by Ian Kershaw
A good deal of effort was put into designing striking red posters and leaflets advertising the meeting. The party’s programme, to be announced at the meeting, was also printed and distributed. The publicity worked. The huge hall was packed when Hitler arrived at quarter past seven that evening. Still according to his own account, after a first speaker, whose name he does not mention, had spoken, Hitler – chairing the meeting in the absence of Drexler, who had apparently suffered some sort of nervous collapse – took the floor. Clashes between his supporters and those trying to heckle the speaker took place, but Hitler continued speaking, to mounting applause, and expounded the programme, swaying his audience to rapturous and unanimous acclamation of its twenty-five points.32 Finally, declares Hitler in his Mein Kampf version, ‘there stood before me a hall full of people united by a new conviction, a new faith, a new will’. The German hero was setting out on his quest: ‘A fire was kindled from whose flame one day the sword must come which would regain freedom for the Germanic Siegfried and life for the German nation… Thus slowly the hall emptied. The movement took its course.’33
The story has been aptly described as ‘a heroic legend in half-naturalistic style, young Siegfried warbling his wood-notes wild in Munich beer halls’.34 The legend was framed to portray the beginnings of the Führer figure, Germany’s coming great leader and saviour, as it had emerged by the writing of the first volume of Mein Kampf in 1924. Towering over the weak and vacillating early leaders of the party, certain of himself and of the coming to fruition of his mighty vision, proven successful in his methods, his greatness – so his account was designed to illustrate – was apparent even in these first months after joining the movement. There could be no doubt about his claim to supremacy in the völkisch movement against all pretenders.
After dealing with subsequent successes in building up the party’s following, Hitler returned to the early party history in a later passage in Mein Kampf when, surprisingly briefly and remarkably vaguely, he described his takeover of the party leadership in mid-1921. His terse summary simply indicates that after intrigues against him and ‘the attempt of a group of völkisch lunatics’, supported by the party chairman (Drexler), to obtain the leadership of the party had collapsed, a general membership meeting unanimously gave him leadership over the whole movement. His reorganization of the movement on 1 August 1921 swept away the old, ineffectual quasi-parliamentary way of running party matters by committee and internal democracy, and substituted for it the leadership principle as the organizational basis of the party. His own absolute supremacy was thereby assured.35
Here, it seems, embodied in the description in Mein Kampf, is the realization of Hitler’s ambition for dictatorial power in the movement – subsequently in the German state – which could be witnessed in his early conflicts with Harrer and Drexler, and his rejection of the initial inner-party democratic style. The weakness of lesser mortals, their inability to see the light, the certainty with which he went his own way, and the need to follow a supreme leader who alone could ensure ultimate triumph – these, from the outset, are the dominant themes. The beginning of his claim to leadership can thus be located in the earliest phase of his activity within the party. In turn, this suggests that the self-awareness of political genius was present from the beginning.
Little wonder that, on the basis of this story, the enigma of Hitler is profound. The ‘nobody of Vienna’, the corporal who is not even promoted to sergeant, now appears with a full-blown political philosophy, a strategy for success, and a burning will to lead his party, and sees himself as Germany’s coming great leader. However puzzling and extraordinary, the underlying thrust of Hitler’s self-depiction has found a surprising degree of acceptance.36 But, though not inaccurate in all respects, it requires substantial modification and qualification.
