Becoming Hitler

by Thomas Weber

  To achieve his goals, Drexler had cofounded the German Workers’ Party. The party had been the brainchild of two men, Drexler, its Munich chairman, and Karl Harrer, its national leader. Five years Hitler’s senior, Drexler had been born in Munich, the son of a railway worker. At the age of twenty-seven, in 1901, Drexler had left Munich for Berlin but failed to find work, henceforth leading a vagabond’s life all over Germany. He had scraped a living together by playing the zither and reportedly having bitter run-ins with Jewish cattle traders. A year later, he had gone back to Munich, finding, just as his father had, employment with the Royal Bavarian State Railway. During the war, he had stayed on the home front, continuing to work as a metalworker for the Munich railway shops.

  With his quiet, serious, and burly appearance, young Drexler was an unlikely candidate to be the founder of a political movement. Yet he was incensed by what he had seen as a failure of Marxist Socialism to address the “national question.” This inspired him to pen an article, “The Failure of the Proletarian International and the Idea of the Brotherhood of Man.”42 If his own claims can be trusted, he became even angrier when he realized that Germany’s war effort had been undermined by war profiteers and black marketers on the home front, whom he blamed for the hunger and misery reigning in Munich. In response to this, Drexler set up a Combat League Against Usury, Profiteering and Professional Bulk Buyers in late 1917. Yet to his great disappointment, few people shared his assessment of the origins of Munich’s misery; no more than forty people joined his Combat League. This was not the only disappointment for the self-professed socialist in 1917. When that year Drexler joined the Munich chapter of the German Fatherland Party, a party that had been created nationwide to rally conservative and right-wing groups behind the war effort, he hoped to build a bridge between socialists and the bourgeoisie, but he was shunned. Within three months, he left the party. Yet he did not give up.

  On March 7, 1918, he set up a “Free Workers’ Committee for a Good Peace,” aimed at rallying the working classes behind the war effort and at campaigning against war profiteering. Even though yet again precious few people joined, a fateful encounter took place at the first public meeting of the Workers’ Committee, on October 2, 1918, for the meeting was attended by Karl Harrer.

  Harrer, a young sports journalist born in a small town in the northern part of Upper Bavaria, believed, as Drexler did, in the urgency of bringing the working class and the bourgeoisie together to rally behind the nation. Harrer, a veteran whose war ended when he was hit by a bullet or shrapnel in one of his knees, believed that a secret society–style organization should be set up to target workers. The goal would be to pull them away from the extreme left and bring them into the fold of the völkisch movement. So, Harrer and Drexler set up a “Political Workers’ Circle.”43

  Völkisch is next to impossible to translate into English. In the words of one scholar, “The word has been rendered as popular, populist, people’s, racial, racist, ethnic-chauvinist, nationalistic, communitarian (for Germans only), conservative, traditional, Nordic, romantic—and it means, in fact, all of those.” It denotes “a sense of German superiority” as well as “a spiritual resistance to ‘the evils of industrialization and the atomization of the modern man.’”44

  By late December 1918, Drexler concluded that it was futile to discuss Germany’s future and its salvation only in a small circle and decided that they should set up a new party. This culminated in the foundation of the German Workers’ Party in a hotel in Munich’s old town on January 5, 1919, attended by approximately fifty people, barely more than had attended meetings of his Combat League back in 1917. Its core consisted of twenty-five of Drexler’s co-workers from the Royal Bavarian State Railway. And it defined itself, in Drexler’s words, as a “socialist organization that [must] be led only by Germans”—in short, its main goal was to reconcile nationalism and socialism.45

