Hitler 1889-1936: Hubris

by Ian Kershaw

  Another important patron at this time was the völkisch poet and publicist Dietrich Eckart.117 More than twenty years older than Hitler, Eckart, who had initially made his name with a German adaptation of Peer Gynt, had not been notably successful before the war as a poet and critic. Possibly this stimulated his intense antisemitism. He became politically active in December 1918 with the publication of his antisemitic weekly Aufgut deutsch (In Plain German), which also featured contributions from Gottfried Feder and the young emigré from the Baltic, Alfred Rosenberg. He spoke at DAΡ meetings in the summer of 1919, before Hitler joined,118 and evidently came to regard the party’s new recruit as his own protege. Hitler himself was flattered by the attention paid to him by a figure of Eckart’s reputation in völkisch circles. In the early years, relations between the two were good, even close. But for Hitler, as ever, it was Eckart’s usefulness that counted. As Hitler’s self-importance grew, his need for Eckart declined and by 1923, the year of Eckart’s death, the two had become estranged.119

  At first, however, there could be no doubt of Eckart’s value to Hitler and the NSDAP. Through his well-heeled connections, Eckart afforded the beerhall demagogue an entrée into Munich ‘society’, opening for him the door to the salons of wealthy and influential members of the city’s bourgeoisie. And through his financial support, and that of his contacts, he was able to offer vital assistance to the financially struggling small party. Since membership fees did not remotely cover outgoings, the party was dependent upon help from outside. It came in part from the owners of Munich firms and businesses, including the publisher Lehmann. Some aid continued to come from the Reichswehr. Mayr’s office paid for the 3,000 brochures, attacking the detested Versailles Treaty (seen not just on the extreme Right as cripplingly punitive and humiliating for Germany), which Lehmann had published for the party in June 1920.120 But Eckart’s role was crucial. He arranged, for example, the funding from his friend, the Augsburg chemist and factory-owner Dr Gottfried Grandel, who also backed the periodical Aufgut deutsch, for the plane that took him and Hitler to Berlin at the time of the Kapp Putsch. Grandel later served as a guarantor for the funds used to purchase the Völkischer Beobachter and turn it into the party’s own newspaper in December 1920.121

  The party leadership had been looking to buy the near-bankrupt Beobachter since the summer to provide the wider publicity that was needed. But it was only in mid-December, when rival bidders for the newspaper emerged, that Hitler moved. Together with Hermann Esser and the deputy party-chairman Oskar Körner, he turned up in an agitated state at Drexler’s flat at two o’clock in the morning on 17 December claiming the Beobachter was ‘in danger’, that it was about to fall into Bavarian separatists’ hands. Drexler’s mother was wakened up to make coffee, and around the kitchen table it was decided that Drexler would first thing the next morning call on Eckart to persuade him to encourage his wealthy contacts to provide the financial backing to acquire the newspaper. Hitler, meanwhile, would seek out Dr Grandel in Augsburg. Six hours later, Drexler was drumming an irritable Eckart out of bed, disgruntled at being awakened so early. They were soon on their way to see General von Epp. Eckart convinced the latter how vital it was to gain possession of the Beobachter and stood guarantor with his house and property for the 60,000 Marks which Epp provided from the funds of the Reichswehr. Other sources yielded a further 30,000 Marks, and Drexler himself, earning 35 Marks a week, took over the remaining debts of 113,000 Marks before, that afternoon, becoming the legal owner of the Völkischer Beobachter.122 Thanks to Eckart, the Reichswehr, and in no small measure to Drexler himself, Hitler now had his newspaper. His thanks to Eckart were suitably fulsome.123

