1924: The Year that Made Hitler

by Peter Ross Range

  To many, this might have been a tempting offer. But even though the old-fashioned Prussian general favored a right-wing government, he wanted no part of lamppost hangings and extreme rhetoric from a fire-breathing beer hall politician. According to Selchow, Seeckt simply replied: “From today forward, Herr Hitler, we have nothing more to say to one another!” Seeckt left for Berlin.7

  By now Hitler had built a reputation as an iron man who stood up to bourgeois politicians. Nazi Party membership, by local standards, was soaring—from twenty thousand to fifty-five thousand in 1923 alone.* A Hitler speech in Munich was now always promoted on wall posters as a Riesenversammlung—a “gigantic gathering”—and indeed it was. With his apocalyptic predictions, pat solutions, and unvarnished appeal to mass emotions, Hitler was able to fill the Circus Krone with up to six thousand listeners.

  These listeners were eager to hear facile explanations for their mounting misery, and Hitler knew just where to place the blame. Pointing the finger at the stab-in-the-back civilians, especially Jews, who “betrayed” the “frontline fighters” in 1918 and thereby caused Germany to lose the war, Hitler vilified the current German government and the Weimar constitution as illegitimate. His was becoming the loudest voice among the numerous Weimar Republic rejectionists on both extremes of German politics—Communists on the left, ultranationalists and unreconstructed monarchists on the right. Hitler made proximate bugaboos of “Big Capital” and “internationalists,” meaning all leftists who promoted the socialist international brotherhood. He denounced France and Britain and poured scorn on the “swindle” of Woodrow Wilson’s unrealized Fourteen Points. He painted a rosy picture of prewar Germany in contrast to its current “disgrace and defeat.”8 He made complicated things simple. “Political agitation must be primitive,” he said.9

  Hitler’s skill at galvanizing his audiences and striking deeper emotional chords than other politicians lay not merely in his demagoguery, but also in his ability to see beyond the political issues of the day to underlying themes and yearnings of his listeners. While he could rail with the best of them about the French occupation, inflation, unemployment, and the feckless government in Berlin, he also reached for something larger and broader—“a sense of greatness”—that resonated on a personal level among people feeling confused and buffeted by events beyond their control. “The question of the recovery of the German people is not a question of economic recovery,” he wrote in an internal party memorandum. “Rather it is a matter of regaining an inner feeling among the people, the only thing that can lead again to national greatness and, through that, to economic welfare.”10 Hitler was selling the goodness and the potential of the German people, not just a stronger mark and fair wages. When he denounced the “outrages” of the Treaty of Versailles, ranted about “usury against the people,” and rhapsodized about the “culture-creating” qualities of Germanic peoples, listeners felt he was talking about them, not about abstractions. Whatever the wrongs of World War I and whatever the merits of assigning “sole war guilt” to Germany as a collective, Germans as individuals did not feel that they were any worse than the French, the Belgians, or anyone else. Their self-esteem was shattered and offended, but Hitler’s speeches offered them a different picture of themselves as strong and honorable people. He cleverly branded the Nazi undertaking a “freedom movement.” This ingenious emotional strategy transformed his events into mass entertainments with an overlay of religious fervor, like revivalist tent meetings. Posters advertising the gatherings even had a negative religious tilt: “Jews not admitted,” they read.

  Hitler did more than appeal to emotions, though; he made arguments that had people nodding their heads. His heady brew of nationalism, social Darwinism, and biological anti-Semitism was served up with a stiletto intellect and a prodigious historical memory. “In a very short time I learned how to knock the enemy’s weapons out of his own hands,” wrote Hitler. Hitler’s particular joy was preaching to his opponents and tormentors. Other politicians, he noticed, “made speeches to people who were already in agreement with them. But that missed the point: all that counted was using propaganda and enlightenment to convince people who… came from a different point of view.” Hitler already understood the importance of wooing the independents.

