The Third Reich

by Thomas Childers

  Millions of returning soldiers were being discharged, finding their way through the revolutionary chaos to reach home. But Hitler was not eager to leave the war behind. “In the world of peace,” the journalist Konrad Heiden astutely observed, “Hitler had been a foreigner, in the world of war he felt at home.” Now he had nowhere to go. The army was dissolving, revolutionary workers’ and soldiers’ councils were sprouting all across the country, the Social Democrats, the ultimate outsiders of Imperial Germany, held power in Berlin, and revolution was in the air. In late November, as he struggled to come to grips with this nightmarish turn of events, Hitler was released from the hospital and ordered to report to the regimental reserve in Munich. With his usual flair for self-dramatization he would later claim that it was then, as he prepared to depart Pasewalk, that he made the momentous decision “to go into politics.” In fact, he left the hospital with no other goal than to stay in the army for as long as possible, where he was guaranteed food, shelter, and for the time being regular pay. At twenty-nine years of age, he would soon be mustered out of the army and would again be, just as he had been in Vienna and prewar Munich, a mere face in the crowd, an unknown, with no profession, no prospects, and no future.

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  HITLER AND THE CHAOS OF POSTWAR GERMANY

  When Hitler arrived in Munich in late November of 1918, he found a city roiling in political turmoil. Earlier in the month a Socialist revolution led by Kurt Eisner of the USPD, who had spent a year in prison for publicly opposing the war, had brushed aside the ancient Wittelsbach monarchy and proclaimed a Bavarian Socialist Republic. The Socialist government struggled to establish some semblance of order, but with food scarce, unemployment rampant, and thousands of armed veterans roaming the streets, it proved unable to master the deteriorating situation. On February 21, 1919, Eisner was assassinated by a reactionary fanatic, setting off a chain reaction of political violence that reduced Munich to virtual chaos. A cabinet headed by Majority Social Democrat (the MSPD) Johannes Hoffmann assumed power, but on April 7, a group of frustrated radicals, more anarchist and bohemian than Communist (some referred to them derisively as “coffeehouse revolutionaries”) declared the creation of a government based on the Workers, Soldiers, and Peasants Councils. In the mounting disorder that ensued, the Hoffmann cabinet fled to Bamberg in northern Bavaria and refused to recognize this new Councils Republic (Räterepublik).

  Led by a twenty-five-year-old poet and playwright, Ernst Toller, the Councils Republic fired off a barrage of reforms, some of them radical, others spectacularly idiosyncratic—capitalism would be abolished and free money issued; all banks and industrial firms were to be nationalized; agriculture was to be collectivized; a red army would be raised, and revolutionary tribunals were created to ferret out counterrevolutionary activities. The new regime also ordered that poems by Hölderlin and Schiller be published on the front pages of all the city’s newspapers, and its Commissar for Foreign Affairs, only recently released from an insane asylum, declared war on Württemberg and Switzerland because “these dogs” had failed to loan him badly needed locomotives. He also cabled Lenin and the pope indignantly complaining that his predecessor had absconded with the key to the ministerial toilet. It hardly came as a surprise when the Räterepublik fell after a mere six days, ousted by militant Communists who declared the creation of a Bavarian Soviet Republic on the Bolshevik model. The Communist takeover was led by two Russian Bolsheviks, Max Levien and Eugen Leviné, who proclaimed that this government, unlike its dilettantish predecessor, would represent “the genuine rule of the proletariat.” They immediately called for a general strike, disarmed the Munich police, and set about creating a Red Army, manned by veterans and radical labor unionists. To pay for this force, they plundered homes in the better sections of town, and commanded all civilians to turn over their cash in return for government-backed credit vouchers. Following directives from Moscow, they ordered the arrest of aristocrats and prominent members of the upper middle class, fifty of whom were held hostage in a local high school. Bavaria, they proudly proclaimed, would constitute the advance outpost of a Communist archipelago that would stretch from Russia, to Hungary, to Austria, and into Western Europe.

