by Thomas Weber
Despite early Jewish influences, in the wake of the First World War and the revolution Hitler and Eckart shared exterminatory rhetoric when referring to Jews. In his letter to Gemlich, Hitler had identified as his ultimate goal “the total removal of Jews”; and Eckart expressed during his initial encounter with Hitler his desire to load all Jews onto a train and drive them in it into the Red Sea.30
Eckart was of paramount importance to Hitler not only because of his political influence on him, nor because, likely under his influence, Hitler first started to believe himself to be a superior being. He was also of the utmost importance to Hitler because of his life outside of politics, or one should say his life on the borderline of politics and arts. It was through Eckart that Hitler—who never had managed on his own to find a footing in Munich’s arts scene—was introduced to like-minded artists who formed a subculture in a city dominated by progressives. For Hitler, Eckart’s most important introduction was to Max Zaeper, a painter of landscapes whose goal was to purge Jewish influences from art and who ran a salon of like-minded artists. When Eckart first brought Hitler along to Zaeper’s salon in the autumn of 1919, he introduced him as an expert on architecture of working-class background. Hitler certainly looked every inch an underprivileged expert to the other participants. As one of them recalled, Hitler appeared at the salon with “his grey eyes slightly veiled, with dark hair and a drooping moustache and remarkably wide nostrils. His suit was dark and shabby with old, frayed trousers that bagged at the knees.”31
Dietrich Eckart was to have such an important influence on Hitler that the second volume of Mein Kampf would be dedicated to him. Yet Hitler did not mention Eckart in the text of the book, because he was trying to present himself as a man who had been entirely self-made. Nevertheless, despite omitting him from Mein Kampf, Hitler would admit, in private, that Eckart had played the role of his mentor and teacher. During the night of January 16/17, 1942, he would tell his entourage in military HQ: “We have all moved forward since then, that’s why we don’t see what [Eckart] used to be back then: a polar star. The writings of all the others were filled with platitudes, but if he told you off: such wit! I was a mere infant then in terms of style.”32 Eckart was indeed to have the strongest influence on Hitler in the early years of the party.33
Compared to where the DAP had stood in the summer of 1919, it had transformed itself phenomenally by the end of that year. Yet even then, it remained a fairly obscure political grouping, as evident, for instance, in its fate among Munich’s students. Although by that time many of those who showed up at DAP meetings were university students, the overwhelming majority of their fellow students did not display any interest in the party and its activities. For instance, a student from the Rhineland spent the winter semester 1919/1920 at Munich University without ever attending DAP events. He was none other than Joseph Goebbels, who would become the propaganda chief of the Third Reich. It is not as if students like Goebbels were all apolitical; it is just that they had no interest in the DAP.
Goebbels was oscillating between, on the one hand, his Catholic upbringing, against which he had started to rebel—even though he had still voted for the Bavarian People’s Party (BVP) while a student in Würzburg in January—and his growing socialist, antimaterialist, German nationalist, and pro-Russian sentiments, on the other. While living in Munich, he worked on a drama with the title “The Working Class Struggle” and felt intellectually close to Jewish poet-writer Ernst Toller, a leading member of the Munich Soviet Republic. The only place where Goebbels may conceivably have had a fleeting encounter with Hitler without realizing it was in the opera house, as both he and Hitler loved attending Wagner operas.34
The socialist, antimaterialist, and nationalist sentiments of Goebbels and Hitler and the nascent DAP were not worlds apart. Yet their attitudes toward anti-Semitism were. The fervent anti-Semitism of the DAP is likely to have been one reason why the party did not become a home to students like Goebbels. Earlier in 1919, Goebbels had written to his girlfriend Anka: “You know I am not particularly fond of this exaggerated anti-Semitism. [… ] I couldn’t say that the Jews are my particular friends, but I don’t think that we will be rid of them by cursing or polemicizing, or even by pogroms, and if that was possible, it would be very ignoble and inhumane.”35
Yet despite the DAP’s continued obscurity, there was a silver lining on the horizon for the party in the winter of 1919/1920, perhaps best epitomized by an event that took place on January 16, 1920. That day, the trial of Count Arco, Kurt Eisner’s assassin, finally came to a close.