  The beer hall preacher was adding to his propagandistic bag of tricks, too: He used rousing music to warm up the crowds and rolling waves of flags and uniforms to induce a sense of shared community and militant purpose. He consciously staged prima donna–style late arrivals and approached the stage directly through the audience, not from the behind the podium. He began to fetishize the newly adopted raised-arm Nazi salute copied from Mussolini, who got it from the Romans. In a pre-radio, pre-television era, with no intermediating machine between speaker and audience, such crowd-pleasing devices were effective techniques for building a bond, even if momentary. Hitler’s talents were ideally suited for a visceral connection with mobs of people, who went home with an afterglow of political enthusiasm undiluted by a television or radio report, or even by pictures in the next day’s newspaper since almost none were printed at the time. And Hitler made sure his picture did not appear in those that were printed; he understood the value of maintaining an aura of mystery and initially forbade anyone to photograph him. When Heinrich Hoffmann, his future friend and court photographer, in 1922 attempted an unauthorized picture of Hitler on the street, the Nazi leader’s bodyguards attacked Hoffmann and exposed his photo plate. It would be another year, in September 1923, before the world got its first look at Hitler from an Associated Press photograph taken at a rally in Nuremberg.11

  Hitler had honed his speaking style as well: a slow start, wandering through history, followed by Wagnerian crescendos and bombastic finales. Practicing before mirrors (and later in front of Hoffmann’s camera), he had developed a repertoire of theatrical gestures to dramatize his points—the extended fist, the pleading hands, a toss of his forelock as sweat poured from his brow. “His technique resembled the thrusts and parries of a fencer,” noted Hanfstaengl.12 Then, just as dramatically as he had entered, Hitler would depart through the crowd as a final anthem was played by a band. Lingering for argument and discussion could, he believed, “completely undo hours of oratorical labor.”13 People came to be carried away by the man who could speak from sketchy notes for up to three hours, and they were.

  Wrote one woman in 1923: “You cannot imagine how quiet it becomes when this man speaks. It’s as though thousands of listeners can no longer breathe. A cheer goes up that lasts for minutes when, full of rage, he skewers the acts of those who govern us and who now prevent him and his followers from dealing with the November Bigs. Until he waves his hand for quiet, so that he can continue speaking, there is no peace.… Adolf Hitler has such a firm belief in the honesty of his national socialist standpoint that he spontaneously transfers it to his listeners.”14

  Karl Alexander von Müller, the history professor who had noticed Hitler’s oratorical bent during his “political citizenship” courses at the University of Munich, remembered his first experience, belatedly, of Hitler as a public speaker. It was at a 1923 rally in the large Löwenbräukeller beer hall.

  “For hours, booming military music; for hours, short speeches by subordinate speakers. When was he coming—had something unexpected happened?” Müller wrote. “Nobody can describe the fever that spread in this atmosphere. Suddenly there was movement at the back entrance. Words of command. The speaker on the platform stopped in mid-sentence. Everybody jumped up, saluting. And right through the shouting crowds and the streaming flags the one they were waiting for came with his followers, walking quickly to the platform, his right arm raised stiffly. He passed by me quite close and I saw a different person from the one I had met now and then in private homes; his gaunt, pale features contorted as if by inward rage, cold flames darting from his protruding eyes, which seemed to be searching out foes to be conquered.… ‘Fanatical, hysterical romanticism with a brutal core of willpower?’ I n
oted down.”15

  Hitler was maintaining a frantic schedule in 1923. He spoke all over Munich—in the Hofbräuhaus, the Bürgerbräukeller, the Löwenbräukeller, the Circus Krone, even at out-of-town Nazi gatherings in Nuremberg, Bayreuth, Augsburg, and Regensburg, all in Bavaria. Once he spoke in Salzburg, just across the border in Austria. Hitler, the indefatigable mouth, was already on his way to becoming perhaps the most prolific political speaker of all time, with a lifetime production of words to rival that of the most inexhaustible writer.16 And he was increasingly hammering his central theme—the Jews.

