Hitler in Hell

by Martin van Creveld

  It must have been in September 1919 that I was ordered to take a look at some splinter group, previously wholly unknown to me. It called itself the Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, or German Workers’ Party. Following the Soviet model, the “Revolution” had granted soldiers the right to participate in politics. That was why my superiors took an interest in this and similar groups. So I went to one of their meetings. For two hours I listened to a speech by one Gottfried Feder. An economist by trade, he had written a brochure and now spoke about the need to break the shackles of interest which high finance had imposed on the German people.

  The number of those present may have been between twenty and twenty-five. Feder was not the best of speakers, and I was thoroughly bored. I was just on the point of leaving when it was announced that there would be a discussion. At first they talked about all kinds of trivial points. Then, however some professor stood up and argued that Bavaria should secede from the Reich. Instead, he said, it should join Austria! When my turn came, I wiped the floor with him.

  Again, I have described what happened next in Mein Kampf. A week or so later, I received a postcard saying that I had been admitted to the Party. It was a peculiar method of attracting members, which still amuses me. Nevertheless, I accepted their invitation and went to their next meeting. A more philistine, less interesting one you never saw. They had neither a program nor any kind of written brochure to explain who they were and what they wanted; nor did they have membership cards or stamps. In a way, though, their utter confusion and unimportance spoke in their favor. The reason was that they reflected those of countless people, myself in many ways included. Besides, it seemed a suitable place where I, unknown and without resources of any kind, might make my mark. So I decided to stay and see what I could do.

  From then on the seven members of the Party—I was the seventh—met every Wednesday evening in some café. Our first task was to increase the number of participants. To do so, I decided to hold one public meeting a month. When the time came, I personally distributed invitations in the streets or delivered them to certain addresses—with hardly any success, I might add. Switching to mimeographed material, we did a little better. First, we had eleven attendees, then thirteen, then twenty-three, and then thirty-four. At that point we had enough money to put an ad in the Münchener Beobachter, the Munich Observer. It worked. At our next meeting we had 111 people present. What a colossal success! It was also the first time I spoke to a larger public. It confirmed what I had already begun to suspect: namely, that I had a talent for doing so and could reach people’s hearts.

  Outsiders who have never taken part in politics may consider all this funny. And funny, in a way, it was; we were a bunch of ludicrous nobodies trying to suggest answers to problems so enormous as to appear altogether insoluble. These detractors have no idea how hard it is to attract people and to keep them interested. Above all, we needed to make them stop complaining and start acting! Nor do they know how much willpower and money doing so demands. We—my comrades and I—had the willpower. But we had practically nothing else.

  Encouraged, we increased the number of meetings to one every fortnight. At times it worked; at other times it did not. We made mistakes, as by renting halls located in the wrong neighborhoods, and did our best not to repeat them. On 24 February 1920, by which time we had changed the Party’s name to Nazionalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (NSDAP), we felt strong enough to hold our first mass meeting, during which we intended to announce our program. It consisted of twenty-five points, and my comrades thought I was the most suitable person to announce it. So that was what, in front of 2,000 cheering people, I did.

  The most important points of the program were as follows. 1. The unification of all Germans in the Greater Germany on the basis of the people’s right to self-determination. 2. Equal rights for the German people with respect to the rest, i.e. the abrogation of the peace treaties. 3. The restoration of our colonies. 4. That the right to be a citizen and hold public office be limited to members of the German race alone, meaning that Jews would be excluded. 5. That the state take responsibility for the livelihood of its citizens. 6. Equal rights and obligations for all citizens. 7. The abolition of unearned income and the confiscation of war profits. 8. The nationalization of trusts and a division of the profits of all heavy industries. 9. Land reform and the abolition of taxes on land. 10. The maintenance of a healthy middle class. 11. Educational reform, so as to concentrate all authority in this field in the hands of the state. And 12. The establishment of a strong state capable of doing all this.

