by Ian Kershaw
Whatever the pathos of these comments, they testify to Hitler’s instinctive ability, singling him out from other speakers relaying a similar message, to speak in the language of his listeners, and to stir them through the passion and – however strange it might now sound to us – the apparent sincerity of his idealism.
Rising attendances marked Hitler’s growing success and mounting reputation as the party’s star speaker. By the end of 1920 he had addressed over thirty mass meetings – mostly of between 800 and 2,500 persons – and spoken at many smaller internal party gatherings. In early February 1921 he would speak at the biggest meeting so far – over 6,000 people in the Zircus Krone, which could accommodate the largest indoor crowds in Munich. Until mid-1921 he spoke mainly in Munich, where the propaganda and organization of the meetings would ensure a satisfactory turn-out, and where the right atmosphere was guaranteed. But, not counting the speeches made during a fortnight’s visit to Austria in early October, he held ten speeches outside the city in 1920, including one in Rosenheim where the first local group of the party outside Munich had just been founded. It was largely owing to Hitler’s public profile that the party membership increased sharply from 190 in January 1920 to 2,000 by the end of the year and 3,300 by August 1921. He was rapidly making himself indispensable to the movement.
VIII
Hitler spoke from rough notes – mainly a series of jotted headings with key words underlined. As a rule, a speech would last around two hours or more. In the Festsaal of the Hofbräuhaus he used a beer table on one of the long sides of the hall as his platform in order to be in the middle of the crowd – a novel technique for a speaker which helped create what Hitler regarded as a special mood in that hall. The themes of his speeches varied little: the contrast of Germany’s strength in a glorious past with its current weakness and national humiliation – a sick state in the hands of traitors and cowards who had betrayed the Fatherland to its powerful enemies; the reasons for the collapse in a lost war unleashed by these enemies, and behind them, the Jews; betrayal and revolution brought about by criminals and Jews; English and French intentions of destroying Germany, as shown in the Treaty of Versailles – the ‘Peace of shame’, the instrument of Germany’s slavery; the exploitation of ordinary Germans by Jewish racketeers and profiteers; a cheating and corrupt government and party system presiding over economic misery, social division, political conflict, and ethical collapse; the only way to recovery contained in the points of the party’s programme – ruthless showdown with internal enemies and build-up of national consciousness and unity, leading to renewed strength and eventual restored greatness. The combination of traditional Bavarian dislike of the Prussians and the experience of the Räterepublik in Munich meant that Hitler’s repeated onslaught on the ‘Marxist’ government in Berlin was certain to meet with an enthusiastic response among the still small minority of the local population drawn to his meetings.
While Hitler basically appealed to negative feelings – anger, resentment, hatred – there was also a ‘positive’ element in the proposed remedy to the proclaimed ills. However platitudinous, the appeal to restoration of liberty through national unity, the need to collaborate of ‘workers of the brain and hand’, the social harmony of a ‘national community’, and the protection of the ‘little man’ through the crushing of his exploiters, were, to go from the applause they invariably produced, undeniably attractive propositions to Hitler’s audiences. And Hitler’s own passion and fervour successfully conveyed the message – to those already predisposed to it – that no other way was possible; that Germany’s revival would and could be brought about; and that it lay in the power of ordinary Germans to make it happen through their own struggle, sacrifice, and will. The effect was more that of a religious revivalist meeting than a normal political gathering.
