Becoming Hitler

by Thomas Weber

  Harrer envisioned that the DAP would function as an exclusive and somewhat secretive society or lodge that, by selecting as its members men who had influence among workers, would over time popularize völkisch and anti-Semitic ideas within the working classes. Hitler’s loutish behavior had no place in his concept of the party.

  Few people had been aware of the society prior to the execution of some of its members in the dying days of the Munich Soviet Republic. Even someone as well connected in conservative circles as the essayist and schoolteacher Josef Hofmiller had been unaware of the Thule Society until after the end of the Soviet Republic. On May 7, in one of the last entries of his diaries that have survived, Hofmiller had asked himself: “Thule Society? What is that?”6 However, in the days that followed, when the executions had been on everybody’s mind, the society had become the talk of the town. Politically, almost overnight, the Thule Society had gained legitimacy as a defender of Bavaria against left-wing extremists in the eyes of many people who otherwise would have viewed the group as nothing but a bizarre “fringe” organization. For a while, the Thule Society appeared to be on the ascendancy and hence Harrer’s vision seemed a viable one.7

  Yet by the time Hitler appeared on the scene in September, Drexler and the people close to the local chairman of the DAP had long started to have misgivings about Harrer’s vision of the DAP as a Thule Society–style secret society for the working classes. For one thing, Drexler and his associates were self-mobilized men unlikely to have cherished the idea of being reduced to tools in the hands of the Thule Society. Also, the society’s fame and importance in the wake of the crushing of the Munich Soviet Republic had been little more than a seven-day wonder. In fact, the group’s head, self-styled aristocrat Rudolf von Sebottendorff, had abandoned Munich soon after the fall of the Soviet Republic. After just over a year in the city, he already had had enough of Munich.8

  Over the summer, the Thule Society had become increasingly marginalized in the political life of Munich. Undoubtedly, for members of the DAP, support by the society looked less and less important.9 The members of the Thule Society had to realize that many people who had been opposed to the Soviet Republic had been prepared to join ranks with the society for tactical gain at the time, but would not actively support the society over the long term once the republic had been defeated. Furthermore, a society whose very name signified a rejection of Christianity was unlikely to set deep roots in the Catholic establishment of Bavaria. Sebottendorff and his peers had named the society after Thule in the belief that Iceland, before its demise, had functioned as a refuge for Germanic people who had resisted Christianization in the early Middle Ages.10 In short, by the autumn of 1919, the Thule Society was only a shadow of its former self.

  Rather than side with Harrer’s vision of the DAP as a secret society, Drexler pushed to welcome Hitler into the party as an effective vocal deliverer of its propaganda; that is, to use him to appeal directly to the public. Drexler advocated for Hitler to give his first official speech for the DAP at the party’s October meeting. As Harrer had become a lame duck within the party through the implosion of the Thule Society, Drexler had his way. The only concession Harrer managed to secure was that Hitler would not be the first, main speaker, but the second one of the evening.11

  Hitler’s inaugural speech for the DAP was an instant success. It took place on the evening of October 16, 1919, right after the main speech to the party meeting at the Hofbräukeller, one of Munich’s best-known beer halls, located across the river from the city center. As the Münchener Beobachter reported a few days later, Hitler spoke with “rousing words,” making the case for “the necessity to rally against the common enemy of nations”—that is, the Jews—and urging people to support “a German press, so that the nation will learn the things about which the Jewish papers keep quiet.”12

  Hitler’s well-received debut proved Drexler right, as a result of which the party’s new recruit became one of its regular speakers. Hermann Esser, who like Hitler worked for Mayr and who now frequently attended DAP meetings, too, soon realized that Hitler surpassed everybody else in his talents as a speaker. As Esser recalled of those early speeches, “I believe that Hitler’s effect even then was based on a circumstance repeatedly noticed by myself later: People from Austria, native Austrians, generally possess a greater talent for speaking without notes than do northern Germans or we Bavarians.” Yet, according to Esser, Hitler’s Austrian heritage was not the only reason for his success as a speaker: “And he also displayed a good sense of humor in some of his observations, he could be rather ironic sometimes. It was all of this together that had an effect on his listeners.” Furthermore, Hitler came over as more authentic than did other speakers. People thought that there was something special about him that made him such an attractive figure. They saw in him someone who was “a soldier and one who has gone hungry,” someone who made “the impression of being a poor devil,” and someone whose use of irony made his speeches special.13