  Party programs, indeed programs of any sort, are always problematic. Nothing puts people off more quickly than having to listen to, or read, a point-by-point program. One well-known psychologist has claimed that the maximum number of points people can remember is seven. I, who have some experience in the matter, would argue that, with the masses at any rate, the true figure is closer to three. Once a program is formulated, few people ever refer to it again. Yet a program one must have, or else no one will take one seriously. It was in order to be taken seriously, too, that we called ours “unalterable.” In this respect as in so many others, we kept our word. Looking back, I think our program was as good as we could make it at the time. This is also proved by the fact that we turned most of our ideas into reality, which is more than the great majority of parties, either before or after us, have done or even tried to do.

  It was around this time, too, that we adopted the swastika as our symbol. The swastika is an old Germanic sign going back thousands of years. Symbolizing the sun, it is found in many places all over the world where people of Germanic people lived and made their cultural influence felt. During the war and immediately afterward various groups and units took it up as their emblem. As it happened, one of them was a German fighter squadron stationed in Palestine! Having decided to do the same, I used my experience as an artist to design our flag around it. Computer-assisted design was still in the future, so the work took time and effort, but what a huge success it was!

  The colors of the flag were those of the defunct German Empire and, in this sense, a tribute to the glorious past. The red background stood for the socialist idea of our Party, the white circle for nationalism. The black swastika symbolized the eternal Aryan struggle for survival against other races. The fact that, after 1945, our flag was prohibited and still remains so in a great many places only shows how eminently successful, how irresistible, my design was.

  This is the place to say a word about some of my earliest comrades with whom I worked at the time. Two of them, a machinist named Anton Drexler who was the founder of the Party, and the aforementioned Gottfried Feder, soon fell by the wayside. Drexler was a serial joiner and joined a variety of other organizations. He did not participate in the November 1923 Putsch and was elected to the Bavarian Parliament after standing for another party. He was present again when the Party was reestablished following my release from Landsberg, but by then I had little difficulty pushing him aside.

  Feder’s main problem was that he was an ideologue. Lacking the oratorical skills we needed so much, he continued to write brochures on economic matters. Many were quite obscure. But that did not prevent him from being regarded as the Party’s primary economic expert. He retained this position until after the September 1930 elections, which suddenly turned us into the country’s second-largest party. At that point his extreme Left-wing socialist views forced me to disassociate myself from him so as to enlist the support, and the money, of some of Germany’s greatest industrialists.

  Two others who played a role at the time were Ludwig von Scheubner-Richter and Dietrich Eckart. Scheubner-Richter came to us from the Baltic, where he had spent much of his life and where he had been among those who tried to oppose the Bolshevization of his country. In our march on 9 November 1923 he was in the first rank, walking arm-in-arm with me. Shot in the lungs and dying instantly, he took me down with him to the pavement. I dedicated the first volume of Mein Kampf to him, as well as
to fifteen others who died on that day.

  Eckart was a successful playwright with the outstanding command of the German language such success demands. In 1912 he adapted Ibsen’s Peer Gynt. Thereupon, it became one of the best-attended productions of the age. In Berlin alone it was shown 600 times. He helped us financially, made me take lessons in oratory and diction, and introduced me to a great many important people. After the Putsch, he was arrested along with me. Taken ill, he was released and died soon after. I dedicated the second volume of Mein Kampf to him.

  Other comrades dating from those days were Alfred Rosenberg and Julius Streicher. Rosenberg, like Scheubner-Richter, was from the Baltic. Like Feder he was an ideologue first and foremost. He edited the Party newspaper, the Völkischer Beobachter (Völkisch Observer), and wrote numerous pamphlets as well as a book, Der Mythus des Zwanstigsten Jahrhundert (The Myth of the Twentieth Century.) Initially, he could not even sell the entire first edition. Later, having been put on the Index, it sold no fewer than 200,000 copies. In 1940-41 I made him the Commissioner for the Occupied Territories in the East, a post for which, given his background, he seemed well suited. Perhaps this is the place to say that, seen from the point of view of propaganda, the value of newspapers and, even more so, books, is limited. It is certainly not zero, or else I would not have bothered with them. But as my entire career shows, it cannot compare with that of the spoken word. Television, which in my time was in its infancy but which, along with its various offshoots, has since grown into the most powerful instrument of propaganda in history, confirms me in my view.

