by Ian Kershaw
Hitler’s actions were not, as they have again often been seen, part of a preconceived scheme to take over the party leadership. As we have already noted, Hitler had several months earlier turned down the offer to become a member of a small ‘action committee’, and even the chairmanship of the party. In spring 1921, he made no attempt to initiate a takeover of the party leadership, though the conditions for such a move were by no means unfavourable. Instead of a calculated, rational strategy to secure his position, his response was highly emotional, prima-donna-like. But behind the bluster, he betrayed signs of uncertainty, hesitancy, and inconsistency. The hypersensitivity to personal criticism, the inability to engage in rational argument and, instead, rapid resort to extraordinary outbursts of uncontrolled temper, his extreme aversion to any institutional anchoring: these features of an unbalanced personality repeatedly manifested themselves to the end of his days. At this time, they indicated that, far from taking clear, decisive steps to shape events as he wanted them to develop – which an organized move to take over the leadership would have allowed – he was largely reacting to developments outside his own control.155 This was to be the case, too, in the July crisis.
Though the merger with the DSP had been fended off for the time being, an even bigger threat, from Hitler’s point of view, arose while he was away in Berlin. Dr Otto Dickel, who had founded in March 1921 in Augsburg another völkisch organization, the Deutsche Werkgemeinschaft, had made something of a stir on the völkisch scene with his book Die Auferstehung des Abendlandes (The Resurrection of the Western World). Dickel’s mystic völkisch philosophizing was not Hitler’s style, and, not surprisingly, met with the latter’s contempt and angry dismissal.156 But some of Dickel’s ideas – building up a classless community through national renewal, combating ‘Jewish domination’ through the struggle against ‘interest slavery’ – bore undeniable similarities to those of both the NSDAP and the DSP. And Dickel, no less than Hitler, had the conviction of a missionary and, moreover, was also a dynamic and popular public speaker. Following the appearance of his book, which was lauded in the Völkischer Beobachter, he was invited to Munich, and – with Hitler absent in Berlin – proved a major success before a packed audience in one of Hitler’s usual haunts, the Festsaal of the Hofbräuhaus. Other speeches were planned for Dickel. The NSDAP’s leadership was delighted to find in him a second ‘outstanding speaker with a popular touch’ (volkstümlichen und ausgezeichneten Redner).157
Hitler, meanwhile, was still in Berlin. He failed to turn up at a meeting with a DSP representative on I July for further merger talks, and did not return to Bavaria until ten days later. He had evidently by then got wind of the alarming news that a delegation of the NSDAP’s leaders was due to have talks there with Dickel and representatives of the Augsburg and Nuremberg branches of the Deutsche Werkgemeinschaft. He appeared before the NSDAP delegates themselves arrived, beside himself with rage, threatening the Augsburg and Nuremberg representatives that he would see that a merger was stopped. But when his own people eventually turned up, his uncontrolled fury subsided into sulky silence. Three hours of suggestions from Dickel for the formation of a loose confederation of the different groups and recommendations for improvements to the NSDAP’s programme prompted numerous outbursts from Hitler before, being able to stand it no longer, he stormed out of the meeting.158
If Hitler hoped his tantrums would convince his colleagues to drop the negotiations, he was mistaken. They were embarrassed by his behaviour and impressed by what Dickel had to offer. Even Dietrich Eckart thought Hitler had behaved badly. It was accepted that the party programme needed amending, and that Hitler ‘as a simple man’, was not up to doing this. They agreed to take back Dickel’s proposals to Munich and put them to the full party committee.159
Hitler resigned from the party in anger and disgust on II July. In a letter to the committee three days later, he justified his move on the grounds that the representatives in Augsburg had violated the party statutes and acted against the wishes of the members in handing over the movement to a man whose ideas were incompatible with those of the NSDAP. ‘I will and can not be any longer a member of such a movement,’ he declared.160 Hitler had resigned ‘for ever’ from the party’s committee in December 1920.161 As we have noted, he threatened resignation yet again following the Zeitz conference in late March 1921. The histrionics of the prima donna were part and parcel of Hitler’s make-up – and would remain so. It would always be the same: he only knew all-or-nothing arguments; there was nothing in between, no possibility of reaching a compromise. Always from a maximalist position, with no other way out, he would go for broke. And if he could not get his way he would throw a temper-tantrum and threaten to quit. In power, in years to come, he would sometimes deliberately orchestrate an outburst of rage as a bullying tactic. But usually his tantrums were a sign of frustration, even desperation, not strength. It was to be the case in a number of future crises. And it was so on this occasion. The resignation was not a carefully planned manoeuvre to use his position as the party’s star performer to blackmail the committee into submission. It was an expression of fury and frustration at not getting his own way. His threat of resignation had worked before, after the Zeitz conference. Now he was risking his only trump card again. Defeat would have meant the party’s amalgamation in Dickel’s planned ‘Western League’ (Abendländischer Bund) and left Hitler with only the option – which he seems to have contemplated – of setting up a new party and beginning again.162 There were those who would have been glad, whatever his uses as an agitator, to have been rid of such a troublesome and egocentric entity. And the spread of the party that the merger with Dickel’s organization presented offered more than a little compensation.
