by Ian Kershaw
Even so, it was striking that, away from his Munich citadel, Hitler’s power was still limited. He showed himself quite incapable of exercising his authority on the internecine strife that dominated the Nuremberg branch of the NSDAP over the coming year. Neither arbitrary decree from Munich nor even Hitler’s personal intervention could impose a solution on the bitter power-struggle erupting in the early months of 1923 between Streicher and his rival in Nuremberg, Walther Kellerbauer, nine years older, a former naval officer, good publicist and speaker, editor of a party newspaper, the Deutscher Volkswille (German Will of the People), and with his own pretensions to running the branch. After months of bitter wrangling, Streicher proved victorious. This was despite Kellerbauer, someone Hitler was not keen to alienate, for a time being able to call upon the party leader’s support.51 Hitler was the undisputed propaganda champion of the party. But away from his Munich base, his writ still did not always run.
This was in itself ample reason for the interest which his Munich following began to show in building up the leadership cult around Hitler. A significant boost to the aura of a man of destiny attaching itself to Hitler came from outside Germany. On 28 October 1922, Mussolini’s Blackshirts had marched on Rome and seized power. At least that was the myth that was propagated. In reality, around 20,000 badly-armed, ill-equipped and hungry Fascists, approaching Rome from four directions, had halted around twenty miles from the city, some of them leaving for home in streaming rain. There was, in fact, no ‘March on Rome’, which the Italian army could in any case easily have crushed if necessary. On 29 October, King Victor Emmanuel III simply invited Mussolini to form a government. When the Fascist Leader arrived in Rome the following day he was wearing a black shirt, black trousers, and a bowler hat.52
Mussolini’s so-called ‘March on Rome’ on 28 October 1922 – fictitious though it was in the Fascist legend of a heroic ‘seizure of power’ – nevertheless deeply stirred the Nazi Party. It suggested the model of a dynamic and heroic nationalist leader marching to the salvation of his strife-torn country. The Duce provided an image to be copied. Less than a week after the coup d’état in Italy, on 3 November 1922, Hermann Esser proclaimed to a packed Festsaal in the Hofbräuhaus: ‘Germany’s Mussolini is called Adolf Hitler.’53 It marked the symbolic moment when Hitler’s followers invented the Führer cult.
III
Notions of ‘heroic’ leadership had been part of the political culture of the nationalist Right in the years before the First World War. The Bismarck cult, exaggerated hopes invested in the Kaiser and then dashed, grandiose images of Imperial grandeur and military glory contrasting starkly with counter-images of weak and puny party-politicians squabbling in the Reichstag, helped, as we have seen, to advance the idea of national salvation. A rebirth of the nation was promised through the subordination to a ‘great leader’ who would invoke the values of a ‘heroic’ (and mythical) past. The nationalist associations, most prominently the Pan-German League, popularized and disseminated such notions. The Protestant ‘educated’ middle classes were affected more than most by them. Germanic myths and romantic imagery in the bourgeois youth movement provided a base for their cultivation among the younger generation. Even so, such ideas hardly occupied a central position in German political culture before 1914.
However, war and revolution gave new substance to images of ‘heroic’ leadership. The subsequent idealization of the ‘community of fate’ in the trenches, and the ‘great deeds’ and heroism of ‘true’ leadership in the struggle for national survival – undermined, according to the legend, from within – provided a mass of new potential adherents on the counter-revolutionary Right to the idea of a coming ‘great leader’. Images of leadership varied. Ernst Röhm, whose background we have briefly glimpsed, stands proxy for thousands in his idolization of the leadership of the military ‘man of action’. For the neo-conservative Right, the shock of the Revolution and the dominance of the detested Social Democrats, contempt for the ‘party system’ and parliamentary government, and Germany’s international humiliation and weakness meant an evocation of Bismarck in the yearning for a great ‘statesman’. Literary figures were among the most expressive advocates of ‘heroic’ leadership. The author Ernst Jünger saw ‘the great politician of the future’ as a ‘modern man of power’ in the ‘machine era’ – ‘a man of outstanding intelligence’, perhaps emerging from a party, but standing ‘above parties and divisions’, whose natural instinct and will would select the right path and overcome all obstacles.54 The Bonn writer Ernst Bertram linked his vision of a coming Leader, in a poem composed in 1922, with notions of ‘renewal’ arising from the banks of the Rhine and staving off the threat from Asia.55 Within the Protestant Church, there were those who looked to the coming Leader to bring about spiritual renewal and moral revival. The fall of the monarchy and collapse of ‘God-given’ authority, the secularization of society, and the perceived ‘crisis of faith’ in German Protestantism all contributed to a readiness to look to a new form of leadership which could reinvoke ‘true’ Christian values. The shadings of the various leadership images came together in the tract of the nationalist publicist Wilhelm Stapel, a former liberal turned völkisch enthusiast, member of the Hamburg group of neo-conservatives associated with the ideas of Moeller van den Bruck, who depicted the ‘true statesman’ as ‘at one and the same time ruler, warrior, and priest’.56 It amounted to a secularized belief in salvation, wrapped up in pseudo-religious language.