  Streicher was a Franconian and as rabid an anti-Semite as I have ever met. By his own account, he had converted to National Socialism after hearing me speak. From that point on he fought for us like a buffalo. On the way he brought us the members of his Deustche Sozlialistische Partei, doubling our membership. Had it not been for him, we never would have won Nuremberg for our cause. Later, he became our Gauleiter (district leader) of Franconia. A brilliant journalist, his paper, Der Stürmer (The Attacker) helped us as much as any newspaper could. No one was better than him at waking up the masses to the Jewish danger! An insatiable womanizer, he often overstepped the boundaries of “good taste,” producing material which can only be called pornographic. That, as well as the endless problems he had with women, was why certain Party members disliked him and urged me to get rid of him. In 1940 he was indicted for corruption and convicted. Thereupon, I was forced to strip him of his post as Gauleiter of Franconia. But I never forgot that he had marched with me during the Putsch. He was also one of the very few people whom I allowed to address me with the familiar Du. So I left him his paper and did not take any other steps against him.

  With so much going on, it was time for me to leave the army and to start working for the Party full time. On 31 March 1921 I was discharged. I spent the next two and a half years organizing and speaking, speaking and organizing. Not just at public meetings—which, on the whole, grew larger and larger—but also at private ones. Particularly important in this regard were some elderly, usually well to-do, ladies of the kind that are always looking for young talent to protect and support. Thanks partly to Eckart’s efforts on my behalf, they invited me to their drawing rooms, treated me with tea, and provided me with audiences consisting of people like themselves. Dressed in a cheap blue suit, all I could afford, I felt like an ape in a zoo, but what other choice did I have?

  One of my first female supporters was the widow of a high school principal, Carola Hoffmann. So taken with me was she that she looked after my laundry and baked for me. She also lent us her house, which we used for holding meetings. Others were Viktoria von Dirksen who, starting in 1922, used her salon to put me in contact with the so-called “better circles.” So central was her role in helping us during the difficult year after the Putsch that she came to be nicknamed “The Mother of the Movement.” Others were Elsa Bruckmann, the wife of the Munich publisher of that name, Helene Bechstein, the wife of the famous piano-manufacturer, and Winifred Wagner, whose tremendous admiration for her father-in-law, Richard Wagner, I shared. Her husband, Siegfried, testified that she “fought like a lion” on my behalf.

  Some of their contributions came in the form of cash, of which we had little but could not have too much. The rest took the form of jewels and other precious objects, which I used to pawn. My lodgings, the clothes I wore, and the restaurants where I ate improved somewhat. I even started to be driven around in a used 24-horsepower Selve, one of the countless car models that have since been abandoned and forgotten. So old was it that the seaweed of the upholstery came sprouting out of the seats! Somewhat later, I replaced it with a Mercedes Frau Bechstein had given me. But great luxury? No way. As late as 1928, I was still living in a small rented room in Munich. At 41 Thierschstrasse, in case anyone wants to know.

  More important than my personal circumstances was the fact that the Party and I were by no means the only ones in the field. As often happens in the wake of a defeat, Germany at the time was desperately looking for leadership—any kind of leadership, almost, that would tell people what to do, take them out of their troubles, and point to the future. One person who realized this very well was Eckart. He was one of the first who believed that I had the necessary qualities to lead. He also used to say that Germany’s future leader had to be single. Only thus, he explained, could he capture the female half of the nation, whose hearts are always stronger than their brains. He was quite correct as it turned out.

