The next few days came and with them the most terrible certainty of my life. The rumors became more and more oppressive. What I had taken for a local affair was now said to be a general revolution. To this was added the disgraceful news from the front. They wanted to capitulate. Was such a thing really possible?
On November 10, the pastor came to the hospital for a short address: now we learned everything.
In extreme agitation, I, too, was present at the short speech. The dignified old gentleman seemed a-tremble as he informed us that the House of Hollenzollern should no longer bear the German imperial crown; that the fatherland had become a “republic”; that we must pray to the Almighty not to refuse His blessing to this change and not to abandon our people in the times to come. He could not help himself, he had to speak a few words in memory of the royal house. He began to praise its services in Pomerania, in Prussia, nay, to the German fatherland, and – here he began to sob gently to himself – in the little hall the deepest dejection settled on all hearts, and I believe that not an eye was able to restrain its tears. But when the old gentleman tried to go on, and began to tell us that we must now end the long War, yes, that now that it was lost and we were throwing ourselves upon the mercy of the victors, our fatherland would for the future be exposed to dire oppression, that the armistice should be accepted with confidence in the magnanimity of our previous enemies, I could stand it no longer. It became impossible for me to sit still one minute more. Again everything went black before my eyes; I tottered and groped my way back to the dormitory, threw myself on my bunk, and dug my burning head into my blanket and pillow.
Since the day when I had stood at my mother’s grave, I had not wept.
His rage and ignominy at what he saw as a breach of faith formed the engine of hatred that drove his later political ideas and actions; without it they are unthinkable. The scene in which he buries his face in his pillow and weeps transforms into an ominous, heavily laden picture of the consequences of that breach:
And so it had all been in vain. In vain all the sacrifices and privations; in vain the hunger and thirst of months which were often endless; in vain the hours in which, with mortal fear clutching at our hearts, we nevertheless did our duty; and in vain the death of two millions who died. Would not the graves of all the hundreds of thousands open, the graves of those who with faith in the fatherland had marched forth never to return? Would they not open and send the silent mud- and blood-covered heroes back as spirits of vengeance to the homeland which had cheated them with such mockery of the highest sacrifice which a man can make to his people in this world?
This host of spirits, these two million dead soldiers covered with mud and blood, were indeed to come home and haunt Germany, it was in order to restore their honor and accord meaning to their sacrifice that Hitler rearmed the nation in the thirties; defeat was to be avenged, the old enemies and the traitors who had worked for peace were to be crushed, but it was also because the war in itself had been so significant to him and so many of his generation. Nazism was also a death cult and a warrior cult; this gruesome image, the graves opening, the fallen rising up, bloodied and smeared with mud, as spirits of vengeance, was later to find further expression in the skull-and-crossbones symbolism of the SS.
In contrast to the majority he had nothing to come back to when the war ended, so what he did was to remain in the military, for besides meaning and direction the army had given him food, lodgings, and a well-defined job of work to carry out for four years. He went back to Munich and reenlisted with the reserve battalion of the infantry regiment with which he had served.
* * *
After returning to Munich, Hitler was assigned duty as a prison-camp guard for two months, subsequently carrying out guard duty at the city’s Hauptbahnhof, and was selected as a representative of his company. In the spring of 1919, following a period of civil unrest, he was picked out by the officer in charge of an army information department, a captain by the name of Karl Mayr, whose job it was to monitor suspicious political elements, which is to say the radical left, and to combat subversion within army ranks. Hitler was undergoing an anti-Bolshevik “instruction course,” Kershaw writes, and it was on this occasion his rhetorical talents first came to notice. A lecturer on the course, a Professor von Müller, mentioned these and pointed him out to Mayr, who recognized Hitler immediately as “Hitler from the List Regiment.” Later, Mayr would write, “he was like a tired stray dog looking for a master … ready to throw in his lot for anyone who would show him kindness,” Toland reports. The most remarkable thing about this description of Hitler, however, is that at this time he was “totally unconcerned about the German people and their destinies.” This was hardly the fact of the matter; what Mayr observed was that Hitler was not talking about it. Introverted, silent, troubled, pale, without purpose – a stray dog hungry for kindness. Mayr gave him that kindness, or at least a small measure of purpose: toward the end of the summer Hitler was giving his own pro-nationalist, anti-Bolshevik “course” at a military camp outside Augsburg. In Hitler’s own words:
One day I asked for the floor. One of the participants felt obliged to break a lance for the Jews and began to defend them in lengthy arguments. This aroused me to an answer. The overwhelming majority of the students present took my standpoint. The result was that a few days later I was sent into a Munich regiment as a so-called “educational officer.”