  In Bamberg, the Hoffmann cabinet appealed to the provisional government in Berlin to recruit a force of some 35,000 Free Corps troops to march against the Communist government in Munich. These Free Corps units were paramilitary associations formed spontaneously all across Germany in 1919 as six million veterans flooded back into the country and were being rapidly mustered out of the army. For the most part they were composed of demobilized soldiers, junior-grade officers, and enlisted men whose formative experience had been war and who found themselves unable or unwilling to demobilize psychologically. They were joined by an admixture of eager university students and young men who had missed out on the war and were impatient for action. They tended to be ultranationalist, anti-Marxist, and often anti-Semitic.

  Far from being threatened by these paramilitary organizations, the Reichswehr viewed the Free Corps as useful auxiliaries to the severely reduced army and provided funds for their operations. The provisional government in Berlin engaged Free Corps units to protect Germany’s eastern frontier against the Poles and Bolsheviks, but also deployed them against domestic enemies on the far left. Although their ostensible mission was to restore law and order, their actions amounted to a bloody crusade against the radical left. In the spring of 1919, Free Corps units, acting on government orders, brutally suppressed a Communist-inspired strike movement in the Ruhr and attacked strongholds of the radical left elsewhere in Germany. Germany was teetering on the cusp of civil war. It was a reflection of the near chaotic conditions prevailing in Germany that these quasi-legal armed formations could roam the country like the freebooters of the Thirty Years War, fighting the perceived threats from the left everywhere. Although they acted independently and were never united under a single command, these Free Corps units in 1919–20 numbered between 300,000 and 400,000 men, roughly four times the size of the regular army.

  In late April 1919 Free Corps forces encircled “Red Munich,” and then in an orgy of pitiless brutality during the first days of May, Free Corps troops, using heavy weapons and even flamethrowers, crushed the severely overmatched “Red Army.” The leaders of the Red Republic were shot or beaten to death or executed after perfunctory trials; the fortunate ones escaped across the frontier. In all, some 600 people—1,200 by some estimates—died in the fighting and its bloody aftermath, leaving behind an indelible impression of Bolshevik terror and counterrevolutionary suppression.

  Stationed in Munich throughout the most violent period of the revolution, Hitler witnessed firsthand the ferocious Marxist demons of his nightmares, the “un-German” revolutionaries who had sabotaged the Reich and delivered Germany to the rapacious Allies. Here he also found confirmation of his association of Jews with the radical left. Many of the Communist leaders were indeed Jewish. Of course, most Jews were not radicals and most radicals were not Jews, but many, and not just on the radical right, came to share this bogus notion during the postwar period of chaos, revolution, and violence. Those seeking a scapegoat for Germany’s downfall had found one.

  Contrary to his brief and obfuscating account of those turbulent days in Mein Kampf, Hitler did not take part in resisting, much less defeating, the Reds. As best he could, he kept his head down, serving unobtrusively and opportunistically the successive Socialist governments in the regular Bavarian army. He was relieved to escape Munich for almost two months, staying out of harm’s way in Traunstein as a guard at a POW camp and returning to Munich in early February. Once back, his only duty was to guard the main railway station and later to inform on members of his unit whom he suspected of leftist sympathies, a task he performed with his usual zeal. Munich in the spring of 1919 was essentially under military rule, and the Bavarian Reichswehr was determined to ferret out and extinguish any lingering subversive sentiments among the tr
oops. To this end, it established a military intelligence bureau that initiated a program to indoctrinate the troops in the proper anti-Marxist, nationalist values. A set of “speakers courses” was created to train “suitable personalities from among the troops” who seemed to have the potential to be effective instructors, and in early June Hitler was assigned to this program. The courses, taught largely by faculty at the university, included such offerings as “German History Since the Reformation,” “The Political History of the War,” “Socialism in Theory and Practice,” and “Our Economic Situation and the Peace Conditions.” All the instructors had impeccable nationalist credentials, but one in particular made a strong impression on Hitler. Gottfried Feder, an engineer by training and a self-taught economist, lectured on his concept of “interest slavery,” drawing a distinction between capital derived from productive labor and capital accruing from stock market speculation and interest. Jews, he argued fiercely, were masters of the latter, of international finance that exploited and enslaved honest Germans by their unproductive manipulation of capital. The topic of his first lecture, “Breaking Interest Slavery,” would soon be embedded in the National Socialist program. It was, Hitler believed, “a theoretical truth which would inevitably be of immense importance for the future of the German people.”

