CHAPTER SIXTEEN

‘The movement was on the march’

The path to power unfurling in Hitler’s mind at this time involved the seizure and control of the state through brute force and relentless propaganda. He would mould the German nation in his image, impelled by his childhood dreams, his thirst to avenge German military honour and the imperative to ‘cleanse’ the German race of impure racial elements. With this goal, he focused all his efforts on transforming the DAP into a new party of ‘national socialists’, to which end they adopted a new name, the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (NSDAP), on 24 February 1920, under Hitler’s pressure. The diminutive ‘Nazi’, first used derogatorily by their political enemies, became a catchword in Munich’s beer halls in the early 1920s.

The party saw itself as the hammer, and the German people the anvil, of a new political forge. And no other member matched the agility and verve with which Hitler saw and exploited opportunities to seize and drive the agenda, from transforming the party aesthetic – vitally important to the artist, who took a close interest in the style of the swastika and uniforms – to cementing the party’s ‘25-point Programme’ (see here).

Benito Mussolini, leader of Italy’s fascist movement, had been the first to exploit the political appeal of a ‘national workers’ party that welded patriotism with socialism (Tito and Ho Chi Minh would try variants, in Yugoslavia and Vietnam). Under Hitler, however, ‘national socialism’ would be a different beast, far exceeding the boundaries of the ‘nation’ and the traditional definition of ‘socialism’.

From the outset, Hitler saw the absolute need to differentiate German National Socialism from the Leninist and social democratic breeds he so loathed. The idea of loyalty to class over country was repugnant to him, reawakening the disgust he claimed he had felt for unionized labour during a brief stint as a construction worker in Vienna. No political system was more abhorrent to him than the Bolsheviks’ proletarian paradise then being violently imposed upon Russia (and which would become the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the USSR, in December 1922). That explains why Hitler focused his wrath not only on the Jews but also on Bavaria’s local communists, whose short-lived soviet, or workers’ council, and brief takeover of the state had raised the horrifying spectre of a Russian invasion of Germany.

‘The fate of Russia would be ours!’ he warned repeatedly in 1919–20. Lenin’s Bolsheviks had killed more than 30 million people, he exaggerated grossly, ‘partly on the scaffold, partly by machine guns … partly in veritable slaughterhouses, partly, millions upon millions, by hunger; and we all know that this wave of hunger … this scourge is approaching, that it is also coming upon Germany.’¹ In truth, about 3 million would die under Lenin, chiefly in the civil wars between the Red and White Armies.

Hitler’s political purpose was clear: to ‘annihilate and exterminate’ the Marxist world view, which he would achieve through an ‘in comparable, brilliantly orchestrated propaganda and information organization’ in tandem with ‘the most ruthless force and brutal resolution, prepared to oppose all terrorism on the part of the Marxists with tenfold greater terrorism.’² His cheering admirers saw nothing amiss in Hitler calling on Germany to inflict massive violence on their enemies and to use the state as a lawless vehicle for oppression.

Indeed, as well as hatred of the Jews, Marxists and ‘November Criminals’, Hitler’s early speeches contained three related themes that should have rung alarm bells in the wider world: the rejection of democracy; the normalization of vigilante justice; and the gradual dismantling of the system of law and order. All three would define the coming Nazi regime.

 

The evolving party needed structure and direction in readiness for the mass meeting scheduled for 24 February 1920. Sharing the task, Drexler and Hitler laid down twenty-five principles that amalgamated their ideas – the ‘25-point Programme’ (see Appendix, for full list) – which they planned to present to the meeting. The first four encapsulated the essence of the NSDAP:

1. We demand the unification of all Germans in the Greater Germany on the basis of the people’s right to self-determination.
2. We demand equality of rights for the German people in respect to the other nations; abrogation of the peace treaties of Versailles and St. Germain.
3. We demand land and territory (colonies) for the sustenance of our people, and colonization for our surplus population.
4. Only a member of the race can be a citizen. A member of the race can only be one who is of German blood, without consideration of creed. Consequently, no Jew can be a member of the race.

As well as these demands came a few nods at popular policies, aimed at broadening the Nazis’ mandate: social welfare for veterans and the elderly; freedom of religion; and higher education for all. The rest was a prescription for tyranny over a nation emptied of Jews and non-Germans, in which the state would enjoy complete control over the people and the press. The final clause called for ‘unlimited authority of the central parliament over the whole Reich and its organizations in general’.³

On 24 February 1920, in the upper hall of Munich’s Hofbräuhaus, Drexler and Hitler unveiled the programme to a crowd of 2,000 of the party faithful. Hitler worked them into a frenzy with his attacks on the Jews and Versailles. ‘How shall we protect our fellow human beings against this band of bloodsuckers [the Jews]?’ he roared. ‘Hang them,’ the crowd shouted back.

