by A. N. Wilson
In Berlin, the Republican government was perpetually threatened, on the one hand by the furious voices of the Right (who ranged from old royalists who were shocked by the emperor’s abdication, to those who would favour a military dictatorship) and, on the other hand, by the enormous power and influence of the Communists. In Bavaria, where the Wittelsbach Dynasty abandoned its crown, the Communists took over for a short while until they were replaced by a right-wing republic led by Gustav von Kahr. The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk had been signed a few months before Germany capitulated to France, Britain and America. In this treaty, the Russians signed away large tracts of land which would the following year be given back to them by the terms of the Treaty of Versailles. The Communist government of Lenin had every reason to hope that the discontented soldiers of the German army and the hard-pressed German working classes, suffering enormous post-war hardship, would turn to Communism.
It was this which the German officer class was determined to resist. Seventy miles to the west of Munich was the camp of Lechfeld where thousands of troops, returning prisoners of war and others, were assembled before being discharged into civilian life. The camp was ‘Bolshevistically and Spartacistically contaminated’ – according to the officer in charge. (Spartacist was another word for the Communist movement, named after the leader of the Roman slave rebels, Spartacus.) Hitler was among those soldiers enlisted into the ‘education detachment’, the Aufklärungskommando, to speak to these would-be Communists and persuade them of the dangers of the Red Peril. This was in July 1919, when the Treaty of Versailles, with all its unfairness, was a source of agony to all Germans. Hitler denounced the Treaty, he denounced the Communists and he denounced the international capitalist financiers and Jews whom he held responsible for having started the war in the first instance.
There could be no doubt that Hitler had the gift of the gab. ‘Herr Hitler, if I may put it this way, is the born people’s orator’, wrote an approving member of this early audience, ‘and by his fanaticism and his crowd appeal he clearly compels the attention of his listeners, and makes them think his way.’1
Together with his actual ability to manipulate an audience, Hitler also showed an intuitive sense which amounted to genius that the spoken word was going to be of more significance than the written word in the coming years. Even the Communists, with their belief in harnessing the power of the often illiterate masses, clung to a belief in the written text which showed them to be the natural heirs of Gutenberg, Luther and Caxton. From the beginnings of Communism in the early nineteenth century to its crisis or unravelling in the 1970s, Communism remained, among other things, a doctrine, whose texts, like the Koran or the Talmud, could be endlessly re-perused by the Doctors of the Church, and interpreted in a literary way. They belonged to the vanishing world of the text; Hitler belonged to the oral future, the future which contained Walt Disney, television and cinema.
‘The greatest revolutions in this world have never been directed by a pen! [The irony appears heavier in German, because the word for pen is feather.] No, the only thing the pen has been able to do is to provide theoretical foundations. But the power which has always set rolling the greatest religious and political avalanches in history from time immemorial has been the magic power [die Zauberkraft] of the spoken word.’2
Zauberkraft. From the beginning he saw himself as a magician. In fact, his sense of the power of the spoken word, the word blared through a loud-hailer, the word broadcast on radio and in film, was very far from being some ancient truth which had rolled down the ages from time immemorial. It was completely modern as in most respects he was. You can not imagine Hitler emerging as a dominant figure in any century before the twentieth. To this degree alone he is the supreme ‘eminent life’ of the twentieth century because in many respects he embodies it. He foreshadows Hollywood and television stars, and all the post-war politicians, of the free world as well as of the dictatorships, who depended for their success on their ability to present themselves on screen – a consideration which would have probably ditched the careers of most true political orators or administrative geniuses, from Pericles to Churchill (who was hopeless at TV). ‘The destiny of Peoples can only be changed by a storm of hot passion and only he who carries such passion within himself can arouse it in others. Such passion alone gives its Chosen One the words which like hammer blows can open the gates to the heart of a people. But the man whose passion fails and whose lips are sealed – he has not been chosen by heaven to proclaim its will. Therefore, let the writer remain by his ink-well …’3
Hitler, together with Pathé, the pioneer of cinematic newsreels, and together with the Hollywood producers and the early pioneers of sound broadcasting, saw that the twentieth century was going to leave behind the printed word. Germany had invented printing. Under Hitler’s dictatorship, Germany would burn its books. Gutenberg’s printing press created a revolution in human consciousness. It created a freedom which no Inquisition or procurator could entirely suppress. With the widespread distribution of printed matter, anyone capable of reading could study, and re-read texts and make up their own minds.
