by Ian Kershaw
Alongside the commander of the unit, Rudolf Beyschlag, Hitler undertook the lion’s share of the work, including helping to stir discussion of Beyschlag’s lectures on, for example, ‘Who Bears the Guilt for the World War?’ and ‘From the Days of the Munich Räterepublik’. He himself gave lectures on ‘Peace Conditions and Reconstruction’, ‘Emigration’, and ‘Social and Economic Catchwords’. He threw himself with passion into the work. His engagement was total. And he immediately found he could strike a chord with his audience, that the way he spoke roused the soldiers listening to him from their passivity and cynicism. Hitler was in his element. For the first time in his life, he had found something at which he was an unqualified success. Almost by chance, he had stumbled across his greatest talent. As he himself put it, he could ‘speak’.
Participants’ reports on the course confirm that Hitler was not exaggerating the impact he made in Lechfeld: he was without question the star performer. A central feature of his demagogic armoury was antisemitism. In his ferocious attacks on the Jews, he was, however, doing no more than reflect sentiments which were widespread at the time among the people of Munich, as reports on the popular mood demonstrated. The responses to Hitler’s addresses at Lechfeld indicate how accessible the soldiers were to his way of speaking. The commander of the Lechfeld camp, Oberleutnant Bendt, even felt obliged to request Hitler to tone down his antisemitism, in order to prevent possible objections to the lectures as provoking antisemitic agitation. This followed a lecture by Hitler on capitalism, in which he had ‘touched on’ the ‘Jewish Question’. It is the first reference to Hitler speaking publicly about the Jews.
Within the group, and certainly in the eyes of his superior, Captain Mayr, Hitler must have acquired the reputation of an ‘expert’ on the ‘Jewish Question’. When Mayr was asked, in a letter of 4 September 1919 from a former participant on one of the ‘instruction courses’, Adolf Gemlich from Ulm, for clarification of the ‘Jewish Question’, particularly in relation to the policies of the Social Democratic government, he passed it to Hitler – whom he evidently regarded highly – for an answer. Hitler’s well-known reply to Gemlich, dated 16 September 1919, is his first recorded written statement about the ‘Jewish Question’. He wrote that antisemitism should be based not on emotion, but on ‘facts’, the first of which was that Jewry was a race, not a religion. Emotive antisemitism would produce pogroms, he continued; antisemitism based on ‘reason’ must, on the other hand, lead to the systematic removal of the rights of Jews. ‘Its final aim,’ he concluded, ‘must unshakeably be the removal of the Jews altogether.’
The Gemlich letter reveals for the first time key basic elements of Hitler’s Weltanschauung which from then on remained unaltered to the last days in the Berlin bunker: antisemitism resting on race theory; and the creation of a unifying nationalism founded on the need to combat the external and internal power of the Jews.
IV
Following his success at Lechfeld, he was by this time plainly Mayr’s favourite and right-hand man. Among the duties of the informants assigned to Mayr was the surveillance of fifty political parties and organizations ranging from the extreme Right to the far Left in Munich. It was as an informant that Hitler was sent, on Friday, 12 September 1919, to report on a meeting of the German Workers’ Party in Munich’s Sterneckerbräu. He was accompanied by at least two former comrades from Lechfeld. The speaker was to have been the völkisch poet and publicist Dietrich Eckart, but he was ill and Gottfried Feder stood in to lecture on the ‘breaking of interest slavery’. According to his own account, Hitler had heard the lecture before, so took to observing the party itself, which he held to be a ‘boring organization’, no different from the many other small parties sprouting in every corner of Munich at that time. He was about to leave when, in the discussion following the lecture, an invited guest, a Professor Baumann, attacked Feder and then spoke in favour of Bavarian separatism. At this Hitler intervened so heatedly that Baumann, totally deflated, took his hat and left even while Hitler was still speaking, looking ‘like a wet poodle’. The party chairman, Anton Drexler, was so impressed by Hitler’s intervention that at the end of the meeting he pushed a copy of his own pamphlet, My Political Awakening, into his hand, inviting him to return in a few days if he were interested in joining the new movement. ‘Goodness, he’s got a gob. We could use him,’ Drexler was reported to have remarked. According to Hitler’s own account, he read Drexler’s pamphlet in the middle of a sleepless night, and it struck a chord with him, reminding him, he claimed, of his own ‘political awakening’ twelve years earlier. Within a week of attending the meeting, he then received a postcard informing him that he had been accepted as a member, and should attend a committee meeting of the party a few days later to discuss the matter. Though his immediate reaction, he wrote, was a negative one – he allegedly wanted to found a party of his own – curiosity overcame him and he went along to a dimly-lit meeting of the small leadership group in the Altes Rosenbad, a shabby pub in Herrenstraße. He sympathized with the political aims of those he met. But he was appalled, he later wrote, at the small-minded organization he encountered – ‘club life of the worst manner and sort’, he dubbed it. After a few days of indecision, he added, he finally made up his mind to join. What determined him was the feeling that such a small organization offered ‘the individual an opportunity for real personal activity’ – the prospect, that is, of quickly making his mark and dominating it.