I started out with the greatest enthusiasm and love. For all at once I was offered an opportunity of speaking before a larger audience; and the thing that I had always presumed from pure feeling without knowing it was now corroborated: I could “speak.” My voice, too, had grown so much better that I could be sufficiently understood at least in every corner of the small squad rooms.
No task could make me happier than this, for now before being discharged I was able to perform useful services to the institution which had been so close to my heart: the army.
And I could boast of some success: in the course of my lectures I led many hundreds, indeed thousands, of comrades back to their people and fatherland. I “nationalized” the troops and was thus also able to help strengthen the general discipline.
Here again I became acquainted with a number of like-minded comrades, who later began to form the nucleus of the new movement.
That he ever held the position of “educational officer” is a misrepresentation, and the number of students he lectured is grossly exaggerated, but his teaching was undoubtedly a success and his talent for winning over an audience was demonstrable. Professor von Müller describes the moment he first saw Hitler hold forth:
[A small group were] riveted to a man in their midst who, with a strangely guttural voice incessantly and with mounting passion, spoke to them. I had the peculiar feeling that the excitement generated by his performance at the same time gave him his voice. I saw a pallid, gaunt face under strands of hair hanging down in unmilitary fashion. He had a close-cropped moustache and strikingly large, light blue, fanatically cold, glowing eyes.
Hitler’s task was to give lectures to his fellow soldiers and to monitor the teeming numbers of political parties which had arisen in Munich at that time. It was in this latter capacity, in the autumn of 1919, that he attended a meeting of a small party called the German Workers’ Party, whose political program was a blend of nationalism, socialism, and anti-Semitism, combating internationalism and Judaism its two primary causes. Shortly after this meeting Hitler applied for membership of the party, which would soon change its name to the German National Socialist Workers’ Party, swelling from a few dozen members at the time of Hitler joining to become the largest political party in Germany in the space of little more than a decade.
Four days after his membership was accepted, Hitler was ordered by Mayr to respond to an inquiry the department had received from a former participant in one of the instruction courses asking for a clarification of “the Jewish Question.” Hitler provided a lengthy and meticulous reply, writing that the J
ews were a race, not a religion, and that anti-Semitism had to be based not on sentiment but on fact. An emotional reaction would lead to pogroms, whereas anti-Semitism based on reason had to lead to a systematic removal of the rights of the Jews. The “final aim,” he concluded, “must unshakeably be the removal of the Jews altogether.”
* * *
Three years later, in autumn 1922, the American ambassador to Germany dispatched a man to Munich to compile a report on the new and prospering National Socialist party and its leader, Adolf Hitler. The attaché’s name was Truman Smith and his specific brief was to meet Hitler and provide an assessment of his character, personality, abilities, and weaknesses, as well as to investigate the strengths and potentialities of his party, the NSDAP. The United States consul in Munich, Robert Murphy, informed Smith that Hitler was a “pure and simple adventurer,” though nevertheless believed he was “a real character and is exploiting all latent discontent”; still it was questionable whether he was “big enough to take the lead in a German national movement,” as Toland reports. At the invitation of newspaper editor Max Erwin von Scheubner-Richter, a member of Hitler’s inner circle who assured him that the party’s anti-Semitism was purely propaganda, Smith witnessed Hitler’s inspection of storm troopers in front of the new party headquarters:
A remarkable sight indeed. Twelve hundred of the toughest roughnecks I have ever seen in my life pass in review before Hitler at the goose step under the old Reichflag wearing red armbands with Hakenkreuzen. Hitler, following the review, makes a speech … then shouts, “Death to the Jews!” etc. and etc. There was frantic cheering. I never saw such a sight in my life.