  VI

  To the Munich public, by 1921, Hitler was the NSDAP. He was its voice, its representative figure, its embodiment. Asked to name the party’s chairman, perhaps even politically informed citizens might have guessed wrongly. But Hitler did not want the chairmanship. Drexler offered it him on a number of occasions. But Hitler refused.124 Drexler wrote to Feder in spring 1921, stating ‘that each revolutionary movement must have a dictatorial head, and therefore I also think our Hitler is the most suitable for our movement, without wanting to be pushed into the background myself’.125 But for Hitler, the party chairmanship meant organizational responsibility. He had – this was to remain the case during the rise to power, and when he headed the German state – neither aptitude nor ability for organizational matters. Organization he could leave to others; propaganda – mobilization of the masses – was what he was good at, and what he wanted to do. For that, and that alone, he would take responsibility. Propaganda, for Hitler, was the highest form of political activity. He had learnt at first from the Social Democrats as well as from the antisemites of the Schutz- und Trutzbund. He probably also learnt from Gustave Le Bon’s tract on crowd psychology – though most likely at second hand.126 But most of all he learnt from his own experience of the power of the spoken word, given the right political climate, the right crisis atmosphere, and a public ready to trust in political faith more than reasoned argument. In Hitler’s own conception, propaganda was the key to the nationalization of the masses, without which there could be no national salvation. It was not that propaganda and ideology (Weltanschauung) were distinctive entities for him. They were inseparable, and reinforced each other. An idea for Hitler was useless unless it mobilized. The self-confidence he gained from the rapturous reception of his speeches assured him that his diagnosis of Germany’s ills and the way to national redemption was right – the only one possible. This in turn gave him the self-conviction that conveyed itself to those in his immediate entourage as well as those listening to his speeches in the beerhalls. To see himself as ‘drummer’ of the national cause was, therefore, for Hitler a high calling. It was why, before the middle of 1921, he preferred to be free for this role, and not to be bogged down in the organizational work which he associated with the chairmanship of the party.127

  The outrage felt throughout Germany at the punitive sum of 226 thousand million Gold Marks to be paid in reparations, imposed by the Paris Conference at the end of January 1921, ensured there would be no let-up in agitation.128 This was the background for the biggest meeting that the NSDAP had until then staged, on 3 February in the Circus Krone. Hitler risked going ahead with the meeting at only one day’s notice, and without the usual advance publicity. In a rush, the huge hall was booked and two lorries hired to drive round the city throwing out leaflets.129 This was another technique borrowed from the ‘Marxists’, and the first time the Nazis had used it. Despite worries until the last minute that the hall would be half-empty and the meeting would prove a propaganda débâcle, more than 6,000 turned up to hear Hitler, speaking on ‘Future or Ruin’ (Zukunft oder Untergang), denounce the ‘slavery’ imposed on Germans by the Allied reparations, and castigate the weakness of the government for accepting them.130 ‘The known leader of the antisemites, Hitler’ had less success three days later when, as third speaker at a mass rally of 20,000 members of the ‘patriotic associations’ in Odeonsplatz, he made no impact with his ‘party-political tendencies’.131

  Hitler wrote that after the Circus Krone success he increased the ΝSDAΡ’s propaganda activity in Munich still further.132 And indeed the propaganda output was impressive. Hitler spoke at twenty-eight major meetings in Munich and twelve elsewhere (nearly all still in Bavaria), apart from several contributions to ‘discussions’, and seven addresses to the newly-formed SA in the latter part of the year. Between January and June 1921 he also wrote thirty-nine articles for the Völkischer Beobachter, and from September onwards contributed a number of pieces to the party’s internal information leaflets (Mitteilungsblätter).133 Of course, he had the time in which to devote himself solely to propaganda. Unlike the other members of the party leadership, he had no other occupation or interest.

  Politics consumed practically his entire existence. When he was not giving speeches, or preparing them, he spent time reading. As always, much of this
was the newspapers – giving him regular ammunition for his scourge of Weimar politicians. He had books – a lot of them popular editions – on history, geography, Germanic myths, and, especially, war (including Clausewitz) on the shelves of his shabby, sparsely furnished room at 41 Thierschstraße, down by the Isar.134 But what, exactly, he read is impossible to know. His lifestyle scarcely lent itself to lengthy periods of systematic reading. He claimed, however, to have read up on his hero Frederick the Great, and pounced on the work of his rival in the völkisch camp, Otto Dickel, a 320-page treatise on Die Auferstehung des Abendlandes (The Resurrection of the Western World), a mystical tract attempting to turn Spengler’s pessimism on its head, immediately on its appearance in 1921 in order to be able to castigate it.135

