by Ian Kershaw
Simplicity and repetition were two key ingredients in his speaking armoury. These revolved around the unvarying essential driving-points of his message: the nationalization of the masses, the reversal of the great ‘betrayal’ of 1918, the destruction of Germany’s internal enemies (above all the ‘removal’ of the Jews), and material and psychological rebuilding as the prerequisite for external struggle and the attainment of a position of world power.4 This conception of the path to Germany’s ‘salvation’ and rebirth was already partially devised, at least in embryo, by the date of his letter to Gemlich in September 1919.5 Important strands remained, however, to be added. The central notion of the quest for ‘living-space’ in eastern Europe was, for instance, not fully incorporated until the middle of the decade. It was only in the two years or so following the putsch debacle, therefore, that his ideas finally came together to form the characteristic fully-fledged Weltanschauung that thereafter remained unaltered.
But all this is to run ahead of the crucial developments which shaped the first passage of Hitler’s political ‘career’ as the beerhall agitator of an insignificant Munich racist party and the circumstances under which he came to lead that party.
I
The equation of National Socialism with Hitler, the frequently heard claim that it is no more than Hitlerism, always was a quite misleading oversimplification.6 That Hitler was indispensable to the rise to and exercise of power of National Socialism is, of course, undeniable. But the phenomenon itself existed before Hitler was heard of, and would have continued to exist if Hitler had remained a ‘nobody of Vienna’.7 Much of the pot-pourri of ideas that went to make up Nazi ideology – an amalgam of prejudices, phobias, and Utopian social expectations rather than a coherent set of intellectual propositions – was to be found in different forms and intensities before the First World War, and later in the programmes and manifestos of fascist parties of many European countries. Integral nationalism, anti-Marxist ‘national’ socialism, social Darwinism, racism, biological antisemitism, eugenics, elitism intermingled in varying strengths to provide a heady brew of irrationalism attractive to some cultural pessimists among the intelligentsia and bourgeoisie of European societies undergoing rapid social, economic, and political change in the late nineteenth century. There was nothing especially Teutonic about them, though, naturally, as we noted in an earlier chapter, some of the ideas took on a particular form and developed a specific intonation in Germany and German-speaking Austria.
Ideas of a ‘national’, or ‘German’, socialism, in contrast to the international socialism of Marxism, were nothing new in Germany in 1919, though the war had given such notions a strong boost. The liberal pastor Friedrich Naumann had founded a ‘National-Social Association’ in the 1890s with a view to weaning industrial workers from class-struggle and integrating them as the pillars of the new nation-state. The attempt had failed dismally by 1903, and the notion of a ‘German’ socialism came to be wholly associated with the extreme anti-liberal politics of the antisemitic and völkisch movement. The appeal here was mainly to the lower-middle classes – traders, craftsmen, small farmers, lower civil servants – and rooted in a combination of antisemitism, extreme nationalism, and vehement anti-capitalism (usually interpreted as ‘Jewish’ capitalism).8 Similar tendencies in Austria, during the time of Hitler’s youth, were to be found, as we noted in an earlier chapter, in the Schönerer movement. We noted, too, that conflicts between Czech and German workers in Bohemia had already led by 1904 to the establishment of a German Workers’ Party at Trautenau in what came to be known as the Sudetenland, combining völkisch nationalism and anti-Marxist, anti-capitalist socialism.9 Hitler acknowledged the foundation, twenty years earlier, of this Austrian National Socialist Party, at his trial after the Putsch, though disclaimed any connection with his own movement.10 Certainly, there is no hint that he showed any interest in it or even acknowledged its existence during his time in Austria. The similarity of name continued after the war, when the Trautenau party became the German National Socialist Workers’ Party (DNSAP, Deutsche Nationalsozialistische Arbeiterpartei). There were contacts with Hitler’s movement in the early 1920s, but by 1923 the supremacy of the latter was established and in 1926 Hitler became acknowledged as the sole leader of both the Austrian and German branches of the re-established NSDAP.11
The völkisch variant of nationalism remained a minority taste before the First World War, though gaining influential backing through the Pan-Germans, through the dissemination of popular racist works such as those of Theodor Fritsch and Houston Stewart Chamberlain, and through the popularizing of exclusivist and aggressive ethnic nationalism in countless schools and youth organizations. The central strands of völkisch ideology were extreme nationalism, racial antisemitism, and mystical notions of a uniquely German social order, with roots in the Teutonic past, resting on order, harmony, and hierarchy.12 Most significant was the linkage of a romanticized view of Germanic culture (seen as superior but heavily threatened by inferior but powerful forces, particularly Slavs and Jews), with a social Darwinian emphasis upon struggle for survival, imperialist notions of the need for expansion to the Slavic east in order to safeguard national survival, and the necessity of bringing about racial purity and a new élite by eradicating the perceived arch-enemy of Germandom, the spirit of Jewry.
