Becoming Hitler

by Thomas Weber

  Due to Eckart’s unreliability in operational matters and no doubt out of temporary annoyance with him, Hitler began trying to run the party without his direct help. For instance, he turned to the Berlin coffee merchant Richard Franck in the hope that Franck might help him improve on his dismal fund-raising record in Munich. The Berlin businessman put him in touch with Alfred Kuhlo, the head of the Bavarian Federation of Industrialists. Yet Hitler failed to find common ground with the industrialists Kuhlo arranged for him to meet, due to the antifreemasonary and anti-Semitic stands of the NSDAP. On hearing their conditions for a low-interest loan, Hitler responded, “Keep your money!” and left the room. As he recalled in 1942: “I had no idea that they were all Freemasons! How often did I subsequently have to hear people tell me: Well, if only you’ll cut all the anti-Jewish agitation out.”27

  Having failed to secure the necessary funds in Munich, Hitler tried once more to make use of Eckart as a political operator while the two men and their peers continued to live in anticipation of a political crisis that they could exploit to bring about a Mussolini-style takeover of Bavaria and Germany. Hitler and Emil Gansser thus took Eckart along on a trip to Zurich in August 1923, in the hope that the Wille family might help the party again and in the belief that Eckart’s presence would make a difference in this endeavor.

  Even though Ully Wille assembled a few dozen Swiss businessmen, members of the German colony, as well as right-wing Swiss officers to meet the leader of the NSDAP at Villa Schönberg on August 30, Hitler’s address to his Swiss audience and his meeting the following day with Wille’s parents were both fiascos. Hitler, Eckart, and Gansser had to return to Bavaria empty-handed.28

  In all likelihood, Hitler’s mission to Switzerland had failed because of insufficient common political ground between him and the associates of his Swiss host. However, Hitler and Gansser blamed Eckart’s late-night behavior and lack of social graces. As Gansser put it: “The people here would almost have been won over to the new idea, if Dietrich Eckart hadn’t had one over the eight in the early hours and hadn’t hammered with his fist onto the table and acted like an elephant in a china store. These Bavarian methods are out of place here.”29

  The Switzerland debacle reinforced Hitler’s belief that, as a political operator, Eckart had become a liability. Yet he did not treat him in the same way he had those who had stood in his way. Harrer had been discarded. Drexler had been sidelined while continuing to be treated with superficial politeness. Eckart, meanwhile, was merely removed from operational matters by necessity, due to his drinking habits as well as his disorganization. Nevertheless, emotionally and intellectually Hitler stayed close to Eckart, despite their quarrel in the summer, and continued to visit him in the mountains that year. Furthermore, the way Hitler would speak about Eckart during the Second World War reveals that their relationship had not been just of a political nature. It also had had an emotional connection that had never been the case between Hitler and his sister. For instance, during the night of January 16/17, 1942, Hitler would reminisce: “Things were so pleasant at Dietrich Eckart’s place when I visited him on Franz-Joseph-Strasse.”30

  The political crisis in Germany had taken a sharp turn for the worse since Eckart wrote in the guest book of the Schwarzenbachs in December 1922 that the “year of decision” had come. In January, French and Belgian troops occupied the Ruhr district, Germany’s industrial heartland, out of concern that Germany would stop making its reparation payments. The move totally backfired, as the foreign occupation of the district stiffened German resolve to defy the French and the Belgians. What ensued were civil war–like conditions lasting for several months. The German government, all the while, printed more and more money to meet its reparation payments and try to fix the domestic economy, thus inadvertently producing hyperinflation. By the summer, the German economy and its currency were in free fall.

  In plotting how best to benefit both personally and for his party from the worsening political crisis, Hitler turned less and less toward other people for advice in operational and tactical matters, relying increasingly on his gut instinct as well as his study of history. While continuing to eschew a style of politics predicated on the art of compromise and deal making, he was perfectly happy to make insincere tactical compromises. In other words, he was willing to do and say whatever it took to pursue his political goals. A compromise for him was never genuine but always a means to an end. Due to his Manichean worldview, his extremist personality, and the nature of his political end goals, Hitler, unlike other politicians, was never content with standing by compromises. His ultimate aim was a total transformation of Germany. As he deemed that transformation to be a life-or-death issue, any compromise could be only of a tactical and temporary nature for him.