The sentence handed down that day certainly was hardly a source of rejoicing on the political right, for Arco was condemned to death. As Goebbels witnessed, Munich University was in turmoil after news broke about the verdict, resulting in passionate pro-Arco protests by many students. Yet the way even the state prosecutor of the trial celebrated Arco is emblematic of how far the political climate had moved to the right in recent months, thus creating opportunities for groups and parties on the radical right. In his assessment of Arco, the state prosecutor had sounded more like his defense lawyer than his prosecutor: “It was a true, profound, deeply rooted patriotism that motivated the defendant.” He added, “If only all of our young people were inspired by such ardent patriotism, we could hope to be able to look forward to the future of our Fatherland with glad hearts and confidence.”36
Even Bavaria’s minister of justice, Ernst Müller-Meiningen, a member of the liberal German Democratic Party (DDP), had sympathies for Eisner’s assassin and quickly commuted the death sentence, first to life imprisonment and subsequently to a four-year term, which Arco was to serve in a comfortable cell at Landsberg fortress. During his trial, Arco had managed to charm half of Munich. Elsa Bruckmann, for instance, found him “particularly likeable.” The former Romanian princess thought that “he acted wholly from noble motives.” Bruckmann told her mother that “everybody only says the very best about him.”37
The DAP was not a direct beneficiary of the rightward swing in Bavarian politics that fueled expressions of sympathy toward Arco. The political and ideological differences between Arco and the DAP were at least as significant as were their similarities,38 for Arco was a Bavarian separatist and monarchist. Indeed, the separatist, monarchist, authoritarian wing of the BVP was the greatest immediate beneficiary of Bavaria’s tilt toward the right. In fact, even once Hitler was in power, little love would be lost between Eisner’s assassin and the party of the soldier who had served Eisner’s regime. In 1933, Arco would be taken into “protective custody” for fear that he might turn into an assassin again, and target Hitler.39
Nevertheless, the move to the right in Bavarian politics also benefited the DAP. All parties that had been critical of Eisner, and that were now helping to check potential renewed radical left-wing takeover attempts, rose in the esteem of large swaths of conservative and centrist political supporters. In other words, while relatively few people actively supported such political groups in early 1920, and while many of the political goals of the DAP often openly clashed with those of Bavarian centrists and conservatives, the DAP’s role as part of an antirevolutionary bulwark gave it a standing in Bavarian politics. That role, unlike in the past, provided the party with the right and ability to get a hearing, upon which the DAP could build in the months and years to come.40
In addition, many conservatives in Germany, particularly young ones, had come to the realization in the aftermath of the war that there was no going back to the old regime. They had concluded that prewar conservative parties and organizations had failed to solve the “social question”; in other words, the social and class tensions resulting from industrialization. Likewise, they lacked conviction that the prewar conservative party, the German Conservative Party (Deutschkonservative Partei), even in its revamped postwar form, would be able to turn itself into a people’s party and appeal to workers. Even though the new conservative party proclaimed in its name—German National People’s Party
(Deutschnationale Volkspartei, or DNVP)—to be a people’s party, young conservatives in Germany, such as Ulrich von Hassell, doubted that the party would really be able to achieve that.
Hassell, the son-in-law of Alfred von Tirpitz, Kaiser Wilhelm’s ultraconservative head of the navy and a towering figure in the DNVP, had published a manifesto, “We Young Conservatives,” in November 1918, right after the end of the war, advocating that conservatives and socialists, rather than conservatives and liberals, find common ground and come together. As an opponent of Anglo-American international capitalism, he did not see a chance of a political alliance with liberals. Yet, as the young member of the DNVP stated in his manifesto, he believed that cooperation between socialists and conservatives was both possible and desirable, so as to solve the “social question” and to embrace the future. He thought this was the only way that would ensure the survival of conservatism in an age of mass politics. Initially, Hassell had had the Social Democratic Party (SPD) in mind when drawing up his vision of a conservative-socialist alliance, but within months he had given up on the Social Democrats.41
The thinking behind Hassell’s proposal was part of a wider conservative strategic realignment, from which ultimately collectivist parties that were offsprings of both socialism and nationalism would benefit most. In other words, the spirit standing behind Hassell’s manifesto fueled conservatives all over Germany into being at least curious about and open to such parties as the DAP. They were seen as parties that could potentially appeal to voters considered to be out of the reach of conservative parties, even if conservatives did not share all of the policy goals of such parties.
