Hitler

by Joachim C. Fest

  Presently my critical faculty was swept away…. I do not know how to describe the emotions that swept over me as I heard this man. His words were like a scourge. When he spoke of the disgrace of Germany, I felt ready to spring on any enemy. His appeal to German manhood was like a call to arms, the gospel he preached a sacred truth. He seemed another Luther. I forgot everything but the man; then, glancing round, I saw that his magnetism was holding these thousands as one.

  Of course I was ripe for this experience. I was a man of thirty-two, weary of disgust and disillusionment, a wanderer seeking a cause: a patriot without a channel for his patriotism, a yearner after the heroic without a hero. The intense will of the man, the passion of his sincerity seemed to flow from him into me. I experienced an exaltation that could be likened only to religious conversion.34

  From the spring of 1922 on the membership figures began climbing by leaps and bounds. By summer the party had some fifty local groups, and at the beginning of 1923 the Munich business office had to be closed temporarily because it was unable to cope with the mass of applications. Part of this increase was due to an order requiring every “party comrade” to bring in three new members and one subscriber to the Völkische Beobachter every three months. But much of it was surely due to Hitler’s growing skill as an orator and organizer.

  In order to meet the needs of disoriented people, the NSDAP tried to create close links between the party and the personal lives of the members. In this respect it was once more drawing on the tested practices of socialist parties. But the rite of the weekly evening talkfests, at which attendance was obligatory, the joint outings, concerts, or solstice festivals, the singing, the cookouts, and saluting, in addition to the various forms of bland sociability that developed in party headquarters and storm troop barracks—all this went far beyond the model and appealed more directly to the human craving for solidarity. The movement’s greatest task, Hitler declared, was to provide “these seeking and erring masses” with the opportunity “at least somewhere once more to find a place where their hearts can rest.”

  At first Hitler’s policy had been to enlarge the party at all costs. But after a while he took another line, establishing new local groups only when a capable leader in whom he personally had confidence could be found, one who could satisfy the craving for authority so obviously crying out for fulfillment.

  For the party aimed at being more than an organization for specific political purposes. It never forgot, in its concern with the affairs of the day, that in addition to giving the members a deeply serious interpretation of the world it must also provide them with a touch of that banal contentment so conspicuously missing in the misery and isolation of everyday living. In its effort to be all at once homeland, center of existence, and source of knowledge the party was already manifesting its later claims to totality.

  Within a year the NSDAP thus developed into “the strongest power factor in South German nationalism,” as one observer wrote. The North German party groups, too, showed such marked growth, inheriting membership from the disintegrating German Socialist Party. When, in June, 1922, the Foreign Minister, Walter Rathenau, was assassinated by nationalist conspirators, some German states, such as Prussia, Baden, and Thuringia, decided to ban Hitler’s party. In Bavaria, however, the experiences of the soviet period had not been forgotten; the NSDAP, as the most radical anti-Communist party, was not molested. In fact, many of Hitler’s followers held top positions in the Munich police force, including Police Commissioner Pöhner and Oberamtmann (Chief Bailiff) Frick, his specialist in political affairs. These two men quashed any protests against the NSDAP, kept the party informed of planned actions against it, and if the police had after all to intervene, took care that such actions came to nothing. Frick later admitted that the police could easily have suppressed the party at this time, but that “we held our protecting hand over the NSDAP and Herr Hitler.” And Hitler himself remarked that without the assistance of Frick he would “never have been out of the clink.”35

  Hitler found himself imperiled only once, when Bavarian Interior Minister Schweyer raised the question of having the troublesome alien agitator deported to Austria. A conference in 1922 among the leaders of all the government parties had agreed that the rowdy bands in the streets of Munich, the brawls, the constant molesting of the citizenry, were becoming intolerable. But Erhard Auer, the leader of the Social Democrats, opposed deportation on the grounds that it would be a violation of “democratic and libertarian principles.” So Hitler was allowed to go on denouncing the republic as a “sanctuary for foreign swindlers,” threatening the administration that when he came to power “may God have mercy on you!” and proclaiming that there could be “only one punishment: the rope” for the treasonous leaders of the Social Democratic Party. Whipped up by his demagogy, the city of Munich became an enclave of antirepublicanism, buzzing with rumors of coups, civil war, and restoration of the monarchy. When Reich President Friedrich Ebert visited Munich in the summer of 1922, he was met at the railroad station with boos, jeers, and the display of red bathing trunks. (The President had been so unwise as to let himself be photographed, along with Noske, his Defense Minister, in a bathing suit. In the authoritarian-minded German nation, the loss of dignity was catastrophic.) Chancellor Wirth’s advisors warned him to cancel a planned trip to Munich. At the same time, Hindenburg was being greeted with ovations, and transportation of the body of Ludwig III, the last Wittelsbach monarch, who had died in exile, brought the whole city out into the streets, awash in tears of mourning and nostalgia.