But the loss of its sole star performer would have been a major, perhaps fatal, blow to the NSDAP. His departure would have split the party. In the end, this was the decisive consideration. Dietrich Eckart was asked to intervene, and on 13 July Drexler sought the conditions under which Hitler would agree to rejoin the party. It was full capitulation from the party leadership. Hitler’s conditions all stemmed from the recent turmoil in the party. His key demands – to be accepted by an extraordinary members’ meeting – were ‘the post of chairman with dictatorial power’; the party headquarters to be fixed once and for all as Munich; the party programme to be regarded as inviolate; and the end of all merger attempts.163 All the demands centred upon securing Hitler’s position in the party against any future challenges. A day later the party committee expressed its readiness in recognition of his ‘immense knowledge’, his services for the movement, and his ‘unusual talent as a speaker’ to give him ‘dictatorial powers’. It welcomed his willingness, having turned down Drexler’s offers in the past, now to take over the party chairmanship. Hitler rejoined the party, as member no.3680, on 26 July.164
Even now the conflict was not fully at an end. While Hitler and Drexler publicly demonstrated their unity at a members’ meeting on 26 July,165 Hitler’s opponents in the leadership had his henchman Hermann Esser expelled from the party and prepared placards denouncing Hitler, and had printed 3,000 copies of an anonymous pamphlet attacking him in the most denigratory terms as the agent of sinister forces intent on damaging the party.166 But Hitler, who had shown once more to great effect how irreplaceable he was as a speaker in a meeting, packed to the last seat, in Circus Krone on 20 July, was now in the driving seat.167 Now there was no hesitancy. This was Hitler triumphant. To tumultuous applause from the 554 paid-up members attending the extraordinary members’ meeting in the Festsaal of the Hofbräuhaus on 29 July, he defended himself and Esser and rounded on his opponents. He boasted that he had never sought party office, and had turned down the chairmanship on several occasions. But this time he was prepared to accept. The new party constitution, which Hitler had been forced to draft hurriedly, confirmed on three separate occasions the sole responsibility of the First Chairman for the party’s actions (subject only to the membership meeting). There was o
nly one vote against accepting the new dictatorial powers over the party granted to Hitler. His chairmanship was unanimously accepted.168
The reform of the party statutes was necessary, stated the Völkischer Beobachter, in order to prevent any future attempt to dissipate the energies of the party through majority decisions.169 It was the first step on transforming the NSDAP into a new-style party, a ‘Führer party’. The move had come about not through careful planning, but through Hitler’s reaction to events which were running out of his control. Rudolf Heß’s subsequent assault on Hitler’s opponents in the Völkischer Beobachter contained the early seeds of the later heroization of Hitler, but also revealed the initial base on which it rested. ‘Are you truly blind,’ wrote Heß, ‘to the fact that this man is the leader personality who alone is able to carry through the struggle? Do you think that without him the masses would pile into the Circus Krone?’170
6
THE ‘DRUMMER’
‘I am nothing but a drummer and rallier.’
Hitler, to Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, 1922
‘Our task is to give the dictator, when he comes, a people ready for him!’
Hitler, in a speech on 4 May 1923
‘Not from modesty did I want at that time to be the drummer. That is the highest there is. The rest is unimportant.’
