Führer
The young rabble-rouser who had flown up to Berlin from Munich at the time of the Kapp putsch in March 1920 was now, three years later, a powerful figure in Bavaria with political tentacles reaching out into other parts of Germany. His rise had been astonishing. The NSDAP (or, as it was known for short, affectionately or otherwise, the Nazi Party) had expanded rapidly since Adolf Hitler took charge.
In January 1919, the Spartacists had attempted a coup on the Bolshevik model in Berlin. A hundred insurgents died in fighting for the capital. Disturbances followed throughout Germany, culminating in the short-lived ‘Soviet Republic’ of Bavaria. A group of idealists and adventurers ruled chaotically and violently in Munich for some weeks before their regime was suppressed in May 1919 by a mix of army troops, Freikorps and armed local volunteers known as the Einwohnerwehr (a citizens’ militia, literally translatable as ‘inhabitants’ defence’).
The ‘white terror’ that ensued was, if anything, worse than the red. The battle for Munich is thought to have cost more than 600 lives, only 38 of them on the counter-revolutionary side and 335 of them civilians.1 With ruthless, unapologetic reactionaries in power in Munich, Bavaria, which had always possessed a keen sense of its own identity even within the unified Reich, now began to drift away from democratic Berlin. During the following years, this would give Bavaria a ‘semi-detached’ status.
Among those soldiers who had remained with the colours after the war was an infantry corporal of decidedly anti-democratic and anti-Semitic views. He had heard of the November armistice in a military hospital on the Baltic coast while immobilised by the effects of a mustard gas attack on the Western Front. Little except his extreme opinions seemed, at that point, to distinguish Adolf Hitler from the great mass of defeated soldiery. However, unlike millions of others he had no home or family awaiting him when he recovered. Although he had chosen to serve with the German army, he was an Austrian citizen, son of a customs official. Both his parents were now dead, and Austria was, moreover, in any case in an even worse condition than Germany. Neither did he have a career to return to, having eked out a semi-vagrant existence before answering the call to the colours in August 1914. He had only fifteen already somewhat devalued marks in the bank. So, in mid-November 1918, Hitler travelled back to Munich, where he had lived before enlisting, to rejoin his army unit.
Hitler does not seem to have played a role in physically restoring ‘order’ during the spring of 1919. A great talker, evolving into a nationalist firebrand, he was earmarked for a different role. Hitler attended an army-sponsored political education course, ‘graduating’ at the end of August.
After the imposition of a conservative-nationalist Bavarian government, the Munich Reichswehr command undertook an operation to shore up grass-roots support for the new regime. Corporal Hitler was ordered to check out promising local organisations. This assignment brought him, on the evening of 12 September 1919, to a meeting of the tiny right-wing, anti-Semitic National Workers’ Party (DAP) in a function room at the Sterneckerbräu brewer in the street named Tal, in central Munich.
Hitler remained quiet until an academic gentleman made some remarks that displeased him. This unleashed a crushing torrent of oratory from the newcomer, forcing the Herr Professor to withdraw, defeated. The DAP’s founder and leader, a self-educated tool maker named Anton Drexler, remarked admiringly, after hearing Hitler’s tirade: ‘God, that one’s got a mouth on him. We could use him.’
Hitler became an active member of the party. Drexler, by all accounts a shy and indecisive man, was quickly overshadowed by him. Demobilised in spring 1920, Hitler became the party’s propaganda chief. His rabble-rousing eloquence was clearly responsible for the rapid improvement in the party’s fortunes. A year later, he became Führer of the NSDAP (the words ‘National Socialist’ had by now been added), armed at his insistence with dictatorial powers that would endure to his and the party’s end.
Hitler’s challenge to what he referred to as the ‘Jew-Republic’ was totally uncompromising. Unlike other nationalist parties, the Nazis preached non-involvement in the democratic process and made open preparations for a coup that would install a dictatorship in Bavaria and throughout Germany. This quickly led to the party being made illegal in Prussia, which contained two-thirds of the Reich’s population, and in several other of the larger northern states.
