Anti-Semitism was symbolically inscribed in the new flag, put together by Hitler himself. He said that the red background of the flag stood for “the social idea” of the movement. This was an attempt to snatch the attractive red color from the Russians, for whom red held a traditional religious significance. The white on the flag of the NSDAP referred to the “nationalistic idea,” and the swastika—which Hitler first saw in prewar Austria—symbolized the mission and struggle of “Aryan man.” He claimed that the swastika also stood for “creative work, which has been and always will be anti-Semitic.” The swastika, therefore, certainly in Hitler’s mind, was a visualization of the Party’s anti-Semitism.37
Anyone who lived through those times had to be aware that the NSDAP was the most radical anti-Semitic political party in German history. No doubt, on the model of most political parties, it would modify its appeals to fit local circumstances. But anti-Semitism was the central plank, so obvious to the Nazis that it did not warrant debate. Hitler had not always been anti-Semitic. But in postwar Munich his obsessive concern about German national pride developed in such a way that it could not be disconnected from an unholy and abiding hatred of the Jews.
Many people in Germany did not know what the swastika stood for in 1920, but they began to figure it out. The lawyer and newspaperman Sebastian Haffner remembered that as a boy he saw a schoolmate scribbling the symbol in his notebook and asked in a whisper what it meant. “Anti-Semitic sign,” he was told, and it meant “Out with the Jews. You have to know.”38
During 1920 Hitler began to collect large speaking fees, not only in Bavaria but in other German states. The fees ran from two hundred to one thousand Reichsmarks, considerable sums for the time. He also accepted funds from right-wing circles in Munich, people with money or connections like Captain Mayr, Dietrich Eckart, Heinrich Class, and Ernst Röhm, the latter to become one of Hitler’s closest friends and allies.39
By 1920 Hitler’s name had become synonymous with the NSDAP, but he was not its leader. Certainly he did not have to fight for leadership, because Drexler offered him that on several occasions in 1921. Hitler declined, partly because he sensed his gift was for speaking and appealing to the public, not in dealing with the mundane issues of managing a political party.40
He claimed leadership of the Party, so he said in his autobiography, when in the summer of 1921 his hand was forced to stop “a group of völkisch lunatics” who wanted to take over.41 The matter came up while Hitler was away in Berlin, and soon after his return, on July 11, he resigned from the Party. In a six-page letter sent to the executive several days later, he complained that they had broken the spirit of the Party and that under the circumstances he was left with no choice but to leave it. Yet Hitler was well aware of his importance to the Party and, ever playing politics, despite his pretensions to be somehow above the political fray, set six conditions under which he would change his mind, the most important of which was that he be made “First Chairman with dictatorial powers.” Drexler and the others capitulated, and on July 29 Hitler got what he wanted.42
He offered himself as a man of principle who so far as leadership was concerned could take it or leave it. But this self-presentation masked a deep yearning for supreme power that he did not want to share with anyone. He was immensely patient, and now, as he would later, in 1933, he waited until the moment was right to assert his dominance. His wish was to be acknowledged as the only alternative to chaos and disintegration.
He liked to regard himself as the great “theoretician and program maker,” not an organizer and certainly not one suited to the drudgery of routine administrative chores. Being a leader to Hitler’s way of thinking was “being able to move millions,” to “attract supporters.”43 He needed everyone at his feet, loyal colleagues and adoring masses.
For Hitler, the leader had to be the first propagandist with the aim of working “on the general public from the standpoint of an idea” and making them “ripe for the victory of this idea.” The organization had a different role to play. Its job was to bring supporters together through persistent work, and Hitler sought out talented organizers. He installed Max Amann, one of his wartime sergeants, as the Party’s new business manager. Amann showed skill, and he also worked on Hitler’s personal matters. As of January 3, 1921, the Völkischer Beobachter (Nationalist Observer) became the Party’s official organ, and in August 1921 Hitler named Dietrich Eckart the editor in chief.