Hitler, at his trial, 27 March 1924
When Hitler assumed the leadership of his party in July 1921, he was still no more than a beerhall agitator – a local celebrity, to be sure, but otherwise scarcely known. The takeover of the party leadership itself followed internal squabbles – of little moment to the outside world – within the intrinsically fractious völkisch movement. The NSDAP certainly made a great deal of noise, and had made its presence felt on the Munich political scene. But it was hardly yet a significant force. Without the extraordinary conditions in Bavaria – the self-proclaimed ‘cell of order’ – and without the backcloth nationwide of political instability, economic crisis, and social polarization, everything suggests it would have remained insignificant. As it was, while völkisch parties struggled to make much of a mark in most German states, including Prussia – by far the largest state – the NSDAP could become by 1923 a key player in the upsurge of nationalist opposition in Bavaria to Weimar democracy. And from a local beerhall agitator, the party’s leader emerged between 1921 and 1923 as the ‘drummer’ of the nationalist Right. That would be his role down to the ill-fated attempt in November 1923 to take over the state by force – the notorious ‘Beerhall Putsch’. Only in the light of those dramatic events and their aftermath would a crucial transformation in his self-image be sealed.
Hitler was content in the early 1920s to be the ‘drummer’ – whipping up the masses for the ‘national movement’. He saw himself at this time not, as portrayed in Mein Kampf, as Germany’s future leader in waiting, the political messiah whose turn would arise once the nation recognized his unique greatness. Rather, he was paving the way for the great leader whose day might not dawn for many years to come. ‘I am nothing more than a drummer and rallier (Trommler und Sammler),’ he told Arthur Moeller van den Bruck in 1922.1 Some months earlier, he had reputedly stated in an interview in May 1921 with the chief editor of the Pan-German newspaper DeutscheZeitung that he was not the leader and statesman who would ‘save the Fatherland that was sinking into chaos’, but only ‘the agitator who understood how to rally (sammeln) the masses’. Nor, he allegedly went on, was he ‘the architect who clearly pictured in his own eyes the plan and design of the new building and with calm sureness and creativity was able to lay one stone on the other. He needed the greater one behind him, on whose command he could lean.’2
To be the ‘drummer’ meant everything to Hitler at this time. It was the ‘vocation’ that replaced his dreams of becoming a great artist or architect. It was his main task, practically his sole concern. Not only did it allow full expression to his one real talent. It was also in his eyes the greatest and most important role he could play. For politics to Hitler – and so it would in all essence remain – was propaganda: ceaseless mass mobilization for a cause to be followed blindly, not the ‘art of the possible’.
I
Hitler owed his rise to at least regional prominence on the nationalist Right in Bavaria not simply to his unparalleled ability as a mob-orator at mass meetings in Munich. As before, this was his chief asset. But linked to this, and of crucial importance, was the fact that he was the head of a movement which, in contrast to the earliest phase of the party’s existence, now came to develop its own substantial paramilitary force and to enter the maelstrom of Bavarian paramilitary politics.
Acceptance of a high level of political violence was a hallmark of the political culture of Germany between the wars. The brutalization of society engendered by war and near-civil war together with the upheaval and turmoil of the revolution prepared the ground for a readiness to tolerate violence paradoxically seen to be serving the interests of a return to order and normality. It was a mentality which not only contributed to the rise of National Socialism, but also to the moral indifference to violence that was so widespread during the Third Reich itself.3 The exponents of the extreme political violence were for the most part the counter-revolutionary private armies – the Freikorps, the Volunteer Associations, the Citizens’ Defence Forces – which sprang up in Germany after the war and were actively supported and deployed by state authorities. Gustav Noske had begun the use of non-state forces in the service of the state in the brutal suppression of the Spartacus Rising in January 1919. The Freikorps participated, as we have already noted, in the smashing of the Räterepublik in Munich four months later. A plethora of paramilitary organizations emerged across the political spectrum, but most prominently on the counter-revolutionary Right. It was above all in the peculiar conditions of post-revolutionary Bavaria that the private armies, with the toleration and often active support of the Bavarian authorities, could fully flourish.
