The Nazis always impressed observers with their raw energy and activism, but it was more than their “noisiness” that separated them from their right-wing competitors; it was the very nature of the party itself. Hitler was determined that the NSDAP would not be a conventional political party, but a movement driven by an all-embracing ideological vision that would challenge and ultimately vanquish the “Jewish Marxism” of the left. And it would pursue its vision with ruthless, fanatical zeal. The party would tolerate no compromises, no half measures, no dialogue. “There is no making pacts with Jews,” Hitler later warned in Mein Kampf. “There can only be the hard ‘either—or.’ ”
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Hitler’s radicalism, his growing mastery over crowds, and his emphasis on action attracted a wide variety of men and transformed the character and identity of the party. While the DAP of Drexler and Harrer drew followers who were for the most part nonunion workers, craftsmen, and small shopkeepers, Hitler attracted a different element. He began by recruiting men from his old regiment, from the barracks, and other combat veterans. These were men with few ties to a middle-class past and who had contempt for the moral confines of bourgeois life. They were comfortable in uniform, with weapons, military discipline, and violence, men of action who would not be constrained either by bourgeois convention or even law. They believed that they could do anything, accomplish anything through iron will, determination, and, when necessary, by force—men, in other words, cut from the same cloth as Hitler. As Hitler’s reputation grew, such men flooded into the little DAP and quickly swamped the original membership. Although he did not directly challenge the party’s executive committee, Hitler built a cadre of men loyal to him that gradually undermined its authority. Dietrich Eckart, a hard-drinking poet and journalist with good connections in artistic and social circles, acted as something of a mentor to the younger Hitler. Eckart was a ferocious Jew hater and published a scurrilously anti-Semitic sheet called Auf Gut Deutsch (In Plain German). After hearing Hitler speak for the first time, Eckart believed he had discovered the “messiah” who could unite the country and lead Germany out of the leftist, pacifist darkness. He introduced the untutored Hitler not only to important figures in the Völkisch movement but to moneyed members of the Munich social elite as well. It was Eckart and his connections who raised the funds to buy the tiny Münchner Beobachter, which, as the Völkischer Beobachter (People’s Observer), would become the party’s official newspaper.
Also drawn to Hitler by his speeches was Alfred Rosenberg, a Baltic German who was of a philosophical disposition, given to conspiracy theories involving Jews, Freemasons, and Marxists. His prolific writings in the Völkisch press, with titles such as his 1919 books The Tracks of the Jews Through the Ages and Immorality in the Talmud, fairly bristled with crackpot ideas and were couched in exactly the turgid, pseudo-profound language that appealed to the autodidact Hitler. Rosenberg also introduced Hitler to the sensational Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a fraudulent Russian work that purported to reveal a Jewish conspiracy to dominate the world. The Protocols was making the rounds in Europe, and although it was obviously a work of pure invention, it stirred anti-Semitic sentiments across the continent. In 1923 Hitler would appoint Rosenberg to the editorship of the Völkischer Beobachter.
Another new party member, Rudolf Hess, had been trained as a combat pilot toward the end of the war, and as a student in postwar Munich had been profoundly influenced by Professor Karl Haushofer’s concept of Lebensraum, living space, as the key to a nation’s power. Haushofer argued that culturally superior but “land-starved” states must expand territorially or slip into inevitable decline. Germany’s only hope for survival as a great power lay in acquiring land in the East, by which he meant Russia. Hess introduced these ideas to Hitler. Several years younger than Hitler, Hess was not terribly bright, but he became slavishly devoted to Hitler and would serve as his loyal personal secretary.
Also among this group of early Hitler converts was twenty-year-old Hermann Esser, a flamboyant character so thoroughly disreputable in his private life that Hitler openly referred to him as a scoundrel—but a useful one. Esser carried on a variety of unsavory sexual affairs and was said to live exclusively on the income of his various mistresses, but in these early days he proved to be, after Hitler, the party’s most popular speaker. When Hitler became official leader of the NSDAP in 1921 he placed Esser in charge of the party’s propaganda.