Three days later, on the morning of November 22, Smith meets Hitler in person, and is given an outline of the party’s politics. During the meeting Hitler states that “only a dictatorship can bring Germany to its feet,” and that it was
much better for America and England that the decisive struggle between our civilization and Marxism be fought out on German soil rather than on American and English soil. If we (America) do not help German Nationalism, Bolshevism will conquer Germany. Then there will be no more reparations and Russian and German Bolshevism, out of motives of self-preservation, must attack the Western nations.
While also discoursing on other subjects, Toland writes, Hitler avoids mentioning the Jews at all, until Smith asks him outright, Hitler disarmingly replying that he merely favors the withdrawal of citizenship and their exclusion from public affairs. By the time their meeting ended, Smith was convinced Hitler was going to be an important factor in German politics. Before leaving, Smith accepted a ticket from the party press secretary, Rosenberg, to a speech Hitler was giving that same evening. As it turned out, he was unable to attend, being called back to his embassy and having a train to catch, for which reason he passed his ticket on to Ernst Hanfstaengl, a Munich contact of Warren Robbins, who was a counselor at the embassy; the two had studied together at Harvard. Hanfstaengl’s father was German, his mother American, both families belonging to the highest echelons of their respective societies. His mother was of old New England stock, his maternal grandmother was the cousin of General Sedgwick, who fell in the Civil War, his maternal grandfather was General William Heine, originally from Dresden, also a Civil War veteran, and a pallbearer at the funeral of Abraham Lincoln. Hanfstaengl’s mother remembered the funeral and her father being visited in Dresden by Wagner and Liszt. On his father’s side, two generations of Hanfstaengls had served as privy councillors to the Dukes of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, and the family were well-known patrons of the arts; his grandfather founded an art publishing house and had moreover photographed three German Kaisers, Moltke, Liszt, and Wagner, as well as Ibsen, and the family home in Munich was a favored rendezvous for such luminaries as Richard Strauss, Fridtjof Nansen, and Mark Twain. Hanfstaengl was in other words a person for whom the world stood open, a member of Munich’s cultural glitterati as well as that of the American northeastern seaboard; during his time at Harvard he had met two American presidents, the then-incumbent Theodore Roosevelt, as well as his later successor, Franklin D. Roosevelt, not to mention the poet T.S. Eliot, a fact he makes abundantly clear in the blustering introduction to his memoirs, first published in the United States in 1957.
It was Hanfstaengl who took Smith to the train in Munich that November evening in 1922, meeting Rosenberg, who gave Hanfstaengl Smith’s ticket to the evening’s event and accompanied him to the venue. Hanfstaengl describes Rosenberg as “a sallow, untidy fellow, who looked half-Jewish in an unpleasant sort of way.” They take a tram to the Kindl Keller beer hall, which is packed. Hanfstaengl sits down at the press table and asks one of the reporters there where Hitler is. The man points; Hitler is seated next to Max Amann, a sergeant from his old regiment, and Anton Drexler, founder of the party Hitler joined three years before. Hanfstaengl’s first impression is this:
In his heavy boots, dark suit, and leather waistcoat, semistiff white collar and odd little moustache, he really did not look very impressive – like a waiter in a railway-station restaurant.
When Drexler introduces Hitler, a roar of applause goes up. Hitler straightens up and walks past the press table to the platform with a “swift, controlled step, the unmistakable soldier in mufti.” The atmosphere is electric, Hanfstaengl writes, and the speech Hitler proceeds to give is brilliant.
No one who judges his capacity as a speaker from the performances of his later years can have any true insight into his gifts. As time went on he became drunk with his own oratory before vast crowds and his voice lost its former character through the intervention of microphone and loudspeaker. In his early years he had a command of voice, phrase, and effect which has never been equaled, and on this evening he was at his best.