  One day, during a break between classes, Karl Alexander von Müller, one of Hitler’s instructors, noticed a group of students gathered around one of their number, engaging in a fierce discussion. “The men seemed spellbound by a man in their midst, who railed at them uninterruptedly in a strangely guttural yet passionate voice. I had the unsettling feeling that their excitement was his work and simultaneously the source of his own power. I saw a pale, thin face under an unsoldierly shock of hanging hair, and striking large light blue eyes that glittered fanatically.” Later he remarked to Captain Mayr, head of the program, “Do you know you have a natural orator in your group?” Hitler very quickly emerged as the star of the program. His oddly gripping manner of speech, his fanatical intensity, and his populist language provoked enthusiastic, stormy responses from the soldiers who formed his captive audiences. He had discovered a hidden talent. “For all at once I was offered an opportunity of speaking before a larger audience; and the thing I had always presumed from pure feeling without knowing it was now corroborated: I could ‘speak.’ ”

  In July, Mayr chose him as one of a small number of agents to conduct a five-day indoctrination course at a Reichswehr camp near Augsburg, where returning POWs were said to be harboring Communist sentiments. His speeches were thunderous attacks on the Marxists, the “November criminals” who had stabbed the army in the back, and the universally hated Treaty of Versailles, signed in June. “Herr Hitler,” one of the soldiers in his audience remarked, “is the born people’s speaker, and by his fanaticism and his crowd appeal he clearly compels the attention of his listeners, and makes them think his way.” He was particularly fierce when speaking of the Jews. So extreme, so inflammatory were his anti-Jewish harangues that the camp commander actually requested Hitler to tone down his anti-Semitic rhetoric. By the time he returned to Munich Hitler had acquired the reputation as something of an expert on Jewish matters, so much so that when Mayr received a letter from a Herr Adolf Gemlich asking for clarification on the “Jewish question,” he turned to Hitler to write the response.

  Was it the case, Gemlich wanted to know, that the Jews were a threat, as some saw them to be, or was their “corruptive influence” being overestimated? Hitler began his letter by affirming that “the danger posed by Jewry for our people” was very real and must be combated. But “anti-Semitism as a political movement,” he insisted, could “not be defined by emotional impulses, but by recognition of the facts,” the first and most important of which was that Jewry was “a race not a religious community.” The Jew “lives amongst us as a non-German alien race,” with the full rights of citizenship, while corrupting German society by its obsession with money. In the Jew’s striving for money and power, he is “unscrupulous in the choice of methods and pitiless in their employment. . . . His power is the power of money, which multiplies in his hands effortlessly and endlessly through interest”—echoes of Feder. “Every higher goal men strive for—religion, democracy, socialism—is to the Jew only a means to an end, the way to satisfy his lust for gold and domination.” In what would be one of his many ominous biological metaphors, the Jew, he asserted, was “a racial tuberculosis of the nations.”

  Emotional anti-Semitism might bring temporary satisfaction but would produce only senseless pogroms. But “anti-Semitism based on reason” would lead to a systematic legal campaign against the Jews and the elimination of their privileges. This could not be accomplished by a weak democratic government led by “irresponsible majorities” with “internationalist phrases and slogans.” Needed instead was a powerful state led by “nationally minded leadership personalities.” The rights and privileges of this alien, corrosive race must be curbed or eliminated, but “the ultimate objective,” he concluded, “must be the irrevocable removal of the Jews in general.”

