Becoming Hitler

by Thomas Weber

  Arguably, there were two main reasons for the success of the NSDAP in coming out on top after the consolidation. One was that the party had gone its own way, refusing to play second fiddle to anyone and refusing to join forces with equal partners. The other was that it had staged itself better and had been louder and more entertaining than its competitors. The person responsible for all this was, first and foremost, Adolf Hitler.

  In the almost two years that had passed since his sudden political epiphany on the eve of his propaganda course with Karl Mayr, Hitler had tried to find answers as to how Germany should be recast to survive in a fast-changing world. He had not seen his role as merely offering practical advice or helping to repackage the endeavors of others in a more attractive manner. Rather, in the way expected of a “genius,” he sought to offer revelations about the hidden architecture of the world and the nature of things, presenting them as the new testament for a new Germany. Proclaiming them in quasi-religious language, he asserted that these measures were necessary for deliverance from the misery of the past and present.

  Mein Kampf, as well as the subsequent writings and proclamations of Hitler’s propagandists, would make it sound as though the new testament of a new Germany had been revealed to Hitler early on, in his years as a student and as a struggling artist in Vienna. More recently, it has been popular to believe that the “new testament” came to him in a prepackaged form, either during the revolution or in its aftermath. Hitler, it has been said, had merely appropriated that ready-made “new testament,” pretending it was his revelation, when in fact he merely changed the label on a “testament” written by others and then ran with it for the rest of his life.

  Although, while devising Germany’s “new testament,” he of course borrowed copiously from others, he neither limited himself to producing an identical copy of the ideas of the people around him nor invariably remained true to them. He picked and chose from the rich paintbox of thought available to him to paint, erase, and repaint his vision for Germany. That vision became the source not of one “new testament” but of several competing and changing incarnations of it. Hitler was surprisingly flexible in changing his “new testament” when its ideas seemed insufficient to explain the world.

  Hitler had focused initially on providing a macroeconomic indictment of Western capitalism and finance. At that time, race had mattered to him insofar as it allowed him to create a dualism between a Jewish and non-Jewish “spirit” that would determine whether a country was to have a bright future or be pushed onto a path of terminal decline and death. What followed had not just been a pivot to the east but also from macroeconomic to geopolitical power as a means to understand and explain the world. As a result, Hitler sought to establish a permanent alliance with Russia (treating the country as Germany’s eastern neighbor and thus ignoring Poland’s very existence) so as to put Russia and Germany for all time on the same footing as the Anglo-American world. Along the way, anti-Bolshevik and conspirational anti-Semitism became more important than previously had been the case. Yet the hierarchy of his anti-Semitism remained intact in that he still saw anti-Bolshevik anti-Semitism as a function of anticapitalist anti-Semitism.

  While writing and rewriting drafts of his “new testament,” Hitler’s fortunes were transformed spectacularly. In the summer of 1919, he had been a talented but struggling minor propagandist for the Reichswehr in Munich. By the early summer of 1921, he was de facto second-in-command of a party that was the talk of the town in Munich. In his rise to prominence in the NSDAP, he had defied the usual path to power within political parties, one typically fraught with backroom deals, compromise, and backstabbing. Rather, the popular obsession with genius at that time had allowed a man with a ruthless will to power and a talent for responding to unforeseen events to catapult himself to nearly the top. Moreover, Hitler’s charismatic performative, rather than discursive, style of politics was ideally suited for a splinter party that wanted to make itself heard in a city in which many competitive groups existed on the far right of politics.

  Hitler now faced a new problem: along the way of transforming the fortunes of the NSDAP, he had made many enemies, not just outside the party but also inside it. By the early summer of 1921, his enemies within the party were plotting against him, and he faced an imminent threat. At stake were both his personal fortune, political success, and his “new testament.”