Some time during the second half of September, Hitler joined the German Workers’ Party, and was given the membership number 555. He was not, as he always claimed, the seventh member. As the first party leader, Anton Drexler, put it in a letter addressed to Hitler in January 1940, but never sent:
No one knows better than you yourself, my Führer, that you were never the seventh member of the party, but at best the seventh member of the committee, which I asked you to join as recruitment director (Werbeobmann). And a few years ago I had to complain to a party office that your first proper membership card of the DAP … was falsified, with the number 555 being erased and number 7 entered.
Like so much of what Hitler had to say in Mein Kampf about his earlier life, his account of entering the party cannot be taken at face value, and was devised, like everything else, to serve the Führer legend that was already being cultivated. And whatever Hitler wrote about wrangling for days about whether or not to join the DAP, the decision might not ultimately have been his to take. In a little noticed piece of evidence, his Reichswehr boss Captain Mayr later claimed that he had ordered Hitler to join the German Workers’ Party to help foster its growth. For this purpose, Mayr went on, he was provided at first with funds – around the equivalent of 20 gold Marks a week – and, contrary to normal practice about members of the Reichswehr joining political parties, was allowed to stay in the army. He was able to do this, drawing his army pay as well as speaker fees, until his discharge on 31 March 1920. This already enabled him – in contrast to the other DAP leaders who had to fit politics around their normal jobs – to devote all his time to political propaganda. Now, on leaving the army, his confidence boosted by his early successes as a DAP speaker in the Munich beerhalls, he was in a position to do what, since he had made his mark in the anti-Bolshevik course at Munich University and worked with Mayr as a Reichswehr propagandist and informant, had emerged as a ready-made career-opening to replace the fantasies of becoming a great architect and the realities of returning to an existence as a small-time painter of street scenes and tourist attractions. Without Captain Mayr’s ‘talent-spotting’, Hitler might never have been heard of. As it was, if only on the beerhall fringes, he could now become a full-time political agitator and propagandist. He could do for a living the only thing he was good at doing: speaking.
The path from Pasewalk to becoming the main attraction of the DAP had not been determined by any sudden recognition of a ‘mission’ to save Germany, by strength of personality, or by a ‘triumph of the will’. It had been shaped b
y circumstance, opportunism, good fortune, and, not least, the backing of the army, represented through Mayr’s important patronage. Hitler did not come to politics; politics came to him – in the Munich barracks. His contribution, after making his mark through a readiness to denounce his comrades following the Räterepublik, had been confined to an unusual talent for appealing to the gutter instincts of his listeners, in the Lechfeld camp, then in the Munich beerhalls, coupled with a sharp eye to exploiting the main chance of advancement. These ‘qualities’ would prove invaluable in the coming years.