  Tactically, Hitler had an astonishing talent for presenting himself in a way that would make people holding opposing political views believe that he supported them. For instance, monarchists thought that deep in his heart he was a monarchist, whereas republicans thought he really was republican by conviction. The fact that the surviving books from Hitler’s private library include a heavily annotated copy of a book on socialist monarchy as the state of the future would suggest that he genuinely was trying to figure out what future role, if any, monarchies should have. However, he did not publicly voice his opinion on the question, but, as Hermann Esser recalled, remained vague about his preferences. He thus allowed monarchists to believe he would help them bring back the monarchy, while others thought he would aid them in establishing a socialist and nationalist state. For instance, Hitler had stated in a speech on April 27, 1920: “The choice now is not one between a monarchy and a republic, but we shall only go for the form of state, which in any given situation is the best for the people.”31

  Hitler’s odd mixture of bold and vague statements, both in the early 1920s and subsequently, always would leave open the question as to what was a genuine versus a tactical statement on his part. This would allow people to project their own ideas onto him. Hitler managed to make himself a canvas upon which everyone could draw his or her own image of him. As a result, people of disparate ideas and convictions would support him, even though their images of him varied widely. This in turn would allow him to rise in the years to come. Once in power, it would provide a smokescreen behind which he could pursue goals that were often different in character from those that people thought they were supporting by backing him. In short, he managed to present himself in a way that ensured that everybody had their own Hitler, thus empowering him to pursue his own policy goals, which for instance allowed both monarchists and their adversaries to view Hitler as one of their own.

  It was of the utmost importance for Hitler in 1923 not to antagonize monarchists. The NSDAP was far too small on its own to be anything but the organizational shell or structure of a protest movement. Furthermore, the party had to rely on the goodwill of Bavarian monarchists and others in the political establishment to avoid being banned, as it already had been recently in Prussia and Hesse. If his party wanted to exploit the rapidly deteriorating political situation in Germany and head a national revolution, Hitler had to try, for a while, to piggyback the NSDAP upon a much stronger political movement. Subsequently, he would need to play the leaders of that movement against one another and, by doing so, overwhelm and eliminate them, in the same way that he had managed to remove Harrer and Drexler from the leadership of his own party. The obvious choice for Hitler was to ride to power on the backs of Bavarian and Prussian conservatives.

  Joining forces with monarchists who were hard-core Bavarian separatists and opponents of a united Germany was, of course, anathema to him. But collaborating with conservatives who dreamed of the reestablishment of a Bavarian monarchy that would remain within the fold of a more nationalist Germany was tactically acceptable. As Esser recalled, Hitler did not challenge them, for the simple reason that he wanted to get the support of the patriotic leagues operating in Bavaria. Those leagues were de facto covert para
military organizations meant to circumvent both the terms of the Versailles Treaty and the dissolution of a separate Bavarian Army created in the wake of the postwar revolution in Bavaria.32

  Gaining the support of Bavarian and north German conservatives would be a monumental challenge, not least because the Bavarian establishment was deeply divided in their attitudes toward the NSDAP. To win over the political establishment of Bavaria as collaborators, Hitler would thus have to present himself as someone who, out of patriotic duty, would do their bidding for them. As the overwhelming majority of members of the Bavarian establishment still had at least monarchist sympathies, Hitler had to go out of his way not to appear as an opponent of the monarchy.33 As far as they were concerned, the future of the Bavarian monarchy still hung in the air. Even though Ludwig III had died in late 1921, it was expected that his son, Rupprecht von Bayern, would eventually proclaim himself king once the political circumstances were right, as Ludwig technically had never abdicated.34

