Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler

by Robert Gellately

  In Munich throughout March and into April various institutions competed for power. Immediately after Eisner’s assassination, a radical central council had been created on February 22, with representatives from the MSPD, USPD, and KPD. Uncertain about what to do, they recognized the duly elected Landtag (state parliament). This action created friction within the council and led to the resignation of Max Levien, the head of the Communist Party. On March 17, the Landtag selected Johannes Hoffmann as Bavaria’s prime minister. As a moderate member of the MSPD, he built a cabinet with representatives of the MSPD and USPD, as well as some from the Bavarian Peasant Party.

  “JEWISH BOLSHEVISM”

  The political crisis in Munich was not over, and some radicals tried to create a councils republic (Räterepublik) along the lines of the Soviet Union and Hungary. Leaders of the Bavarian Communist Party wanted a second revolution but rejected the idea of a Soviet republic. In the chaos, such a republic was declared anyway. On April 7, in the name of the new Bavarian Soviet Republic, Ernst Niekisch, chairman of the Central Council, asserted after all that the elections to the Landtag (due to meet the next day) were null and void.

  The decisive push for the Soviet republic came not from the Communists, who participated in the short-lived regime, but from the USPD and some anarchists. Gustav Landauer, a radical Socialist and Jew, was named commissar of education and enlightenment, and thus put in control of the mostly Christian school system, an appointment that was received as an affront to the mainly Catholic population. Promises to collectivize agriculture were met with disbelief.

  Even Communist leaders in Munich were relieved with the collapse of what they called the “Fake Councils Republic” on April 13. From temporary headquarters in Bamberg, Prime Minister Hoffmann laid siege to the city and finally decided on a surprise attack. Violence erupted, but the Soviet republic briefly survived.

  Improbably enough, at that moment Eugen Leviné asserted control over the republic and soon issued a proclamation: “The sun of the world revolution has risen! Long live the world revolution!… Long live Communism!”21 Leviné was born in St. Petersburg in 1883 into the family of a wealthy Jewish businessman. He was educated in Germany and a naturalized German citizen. He arrived in Munich on March 5, at the behest of Paul Levi, the new head of Germany’s Communist Party, and insisted the Communists have nothing to do with the first Bavarian Soviet Republic, which he called phony.

  On April 13, Leviné decided, not on express orders but in keeping with Lenin’s hopes, that the moment was right to take power in Munich. The motto of the new regime was “Today finally Bavaria has established the Dictatorship of the Proletariat.” However, the sun of Communist revolutions was setting, not rising. To the east, Romanian troops invaded and crushed the Communists in Hungary on April 10, and on April 18 the Austrian Communists were routed in Vienna.22

  Lenin telegraphed his best wishes to Leviné on April 27 and advised him to broaden support by canceling mortgages and rents of small peasants. Terror was never far from Lenin’s mind, and he suggested taking hostages from among the bourgeoisie. But the days of the Leviné regime in Bavaria were numbered.23

  Munich was under siege, and conditions in the city grew grim. In Bamberg, Johannes Hoffmann was still rightful head of government and issued calls for volunteers to crush the Communist regime. One of his ministers put it this way: “Russian terror rules in Munich. Led by alien insurgents, Communists have seized power…. If we do not want to experience the fate of Russia, we must protect our threatened Bavarian land to the last man.”24 “Alien” here was a code word for Jews, Russians, and non-Bavarian Germans.

  A hastily assembled Red Army of the Munich Soviet Republic was no match for the forces that “liberated” the city at the end of April. The Reds killed innocent hostages, while the White troops, some Bavarian but reinforced by Free Corps troops sent by Noske, carried out indiscriminate revenge. A total of 606 people were killed, 38 of them government troops. Leviné was tried for high treason and executed. Still others were given prison terms, but many escaped.25

