Hitler 1889-1936: Hubris

by Ian Kershaw

  Only Hitler could bring in the crowds for the NSDAP. To this extent, his self-centred account in Mein Kampf was perfectly correct. It was a month after feeling provoked into joining in the discussion at the DAP meeting on 12 September 1919 before his first ‘performance’ as a party speaker in the Hofbräukeller on 16 October 1919.64 The memory of his success, as we have seen, lasted with him. In Mein Kampf he used the almost identical phrase with which he had already described his ‘self-discovery’ in the Lechfeld Camp: ‘What before I had simply felt within me, without in any way knowing it, was now proved by reality: I could speak!’65 Though plainly stylized, as the double rendition of this phrase demonstrates, there can be no doubting the self-confidence that flowed through Hitler as a result of the confirmation, for the first time before a non-captive audience, that the way he spoke could stir his audience.

  In the company of an individual, Hitler’s egocentric manner could be totally off-putting. An acquaintance at the time, contemptuous of Hitler’s activity as a Reichswehr spy, but forced to suffer an involuntary lecture on the future mission of German artists, could eventually stand no more of the peroration: ‘Tell me, have they shit in your brain and forgotten to flush it?’ he asked, leaving Hitler speechless.66 But in front of a beerhall audience Hitler’s style was electrifying.

  While in his Nuremberg cell awaiting the hangman, Hans Frank, the ex-Governor General of Poland, recalled the moment, in January 1920, while he was still only nineteen years old (though already committed to the völkisch cause), that he had first heard Hitler speak. The large room was bursting at the seams. Middle-class citizens rubbed shoulders with workers, soldiers, and students. Whether old or young, the state of the nation weighed heavily on people. Germany’s plight polarized opinions, but left few unmoved or disinterested. Most political meetings were packed. But, to Frank – young, idealistic, fervently anti-Marxist and nationalistic – speakers were generally disappointing, had little to offer. Hitler, in stark contrast, set him alight.

  The man with whom Hans Frank’s fate would be bound for the next quarter of a century was dressed in a shabby blue suit, his tie loosely fastened. He spoke clearly, in impassioned but not shrill tones, his blue eyes flashing, occasionally pushing back his hair with his right hand. Frank’s most immediate feeling was how sincere Hitler was, how the words came from the heart and were not just a rhetorical device. ‘He was at that time simply the grandiose popular speaker without precedent – and, for me, incomparable,’ wrote Frank.

  I was strongly impressed straight away. It was totally different from what was otherwise to be heard in meetings. His method was completely clear and simple. He took the overwhelmingly dominant topic of the day, the Versailles Diktat, and posed the question of all questions: What now German people? What’s the true situation? What alone is now possible? He spoke for over two-and-a-half hours, often interrupted by frenetic torrents of applause – and one could have listened to him for much, much longer. Everything came from the heart, and he struck a chord with all of us… He uttered what was in the consciousness of all those present and linked general experiences to clear understanding and the common wishes of those who were suffering and hoping for a programme. In the matter itself he was certainly not original… but he was the one called to act as spokesman of the people… He concealed nothing… of the horror, the distress, the despair facing Germany. But not only that. He showed a way, the only way left to all ruined peoples in history, that of the grim new beginning from the most profound depths through courage, faith, readiness for action, hard work, and devotion to a great, shining, common goal… He placed before the protection of the Almighty in the most serious and solemn exhortation the salvation of the honour of the German soldier and worker as his life-task… When he finished, the applause would not die down… From this evening onwards, though not a party member, I was convinced that if one man could do it, Hitler alone would be capable of mastering Germany’s fate.67

  Whatever the pathos of these comments, they testify to Hitler’s instinctive ability, singling him out from other speakers relaying a similar message, to speak in the language of his listeners, and to stir them through the passion and – however strange it might now sound to us – the apparent sincerity of his idealism.