Though Hitler was invariably up-to-date in finding easy targets in the daily politics of the crisis-ridden Republic, his main themes were tediously repetitive. Some, in fact, often taken for granted to be part of Hitler’s allegedly unchanging ideology, were missing altogether at this stage. There was, for example, not a single mention of the need for ‘living space’ (Lebensraum) in eastern Europe. Britain and France were the foreign-policy targets at this time. Indeed, Hitler jotted among the notes of one of his speeches, in August 1920, ‘brotherhood towards the east’. Nor did he clamour for a dictatorship. Such a demand occurs only in one speech in 1920, on 27 April, in which Hitler declared that Germany needed ‘a dictator who is a genius’ if it were to rise up again. There was no implication that he himself was that person. Surprisingly, too, his first outright public assault on Marxism did not occur before his speech at Rosenheim on 21 July 1920 (though he had spoken on a number of occasions before this of the catastrophic effects of Bolshevism in Russia, for which he blamed the Jews). And, remarkably, even race theory – where Hitler drew heavily for his ideas from well-known antisemitic tracts such as Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Adolf Wahrmund, and, especially, the arch-popularizer Theodor Fritsch (one of whose emphases was the alleged sexual abuse of women by Jews) – was explicitly treated in only one speech by Hitler during 1920.
This scarcely meant, however, that Hitler neglected to attack the Jews. On the contrary: the all-devouring manic obsession with the Jews to which all else is subordinated – not observable before 1919, never absent thereafter – courses through almost every Hitler speech at this time. Behind all evil that had befallen or was threatening Germany stood the figure of the Jew. In speech after speech he lashed the Jews in the most vicious and barbaric language imaginable.
Genuine socialism, declared Hitler, meant to be an antisemite. Germans should be ready to enter into a pact with the devil to eradicate the evil of Jewry. But, as in his letter to Gemlich the previous autumn, he did not see emotional antisemitism as the answer. He demanded internment in concentration camps to prevent ‘Jewish undermining of our people’, hanging for racketeers, but ultimately, as the only solution – similar to the Gemlich letter – the ‘removal of the Jews from our people’. The implication, as in his explicit demands with regard to Ostjuden (usually poor refugees from persecution in eastern Europe), was their expulsion from Germany. This was undoubtedly how it was understood. But the language itself was both terrible and implicitly genocidal in its biological similes. ‘Don’t think that you can combat racial tuberculosis,’ he declared in August 1920, ‘without seeing to it that the people is freed from the causative organ of racial tuberculosis. The impact of Jewry will never pass away, and the poisoning of the people will not end, as long as the causal agent, the Jew, is not removed from our midst.’
His audiences loved it. More than anything else, these attacks evoked torrents of applause and cheering. His technique – beginning slowly, plenty of sarcasm, personalized attacks on named targets, then a gradual crescendo to a climax – whipped his audiences into a frenzy. His speech in the Festsaal of the Hofbräuhaus on 13 August 1920 on ‘Why are we Antisemites?’ – his only speech that year solely relating to the Jews and probably intended as a basic statement on the topic – was interrupted fifty-eight times during its two hours’ duration by ever wilder cheering from the 2,000-strong audience. To go from a report on another Hitler speech a few weeks later, the audience would have been mainly drawn from white-collar workers, the lower-middle class, and better-off workers, with around a quarter women.
At first, Hitler’s antisemitic tirades were invariably linked to anti-capitalism and attacks on ‘Jewish’ war profiteers and racketeers, whom he blamed for exploiting the German people and causing the loss of the war and the German war dead. The influence of Gottfried Feder can be seen in the distinction Hitler drew between essentially healthy ‘industrial capital’ and the real evil of ‘Jewish finance capital’.
There was no link with Marxism or Bolshevism at this stage. Contrary to what is sometimes claimed, Hitler’s antisemitism was not prompted by his anti-Bolshevism; it long predated it. There was no mention of Bolshevism in the Gemlich lette
r of September 1919, where the ‘Jewish Question’ is related to the rapacious nature of finance capital. Hitler spoke in April and again in June 1920 of Russia being destroyed by the Jews, but it was only in his Rosenheim speech on 21 July that he explicitly married the images of Marxism, Bolshevism, and the Soviet system in Russia to the brutality of Jewish rule, for which he saw Social Democracy preparing the ground in Germany. Hitler admitted in August 1920 that he knew little of the real situation in Russia. But – perhaps influenced above all by Alfred Rosenberg, who came from the Baltic and had experienced the Russian Revolution at first hand, but probably also soaking up images of the horror of the Russian civil war which were filtering through to the German press – he plainly became preoccupied with Bolshevik Russia in the second half of the year. The dissemination of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion – the forgery about Jewish world domination, widely read and believed in antisemitic circles at the time – probably also helped to focus Hitler’s attention on Russia. These images appear to have provided the catalyst to the merger of antisemitism and anti-Marxism in his ‘world-view’ – an identity which, once forged, never disappeared.
