Becoming Hitler

by Thomas Weber

  On one occasion, though, Hitler no doubt would have preferred to be treated like a dancing bear rather than to suffer the treatment that he did receive. During that occasion, Michael Keogh, an Irishman serving in the German army, had to rescue Hitler from the soldiers he was addressing, if Keogh’s account of the incident is to be trusted. (See Image 10).

  Keogh had fallen into the hands of the Germans during the First World War and became a POW. When German authorities tried to recruit an Irish Brigade from Irish POWs that would fight for Irish independence against the British, he had been one of the volunteers who had joined up. Even though the attempt to set up the Irish Brigade had been a fiasco, Keogh, now a traitor to the British government, had stayed in Germany and joined the regular German army in May 1918, as a result of which he had encountered Hitler late in the war. Decommissioned at the end of the war, he had joined a Freikorps as a captain when volunteers were sought to put an end to the Munich Soviet Republic. After the crushing of the short-lived Communist experiment in Munich, Keogh was reactivated and served in the city in the Fifth Demobilization Company of the Fourteenth Infantry Regiment under his assumed German name Georg König.19

  It was in his capacity in the military in Munich in the summer of 1919 that he again met Hitler, as Keogh recalled: “[One day], I was the officer of the day in the Turken Strasse barracks when I got an urgent call about eight o’clock in the evening. A riot had broken out over two political agents in the gymnasium. These ‘political officers,’ as they were called, were allowed to visit each barracks and make speeches or approach the men for votes and support.” Keogh would state, “I ordered out a sergeant and six men and, with fixed bayonets, led them off at the double. There were about 200 men in the gymnasium, among them some tough Tyrolean troops. Two political agents, who had been lecturing from a table top, had been dragged to the floor and were being beaten up. Some of the mob were trying to save them. Bayonets—each man carried one at his belt—were beginning to flash. The two on the floor were in danger of being kicked to death.”

  Keogh had ordered the guard to fire one round over the heads of the rioters. “It stopped the commotion. We hauled out the two politicians. Both were cut, bleeding and in need of a doctor. The crowd around muttered and growled, boiling for blood. There was only one thing to do. One of the two men, a pale character with a moustache, looked the more conscious despite being beaten. I told him: ‘I’m taking you into custody. I’m putting you under arrest for your own safety.’ He nodded in agreement. We carried them to the guardroom and called a doctor. While waiting for him, I questioned them. The fellow with the moustache gave his name promptly: Adolf Hitler.”20

  Hitler was not the only one who encountered opposition to his work as a propagandist in the Reichswehr. Karl Mayr’s activities were often challenged, too. Mayr had to deal with military and civilian authorities in Munich who at times were far from supportive of him and his ideas.

  As Hermann Esser’s letter of complaint to Mayr about the exclusion of Feder’s publications from the free propaganda materials of the District Military Command 4 indicates, Mayr was far from all-powerful in Munich. Although he could invite Feder to speak, he could not get away with distributing Feder’s written works for free to the course participants, and so instead advised Hermann Esser that they should buy Feder’s pamphlet themselves. Besides, he said, going to as many bookstores as possible and asking for the pamphlet would be “the most inexpensive way to advertise the pamphlet, which would doubtlessly otherwise be in danger of being again and again removed from the display windows of bookshops by Jewish agents.”21

  Mayr did not feel that his position was particularly secure within Munich’s heterogeneous political and military establishment. For instance, on July 30, he wrote to a prospective participant in one of his courses, “We may see you at a later date, unless by then the organizers should have succumbed to party-political machinations, originating chiefly perhaps from (Jewish) philistines and obstructionists.” Similarly, on August 16, Mayr told one of his other correspondents, “I can incidentally tell you in confidence that a number of influential circles, primarily of Jewish orientation, made determined efforts to unseat myself, Count Bothmer and several others selected by me.”22 This was not the last time that Mayr was challenged for his views and actions. In the months to come, he would have various run-ins with other officers serving in Munich, which ultimately would make his position in the District Military Command 4 untenable.