Whatever the particular emphasis, the conservative and völkisch Right juxtaposed the negative view of a ‘leaderless democracy’ with a concept of a true leader as a man of destiny, born not elected to leadership, not bound by conventional rules and laws, ‘hard, straightforward, and ruthless’, but embodying the will of God in his actions. ‘God give us leaders and help us to true following,’ ran one text.57 Devotion, loyalty, obedience, and duty were the corresponding values demanded of the followers.
The spread of fascist and militaristic ideas in post-war Europe meant that ‘heroic leadership’ images were ‘in the air’ and by no means confined to Germany. The emergence of the Duce cult in Italy provides an obvious parallel. But the German images naturally had their own flavour, drawing on the particular elements of the political culture of the nationalist Right. And the crisis-ridden nature of the Weimar state, detested by so many powerful groups in society and unable to win the popularity and support of the masses, guaranteed that such ideas, which in a more stable environment might have been regarded with derision and confined to the lunatic fringe of politics, were never short of a hearing. Ideas put into circulation by neo-conservative publicists, writers, and intellectuals were, in more vulgarized form, taken up in paramilitary formations and in the varied groupings of the bourgeois youth movement. The model of Mussolini’s triumph in Italy now offered the opening for such ideas to be incorporated into the vision of national revival preached by the National Socialists.
The Führer cult was not yet the pivot of the party’s ideology and organization. But the beginnings of a conscious public profiling of Hitler’s leadership qualities by his entourage, with strong hints in his own speeches, dates back to the period following Mussolini’s ‘March on Rome’.58 Hitler was beginning to attract fawning excesses of adulation – even stretching to grotesque comparisons with Napoleon – from admirers on the nationalist Right. The ground for the later rapid spread of the Führer cult was already well fertilized.59
There had been no trace of a leadership cult in the first years of the Nazi Party. The word ‘leader’ (‘Führer’) had no special meaning attached to it. Every political party or organization had a leader – or more than one. The NSDAP was no different. Drexler was referred to as the party’s ‘Führer’, as was Hitler; or sometimes both in practically the same breath.60 Once Hitler had taken over the party leadership in July 1921, the term ‘our leader’ (‘unser Führer’) became gradually more common.61 But its meaning was still interchangeable with the purely functional ‘c
hairman of the NSDAP’. There was nothing ‘heroic’ about it. Nor had Hitler endeavoured to build up a personality cult around himself. But Mussolini’s .triumph evidently made a deep impression on him. It gave him a role-model. Referring to Mussolini, less than a month after the ‘March on Rome’, Hitler reportedly stated: ‘So will it be with us. We only have to have the courage to act. Without struggle, no victory!’62 However, the reshaping of his self-image also reflected how his supporters were beginning to see their leader. His followers portrayed him, in fact, as Germany’s ‘heroic’ leader before he came to see himself in that light. Not that he did anything to discourage the new way he was being portrayed from autumn 1922 onwards. It was in December 1922 that the Völkischer Beobachter for the first time appeared to claim that Hitler was a special kind of leader – indeed the Leader for whom Germany was waiting. Followers of Hitler leaving a parade in Munich were said ‘to have found something which millions are yearning for, a leader’.63 By Hitler’s thirty-fourth birthday, on 20 April 1923, when the new head of the S A, Hermann Göring – thirty years old, Bavarian born but from the time of his military training in Berlin a self-styled Prussian, handsome (at this time), wildly egocentric, well connected and power-hungry, bringing the glamour of the World-War-decorated flying ace as well as important links to the aristocracy to the Nazi Movement – labelled him the ‘beloved leader of the German freedom-movement’, the personality cult was unmistakable.64 Political opponents scorned it.65 That it was not without its mark on Hitler himself is plain. Eckart told Hanfstaengl, while on holiday with Hitler near Berchtesgaden in the Bavarian Alps bordering on Austria in May 1923, that Hitler had ‘megalomania halfway between a Messiah complex and Neroism’, after he had allegedly compared the way he would deal with Berlin with Christ throwing money-changers out of the temple.66 Similar signs can be read into the letter no less a figure than Gottfried Feder addressed to his party leader on 10 August 1923, strongly criticizing his lifestyle, his ‘anarchy in the allocation of time’, and not least the way Hitler was now placing himself above the party. ‘We gladly yield first place to you. But we have no understanding for tyrannical tendencies,’ Feder witheringly concluded.67