Hitler was the first and the most hypnotic artist of post-literacy.
And so it was, in that frenzied atmosphere of post-war German army camps, that Hitler had his first taste of the narcotic of adulation which, throughout a friendless, charmless and loveless thirty years of life, he had presumably craved at the deepest level. Wagner devotee that he was, he was naturally drawn to the politics of mass emotion. Not for him the quietly reasoned hope that by patient collaboration between men and women of good will, the worst features of the Treaty of Versailles could be negotiated; nor, at home, would he have possessed the smallest inclination to support a coalition of liberal opinion to safeguard jobs or institutional life as a more rational alternative to Bolshevism. From the very beginning, he wanted the big music of German nationalism, with all its associated xenophobia, philistine Jew-hatred and quasi-religious emotionalism. There were as many splinter parties of the extreme Right as there were of the extreme Left. As a much-trusted young speaker in the Aufklärungskommando, it was his task and his delight to sniff around in these unsavoury pools in Munich. He lighted upon the tiny German Workers Party, an extreme right-wing sect which had been founded by a Munich locksmith, Anton Drexler, on 7 March 1918. Drexler asked Hitler to join the central committee of the party, and he did so as the seventh member, though his membership number was 555. (It would seem unlikely that there were as many as 100, let alone 500, members at this date.) Karl Harrer, another of the party members, expressed the view, having heard committee member 555 speak in the Hofbräuhaus, one of the bigger beer-cellars in Munich, that Hitler had no gifts as an orator. But his opinion was not shared. The first time Hitler stood on the table of this medieval beer-hall and addressed the drinkers, there was an audience of 111. A little later, he addressed an audience of 200. By August 1920, the party was holding public rallies and had adopted the name by which it would ever afterwards be known – the National Socialist German Workers’ Party. With the whimsical German habit of shortening, nicknames and acronymics, the supporters of the NSDAP – Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei – were called the Nazis.
Hitler’s chief gift was for public speaking, but he also displayed, during these months, and in the years to come, two qualities which had lain latent and which, for example, his room-mate Kubizek could hardly have guessed at when he saw young Adolf lolling on his scruffy bed feeling sorry for himself in Vienna and doing absolutely nothing.
One of these gifts was a Machiavellian skill at political manipulation: it took him no time at all to move in on Drexler’s little band of malcontents and make them accept him as their leader. The second thing which he brought to the party in particular, and to life in general, was a taste for violence. An essential colleague in Hitler’s rise to power was Captain Ernst Röhm, a scar-faced homosexual who, as he said in the opening sentence of his memoirs, ‘From my childhood I had only one th
ought and wish – to be a soldier.’ Röhm loved the company of mindlessly violent street-boys, and with the new party being organized by Hitler and friends, Röhm saw the perfect opportunity for rough stuff on the grand scale. When all-out mob violence was not available, there would always be shop windows to be smashed, Reds to be given bloody noses and Jews to be pummelled in darkened alleys. Röhm had organized a patriotic free army – Freikorps – of men coming out of the army who were determined to fight against the Communists. By bringing these men into the National Socialist movement from the beginning, Röhm not only swelled its ranks. He determined that it should be by definition a cult of violence. His storm-division, Sturmabteilung or SA, could march, in their brown shirts and beneath the swastika emblem which had now been incorporated into the party regalia, as a private army within Germany.