The far right (and far left) continued to prosper as reparations started to bite, social and economic unrest grew and the currency’s value began its dizzying slide. When Hitler joined, the membership of the DAP amounted to less than a hundred. By the end of 1921 that of the relaunched NSDAP had reached 6,000. Despite being officially banned throughout most of the country, during 1922 the party passed the five-figure mark until, in January 1923, its membership exceeded 20,000 and it was able to stage its first national party congress.
Even Germans living abroad had taken a fancy to young Hitler. It was 1,000 precious dollars, donated by a German-American in February 1923 – with the mark at around 28,000 to the dollar – that allowed Hitler to turn the party organ, the Völkischer Beobachter (literally, ‘Folkish Observer’) from a twice-weekly into a daily paper.
Schlageter was one of the ‘underground Nazis’ in the north when he was arrested and executed by the French.2 His allegiances were, it was true, a little more complicated than that. This passionate young nationalist has been said to have joined a number of right-wing organisations, and before his arrest to have strongly criticised Hitler for lack of enthusiasm in support of the struggle against the French in the Ruhr.3
Hitler’s reaction to the Ruhr occupation had indeed differed radically from that of most German nationalist leaders. Addressing a large rally at the Zirkus Krone in Munich on 11 January 1923, the day of the invasion, he refused to join in the united chorus of opposition, the so-called new Burgfrieden, claiming instead that it was the ‘Jews’ and the ‘November criminals’ (i.e. the leaders of the 9 November revolution) who were really to blame. It was they, he proclaimed, who had brought Germany so low that the old enemy, France, could humiliate her in this way. Hitler even ordered that Nazi Party members taking part in resistance activities in the Ruhr should be expelled from the organisation.4
Hitler’s line on the Ruhr was not necessarily popular among the rank and file, though he breathed more than sufficient fire on other matters to send the supporters he referred to as ‘an army of revenge’ home happy. The Times, reporting on the meeting, wrote:
Herr Hitler asked his supporters to return home quietly and to avoid any demonstrations in the streets. In spite of this advice, however, bands of ‘storm troops’ paraded the streets, singing the Fascist war songs, and a serious attack was made on the Hotel Vier Jahreszeiten, where members of the Allied Control Commission are quartered. The police were prepared, and in a hand-to-hand struggle the attackers were beaten off. Towards midnight, crowds assembled in front of the Rathaus, where, after singing the ‘The Watch on the Rhine,’ the meeting dispersed, but first of all a solemn oath was sworn ‘to be revenged on France for the invasion of the Ruhr’.5
It was clear that Hitler saw the Ruhr struggle as a distraction from the main task of building up a Fascist-style formation ready for a ‘march on Berlin’, on the model of Mussolini’s seizure of power in October 1922. In line with this, the Führer’s party continued to grow, and its actions to become more menacing. On 1 May, the Nazis, some 1,200-strong, fought pitched battles in Munich with leftists. By some accounts, Hitler’s followers were armed with light machine guns. ‘The number of men wearing Swastika badges to be seen during a walk through the streets of Munich is amazing,’ The Times, organ of the British Establishment, noted three weeks later. The Völkischer Beobachter was ‘sold in most cafés and restaurants every evening by youths in full fascist uniform. It seems to have a considerable circulation.’6
By the early summer, the Nazis had nevertheless clearly decided to hedge their bets on the Ruhr issue. Two weeks after Schlageter’
s execution, on 10 June, a memorial ceremony was staged on the Königsplatz in Munich through the initiative of the NSDAP. Forty thousand members of various nationalist organisations attended, and Hitler gave ‘an aggressive speech’ according to The Times, advocating ‘active resistance’ and declaring that ‘a storm would soon break forth’.7
Schlageter was on his way towards a position atop the Pantheon of Nazi heroes. There would be many more. Not that Hitler, though he had clearly tacked to suit the political wind, fundamentally changed his policy on the Ruhr. The French actions there were an outrage, but then the French were . . . simply being French. The real guilty parties in this affair remained, as ever, the democratic parties of Weimar and their politicians. Not forgetting their alleged Jewish backers, who were, of course, also behind the French plutocrats who had engineered the Ruhr occupation.