In the short term, the new openness of conservatives was of limited use to the DAP as long as it only operated within Bavaria, as outside Bavaria existed far more fertile ground for such parties as the DAP to thrive. In the rest of the country, mainstream conservative parties—chief among them the German National People’s Party—believed that they themselves were, despite their best efforts, unlikely to succeed in appealing directly to the working class and the lower middle class. This is why they outsourced appealing to the working class and the lower middle class to small parties of the DAP variant. Yet in Bavaria, the DNVP, or to be precise its Bavarian arm—the Mittelpartei—was not the leading conservative party. Bavarian conservatism was dominated by the BVP which, unlike the DNVP, was a people’s party with a cross-class appeal. Although BVP politicians might have seen the DAP as a useful anti-Bolshevik ally, they did not feel that they had to franchise out appealing to workers and the lower middle classes. They thought that the BVP was perfectly capable of doing so itself. Therefore, a party with a profile like that of the DAP would most likely find its breakthrough outside Bavaria.42
Yet to the DAP’s gain in Bavaria, a significant minority of Bavarian Catholics had started to feel alienated by the internationalism of the Holy See and the democratization of the BVP. As a result, they began to turn against both the Catholic Church and the BVP. For them, the DAP provided a potential and viable new political home. They felt inspired by the articles and pamphlets by local Catholic writers such as Franz Schrönghammer-Heimdal, a close friend of Dietrich Eckart’s. Schrönghammer-Heimdal, who soon would join the DAP, was propagating a national, völkisch Catholicism. For him Jesus was not Jewish but a Galilean Aryan from Nazareth. In some of Eckart’s articles, too, there were echoes of the kind of Catholicism advocated by his friend.43
Catholics in Munich who believed in the kind of national Catholicism for which Schrönghammer-Heimdal stood no longer felt represented by Munich’s archbishop. Even though Faulhaber was no friend of the new political order, his main objective was to fight the curtailment of the rights of the Catholic Church. However, to the dismay of a section of right-wing Catholics, Faulhaber endorsed “peace” and “understanding between the nations.” He even started to accept democracy, as long as it would not be applied to the internal running of the church. As he put it in his pastoral letter for Lent 1920, “The trees of the earth grow upward, but the stars of the sky shine down on us from above.” In other words, he believed that political rule on earth should be legitimated from below—democratically—while religion should be governed through the pope directly from heaven.44 The significant minority of Bavarian Catholics alienated by Faulhaber and the Catholic establishment provided, in the short to medium term, the greatest potential for growth of the DAP.
Something else to benefit the DAP was the continued hardship and hunger reigning in Munich, against the backdrop of the return of influenza to Munich. The situation in Munich had been so bad that Faulhaber and Pope Benedict XV spoke about how hunger was written into the faces of children during the visit of Munich’s archbishop to Rome in December 1919. On December 28, the pope thus had issued an appeal to the world to help Germany’s children by sending them both bread and love.45
Finally, the most important reason that the future of the DAP started to look bright was the outcome of the power struggle between Drexler—the chairman of the Munich chapter of the party—and Harrer, the party’s national chairman—that came to a head by the end of the year. After Harrer had failed to keep Hitler off the stage in October, he still tried to regain the initiative. Yet Harrer had been fighting a losing battle, as Hitler and Drexler had teamed up against him to undermine Harrer’s Thule-style vision of the party whenever they could. The two managed to isolate Harrer within the party’s executive. Hitler argued that the party should woo the masses as soon as possible, whereas Harrer steadfastly continued to argue that the DAP should not play to the masses.