At thirty-nine a veritable tribal elder by the Nazis’ youthful standards, Julius Streicher was a notoriously crude character. Short and stocky with a barrel chest, a shaven head, and an intimidating, blustering manner, Streicher was perhaps the most violently anti-Semitic of the Nazi leaders, a position for which there was keen competition. In early 1923 he began publishing a weekly newspaper, Der Stürmer (The Striker), a particularly vulgar tabloid that specialized in salacious depictions of grotesquely distorted Jews molesting pure Aryan women, their clothes torn, breasts exposed. Although Streicher’s paper was and would remain an embarrassment to many party leaders, it had Hitler’s full support. Streicher earned Hitler’s enduring gratitude when in 1921 he deserted the German Socialist Party (despite its name, a right-wing party) and joined the NSDAP, bringing his many followers with him, a move that virtually doubled the size of the Nazi party.
These men, more militant and active than the executive committee, transformed the NSDAP into a more radical, revolutionary party. Some in the leadership were uncomfortable with Hitler’s raw ambition and feared that he was moving the party too far, too fast—and that they were losing control. But efforts to rein in Hitler proved unsuccessful, and Harrer resigned from the executive committee. Although Drexler assumed the chairmanship, it was increasingly clear that Hitler had eclipsed the stodgy executive committee and had become the catalyst of the party.
Hitler’s leadership was officially confirmed at a membership meeting in January 1922. The party’s membership was growing, chapters (Ortsgruppen) were opening in other towns, and another set of adherents, energetic, ruthless men drawn less by ideology than by Hitler’s dynamism and call to action, joined the party. Hermann Göring was a celebrated war hero, winner of Pour le Mérite, Germany’s highest award for bravery in combat, and the last group commander of the illustrious Richthofen squadron. After the war he had bounced from one job to another—he flew as a stunt pilot in air circuses in Denmark and Sweden, where he married a Swedish baroness; he became a commercial pilot, an aircraft salesman for Fokker; he enrolled at the university in Munich. Too restless to settle down, he found peacetime sorely lacking in the adventure he had enjoyed during the war. In 1921 he walked into the party’s new office in the Corneliusstrasse and offered his services. Hitler was delighted to have a genuine war hero onboard. Göring, who ultimately became Hitler’s extremely powerful deputy and second in command of the Third Reich, projected an image of a dashing man of action, jolly, outgoing, a hail-fellow-well-met. He was also utterly ruthless. Although he shared Hitler’s xenophobia and anti-Semitism, he was less interested in ideology than in action and power. He joined the Nazi party, he later remarked, not because of any ideological nonsense but because it was revolutionary.
Göring was not the portly, almost clownish figure he would later become, but a man of soldierly bearing and physique. It was precisely his distinguished military background and his swaggering persona that prompted Hitler to put him in charge of a new party formation whose ostensible task was to protect the party’s speakers from enemies at public meetings and rallies. These men were the rough and ready of the party, ex-soldiers, Free Corps veterans, and thugs eager to smash heads, to meet the Communists and Social Democrats in battle and lay claim to the streets. Initially called the Gymnastic and Sports Division, an appellation that fooled no one, in late 1921 the organization was renamed the Sturmabteilung (Storm Section) or SA. Although they did not yet wear the yellowish brown uniforms that would become ubiquitous features of the German political landscape, in the summer of 1922 th
e Storm Troopers appeared in the beer halls and streets of Munich, quickly earning a reputation for violence and thuggery.
Göring was officially in charge of the SA, but Ernst Röhm was its real driving force. Like Eckart, Rosenberg, and Hess, Röhm had joined the DAP in 1919, and he was the most important of the Hitler loyalists. Wounded in the war, his face badly scarred by gunfire, Röhm was above all a soldier, and like Hitler he was unwilling to leave the war behind. “War and unrest,” he wrote in a 1928 memoir, “appeal to me more than the orderly life of your respectable burgher.” He had fought for four years in the trenches, was a recipient of the Iron Cross first class, and was still a captain in the army in the early postwar years.
His duties in the new Reichswehr included liaising with the various right-wing organizations that were sprouting like weeds around Munich. Röhm had contacts with a variety of right-wing paramilitary groups, from which he funneled men into the DAP. He was committed to establishing a fighting force for the party and hoped ultimately to forge a coalition of rightist paramilitary organizations that would combat the Marxists. He convinced the army to train SA men in the military arts, and he was also in charge of a stockpile of weapons from the demobilized army and Free Corps. In what proved to be a crucial ingredient of right-wing terror, he surreptitiously supplied various counterrevolutionary groups, especially the SA, with small arms.