IX
Hitler’s speeches put him on the political map in Munich. But he was still very much a local taste. And however much noise he made, his party was still insignificant compared with the established socialist and Catholic parties. Moreover, though it is going too far to see him as no more than the tool of powerful vested interests ‘behind the scenes’, without influential backers and the ‘connections’ they could provide his talents as a mob-agitator would not have got him very far.
Though Hitler had already signalled his intention of making a living as a political speaker, he was, in fact, until 31 March 1920 still drawing pay from the army. His first patron, Captain Mayr, continued to take a close interest in him and, if his later account can be believed, provided limited funding towards the staging of the mass meetings. At this time, Hitler was still serving both the party and the army. In January and February 1920, Mayr had ‘Herr Hittler’ lecturing on ‘Versailles’ and ‘Political Parties and their Significance’ in the company of distinguished Munich historians Karl Alexander von Müller and Paul Joachimsen to Reichswehr soldiers undertaking ‘citizenship education courses’. In March, during the Kapp Putsch, when a short-lived armed coup had attempted to overthrow the government, forcing it to flee from the Reich capital, he sent him with Dietrich Eckart to Berlin to instruct Wolfgang Kapp on the situation in Bavaria. They arrived too late. The Right’s first attempt to take over the state had already collapsed. But Mayr was undeterred. He retained both his contact with Kapp and his interest in Hitler. He still had hopes, so he told Kapp six months later, that the NSDAP – which he thought of as his own creation – would become the ‘organization of national radicalism’, the advance-guard of a future, more successful, putsch. He wrote to Kapp, now exiled in Sweden:
The national workers’ party must provide the basis for the strong assault-force that we are hoping for. The programme is still somewhat clumsy and also perhaps incomplete. We’ll have to supplement it. Only one thing is certain: that under this banner we’ve already won a good number of supporters. Since July of last year I’ve been looking … to strengthen the movement … I’ve set up very capable young people. A Herr Hitler, for example, has become a motive force, a popular speaker of the first rank. In the Munich branch we have over 2,000 members, compared with under 100 in summer 1919.
Early in 1920, before Hitler had left the Reichswehr, Mayr had taken him along to meetings of the ‘Iron Fist’ club for radical nationalist officers, founded by Captain Ernst Röhm. Hitler had been introduced to Röhm by Mayr, probably the previous autumn. Interested in a variety of nationalist parties, particularly with a view to winning the workers to the nationalist cause, Röhm had attended the first meeting of the DAP addressed by Hitler on 16 October 1919 and had joined the party shortly afterwards. Now Hitler came into far closer contact with Röhm, who rapidly came to replace Mayr as the key link with the Reichswehr. Röhm had been responsible for arming the volunteers and ‘civil defence’ (Einwohnerwehr) units in Bavaria and had in the meantime become an important player in paramilitary politics, with excellent connections in the army, the ‘patriotic associations’, and throughout the völkisch Right. He was, in fact, at this time, along with his fellow officers on the Right, far more interested in the massive Einwohnerwehren, with a membership of over quarter of a million men, than he was in the tiny NSDAP. Even so, he provided the key contact between the NSDAP and the far larger ‘patriotic associations’ and offered avenues to funding which the constantly hard-up party desperately needed. His connections proved invaluable – increasingly so from 1921 onwards, when his interest in Hitler’s party grew.