We have already seen how conditions in the last two years of the war were conducive to the rapid spread of antisemitism and völkisch nationalism, of which it was an integral part. The massive political upheaval and disarray that followed defeat and revolution gave even greater sustenance to the ideas of extreme nationalism. These ideas were represented in a variety of forms by a myriad of different political groups and movements. But of importance, in the changed circumstances, was that völkisch nationalism, in all its extremes, could now blend into more mainstream nationalist forces to offer a frontal ideological rejection of democracy and the Weimar state. The foundations of a rounded anti-democratic ideology, an antithesis to Weimar, were established not in the primitive beer-table discussions of völkisch ‘ thinkers’ and ‘philosophers’, but by neo-conservative writers, publicists and intellectuals such as Wilhelm Stapel, Max Hildebert Boehm, Moeller van den Bruck, Othmar Spann, and Edgar Jung. Ideas of an organic Volk, resting on purity of blood and race, forming a national community (Volksgemeinschaft) that transcended each individual within it, producing a true ‘national’ socialism which was anti-liberal as it was anti-capitalist and anti-bourgeois, binding each individual at the same time to service to that community through subordination to leaders of notable ability, wisdom, and substance, formed central elements of this ideology.13
The anti-capitalist and anti-bourgeois ideas of this ensemble naturally did not endear themselves to the conservative nationalists in the German National People’s Party, the DΝVΡ, the mainstream nationalist party which had arisen from the ashes of the old German Conservative Party.14 And the neo-conservatives generally thought the Nazis were vulgar and primitive. Even so, defeat, revolution, and the establishment of democracy had fostered a climate in which a counter-revolutionary set of ideas could gain wide currency, blending in part both into older forms of conservative nationalism and into the newer, popularized and vulgarized brands of völkisch nationalism. The ‘national disgrace’ felt throughout Germany at the humiliating terms imposed by the victorious Allies and reflected in the Versailles Treaty signed on 28 June 1919, with its confiscation of territory and, even more so, its ‘guilt clause’, enhanced the creation of a mood in which such ideas were certain of a hearing. The first Reichstag election in June the following year, in its calamitous losses for the parties supportive of the new democracy, revealed, as is often said, that Weimar was now ‘a Republic without republicans’ – a notable exaggeration, but expressive of the state’s low esteem in the eyes of a majority of its citizens (including many of its most powerful).15 The potential was thus provided for extreme nationalism to move from the fringes of politics towards the centre groun
d.
The crowds that began to flock in 1919 and 1920 to Hitler’s speeches were not motivated by refined theories. For them, simple slogans, kindling the fires of anger, resentment, and hatred, were what worked. But what they were offered in the Munich beerhalls was nevertheless a vulgarized version of ideas which were in far wider circulation. Hitler acknowledged in Mein Kampf that there was no essential distinction between the ideas of the völkisch movement and those of National Socialism.16 He had little interest in clarifying or systematizing these ideas. Of course, he had his own obsessions – a few basic notions which never left him after 1919, became formed into a rounded ‘world-view’ in the mid-1920s, and provided the driving-force of his ‘mission’ to ‘rescue’ Germany. But ideas held no interest for Hitler as abstractions. They were important to him only as tools of mobilization.
When Hitler joined the German Workers’ Party, it was one of some seventy-three völkisch groups in Germany, most of them founded since the end of the war.17 In Munich alone there were at least fifteen in 1920.18 Like the DAP, most of these were small, insignificant organizations. An exception, however, and an important bridge to the early following of the Nazi Party, was the German Nationalist Protection and Defiance Federation (Deutschvölkischer Schutz- und Trutz-Bund), founded at the beginning of 1919 on an initiative of the Pan-German League to amalgamate a number of smaller völkisch associations into an organization capable of winning the masses to the antisemitic movement.19 Though its headquarters were located in Hamburg, where völkisch ideas were already widespread in the white-collar workers’ union, the Deutschnationaler Handlungsgehilfenverband, it found significant resonance in the heated antisemitic climate in Munich. Its propaganda output was formidable. In 1920 alone it distributed 7.6 million pamphlets, 4.7 million handbills, and 7.8 million stickers.20 As the symbol of the völkisch struggle it chose the swastika. Some of its early membership had drained into it from the short-lived Fatherland Party. Within a year it had expanded from 30,000 to 100,000 members and went on to more than double this to over 200,000 members in the three years of its existence. Prominent among them were former soldiers angered at their treatment after a war allegedly lost through a ‘stab-in-the-back’, artisans feeling their status under threat from the proletariat, teachers attracted to pan-German ideology, and students resentful at their own altered prospects and insulted by national humiliation.21 Many of its members later found their way into the NSDAP.22 The fact that the Schutz- und Trutzbund was a purely agitatory organization, not allied to any political party, and had no clear political aims hampered its effectiveness. But its rapid expansion was an indication of the growing potential for völkisch ideas – and particularly for the mobilizing force of antisemitism – if they could be ‘marketed’ effectively.