The massive Citizens’ Defence Force (Einwohnerwehr) – comprising up to 400,000 men with 2½ million weapons – that was established in Bavaria immediately after the crushing of the Räterepublik was the product of a mentality obsessed by the need for protection against a presumed threat from the Left and ready, as the popularity of the counter-revolutionary violence in spring 1919 showed, to resort to any measures to ensure that protection.4 The Einwohnerwehr, and a number of other, similar, organizations that emerged alongside it, represented ‘white-blue’ Bavarian traditionalism and, as the name suggested, was in essence defensively orientated. But more sinister paramilitary organizations found a welcome refuge in the Bavarian ‘cell of order’ after the collapse of the Kapp Putsch in 1920. The vehemently anti-socialist, counter-revolutionary regime of Minister President Gustav Ritter von Kahr turned Bavaria into a haven for right-wing extremists from all over Germany, including many under order of arrest elsewhere in the country. From a new protected base in Munich, for example, Captain Hermann Ehrhardt, a veteran of orchestrated anti-socialist violence in the Freikorps, including the suppression of the Räterepublik, and a leader of the Kapp Putsch, was able to use his Organisation Consul to build up a network of groups throughout the whole of the German Reich and carry out many of the political murders – there were 354 in all perpetrated by the Right between 1919 and 1922 – that stained the early years of the troubled new democracy.5 And Kahr’s strident line of Bavarian frontal opposition to the central government of the Reich – feeding the traditional hatred of Berlin that had been acutely shored up during the war, and the resentments at the diminished powers of Bavaria in the Reich constitution – had the effect of linking ‘white-blue’ particularist feeling with ‘black-white-red’ nationalist antagonism towards ‘red’ Berlin. The theologian Ernst Troeltsch commented in September 1921:
Since Reich policy stood, and must stand, strongly under the influence of socialism, this has continued to be identified with the hated Berlin and with Jewry, thus directing the torrents of particularis
m and antisemitism on to the mills of anti-socialism… In addition there is then the strong force of monarchism, the bitterness of former members of the military, the collaboration of Prussian emigrants, and the very understandable disaffection of idealist patriots. All this is knotted together into the idea of allocating Bavaria the mission of saving the Reich from socialism, and seeing it as the cell of order and starting-point of reconstruction.6
By spring 1921 Kahr was no longer able to prevent the dissolution of the Bavarian Einwohnerwehr after holding out for a year against the Reich’s insistence (under Allied pressure) on confiscation of weapons and dismantling of civilian defence units.7 The resulting fury towards Berlin prompted further radicalization. And out of the dissolved Einwohnerwehr arose a bewildering array of new or already existing but now strengthened ‘patriotic associations’ competing with each other in their activism and radicalism. The largest – and intended to be the successor to the Einwohnerwehr, though in reality a coalition of numerous fractions which would eventually split – was the Bund Bayern und Reich, a ‘white-blue’ Bavarian loyalist organization, combining strong monarchist and Christian traditionalist strains with vehement anti-Marxism and antisemitism, operating under the slogan ‘First the Homeland, then the World!’8 It was run by the Regensburg public health inspector Dr Otto Pittinger, formerly prominent in the district leadership of the civil defence units in the Upper Palatinate province of Bavaria. Since Pittinger had difficulty in exercising authority over his organization, smaller but more radical associations moved in to fill the vacuum and expand their influence. Among them were the Bund Oberland, which had emerged from Epp’s Freikorps Oberland, had been involved in the ending of the ‘Councils Republic’, and had further cut its teeth in the campaign against the Poles in Upper Silesia in 1921; the Reichsflagge, previously with a following mainly confined to Franconia but now, under the direction of Ernst Röhm (head of the Munich branch), expanding into southern Bavaria; the Vaterländische Vereine Münchens (VVM, Patriotic Associations of Munich), the successor to the Einwohnerwehr in the Bavarian capital; and a variety of organizations and sub-organizations, most prominent of them the Wiking-Bund, headed by Captain Ehrhardt.9 It was Ehrhardt, alongside Ernst Röhm, who was to play a leading role in establishing the NSDAP’s own paramilitary organization, which was to emerge from 1921 onwards into a significant feature of the Nazi Movement and an important factor in paramilitary politics in Bavaria.10