V
Without the Reichswehr’s ‘discovery’ of his talent for nationalist agitation, Hitler had every prospect of returning to the margins of society – an embittered war veteran with little chance of personal advancement. Without his self-discovery that he could ‘speak’, Hitler would not have been able to contemplate the possibility of making a living from politics. But without the extraordinary political climate of post-war Germany, and, quite especially, the unique conditions in Bavaria, Hitler would have found himself in any case without an audience, his ‘talent’ pointless and unrecognized, his tirades of hate without echo, the backing from those close to the avenues of power, on whom he depended, unforthcoming.
When he joined the infant German Workers’ Party in September 1919, he was still, as he himself put it, among the ‘nameless’ – a nobody. Within three years, he was being showered with letters of adulation, spoken of in nationalist circles as Germany’s Mussolini, even compared with Napoleon. And little more than four years later, he had attained national, not just regional, notoriety as a leader of an attempt to take over the power of the state by force. He had of course failed miserably in this – and his political ‘career’ looked to be (and ought to have been) at an end. But he was now a ‘somebody’. The first part of Hitler’s astonishing rise from anonymity to prominence dates from these years in Munich – the years of his political apprenticeship.
It is natural to presume that such a swift rise even to provincial celebrity status must have been the result of some extraordinary personal qualities. Without doubt, Hitler did possess abilities and traits of character that contributed towards making him a political force to be reckoned with. To ignore them or disparage them totally would be to make the same mistakes of underestimation made by his political enemies, who ridiculed him and regarded him as a mere cipher for the interests of others. But Hitler’s personality and his talents, such as they were, alone do not explain the adulation already being lavished on him by growing numbers in the völkisch camp by 1922. The origins of a leadership cult reflected the mentalities and expectations prevalent in some sectors of German society at the time, more than they did special qualities of Hitler. Nor would his abilities as a mob-orator, which were most of what he had to offer at the time, in themselves have been sufficient to have lifted him to a position where he could, even if for a mere few hours – in retrospect, hours of pure melodrama, even farce – head a challenge to the might of the German state. To come this far, he needed influential patrons.
Without the changed conditions, the product of a lost war, revolution, and a pervasive sense of national humiliation, Hitler would have remained a nobody. His main ability by far, as he came to realize during the course of 1919, was that in the prevailing circumstances he could inspire an audience which shared his basic political feelings, by the way he spoke, by the force of his rhetoric, by the very power of his prejudice, by the conviction he conveyed that there was a way out of Germany’s plight, and that only the way he outlined was the road to national rebirth. Another time, another place, and the message would have been ineffective, absurd even. As it was, indeed, in the early 1920s the great majority of the citizens of Munich, let alone of a wider population to whom Hitler was, if at all, known only as a provincial Bavarian hot-head and rabble-rouser, could not be captivated by it. Nevertheless, at this time and in this place, Hitler’s message did capture exactly the uncontainable sense of anger, fear, frustration, resentment, and pent-up aggression of the raucous gatherings in the Munich beerhalls. The compulsive manner of his speaking derived in turn much of its power of persuasion from the strength of conviction that combined with appealingly simple diagnoses of and recipes to Germany’s problems.
Above all, what came naturally to Hitler was to stoke up the hatred of others by pouring out to them the hatred that was so deeply embedded in himself. Even so, this had never before had the effect it was to have now, in the changed post-war conditions. What, in the Men’s Home in Vienna, in the Munich cafés, and in the regimental field headquarters, had been at best tolerated as an eccentricity now turned out to be Hitler’s major asset. This in itself suggests that what had changed above all was the milieu and context in which Hitler operated; that we should look in the first instance less to his own personality than to the motives and actions of those who came to be Hitler’s supporters, admirers, and devotees – and not least his powerful backers – to explain his first breakthrough on the political scene. For what becomes clear – without falling into the mistake of presuming that he was no more than the puppet of the ‘ruling classes’ – is that Hitler would have remained a political nonentity without the patronage and support he obtained from influential circles in Bavaria. During this period, Hitler was seldom, if ever, master of his own destiny. The key decisions – to take over the party leadership in 1921, to engage in the putsch adventure in 1923 – were not carefully conceived actions, but desperate forward moves to save face – behaviour characteristic of Hitler to the end.