Hitler would remember that speech in the Hofbräuhaus as one of the high points of his early political career; and the Nazis would later cherish it as a founding moment of the movement. He claimed that he had converted the hall to National Socialism and kindled the fire that would sharpen the ‘German sword of vengeance’, ‘restore freedom to the German Siegfried’ and ‘bring back life to the German nation …’ He felt that the ‘Goddess of Vengeance was now getting ready to redress the treason of the 9th November, 1918 [the date of the proclamation of the German Republic by Philipp Scheidemann, but Hitler was probably also alluding to the hated Armistice, two days later].’ He concluded: ‘The hall was emptied. The movement was on the march.’⁴

Opposition taunts of ‘Down with Hindenburg, Ludendorff and the German Nationalists!’ drowned out part of his speech, according to a cursory report in the next day’s newspaper (in fact, the mainstream German press barely reported the event, so little credibility did they accord the new party on the extreme right, whose members they tended to dismiss as upstarts and freaks).⁵ But Hitler had achieved what he had set out to do: win notoriety as the most provocative spokesman of the extremist parties in Munich. It all seemed so easy, because his most valuable political asset came naturally to him, as Kershaw observes: ‘… to stoke up the hatred of others by pouring out to them the hatred that was so deeply embedded in himself.’⁶

 

Around this time, early in 1920, Dietrich Eckart, one of the founder members of the DAP, a heavy-drinking poet and playwright who subscribed to a mystical notion of German supremacy, began to exert a powerful influence over Hitler. Eckart, on first hearing Hitler speak in 1919, was at once drawn to the raw energy of the man’s voice and had been one of the first to recognize his potential.

Eckart saw that Hitler’s ideas needed a more solid grounding, and his brawling style refashioning to appeal to a wider German audience. He now appointed himself as the Nazis’ Pygmalion, carving his protégé into the kind of man who would be presentable to families, wealthy matrons and their daughters. He introduced Hitler to powerful people, showing him off in the city’s fashionable salons. Most of all, Eckart helped raise funds for the fledgling Nazi Party.

His most important influence on Hitler was to cement in the latter’s mind a connection between Marxism and Judaism. Eckart achieved this by drawing on the ‘intellectual’ racism of Alfred Rosenberg, an émigré from Estonia who had supported the counter-revolutionaries against the Bolsheviks in Russia, and a committed anti-Semite, who met Hitler around this time and was soon to become the Nazi Party’s chief ideological thinker.

Hitherto none-too-subtle code words for each other, ‘Marxism’ and ‘Judaism’ were now routinely used synonymously, conflating in one vast conspiracy the principal enemy of the German state: a Jewish Bolshevik. According to this ‘analysis’, Jews were communists and communists were Jews (when they weren’t being capitalists). Hitler had often made the connection; now he shared Eckart’s and Rosenberg’s pseudo-scientific certainty.

Eckart also offered Hitler an instruction in ‘racial theory’. Spurring him on was the publication, for the first time in Germany, of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a bogus document purporting to reveal the existence of a Jewish plot to foment war and revolution and to conquer the world. It had first appeared in Russia in 1903 and circulated throughout many other countries in the early part of the twentieth century; Rosenberg too had been profoundly influenced by it. Its sensational appearance in Germany in 1919 could not have come at a worse time for the Jewish people. The NSDAP not only believed it, they also commandeered it as part of their ideological arsenal. Eckart frequently invoked The Protocols in declaring an apocalyptic war on the Jews. ‘When light clashes with darkness,’ he wrote, ‘there is no coming to terms! Indeed, there is only struggle for life and death, truth and lies, Christ and Antichrist.’ In Eckart’s mind the First World War had not ended; it continued, as a holy crusade against the perpetrators of Germany’s humiliation.⁷

Eckart’s lurid biblical imagery portrayed Germany as a nation more sinned against than sinning, martyred by a Jewish cabal who would be severely punished: ‘These Pharisees … whine about their wretched nest eggs! The liberation of humanity from the curse of gold stands before the door! It’s not simply a question of our collapse – it’s a question of our Golgotha!’⁸

Hitler drained the cup of Eckart, Rosenberg, Feder and other anti-Semitic ‘evangelists’ in damning the Jews as the common element that bound Germany’s enemies together. The Jews were not only active leaders on the left; they were the dominant force on the capitalist right. They were damned whatever they were, or wherever they happened to be. In Hitler’s mind, Marxism, capitalism and Judaism now coalesced as a monolithic movement, menacing the national polity and threatening to infect and destroy the Germanic race itself.