  From Dietrich Eckart, Hitler had learned early in his speaking career that he could always stir up a crowd by plucking at the widespread anti-Semitic sentiments then rampant in Europe, especially in Germany. His nasty swipes at “Jewish domination” and “Jewish usurers” unleashed the greatest applause.17 Speeches with titles like “The World Jew and the World Stock Exchange” and “Germany at the Crossroads: The Jews’ Paradise or German People’s State?” drew large crowds eager to hear about the Jewish bugaboo, the root of all misery. One long-winded speech, titled “The ‘Inciters’ of Truth,” laid blame for Germany’s postwar downfall on Jews; a special reprint of the speech by the Völkischer Beobachter sold out, so it was reprinted again.18 Among Hitler’s favorite resources for his anti-Semitism were the works of American automobile magnate Henry Ford (The International Jew) and the notorious Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Even though Hitler soon knew that the Protocols were a forgery, he continued to invoke them in his speeches because they contained “the inner truth” about Jewry, he claimed.19

  Gradually, Hitler had begun spinning his increasingly radical anti-Jewish views into an all-encompassing theory of the world. “Hitler and his associates… believed that anti-Semitism offered the explanatory framework for world history,” wrote historian Jeffrey Herf.20 By 1923, Hitler had developed a convenient, highly simplified, stereotype-based narrative of Jewish perfidy (Werdegang des Judentums, or “the path of the Jews”). Borrowing heavily from anti-Semitic writer Theodor Fritsch, Hitler outlined a tale of the cunning Jew. The story was, in Hitler’s telling, a quick leap through the centuries that led inexorably to the Jews’ full conquest of Germany, Europe, and the world. The path began with “court Jews” (Hofjuden) achieving positions of influence in Europe as personal bankers to nobility. Then came the “popular Jew” (Volksjude) who promoted democracy “and became everybody’s friend” while espousing a “false humanitarianism.”21 But this good democratic Jew then mutated into the “blood Jew” (Blutjude), the merciless member of the Bolshevik leadership that took over Russia and unleashed a sanguinary reign of terror, Hitler claimed. “The Jew governs. He creates a dictatorship of the proletariat.… Instead of parliament, the gallows.”22

  Never mind historical details. Hitler’s little story line was devoured by a crowd hungry for scapegoats. (It was also perfect preparation for what would become the most famous chapter of Mein Kampf, “Nation and Race.”) Undergirding his paranoiac anti-Semitic construct of history was the message that Germans were the victims. He was not only painting the treacherous Jew as a target of hate and, eventually, extermination; he was first portraying Jews as the aggressor, an active enemy who was a mortal threat to Germans. As he told this story, over and over again, to rapt audiences, Hitler was laying the groundwork for a later message—convincing the German people that Jews had forced him to go to war. (In a 1939 speech before the Reichstag, he blamed Jews in advance for the outbreak of World War II and for their own coming mass extinction. If the “international Jewish capitalists” succeeded “in plunging mankind into yet another world war,” railed Hitler, the result would be the “annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.”)

  Even in the early 1920s, as he and Hanfstaengl were strolling home from a hugely popular movie, Fridericus Rex, which glorified Frederick the Great, Hitler made a comment that stunned his companion and foreshadowed his murderous future. Hitler said he especially liked the moment when the aging king threatened to have the crown prince beheaded. No sentimentality, indicated Hitler, should stand between a leader and his goals, a position often restated in later years. “Great deeds require harsh measures,” Hitler told his walking companion. “What does it matter if a couple dozen of our Rhineland cities go up in flames? A hundred thousand dead would mean nothing if it assures Germany’s future.”

  “I was thunderstruck,” wrote Hanfstaengl.23

  Hitler’s expansionist bent was also beginning to show. He announced the Nazi belief in a Greater Germany encompassing all of German-speaking Austria and the Bohemian parts of Czechoslovakia, especially Sudetenland. He called for more “land and soil” for the German people, a harbinger of what would become his Lebensraum policy and, ultimately, his invasion of Russia.

  While keeping his mad schedule, Hitler took time for a quick fund-raising trip to Berlin by car with Hanfstaengl, a trip that nearly brought the whole juggernaut down. Hanfstaengl’s car, a not-so-shiny old Selve, was stopped in “red Saxony” near Leipzig by a Communist roadblock. Hitler was already known as the Communists’ archenemy; had the armed men realized who the small mustachioed man was, the scene could have ended with Hitler’s arrest, or worse. But the quick-thinking, theatrical Hanfstaengl—a dual American and German citizen—whipped out his U.S. passport and “affected an atrocious accent” in German, he wrote. Declaring himself an important international businessman, he described the fellow sitting silently in the backseat as “my man” (valet). The Communists waved them on.24