  PART III

  MESSIAH

  CHAPTER 10

  The Bavarian Mussolini

  (July 1921 to December 1922)

  “Adolf Hitler—Traitor?” was the heading of an anonymous flier that a number of National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP) members printed and distributed in the summer of 1921. The flier, whose purpose was to destroy Hitler and his standing in politics, was as hard-hitting as any criticism that the political left had leveled against him. It accused him of being run by “sinister men in the shadows in Berlin.” It also suggested that he was a marionette in the hands of Jewish conspirators who had deployed him to split the party and to weaken it from within. Additionally, it presented Hitler as a megalomaniac who was incapable of accepting other people as his equals and faulted him for getting worked up and angry every time somebody asked him about his past. He was also labeled a sympathizer of Kaiser Karl, the last emperor of Austria, which was a particularly bizarre charge, given his long record of opposition to the House of Habsburg. Meanwhile, Hermann Esser, who continued to be one of Hitler’s closest associates, was accused of being a Social Democratic spy.1

  The printing of the anti-Hitler flier marked the escalation of a struggle that had been brewing within the party for months. At its heart lay disagreement over the future direction of the NSDAP as well as over the role that Hitler might play in it. The distribution of the flier also marked the end of a gradual falling-out between Drexler and Hitler over the future strategy of the party. Whereas Hitler supported a revolutionary, violent path, Drexler advocated a legalistic, parliamentary one. Although in the spring Drexler had supported a merger with other National Socialist groups in Germany, Austria, and Czechoslovakia, and he continued to champion close cooperation with the German Socialist Party (the party that had once shunned Hitler when he had desired to join it). By contrast, Hitler was fiercely opposed to any such move, firmly believing that the NSDAP should go its own way.2

  The struggle between the two men came to a head in July 1921, when, behind Hitler’s back, Drexler wooed Otto Dickel, the leader of the Deutsche Werkgemeinschaft, an Augsburg-based völkisch group, and invited him to speak in Munich. At that time Hitler was on an extended fund-raising trip in Berlin. (Whether Hitler had left Munich for several weeks to demonstrate that the party would not be able to function without him remains unresolved.)3

  Dickel, a schoolteacher born in Hesse who as an adult had made Bavaria his adopted home, was the author of a book that called for a renaissance of the Occident vis-à-vis the rest of the world. His argument was based on a combination of nationalism, economic socialism, and anti-Semitism. Dickel’s popular touch ensured that his speech in Munich was an instant success, as a result of which Drexler invited him to become a regular speaker for the NSDAP. Drexler, meanwhile, accepted an invitation to come to Augsburg on July 10 to discuss with Dickel and the leaders of the Nuremberg-based German Socialist Party future cooperation between the NSDAP, the Deutsche Werkgemeinschaft, and the German Socialist Party.4

  When Esser contacted Hitler in Berlin and told him what had been going on in Munich and about Drexler’s impending meeting in Augsburg, Hitler rushed over to crash it. His appearance at the meeting turned into a fiasco. Dickel took apart the party program point by point and criticized the name of the party as misleading and cumbersome, while Hitler kept interrupting him, all to no avail, as the NSDAP executive members present were impressed by Dickel’s vision and leadership qualities and failed to support Hitler. Hitler then stormed out of the meeting—and quit the party the following day.5

  It is not entirely cl
ear whether Hitler left the party in the belief that all was lost for him in the NSDAP, or whether it was nothing but a clever ploy and gamble. Whatever his intentions, he emerged triumphant from the crisis that was triggered by his exit from the NSDAP. Without Hitler, the party lost its bearings. Dickel was simply not able to fill his shoes. The crisis revealed that since joining the party in the autumn of 1919, Hitler had gradually become its de facto leader. Now in the summer of 1921, a situation had finally arisen that allowed him to grab power on his own terms.

  In the wake of Hitler’s departure from the party, his mentor Dietrich Eckart lobbied in support of him, which resulted in a U-turn by Drexler and the other members of its executive committee, who now sent Eckart to Hitler to urge him to rejoin the party. In response, Hitler sent a list of demands to the NSDAP’s executives that had to be met before he would come back. He did not mince any words. He expected to be given, as he put it, “the post of 1st Chairman with dictatorial powers.” Another of his conditions was that the party’s headquarters would remain in Munich for all time and that there would be no change to the party’s name or its platform for the following six years. He also demanded that the NSDAP’s dealings with Dickel be ended immediately.6

  On July 29, Drexler presented Hitler’s demands and put them to a vote at an extraordinary meeting of the party. Due to Drexler’s complete about-face championing of him, the day turned into a triumph for Hitler. Of the 554 members present, all but one voted in favor of the proposal. Hitler was now finally the new leader of the party. Drexler was made honorary chairman of the party for life.