Hitler later claimed that he ‘became an out-and-out anti-Semite’ at this time.⁹ Vienna, Pasewalk and Versailles, of course, had elicited similar ‘life-changing’ statements. In truth, as we’ve seen, his ‘conversion’ resulted from cumulative memories and experiences, ambition, hatred and vengeance, shaped by Mayr, Drexler, Eckart, Rosenberg and others, and, most acutely, his long memory of the war.

In the next two years, Hitler’s emerging, savage anti-Semitism and raw political ambitions would serve and mutually reinforce a common goal: the seizure of power. With his oratorical skills and organizational flair, he was seen in the party as the coming man, an indispensable political asset. The rank and file increasingly embraced him as their mystical leader, the prophet of the movement; a few of the better-read Nazis saw him as their long-awaited Übermensch, the Nietzschean superman.

 

Standing in a crowded beer hall one night in the summer of 1920 was a tall, striking young man with the swagger of a war hero and an expression of delighted recognition on his face. This was Rudolf Hess, a twice-wounded former soldier who, like Hitler, had served in a Bavarian division during the war. He had taken part in the First Battle of Ypres, Verdun and the Somme, and then trained as a fighter pilot. Like Hitler, he was twice-decorated, receiving the Iron Cross (Second Class) and the Bavarian Military Medal for bravery.

That night Hess listened, transfixed, as his fellow war veteran addressed the Sterneckerbräu: ‘Hitler stood in the tobacco haze in a grey soldier’s uniform, crying out that the day would come “when the banner of our movement shall wave over the Reichstag in Berlin, over the Berlin Palace, indeed, over every German home”.’¹⁰

Hess fell swiftly into a state of awed devotion. He shared Hitler’s belief in the ‘stab in the back’; he blamed the Jews and Marxists for Germany’s defeat; he decried Germany’s humiliation at Versailles. Yet nobody had rolled them all together, into one grand political case for German defiance, like Hitler was doing. Here was the man who could save Germany, Hess thought. He joined the NSDAP in July 1920, as Number 16.

In Hess, Hitler found a trusted friend, fundraiser and collaborator. Both had survived the near-annihilation of their regiments, in 1914 and 1916, and both ‘felt themselves entitled to speak of destiny’s special protection’.¹¹ They became inseparable companions on the long march to power.

Hess and Hitler, according to an incisive essay by Konrad Heiden, became ‘intellectually conjoined to a degree that is possible only in abnormal personalities. Indeed, they had grown into one personality consisting of two men.’¹² Hess’s mind was, in a sense, ‘grafted upon Hitler’.¹³ Hess even acted as Hitler’s stand-in bodyguard, on 4 November 1921, injuring himself while protecting Hitler from a bomb that exploded in the Hofbräuhaus.

Throughout the 1920s their relationship deepened into one of mutual ‘admiration and love’, in which Hess became Hitler’s amanuensis and personal secretary, the man to whom the Führer would dictate Mein Kampf.¹⁴ In the years to come, Hess would rise on the wave of Hitler mania, eventually rewarded for his loyalty with the post of Deputy Führer.

For the time being, Hitler was still little more than a beer-hall rabble-rouser and ‘drummer boy’ for the movement, as he himself would say. His methods were those of the political bully and grassroots thug. His comrades made no secret of the party’s brutal origins. Like most of the early Nazi members, Hitler enjoyed a good beer-hall brawl. And while he rarely participated directly, he relished ordering the party’s militia, the Sturmabteilung (SA) – literally, Storm Detachment or storm troop (the name derived from small, lightning attack units in the First World War) – to smash up his political enemies: the flying steins (beer mugs), the smashed jaws, the blood on the floorboards – all announced the arrival of Hitler and his movement.

The SA, known as the Brownshirts on account of their light khaki uniforms, acted as Hitler’s personal police force and were initially deployed to control crowds and beat up protestors. They swiftly and violently made their presence felt in the beer halls and at party rallies, and on the streets. Gangs of SA prowled the city, threatening anyone who struck them as Jewish or homosexual or somehow not acceptable to the Nazis. They rapidly became one of the best-organized, largest and most brutal examples of an assortment of private militias spurred into being by their leaders’ defiance of the Versailles Treaty, which had banned paramilitary armies. Any budding Führer worthy of respect would boast a detachment of ‘bodyguards’, or whatever euphemism he chose to describe his personal thugs.