  As the revolution radicalized in early 1919, the German Workers’ Party soon ceased its operations and went into hibernation until after the crushing of the Munich Soviet Republic, when it tried to exploit the rise of anti-Bolshevik anti-Semitism in Munich.46 The party now met intermittently in the back room of the Sterneckerbräu and other restaurants. It was still at best a tiny, sectarian secret society. In reality, it was little more than a politicized Stammtisch, the meeting of regulars in a pub or beer hall, at which people would rail about how Germany had been disgraced and would vent their frustrations at Jews. On a bad day, only about twenty people would show up for meeting of the party. Even on a good day, attendance was only twice that size. Furthermore, the working of the “party leadership” had nothing in common with that of a traditional political organization. It was akin to that of a local club or association. Occasionally, Drexler managed to get local völkisch notables to address party meetings.47

  On completing his reading of Drexler’s pamphlet, Hitler faced the choice of whether to accept the invitation of the local chairman of the DAP and become active in the party. Yet before he could put any more thought into that, he had to get out of bed and embark on his day job of carrying out propaganda work for Karl Mayr.

  As part of his duties, Hitler had to take time-consuming tasks off Mayr’s back. On one of the days following Hitler’s reading of Drexler’s pamphlet, Mayr forwarded to him a letter that he had received from Adolf Gemlich in Ulm, a former participant in one of his propaganda courses. In his cover note, Mayr asked Hitler to compose a one- to two-page response. Gemlich, a twenty-six-year-old Protestant born in Pomerania in northern Germany—incidentally, in the same small town that housed the army hospital in which Hitler had spent the final weeks of the war—had asked Mayr, “What is the attitude of the governing Social Democrats to Jewry? Are the Jews part of the ‘equality’ of nations in the socialist manifesto, even though they must be regarded as a danger to the nation?”

  As had become clear at Lechfeld, the inquiry concerned an issue about which Hitler, by now, cared more than most. As he sat down to work on September 16, he therefore put all his energy into drafting his response to Gemlich, producing a statement much longer than he had been asked to write.

  His letter is as revealing for what it stated as for what it did not say. Hitler told Gemlich that most Germans were anti-Semites for mostly the wrong reasons. Their anti-Semitism, he opined, was a result of unfavorable personal encounters they had with Jews and thus tended to take “the characteristics of a mere emotion.” Yet that kind of anti-Semitism, he continued, ignored something far more significant, namely, the “pernicious effect that Jews as a whole, consciously or unconsciously, have on our nation.” He therefore called for an anti-Semitism that was not based on emotions but on “fact-based insights.”

  Hitler told Gemlich that Jews acted like “leeches” toward the peoples among whom they were living. Further, he stated that “Jewry is absolutely a race and not a religious community”; that Jews adopt the language of the countries in which they choose to reside but never adopt anything other than that from their hosts. Due to “a thousand years of inbreeding,” he wrote, they never intermingle with nations in which they live.48 Ignoring or oblivious to the high intermarriage rate between Jews and non-Jews in prewar Germany,49 Hitler argued that Jews maintained their own race and its characteristics. Hence, they were “a non-German, foreign race” living among Germans, thus infecting Germany with their materialism.

  Hitler declared that the Jews’ “sentiments” and even more so their “thoughts and ambitions” were dominated by “their dance round the Golden Calf,” as a result of which “the Jew” turned into a “leech of his host nations.” Jews would do so—and here we hear clear echoes of ideas expressed by Gottfried Feder—through “the power of money, which interest causes to multiply effortlessly and endlessly in his hands. Money forces this most dangerous of all yokes on the necks of nations, who find it so hard to discern its ultimate doleful consequences through the initial golden haze.”

  According to Hitler, Jewish materialism cau
sed “racial tuberculosis of the nations” because Jews corrupted the character of their hosts. Essentially, he suggested that, as a result of the “leech”-like behavior of Jews, host nations were starting to act like Jews themselves: “He [i.e., the Jew] destroys [… ] a nation’s pride in itself and in its own strength through ridicule and a shameless inducement to vice.” Rather than carry out pointless pogroms against Jews, he wrote, governments should limit the rights of the Jews and ultimately remove Jews altogether from their host nations: “Antisemitism from purely sentimental reasons will find its ultimate expression in the shape of pogroms. But the antisemitism of reason must lead to the application of the law in order to eliminate systematically the privileges held by Jews [… ] But the ultimate, unshakeable objective of the antisemitism of reason must be the total removal of Jews.”

