CHAPTER FIFTEEN

‘I could speak!’

True to his word, in May 1919 Karl Mayr assigned Hitler a role on an ‘investigating commission’ of the Reichswehr, looking into the causes and perpetrators of the communist revolution. In this role, Hitler would receive his first taste of real political authority: part of his job would be to investigate the political allegiances of his battalion during the revolution, acting effectively as a paid informer against his old comrades or any soldier who had backed the Marxist uprising.

In other words, Hitler’s ‘first political activity’, as he called it, was to denounce fellow soldiers who had dared support the left’s anti-war uprising. He was little more than a traitor to the men with whom he served. He would, for example, accuse Georg Dufter, his former colleague on the Soldiers’ Council of the 1st Demobilization Company, of spreading propaganda for the Soviet Republic. Dufter, in Hitler’s view, was ‘the worst and most radical rabble-rouser within the regiment’.¹ So much for soldiers’ solidarity.

In Bavaria at this time the armed forces controlled the state administration in the aftermath of the bloody suppression of the communists. The ruling Social Democrats were due to return, in August, and the interim period offered a perfect chance for the far right to seize a filament of power, or at least to harden their grip on the state. They were quick to exploit this unusual opportunity, occupying the power vacuum with unseemly relish: thugs, baton-wielders, paramilitary gangs, extremists of every stripe exercised their muscles, rallying their supporters and harassing their opponents. Far-right political cells proliferated in Munich, in what was a very dangerous time to be a communist or a liberal.

Recognizing Hitler’s energy and rousing personality, Mayr, who now headed the intelligence unit of the Bavarian Reichswehr, encouraged his wayward protégé to educate himself, to ground his rampaging mind in the ‘national thinking’ courses then being held at the Reichswehrlager (army base) on the Lechfeld plain, near Augsburg. The lectures promised to advance Hitler’s education in capitalism and economics. Yet they began from an extremely skewed perspective: they aimed at fuelling conspiracy theories and fomenting hatred, chiefly against the Jews and Slavs, rather than instructing the audience in basic economics.

Hitler seized on the parts of the lectures that fed his burgeoning sense of himself as a political agitator. If he lacked the critical faculties to analyse what he was being told, he digested what he felt he was supposed to believe, or whatever reinforced his prejudices. He swallowed the lines that the Jews controlled the stock market and that the Jews were spreading Bolshevism. The Jews were everywhere, he heard, controlling the workers, running the markets, poisoning politics – and always acting against German interests. They were ‘the enemy of the people’. This was straight out of the script of that paranoid hater of the Jews, the writer Alfred Rosenberg, the closest thing to an intellectual in the early National Socialist movement. Hitler eagerly bought into all this, as though feeding the crystallization of a monstrous theory.

It wasn’t a ‘eureka moment’, of course. Since his Vienna days, Hitler had been exposed to demagogues warning him of secret, Hebraic powers that sought to conquer the Fatherland. Yet he was far more susceptible to their siren song in these years after the war. In Munich at this time there operated a shadowy array of hard-line movements who peddled vast conspiracy theories that conditioned the thinking and mood on the extremist fringe. One was the Aufbau Vereinigung (Reconstruction Organization), a Munich-based counter-revolutionary group comprising White Russian émigrés and proto-National Socialists, who aimed to overthrow the governments of Germany and the Soviet Union and install far-right autocratic regimes. The Aufbau Vereinigung had a profound influence on the development of early National Socialist ideology and, with the assistance of US car-maker Henry Ford, helped to finance the fledgling movement. According to the historian Michael Kellogg, the Aufbau’s ideology helped to persuade Hitler that a Jewish conspiracy involving an alliance of international finance and Bolshevism was determined to crush Germany and dominate mankind.²

All these influences played out in the way Hitler perceived the society around him. Convinced that Germany was in the grip of such a conspiracy, he began to see Jews in charge everywhere. There was barely a ‘Jew-free’ space in Germany, he came to think. In every nook and cranny, prominent ‘Chosen People’ could be found, manipulating and debauching his beloved Fatherland. He would later blame ‘the Jews’ for organizing the massive strikes in early 1918 that helped to ensure Germany’s defeat,³ setting aside the fact that most of the German working men who participated were neither Jews nor communists. They were simply employees whose families were hungry and fed up.