  Otherwise, as it had been since the Vienna days, much of his time was spent lounging around cafés in Munich. According to his photographer Heinrich Hoffmann, he specially liked the Café Heck in Galerienstraße, his favourite. In a quiet corner of the long, narrow room of this coffee-house, frequented by Munich’s solid middle class, he could sit at his reserved table, his back to the wall, holding court among the new-found cronies that he had attracted to the ΝSDAΡ.136 Among those coming to form an inner circle of Hitler’s associates were the young student Rudolf Heß, the Baltic-Germans Alfred Rosenberg (who had worked on Eckart’s periodical since 1919) and Max Erwin von Scheubner-Richter (an engineer with excellent contacts to wealthy Russian emigrés).137 Certainly by the time Putzi Hanfstaengl, the cultured part-American who became his Foreign Press Chief, came to know him, late in 1922, Hitler had a table booked every Monday evening at the old-fashioned Café Neumaier on the edge of the Viktualienmarkt.138 His regular accompaniment formed a motley crew – mostly lower-middle class, some unsavoury characters among them. Christian Weber, a former horse-dealer, who, like Hitler, invariably carried a dog-whip and relished the brawls with Communists, was one. Another was Hermann Esser, formerly Mayr’s press agent, himself an excellent agitator, and an even better gutter journalist. Max Amann, another roughneck, Hitler’s former sergeant who became overlord of the Nazi press empire, was also usually there, as were Ulrich Graf, Hitler’s personal bodyguard, and, frequently, the ‘philosophers’ of the party, Gottfried Feder and Dietrich Eckart. In the long room, with its rows of benches and tables, often occupied by elderly couples, Hitler’s entourage would discuss politics, or listen to his monologues on art and architecture, while eating the snacks they had brought with them and drinking their litres of beer or cups of coffee.139 At the end of the evening, Weber, Amann, Graf, and Lieutenant Klintzsch, a veteran of the Ehrhardt-Brigade who had taken part in the Kapp Putsch, would act as a bodyguard, escorting Hitler – wearing the long black overcoat and trilby that ‘gave him the appearance of a conspirator’ – back to his apartment in Thierschstraße.140

  Hitler scarcely cut the figure of a mainstream politician. Not surprisingly, the Bavarian establishment regarded him largely with contempt. But they could not ignore him. The old-fashioned monarchist head of the Bavarian government at the time, Minister President Gustav Ritter von Kahr, who had assumed office on 16 March 1920 following the Kapp Putsch and aimed to turn Bavaria into a ‘cell of order’ representing true national values, thought Hitler was a propagandist and nothing more. This was a not unjustifiable assessment at the time. But Kahr was keen to gather ‘national forces’ in Bavaria in protest at the ‘fulfilment policy’ of Reich Chancellor Wirth. And he felt certain that he could make use of Hitler, that he could control the ‘impetuous Austrian’.141 On 14 May 1921 he invited a delegation from the NSDAP, led by Hitler, to discuss the political situation with him. It was the first meeting of the two men whose identical aim of destroying the new Weimar democracy was to link them,.if fleetingly, in the ill-fated putsch of November 1923 – a chequered association that would end with Kahr’s murder in the ‘Night of the Long Knives’ at the end of June 1934. Whatever Kahr’s disdain for Hitler, his invitation to a meeting in May 1921 amounted to recognition that the latter was now a factor in Bavarian politics, proof that he and his movement had to be taken seriously.

  Rudolf Heß, still studying at Munich under the geopolitician Professor Karl Haushofer, introverted and idealistic, and already besotted with Hitler, was part of the delegation. Three days later, unsolicited and unprompted by Hitler, he wrote a lengthy letter to Kahr, describing Hitler’s early life and eulogizing about his political aims, ideals, and skills. Hitler, he wrote, was ‘an unusually decent, sincere character, full of kind-heartedness, religious, a good Catholic’, with only one aim: ‘the welfare of his country’. Ηeß went on to laud Hitler’s self-sacrifice in this cause, how he received not a penny from the movement itself but made his living purely from the fees he received for other speeches he occasionally made.142