  Hitler concluded that to limit the rights of Jews, Germany needed a different government, “a government of national strength and never a government of national impotence.” The future leader of the Third Reich posited that a “Renaissance” of Germany could only be brought about through “reckless efforts by patriotic leaders with an inner sense of responsibility.”50 In his statement, Hitler set himself against Bavaria’s Catholic establishment. For instance, Munich’s archbishop, Michael von Faulhaber, publicly warned at an event at Circus Krone, Munich’s biggest speaking venue, in the autumn of 1919 against “overplaying the sovereign rights of rulers, and against the idolizing of the absolute state.”51

  In was also in his hatred of internationalism that Hitler set himself against Faulhaber and Munich’s Catholic establishment. For Munich’s archbishop, there was no contradiction in being Bavarian, being a German, and being an internationalist, as evident in the letter he wrote to the politician of the liberal German Democratic Party (DDP) and author of a study on internationalism Friedrich Fick: “I would like to express my sincerest thanks for your very kindly sending me your study about ‘International protection against defamation and insults among peoples.’ I am very glad to see that you [… ] advocate truthfulness between peoples in such a thorough and practical manner,” Faulhaber stated on November 7, 1919, exactly one year to the day after the revolution had started in Bavaria. “The devastation that is caused by nations exchanging defamations, and the guarantee for international peace that inheres in mutual truthfulness, are in themselves good enough reasons to organize an international congress at which to discuss this topic according to the guidelines given in your study.”52

  A century after its composition, Hitler’s letter to Adolf Gemlich on the surface reads like a chilling foreboding of the Holocaust. Superficially, it also seems both reflective and representative of the sudden surge in anti-Semitism in Munich in 1919.53 Yet most likely it was neither.

  Although Hitler’s anti-Semitism of September 1919 was not original in character, and although it was expressed also by an important minority of Bavarians, particularly in the army,54 it did not take the form of the most popular brand of anti-Semitism—anti-Bolshevik Jew-hatred—in postrevolution Munich. Rather, it was anticapitalist in character and was directed against finance capitalism.55 For instance, in November 1919, Munich’s Police Directorate would conclude that popular anti-Semitism in Munich was fueled by “the particular emergence of Jews since the beginning of the revolution in Munich’s Soviet Republic etc.,” as well as by an identification of Jews with profiteering and racketeering, yet would make no mention of finance capitalism.56

  Meanwhile, anti-Bolshevism simply did not feature in Hitler’s letter, even though Gemlich’s enquiry had explicitly asked about the relationship of Socialism and Jews. Hitler’s anti-Semitism was thus not powered by the anti-Semitic storm that had gathered during the revolution and the Munich Soviet Republic.57 The latter was, at its core, anti-Bolshevik in character.58 Unlike Hitler’s anti-Semitism, which was indiscriminately directed against all Jews, this was an anti-Semitism in which there was still a place for Jews, as there was in traditional Catholic Upper-Bavarian anti-Semitism.59 In fact, it was an anti-Semitism that still allowed those Jews, who were the very personification of the kind of Jews hated by Hitler, to feel well at ease in Munich. For instance, Claribel Cone, despite being Jewish, American, and extremely rich, still thoroughly enjoyed life in Munich and seems to have been treated well in the city.

  A physician and pathologist in her midfifties who had turned into a lady of leisure and art collector, Cone lived in Munich from 1914 to 1917 and from the end of the war to 1920. Her life in that city was so extravagant that she spent her entire time in Munich in its poshest hotel, the Regina Palasthotel, where she required a separate hotel room simply to store some of her belongings. Even though she lived in the hotel at which Karl Mayr and other officers from the District Military Command 4 had their office and which Hitler is likely to have frequented, her postwar accounts of her life in Munich were just as positive as her earlier ones had been.60