III
The break with Karl Harrer soon came. It was not, however, an early indicator of Hitler’s relentless striving for dictatorial power in the movement. Nor was it simply a matter of whether the party should be a mass movement or a type of closed völkisch debating society.37 A number of völkisch organizations at the time faced the same problem, and attempted to combine an appeal to a mass audience with regular meetings of an exclusive ‘inner circle’. Harrer tended strongly towards the latter, represented by the ‘Workers’ Circle’, which he himself controlled, in contrast to the party’s ‘Working Committee’, where he was simply an ordinary member. But Harrer found himself increasingly isolated. Drexler was as keen as Hitler to take the party’s message to the masses. He later claimed that he, and not Hitler, had proposed announcing the party’s programme at a mass meeting in the Hofbräuhausfestsaal, and that Hitler had initially been sceptical about the prospects of filling the hall.38 As long as Harrer directed the party through his control of the ‘Workers’ Circle’, the question of the more viable propaganda strategy would remain unresolved. It was necessary, therefore, to enhance the role of the Committee, which Drexler and Hitler did in draft regulations that they drew up in December, giving it complete authority and ruling out any ‘superior or side government, whether as a circle or lodge’.39 The draft regulations – bearing Hitler’s clear imprint – determined that the Committee’s members and its chairman should be elected in an open meeting. Their unity, it went on, would be ensured through strict adherence to the programme of the party (which Hitler and Drexler were already preparing). The new regulations were plainly directed against Harrer. But they were not devised as a stepping-stone on the way to Hitler’s supreme power in the party. Evidently, he had no notion of dictatorial party rule at the time. He was ready to accept the corporate leadership of an elected committee. Decisions to stage mass meetings in the next months were, it seems, those of the Committee as a whole, approved by a majority of its members, not Hitler’s alone, though, once Harrer had departed and in view of Hitler’s increasing success in drawing the crowds to listen to his speeches, it is hard to believe that there was any dissension. Harrer alone, it appears, opposed the staging of an ambitious mass meeting in early 1920, and accepted the consequences of his defeat by resigning. Personal animosity also played a role. Harrer, remarkably, thought little of Hitler as a speaker. Hitler was in turn contemptuous of Harrer.40
The party’s first mass meeting was initially planned to take place in the Bürgerbräukeller (another large beerhall, on Rosenheimerstraße, just over the river Isar about half a mile south-east of the city centre) in January 1920, but had to be postponed because of a general ban on public meetings at the time.41 It was rescheduled for the Hofbräuhaus on 24 February. The fear that the meeting would be broken up through planned disturbances by political opponents, anxious to disrupt the first big meeting of a party calling itself a ‘workers’ party’, was probably exaggerated at this early stage in the party’s development. Large antisemitic meetings were nothing new in Munich at the time. Disturbances had to be reckoned with. A high-point of the antisemitic wave of agitation that had begun in Munich in summer 1919 had already taken place: a huge meeting of the Schutz- und Trutzbund on 7 January 1920, attended by 7,000 people, had provoked scenes of uproar.42 Corporal Hitler, who made a brief contribution to the ‘discussion’, cannot fail to have been impressed by the resonance of antisemitic agitation – or by the mark on public opinion in Munich made by such a piece of political theatre.43 The main worry of Hitler, as of Drexler, was not that there would be disruption, but that the attendance would be embarrassingly small. This was why, since Drexler recognized that neither he nor Hitler had any public profile, he approached Dr Johannes Dingfelder, not even a party member but well known in Munich völkisch circles, to deliver the main speech, on ‘What We Are Needing’ (Was uns not tut). Hitler’s name was not even mentioned in any of the publicity. Nor was there any hint that the party’s programme would be proclaimed at the meeting.44
The twenty-five points of this programme – which would in the course of time be declared ‘unalterable’ and be in practice largely ignored – had been work
ed out and drafted over the previous weeks by Drexler and Hitler. Discussion was already under way in mid-November 1919; Drexler had a draft ready a month later, and produced a further draft by 9 February, before the final version was produced in time for the Hofbräuhaus meeting.45 The content had much in common with the programme of the DSP.46 Its points – among them, demands for a Greater Germany, land and colonies, discrimination against Jews and denial of citizenship to them, breaking ‘interest slavery’, confiscation of war profits, land reform, protection of the middle class, persecution of profiteers, and tight regulation of the press – contained little or nothing that was original or novel on the völkisch Right.47 Religious neutrality was included in the attempt to avoid alienating a large church-going population in Bavaria. ‘Common good before individual good’ was an unobjectionable banality. The demand for ‘a strong central power’ in the Reich, and ‘the unconditional authority’ of a ‘central parliament’, though clearly implying authoritarian, not pluralistic, government, gives no indication that Hitler envisaged himself at this stage as the head of a personalized regime. There are some striking omissions. Neither Marxism nor Bolshevism is mentioned. The entire question of agriculture is passed over, apart from the brief reference to land reform. The authorship of the programme cannot fully be clarified.48 Probably, the individual points derived from several sources among the party’s leading figures. The attack on ‘interest slavery’ obviously drew on Gottfried Feder’s pet theme. Profit-sharing was a favourite idea of Drexler. The forceful style, in comparison with the more wordy DSP programme, sounds like Hitler’s.49 As he later asserted, he certainly worked on it.50 But probably the main author was Drexler himself. Certainly, Drexler himself claimed this in the private letter he wrote to Hitler (though did not send) in January 1940. In this letter, he stated that ‘following all the basic points already written down by me, Adolf Hitler composed with me – and with no one else – the 25 theses of National Socialism, in long nights in the workers’ canteen at Burghausenerstraße 6’.51