Seized by the conviction that a conspiracy of Jewish capitalists and Bolsheviks was working against the German Reich, Hitler could barely restrain himself from speaking out. He felt compelled to share his new ‘insight’ of a society wholly corrupted by the ‘Hebrew race’. In July 1919, he got his chance. While on a training course at Munich University he attended a lecture by Gottfried Feder, an engineer from Murnau who condemned ‘Jewish usury’ and blamed ‘the Jews’ for controlling international capital. Feder cast the Jews as the gatekeepers of global capitalism, an outlook that would form the bedrock of Nazi ideology (along with the parallel conspiracy theory that the Jews were behind the rise of global communism).

After Feder’s speech, several in the departing crowd paused before a young man with a snub moustache, a flick of black hair and ‘remarkably large, light blue, fanatically cold, gleaming eyes’, as one observed.⁴ It was not Hitler’s appearance that held them spellbound, however, but his extraordinary voice: bellicose, impassioned, unyielding. Young Adolf was in full flight, raging against his enemies. Feder’s speech seemed to have inflamed his mind like a torch to tinder.

 

Hitler’s oratorical skills were soon noticed. Feder’s brother-in-law and fellow speaker Karl Alexander von Müller mentioned to Mayr after that session, ‘Do you know that one of your trainees is a natural born public speaker?’⁵ Captain Mayr cast a fresh eye on his furious young protégé, duly rewarding Hitler’s ‘good work’ in ratting on his fellow soldiers and his growing reputation as an impassioned defender of Germany by promoting him to a new ‘political’ role in the regimental Demobilization Office where his oratorical skills could be used to advantage. This was a job in an ‘Enlightenment Squad’⁶ at the army base in Lechfeld. In this role, Hitler would serve as one of twenty-six instructors, lecturing returning servicemen in the economic and political conditions at home.

In substance like Feder’s, in style far more vitriolic, his presentations were soon the talk of Lechfeld. It was the speaker, not the content of his speeches, that amazed those who heard them: it was the way he spoke, on familiar and well-trodden themes, that enraptured his listeners. He appealed to their most basic emotions – fear, envy, blame, hatred – and exhorted them to target the Jews and communists, who, he claimed ad nauseam, were responsible for Germany’s humiliation. His audiences rapidly grew. Hitler quickly realized that a message of aggressive anti-Semitism struck a chord with many German people, especially the lower-middle classes who had lost most in the post-war economic crisis. By focusing their resentment, like a beam through a magnifying glass, on a single, detested target, Hitler saw that he could unleash the pent-up rage of a people who yearned for someone to blame for Germany’s post-war misery.

As such, ‘the Jews’ served as the perfect scapegoat for this would-be populist and soap-box orator. They were widely unpopular, electorally insignificant and anathema to right-thinking Lutherans. And by stoking Bavaria’s latent anti-Semitism into full-blown hatred, Hitler found that he could draw accolades to himself and carve out a new life as a propagandist, an organizer, perhaps a politician. This was not pure opportunism: rather, a potent mixture of the viscerally personal and the brazenly populist, a process by which Hitler’s own political ambitions and society’s hatred of the Jews became mutually reinforcing.

‘Like a sponge, Hitler sucked up popular anti-Jewish sentiment,’ writes his biographer Volker Ullrich. ‘His turn towards fanatical anti-Semitism, which he would later claim had originated in Vienna, actually took place amidst the revolution and counter-revolution in Munich.’⁷

In fact, Hitler’s ‘conversion’ to extreme anti-Semitism drew on deeper impulses than his exposure to these post-war upheavals. The anti-Semitic mood in Bavaria, which by now had become an autonomous state within the Weimar Republic, ignited his memories of his ‘exposure’ to Jewish people in Vienna and Munich before and during the war. And these memories acquired a twisted, toxic quality in a mind that would soon identify the Jews as a ‘race’ of parasites that posed an existential threat to Germany.