Röhm attracted discontented ex-soldiers and violent youths into his SA. This in turn made the Nazis, from their inception, a frightening organization. If you criticized them or fell foul of them for whatever reason, you knew that you were risking broken ribs.
The intimidating power of his movement – and it had become Hitler’s movement from the moment he moved in on Drexler’s party – allowed him to develop his own cult of personality. While the SA frightened his rivals, Hitler could develop his quasi-operatic skills as a public performer. Hitler’s own gift for self-mythologizing was itself of a Wagnerian capacity. ‘In that hour, IT began.’
‘It’ – the thing which began with that production of Rienzi, seen in his youth – was among other things a lifelong passion for the music dramas of Richard Wagner. But it was also the capacity to see himself, and politics, as part of a music drama. He concluded the first volume of My Struggle with an account of the first big National Socialist rally in Munich on 24 February 1920. What catches our attention here is not whether any detail of Hitler’s account is true or could be challenged by others, but the way in which he chose, in his book, to present the occasion. He claimed that he alone took charge of the organization of the rally. He advertised it with posters and leaflets. ‘The text was concise and definite, an absolutely dogmatic form of expression being used.’4 One of the aims of the rally was to summon the faithful together. But another, equally important to Hitler, was to antagonize the enemy. For this reason he chose to set the swastika emblem in red banners. The propaganda point which he wanted to make was that the centre parties in German politics were no more than useful stooges to the Communists. The effect which he wanted to produce by using red banners was to draw the Communists out for a street battle. He hoped that the police would try to ban his rally, because of the red banners, and that there would then be a pitched battle between National Socialists and Communists. He had an ally in the Chief of Police, Ernst Pöhner, ‘who, in contradistinction to the majority of our so-called defenders of the authority of the State, did not fear to incur the enmity of traitors to the country and the nation but rather courted it as a mark of honour and honesty. For such men hatred of the Jews and Marxists, and the lies and calumnies they spread, was their only source of happiness in the midst of national misery.’
Hitler tells us in My Struggle that as he strode into the crowds waiting outside the Hofbräuhaus for the rally, and saw over 2,000 people, ‘my heart was nearly bursting with joy’.5
There were various speakers, some of whom were heckled. Then Hitler rose, and he proceeded to tell the audience of his twenty-five points. This was the party manifesto which Hitler and Drexler had thrashed out, including the ripping up of the Treaty of Versailles, the establishment of a Greater Germany formed by the union with Austria, and the abolition of Jewish rights of citizenship. As Hitler spoke on these themes, the hecklers fell silent, and his sentences were received with applause. For a speaker to outline twenty-five points, and to promise in advance that this was his intention, is, to put it mildly, asking a lot of an audience. Yet such was Hitler’s magnetism that this deadly sounding speech clearly had the crowd in raptures. The meeting lasted four hours. ‘As the masses streamed towards the exits, crammed shoulder to shoulder, shoving and pushing, I knew that a movement was now set afoot among the German people which would never pass into oblivion.’6
He saw it, however, in operatic terms. ‘A fire was enkindled from whose glowing heat the sword would be fashioned which would restore freedom to the German Siegfried and bring back life to the German nation.’7
Henceforth, the German people were seen as an orchestra whom he could conduct, as a great chorus who could sing his compositions. During the two or three years after the war, the government in Berlin suffered many setbacks. Politicians, and political activists on the Left, continued to see Germany’s problems in purely political terms. Hitler never did this. Kubizek as an adolescent had been surprised by Hitler’s outburst after Rienzi because he had never heard him speak of politics before. We see no sign of politics as such interesting him throughout his twenties. As it happened, he would show consummate skill at political negotiation with those who thought, by their greater levels of sophistication or experience, that they could bamboozle or somehow use him. They would invariably find that he had wrong-footed them. For the time being, however, there was no need to paint in the details of his picture. He needed only the broad wash. Finer shading would come later.