  His successes within Munich encouraged Hitler to undertake his first bold stroke outside the city. In mid-October, 1922, the patriotic societies of Coburg organized a demonstration, to which they invited Hitler. It was suggested that he come with “some companions.” Hitler interpreted this phrase in his customary brazen manner. Intending to take over and dominate the demonstration, he set out in a special train with some 800 men, a display of standards, and a sizable contingent of band musicians. On arrival he was asked not to march into the city in a solid formation. According to his own report, he “flatly refused” the request and ordered his men to march in formation “with bands playing.” Growing hostile crowds formed along both sides of the street. But since the expected mass riot did not begin, they had no sooner reached the meeting hall when Hitler ordered his units to march back the way they had come. Moreover, he added a theatrical touch that brought the tension to an intolerable height: the bands stopped playing and the men marched only to throbbing drumrolls. This time the predictable street battle erupted. It dragged on in a series of small skirmishes all through the day and into the night, and ultimately the National Socialists emerged as the victors.

  This was the first of those challenges to the political authorities that were to dominate the following years. Significantly, Cohurg became one of the most reliable NSDAP bases. The participants in the trip were honored by a special medal struck as a memorial to the occasion. The braggadocio of Hitler’s men during the following weeks repeatedly led to rumors of coups. Finally, Interior Minister Schweyer sent for Hitler and issued a grave warning. If there were any resort to force, Schweyer said, he would order the police to shoot. But Hitler assured him he would “never as long as I live make a putsch.” He gave the minister his word of honor.

  Such incidents as this, however, encouraged him to think that he could call the next move. All these bans, summonses, and warnings were evidence of how far he had come, starting from nothing. In his emotional states he envisioned a historic role for himself. For confirmation there were Mustafa Kemal Pasha’s seizure of power in Ankara and Mussolini’s recent march on Rome. All keyed up, he listened to an informant describe how the black shirts, thanks to their enthusiasm, resolution, and the benevolent passivity of the army, had marched tempestuously to victory, snatching one city after the other from the “Reds.” Later Hitler spoke of the enormous impetus this “turning point in history” had given him. Very much as in his boyhood
, he let himself be carried away on the wings of imagination. At such times he would vividly see the swastika banner “fluttering over the Schloss in Berlin as over the peasant’s hut.” Or during some quiet coffee break he would casually remark, returning from some distant dream world, that in the next war “the first order of business would be to seize the grain-growing areas of Poland and the Ukraine.”

  Coburg had given him fresh confidence. “From now on I will go my way alone,” he declared. Only a short time before he had still thought of himself as a harbinger and dreamed that “one day someone will come along, with an iron cranium and possibly with filthy boots, but with a pure conscience and strong fist, who will put an end to the blabber of these armchair heroes and give the nation deeds.” Now, tentatively at first, he began to think of himself as the coming man and actually ended by comparing himself to Napoleon. His army superiors during the war would not promote him to a noncom on the ground that he would be incapable of arousing respect. Now, by his extraordinary and ultimately devastating capacity to evoke loyalty, he demonstrated his talent for leadership. For it was solely for his sake that his followers went to the lengths they did; it was only with eyes on him that they were ready to stake their lives, trample over their own compunctions, and from the very beginning to commit crimes. He liked to be called “Wolf” in his intimate circle; the name, he decided, was the primitive Germanic form of Adolf. It accorded, moreover, with his jungle image of the world and suggested the qualities of strength, aggressiveness, and solitariness. He also used “Wolf” as a pseudonym occasionally and later gave it to the sister who ran his household. And when it was decided to establish the Volkswagen plant, Robert Ley declared: “We shall name the town Wolfsburg, after you, my Führer.”36

  He early developed a sense that all his actions were taking place under the eyes of the “goddess of history.” Though his real party membership number was 555, he invariably claimed to be member number 7. This not only raised his status as an early member but gave him the nimbus of a magic number. Along with this he began blotting out his private life. He made a principle of not inviting even the most intimate members of his entourage to his home. He tried as far as possible to keep them apart from one another. Meeting one of his early acquaintances in Munich at this time, he urgently begged him “never to give information to anyone, not even his closest party comrades, about his youth in Vienna and Munich.” He tried out poses, attitudes, posturings; at the start he often made rather a botch of them and showed the strain of trying to be what he was not. But even in the later years close study will separate out the strands, show the constant alternation between rehearsed self-control and attacks of literally senseless rage, between Caesaristic postures and lax stupefaction, between his artificial and his natural existence. In this early phase of the process of stylization he seemed unable to hold to his image consistently. He had only begun to sketch it, and the various elements were hardly congruous. An Italian Fascist at the time saw him as “a Julius Caesar with Tyrolean hat.”

  Still and all, he had very nearly attained the dream of his youth. He was living unattached, without the bother of an occupation, subject only to his own whims; he was “master of his time” and, moreover, his drama, explosive effects, glitter and applause. It was an artist’s life, more or less. He drove fast cars, cut something of a figure at various salons, and was at home in the “great world” among aristocrats, captains of industry, notables, and scientists. There were moments when he thought of settling for bourgeois security within the present framework. He would not ask much, he commented at such times: “All I desire is for the movement to keep going and for me to make a living as chief of the Völkische Beobachter.”