The notion of the Jews being to blame for everything fitted even better into the framework of the post-war inflation. Jews represented, for the German far right, internationalism, mobile finance capital, the rendering to mere unreliable (and stealable) paper of the honest, tangible wealth that came from making and growing things. Therefore the destruction of real value that the inflation had brought with it was seen as an essentially Jewish phenomenon.
Interviewed in November 1922 by the American diplomat-cum-spy Colonel Truman Smith at the NSDAP’s still relatively modest headquarters in Munich, Hitler thundered that ‘the printing of paper money must be stopped. This is the worst crime of the present government.’8 It was a theme the Führer hammered away at even more enthusiastically in the early part of 1923, referring constantly to the ‘Jewification’ (Judaisierung) of the economy. ‘The government calmly goes on printing these scraps of paper because, if it stopped, that would be the end of the government,’ Hitler declared:
Because once the printing presses stopped – and that is prerequisite for the stabilisation of the mark – the swindle would at once be brought to light . . . Believe me, our misery will increase. The scoundrel will get by. But the decent, solid businessman who doesn’t speculate will be utterly crushed; first the little fellow on the bottom, but in the end the big fellow on top too. But the scoundrel and the swindler will remain, top and bottom. The reason: because the state itself has become the biggest swindler and crook. A robbers’ state! . . . If the horrified people notice that they can starve on billions, they must arrive at this conclusion: we shall no longer submit to a state which is based on the fraudulent idea of a majority and demand a dictatorship.9
Time would tell if these ‘starving billionaires’ could be mobilised to sweep the Nazis into power before the democratic government got the inflation under control. As yet, there was little sign of that.
20
‘It Is Too Much’
In the late summer of 1922, the twenty-three-year-old soon-to-be-famous novelist Ernest Hemingway was still living in relative poverty among the American expatriate community in Paris. Because he wasn’t making a living from fiction, Hemingway was forced to earn his crust as a correspondent for the Toronto Star. On the paper’s behalf in mid-August he travelled with his wife to the eastern borders of France. They made the trip by the increasingly fashionable means of an aeroplane, half price for journalists.
He got an article for the Star out of that. He also got one out of a visit to the German border town of Kehl, just a walk across the bridge from the ancient city of Strasbourg, until recently German but now once more French. His task? To investigate for his paper’s readers back in Canada the bizarre phenomenon that was German inflation:
There were no marks to be had in Strasburg, the mounting exchange has cleaned the bankers out days ago, so we changed some French money in the railway station at Kehl. For 10 francs I received 670 marks. Ten francs amounted to about 90 cents in Canadian money. That 90 cents lasted Mrs Hemingway and me for a day of heavy spending and at the end of the day we had 120 marks left!1
They bought some apples from a fruit stand, where ‘a very nice looking, white-bearded old gentleman’ watched them, then shyly asked how much their purchase had cost. When told, twelve marks, he smiled. ‘It is too much.’
He went up the street, walking very much as white-bearded old gentlemen of the old regime walk in all countries, but he had looked very longingly at the apples. I wish I had offered him some. Twelve marks, on that day, amounted to a little under 2 cents. The old man, whose savings were probably, as most of the non-profiteer classes are, invested in German pre-war and war bonds, could not afford the 12 mark expenditure. He is a type of the people whose income does not increase with the falling purchasing value of the mark . . .
Lunch at the town’s best hotel cost the equivalent of fifteen Canadian cents. And the French invaded the place every afternoon to gorge themselves on the excellent German cream cakes. ‘The proprietor and his helper were surly and didn’t seem particularly happy when all the cakes were sold,’ Hemingway commented. ‘The mark was falling faster than they could bake.’
By January 1923, even the bare minimum of tolerance between French and Germans that Hemingway had witnessed in Kehl was a thing of the past. The Ruhr invasion had wrenched relations back to a level of bitterness as bad as, in some ways perhaps even worse than, the two nations had experienced between 1914 and 1918. And the mark, which in September been 800 to the Canadian dollar (valued at slightly less than the American) was now worth roughly one-fiftieth of that miserable sum. The old gentleman who had looked so longingly at the apples at the fruit stall in Kehl would have found a kilo of them, and by now much more besides, as far beyond any prospect of purchase as a kilo of Beluga caviar.