It was as a propagandist, not as an ideologue with a unique or special set of political ideas, that Hitler made his mark in these early years. There was nothing new, different, original, or distinctive about the ideas he was peddling in the Munich beerhalls. They were common currency among the various völkisch groups and sects and had already been advanced in all their essentials by the pre-war Pan-Germans. What Hitler did was advertise unoriginal ideas in an original way. He gave voice to phobias, prejudice, and resentment as no one else could. Others could say the same thing but make no impact at all. It was less what he said, than how he said it that counted. As it was to be throughout his ‘career’, presentation was what mattered. He consciously learnt how to make an impression through his speaking. He learnt how to devise effective propaganda and to maximize the impact of targeting specific scapegoats. He learnt, in other words, that he was able to mobilize the masses. For him this was from the outset the route to the attainment of political goals. The ability to convince himself that his way and no other could succeed was the platform for the conviction that he conveyed to others. Conversely, the response of the beerhall crowds – later the mass rallies – gave him the certainty, the self-assurance, the sense of security, which at this time he otherwise lacked. He needed the orgasmic excitement which only the ecstatic masses could give him. The satisfaction gained from the rapturous response and wild applause of cheering crowds must have offered compensation for the emptiness of his personal relations. More than that, it was a sign that he was a success, after three decades in which – apart from the pride he took in his war record – he had no achievements of note to set against his outsized ego.
Simplicity and repetition were two key ingredients in his speaking armoury. These revolved around the unvarying essential driving-points of his message: the nationalization of the masses, the reversal of the great ‘betrayal’ of 1918, the destruction of Germany’s internal enemies (above all the ‘removal’ of the Jews), and material and psychological rebuilding as the prerequisite for external struggle and the attainment of a position of world power. This conception of the path to Germany’s ‘salvation’ and rebirth was already partially devised, at least in embryo, by the date of his letter to Gemlich in September 1919. Important strands remained, however, to be added. The central notion of the quest for ‘living space’ in eastern Europe was, for instance, not fully incorporated until the middle of the decade. It was only in the two years or so following the pu
tsch debacle, therefore, that his ideas finally came together to form the characteristic fully-fledged Weltanschauung that thereafter remained unaltered.
But all this is to run ahead of the crucial developments which shaped the first passage of Hitler’s political ‘career’ as the beerhall agitator of an insignificant Munich racist party and the circumstances under which he came to lead that party.
VI
The crowds that began to flock in 1919 and 1920 to Hitler’s speeches were not motivated by refined theories. For them, simple slogans, kindling the fires of anger, resentment, and hatred, were what worked. But what they were offered in the Munich beerhalls was nevertheless a vulgarized version of ideas which were in far wider circulation. Hitler acknowledged in Mein Kampf that there was no essential distinction between the ideas of the völkisch movement and those of National Socialism. He had little interest in clarifying or systematizing these ideas. Of course, he had his own obsessions – a few basic notions which never left him after 1919, became formed into a rounded ‘world-view’ in the mid-1920s, and provided the driving-force of his ‘mission’ to ‘rescue’ Germany. But ideas held no interest for Hitler as abstractions. They were important to him only as tools of mobilization. Hitler’s achievement as a speaker was, therefore, to become the main popularizer of ideas that were in no way his invention, and that served other interests as well as his own.
When Hitler joined the German Workers’ Party, it was one of some seventy-three völkisch groups in Germany, most of them founded since the end of the war. In Munich alone there were at least fifteen in 1920. Within the völkisch pool of ideas, the notion of a specifically German or national socialism, tied in with an onslaught on ‘Jewish’ capitalism, had gained ground in the last phase of the war, and spawned both Drexler’s German Workers’ Party and what was soon to become its arch-rival, the German-Socialist Party (Deutschsozialistische Partei).