  Hitler spoke again at a DAP meeting on November 13, against the background of rising anti-Semitic agitation in Munich that had seen anti-Jewish handbills and fliers handed out or thrown into the streets. This time, the talk was about the Versailles Treaty. Hitler used his own sense of betrayal—which he had felt since the late spring or early summer toward the United States, Britain, and France—to connect with his audience. He concluded that “there is no international understanding, only deceit; no reconciliation, only violence.” What followed, according to a police report about the event, was “thundering, much repeated applause.”14

  Fifteen days later, Hitler was the fifth speaker at another party event. He again returned to the theme of the hollowness of the promises made at the end of the war about the self-determination of peoples, calling out, “We demand the human right of the defeated and deceived,” and asking his audience, “Are we citizens or are we dogs?” Yet Hitler did not just rail at the victor powers of the First World War; he also made the positive case for the establishment of a government of technocrats. To the laughter of his listeners, he said of Matthias Erzberger, the minister of finance who had been born in the town of Buttenhausen, Swabia and trained as a teacher, “A man, while being the best teacher in the town of Buttenhausen, can yet be the worst finance minister,” and demanded, “We want experts in our government, not incompetents.”15

  As the autumn faded into winter, the DAP’s meetings took place in bitterly cold venues because of the prohibition on heating meeting halls due to the acute fuel shortage in Munich. Yet Hitler’s involvement began to pay off, as attendance at DAP events started to grow.16 When, on December 10, he walked to the front of the hall of the restaurant Zum Deutschen Reich to address a meeting—in his black trousers, white shirt, black tie, and an old worn jacket that was rumored to have been the present of a Jewish peddler in prewar Vienna—he passed as many as three hundred people. This was more than ten times the size of audiences that had attended some of the party’s meetings the previous summer.17

  As in his other talks, Hitler sought to identify the implications of what he saw as hollow Wilsonian promises about the dawn of a new age in international affairs. He addressed three questions: “Who is at fault for Germany’s humiliation? What is right? Can there be right without right? [i.e., can there be justice without a formal system of justice?].”

  To Hitler, might was more important than right, a belief that for him at that time was not driven by social Darwinist thought. Rather, it was fueled by what he saw as a realization that the promises made by the United States to Germany toward the end of the war did not count for anything when put to the test. Hitler said, “We could see it for ourselves at the end of the World War. North America declines to join the League of Nations because it is powerful enough by itself and does not require the help of others, and because it would feel restricted in its freedom of movement.”

  Hitler’s belief that “might and the knowledge that one has auxiliaries in closed formation at one’
s back decide what is right” was also based on a reading of the history of the previous centuries. He argued that China’s treatment of Japan in the nineteenth century, Britain’s approach to India, the United States’ discrimination against nonwhite immigrants, and England’s approach to Holland in the early modern age had all been driven by might, not by right. He declared that only if Germans realized what everybody else already knew—that there was no right without might—could Germany survive. He also stated that Germany had to find an answer to the problem of the country’s insufficient food stocks, which was driving its people to immigrate to the British Empire. Emigration was pernicious, Hitler insisted, as it would result in many of its best men being lost to Germany, with the consequence that Germany would be weakened and Britain strengthened in international affairs.

  The bottom line of Hitler’s talk in the cold hall of Zum Deutschen Reich was twofold: First, Germany had to recast itself to survive on the global stage. And second, Germany had to realize which countries would always be its enemies and which would only develop enmity toward it out of expediency. He went on to state that there were two kinds of enemies: “The first sort includes our eternal enemies, England and America. In the second group are nations that have developed enmity toward us as a consequence of their own unfortunate situations or due to other circumstances.”18 One of the countries Hitler singled out as not being a natural enemy of Germany was the one that would incur the highest number of casualties in its fight against Germany in the Second World War: Russia.