Eckart was a Hitler loyalist, a poet and writer with anti-Semitic inclinations. He contributed some of his own money to obtaining the newspaper and the publishing firm Eher Verlag, and he also helped obtain funds from the army and wealthy donors. The publishing company, eventually run by Amann, brought out pamphlets and books, including Hitler’s Mein Kampf.
Another important touch was added on October 5, when the Party’s protection squad—hitherto called the Gymnastic and Sport Department—was renamed the Sturmabteilung (literally “Storming Department”), or brown-shirted SA.
ANTI-SEMITISM AND ANTI-BOLSHEVISM
Hitler’s anti-Semitism and anti-Bolshevism took shape at about the same time, following the Bolshevik Revolution, and particularly in the context of the postwar Councils Republic in Bavaria.
Those in Hitler’s circle propounded similar views, particularly Eckart and two men from the Baltic area, Alfred Rosenberg and Max Erwin von Scheubner-Richter. Hitler read their publications avidly and exchanged ideas, particularly about Russia. They knew White refugees who had fled from the East and brought with them the forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. This book, about an alleged Jewish plot to take over the world, predated the First World War, and both Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany and Nicholas II of Russia were firm believers in it.44 The Russian Revolution and murder of the tsarist family helped make the book better known in the West. Eckart, Rosenberg, and Scheubner-Richter accepted the veracity of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and one of them likely passed this myth on to Hitler in 1920. On August 12, 1921, Hitler first referred to the “Wise men of Zion” in a speech and did so again a week later. He internalized the theory completely and took it as fact.45
Reception for The Protocols of the Elders of Zion was prepared by news flooding out of Russia about the revolution and the terror. Newspapers covered the story widely. The Völkischer Beobachter, even before Hitler’s Party took it over, was laden with tales linking the Jews to Bolshevism and its terror. The swastika, so it was claimed in one story from mid-November 1920, was the symbol of anti-Bolshevism.46
Hitler’s first speech to deal with this general theme was on February 9, 1920. In the talk on the “approach of the Bolsheviks” he spoke about Marx and Engels and the councils system.47 Later that month he implied that conditions were so bad in Russia that the eastern Jews were leaving. In a speech to a Party meeting on April 27, officially billed as “Politics and the Jews,” he went into detail about Russia, from the civil war to the “mass murder” of the intelligentsia, destruction of the economy, and introduction of the twelve-hour workday. He warned that if Germans did not do something, the same thing would happen in their country. “Who managed all this?” he asked rhetorically. He said he and his Party were prepared to carry on the struggle “until the last Jew is removed from the German Reich.”48
He played on the theme that Russia suffered “hunger and misery” and that “the guilt for this development” was attributable to “none other than the Jews.” He warned that the leaders of the Bavarian Soviet Republic wanted the same for Germany.49 On July 27 he asked, once more rhetorically: “What had Bolshevism promised after the revolution?” It would end class domination and bureaucracy, abolish private property, and shorten the working day. What did Bolshevism do? It delivered workers to state enterprises and forced a piecework system, created a new (and illiterate) bureaucracy, permitted foreign companies to exploit the country, and brought about the great famine.50
He painted Lenin as a failure who had surrendered the Russian people to the dictat
orship of the Jews. Exaggerating the extent of Jewish influence, he said that they constituted 430 out of 478 people’s commissars.51 In a speech reported in the Nazi newspaper at the end of the year, the numbers he gave were 466 Jews out of 674 commissars.52 He dwelled on the point that the victory of Marxism in Russia was the triumph of the Jews.53 It was not enough merely to study Bolshevism to stop Germany from becoming bolshevized, just as it was insufficient to recognize the dangers of the Jews “in order to render them harmless” (um den Juden unschädlich zu machen). It was crucial to do something about it.54
To be a “Socialist” for Hitler was to oppose materialism and to fight the Jews. The Russians had attacked only industrial capitalism, he claimed. They had not touched Jewish capitalism, by which he presumably meant finance capital. In a January 1, 1921, newspaper article Hitler began referring to the Soviet Union as “the Jewish blood dictatorship” in which allegedly 150 million suffered “bloody terror” at the hands of 600,000.55
As for the Soviets, they firmly intended to export Communism, if necessary by force of arms. Lenin ordered the invasion of southern and Western Europe in mid-summer 1920. In early July, with victories against the Poles already behind him, he fantasized about bringing Communism to Italy, Hungary, Romania, Czechoslovakia, and Germany. He said that even failure in Poland (which soon came) should not stop them, because he so firmly believed in world revolution.56 He never renounced it.