  This was the official line that Hitler himself had put out the previous September in the Völkischer Beobachter. It was quite disingenuous. On no more than a handful of occasions did he speak at nationalist meetings other than those of the ΝSDAΡ.143 The fees from these alone would certainly not have been enough to keep body and soul together. Rumours about his income and lifestyle were avidly taken up on the Left. Even on the völkisch Right there were remarks about him being chauffeured around Munich in a big car, and his enemies in the party raised questions about his personal financial irregularities and the amount of time the ‘king of Munich’ spent in an expensive lifestyle cavorting with women – even women smoking cigarettes.144 In fact, Hitler was distinctly touchy about his financial affairs. He repeated in court in December 1921 in a libel case against the socialist Münchener Post that he had sought no fees from the party for sixty-five speeches delivered in Munich.145 But he accepted that he was ‘supported in a modest way’ by party members and ‘occasionally’ provided with meals by them.146 One of those who looked after him was the first ‘Hitler-Mutti’, Frau Hermine Hofmann, the elderly widow of a headmaster, who plied Hitler with endless supplies of cakes and turned her house at Solln on the outskirts of Munich for a while into a sort of unofficial party headquarters.147 A little later the Reichsbahn official Theodor Lauböck – founder of the Rosenheim branch of the NSDAP, but subsequently transferred to Munich – and his wife saw to Hitler’s well-being, and could also be called upon to put up important guests of the party.148 In reality, the miserable accommodation Hitler rented in Thierschstraße, and the shabby clothes he wore, belied the fact that even at this date he was not short of well-to-do party supporters. With the growth of the party and his own expanding reputation in 1922–3, he was able to gain new and wealthy patrons in Munich high society.

  VII

  The party was, however, perpetually short of money. It was on a fund-raising mission in June 1921 to Berlin by Hitler, to try (in the company of the man with the contacts, Dietrich Eckart) to find backing for the ailing Völkischer Beobachter, that the crisis which culminated in Hitler’s takeover of the party leadership unfolded.149

  The background was shaped by moves to merge the NSDAP with the DSP. To go from the party programmes, despite some differences of accent, the two völkisch parties had more in common than separated them. And the DSP had a following in north Germany, which the Nazi Party, still scarcely more than a small local party, lacked. In itself, therefore, there was certainly an argument for joining forces. Talks about a possible merger had begun the previous August in a gathering in Salzburg, attended by Hitler, of national socialist parties from Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia and Poland.150 A number of overtures followed from the DSP leaders between then and April 1921. At a meeting in Zeitz in Thuringia at the end of March, Drexler – presumably delegated by the NSDAP, but plainly in the teeth of Hitler’s disapproval – even agreed to tentative proposals for a merger and – anathema to Hitler – a move of the party headquarters to Berlin.151 Hitler responded with fury to Drexler’s concessions, threatened to resign from the party, and succeeded ‘amid unbelievable anger’ in reversing the agreement reached at Zeitz.152 Eventually, at a meeting in Muni
ch in mid-April, amidst great rancour and with Hitler in a towering rage, negotiations with the DSP collapsed. The DSP was in no doubt that Hitler, the ‘fanatical would-be big shot’, whose successes had gone to his head, was solely responsible for the NSDAP’s obstructionism. Hitler, dismissive of notions of a specific political programme to be implemented, interested only in agitation and mobilization, had set his face rigidly from the outset against any possible merger. To Hitler, the similarities in programme were irrelevant. He objected to the way the DSP had rushed to set up numerous branches without solid foundations, so that the party was ‘everywhere and nowhere’, and to its readiness to resort to parliamentary tactics.153 But the real reason was a different one. Any merger was bound to threaten his supremacy in the small but tightly-knit NSDAP. That he was so fearful of losing his dominance is a further pointer probably to Hitler’s personal as well as to his political insecurity.

  Of importance for the crisis in the party that was to erupt three months later was the fact that, although he had succeeded in torpedoing the merger, Hitler had encountered significant opposition from within his own movement on the part of those who were by no means convinced that a strategy based on no more than a constant barrage of agitation would ultimately prove successful. It was not simply, as has often been claimed, a matter of the old party leadership against the Hitler clique, thrusting for power. There were genuine differences about political strategy. Four or five members of the committee were sceptical about Hitler’s approach, and favoured more traditional völkisch methods. Gottfried Feder, no less, complained bitterly to Drexler about Hitler’s crude style of propaganda and criticized the chairman’s conciliatory attitude towards him. But Drexler replied by defending both Hitler and his approach.154 Personal factors also played a part. Hitler knew he was the only star the party had, and was not reticent in exploiting the power this gave him. But, as the July crisis was to show, there were those on the party’s committee who bitterly resented his special position and the way he was using this to veto all suggestions on the future of the party that did not meet with his approval.