During 1923 there are indications in Hitler’s speeches that his self-perception was changing. He was now much more preoccupied than he had been in earlier years with leadership, and the qualities needed in the coming Leader of Germany. At no time before his imprisonment in Landsberg did he unambiguously claim those qualities for himself. But a number of passages in his speeches hint that the edges of what distinguished the ‘drummer’ from the ‘Leader’ might be starting to blur.
In November 1922, Hitler spoke of obedience to the leader as the first duty. According to the police report of his speech in Munich’s Bürgerbräukeller, however, he went on to speak in the plural of ‘leaders’ who were elected and could, if found wanting, be rejected.68 A few days later, he emphasized that only the leader was answerable to the masses, that commissions and committees were a hindrance to a movement.69 Such comments were no different from views expressed by Hitler at the time that he took over the party leadership. But before 1923 he had rarely spoken of a dictatorship in Germany, and then in somewhat veiled terms which did not necessarily imply the rule of a single individual.70 By 1923, in the wake of Mussolini’s success, with mounting crisis in the Reich, and with adulation being heaped on him by his own supporters, Hitler looked increasingly to ‘a strong man who would rescue Germany’.71 He continued to speak in the plural, however, of the need for leaders – of a non-parliamentary kind – who would rule if necessary against the will of the majority in the interests of the nation.72‘The people don’t want ministers any longer, but leaders,’ he proclaimed.73 On 4 May 1923, in a speech castigating the parliamentary system as the ‘downfall and end of the German nation’,74 Hitler gave the clearest hint to date of how he saw his own role. With reference to Frederick the Great and Bismarck, ‘giants’ whose deeds contrasted with those of the Reichstag, ‘Germany’s grave-digger’, he declared: ‘What can save Germany is the dictatorship of the national will and national determination. The question arises: is the suitable personality to hand? Our task is not to look for such a person. He is a gift from heaven, or is not there. Our task is to create the sword that this person will need when he is there. Our task is to give the dictator, when he comes, a people ready for him!’75
By July he was saying that only the value of personality, not majority decisions of parliament, could save Germany: ‘as Leader of the National Socialist Party I see my task in accepting the responsibility’.76 His call for a dictatorship met with great applause.77 As his remarks show, he saw himself still as the ‘drummer’.78 But there was an element of ambiguity. In an interview with the British Daily Mail on 2 October 1923, Hitler was reported as saying: ‘If a German Mussolini is given to Germany… people would fall down on their knees and worship him more than Mussolini has ever been worshipped.’79 If he was seeing himself – as his followers were seeing him – as the ‘German Mussolini’, then he was apparently beginning to associate the greatness of national leadership with his own person.80 In Nuremberg, asking whether Kahr deserved support, he denied the Bavarian ruler any claim to true leadership. He located ‘greatness’ solely in heroic qualities of the individual, and found these in ‘three of our greatest Germans’: Martin Luther, Frederick the Great and Richard Wagner. All three were ‘pioneers’ (Wegbereiter) in the national cause and thereby ‘heroes of their people’. Kahr was ‘decent’, and a capable administrator. But these were things to be taken for granted.81 Kahr thought only in Bavarian defensive terms, and was incapable of leading from Munich the struggle for national liberation.82 ‘A freedom-fighter must have the right instinct, he must have will and nothing more than will.’83 The juxtaposition of heroic leadership, its denial to Kahr, and the qualities required of the ‘freedom-fighter’ again suggest that Hitler was beginning to stake a claim for himself to the position of supreme (and heroic) national leader. The ambiguity remained. He saw his own aim as that of the ‘pioneer’, the one ‘paving the way for the great German freedom-movement’.84 On the one hand, this still suggested the ‘drummer’.85 On the other, he had already just linked the path-breaking pioneer with the great national heroes of the past. At any rate, he felt by this time, so he said, ‘the call to Germany’s salvation within him’, and others detected ‘outright Napeoleonic and messianic allures’ in what he said.86