In a quiet, reserved voice he drew a picture of what had happened in Germany since November 1918: the collapse of the monarchy and the surrender at Versailles; the founding of the Republic on the ignominy of war guilt; the fallacy of international Marxism and Pacifism; the eternal class war leitmotif and the resulting hopeless stalemate between employers and employees, between Nationalists and Socialists.
As he felt the audience becoming interested in what he had to say, he gently moved his left foot to one side, like a soldier standing at ease in slow motion, and started to use his hands and arms in gesture, of which he had an extensive and expressive repertoire. There was none of the barking and braying he later developed, and he had an ingenious, mocking humor which was telling without being offensive.
Hitler criticizes the Kaiser for being a weakling, he criticizes the Weimar Republicans for accepting the victors’ demands, which were stripping Germany of everything but the graves of those who perished in the trenches. He compares the separatist movement and religious exclusivity of the Catholic Church in Bavaria with the comradeship of the soldiers on the front line, who never asked a wounded comrade his religion before leaping to his aid. He speaks at length on the subjects of patriotism and national pride, highlighting Kemal Atatürk in Turkey and Benito Mussolini in Italy as examples to be followed. He hits out at war profiteers and receives roaring applause as he tears them apart for wasting valuable foreign currency on importing oranges from Italy at the same time as half the country goes hungry because of inflation. He attacks the Jews, who are becoming fat on the misery of others, and he lashes out against the communists and socialists for wanting to disrupt German traditions.
I looked round at the audience. Where was the nondescript crowd I had seen only an hour before? What was suddenly holding these people, who, on the hopeless incline of the falling mark, were engaged in a daily struggle to keep themselves within the line of decency? The hubbub and mug-clattering had stopped and they were drinking in every word. Only a few yards away was a young woman, her eyes fastened on the speaker. Transfixed as though in some devotional ecstasy, she had ceased to be herself and was completely under the spell of Hitler’s despotic faith in Germany’s future greatness.
When the speech was
over Hanfstaengl went up to introduce himself to Hitler, who was still standing on the platform.
Naïve and yet forceful, obliging and yet uncompromising, he stood, face and hair soaked in perspiration, his semistiff collar, fastened with a square imitation-gold safety pin, melted to nothing. While talking he dabbed his face with what had once been a handkerchief, glancing worriedly at the many open exits through which came the drafts of a cold November night.
“Herr Hitler, my name is Hanfstaengl,” I said. “Captain Truman Smith asked me to give you his best wishes.” “Ah yes, the big American,” he answered. “He begged me to come here and listen to you, and I can only say I have been most impressed,” I went on. “I agree with 95 percent of what you said and would very much like to talk to you about the rest some time.”
“Why, yes, of course,” Hitler said. “I am sure we shall not have to quarrel about the odd 5 percent.” He made a very pleasant impression, modest and friendly. So we shook hands again and I went home.
There are many descriptions of Hitler’s speeches from this time. Hanfstaengl’s is special because he belongs to the apex of society, not the usual beer-hall crowd that is most often Hitler’s audience, and the fact that he is so taken by Hitler’s gifts indicates that the vulgar and tasteless, brutally simple strokes of Mein Kampf were absent from his public appearances. Hanfstaengl recognizes that Hitler is petty bourgeois, but also that as a speaker he is unconstrained by the fact, rising above it by virtue of his magnetism and oratorical skills, the almost hypnotic charisma he so obviously possesses, and is thereby able to capture the imagination of almost every member of the crowd, regardless of class. At the same time his petty-bourgeois nature is a crucial factor, for as Hanfstaengl thinks to himself that night, unable to sleep after listening to Hitler for the first time:
Where all our conservative politicians and speakers were failing abysmally to establish any contact with the ordinary people, this self-made man, Hitler, was clearly succeeding in presenting a non-Communist program to exactly those people whose support we needed.
My Struggle, Book 6 Page 82