Blaming a defenceless minority for Germany’s ills distracted attention from the real cause – a world war of unprecedented destructiveness and the impact of the British naval blockade, which hadn’t been fully lifted until June 1919. The ‘scapegoat’ was the crudest political tactic, as old as human organization, relying on lies, disinformation and a primitive appeal to the most basic instincts: hatred, xenophobia, fear.

To succeed, it required a leader, a demagogue, with the charisma and persuasive power to express deep-rooted rage and social dislocation. It also needed a pivotal moment, a catalysing event, that would attract the masses to that leader like iron filings to a magnet.

 

For Hitler, that moment arrived with the signing by Germany and the Allied powers of the Treaty of Versailles on 28 June 1919. The peace settlement infuriated Germany, chiefly Article 231 – the notorious ‘War Guilt Clause’ – which required the country to ‘accept the responsibility of Germany and her allies for causing all the loss and damage’ of the war, itself a direct consequence of German aggression.⁸

All Germany’s colonies were to be confiscated, her army reduced to 100,000, her navy to thirty-six ships (including six dreadnoughts), her air force abolished and her imperial ambitions crushed. Parts of her territory were to be handed over to other nations: the Saar coalmines were ceded and Alsace-Lorraine returned to France. In the east, Germany would recognize the independence of Czechoslovakia and Poland, and cede parts of Upper Silesia and Posen to Poland, among other territorial concessions.

The Rhineland would be demilitarized, a measure that fell short of the demand by French Prime Minister George Clemenceau for a French-controlled buffer state against future German aggression. ‘America is far away, protected by the ocean,’ he told US President Woodrow Wilson. ‘Not even Napoleon himself could touch England. You are both sheltered; we are not.’⁹

Cripplingly for the dreams of Pan-Germans like Hitler, the treaty prohibited indefinitely the merging of Germany and Austria. Worse, the German delegates to Versailles, who had no say in the negotiations, were shocked to discover that Germany would not fully share in Wilson’s principles of ‘self-determination’. These endowed people of the same nationality with the right freely to choose their sovereignty and govern themselves, and that one nationality should have no right to govern another. Would that put an end to the German Reich? Would foreigners henceforth prescribe the form of the German government?

A nation in chains, a slave state: such was the popular German outcry against Versailles. From the Bavarian beer halls to the estates of the Prussian aristocracy, the people railed against a document they feared would make Germany a vassal of Britain and France. ‘What hand would not wither that binds itself and us in these fetters?’ responded the German chancellor, Philipp Scheidemann.¹⁰ The ferociously anti-Semitic, Pan-German newspaper Völkischer Beobachter (which the Nazis would later buy and turn into their mouthpiece) condemned the Treaty as a ‘syphilitic peace … born of brief, forbidden lust, beginning with a small hard sore, gradually attacks the limbs and joints, even all the flesh, down to the heart and brain of the sinner.’¹¹

In fact, the Versailles Treaty was relatively moderate. It fell well short of the drastic terms Germany had imposed on Russia in the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (3 March 1918), which forced Russia to relinquish all her obligations to the Triple Entente and cede the Baltic States to Germany, as well as stripping Russia of a large part of her resources. Nor would Versailles prescribe the death of the Reich: Germany would be free to elect its own government and pursue its political destiny. There would be no ‘occupying force’ of the kind that descended on the divided Fatherland after 1945. And yet, as the historian Michael Burleigh concludes, Germans of all political complexions were united in seeing Versailles as ‘the triumph of an Allied conspiracy to enmesh Germany in a network of restrictions and obligations in perpetuity, for the reparations bill was left ominously open-ended.’¹²

In the end, the reparations bill totalled 132 billion gold marks, or about US$30 billion ($400 billion in today’s money). The expectation that the Germans would pay this astronomic sum relied on a gentleman’s understanding that ‘your word is your bond’, in an era that had supposedly cast off the notion that treaties were to be fixed in wax lest they be abused, ignored or used to buy time. ‘The new attitude,’ wrote the historian A. J. P. Taylor, ‘corresponded to the “sanctity of contract” which is the fundamental element in bourgeois civilisation. Kings and aristocrats do not pay their debts, and rarely keep their word. The capitalist system would collapse unless its practitioners honoured, without question, their most casual nod; and the Germans were now expected to observe the same ethic.’¹³

Proud, moderate Germans refused to accept the terms. The resurgent centre right believed Germany deserved the magnanimity and respect of a worthy opponent, not the punitive vengeance of victors picking over the spoils. Their defiance arose from the fact that many Germans refused to accept that they had ‘lost’ the war.