The lack of clarity in Hitler’s comments about the future leadership was, in part, presumably tactical. There was nothing to be gained by alienating possible support through a premature conflict about who would later be supreme leader. As Hitler had stated in October, the leadership question could be left unanswered until ‘the weapon is created which the leader must possess’. Only then would the time be ripe to ‘pray to our Lord God that he give us the right leader’.87 But it was predominantly a reflection of Hitler’s concept of politics as essentially agitation, propaganda, and ‘struggle’.88 Organizational forms remained of little concern to him as long as his own freedom of action was not constrained by them. The crucial issue was the leadership of the ‘political struggle’. But it is hard to imagine that Hitler’s self-confidence in this field and his ingrained refusal to compromise would not subsequently have meant his demand for total, unconstrained leadership of the ‘national movement’. At any rate, Hitler’s comments on leadership in the crisis-ridden year of 1923 seem to indicate that his self-image was in a process of change. He still saw himself as the ‘drummer’, the highest calling there was in his eyes. But it would not take much, following his triumph in the trial after the failed putsch, to convert that self-image into the presumption that he was the ‘heroic leader’ himself.
IV
That was all in the future. Around the beginning of 1923, few, if any, outside the ranks of his most fervent devotees thought seriously of Hitler as Germany’s coming ‘great leader’. But his rise to star status on Munich’s political scene
– alongside the Hofbräuhaus, the city’s only notable curiosity, as one newspaper put it89 – meant that individuals from quite outside his normal social circles began to take a keen interest in him.
Two were converts to the party who were able to open up useful new contacts for Hitler. Kurt Lüdecke, a well-connected former gambler, playboy, and commercial adventurer, a widely-travelled ‘man of the world’, was ‘looking for a leader and a cause’ when he first heard Hitler speak at the rally of the ‘Patriotic Associations’ in Munich in August 1922.90 Lüdecke was enthralled. ‘My critical faculty was swept away,’ he later wrote. ‘He was holding the masses, and me with them, under a hypnotic spell by the sheer force of his conviction… His appeal to German manhood was like a call to arms, the gospel he preached a sacred truth. He seemed another Luther… I experienced an exaltation that could be likened only to religious conversion… I had found myself, my leader, and my cause.’91 According to his own account, Lüdecke used his connections to promote Hitler’s standing with General Ludendorff, a war-hero since repulsing the Russian advance into East Prussia in 1914, in effect Germany’s dictator during the last two war years, and now the outstanding figure on the radical Right, whose name alone was sufficient to open further doors to Hitler. He also sang Hitler’s praises to the former Munich chief of police, already an important Nazi sympathizer and protector, Ernst Pöhner.92 Abroad Lüdecke was able to establish contacts just before the ‘March on Rome’ with Mussolini (who at that time had never heard of Hitler), and in 1923 with Gömbös and other leading figures in Hungary.93 His foreign bank accounts, and sizeable donations he was able to acquire abroad, proved valuable to the party during the hyperinflation of 1923.94 He also fitted out and accommodated at his own cost an entire stormtrooper company. Even so, many of Lüdecke’s well-placed contacts were impatient at his constant proselytizing for the NSDAP, and quietly dropped him. And within the party, he was unable to overcome dislike and distrust. He was even denounced to the police by Max Amann as a French spy and jailed under false pretences for two months.95 By the end of 1923, Lüdecke had used up almost his entire income on behalf of the party.96