Röhm envisioned the SA as a private army under his command and largely independent of the party leadership. Hitler, who respected Röhm as a fellow front soldier—he was one of the very few who addressed Hitler with the familiar du—was also keen to have such a paramilitary organization, but he took a quite different view of its role. For Hitler, the Storm Troopers were to be subordinate to the party leadership and serve as an important weapon to be wielded by the party for its agitation and propaganda activities. Blurred in these early years of the NSDAP’s existence, those conflicting visions would strain the relationship between the SA and the party down to 1934.
By 1922 Hitler had become a local phenomenon, not only a major figure in Munich’s right-wing demimonde but something of a minor celebrity about town. He was seen at the opera, at concerts, at films—he was a great fan of the movies, especially the Hollywood variety—and met regularly for social evenings at the Café Neumayer, overlooking the Viktualienmarkt, with his cronies and admirers—Göring, Rosenberg, Esser; and Max Amann, his former sergeant and since 1921 business manager of the party; Ulrich Graf, a wrestler and barroom bouncer who served as his bodyguard; Emil Maurice, his driver and general factotum; Heinrich Hoffmann, who became Hitler’s personal photographer. At the end of an evening of Hitler monologues, an armed escort would accompany their leader back to his narrow, one-room flat in the Thierschstrasse.
Hitler’s reputation as an eccentric and political maverick piqued the interest of some in the city’s more refined social set. Ernst “Putzi” Hanfstaengl, heir to a lucrative international art reproduction firm, was won over to Hitler after hearing him speak to a mass meeting in the Kindlkeller in November 1922. Tall and gangly, Hanfstaengl was a well-heeled, Harvard-educated bon vivant with connections to the business and social worlds of Munich. He was also a man of culture, an accomplished amateur musician whose vigorous piano playing, especially of Wagner, entranced Hitler.
Hanfstaengl took it upon himself to introduce Hitler into polite society, where he was a hit with a number of society ladies who adopted this thrilling—and delightfully dangerous—bohemian with a thick Austrian accent and peculiarly clipped mustache. Helene Bechstein of the Bechstein piano fortune, and Elsa Bruckmann, whose family owned a major publishing firm in Munich, took a particular interest in him, treating him much like a bright son in need of social instruction. They mothered him, gave him money, advised him on matters of etiquette and attire, and held soirees for him at their salons in Munich and Berlin. On such occasions his behavior was decidedly odd: he might chat with courtly Viennese charm or sit through dinner in stony silence. If asked a question on some political or social matter, he might abruptly jump to his feet and deliver a passionate speech, bellowing as if he were addressing a crowd of thousands at the Hofbräuhaus. Then he would just as abruptly bow to his host and depart. He never failed to make an impression.
For Hitler, the pinnacle of these social connections was to come in Bayreuth where Helene Bechstein introduced him to Wagner’s son Siegfried and his wife, Winifred, and to the ancient Houston Stewart Chamberlain, the expatriate Englishman who had married one of Wagner’s daughters and become a fervent German nationalist and racist. The Wagners were surprised and impressed by Hitler’s extensive knowledge of the Master’s operas. Winifred was utterly charmed by Hitler and saw him as the “coming man” in German politics. Siegfried tolerated him, indulging his wife and treating the exotic, sallow-faced Austrian rather like a not quite housebroken mascot.
Hitler was generally indifferent to his appearance; he wore distinctly eccentric attire—not the usual conservative uniform favored by politicians—black suits and shoes, starched shirts, stiff collars, cravats. Aside from the lederhosen, knee stockings, incongruous brown leather vest, and traditional Bavarian jacket he sometimes donned for outdoor events, he could be seen around the city wearing a black slouch hat and a seedy trench coat, which made him look less like an aspiring politician than a Chicago mobster. He also carried a dog whip and pistol, which shocked and titillated his society patrons. He owned a cheap blue suit, which he wore when speaking in the beer halls and when introduced into the salons of the elite. On such occasions, as Hanfstaengl remarked, Hitler looked “like a waiter in a railway station restaurant.” Frau Bechstein insisted on buying her rough-edged protégé formal evening clothes and patent leather shoes, which he was careful not to wear in public. Hitler was very fond of the shoes, which he did wear, but understood that he could hardly project himself as a man of the people if he were seen in a dinner jacket and white tie.