  What helped Hitler was that an increasing number of men in the Bavarian political establishment, including many of those who had not given up on democracy, mistakenly thought that they could use the leader of the NSDAP as a pawn in their own game. For instance, Count Hugo von Lerchenfeld, who had replaced Gustav von Kahr as Bavarian minister-president in September 1921, firmly supported parliamentary democracy. In fact, Count Lerchenfeld had been willing to form a coalition government of the Bavarian People’s Party (BVP) and the Social Democratic Party (SPD). The eventual failure to form an alliance was not due to any insurmountable disagreement over democracy. Rather, as far as the BVP was concerned, it had been a result of the SPD’s unwillingness to accept that sovereignty should lie, first and foremost, with Bavaria.35 When, a year later, Lerchenfeld’s government had collapsed, a more conservative government had been formed under yet another technocrat, Eugen Ritter von Knilling. Nevertheless, the primary preoccupation of Knilling’s government had been to bring power back to Bavaria, not to abolish democracy, and for that the government was prepared to make use of Hitler, if need be.

  As the visit of an American diplomat to Munich in November 1922 revealed, Bavarian politicians and technocrats then believed Hitler to be nothing but a useful pawn in their game. Captain Truman Smith, the assistant military attaché of the US Embassy in Berlin, was told during his exploratory trip to Munich to gain a firsthand impression of “this man H[itler],” yet the goal of the Bavarian political establishment was not to abolish the constitution. Rather, it was to “revise the Weimar constitution so as to give the [Bavarian] state more independence” and so as to return Germany to the kind of federal system that had existed prior to the war.36

  The officials whom Truman Smith met explained that the Bavarian establishment essentially had very different ideals and goals from those of the National Socialists, and that supporting Hitler was therefore no more than a means to an end. Furthermore, officials in the Bavarian Ministry of Foreign Affairs informed Smith that although the National Socialists were hostile to the Bavarian government, some of their goals could be channeled to the advantage of the Bavarian establishment. Smith was also told that the National Socialists could be used to pull workers away from the extreme left and thus to contain it.

  Smith—who while in Munich attended a National Socialist rally at which Hitler had shouted amid frantic cheering, “Death to the Jews”—was also told that “Hitler was not as radical as his speeches made him out.” One of the Bavarian Foreign Ministry officials with whom the attaché met was of the opinion that “behind the scenes, [the National Socialists] are reasonable persons, who bark louder than they bite.” Max Erwin von Scheubner-Richter, meanwhile, informed Smith that “Hitler had reached a secret compromise with the Bavarian government, regarding what the party could and couldn’t do within Bavaria.”37

  As the information provided to Smith reveals, Hitler’s deceit had worked astonishingly well for a while. Yet he still faced two major challenges: He still needed to demonstrate that he could play the members of the Bavarian establishment against one another and thereby overwhelm them just as easily as he had managed to trick them into believing that they were, in fact, playing him. Moreover, he had to deal with the important and powerful minority of establishment figures whom he had not managed to fool into believing that he was their pawn.

  For instance, Bavaria’s minister of the interior, Franz Xaver Schweyer, had consistently seen in Hitler a grave and uncontrollable danger. As early as the spring of 1922, Schweyer had contemplated taking decisive action against the leader of the NSDAP. On March 17, 1922, Schweyer had invited the leaders of the BVP, the conservative Mittelpartei, the liberal German Democratic Party, the Independent Social Democrats, and the Social Democrats to a meeting to discuss Hitler. At the gathering, Schweyer complained in his Swabian patois about the banditry of Hitler’s supporters in the streets of Munich. Hitler, he said, behaved “as if he was the master of the Bavarian capital, while in fact he was a stateless individual.” Schweyer then shared the news with the assembled party leaders that he was considering expelling Hitler from Bavaria.”38 At a time when Helene Hanfstaengl, “the German girl from New York,” was more likely to support him than were members of Munich’s indigenous establishment, Schweyer’s move posed a grave threat to Hitler. He faced the acute risk that his political career would collapse like a house of cards.