  Leaders of several other key German states (Prussia and Saxony) in this period were, like Kurt Eisner, also Jewish. In Bavaria the Jews had led the Soviet republic; they included Ernst Toller, Erich Mühsam, Gustav Landauer, Towia Axelrod, Eugen Leviné, and Max Levien. The latter three men were born in Russia, thereby linking them in German minds to Bolshevism in some way, even if they were not specifically Lenin’s representatives. Other Communist (and Socialist) leaders in Germany were Jewish, most notably Rosa Luxemburg, whose Polish-Jewish ancestry was well known. Her Jewish colleagues among the German Communists included Leo Jogiches and Paul Levi. Béla Kun’s Communist government included a majority of Jewish commissars, and many leading Marxists in Austria were Jewish.26

  For contemporaries with a penchant for conspiracy theories, it was easy to connect these events to Jewish leaders in Russia, of whom the most prominent were Trotsky, Zinoviev, and Kamenev. It did not matter that they had long since renounced their religious faith. They were taken anyway as the embodiment of international “Jewish Bolshevism,” a condemnatory term brought to the West by émigrés who fled Russia.

  Hitler was in Munich during these “Bolshevik revolutions,” where fear of Moscow’s tampering was not merely a theoretical possibility but part of daily experience.

  Most people in Bavaria were delighted to see the end of the upheaval. The great novelist Thomas Mann remarked on his “feeling of liberation and cheerfulness” that the “Munich Communist episode is over.”27 Ruth Fischer, one of the leaders of the KPD, recognized after the fact that the revolutions in Munich, which she likened to a civil war, “increased the horror” of the Bavarian middle classes for revolution. Without these events, she concluded, “Munich would never have become the birthplace of the Hitler movement.”28

  Anti-Semitic organizations proliferated in this period and drew hundreds of thousands of members. They emphasized the role of the Jews in the defeat of Germany and in the revolutions from Petrograd to Berlin to Munich and beyond, with the Jews portrayed as the “wirepullers of the revolution.” A common claim was that Germany had become a “Jews’ republic.”29

  HITLER’S RIGHT-WING POLITICS

  The Bavarian army was revamped, and on May 11 the Bavarian Reichswehr Gruppenkommando 4 (or Gruko 4) was formed under Major General Arnold von Möhl with jurisdiction over regular troops in Bavaria and civilian affairs in Munich. A “news” department of Gruko 4 covered the press, information, and propaganda and also collected information to “school” the troops and influence political developments.

  On May 28, General Möhl issued instructions for anti-Bolshevik propaganda to be undertaken immediately by speakers drawn from all ranks after they were given some anti-Bolshevik “schooling.” Adopting an anti-Bolshevik perspective, the courses would deal with eight topics, including German history, the theory and practice of Socialism, and Russia and its past.30

  On May 30, a General Staff officer, Captain Karl Mayr, took over the news department. A radical nationalist and anti-Semite, he got to know Hitler, who was considered reliable and one of the more mature men, at thirty years old. Hitler’s education as an anti-Bolshevik speaker began on June 5, 1919, with lectures at Munich’s university. For Hitler, the school dropout with pretensions to being better educated than his mates, this was a great chance to hear what professors and experts had to say. Instructors included the historian Karl Alexander von Müller and the economics specialist Gottfried Feder.

  Hermann Esser, another participant in the course, said Feder blamed certain “circles”—namely “international Jewry”—for the “cancer” besetting the German economy. Hitler picked up on these themes and became a devotee of Feder’s ideas, impressed with his understanding of “the speculative and economic character of stock exchange and loan capital.” Breaking “the slavery of interest” became code for ending the economic power of the Jews. Hitler said Feder criticized aspects of capitalism, including its
internationalism, but did not question capitalism as such.31

  Hitler was elected to the minor position of deputy battalion representative by his fellow soldiers during the heady days of the Bavarian Soviet Republic in April 1919. Far from concluding that he might have had Communist or even Socialist sympathies at that time, we should assume he just went along and was at best “neutral.” There is no evidence he was ever attracted by Marxists’ rejection of capitalism and their enthusiasm for “international brotherhood.” To the extent he held “Socialist” opinions, these were critical of “stock exchange” capitalism and speculators. It was no doubt embarrassing for Hitler later that he had anything, however briefly, to do with the left-wingers. He lied about the episode in his autobiography.32

  Hitler took far more seriously his involvement with right-wingers as a member of a military propaganda detachment. On August 19 he spent five days at a camp in Lechfeld dealing with troops whose sentiments favored left-wing politics and Bolshevism. The task was to knock such ideas out of their heads before they were demobilized.