Hemingway could live decently in Paris because, for someone paid in dollars, it was cheap. Two and a half to three dollars a day, he said, would keep the visitor in comfort. ‘At the present rate of exchange,’ he wrote for the Toronto Star earlier in 1922, ‘a Canadian with an income of one thousand dollars a year can live comfortably and enjoyably in Paris. If exchange were normal the same Canadian would starve to death. Exchange is a wonderful thing.’2
The cheapness of living in France – and the franc continued to decline, steadily though at a more modest rate than the mark, throughout this period – was a great lure to the ‘lost generation’, as were Paris’s cultural riches, although escaping Prohibition was another one. Some other American expatriates went the whole hog and moved to Berlin, where in these years the economic power that their currency provided was, literally, fantastic. Matthew Josephson, the American writer and critic, moved to Germany in the early 1920s and ran a literary magazine from his apartment. A visitor from New York reported:
For a salary of a hundred dollars a month in American currency, Josephson lived in a duplex apartment with two maids, riding lessons for his wife, dinners only in the most expensive restaurants, tips to the orchestra, pictures collected, charities to struggling German writers – it was an insane life for foreigners in Berlin . . .3
In November 1922, the London Observer reported on the ‘very strong anti-foreigner movement which is growing among the population of Berlin’. It had begun, the report said, with resentment against the poor Jews who had arrived during and after the war from Galicia, the formerly Austrian part of Poland. Then, as it became clear that foreigners with ‘hard currency’ could live as they wanted, a wave of anger against them followed:
There are whole neighbourhoods consisting of big blocks of buildings – ‘mansions’, containing from ten to fifty flats have been bought up by those who speculated in marks soon after the Armistice was signed, and who have viewed with ever-increasing dismay the depreciation of the paper they held. To buy anything that stood in brick or stone meant that some solid value might yet be obtained for the outlay. The German house owner was obliged to sell owing to the rental restrictions imposed by the government, which have reduced landlords to beggary, and to sell quickly for the fear of ‘socialisation’.
Half the professional classes owned some such house representing the family for
tune, and the plight of the intellectuals is as inextricably bound up with their property as is their profession. The Spaniard, Dutchman, and, of late, the Czech, have bought whole streets, and refuse any more repairs than the law imposes on the unfortunate German landlord. One such house owner can incur the undying hatred of as many people as his property will hold. It is now being realised that when the mark is stabilised the actual ruin of the former possessing classes will be complete. A very great deal of the sudden proletarian ‘hatred’ [of foreigners] can be explained this way, and peculiar treatment in train, tram, and public places may be laid at its door.4
In January 1923, State Secretary Eduard Hamm of the Reich Chancellery wrote a report in which he called for strict immigration controls, not just on Jews coming in from the east (or not explicitly - he used the code word Ostwanderer, or ‘east migrants’), but on all foreigners seeking to do business and to find (and especially buy) housing in Germany. He was an enthusiastic supporter of charging higher prices to foreigners in hotels, theatres, restaurants and other places of entertainment, and also of introducing special taxes and fees that would apply to foreigners, both on entry to the country and while living there. All this was clearly related to popular resentment, an all-too-understandable feeling that foreigners were exploiting Germany’s time of weakness for their own pleasure and profit.
This idea was not new. Nor was the general, unofficial idea of squeezing the foreigner who, in the Manchester Guardian’s phrase, had a yen for exploiting the favourable exchange rate to enjoy ‘that cheap holiday in Germany’.5 The Manchester Guardian reported that the Prussian government was proposing a tax of four gold marks (no paper marks for the wise tax collector), then worth about five shillings sterling, for every day the foreigner spent in Germany. The Times picked up the same story, running an even less forgiving headline: ‘Fleecing the Foreigner. Germans Ready for the Tourist’. It continued: ‘As the tourist season approaches in Germany the problem of exploiting the foreign visitor is eagerly discussed.’ Noting the five shillings a day tourist tax, and frequent ‘surcharging’ techniques used against foreigners in shops, hotels and restaurants, it went on into a broader rant which perhaps owed something to the virulently anti-German views of its very hands-on proprietor, Lord Northcliffe, who had recently visited the Rhineland:
The Downfall of Money: Germanys Hyperinflation and the Destruction of the Middle Class Page 27