On January 5, 1920, the power struggle between Harrer, Drexler, and Hitler was over, as the “national” leader of the DAP realized that he had been boxed into a corner from which he would not be able to escape. Harrer therefore resigned from the party. He would never again play a prominent role anywhere and would die prematurely at the age of thirty-five in 1926.
With Harrer’s resignation, the Thule vision of the DAP was dead. Hitler and Drexler had prevailed. Drexler now became the overall chairman of the party, while any resistance against Hitler’s inclusion in the party executive had disappeared. As the party’s most gifted propagandist, Hitler was now able to serve without major opposition by DAP leadership.46
With Harrer gone, Drexler and Hitler could plot uninhibitedly for the party to go out into the open and cease to be a quasi-secret society. The first attempts to build up a professional party infrastructure had already been under way since November, when plans had been drawn up to print enrollment forms as well as announcements of DAP events and the statutes of the party.47
Furthermore, on January 15, 1920, the DAP set up its first real office. The Sterneckerbräu had offered the party room for the office free of charge under the condition that the DAP would hold its regular weekly meeting of party members in the Sterneckerbräu. The offer also came with the understanding that people meeting or working in the office would order drinks or food from the restaurant. As Hitler later described the new office: “It was a small, vaulted, dark room with brown wooden paneling, about six yards long and three broad. On overcast days, everything was dark. We brightened up the walls with posters announcing our meetings, and for the first time hung up our new party flag. When we held a meeting, it was spread out on the table—in short, it remained always before our eyes.”48
The office could only be accessed through a narrow alley running on one side of the Sterneckerbräu. As Hitler and his collaborators first took possession of the office, they put all but one table to the side, setting the remaining table in the middle. It was around that table that the executive assembled during its meetings. They put a smaller table for the managing director (Geschäftsführer) next to the meeting table and placed on top of it the typewriter that had been donated by a party member who ran a stationery and tobacco store around the corner. An old cigar box, meanwhile, was put out to store money.49
Ever since his joining the party, Hitler’s speeches had functioned as an enormo
usly successful recruiter for the DAP. For instance, on December 1, 1919, Emil Maurice—a twenty-year-old watchmaker assistant of Huguenot descent, born close to the North Sea, who had moved to Munich during the war, who would head the SA (the party paramilitary organization) in its early days, and who for a while would be one of Hitler’s best friends—joined the DAP as party member 594. Even after 1945, he would state that it had been Hitler’s speech of November 13 that had made him a convert.50
In the new year, membership continued to grow as Drexler and Hitler’s efforts to build up a professional party infrastructure were beginning to pay off. Among the new January recruits was Hermann Esser. Soon, other left-wing converts joined him in the party. One was Sepp Dietrich, a former head of the Soldiers’ Council of a military unit who would subsequently head Hitler’s personal guard unit—the Leibstandarte-SS “Adolf Hitler”—and would become a general in the Waffen-SS in the Second World War. Julius Schreck, another new DAP member, who would serve Hitler as driver and aide, had been a member of the Red Army during the days of the Munich Soviet Republic. Hitler was well aware of the past of many of the party’s new recruits. As Hitler would state on November 30, 1941, “Ninety percent of my party at the time was made up by leftists.”51
A particularly important new member joined the party on January 16, 1920: Captain Ernst Röhm, the future head of the Sturmabteilung (SA), who came to the DAP from the other end of the political spectrum. He attended the DAP meeting of January 16 out of a sense of disappointment with the conservative German National People’s Party. He was so taken by the party that he joined it on the spot. In the years to come, Röhm would use his influence to make Reichswehr money, cars, and weapons available to the DAP/NSDAP. Soon, Hitler and Röhm would address each other with the familiar “Du” and Hitler would become a regular visitor to Röhm’s family, who would frequently invite him for dinner. In February, the future deputy chairman of the NSDAP, Oskar Körner, joined the party after attending a speech by Hitler. Like Emil Maurice, Körner was yet another non–Upper Bavarian Protestant residing in Munich, where he ran a toy store. Born in Silesia in the German-Polish borderland, the future deputy leader of the party had made the Bavarian capital his home since the end of the war.52