  Even though both men ran into major obstacles in their propaganda work in the summer of 1919, Hitler’s activities under Mayr’s tutelage gave the former an opportunity to develop his anti-Semitic ideas. It is here where the real significance of Hitler’s propaganda work of the summer of 1919, including his deployment at the Lechfeld camp, lies. His anti-Semitic ideas had not been particularly pronounced until the summer of 1919. The first surviving anti-Semitic statement of the man who would be more responsible for the Holocaust than anyone else is from his time in Lechfeld. The way he expressed anti-Semitic ideas there and subsequently elsewhere strongly indicates that his emerging anti-Semitism was a direct result of his attempt to understand why Germany had lost the war and what a future Germany would have to look like so as to survive for all time. In Hitler’s early anti-Semitic utterances are strong echoes of ideas—such as the Jews’ supposed role in weakening Germany—to which he had been exposed during his propaganda course in July.

  At Lechfeld, Hitler participated in group discussions with soldiers and gave at least three talks: “Peace Conditions and Reconstruction,” “Emigration,” and “Social and Economic Terms.” And it was in his talk on “Social and Economic Terms,” which focused on the nexus between capitalism and anti-Semitism, that Hitler made his first known anti-Semitic statement.23 By then, anti-Semitism was so important to him that he focused on it more than his fellow propagandists did, as is evident in a report of a high-ranking officer in the camp, First Lieutenant Bendt. The report, while singing Hitler’s praises for his “very spirited, easy to grasp manner,” took exception to the vehemence with which he attacked Jews:

  On the occasion of a very fine, clear and spirited speech made by Private Hitler about capitalism, in which he touched on the Jewish question, which of course was inevitable, there occurred a difference of opinions with myself during a discussion within the department as to whether one ought to state clearly and bluntly one’s opinion or express it somewhat indirectly. It was stated that the department had been established by Group Commander Möhl and that it acts in an official capacity. Speeches which include an unambiguous discussion of the Jewish question with particular reference to the Germanic point of view might easily give Jews an opportunity to describe these lectures as anti-Semitic. I therefore thought it best to command that discussion of this topic should be carried out with the greatest possible care, and that clear mention of foreign races being detrimental to the German people is to be, if possible, avoided.24

  The fact that Hitler’s anti-Semitism was expressed through anticapitalism rather than anti-Bolshevism makes it highly unlikely that the Soviet Republic had awakened a latent anti-Semitism in Hitler.25 Rather, the realization of Germany’s defeat and the resulting attempt to look for reasons why Germany had lost the war had been part and parcel of his transformation. Yet in the weeks since his political awakening, it had become clear that the postrevolutionary army was too heterogeneous and forbidding a place to become Hitler’s home. He was still in need of a new place where he would feel a sense of belonging. It would not take long before he found it. However, there was to be one other false start before Hitler was to find a new “home” for himself.

  Sometime in early September, Adolf Hitler introduced himself to Georg Grassinger, the member of the Thule Society who had collaborated with the Social Democrats in trying to bring Eisner down. Grassinger was the founding chairman of the German Socialist Party, a party close to the Thule Society, as well as the managing director of the Völkischer Beobachter, the fu
ture National Socialist newspaper that at that time was a de facto organ of the German Socialist Party. Hitler offered his service to write for the paper and told Grassinger that he wanted to join the party and get involved. However, the party leadership relayed to Hitler that they neither wanted him in the party nor wanted him to write for their paper.26 Yet a few days later Hitler was more successful.

  On the evening of September 12, he walked through Munich’s old town. That night, he wore the only civilian outfit he owned as well as his trench coat and a floppy hat that hung to his chin and onto his neck.