  Anti-Bolshevism was one of the themes on which Hitler was a successful speaker. He would begin by referring to the activities of the Jews to “explain” key developments in German history and problems of capitalism. Thus setting the matter in “context,” he became practiced in a story line that combined anti-Bolshevism and anti-Semitism along with nationalism. He presented the message with such passion that he won the enthusiastic approval of the troops.

  The first documented anti-Semitic statement we have from Hitler was in Lechfeld during a talk about capitalism. He later responded to questions by Adolf Gemlich, a fellow propagandist, who wanted more information about what to say about the Jews. Hitler’s letter of September 16, 1919, shows that he had thought about the topic before, and he considered the Jews to be a racial, not merely a religious, community. He was convinced that something radical had to be done to rid Germany of the Jews. But what? Ordinary citizens would be aghast at pogroms, he said. They had become soft as a nation and made themselves vulnerable to the machinations of the Jews, who allegedly had played on the “higher” values of the Germans—religion, Socialism, democracy—to get what they really wanted, money and power. As a nation Germans were suffering from “racial tuberculosis,” and it would be his task to cure them. Hitler drew momentous consequences from this analysis.

  Given his line of thinking, it was a matter of what strategy to take in the combat against the Jews. The German people were sick, unable to stomach pogroms, and too democratic for their own good. Thus the only way to get them to see the light was to work through democracy and the legal system. It was a matter of fighting fire with fire. The “anti-Semitism of reason,” he said, must systematically and legally eliminate the rights of the Jews. The most important objective was the “removal of the Jews altogether” (Entfernung der Juden überhaupt).33

  Hitler started looking into right-wing politics, and there were at least fifty parties and groups available in Munich to choose from. He learned about these when sent to investigate them by Captain Mayr, and he also gave talks to the military and other groups in and around the city, where he made an impression.

  On September 12, 1919, Captain Mayr ordered Hitler to attend a meeting of the German Workers’ Party (DAP) and report on it. The DAP was led by Karl Harrer and Anton Drexler, and the evening’s speakers happened to include Gottfried Feder, whose theme was “How and by what means does one destroy capitalism?” In the discussions that followed, Hitler showed he was knowledgeable and quick. Drexler was impressed and asked him to join the fledgling party.

  Like so much else, Hitler lied in his autobiography about when he joined the DAP and even his membership number—which was not 7 but 555. From September 1919 onward he was in the Party and combined his army job with speaking at political gatherings until he was discharged on March 31, 1920.34

  FOUNDATION OF THE NAZI PARTY

  Hitler began to think of politics as a vocation. It gave him a goal in life, and he dared to imagine himself as someone who might influence Germany’s destiny. He never worked out a formal theory or ideology, nor embraced anyone else’s, but he was emotionally and temperamentally drawn to right-wing politics.

  As a member of the DAP, but by far its best drawing card, he was ambitious enough to want to expand his reach. On January 7, 1920, he spoke to the largest anti-Semitic and völkisch (nationalist) groups in Munich and attracted a crowd of seven thousand. He was starting to make a living as a political speaker. Invoking the activity of the Jews to explain the country’s misfortunes won immediate applause.

  Another favorite theme was the “war guilt question.” The Versailles Treaty was worked out without Germany’s participation in the discussions, despite President Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points and his promise of open diplomacy. Under article 231 of the treaty, Germany was held responsible for the war, and to make matters worse, the country was required to pay all the costs incurred by the Allies, who were asked to compile bills, including veterans’ pensions and widows’ allowances.