  Hitler was by now, in mid-1923, unafraid to flaunt his extreme and anti-democratic views to the outside world. In an interview with an American newspaper, The World, he stated plainly: “Democracy is a joke.… History has always been made by an organized minority which seized power for the benefit of the majority.” Elsewhere, he wrote: “The National Socialist movement is… the mortal enemy of today’s parliamentary system. We oppose the concept of democratic majority rule and promote a Germanic democracy based on the authority of the leader.”25 Hitler told the American Monthly that “Marxism is not socialism, but a Jewish invention [and] no healthy man is a Marxist.”26

  The next showdown between Hitler and the ruling powers came on May 1, 1923, the traditional International Workers’ Day. Informed that Communists and Socialists planned big rallies for May Day, Hitler and the Nazis decided to thwart and attack them. Drawing their weapons out of the Reichswehr arsenal—where they had been stored under special arrangement with the army—Hitler’s men assembled on Theresa’s Meadow, the massive field where the Octoberfest is held every year. But the Nazis were kept a great distance from their leftist adversaries and were eventually surrounded by police and the Reichswehr. Along with their right-wing allies, Hitler’s men were forced to stand down and return their weapons to the Reichswehr armory. This was a victory for Lossow and Seisser and a nasty propaganda defeat for Hitler—the only one he would suffer in the months leading up to his putsch. Nursing his wounds, Hitler withdrew for several weeks to his preferred Alpine retreat, Berchtesgaden, near the Austrian border.

  Staying at a bed-and-breakfast called Pension Moritz under his preferred and oft-used pseudonym Herr Wolf, he was joined on “his magic mountain,” as one observer called it, by various members of his retinue.27 Rudolf Hess, in a letter to his parents, said the leader’s time in the mountains was doing him good. “What an unusual sight to see him ambling around in old lederhosen with bare knees and a short-sleeved shirt. He looks a lot better than before.”28

  Not all of his followers agreed. There were no rooms left at the Pension Moritz when Hanfstaengl arrived in Berchtesgaden, so he had to bunk in with Eckart, the Munich muse, who seemed to be cooling to some of Hitler’s extremist positions and antics. Eckart was put out with Hitler for marching around the courtyard of the little inn, cracking his leather whip and showing off to the proprietor’s comely wife while spouting revolutionary predictions and declamations. “I must enter Berlin like Christ in the Temple of
Jerusalem and wipe out the moneylenders!” shouted Hitler.

  Eckart confided to Hanfstaengl: “Something has gone completely wrong with Adolf. The man is developing an incurable case of folie de grandeur. If he lets his Messiah complex run away with him, he will ruin us all.”29

  CHAPTER FOUR

  A Hot Autumn

  “Tonight the balloon goes up!”

  —STORM TROOPER, 1923

  Hitler’s days in the mountains, it turned out, were balmy times before the coming storm. By autumn 1923, Germany was an explosion waiting to happen. The sitting national government under Chancellor Wilhelm Cuno had just collapsed, its policy of passive resistance a massive failure. Its replacement would be another center-left government under Gustav Stresemann. Inflation continued to gallop out of control, moving into the trillions of marks per U.S. dollar. Talk of civil war was in the air, and even of foreign invasion from the east (Polish and Czech forces) and from the west (French and Belgian forces). Besides assorted hints of aggression by the French military if Germany began falling apart, the French ambassador Pierre de Margerie had explicitly told Chancellor Stresemann that France would intervene if a right-wing dictatorship took over Germany—a major braking factor on potential putschists in Berlin.1

  Just to Bavaria’s north, the states of Thuringia (a land of rolling forests and cultural centers like Weimar and Eisenach) and Saxony (with major cities like Leipzig and Dresden) were in upheaval; they had just admitted Communists into their coalition governments who wanted to stage uprisings to grab the whole cake and stage a Communist revolution in Germany. Their plan was directly supported by the Communist International in Moscow, modeled after Russia’s 1917 October Revolution. The plan was prospectively and aspirationally called the “German October.” In response to these rumblings, General Seeckt and the Reichswehr were preparing to invade Thuringia and Saxony to oust the Communists. There was even talk of using Bavaria’s Reichswehr forces to suppress the neighboring Communists. Germany was, in short, an unstable place with centrifugal forces in play.