Although Hitler received occasional money from the Bechsteins, Bruckmanns, and lesser society patrons, their contributions to his career were not merely financial. More importantly, they imparted to Hitler the basic tenets of acceptable social behavior when interacting with moneyed interests that might contribute to his cause. By opening their salons to him, these wealthy benefactors gave him credibility in mainstream conservative circles where he was generally viewed as a vulgar, rabble-rousing philistine. By 1922, doors were opening. In the spring of that year he was twice invited to speak at the National Club in Berlin, and in Munich he addressed an informal meeting of the League of Bavarian Industrialists and delivered a well-attended talk to business leaders at the Merchants’ Guild Hall. When addressing these business groups, Hitler emphasized the party’s opposition to Marxism, underscoring his determination to pry workers away from the left and reintegrate them into the national community. Attacks on Versailles, especially the reparations clauses, were de rigueur on such occasions, and the anticapitalist, anti–big business rhetoric that occupied such a central position in the party’s program and in so many of his rousing public speeches was notably absent.
These appearances opened the pocketbooks of some in the business community. Ernst von Borsig, a powerful manufacturer of locomotives and heavy machinery in Berlin, and the Ruhr industrialist Fritz Thyssen were impressed with Hitler and funneled cash to the party. There were other contributors, drawn mostly from Munich business circles, and the party even received funds from anti-Marxist groups abroad. These business contributions were important but sporadic and were supplemented by secret funds from the Bavarian Reichswehr, which saw in the NSDAP a useful weapon in the anti-Marxist cause. As Hitler’s popularity grew, however, the party was increasingly financed by its own rank and file. It scrupulously collected membership dues, charged admission to Hitler events, passed the hat at rallies, and launched collection campaigns asking members to make contributions for special causes or occasions—11 million reichsmarks, for example, were collected in celebration of Hitler’s birthday.
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Although still a small splinter party, barely known beyond the borders of Bavaria, the NSDAP was growing rapidly. By fall 1923 the party could claim a membership of 55,000, roughly double what it had been in 1922 and up from 6,000 in 1921. Over half had joined in the first months of 1923 alone. In February 1923, with funds supplied by Hanfstaengl and Röhm, the party acquired two modern rotary presses for the Völkischer Beobachter, which allowed it to print a full-sized paper that would appear on newsstands every day. The party established a theater troupe, which performed its own plays at theaters around the city. The party was now filling larger and larger halls—the Bürgerbräukeller, the Hofbräuhaus, and the gigantic Zirkus Krone, drawing audiences of three to six thousand enthusiastic listeners. Some journalists began calling Hitler “the king of Munich.”
And Munich in the early postwar years provided a particularly fertile breeding ground for Hitler and his party. Since the end of the war and more specifically since the revolution, the city had become a powerful magnet for anti-leftist, anti-Republican nationalist groups. Still reeling from the trauma of the Munich revolution and with the Republican government in Berlin led by Socialists, the traditional Bavarian hostility toward Prussia revived with a vengeance. A strong separatist movement took hold, as some saw in the collapse of the empire and the weakness of the Weimar Republic an opportunity to establish an independent Bavarian state. Some hoped to see a restoration of the Wittelsbach monarchy; others envisioned a Danubian confederation of Bavaria, Austria, and Hungary. The Munich authorities proved distinctly hostile to “Red Berlin,” often refusing to implement directives and decrees from the central government. Efforts by Berlin to curb the vicious right-wing groups in the Reich were ostentatiously spurned by the Bavarian authorities, and as a result this largely conservative Catholic state became, ironically, a haven for counterrevolutionary nationalist-Völkisch extremists of all kinds. It is impossible to overstate the crucial importance of this tolerant, even supportive, posture to Hitler’s early success.
The Third Reich Page 6