  CHAPTER 12

  Hitler’s First Book

  (Summer to Autumn 1923)

  Eventually, Hitler got wind of Interior Minister Franz Xaver Schweyer’s plans to throw him out of the country. The threat of imminent arrest and deportation so worried him that he did not return home to his room on Thierschstraße for a few days, hiding in the apartment of his bodyguard, Ulrich Graf. In the end, though, Hitler was spared from being sent back to Austria due to support he received from an unexpected side: the leader of the Social Democrats, Erhard Auer. Hitler’s liberal political rival shot Schweyer’s proposal down, arguing that expelling the leader of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP) from Bavaria would be undemocratic, and that ultimately Hitler was too insignificant a figure anyway to pose a danger. Ironically, Hitler’s attempt to plot himself to power would be given another lifeline soon, thanks to the Social Democrats’ tragic miscalculation of him rather than by support of the “Cell of Order” set up by the BVP and its allies in 1920.1

  In the face of adversity, Hitler did not give up. Rather than keep his head down, he intensified his efforts to emerge on top from the deepening political crisis. Over the summer and autumn of 1923, he would look for ways to hone his craft even more effectively than previously had been the case. He would take stock of where he currently stood and conclude that he had to change his tactics radically, so that he, rather than somebody else, would head a national revolution once the time was ripe. It is revealing that his ambition and megalomania had grown so far by 1923 that after narrowly escaping deportation as a stateless political activist, he nevertheless believed that it was he who could and should lead a national and nationalist revolutionary movement. It is also telling that by then, his political talents had developed sufficiently to enable him to assess self-critically what had gone wrong and had brought him to the verge of deportation, and thus learn from his operational and tactical mistakes.

  One source of inspiration on how to move forward was an article that appeared in the September 1 edition of Heimatland, the newspaper of the Einwohnerwehren (people’s militias) of Munich. The article encouraged its readers to take inspiration not just from Italy but also from Turkey about how to stage a successful nationalist coup. Written by Hans Tröbst, a thirty-one-year-old officer who had spent the previous twelve years in the military—first in the regular army, then in Freikorps, and most recently in the Kemalist forces during the Turkish War of Independence—it laid out the lessons for Germany from Turkey’s response to the Treaty of Sèvres. Turkey, like Germany, had been on the losing side of the First World War and, in the summer of 1919, ha
d been forced to sign the treaty in Sèvres, on the outskirts of Paris, which was just as punitive as the one that Germany had to sign at around the same time in Versailles. But, unlike the German government, the Turkish Kemalist leadership had subsequently refused to implement the treaty.

  As the editors of Heimatland argued in their editorial endorsement of Tröbst’s article, Germany should take a leaf out of the Kemalist response to the post–First World War settlement: “The fate of Turkey is strikingly similar to our own; from Turkey we can learn how we could have done things better. If we want to become free, we will have no choice but to imitate in one way or another the example of Turkey.” Tröbst had returned to Germany early the previous month. Rather than heading back home to his native Weimar in central Germany, he had made his way to Munich to stay with his brother for a while. In the Bavarian capital, he had met up with General Erich Ludendorff, who by then coordinated many of the ultranationalist activities in the city. With Ludendorff, he devised to write a series of six articles for Heimatland that would set out Turkish lessons for Germany.2

  The ideas put forward in the September 1 article clearly resonated with the ideas Hitler himself had expressed in a speech in November 1922, when he had talked about the examples both Atatürk and Mussolini had set for Germany.3 When Hitler read the piece, he became very eager to meet Tröbst. Fritz Lauböck, Hitler’s secretary and son of the founder of the first NSDAP chapter outside Munich, therefore wrote to Tröbst on September 7, 1923, telling him, “one day we will also have to do what you have experienced in Turkey in order to become free,” and that Hitler wanted to meet Tröbst the following week for an hour in the offices of the Völkischer Beobachter on Schellingstraße.