  Domestically, Hitler singled out for blame, just as he had done at Lechfeld and in his letter to Gemlich, not Bolshevism but Jewish finance capitalism: “Our fight is with the money. Work alone will help us, not money. We must smash interest slavery. Our fight is with the races that represent money.”

  He thus concluded that Germans had to stand up to Jewish capitalism and to the Anglo-American world if Germans wanted to become “a free people within a free Germany.”19

  Even though Hitler became ever more active in the DAP throughout the autumn of 1919, his day job continued to be to carry out propaganda for the Military District Command 4. Until late October, he still formally served in the Second Infantry Regiment. On October 26, he was transferred to the Schützenregiment 41, where he would serve as an “education officer” attached to the regimental staff. As a result of his transfer, Hitler was moved back closer to the heart of Munich, given lodgings in the barracks of the Schützenregiment 41, the Türken Barracks, the very place where he had had to be rescued from being beaten up by Michael Keogh, the Irish volunteer in the German armed forces.

  Hitler now had a post to his liking. He only had to step outside his barracks to be right in the heart of Munich’s art district at whose center were the city’s most famous art museums, the Old Pinakothek and the New Pinakothek. And when staying inside the Türken Barracks, he could spend his time in the regimental library, of which he was now in charge, and engage in his favorite pastime: reading.20

  When away from the barracks on official business, Hitler would sometimes address military units in Munich. On one occasion, he was deployed to Passau on the Bavarian-Austrian border, where he had spent part of his childhood, to speak to soldiers of a regiment based in that city. In January and February 1920, he also participated as a speaker in two propaganda courses of the kind he himself had taken the previous summer, giving a speech on “Political Parties and What They Mean” as well as one on his pet topic, “The Peace of Versailles.”21

  The officer running the two courses, who was not Karl Mayr, was so taken by Hitler’s spirited talk about Versailles that he commissioned him to produce a flier that would compare, per its title, “The Punitive Peace of Brest-Litovsk and the Peace of Reconciliation and International Understanding of Versailles.” Hitler put all his passion into devising the flier, demonstrating how, in his view, the peace of Brest-Litovsk, the peace that Germany had imposed on Russia in early 1918, had been one among equals. He sought to demonstrate that Germany had left Russia proper intact and had resumed trading with it immediately, as well as forgoing almost all demands for reparations. In short, Hitler presented the Peace of Brest-Litovsk as having been driven by an urge to foster “peace and friendship.” The Versailles Treaty, by contrast, he described “as a punitive peace that not only robbed Germany of many of her core territories but that would continue to treat Germany as a pariah, rendering a material and social recovery of Germany impossible.”22

  Throughout the late autumn of 1919 and the ensuing winter, Hitler shuttled between the Türken Barracks, the offices of the Military District Command 4, and the venues at which the DAP and its executive met.23 His activities for the DAP and for the army complemented each other.

  Karl Mayr clearly saw Hitler’s work for the DAP as benefiting the interests of the district command, as evident in his continued backing of his protégé: First, he had supported Hitler’s decision to enter the DAP.24 Second, in addition to the regular pay Hitler continued to receive from the army, Mayr gave Hitler as well as Esser, who also continued to work for him, extra money from what seems to have been a discretionary fund. Every three to four weeks, Mayr would slip each of the two men ten to twenty marks in cash, particularly at times when, as analysts and possibly as spies, they observed a lot of nighttime political meetings for him. Mayr himself also attended Hitler’s talk for the DAP on November 12.25