  But those were moods. Such modesty did not really suit his nature. He had no sense of proportion; some demon was constantly driving him to the edge of the possible and beyond. “Everything in him urged him on to radical and total solutions,” the friend of his youth had concluded. Now another observer tersely called him a fanatic, “with a streak of craziness in him. Now that he is being pampered, he is altogether out of control.”

  Certainly the period of painful obscurity was over, and in hindsight Hitler had come an amazingly long way. Even the neutral onlooker must be astounded at the personal progress he had made in the past three years. He was quite a different person from the pallid and inconsequential drifter he had been at thirty. His life seemed to be made out of two wholly separate pieces. With extraordinary boldness and coldness, he had emerged from his condition as underling. All he needed now was to become a little more polished, to get used to his new part. Everything else suggested that he was on the point of entering a new and larger sphere of action to which he was entirely equal. At any rate Hitler had proved able to cope with whatever came his way, taking in at a glance people, motivations, forces, ideas, and bending everything to his own aim—the enlarging of his power.

  Not unreasonably, his biographers have tended to look for a particular “breakthrough experience.” They have spoken of incubation periods, the disappearance of some block or other, and even demonic powers. But perhaps he was now no different from what he had been, except that he had found some key to himself and been able to reshuffle the unchanged existing elements of his personality into a new arrangement, so that the oddball was transformed into a magnetic demagogue, the “dreamer” into the man of action. He was the catalyst of the masses; without contributing anything new, he set in motion enormous accelerations and crises. But the masses in turn catalyzed him; they were his creation and he, simultaneously, was their creature. “I know,” he said to his public in phrases of almost Biblical ring, “that everything you are, you are through me, and everything I am, I am through you alone.”

  In that lies the explanation for the peculiar rigidity which was present almost from the start. In fact Hitler’s world view had not changed since his days in Vienna, as he himself was wont to declare. For the elements remained the same; all that the masses’ grand cry of reveille did was to charge that world view with enormous tension. But the emotions themselves, the fears and obsessions, were fixed. Hitler’s taste in art also, and even his personal preferences, remained what they had been in the days of his boyhood and youth: Tristan and starchy foods, neoclassicism, anti-Semitism, Karl Spitzweg, and a weakness for cream cake. Though he later declared that while in Vienna he had been “in respect to thinking a babe-in-arms,” in a sense he had always remained so. If we compare the drawings and painstaking water colors of the twenty-year-old postcard painter with those of the First World War soldier or with those of the Chancellor twenty years later, their quality hardly differs. No personal experience, no process of development is reflected in these tight little sketches. As if petrified, Hitler remained what he had been.

  Yet it may be that these immature features were essential for Hitler’s successes. From the summer of 1923 on, the nation reeled from one crisis and emergency to the next. Under such circumstances, fortune favored only the man who despised circumstances, who instead of engaging in politics challenged fate, and who promised not to improve conditions but to overturn them radically and thoroughly. “I guarantee you,” Hitler phrased it, “that the impossible always succeeds. What is unlikeliest is surest.”

  Challenging the Powers that Be

  For me and for all of us, setbacks have been only the whiplash which drove us onward with more determination than before.

  Adolf Hitler

  Hitler had planned a party rally in Munich for the end of January, 1923. He meant to turn it into an intimidating demonstration of his own power. Five thousand SA men had been summoned to Munich from all over Bavaria. They would parade before their Führer on the Marsfeld, or Field of Mars, on the outskirts of town, forming the honor guard for the first solemn dedication of the standards. Concurrently, mass meetings were to be held in no fewer than twelve halls in the city. To increase the popular appeal, the party had hired bands, folk-dance ensembles, and the comedian Weiss Ferdl. The sheer size of the a
ffair, combined with the rumors of a Nazi putsch that had been circulating for weeks, underlined Hitler’s mounting importance as a political figure.

  The way the Bavarian authorities reacted to Hitler’s defiant and challenging proclamations revealed their growing perplexity vis-à-vis the Nazi party. The party’s rise had been so rapid that the exact nature of it as a force on the political scene remained undefined. On the one hand, it did assume a nationalist stance and manifested laudable energy in its antagonism to the Left. Yet, at the same time, it had no respect for authorities and was constantly violating the public order that it claimed to desire above all else. In 1922 the authorities sentenced Hitler to three months’ imprisonment—partly because they were determined to show him that there were limits which they would not allow him to breach. He and his followers had disrupted a meeting of the Bayernbund (Bavarian League) and given its leader, the engineer Otto Ballerstedt, a severe beating. Hitler served only four weeks of the sentence. When he made his first public appearance after his release, he was “carried to the podium amidst applause which seemed as if it would never end.” The Völkische Beobachter called him “the most popular and most hated man in Munich.” The situation involved risks that even Hitler must have found difficult to calculate. The year 1923 was characterized by his repeated efforts to clarify his relationship to the power structure. He tested it from a number of angles, at times taking a wooing tone, at times a threatening one.