  The succession from Drexler to Hitler marked more than a changing of the guard and signified more than a change in policies. Although previously the party had rejected parliamentary democracy while advocating internal democracy within itself, democracy was now dead in the NSDAP.7 Whereas hitherto the Parteileitung (literally, party leadership) of the NSDAP had functioned as an executive committee in which the party chairman was first among equals, the leader of the party now stood above the Parteileitung and had, as Hitler had demanded, dictatorial powers.8 A year and a half after elbowing NSDAP cofounder Karl Harrer out, Hitler had managed to sideline the party’s other founder, too. By eliminating or sidelining one by one whoever in the party was more senior than him or had competed for power with him, he displayed a remarkable Machiavellian skill in political manipulation. Subsequently he would cunningly co-opt many such rivals into supporting him.9

  Hitler now was the leader and dictator of the NSDAP, with free rein to remold the party according to his wishes. He threw Otto Dickel out of the party. Max Amann, his former superior from the List Regiment, Hitler’s wartime unit, was put in charge of the party’s finances and internal management, with a view to imposing on the party the same kind of organizational structure as the headquarters (HQ) of the List Regiment—the only functioning organizational setup he knew firsthand. Hitler told Amann that he needed him urgently because the party’s previous staff had been incompetent and the danger of Bolshevik revolution was imminent.10

  It was at this point that the position of those who, like Hitler, were of a military background and who always had aligned themselves with him was strengthened. The same was true of those of his supporters who regretted that they had been too young to serve in the war. To that end, a euphemistically named “Gymnastics and Sports Section” of the party was set up as its very own paramilitary organization loyal to Hitler; it would soon be renamed Sturmabteilung (Storm Section), or SA. Most early SA members were under the age of twenty-five, and almost all younger than thirty. The newly established SA thus added to the youthful character of the NSDAP, particularly in comparison to other parties of the political right.11

  As a result of Hitler’s takeover of the NSDAP, the party split. A number of members left in opposition to the direction in which its new leader was trying to take the NSDAP. At the initiative of Josef Berchtold, who had helped Hitler find lodgings on Thierschstraße, they set up the “Free National Socialist Association.” Yet they were fighting a losing battle; by the following year the new group was so weak that Berchtold would rejoin the NSDAP, which by that time would be under firm control by Hitler.12

  Gottfried Grandel, Eckart’s friend in Augsburg whose loan had allowed the NSDAP to acquire the Völkischer Beobachter, was putting on a futile fight, too. Alarmed at Hitler’s triumph, he wrote to Eckart: “I like and value Hitler, but his striving for total power concerns me.” He added, “It’s going to come to a bad end if he doesn’t change his ways and allow others to share power. We have to keep in mind that violence and cronyism scare away the best comrades and cripple the best forces, and in so doing empower the less desirable elements.” Grandel urged Eckart to bring Hitler back into line.13 Yet Eckart had no intention of doing so, as the poet-dramatist had started to see in Hitler the embodiment of the main character of his greatest success, Peer Gynt.

  Eckart’s play was an adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s original drama, in which the eponymous protagonist leaves his native Norwegian village intent on becoming “king of the world.” In Ibsen’s play, Gynt is selfish and deceitful and ruins both his soul and body before returning home in ruin and shame. In Eckart’s version, by contrast, Peer Gynt is a protagonist whose transgressions are heroic because they challenge the world of trolls, who for Eckart symbolize Judaism. Due to the noble goals of his actions, Gynt returns to the purity and innocence of youth in the final scene of Eckart’s play. This new conception of the character was influenced by Otto Weininger, who had written about Peer Gynt himself. It is a Peer Gynt who is an anti-Semitic genius aiming to purge the influence of the feminine and thus of Judaism from the world.14