Another important patron at this time was the völkisch poet and publicist Dietrich Eckart. More than twenty years older than Hitler, Eckart, who had initially made his name with a German adaptation of Peer Gynt, had not been notably successful before the war as a poet and critic. Possibly this stimulated his intense antisemitism. He became politically active in December 1918 with the publication of his antisemitic weekly Auf gut Deutsch (In Plain German), which also featured contributions from Gottfried Feder and the young émigré from the Baltic, Alfred Rosenberg. He spoke at DAP meetings in the summer of 1919, before Hitler joined, and evidently came to regard the party’s new recruit as his own protégé. Hitler himself was flattered by the attention paid to him by a figure of Eckart’s reputation in völkisch circles. In the early years, relations between the two were good, even close. But for Hitler, as ever, it was Eckart’s usefulness that counted. As Hitler’s self-importance grew, his need for Eckart declined and by 1923, the year of Eckart’s death, the two had become estranged.
At first, however, there could be no doubt of Eckart’s value to Hitler and the NSDAP. Through his well-heeled connections, Eckart afforded the beerhall demagogue an entrée into Munich ‘society’, opening for him the door to the salons of the wealthy and influential members of the city’s bourgeoisie. And through his financial support, and that of his contacts, he was able to offer vital assistance to the financially struggling small party. Since membership fees did not remotely cover outgoings, the party was dependent upon help from outside. It came in part from the owners of Munich firms and businesses. Some aid continued to come from the Reichswehr. But Eckart’s role was crucial. He arranged, for example, the funding from his friend, the Augsburg chemist and factory-owner Dr Gottfried Grandel, who also backed the periodical Auf gut Deutsch, for the plane that took him and Hitler to Berlin at the time of the Kapp Putsch. Grandel later served as a guarantor for the funds used to purchase the Völkischer Beobachter and turn it into the party’s own newspaper in December 1920.
To the Munich public, by 1921, Hitler was the NSDAP. He was its voice, its representative figure, its embodiment. Asked to name the party’s chairman, perhaps even politically informed citizens might have guessed wrongly. But Hitler did not want the chairmanship. Drexler offered it him on a number of occasions. Each time Hitler refused. Drexler wrote to Feder in spring 1921, stating ‘that each revolutionary movement must have a dictatorial head, and therefore I also think our Hitler is the most suitable for our movement, without wanting to be pushed into the background myself’. But for Hitler, the party chairmanship meant organizational responsibility. He had – this was to remain the case during the rise to power, and when he headed the German state – neither aptitude nor ability for organizational matters. Organization he could leave to others; propaganda – mobilization of the masses – was what he was good at, and what he wanted to do. For that, and that alone, he would take responsibility. Propaganda, for Hitler, was the highest form of political activity.
In Hitler’s own conception, propaganda was the key to the nationalization of the masses, without which there could be no national salvation. It was not that propaganda and ideology were distinctive entities for him. They were inseparable, and reinforced each o
ther. An idea for Hitler was useless unless it mobilized. The self-confidence he gained from the rapturous reception of his speeches assured him that his diagnosis of Germany’s ills and the way to national redemption was right – the only one possible. This in turn gave him the self-conviction that conveyed itself to those in his immediate entourage as well as those listening to his speeches in the beerhalls. To see himself as ‘drummer’ of the national cause was, therefore, for Hitler a high calling. It was why, before the middle of 1921, he preferred to be free for this role, and not to be bogged down in the organizational work which he associated with the chairmanship of the party.
The outrage felt throughout Germany at the punitive sum of 226 thousand million Gold Marks to be paid in reparations, imposed by the Paris Conference at the end of January 1921, ensured there would be no let-up in agitation. This was the background for the biggest meeting that the NSDAP had until then staged, on 3 February in the Circus Krone. Hitler risked going ahead with the meeting at only one day’s notice, and without the usual advance publicity. In a rush, the huge hall was booked and two lorries hired to drive round the city throwing out leaflets. This was another technique borrowed from the ‘Marxists’, and the first time the Nazis had used it. Despite worries until the last minute that the hall would be half-empty and the meeting would prove a propaganda debacle, more than 6,000 turned up to hear Hitler, speaking on ‘Future or Ruin’, denounce the ‘slavery’ imposed on Germans by the Allied reparations, and castigate the weakness of the government for accepting them.