  Rising attendances, as he noted in Mein Kampf, followed in the next weeks, between his first appearance as main speaker – on one of his favourite topics, ‘Brest-Litovsk and Versailles?’ – in the Eberlbräukeller in November 1919, and the big Hofbräuhaus meeting in February 1920. This was merely a prelude to Hitler’s growing success and mounting reputation as the party’s star speaker. By the end of 1920 he had addressed over thirty mass meetings – mostly of between 800 and 2,500 persons – and spoken at many smaller internal party gatherings.68 In early February 1921 he would speak at the biggest meeting so far – over 6,000 people in the Circus Krone, which could accommodate the biggest indoor crowds in Munich, near the Marsfeld just to the west of the city centre.69 Until mid-1921 he spoke mainly in Munich, where the propaganda and organization of the meetings would ensure a satisfactory turn-out, and where the right atmosphere was guaranteed. But, not counting the speeches made during a fortnight’s visit to Austria in early October, he held ten speeches outside the city in 1920, including one in Rosenheim where the first local group of the party outside Munich had just been founded. It was largely owing to Hitler’s public profile that the party membership increased sharply from 190 in January 1920 to 2,000 by the end of the year and 3,300 by August 1921.70 He was rapidly making himself indispensable to the movement.

  IV

  Hitler spoke from rough notes – mainly a series of jotted headings with key words underlined.71 As a rule, a speech would last around two hours or more.72 In the Festsaal of the Hofbräuhaus he used a beer table on one of the long sides of the hall as his platform in order to be in the middle of the crowd – a novel technique for a speaker which helped create what Hitler regarded as a special mood in that hall.73 The themes of his speeches varied little: the contrast of Germany’s strength in a glorious past with its current weakness and national humiliation – a sick state in the hands of traitors and cowards who had betrayed the Fatherland to its powerful enemies; the reasons for the collapse in a lost war unleashed by these enemies, and behind them, the Jews; betrayal and revolution brought about by criminals and Jews;74 English and French intentions of destroying Germany, as shown in the Treaty of Versailles – the ‘Peace of shame’, the instrument of Germany’s slavery; the exploitation of ordinary Germans by Jewish racketeers and profiteers; a cheating and corrupt government and party system presiding over economic misery, social division, political conflict, and ethical collapse; the only way to recovery contained in the points of the party’s programme – ruthless showdown with internal enemies and build-up of national consciousness and unity, leading to renewed strength and eventual restored greatness.75 The combination of traditional Bavarian dislike of the Prussians and the experience of the Räterepublik in Munich meant that Hitler’s repeated onslaught on the ‘Marxist’ government in Berlin was certain to meet with an enthusiastic response among the still small minority of the local population drawn to his meetings.

  While Hitler basically appealed to negative feelings – anger, resentment, hatred – there was also a ‘positive’ element in the proposed remedy to the proclaimed ills. However platitudinous, the appeal to restoration of liberty through national unity, the need to work together of ‘workers of the brain and hand’ (Zusammenarbeiten des Geistes- und Handarbeiters),76 the social harmony of a ‘national community’, and the protection of the ‘little man’ through the crushing of his exploiters, were, to go from the applause they invariably produced, undeniably attractive propositions to Hitler’s audiences.77 And Hitler’s own passion and fervour successfully conveyed the message – to those already predisposed to it – that no other way was possible; that Germany’s revival would and could be brought about; and that it lay in the power of ordinary Germans to make it happ
en through their own struggle, sacrifice, and will.78 The effect was more that of a religious revivalist meeting than a normal political gathering.79

  What Hitler was saying had long belonged to the standard repertoire of nationalist and völkisch speakers. It was as good as indistinguishable from what the Pan-Germans had been preaching for years. And though Hitler was invariably up-to-date in finding easy targets in the daily politics of the crisis-ridden Republic, his main themes were tediously repetitive. Some, in fact, often taken for granted to be part of Hitler’s allegedly unchanging ideology were missing altogether at this stage. There was, for example, not a single mention of the need for ‘living-space’ (Lebensraum) in eastern Europe.80 Britain and France were the foreign-policy targets at this time. Indeed, Hitler jotted among the notes of one of his speeches, in August 1920, ‘brotherhood towards the east’ (Verbrüderung nach Osten).81 Nor did he clamour for a dictatorship. Such a demand occurs in only one speech in 1920, on 27 April, in which Hitler declared that Germany needed ‘a dictator who is a genius’ if it were to rise up again.82 There was no implication that he himself was that person.83 Surprisingly, too, his first outright public assault on Marxism did not occur before his speech at Rosenheim on 21 July 1920 (though he had spoken on a number of occasions before this of the catastrophic effects of Bolshevism in Russia, for which he blamed the Jews).84 And, remarkably, even race theory – where Hitler drew heavily for his ideas from well-known antisemitic tracts such as those of Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Adolf Wahrmund, and, especially, the arch-popularizer Theodor Fritsch (one of whose emphases was the alleged sexual abuse of women by Jews) – was explicitly treated in only one speech by Hitler during 1920.85