Motivated by their desire to punish their erstwhile enemy, the French and British grossly misjudged the social and economic climate in post-war Germany. The German people were bitter, exhausted, broken: of 13 million Germans who had served in the army during the war years, more than 2 million were dead and 4 million wounded, leaving irreparable scars on parents, wives, families and friends. And now this: the burden of blame and a vast invoice.

Nor were the lofty arguments at Versailles distracted by the Treaty’s pernicious effects on the minds of the extremists then proliferating in Germany, such as the then obscure figure of Adolf Hitler. Their rage at Versailles ratcheted up their ache for revenge, and set the world on course for future conflict. Far from making peace, the Treaty prepared the stage for another war.

Bitterness over Versailles became the breeding ground for Hitler the politician. He was a very different animal to Hitler the soldier, though both drew on the same well-spring of rage and defiance. Where the soldier had been content to discharge his duties in a role he relished, the politician manifested a newfound ambition and lust for power. He seethed at the despicable document. For the first time in his life, he sensed that the growing audiences at his lectures were receptive to his tirades. If Versailles infuriated the German people, Hitler would soon give voice to their fury.

He now began to show his mettle as a shrewd, ruthless and strategically minded individual: Hitler the politician quickly grasped the popular appeal of blaming the Jews for Versailles. He reprised the memories of Vienna, most ominously the ‘racial’ basis for Pan-German supremacy and the lesson of Schönerer’s fall: never confuse your followers by dividing your enemies; find a single enemy against whom to rally the masses and focus their ferocity.

 

So far, Hitler’s speeches had been windy rants about German greatness, leavened with hatred of Jews and communists, which appealed to his audiences of soldiers and workers. He had not yet articulated or committed to paper a political programme of violent anti-Semitism.

His fury at Versailles, however, was unextinguishable. Nothing would stand between Hitler and those he held responsible. His first written anti-Semitic statement appeared on 16 September 1919, in his long reply to a soldier, Adolf Gemlich, who had written to ask whether the Jews posed a national threat and, if so, what was to be done with them. Hitler’s letter may be read as a kind of psychological pit stop en route to the full-blown expression of his racial creed: it was ‘the key document’ in his post-war political life, notes Ullrich.¹⁴ It also marked the point at which he distinguished ‘emotional’ from ‘rational’ anti-Semitism, and cast ‘the Jews’ as complicit in a plan to destroy Germany.

If the letter sounds ‘mild’ to us, given what was to come, it was in fact Hitler’s first written condemnation of anyone who shared the Jewish faith, or ‘race’, as he insisted on calling a religion with ethnic roots as diverse as Sephardi and Ashkenazi, Mizrahi and Ethiopian. Other inconvenient facts had no traction on his mind, such as the fact that the Jews amounted to less than 1 per cent of the German population; that most Jews were neither rich nor powerful nor involved in politics; and that Jewish Germans had fought in the war in proportion to their numbers. No doubt the Jews were, in general, better educated and more prosperous than the average, but, if nothing else, that made them higher per capita contributors to the German exchequer – a benefit, not a hindrance, to society.

‘Dear Herr Gemlich,’ Hitler wrote:

The danger posed by Jewry for our people today finds expression in the undeniable aversion of wide sections of our people. The cause of this aversion is not to be found in a clear recognition of the consciously or unconsciously systematic and pernicious effect of the Jews as a totality upon our nation. Rather, it arises mostly from personal contact and from the personal impression which the individual Jew leaves – almost always an unfavorable one. For this reason, antisemitism is too easily characterized as a mere emotional phenomenon. And yet this is incorrect. Antisemitism as a political movement may not and cannot be defined by emotional impulses, but by recognition of the facts. The facts are these: First, Jewry is absolutely a race and not a religious association … There is scarcely a race whose members belong exclusively to just one definite religion.