  His destination was the restaurant named after one of Munich’s former smaller breweries, the Sterneckerbräu, that advertised good food and daily singspiel performances. Once there, Hitler showed no interest in the restaurant’s daily dramatic performance of spoken word and song. He walked straight to one of the restaurant’s back rooms, the Leiberzimmer, as Karl Mayr had sent him to attend and observe the meeting of the German Workers’ Party (Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, or DAP) that was taking place there. Mayr himself seems to have been invited to the meeting, but could not or did not want to go, and thus he sent Hitler in his place.27

  The name of the group meeting in the Leiberzimmer was at best aspirational, for the DAP certainly was not a party in any traditional sense, not least since it did not, in fact, stand for elections. Even though it had both a national and a local chairman, in reality it did not exist anywhere but in Munich; and its membership was so limited that it easily fit into one of the back rooms of the Sterneckerbräu. In fact, as late as February 1921, the chairman of the party would write to an associate of his that he would not refer to their newspaper as a Parteiblatt (party newspaper), as “we are no party and have no intention of becoming one.”28

  The German Workers’ Party was a loose association of a tiny number of disgruntled misfits. It did not even publicly announce its meetings. Rather, people would be invited to attend meetings either orally or by written invitation.29 From the perspective of September 1919, the DAP was the most unlikely of contenders to become one day a mass political movement that would come close to bringing the world to its knees.

  As Hitler sat down in the Leiberzimmer to listen to the proceedings, he was surrounded by memorabilia from veterans of a regiment of lifeguards to the Bavarian royalty, the Infanterie-Leib-Regiment, which hung on the walls of the room. Yet on the evening of September 12, the room was not filled with veterans of the regiment but with some forty to eighty DAP sympathizers who had come to listen to the guest speaker of the evening. That speaker was Gottfried Feder, who—just as he had done during Hitler’s propaganda course—gave a talk on his signature topic, the ills of capitalism. This was Feder’s sixteenth talk of the year but the first time that he addressed the DAP. The title of his talk was “How and By What Means Can Capitalism Be Eliminated?”30

  While at Lechfeld, Hitler himself had lashed out at capitalism, and had it been only Feder who spoke, Hitler might never again have attended a meeting of what was to become the Nazi Party. However, Hitler became incensed by the person who spoke after Feder: Adalbert Baumann, a teacher at one of Munich’s local schools, the Luitpold-Kreisoberrealschule, and the chairman of a political group in Munich, the Bürgervereinigung (Citizens’ Association). Baumann was also the author of a book that made a case for the creation of a German-centered international lingua franca to rival and replace Esperanto. Previously, in January, Baumann had unsuccessfully run to represent the short-lived Democratic-Socialist Citizens’ Party in the Bavarian Parliament. That party, as well as the Bürgervereinigung, shared most of the policy goals of the DAP.31

  The fundamental difference between the DAP and Baumann was the approach he and many of his political collaborators took to Bavarian separatism. For instance, on January 4, as Berlin stood on the verge of civil war, the Münchener Stadtanzeiger, the newspaper that had seen itself as the mouthpiece of the Democratic-Socialist Citizens’ Party, published a passionate plea in favor of Bavarian independence. It argued that “the call for ‘Independence from Berlin’ has resounded a thousand fold, and rightly so” and concluded, “Now the time has come to break away from this ill-fated domination by Berlin. ‘Bavaria for Bavarians’ must be our motto; and we must pay no heed to the laments of those who, because of their business relations with Berlin, have always been in favor of a Greater Germany.”32

  Following Feder’s speech, Baumann—whether to attack Feder’s ideas or to find like-minded men in the DAP is unknown—proceeded to make the case for Bavarian separatism. The chairman of the Bürgervereinigung advocated that Bavaria secede from Germany and form a new state with Austria, in the belief that the victorious powers of the First World War would grant an Austrian-Bavarian state more agreeable peace conditions than they would a Prussia-dominated Germany. Baumann also argued that the establishment of an Austrian-Bavarian state would isolate Bavaria from the risks of renewed revolution that he deemed to be extremely high to the north of Bavaria.33

  Hearing Baumann’s plea, Hitler shot up from his chair and embarked on a spirited attack against Baumann’s secessionism. Only after a quarter of an hour was Hitler done expounding upon his old belief—going back to his adolescence in Austria; in other words, his ur-politicization, well prior to his new politicization and radicalization from that summer—that all ethnic Germans should live together under one national roof. Triggered unexpectedly by Baumann, Hitler turned from a passive observer into an active participant in the DAP meeting on that fateful night.