  This scarcely meant, however, that Hitler neglected to attack the Jews. On the contrary: the all-devouring manic obsession with the Jews to which all else is subordinated – not observable before 1919, never absent thereafter – courses through almost every Hitler speech at this time. Behind all evil that had befallen or was threatening Germany stood the figure of the Jew.86 In speech after speech he lashed the Jews in the most vicious and barbaric language imaginable.

  Genuine socialism, declared Hitler, meant to be an antisemite.87 Germans should be ready to enter into a pact with the devil to eradicate the evil of Jewry.88 But, as in his letter to Gemlich the previous autumn, he did not see emotional antisemitism as the answer.89 He demanded internment in concentration camps to prevent ‘Jewish undermining of our people’,90 hanging for racketeers,91 but ultimately, as the only solution – similar to the Gemlich letter – the ‘removal of the Jews from our people’.92 The implication, as in his explicit demands with regard to Ostjuden,93 was their expulsion from Germany. This was undoubtedly how it was understood. But, as with some pre-war antisemites, the language itself was both terrible and implicitly genocidal in its biological similes.94 ‘You don’t talk about what to do with parasites (Trichinen) and bacilli. Parasites and bacilli are also not reared. They are as quickly and fully as possible destroyed (vernichtet).’ This was not Hitler. It was Paul de Lagarde, leading oriental scholar and specialist in Semitic languages, in 1887, writing of how, in his view, Jews should be treated.95 The atmosphere had become immeasurably more menacing towards the Jews when Hitler deployed similar terminology over thirty years later. ‘Don’t think that you can combat racial tuberculosis,’ he declared in August 1920, ‘without seeing to it that the people is freed from the causative organ of racial tuberculosis. The impact of Jewry will never pass away, and the poisoning of the people will not end, as long as the causal agent, the Jew, is not removed from our midst.’96

  His audiences loved it. More than anything else, these attacks evoked torrents of applause and cheering.97 His technique – beginning slowly, plenty of sarcasm, personalized attacks on named targets, then a gradual crescendo to a climax – whipped his audiences into a frenzy.98 His speech in the Festsaal of the Hofbräuhaus on 13 August 1920 on ‘Why Are We Antisemites?’ – his only speech that year solely relating to the Jews and probably intended as a basic statement on the topic – was interrupted fifty-eight times during its two hours’ duration by ever wilder cheering from the 2,000 strong audience.99 To go from a report on another Hitler speech a few weeks later, the audience would have been mainly drawn from white-collar workers, the lower-middle class, and better-off workers, with around a quarter women.100

  At first, Hitler’s antisemitic tirades were invariably linked to anti-capitalism and attacks on ‘Jewish’ war profiteers and racketeers, whom he blamed for exploiting the German people and causing the loss of the war and the German war dead. He later claimed, in a horrific passage of Mein Kampf, that a million German lives lost at the front would have been saved if ‘twelve to fifteen thousand of these Hebrew corrupters of the people had been held under poison gas’.101 The influence of Gottfried Feder can be seen in the distinction Hitler drew between essentially healthy ‘industrial capital’ and the real evil of ‘Jewish finance capital’.102