Despite worries about the attendance at the party’s first big meeting, some 2,000 people (perhaps a fifth of them socialist opponents) were crammed into the Festsaal of the Hofbräuhaus on 24 February when Hitler, as chairman, opened the meeting.52 Dingfelder’s speech was unremarkable. Certainly, it was un-Hitler like in style and tone. The word ‘Jew’ was never mentioned. He blamed Germany’s fate on the decline of morality and religion, and the rise of selfish, material values. His recipe for recovery was ‘order, work, and dutiful sacrifice for the salvation of the Fatherland’. The speech was well received and uninterrupted.53 The atmosphere suddenly livened when Hitler came to speak. His tone was harsher, more aggressive, less academic, than Dingfelder’s. The language he used was expressive, direct, coarse, earthy – that used and understood by most of his audience – his sentences short and punchy. He heaped insults on target-figures like the leading Centre Party politician and Reich Finance Minister Matthias Erzberger (who had signed the Armistice in 1918 and strongly advocated acceptance of the detested Versailles Treaty the following summer) or the Munich capitalist Isidor Bach, sure of the enthusiastic applause of his audience. Verbal assaults on the Jews brought new cheers from the audience, while shrill attacks on profiteers produced cries of ‘Flog them! Hang them!’ When he came to read out the party programme, there was much applause for the individual points. But there were interruptions, too, from left-wing opponents, who had already been getting restless, and the police reporter of the meeting spoke of scenes of ‘great tumult so that I often thought it would come to brawling at any minute’. Hitler announced, to storms of applause, what would remain the party’s slogan: ‘Our motto is only struggle. We will go our way unshakably to our goal.’ The end of Hitler’s speech, in which he read out a protest at an alleged decision to provide 40,000 hundredweight of flour for the Jewish community, again erupted into uproar following further opposition heckling, with people standing on tables and chairs yelling at each other. In the subsequent ‘discussion’, four others spoke briefly, two of them opponents. Remarks from the last speaker that a dictatorship from the Right would be met with a dictatorship from the Left were the signal for a further uproar, such that Hitler’s words closing the meeting were drowned. Around 100 Independent Socialists and Communists poured out of the Hofbräuhaus on to the streets cheering for the International and the Räterepublik and booing the war-heroes Hindenburg and Ludendorff, and the German Nationalists.54 The meeting had not exactly produced the ‘hall full of people united by a new conviction, a new faith, a new will’ that Hitler was later to describe.55
Nor would anyone reading Munich newspapers in the days following the meeting have gained the impression that it was a landmark heralding the arrival of a new, dynamic party and a new political hero. The press’s reaction was muted, to say the least. The newspapers concentrated in their brief reports on Dingfelder’s speech and paid little attention to Hitler.56 Even the Völkischer Beobachter, not yet under party control but sympathetic, was surprisingly low-key. It reported the meeting in a single column in an inside page four days later. Most of the report dealt with Dingfelder’s speech. Hitler’s contribution was summarized in a single sentence: ‘Herr Hitler (DAP) presented some striking political points (entwickelte einige treffende politische Bilder) which evoked spirited applause, but also roused the numerous already prejudiced opponents present to contradiction; and he gave a survey of the party’s programme, which in its basic features comes close to that of the Deutschsozialistische Partei.’57
Despite this initial modest impact, it was already apparent that Hitler meetings meant political fireworks. Even in the hothouse of Munich politics, the big meetings of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAΡ), as the movement henceforth called itself, were something different.58 Hitler wanted above all else to make his party noticed. In this he rapidly succeeded. ‘It makes no difference whatever whether they laugh at us or revile us,’ he later wrote, ‘whether they represent us as clowns or criminals; the main thing is that they mention us, that they concern themselves with us again and again…’59 He observed the dull, lifeless meetings of bourgeois parties, the deadening effect of speeches read out like academic lectures by dignified, elderly gentlemen. Nazi meetings, he recorded with pride, were, by contrast, not peaceful. He learnt from the organization of meetings by the Left, how they were orchestrated, the value of intimidation of opponents, techniques of disruption, and how to deal with disturbances. The NSDAP’s meetings aimed to attract confrontation, and as a result to make the party noticed. Posters were drafted in vivid red to provoke the Left to attend.60 In mid-1920 Hitler personally designed the party’s banner with the swastika in a white circle on a red background devised to make as striking a visual impact as possible.61 The result was that meetings were packed long before the start, and the numbers of opponents present guaranteed that the atmosphere was potentially explosive.62 To combat trouble, a ‘hall protection’ squad (Saalschutz) was fully organized by mid-1920, became the ‘Gymnastic and Sports Section’ in August 1921, and eventually developed into the ‘Storm Section’ (Sturmabteilung, or SA).63