The German Communist Party in early 1921, encouraged by Moscow, tried an uprising in Prussian Saxony, specifically Halle-Merseburg. The so-called March action was launched with the backing of the Comintern and well-known figures in Moscow as well as Communists like the Hungarian Béla Kun. The Prussian police got wind of the plans and moved into the area on March 19. Ten days later, backed by military forces, they struck. The March action was put down at the cost of 145 killed and around 34,700 arrested. Prisoners were treated terribly in what became almost a white terror. The uprising was widely blamed on “Communist Bolshevik” agitators and “Russian Jews.”57
Hitler saw his movement as a reaction to these kinds of threats. On January 27, 1921, he had said that the Communist Party of Germany wanted to undermine the nation from within and create a dictatorship on the Russian model. Who was going to stand against this “international, Jewish, proletarian mass energy”? Only at the grass roots, he believed, could a counter-energy be found. Trying to get more people elected was not enough. What was needed was a new national and anti-Semitic movement. Mere “electoral anti-Semitism was immoral.”58
Hitler’s anti-Semitic interpretation of events grew more sweeping as the German economy deteriorated. In mid-February 1921 he charged that London and Paris were under the domination of stock-exchange capitalism. This rule worked as follows: first there was the attempt to get reparations from Germany, but when that became impossible, there was a switch to a policy of “exterminating” the country. France was blamed for making outlandish demands and for wanting to bring the German people “to a Jewish dictatorship, to Bolshevism. For that is and remains the final goal of the Jewish stock-exchange leadership.”59
The Nazi message was taking shape. The big question was how Hitler and his tiny Party could get themselves into a position to act on their beliefs.
5
FIRST NAZI ATTEMPT TO SEIZE POWER
The violent heritage of the First World War, coupled with the outbreak of the Russian Revolution, had dramatic effects across Europe. With the rise of Fascism in Italy, Mussolini opened another radical option on the European political landscape.
MUSSOLINI AS MODEL
On October 28, 1922, Benito Mussolini carried out a “march on Rome.” He was a charismatic leader of a relatively small party, and in the last elections his Partito Nazionale Fascista (Fascist Party) managed to win only 35 of the 535 seats. What set Mussolini apart were the Blackshirts, or Squadre d’Azioni. As of April 1922, they numbered probably between 73,000 and 110,000. Many were military desperadoes, disenchanted veterans of the First World War who had little to look forward to by returning to their villages. Mussolini channeled their personal and social discontent into the right-wing politics of action. Together they worked out tactics of intimidation, assault, arson, and other forms of terror, which occasionally led to murder.1
Mussolini stoked the myth that Italy was on the verge of a Communist revolution. The Fascists won over landowners and members of the elite who worried that Italy might follow the Soviet example. Fascism promised law and order. Winston Churchill privately called Mussolini a “swine” for his cruelties, but in public praised him for bringing order and for being a bulwark against Red revolution.2
The march on Rome in 1922 was the culmination of months of Blackshirt violence. Now they occupied public buildings, kicked out the Socialists, and sacked the offices of newspapers, and on October 28 four leaders led an estimated nine thousand squadristi to the gates of Rome. It was a ragtag group that could have been routed by the army with ease and nowhere near the 100,000 men King Victor Emmanuel later mentioned to justify his reluctance to call out the troops. Mussolini was uncertain and waited in Milan, before traveling to Rome by train on October 30.3 He created the myth that 300,000 had marched, but hardly one-tenth as many were involved. The king dithered, and then appointed the inexperienced Fascist leader (aged thirty-nine) the new prime minister. There was joy in the streets of Rome; people were filled with hope that the years of misgovernment were finally over.4
Mussolini’s success demonstrated to Hitler that a charismatic leader, backed with the force of popular appeal, could find his way to power. Mussolini was the first politician in twentieth-century Europe to show that the fragile new democracies could be toppled without fighting never-ending elections.