Within the völkisch pool of ideas, the notion of a specifically German or national socialism, tied in with an onslaught on ‘Jewish’ capitalism, had gained ground in the last phase of the war, and spawned both Drexler’s German Workers’ Party and what was soon to become its arch-rival, the German-Socialist Party (Deutschsozialistische Partei).23 The latter’s founder, Alfred Brunner, a Düsseldorf engineer, had been involved in völkisch politics since 1904. Radical land and finance reform featured in a programme that had many close affinities with the Nazi Party Programme of 1920. By the end of 1919 the DSP had sizeable branches in Düsseldorf, Kiel, Frankfurt am Main, Dresden, Nuremberg, and Munich. Other branches were set up elsewhere, including Berlin, during 1920. By the middle of the year, the party had thirty-five branches and approaching 2,000 members. The organizational spread eventually proved a weakness compared with the regional concentration of the Nazi Party. And attempts to merge the DSP with the Nazi Party in 1920 and 1921 were to form the backcloth to the bitter conflict in the party in summer 1921 that culminated in Hitler taking over the leadership.
Already during the war, Munich had been a major centre of anti-government nationalist agitation by the Pan-Germans, who found a valuable outlet for their propaganda in the publishing house of Julius F. Lehmann – a prominent Munich member of the Fatherland Party – otherwise renowned for the publication of texts on medicine.24 Lehmann was also a member of the Thule Society, a völkisch club of a few hundred well-heeled members, run like a masonic lodge, that had been founded in Munich at the turn of the year 1917–18 out of the pre-war Germanen-Orden, set up in Leipzig in 1912 to bring together a variety of minor antisemitic groups and organizations.25 Its membership list, including alongside Lehmann the ‘economics expert’ Gottfried Feder, the publicist Dietrich Eckart, the journalist and co-founder of the DAP Karl Harrer, and the young nationalists Hans Frank, Rudolf Heß, and Alfred Rosenberg, reads like a Who’s Who of early Nazi sympathizers and leading figures in Munich. The colourful and rich head of the Thule Society, Rudolf Freiherr von Sebottendorff – a cosmopolitan adventurer and a self-styled aristocrat who was actually the son of a train-driver and had made his fortune through shady deals in Turkey and an opportune marriage to a rich heiress – ensured that meetings could be held in Munich’s best hotel, the ‘Vier Jahreszeiten’, and provided the völkisch movement in Munich with its own newspaper, the Münchener Beobachter (renamed in August 1919 as the Völkischer Beobachter, and eventually bought by the Nazis in December 1920). It was from the Thule Society that the initiative arose towards the end of the war to try to influence the working class in Munich. Karl Harrer was commissioned to attempt this, and made contact with a railway workshop locksmith, Anton Drexler. Having been found unfit for military service, Drexler had in 1917 temporarily found an expression of his nationalist and racist sentiments in the Fatherland Party. Then, in March 1918, he had founded a ‘Workers’ Committee for a Good Peace’ in an effort to stir enthusiasm for the war effort among Munich’s working class. He combined his extreme nationalism with an anti-capitalism demanding draconian action against profiteers and speculators. Harrer, a sports-reporter on the right-wing Münchner-Augsburger Abendzeitung, persuaded Drexler and a few others to set up a ‘Political Workers’ Circle’ (Politischer Arbeiterzirkel). The ‘Circle’, a group of usually three to seven members, met periodically for about a year from November 1918 onwards to discuss nationalist and racist themes – such as the Jews as Germany’s enemy, or responsibility for the war and defeat – usually introduced by Harrer.26 Whereas Harrer preferred the semi-secretive völkisch ‘ club’, Drexler thought discussing recipes for Germany’s salvation in such a tiny group had scant value, and wanted to found a political party. He proposed in December the setting up of a ‘German Workers’ Party’ which would be ‘free of Jews (judenrein)’.27 The idea was well received, and, on 5 January 1919, at a small gathering – mainly contacts from the railway yards – in the Fürstenfelder Hof in Munich, the German Workers’ Party was formed. Drexler was elected chairman of the Munich branch (the only one that existed), while Harrer was given the honorary title of ‘Reich Chairman’.28 Only in the more favourable climate after the crushing of the Räterepublik was the infant party able to stage its first public meetings. Attendance was sparse. Ten members were present on 17 May, thirty-eight when Dietrich Eckart spoke in August, and forty-one on 12 September. This was the occasion on which Hitler attended for the first time.29