Through thousands of years of the closest kind of inbreeding, Jews in general have maintained their race and their peculiarities far more distinctly than many of the peoples among whom they have lived. And thus comes the fact that there lives amongst us a non-German, alien race which neither wishes nor is able to sacrifice its racial character or to deny its feeling, thinking, and striving.

Nevertheless, it possesses all the political rights we do. If the ethos of the Jews is revealed in the purely material realm, it is even clearer in their thinking and striving. Their dance around the golden calf is becoming a merciless struggle for all those possessions we prize most highly on earth.

The value of the individual is no longer decided by his character or by the significance of his achievements for the totality but exclusively by the size of his fortune, by his money. The loftiness of a nation is no longer to be measured by the sum of its moral and spiritual powers, but rather by the wealth of its material possessions.

This thinking and striving after money and power, and the feelings that go along with it, serve the purposes of the Jew who is unscrupulous in the choice of methods and pitiless in their employment. In autocratically ruled states he whines for the favour of ‘His Majesty’ and misuses it like a leech fastened upon the nations …

He destroys the character of princes with byzantine flattery, national pride (the strength of a people), with ridicule and shameless breeding to depravity …

His power is the power of money, which multiplies in his hands effortlessly and endlessly through interest, and which forces peoples under the most dangerous of yokes. Its golden glitter, so attractive in the beginning, conceals the ultimately tragic consequences. Everything men strive after as a higher goal, be it religion, socialism, democracy, is to the Jew only means to an end, the way to satisfy his lust for gold and domination …

In his effects and consequences he is like a racial tuberculosis of the nations.

The deduction from all this is the following: an antisemitism based on purely emotional grounds will find its ultimate expression in the form of the pogrom. An antisemitism based on reason, however, must lead to systematic legal combatting and elimination of the privileges of the Jews, that which distinguishes the Jews from the other aliens who live among us (an Aliens Law). The ultimate objective [of such legislation] must, however, be the irrevocable removal of the Jews in general …

For both these ends a government of national strength, not of national weakness, is necessary …

Respectfully,
Adolf Hitler¹⁵

At this point a dour machine-fitter and locksmith called Anton Drexler and a flamboyant society journalist, poet and playwright called Dietrich Eckart entered the stage, and would play vital roles in accelerating Hitler’s career.

On 5 January 1919, along with Gottfried Feder and the sports journalist Karl Harrer, the two men had founded a small political party called the Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (DAP, or German Workers’ Party). It grew out of the Alldeutscher Verband (Pan-German League), which had flourished in the war years and was run rather like a masonic club. The DAP members included a few Bavarian notables and the students Hans Franck and Alfred Rosenberg, both of whom would become prominent Nazis.

Hitler first attended a meeting of this party as an observer (some have miscast his role as ‘spy’) on 12 September 1919, at the behest of Mayr and the Lechfeld commando unit. At the time the DAP was little more than a Munich drinking club of tradesmen, publishers, students and small-business owners. Yet their political beliefs had two distinctive features: a stringent attachment to the white supremacist Thule Society (a sort of extreme right, anti-Semitic Rotary Club, which used the sign of the swastika); and a devotion to the ideal of ‘national socialism’ – championing the working man in the name of Germany.

In the gloomy Sterneckerbräu tavern, later enshrined as a Nazi Party birthplace, Hitler encountered forty-one working men loosely engaged in talk of building a national workers’ party loyal to the Fatherland. Their subject: ‘How and by what means can we get rid of capitalism?’ Near the end of the discussion, Hitler couldn’t resist expounding his own, more extreme vision of Germany’s political future, provoking Drexler, the party chairman, reportedly to say: ‘That one’s got quite a mouth on him! We could use that!’¹⁶ At which point, Drexler shoved into Hitler’s hands a pamphlet he had written entitled ‘My Political Awakening’.