In the summer of 1921, Hitler spent some time in Berlin among various nationalist groups and proposed a merger between the NSDAP and the German Socialist Party, run by Alfred Brunner, a Düsseldorf engineer, and the bullying anti-Semite Julius Streicher. When eyebrows were raised by his comrades in Munich, Hitler immediately threatened to resign – the last thing, by this stage, which the Munich nationalists could survive. The bumbling right-wing Bavarians were appalled by his behaviour, accusing Hitler of ‘a lust for power and personal ambition’.8 The character assessment was obviously true, even if their paranoid assertion that Hitler was being manipulated by the Jews was wide of the mark. He successfully sued the newspaper which printed this material. Drexler and Harrer were distressed, because they wanted to thrash out, point by point, where and how they might differ from Brunner and Streicher’s German Socialist Party, and whether or not they were a fundamentally anti-capitalist organization. For Hitler, such divisive stuff was of no interest. He did not care for details. ‘Any idea’, he wrote in My Struggle, ‘may be looked upon as a source of danger if it be looked upon as an end in itself …’9
Although Hitler’s few ideas were in fact held very forcefully – international Jewish conspiracy, need for expansion into the East for Lebensraum, infallibility of Darwin’s theories, and so forth – it never much troubled him if his ideas were self-contradictory. For example, he deplored both the financiers who manipulated international markets and the Bolsheviks who wished to overthrow them, and saw both of them as part of the same Jewish threat. What he had to offer was not a political programme but an opera, a black-hearted drama into which he wished to suck as many people as possible. Once they had heard it, and allowed its mad music to enter their souls, the German people would be spellbound. Discussion of detailed political ideas was always the undoing of little backstreet parties such as Drexler had founded. As Hitler himself later enunciated, it matters not how idiotic the creed. What matters is the firmness with which it is enunciated.10 Nor was this viewpoint entirely cynical. Hitler had many faults, both as a man and as a politician. He was an incurable liar. He was brutal and cruel. He had none of the normal instincts of decency or kindliness. But he was not – as were some of the other Nazis who helped him into power, such as Goebbels or Speer – a cynical man. Although he distrusted almost everyone else – perhaps actually everyone – he believed in himself. And the great movement which he in some senses invented – embracing a national recovery based on poorly defined feelings of irrational uplift – actually depended for its success on its intellectual incoherence. He drew to himself those who hated Jews for being sinister men smoking cigars in boardrooms and bleeding Germany of its savings, and those who hated Jews for bei
ng red-eyed scavengers plotting the overthrow of capitalism and the manufacturing industry. He drew to himself those with a sense that he was protecting family values and religion, and those who thought – or rather felt – that he was the voice of the modern, the embodiment of Darwinian rationalism which had seen off religion. He drew to himself above all those who, through all the confused early years of the Weimar Republic, still felt the bitter wound of defeat in war, the dreadful unfairness of the Treaty, the sheer incredibility of the fact that the finest army in Europe, never defeated in the field, should have been written off as a failure – at the behest of a bespectacled Princeton professor, an unprincipled Welsh philandering liberal, and a deeply cynical old Frenchman who was determined to punish Germany for his own and his country’s contemptible defeat by Prussia in 1870. To all these people Hitler offered the most tempting of Class A narcotics, that is, Hope. No wonder that on 29 July 1921, when he saw off his rivals and backbiting enemies in the tin-pot little NSDAP, there was first heard the description of him as Unser Führer: Our Leader.
THREE
My Struggle
Throughout the autumn of 1922, there were painful negotiations between Germany and the Allied powers about the payment of reparations. The German Government pleaded with the Allies but the French were adamant. Germany must pay. When Germany defaulted, French troops moved into the industrial Ruhr district on 11 January 1923. This was Germany’s industrial heartland. It accounted for eighty per cent of the country’s steel and pig-iron production and more than eighty per cent of its coal.1 With the paralysis, or effectual confiscation, of German means of production, there was even less chance of meeting the cruel French demands for payment. The Germans adopted a policy of passive resistance to the French.