  Eckart’s message to Hitler was that in aspiring to become Germany’s Peer Gynt, he should not worry about employing violence and transgressing existing norms. That kind of transgression would be justified by the end it served, and ultimately everything would be forgiven. In the introduction to the edition of Peer Gynt that he gave to Hitler less than two months after his becoming leader of the NSDAP, and which bore a handwritten dedication to his “dear friend Adolf Hitler,” Eckart had written, “[Gynt’s] idea of becoming the king of the world should not be taken literally as the ‘Will to Power.’ Hidden behind this is a spiritual belief that he will be ultimately pardoned for all his sins.”15 As stressed in his introduction, the mission of Peer Gynt and of Germany as a whole was to exterminate the trolls of the world: “[It is by] the German nature, which means, in the broader sense, the capability of self-sacrifice itself, that the world will heal, and find its way back to the pure divine, but only after a bloody war of annihilation against the united army of the ‘trolls’; in other words, against the Midgard Serpent encircling the earth, the reptilian incarnation of the lie.”16

  Hitler was more than happy to become Germany’s real-life Peer Gynt. To reshape his public image accordingly, he installed his confidants at the Völkischer Beobachter. Eckart became its editor in chief, and Rosenberg, his deputy, while Hermann Esser worked directly under them as the editor in charge of the layout of the paper. With Hitler’s men firmly in control of the NSDAP’s newspaper as well as its publishing house, they immediately embarked on casting an image of Hitler as someone much more than the chairman of a party—as someone who was divine, the chosen one. Rosenberg and others started to portray Hitler as a messiah, Rosenberg also labeling Hitler as “Germany’s leader” on the pages of the Völkischer Beobachter. In November 1922, meanwhile, the Traunsteiner Wochenblatt, a weekly paper from the town in which Hitler had served in the winter of 1918/1919, was looking forward to the time “in which the masses of the people will raise him up as their leader, and give him their allegiance through thick and thin.”17

  As Hitler accepted being represented as a messiah, and as in 1922 Bavarian newspapers started referring to him as “the Bavarian Mussolini” while Hermann Esser publicly did the same at NSDAP events,18 it would be implausible to argue that, at the time, Hitler continued to see
himself merely as someone who made the case for someone else.

  Certainly, Hitler had not carefully planned his takeover of the NSDAP in the way that it happened. Yet he was not a prima donna–like, frustrated, passive actor who from time to time suddenly threw temper tantrums and who almost by accident became the leader of the party.19 His political talent lay in defining goals in very broad terms and in his ability to wait for situations to emerge that would allow him to move closer to realizing those goals. The broad nature of his goals allowed Hitler a great degree of flexibility in exploiting and responding to opportunities that came up. Furthermore, he had a rare instinctive political talent for knowing when to gamble everything on one card.

  It is beside the point that Hitler often did not fully anticipate the political events to which he responded. He did not need to, as his instinct and training had equipped him with a supreme ability to make decisions and form policies based on incomplete information. In other words, his talent lay in how he had honed his ability to react to the unanticipated and to deal with the unknown when offered various options for action. Hitler’s tendency to approach problems historically helped him here, as his general approach to the art of politics was to look at historical trends and take them as the determining driver of his actions.

  Based on his broad convictions about the nature of reality and about historical trends, Hitler was beginning to master the problem of conjecture in politics, the art of being able to project beyond the known. Unlike in the first half of 1919, he now knew how to deal with the most difficult of tasks in politics, to deal with the uncertainty around choices, and hence how to act without certainty based on his assessment of any given situation. In other words, Hitler had a capacity to act in situations of great uncertainty, with an instinct for the right move.20 This is why his preference for defining goals in broad terms, rather than for detailed planning and strategy, was not a problem for him but a blessing. It allowed him maximum flexibility in turning unanticipated and unplanned situations to his advantage. It was not despite but because of his responsive mode of politics, combined with his talent to project beyond the known in the face of incomplete information, that Hitler was a highly successful political operator.