  But although Mayr had sent Hitler to the DAP in the first place, it had been Hitler himself who had taken active steps to enter politics, already having been politicized by the time he had made his appearance at the German Workers’ Party. That is, Mayr clearly approved of Hitler’s decisions and actions and sought to utilize them to the advantage of the Reichswehr, but Hitler did not enter politics under his instruction. Now, when Mayr tried to use him as his tool, Hitler was increasingly difficult to handle. In fact, Hitler started to emancipate himself from Mayr’s influence in late 1919, while attempting to use other people—possibly even Mayr himself—as his own instrument. Even though it would take until March 1921 for Mayr fully to realize that Hitler was no longer in his pocket, Hitler had already begun to replace Mayr as his paternal mentor toward the end of 1919.26

  His new mentor was the leading man of ideas in the DAP, Dietrich Eckart, a poet, dramatist, Bohemian, and journalist with a jovial but moody nature, a morphine addict with a walruslike face. Eckart was twenty-one years Hitler’s senior. Although most of his endeavors were financially unsuccessful, his 1912 dramatic adaption of Henrik Ibsen’s five-act play in verse Peer Gynt had brought him sudden fame, success, and wealth.

  In the words of Hermann Esser, from late 1919 onward, Hitler “more or less revered Eckart as his fatherly friend, as indeed did I.” According to Esser, “Eckart played the role of the dad to our family, and we honored him as such.” Eckart, meanwhile, would subsequently state that he instantaneously had been impressed by Hitler on first meeting him: “I felt myself attracted by his whole way of being, and very soon I realized that he was exactly the right man for our young movement.” To Eckart, impressed by his energy, Hitler was by far the DAP’s best speaker. He treated Hitler as his favorite protégé in the party. When Esser and Hitler clashed, as they occasionally did at the time, Eckart would act as a peacemaker but he would also tell Esser, as the latter recalled, “Don’t you go getting ideas; he’s your superior by far.”27

  Like so many other early National Socialists, Eckart was an outsider to the southern Bavarian Catholic heartland around Munich who had been attracted by the city. Born and raised in northern Bavaria, he had spent many years in Berlin before moving to Munich in 1913, the same year that Hitler had made the Bavarian capital his home. There were many parallels in Eckart’s and Hitler’s lives despite their age difference. Both were at heart artists, both likely suffered from depression, both had experienced hardship—Hitler in Vienna, Eckart in Berlin—and the passions of both lay equally with arts and politics. And both had been exposed to Jewish influences prior to
the war about which they later preferred to remain silent.

  As a twenty-year-old in Vienna, Hitler had had Jewish business partners and acquaintances in a working-class men’s residence with whom he got on well. For Eckart, Jewish influences went even deeper than that. The two people that he had admired most prior to meeting Hitler had been Jews: Heinrich Heine and Otto Weininger. Heine, the great German-Jewish poet, had been the hero of Eckart’s youth. Eckart’s first publication had been an edition of verse by Heine. As late as 1899, Eckart had celebrated Germany’s most famous Jewish literary figure of the nineteenth century as the country’s genius of that century: “If one bears the entirety of this desolate German epoch—in all its hollowness—in mind, one cannot be surprised enough by the force of genius with which one single man suddenly shattered the ignominious fetters [of the people] and led their liberated spirit onto surprising new paths. This man was Heinrich Heine.” In 1893, Eckart had even written and published a poem that sang the praises of a beautiful Jewish girl.28

  Weininger became important for Eckart at the time of his anti-Semitic conversion in the early years of the twentieth century. Weininger was an Austrian Jew who had converted to Protestantism as an adult. He had published his book Geschlecht und Charakter (Sex and Character) in 1903, shortly before his suicide at the age of twenty-three. Its central theme was the polarity of the male and the female within the individual and the universe, characterizing the female principle with Jewry. For Weininger, the main feature of the female principle was its materialism and the absence of a soul and a personality. After reading the book, Eckart had started to hero-worship its self-hating Jewish author, writing in his notebook at the time, “If I have Weininger’s book in my hand, do I not also hold his brain in my hand? Do I not have the brains myself to read between the lines of his thoughts? Is he not mine? Am I not his?”29