  Although people today continue to dispute whether Germany could have paid the final sums demanded, the Versailles Treaty was a political disaster, and every German politician felt duty-bound to oppose it because it signified national humiliation. The country was presented with the finished treaty and threatened with invasion if it did not sign. The moderate Social Democratic chancellor, Philipp Scheidemann, resigned rather than put his signature to it. By June 23, 1919, the government was left with no choice but to accept the peace without any conditions. A delegation was sent to Paris for the distasteful ceremony at the Versailles Palace on June 28.35

  The territory and possessions lost in the treaty, when combined with the reparations payments, made Germans across the political spectrum regard Versailles as the epitome of unfairness. They called it the Diktat, or dictated peace. Right-wing politicians exploited the national outrage, and it became a mainstay in Hitler’s repertoire. If we compare what happened after 1945, when Germany was helped in its recovery and democracy took root, the vengeful Treaty of Versailles looks particularly faulty.

  Inflation began in the war years, but it soon escalated alarmingly, eventually becoming worse than anything ever seen in an advanced industrial nation. The death of money turned German society from bitterness to chaos. Here was the context in which Hitler’s Party came into existence, blossomed, and attempted to seize power.

  PARTY PLATFORM

  The German Workers’ Party (DAP) was changed into the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP) as of February 1, 1920. Its leader was Anton Drexler, but Hitler was the decisive figure and suggested the new name. The two worked out a twenty-five-point program, celebrated after the fact as having been presented to a public meeting on February 24, 1920.

  Compared with the writings of Marxists like Lenin and Stalin, the program was thin fare. There was no pretense at eloquent philosophical rationalization, no grand historical theory. A key contrast to Communism was that there was no effort at making a universal appeal; rather, the target audience of the NSDAP could be read as “Germans only.”

  The first plank in the platform was for unification into a Greater Germany. Only people of “German blood” could be citizens, and no Jew was to be allowed to be a member of the nation. Noncitizens could live in the country only as guests but not serve in the government or civil service, and their activities were limited even with respect to newspaper writing. All non-German immigration was to cease. It was the duty of the state to feed and care for citizens, and foreign nationals (non-citizens) who could not be fed should be deported.

  Another major demand was to tear up the peace settlements of 1919. That was combined with others that sought “land and territory” for the population.

  The Party’s anti-Semitic character was repeated several different ways and was impossible to overlook. The legal emancipation of the Jews, the pride of their community, was to be reversed, and any who remained in the coun
try would be second-class citizens. In fact, most parts of the platform had an anti-Semitic twist.

  The Party did not aim to recruit a specific social class, but tried to offer something for everyone. It echoed Feder’s demand to break “the slavery of interest” and contained several points with a moderate Socialist tone. The Party favored some social welfare, state involvement in fostering health, protecting mothers and infants, and extending old-age pensions. As well, the program mentioned educational plans, with emphasis on helping gifted children of the poor.

  While critical of capitalism, the Party was hardly anticapitalist. It demanded profit sharing in large industrial enterprises but did not follow through on this point. The Party eventually came out strongly in favor of protecting private property, particularly farm ownership, but here it spoke about prohibiting land speculation. This and the economic demands, such as the abolition of department stores, which in Germany were identified mainly with Jewish firms, were standard anti-Semitic fare.

  There was also a strong law-and-order element in the Party program, which threatened death to those such as “common criminals, usurers, profiteers” if their activities “were injurious to the nation.”

  A fundamental aspect of this kind of “Socialism” was the rejection of what was called “the Jewish-materialist spirit” in favor of the principle “common interest before self-interest.” There was no mention of the threat of Communism or Marxian-based Socialism, but nor did it say anything about other political rivals, or even about cultural affairs. The idea was to keep the message simple.

  One note about the NSDAP that set it apart was the commitment it made to supporters: “The leaders of the Party promise to work ruthlessly—if need be to sacrifice their very lives—to translate this program into action.”36

  The name National Socialist German Workers’ Party underlined both the nationalist and the Socialist themes. That is, it tried to get across the point that this was a Party in competition with the Marxist ones for the support of German workers.