  Another was Kurt Hesse, a highly-decorated Reichswehr officer of whose existence, however, I only became aware later on. In 1922 he published The Warlord-Psychologist. It was one of the few volumes by a German officer that did not content itself with the niceties of strategy such as whether internal lies were preferable to external ones or the other way around. Instead, it showed true insight concerning the psychological needs of the troops as well as the nation at large. Attacking Ludendorff’s bureaucratic style of leadership without mentioning him by name, Hesse explained why people in Germany needed a leader and were looking for him as well as the qualities an eventual leader would have to have. Briefly, the field which I had entered and in which I was trying to compete was a crowded one indeed. By one count Germany had seventy-three different völkisch movements, all with programs more or less similar to our own. In Munich alone there were at least fifteen.

  I will not trouble to list all the countless speeches I held during those years. Nor will I go into the equally countless petty intrigues I had to endure and overcome. That task I leave to my more pedantic biographers, who seem to revel in it. Step by step, and not without an occasional setback, I made my mark in Munich and the surrounding countryside. In July 1921 I was officially appointed the Party’s leader. As my fortunes improved, so did those of the NSDAP.

  My most important instrument was my voice. This being the case, I will say a few words about the way I prepared my speeches and delivered them. I took every speech very seriously and always came carefully prepared. That does not mean I wrote down every word in advance in order to simply read them to the audience. Reading, rather than speaking, is the prerogative of professors—especially, but by no means exclusively, German ones who do not care as to whether anyone does or does not listen to them. I spoke from brief notes, some of which have been preserved. They were there to remind me of the most important points I wanted to make and help me to transition from one to another. In Germany, this was considered a bold innovation at the time. Much later, the leader of the German Women’s Union, Frau Gertrude Scholz-Klink, in one of her speeches specifically thanked me for having taught “us” to speak without notes. Right she was.

  Most of my speeches lasted about two hours. I often gave two a week, and occasionally more. The sheer physical effort, often coupled with extensive travel, was beyond belief. After each one ended, I was bathed in sweat and had to change my clothes. I also lost weight. Trying to anticipate objections in advance, I always paid close attention to the kind of au
dience I was going to address. I also took note of the shape of the hall and my place in it—important matters too many speakers tend to overlook and to neglect. They do not seem to understand the role mise en scene can and must play. As time went on, I developed my repertoire by practicing my speeches in front of a mirror. I also made a habit of entering late so as to increase tension and to make the crowd stand on their toes. Meanwhile, we would keep them amused by playing music, having them shout slogans, and the like.

  I have often been accused of being an angry man. Yes, I was angry. Or perhaps I should say, furious! Furious at the way my people had been betrayed in pre-1914 Austria as well as ever since. Furious at the way we Germans had been surrounded by enemies who were planning our destruction. Furious because of the deaths of so many of my comrades in the Great War. Furious at the traitors who stabbed us frontline soldiers in the back and brought about our country’s defeat. Furious at the way the victors treated us Germans, first by continuing the blockade after the November 1918 armistice and then in the Treaty of Versailles and throughout the 1920s. Furious at the way our Volksgenossen were robbed, abused, and sometimes murdered in almost every one of the newly established states of Eastern Europe. Furious at our enemies, domestic and foreign. Furious, above all, at the Jews! The latter stood behind everything unsavory, everything evil, in this world. Apologize for my fury? Never. It was my rage which turned me into the superbly effective speaker I was. So much so that I practiced it. And so much so that, when the mood deserted me for one reason or another, I was able to fake it.

  From beginning to end, my fury was precisely the fuel that drove me. I do not mean to say that I was always furious. Far from it. Both in Germany and abroad, millions of people owe their impression of me to my rhetorical performances during mass meetings, performances that they witnessed either in person or on screen. They are, however, highly misleading. The great majority of the meetings I addressed during my career were private and relatively small. Early on the audience tended to consist of selected followers as well as society ladies, Later they were joined by professors, high officials, officers, and businessmen. Yelling at such people, or even calling your enemies names, will only make them put you down as vulgar.