Drexler’s ‘awakening’ cohered with Hitler’s own: what Germany needed was a political movement that welded nationalism and socialism – a German workers’ movement, utterly wedded to the Fatherland, not to Marxism or the siren song of Bolshevism that had destroyed the Bavarian soviet. Hitler was seized at once by the magnetism of the idea: a workers’ uprising in the name of Deutschland!

There was nothing new in this: a left-wing pastor, Friedrich Naumann, had set up a similar movement in the 1890s, called the National-Social Association, dedicated to luring workers away from the class war and instilling in them a belief in the German state. It failed, in the early 1900s, at a time when extreme social division made the workers more loyal to class than state.

Yet a very different mood had seized the post-war world, and Drexler’s political theories appealed more to the lower-middle classes – the völkisch (populist) movement of tradesmen, artisans, ex-soldiers, farmers and clerks, who had lost most in the war and economic crisis – than to the traditional working class.

Many far-right German political organizations, chiefly the Pan-German League, the Thule Society and war veterans’ associations, similarly saw the saviour of Germany in the mass power of the Volk (people), many of whom were hankering to reassert their economic influence. The German Socialist Party (Deutschsozialistische Partei, or DSP) shared many elements of the same platform – the hatred of ‘Jewish’ capitalism and the Versailles Treaty – and would later attempt and fail to merge with the Nazi Party.

A few days later, Hitler accepted an invitation to join the DAP, as Member 55 – not Member 7 as he later claimed (in fact he was registered as the 555th member, as the numbering began at 501 to disguise the party’s small size) – and agreed to attend a party committee meeting a week later in a tavern in Herrnstrasse. This failed to impress him: the DAP was bereft of organization, slogans, pamphlets, membership cards. It was clubby small-mindedness, in Hitler’s view, a mere display of faith and goodwill without any inner order or plan.

While the pathos of this political embryo repelled the thirty-year-old Hitler, its Pan-German ideas attracted him. He applauded the ideal of a ‘national socialist’ party, which answered his deepest longings for a movement that ran roughshod over the Marxists while elevating the German people. Moreover, the DAP’s rudimentary structure offered Hitler a blank slate on which to carve his own programme. ‘Never could he,’ wrote the American historian Ronald Phelps, ‘with his “lack of schooling”, have gone to one of the larger parties to face the condescension of their educated leaders and the impossible task of altering their ideas, but in the DAP, “this ridiculous little creation”, he could change things and could shine among less than equals.’¹⁷

Most of all, the DAP offered the structure through which he might express his political fury, chiefly his longing to punish the ‘November Criminals’ who had surrendered Germany. The party’s members shared his burning hatred for these ‘internal’ enemies, Marxists and Jews. And the party endowed his beliefs with the stamp of officialdom, the imprimatur of authority, to which Germans in need of a leader would soon readily respond.

In the DAP, Hitler found himself a new family, another home, a political society that enabled him to draw together the reins of revenge against his enemies, real and imagined: those who had rejected or impoverished him, surrendered Germany to foreign powers, corroded the purity of the German race (Jews and non-Germans) and signed the Treaty of Versailles.

 

The DAP leaders immediately welcomed Hitler’s ideas and recognized his propaganda skills, and within a couple of weeks of joining the party he was invited on to its executive committee. Hitler moved quickly to reshape the party. An office and a typewriter were set up in the Sterneckerbräu; flyers and pamphlets poured off the production line; volunteers plastered the city in the new ideas. Membership rapidly rose, as did Hitler’s reputation. He quickly made himself indispensable, as an organizer and speaker.