Such was Hitler’s popularity, the Brownshirts attracted waves of loyal adherents and rapidly grew into a private army that would play a powerful role in his rise to power in the 1920s and 1930s. Hermann Göring, a once-dashing former air ace, who joined the Nazi Party in 1922 and was to become one of Hitler’s closest henchmen, was one of the earliest and longest-standing SA commanders, on whom Hitler lavished praise: ‘I made him the head of my SA. He is the only one of its heads that ran the SA properly. I gave him a dishevelled rabble. In a very short time he had organised a division of 11,000 men.’¹⁵

Another notorious future Brownshirt commander was Ernst Röhm, an early party member, a rotund ‘hard man’ and (later) open homosexual. He was first given command of the Brownshirts in 1924, after the Munich Putsch (see Chapter 18), but his ideas failed to impress and he resigned. Recalled from a foreign posting in 1931, Röhm was again given command of the SA, and this time he built it into a rival power base that proved to be his undoing. He would be executed on 1 July 1934, during the ‘Night of the Long Knives’, on charges of treason.

With such men in command of his protection, Hitler was free to roam the city and speak wherever he chose. His popularity rose in parallel with his fame as a war hero and far-right revolutionary. Word of his charisma and the passionate reaction to his speeches was drawing hundreds to the beer halls to hear him. By late 1920, the NSDAP had enlisted more than 3,000 members. Hundreds were applying daily. Every time Hitler spoke, more signed on to the Nazi programme. The party had become the ‘recognised force in the Bavarian ultra-right’.¹⁶ Within a year it would be the leading völkisch party,¹⁷ largely due to Hitler’s skill as a propagandist, organizer and orator, fronting audiences that attracted as many as 3,000 people (6,000 heard him speak at Munich’s Zirkus Krone on 3 February 1921, his largest rally of the early 1920s).

He had become the party’s public face, chief spokesman and, in many eyes, its de facto leader. He put his personal touch on every aspect of the party’s operations and propaganda. The Nazi presence began to proliferate throughout Munich, and into Bavarian towns, marked by the visually striking swastika flags and armbands, the stomping groups of Brownshirts and the adoring fans of the ‘Hitler cult’.¹⁸ Rudolf Hess, in his new role as Hitler’s secretary, wrote of the party’s growth that year: ‘A terrible day of judgement dawns for the traitors of the nation before, during and after the war … Some day it will arise, this Greater Germany that shall embrace all who are of German blood.’¹⁹

Yet Hitler still had little recognition outside Bavaria. He himself later acknowledged that he was ‘nobody’ at this point in his career. And he would have stayed that way, as Kershaw persuasively argues, if not for the support of powerful sponsors and the desperate conditions of the post-war Reich.²⁰ What he needed now was a platform, a power base that would catapult his burgeoning political ambitions on to a larger, national stage – and he needed to exert complete control over his party. But not even Hitler would anticipate the pace of his rise to head a movement that would seriously consider overthrowing the leadership of the German state.

 

Around mid-1921, Hitler set his mind on taking over the party leadership. It would be a desperate lunge for power, to shore up his rising status in the party and thwart attempts to merge the NSDAP with the German Socialist Party and another völkisch movement, the Deutsche Werkgemeinschaft, led by Dr Otto Dickel, a remarkably charismatic speaker (who was even seen as a rival to Hitler) with a mystical faith in the German worker.

To Hitler’s mind, the NSDAP’s incumbents had exhausted their usefulness. Drexler, the chairman, lacked the energy and vision to fulfil the party’s ambitions, yet Hitler had hitherto delayed making a bid for the top job because he lacked the numbers. But now, in early July 1921, soon after his return from a trip to Berlin, he woke up to a threat to what he regarded as ‘his’ movement. Furious at the talk of mergers, which would have diluted his power, and disdainful of Dickel’s völkisch idealism, he could wait no longer.

Like any giant political ego that feels itself thwarted, Hitler moved to highlight his importance and indispensability in brazen style. On 11 July 1921, at a meeting of the NSDAP leaders with Dickel and his party to discuss a loose confederation, he threw a tantrum, tore up his membership card and stormed out. It was less a calculated move (as Hitler’s later, carefully timed tantrums would be) than the reaction of a cornered bully, shouting and screaming until he got his way. It was a pattern of behaviour that would recur throughout his leadership: he recognized no compromise, no halfway point. He would have all or nothing, and punctuated his demands with angry threats and a refusal to listen to advice or competing interests.

At first, the party’s leadership were furious. Hitler’s behaviour was unacceptable. Several even accused him of being in the pay of Jews and a supporter of the ousted Austrian emperor. Anonymous pamphlets attacked him as an enemy of the party. But senior Nazis – Eckart, Drexler and Rosenberg – realized that the loss of their finest speaker would be a body blow to the movement. Eckart intervened, and on 13 July Drexler asked Hitler to suggest terms that would persuade him to reverse his decision.