  There was no link with Marxism or Bolshevism at this stage. Contrary to what is sometimes claimed, Hitler’s antisemitism was not prompted by his anti-Bolshevism; it longpredated it.103 There was no mention of Bolshevism in the Gemlich letter of September 1919, where the ‘Jewish Question’ is related to the rapacious nature of finance capital.104 Hitler spoke in April and again in June 1920 of Russia being destroyed by the Jews, but it was only in his Rosenheim speech on 21 July that he explicitly married the images of Marxism, Bolshevism, and the Soviet system in Russia to the brutality of Jewish rule, for which he saw Social Democracy preparing the ground in Germany.105 Hitler admitted in August 1920 that he knew little of the real situation in Russia.106 But–perhaps influenced above all by Alfred Rosenberg, who came from the Baltic and experienced the Russian Revolution at first hand,107 but probably also soaking up images of the horror of the Russian civil war which were filtering through to the German press108 – he plainly became preoccupied with Bolshevik Russia in the second half of the year.109 The dissemination of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion – the forgery about Jewish world domination, widely read and believed in antisemitic circles at the time – probably also helped to focus Hitler’s attention on Russia.110 These images appear to have provided the catalyst to the merger of antisemitism and anti-Marxism in his ‘world-view’ – an identity which, once forged, never disappeared.

  V

  Hitler’s speeches put him on the political map in Munich. But he was still very much a local taste. And however much noise he made, his party was still insignificant compared with the established socialist and Catholic parties. Moreover, though it is going too far to see him as no more than the tool of powerful vested interests ‘behind the scenes’, without influential backers and the ‘connections’ they could provide his talents as a mob-agitator would not have got him very far.

  Though Hitler had already signalled his intention of making a living as a political speaker, he was, in fact, until 31 March 1920 still drawing pay from the army. His first patron, Captain Mayr, continued to take a close interest in him and, if his later account can be believed, provided limited funding towards the staging of the mass meetings.111 At this time, Hitler was still serving both the party and the army. In January and February 1920, Mayr had ‘Herr Hittler’ lecturing on ‘Versailles’ and ‘Political Parties and their Significance’ in the company of distinguished Munich historians Karl Alexander von Müller and Paul Joachimsen to Reichswehr soldiers undertaking ‘citizenship education courses’.112 In March, during the Kapp Putsch, when a short-lived armed coup had attempted to overthrow the government, forcing it to flee from the Reich capital, he sent him with Dietrich Eckart to Berlin to instruct Wolfgang Kapp on the situation in Bavaria. They arrived too late. The Right’s first attempt to take over the state had already collapsed. But Mayr was undeterred. He retained both his contact with Kapp and his interest in Hitler. He still had hopes, so he told Kapp six months later, that the NSDAΡ – which he thought of as his own creation – would become the
‘organization of national radicalism’, the advance-guard of a future, more successful, putsch.113 He wrote to Kapp, now exiled in Sweden:

  The national workers’ party must provide the basis for the strong assault-force (Stoßtrupp) that we are hoping for. The programme is still somewhat clumsy and also perhaps incomplete. We’ll have to supplement it. Only one thing is certain: that under this banner we’ve already won a good number of supporters. Since July of last year I’ve been looking… to strengthen the movement… I’ve set up very capable young people. A Herr Hitler, for example, has become a motive force, a popular speaker (Volksredner) of the first rank. In the Munich branch we have over 2,000 members, compared with under 100 in summer 1919.114

  Early in 1920, before Hitler had left the Reichswehr, Mayr had taken him along to meetings of the ‘Iron Fist’ club for radical nationalist officers, founded by Captain Ernst Röhm. Hitler had been introduced to Rohm by Mayr, probably the previous autumn.115 Interested in a variety of nationalist parties, particularly with a view to winning the workers to the nationalist cause, Röhm had attended the first meeting of the DAP addressed by Hitler on 16 October 1919 and had joined the party shortly afterwards. Now Hitler came into far closer contact with Röhm, who rapidly came to replace Mayr as the key link with the Reichswehr. Röhm had been responsible for arming the volunteers and ‘civil defence’ (Einwohnerwehr) units in Bavaria and had in the meantime become an important player in paramilitary politics, with excellent connections in the army, the ‘patriotic associations’, and throughout the völkisch Right. He was, in fact, at this time, along with his fellow officers on the Right, far more interested in the massive Einwohnerwehren, with a membership of over quarter of a million men, than he was in the tiny NSDAP. Even so, he provided the key contact between the NSDAP and the far larger ‘patriotic associations’ and offered avenues to funding which the constantly hard-up party desperately needed.116 His connections proved invaluable – increasingly so from 1921 onwards, when his interest in Hitler’s party grew.