On 16 October 1919 the new man in the German Workers’ Party took the stage before 111 people in Munich’s Hofbräukeller beer hall. Hitler intended to use his first major political speech as a platform for revenge. He didn’t disappoint his disciples, flogging the ‘November Criminals’ with the intensity of a personal crusade. ‘For thirty minutes,’ according to his biographer Joachim Fest’s vivid description, ‘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.’¹⁸

By the end of the speech, Hitler had not only entrenched himself as the front man of the DAP; he had unleashed a new political force. The people in the room ‘were electrified’, he later boasted: ‘I could speak!’¹⁹

The party agreed. Drexler and Eckart saw in this fiery rabble-rouser a political weapon of unusual emotional power. Hitler should be unleashed on the city. His singular message – denouncing Versailles, avenging German honour and attacking international capital, the Jews, the communists, etc. – exploded on to a world parched of hope and thirsty for vengeance.

Max Amann, the Nazi Party’s future publishing magnate, would later comment in amazement at the transformation in Hitler when he fronted a crowd: ‘There was an unfamiliar fire burning in him … He yelled and indulged in histrionics … He was drenched in sweat, completely wet, it was unbelievable.’²⁰ Hitler honed his scripts and delivery. There was nothing extempore about his speeches: they were all carefully rehearsed. To see him at the podium, pounding his fists, ranting and fuming; to feel the seductive power of this consummate populist was to engender in his audiences a kind of epiphany, awakening them to a new source of hope and power – a new Germany, a mighty Reich, a proud Fatherland. Even the most resistant sceptic fell prey to the allure of his self-belief: here was a man who could express the mood of a nation in the grip of a hitherto inarticulable fury.

During his second public speech, on 13 November 1919, at the Eberlbräu beer hall, Hitler singled out for special disgust the Treaty of Versailles and the man who had signed the Armistice on 11 November 1918, Reich finance minister Matthias Erzberger. Erzberger should be sacked, Hitler shouted, delighting the crowd, several of whom demanded the minister’s assassination (within two years Erzberger would be forced from office and murdered).

At the same time, Hitler began to focus the blame for Germany’s humiliation on a singular enemy. In a speech on 10 December he elevated the Jews to public enemy number one in his pantheon of villains. The Jews were dividing Germany and profiting from civil war, he insisted, declaring ‘Germany for the Germans!’ And on 16 January 1920 he called for an end to Jewish immigration, and the closing of Germany’s borders to all unGerman elements.

Crowds began to pack into the beer halls to hear this strange, defiant young man, so unpromising in appearance, many agreed, until he stood on the podium – and opened his mouth. Many came out of curiosity, having heard stories of an eccentric ex-soldier turned politician. As many would leave, enthralled, spellbound and signed up to the cause.

 

Hitler’s speeches did not persuade everyone. They followed the same, simple format, of head-pounding repetition. As he himself later admitted, he would ram home a single idea into the brains of his audience until even the thickest member understood him. His bombastic delivery and barking voice could not hide a want of substance, of emotional truth. The themes that bound his speeches together were hatred and defiance, which perhaps explains why he was loath to speak to small groups, or family gatherings, about sensitive or personal subjects. He routinely turned down invitations to address weddings and funerals. ‘I must have a crowd when I speak,’ he explained, when rejecting a request to speak at a small wedding party. ‘In a small intimate circle I never know what to say.’²¹

Professor Daniel Binchy, who would become Irish Minister to Germany from 1929 to 1932, witnessed Hitler speak at Munich’s largest beer hall, the Bürgerbräukeller, in 1921. The leader of ‘a new freak party’ would be speaking, a friend of Binchy’s had warned.

‘The hall was not quite full,’ Binchy recalled, ‘the audience seemed to be drawn from the poorest of the poor, the “down-and-outs” of the city …’ He first set eyes on Hitler as the latter sat waiting his turn to speak. ‘I remember wondering idly if it were possible to find a more common-place looking man,’ Binchy wrote at the time:

His countenance was opaque, his complexion pasty, his hair plastered down with some glistening unguent and – as if to accentuate the impression of insignificance – he wore a carefully docked ‘toothbrush’ moustache. I felt willing to bet that in private life he was a plumber: a whispered query to my friend brought the information that he was a housepainter.