Hitler bided his time. He went ahead with a speech at the Circus Krone, Munich’s largest hall, on 20 July, which drew a capacity crowd. It was a resounding success. Then he won an ovation from exultant party stalwarts at a special members’ meeting in the Hofbräuhaus on the 29th. Firmly in charge of the agenda, Hitler let Rudolf Hess do the rest. His loyal number two brought the party leadership to their senses. ‘Are you really blind to the fact,’ Hess wrote, ‘that this man alone possesses the leadership personality capable of carrying out the struggle for Germany?’²¹

Hess’s intervention, and the party’s anxiety to have Hitler back on board, encouraged him to lay down his terms. He would settle for nothing less than dictatorial control over the party’s direction, the first of a string of all-or-nothing gambles he made throughout his political career. If he were to rejoin the NSDAP, he insisted, the party must be led and organized in a way that would make it ‘the sharpest weapon in the battle against the Jewish international rulers of our people’.

To this end, he must be elected as first chairman with ‘dictatorial powers’.²² The NSDAP’s committee grudgingly agreed. From that moment, Hitler would no longer be the party’s ‘drummer boy’, content to whip up the masses for the satisfaction of an idle leadership. He would be its voice, chief propagandist and dictator.

 

As chairman, Hitler moved quickly to elevate his own men and remove or relegate the NSDAP’s former leaders. Anton Drexler was made the party’s honorary life chairman, a sop to his powerlessness. Hitler thus set in motion, as early as mid-1921, a political movement personified by him and answerable to his will, whose primary, stated goals were the rejection of Versailles and the oppression and eventual eradication of the Jewish people from Germany.

He aimed to transform the Nazi movement into a properly structured political party that would command mass appeal.²³ In working to this end, he deployed another face of his many-faceted character: the organizer. He proved himself an exceptional party agitator and a political lightning rod. He reformed the party’s internal structure. He banished its democratic ethos and solicited new members who would be loyal to him rather than to the original leadership.

And he met the leaders of Munich society. Eckart continued showing off his protégé to wealthy political donors and local aristocrats. Hitler leapt at the chance to meet his social superiors, and his wealthy donors found it amusing and charming to entertain a street radical, a beer-hall ruffian, and fawned on him as if he were an exotic species. He revelled in charming wealthy old women. His manners were extravagant, bowing and scraping to disguise his social awkwardness, a caricature of a gentleman. His apparent vulnerability lit their maternal affections. Helene Bechstein, of the piano fortune, was not the only rich heiress who declared, ‘I wished he’d been my son.’ Hitler would return their compliments; in his 1925 Christmas message to Frau Carola Hoffman he wrote ‘To my beloved true little mother.’²⁴ Winifred Wagner, the composer’s daughter-in-law, was ‘full of reverence’ whenever Hitler visited the family in Bayreuth. Such women mothered and fed him, chose his clothes, guided his taste and decorum, as though he were a lost and lonely orphan in search of love (which in a sense, he was). And as he rose to the status of a political celebrity, these impressionable dames found themselves venerating and adoring him. Several dared entertain the thought that young Adolf might be a future husband to their daughters.

Hitler used them as tools for his advancement. He tended to exaggerate his obsequiousness in order to extract the devotion of powerful people who could serve him. The party needed their patronage and their money. And while the Bechsteins, the Hanfstaengls (owners of a fine-arts publishing house) and other wealthy Bavarian families warmed to this shy, suddenly excitable young man, whose ‘almost comic servility’ amused them,²⁵ they little realized they were in the play of just one of Hitler’s personas, adapted to his audience and purpose.

In the beer halls he played the role of a barking revolutionary; at the lectern, a ranting demagogue; and in the salons of the rich, a schmoozing sycophant. In time, as a famous politician, addressing captains of industry, he would come across as a staunch conservative and economic rationalist. And while he loathed the conventional morality of the Church and the bourgeois hypocrisy behind the notions of ‘tolerance’ and ‘decency’, Hitler was adept, when his audience demanded it, at pretending he shared these sentiments.

His personas served several functions: to shield his past, enhance the Hitler ‘mythology’, and free him to perform as he saw fit, to bully, persuade or charm. Nobody quite penetrated Hitler’s many masks, not even his closest companions or the people who worked beside him. Ernst Hanfstaengl and his family were not alone in thinking Hitler a friend, but one who would soon become ‘more secretive than friendly’.²⁶