  In attacking the chairman of the Bürgervereinigung, Hitler hammered home the message that only a united Germany would be able to meet the economic challenges facing it. He laid so successfully and forcefully into Baumann, charging him to be a man without any character, that Baumann left the venue as Hitler was still speaking.34

  As Anton Drexler, the DAP’s local chairman, was to recall of the occasion: “[Hitler] made a short but rousing speech in favor of [the establishment of] a greater Germany that was received by myself and all who heard him with great enthusiasm.” Hitler’s intervention left such an immediate impression on Drexler that, if we can trust his own recollections, he told his peers in the leadership of the DAP: “He has a mouth on him, he’ll come in useful.”35

  Drexler seized the moment right after Hitler had spoken to approach him. “When this speaker had finished, I ran up to him, thanked him excitedly for his talk and asked him to take my pamphlet entitled ‘My Political Awakening’ and to read it, as it contained the fundamental views and principles of the new movement.” Drexler asked Hitler “whether it was agreeable to him to come back in a week’s time and start working more closely with us, since people like him were very necessary to us.”36

  It did not take long for Hitler to delve into Drexler’s manifesto. If we can believe his own claim in Mein Kampf, he started reading it the following morning at 5:00 a.m. after waking up in his room in the barracks of the Second Infantry Regiment and not being able to fall back to sleep.

  According to Mein Kampf, Hitler realized, while reading the manifesto, that the chairman of the DAP and he had undergone very much the same political transformation several years earlier during his Vienna years. Hitler claimed that in Drexler’s pamphlet “an event [i.e., Drexler’s political transformation] was reflected which I had gone through personally in a similar way twelve years ago. I saw my own development come to life again before my eyes.” Hitler’s claim is testimony to the fact that he sometimes did not fully think through the implications of what he was writing in Mein Kampf. While stressing that he had undergone much the same political transformation as Drexler, Hitler inadvertently admitted to his left-wing past, stating that the central theme of Drexler’s manifesto was “how, out of the jumble of Marxist and trade union phrases, he again arrived at thinking in national terms.”37

  As Hitler perused the pages of Drexler’s pamphlet while Munich awoke to another late summer’s day, he learned what kind of party he had encountered the previous night in Munich�
�s old town. The pamphlet was a manifesto against internationalism, which, just as in Hitler’s case, was an internationalism that was not aimed first and foremost at Socialist (i.e., radical left-wing) internationalism. Drexler’s beliefs were directed against the “internationalism of the Center Party” (i.e., Catholic internationalism), “international Freemasonry,” the “capitalist or one might say golden international,” and Socialist internationalism.38 But the internationalism that riled Drexler most of all was its “golden” variant. According to Drexler, Jewish finance capitalism was what was fueling capitalist internationalism.

  To him, international socialism was just a tool in the hands of Jewish bankers, with which they aimed to destroy states so as to subsequently take them over. Jewish Socialist leaders, he wrote, were agents that Jewish financiers used to infiltrate the working classes. Further, he believed Socialist leaders were members of the international Freemasons lodges, which were supposedly dominated by Jewish billionaires and functioned as secret headquarters for Jewish bankers to take over the world. In the words of Drexler, Jewish financiers “aim for nothing less but a capitalist global republic.” In addition, he declared, “There is growing evidence that ‘Jewish Bolshevism’ and [the] Spartacist [movement] are being organized and nurtured by international capital.”39

  The Munich chairman of the DAP also held the “golden” Jewish international responsible for the Versailles Treaty, as a result of which “we now have, instead of an international of nations, the global dictatorship of the capitalist international.”40 Drexler told his readers that he had thus made it his “life’s work” to fight the “global system of financial trusts” and to educate workers on who their real enemy was. His goal, he stated, was to free the world from Jewish bankers and their coconspirators in their Freemason lodges. He saw his pamphlet as a call to arms against the capitalism of the Anglo-American world, repeatedly stressing that Russia and Germany should be friends. What people should do is fight against “Anglo-Jewish ambitions” and against the “Jewish spirit in themselves.”41