II
Hitler’s part in the early development of the German Workers’ Party (subsequently the NSDAP) is obscured more than it is clarified by his own tendentious account in Mein Kampf. As usual, this is characterized less by pure invention than by selective memory and distortion of facts. And, as throughout his book, Hitler’s version of events is aimed, more than all else, at elevating his own role as it denigrates, plays down, or simply ignores that of all others involved. It amounts, as always in Hitler’s own account, to the story of a political genius going his way in the face of adversity, a heroic triumph of the will. The story was the core of the ‘party legend’ which in later years Hitler never tired of retelling at inordinate length as the preface to his major speeches. It was that of the political genius who join
ed a tiny body with grandiose ideas but no hope of realizing them, raising it single-handedly to a force of the first magnitude which would come to rescue Germany from its plight.
Hitler wrote contemptuously of the organization he had joined. The state of the party was depressing in the extreme. The committee constituted practically the whole membership. Though it attacked parliamentary rule, its own matters were decided, after ‘interminable argument’, by majority vote. It met in the dingy back rooms of Munich pubs. It had no permanent headquarters. In fact, it had no membership forms, no printed matter, not even a rubber stamp. Invitations to party meetings were handwritten or produced on a typewriter. The same few people turned up.30 Eventually, a move to mimeographed notices brought a modest rise in numbers attending, and funds were raised to allow a newspaper advertisement in the Münchener Beobachter for a meeting on 16 October 1919 which attracted 111 people to the Hofbräukeller, the large drinking saloon attached to one of Munich’s big breweries, situated in Wienerstraße to the east of the city centre (and not to be confused with the better-known Hofbräuhaus, located in the city centre itself). The main speaker was a Munich professor, but Hitler – according to his own account – then spoke for the first time in public (apart from to captive audiences in the Lechfeld Camp), for half an hour instead of his scheduled twenty minutes. He electrified his audience and prompted a collection of 300 Marks for the party coffers. He brought some of his army contacts into the movement, breathing much-needed new life into it. The party leaders, Harrer and Drexler, were in his view uninspiring: they were neither good speakers, nor had they served in the war. Hitler and the party leadership were at odds about future strategy. On the basis of his initial success, Hitler insisted on more frequent and larger meetings. He got his way, and these took place in the Eberlbräukeller and the ‘Gasthaus Zum Deutschen Reich’, on Dachauerstraße near the barracks area, with Hitler speaking to bigger audiences and with great success.31 By the seventh meeting, a few weeks later, the attendance had swollen to over 400 people. Hitler’s star was now in the ascendant within the party. Early in 1920, his account went on, he urged the staging of the first great mass meeting. Again there were major differences of opinion within the party leadership, doubters arguing that it was premature and would be a disastrous failure. The cautious Harrer, the party’s first chairman, resigned because of his disagreement with Hitler, and was replaced by Drexler. Again, Hitler prevailed. The mass meeting was organized for 24 February 1920 in the Festsaal of the Hofbräuhaus in the centre of Munich. The big, noisy hall on the first floor – above the even rougher and rowdier ‘Schwemme’ down below – had, like all the city’s numerous big drinking establishments, rows of tables stacked with the stone beermugs and benches groaning under the weight of thick-set men in Bavarian short leather trousers while hefty waitresses bustled between the tables delivering foaming litres of beer. When it was not hired out, as it frequently was, for large political meetings, the beer-swilling crowds would sway merrily to drinking songs played by a Bavarian brass band. At political meetings, heavy drinking, prompting verbal interjections and sometimes brawls, was commonplace. Moving to such a venue – a far bigger hall than the infant party had so far used – was risky, courting the embarrassment of a small turn-out.