  After the war, she had to make plans to relocate to America due to restrictions on her American passport. Yet the almost white-haired American woman still enjoyed being in Munich so much that, on September 2, ten days before Hitler’s first attendance at a DAP meeting, she wrote to her sister, “As usual I have taken such deep root into the place where I happen to be living—that it will take more than horses to drive me away.” In early December, she would write to her sister in Baltimore, “I have not really been sleeping here—I have been ‘erlebing’—a word which I coined myself for there is no English word which expresses the Erlebnisse [experiences] I have been having over here in these last 5 ½ war years.”61 And just before Christmas, on December 23, she would report to her sister that things were really moving in the right direction in Germany. She was certainly not blind to the political turmoil that Munich had experienced. Yet there were no signs of alarm in her letter about how she—as a living embodiment of a rich American Jewish capitalist—was being treated:

  On the whole Germany is gradually quieting down from its boiling white heat symptoms to the phenomena of a state more nearly approaching normal. But the evidence of convalescence are still there—more correctly—in convalescing the evidences of the severe illness from which she has suffered are still there. But she means well and will eventually recover fully I believe.

  The Jewish art collector elaborated on why she so enjoyed being in Germany: “She has many excellent qualities. [… ] This is a nation of ‘Dichter and Denker’ [poets and thinkers]. [… ] The old world atmosphere, culture and tradition have still left their traces on this work-a-day world, and as the storm—(the boiling, to be consistent) subsides—one begins to feel again the charm of a world that has for its back-ground—(its back-bone shall I say?)—a culture which existed or began to exist before we were born.”62

  Even in the anti-Semitism of Ernst Pöhner, Munich’s police president, who was to become a prominent member of the NSDAP, there was still space for Jews to exist in the autumn of 1919.63 But in Hitler’s anti-Semitism, there was none. Nevertheless, precisely because it was, at its core, not anti-Bolshevik in character, his anti-Semitism at the time was not only different from mainstream anti-Semitism in Munich; it was also different from his anti-Bolshevik anti-Semitism of the 1940s. Nor was Hitler’s anti-Semitism of September 1919 directly linked to a quest for Lebensraum, or living space, as it subsequently would be, even though the assumption on which Hitler’s letter to Gemlich was based was that a world without Jews would be a good one.

  Hitler’s sudden conversion in the summer of 1919 to radical anti-Semitism was not only a direct consequence but a function of his quest to build a Germany that was resistant to external and internal shocks to its system. That is, although anti-Semitism and racism were part and parcel of Hitler’s worldview, they were not its starting point; his politicization and its continued central idea, founded in the summer of 1919, were an urge to avoid another German defeat and to build a state that would facilitate that goal, not to foster anti-Semitism and racism for their own sake.64

&n
bsp; Hitler’s anti-Semitic conversion was based on two ideas: first, that Jewish capitalism, in terms similar to those that Gottfried Feder had taught to him, was the greatest source of Germany’s weakness; and, second, that Jews formed a race with immutable harmful characteristics that needed to be purged from Germany once and for all. In Hitler’s draft letter to Gemlich, which Mayr sent on with a cover note of his own, we can see a rational application of arguments that are based on irrational beliefs and first principles to the question of how a Germany could be built that would be safe for all times.65

  Due, in no small degree, to Hitler’s biologized all-or-nothing rhetoric, it would be tempting to argue that by September 1919 it already was clear in his mind that ultimately he wanted to remove every single Jew from Germany, even if he could not imagine yet how he would accomplish that.66 Whether or not that was really the case, and whether Hitler’s early postwar anti-Semitism was understood at the time by people who encountered him along those lines, remained to be seen.

  Meanwhile, while he was drafting the letter to Gemlich, Hitler also had to make up his mind whether to accept Anton Drexler’s invitation to start working for the German Workers’ Party. In the event, Private Hitler did not disappoint the local chairman of the DAP. The memory of the DAP meeting of September 12 and of his early morning reading of Drexler’s pamphlet still stirred Hitler. He therefore decided to accept Drexler’s invitation to go to a meeting of the party executive.