  Hitler’s letter, dated September 16, 1919, is his first recorded written pronouncement on the “Jewish question,” indeed, his first recorded political statement, and it offers a foreshadowing of the basic elements of National Socialist ideology—a powerful national state led by a ruthless, determined leadership, rejection of democratic government, a spiritual rebirth of the nation from within, and radical, racial anti-Semitism. It also reveals that by the fall of 1919 the potent brew of prejudices, hatreds, and resentments formed in Vienna and stirred during the war was hardening into a cohesive political vision. Hitler was acquiring a political education; he was poised for an entry into politics.

  In addition to investigating and combating Marxist subversion among the troops, Mayr’s unit was also charged with the surveillance of Munich’s raucous political scene. He sent his agents to monitor the numerous political parties and organizations that were springing up all around the city. Some might be dangerous, some useful. On Friday, September 12, 1919, he dispatched Hitler to report on a meeting of an obscure political group that called itself the German Workers’ Party (Deutsche Arbeiterpartei or DAP). Held in a cramped backroom in the Sterneckerbräu Beer Hall, the meeting was an unimpressive affair, attended by only a smattering of unimposing men. Founded earlier in the year by Anton Drexler, a railway mechanic, and Karl Harrer, a sportswriter associated with the semisecret right-wing Thule Society, the party had few members and even fewer sources of financial support. It had the air of a sleepy, down-at-the-heels debating club.

  The speaker that evening was Gottfried Feder, who spoke on “How and by What Means Can Capitalism Be Eliminated.” It was one of Feder’s favorite themes and one that held Hitler’s attention, but he was most interested in the discussion that followed. Although he was there to monitor the proceedings, he could not resist throwing himself into the fray when a university professor in the tiny crowd asserted that Bavaria should secede from Germany and form a union with Austria. Hitler’s withering demolition of that position so impressed Drexler that he turned to a colleague on the platform and commented: “Man, this one has a mouth on him. We could use him!” When the meeting broke up, Drexler pressed a copy of his pamphlet My Political Awakening into Hitler’s hands and invited him to come to the next meeting. Hitler left underwhelmed.

  The pamphlet, however, piqued his interest. In it, Drexler inveighed against the twin evils of Marxism and Jewish finance capital and called for a national revival by bringing the working and middle classes together in a genuine Volksgemeinschaft, a people’s community, united under a strong authoritarian national government. Hitler was surprised a few days later when he received a card informing him that he had been admitted as a member of the DAP and inviting him to the next meeting of the executive committee. He was initially disinclined to accept the unsolicited offer, but on reflection realized that the little party offered some intriguing possibilities. Its s
mall size would allow him to enter on the ground floor, a virtual founder, and its very sleepiness along with its lack of strong personalities meant that he could immediately exert his influence. After securing the army’s permission, he joined the party as member number 550—a rather misleading status since the party rolls began with number 500.

  When he attended the next meeting at an even smaller and dingier locale, he discovered that the party had no program, no plans, no advertising, no typewriter, no mimeograph machine, not even a rubber stamp (a vital necessity for any German organization). It was also virtually penniless. The executive committee, chaired by Drexler and Harrer, wanted to expand the membership but had no idea how to go about it. Hitler suggested advertising an upcoming meeting in the local press, not simply plastering posters about town and sending handwritten invitations to likely supporters. The executive committee was skeptical but followed Hitler’s suggestion. The meeting at the Hofbräukeller on October 16 drew a modest crowd of 111, but it was by far the largest the party had ever attracted. A week later an audience of over three hundred filled the Eberlkeller to attend a DAP rally, at which Hitler spoke again. Hitler was still on the Reichswehr payroll (he would be until the summer of 1920), which meant that he had plenty of time to devote to political activities. Mayr’s intelligence unit was pleased to have an agent inside the party (Hitler no doubt inflated its importance in his report) and even provided a modest subsidy for the party. Hitler was tireless, always looking for ways to draw attention to the party, to himself. He assumed direction of the party’s propaganda, such as it was, and began to transform the party from an insignificant men’s club to an active, high-profile political organization. He pressed the leadership to establish a permanent office, a small windowless space in the Sterneckerbräu Beer Hall, and begin acquiring office machinery, printed membership cards, stationery, and a business manager.