Hitler had “the profoundest admiration” for Mussolini’s “resolve not to share Italy with the Marxists, but to destroy internationalism and save the fatherland from it.”5 The Italian left-wing parties did not call a general strike (as Mussolini feared) to stop his takeover. Nationalism was running high in the country, fueled by outrage at the meager territorial gains given Italy at the Paris Peace Conference. For many Italians, the Allies did not show enough respect for the 460,000 soldiers who had died in the war and the nearly one million wounded.
In early November 1922, Hitler was asked about the similarities between his movement and the Italian one. He acknowledged that some called his Party the “German Fascists.” He was not sure about that, but agreed that both parties had “in common the unconditional love of fatherland, the will to tear the working class from the claws of the [Communist] International, and the fresh and comradely spirit of the front.”6
The two left-wing parties in Germany, now under the banners of the KPD (Communist Party) and SPD (Social Democratic Party), thought Hitler wanted to turn himself into a German Mussolini.7 Jews in Germany were alarmed by the easy Fascist victory and pointed to the implications for the Nazis.8
At a meeting of the NSDAP on November 3, one of the first since the march on Rome, Hermann Esser, propaganda chief and one of Hitler’s most enthusiastic supporters, called to a large crowd in one of Munich’s beer halls: “We also have Mussolini of Italy in Bavaria. His name is Adolf Hitler.” This was the first time the leaders of the NSDAP publicly indicated their aims. Their revolution would be according to the Italian, not the Soviet, model.9
ECONOMIC CHAOS AND POLITICAL EXTREMISM
The context of Hitler’s attempt to take power in November 1923 was provided by the structural collapse of the German economy. The fledgling republic was saddled with large reparation debts, and every government felt more or less obliged to drag its feet when payments were due. They let economic problems go unsolved in part to show that the debt was impossibly high. In the latter part of 1922 the French threatened to invade if payment was not forthcoming. Chancellor Wilhelm Cuno, who took office on November 22, repeated the phrase of his predecessor “First bread, then reparations.”
On December 26, 1922, the Repara
tions Commission concluded that because Germany failed to deliver the required coal and timber, it was in default on its reparations payments. The British suggested a four-year moratorium, but the French used the pretext to invade. On January 11, 1923, French and Belgian troops marched into the Ruhr, western Germany’s industrial heartland. The aim of the French premier, Raymond Poincaré, was not just to collect reparations but to push the frontier back to the Rhine.10
The uproar in Germany was universal, and all political parties drew together to consider what to do. The notable exception was the NSDAP. Hitler wanted to distinguish his own response from the general outcry, and on January 11 he addressed a mass meeting in Munich. His motto was “Not down with France, but down with the November criminals.”11 The “November criminals” was an instantly recognized code word for those who stabbed the army in the back and signed the hateful Versailles Treaty.
The KPD’s call for a general strike was rejected by the “free” trade unions, allies of the SPD, who wanted to use “passive resistance.” On January 13 an overwhelming majority in the Reichstag applauded Chancellor Cuno and passed a bill to that effect.12 The government instructed railway workers and civil servants to follow only the orders of German authorities. The French responded with martial law, leaving the German government to support workers and employers financially. The effort put an enormous strain on the already shaky budget. The economy was imperiled because the Ruhr region—Germany’s main source of energy and raw materials—was effectively cut off from the rest of the country. The French and Belgians eventually stationed 100,000 troops to wrest their reparations from the Ruhr. These economic aims failed, and they created a political disaster.
Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler Page 12