He rose to speak and after a few minutes I had forgotten all about his insignificant exterior. Here was a born natural orator. He began slowly, almost hesitatingly … Then all at once he seemed to take fire. His voice rose over falterings, his eyes blazed with conviction, his whole body became an instrument of rude eloquence. As his exaltation increased, his voice rose almost to a scream, his gesticulation became a wild pantomime, and I noticed traces of foam at the corners of his mouth … [T]he same phrases kept recurring all through his address like motifs in a symphony: the Marxist traitors, the criminals who caused the Revolution, the German army which was stabbed in the back, and – most insistent of all – the Jews.²²

Years later, Binchy heard Hitler deliver a near-replica of the address, and realized that the Führer simply recycled his speeches throughout his career. While his delivery had improved (Hitler practised his gestures in front of a mirror) and his words were tailored to his audience, he always said much the same thing.

Hitler possessed a rare ability to channel hatred and violence into a programme of political action. Like all great political salesman, he appealed to the heart, not the mind – the dark heart of Germany as the ‘victim’. It little mattered what he actually said; what mattered was the way he said it. He had mastered the art of delivery, to the point that he was more an actor, an impresario, than a political leader. He knew exactly what the masses wanted to hear, and how to stir them up with violent slogans and images of vast conspiracies.

Yet none of Hitler’s speeches conveyed any quotable phrases, great insights or witticisms. If they sometimes provoked laughter, the joke was always at the expense of an easy target, a punchline against Jews or foreigners or others who were unable to respond or protest. ‘[H]e never succeeded,’ observed the historian Percy Schramm, ‘as Bismarck, on the basis of his literary culture, was often able to do – in fashioning an enduring phrase or a memorable epigram.’²³

The newspaper Völkischer Beobachter, which the Nazi Party acquired in 1920, published the scripts of Hitler’s speeches a few days after he delivered them. To read his words on the unforgiving page is to encounter a puffed-up, paranoid mind, curiously childlike, yet so bloated with self-importance and delusions of grandeur that it was little wonder many people – including most European governments – failed to take him seriously.

The issue of 22 April 1922, for example, published a speech Hitler had given ten days earlier entitled ‘The Jew’. ‘The Jew,’ Hitler told his audience, who responded with laughter:

is slowly bloating up, and if you do not believe this, I beg you to go and look in our health resorts. There you will find two kinds of people: the German, who goes there to catch a breath of fresh air … and the Jew, who goes there to get rid of his fat … If you go out into our mountains, whom do you find in new yellow boots, with beautiful knapsacks …? The Jews go up to the hotel, generally as far as the train goes, and where the train stops there they also stop. They sit around within a kilometre’s distance of the hotel, like blowflies around a cadaver.²⁴

The speech then moved on to the more serious matter of the similarities between Hitler and Jesus Christ, in which Hitler portrayed himself as the avenger of Christianity against ‘the userers, the vipers and cheats’ whom Christ had driven from the temple: ‘I recognise with deep emotion, Christ’s tremendous fight for this world against the Jewish poison,’ he continued:

As [a] man, it is my duty to see to it that humanity will not suffer the same catastrophic collapse as did an old civilisation about 2,000 years ago … Two thousand years ago a man was likewise denounced by this particular race … That man was dragged into court and they told him: He is arousing the people! So he also was ‘agitating’! And against whom? Against ‘God’, they cried. Yes indeed, he was agitating against the ‘god’ of the Jews, for that ‘god’ is money.²⁵

His audiences revelled in the comparison: here was a leader prepared to name those responsible for their humiliation, their joblessness and their financial loss. Here was a messiah-like figure, willing to banish the Jews from the Lutheran temple. To a country on its knees, this strangely charismatic speaker offered words that seemed to validate the nation’s sacrifice and war record when nobody else would.

It mattered little to Hitler if his enemies – few of whom dared brave the beer halls where he spoke – opposed or mocked him, so long as they never forgot him. Pounded by war and economic failure, Bavarian society swiftly descended to Hitler’s level: financial destitution reduced thousands of otherwise sensible people to endorse a man and a programme they would have scorned or laughed off in peaceful and prosperous times. It was a measure of the depths of German despair, rather than any of Hitler’s inherent qualities, that he managed to persuade so many.