grew, based on his talent for oratory, his coldness, and his readiness to take risks. He had nothing to lose. Ideas as such mattered little to him. In general he was less interested in a concept than in its potential uses, in whether, as he once remarked, it could yield a “powerful slogan.” His total lack of comprehension for thinking without politically malleable substance came out in his outbursts of “detestation” and “profoundest disgust” for the “antiquated folkish theoreticians,” the “bigmouths,” and “idea thieves.” Similarly, he took the floor for his earliest rhetorical displays only when he had something to strike back at polemically. For him it was not evidence that made an idea persuasive but handiness, not truth but the idea’s aptness as a weapon. “Every idea, even the best,” he noted, “becomes a danger if it parades as a purpose in itself, being in reality only a means to one.” Elsewhere he emphasized that in the political struggle force always needs the support of an idea—significantly, he did not put it the other way round. He regarded National Socialism, too, as chiefly a means to his own ambitious ends. It was merely a romantic, attractively vague cue with which he stepped on the stage. The idea of reconciliation implicit in the phrase seemed more modern, closer to the needs of the age, then the slogans of class struggle. The conservative writer Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, who in the early years of the century had promulgated the idea of nationalistic socialism, now declared that it was “certainly a part of the German future.” Its potentiality was above all apparent to the cool politicians who had axes to grind. There were many such men, all competing in the same game. But before long Hitler knew that he himself would be that part of the German future.