Hitler made his return strictly conditional on the fulfilment of his terms. First of all, he demanded the ‘immediate summoning of an extraordinary general meeting of the membership’ within eight days whose purpose was the replacement of the existing committee by a newly elected one chaired by himself. What is more, Hitler requested ‘dictatorial powers for the immediate establishment of a working group tasked with the ruthless purge of the party of the foreign elements’ that had ‘infiltrated’ it. Secondly, he demanded ‘the immutable acceptance of the principle that the seat of the movement was and would remain in Munich’, and that the local Ortsgruppe Munich would be the headquarters until a national organization could be established. Thirdly, Hitler insisted that there should be no further ‘change of the programme or the name’, at least not for six years; those who agitated for this should be expelled. Fourthly, he said that the NSDAP and the DSP should not join forces. Indeed, he determined that there should never be mergers with any group but only ‘takeover’ without any form of ‘concessions’ on the side of the NSDAP. Fifthly, Hitler laid down that any such negotiations be subject to his veto and that he chose those representing the party. Hitler averred that he made these demands ‘not because I crave power’ but because he was convinced that ‘without an iron leadership’ the party would soon degenerate from a National Socialist Workers Party into a mere ‘Occidental League’. Hitler had originally wanted to control the message rather than the party, but he now realized that he could not do the former without ensuring the latter.
It is not quite clear whether Hitler resigned with the intent of forcing the leadership’s hand, or whether he left in despair and decided to lay down the law only after attempts to win him back showed the underlying strength of his position. Even then, his demands were more modest than they sounded, being subject (as the law required) to membership vote. The ‘dictatorial powers’ were not requested for the running of the party in general but limited to the sphere that Hitler was primarily concerned about, namely the re-establishment and maintenance of ideological coherence. This is what underlay his demand to purge deviators, to oversee the absorption of other groups and the retention of Munich as an ideological ‘Rome’ or ‘Mecca’. The outcome, in any case, was the same. Hitler triumphed all along the line. Drexler caved in. The merger with the DSP was off, and nobody dared to suggest any fresh fusions on an equal basis. Munich remained the capital of the movement. Hitler joined the governing committee of the NSDAP as its chairman and conducted a thorough purge. Otto Dickel was expelled. Drexler was marginalized.82 No party speaker ever again had a good word to say about a Jew, or attempted to suggest that the western powers were not controlled by the Jews.
Hitler’s struggle with Drexler is common to most emerging political movements: the clash between the need for growth and the maintenance of ideological purity, which was the side which he took with such vigour. In July 1921, Hitler won his first political battle. He had become a politician. Whether Hitler had sought leadership or had leadership thrust upon him, it was clear that he now was increasingly not merely the de facto but the formal chief of the NSDAP. If he had once seen himself as a mere ‘drummer’ of the movement for the new Germany, he now aspired to be its leader.
Hitler now moved to reorganize and expand the NSDAP.83 By the end of 1921, membership stood at about 6,000.84 The party moved from Sterneckerbräu to larger premises at Corneliusstrasse 12. Local groups were founded in Hanover, Zwickau and Dortmund. Hitler tightened his control over the party, including the cells outside Germany. In the spring of 1922 the Austrian and Bohemian NSDAP accepted Hitler’s authority.85 Collegial decision-making was abolished. Sub-committees were now appointed by Hitler. Despite these moves, Hitler tried to keep out of day-to-day decision-making, and he saw his involvement in these matters simply as preparatory to resuming his propagandistic drive. Ideological purity rather than control for its own sake seems to have been his main concern. The only formal limitation was that imposed by the Weimar associational law, which meant that he could in theory at least still be held to account by the membership.86
In August 1921, Hitler established a formal party paramilitary formation, which was named the SA or Sturmabteilung on 5 October 1921, with headquarters in 39 Schellingstrasse, Munich. The first commander was Emil Maurice, who had already distinguished himself in brawling at Hitler’s side, or on his behalf. The main task of this new force was to protect NSDAP meetings and disrupt those of the other side. Cyclist, motorized and mounted sections were established, with weapons and training being provided by the Reichswehr. The latter hoped to draw on the SA, as on other right-wing groupings, in the event of civil unrest or a French invasion. The initial growth of the Sturmabteilung was modest, reaching about 700–800 men in twelve months, and about 1,000 at the beginning of the following year. Meanwhile, where Hitler could not establish complete authority over regional party organizations, he compromised. The most significant of these accommodations was with Julius Streicher in Nuremberg, who by 1922 had acknowledged Hitler’s supreme authority in return for more or less total domination of the NSDAP in Franconia.87 Even in Bavaria, therefore, the party remained diverse and Hitler’s level of direct control varied.88
In some ways, Bavaria was a congenial habitat. It considered itself a ‘centre of order’ in the Weimar chaos, an arcadia of conservative and patriotic values.89 Hitler was protected and supported by the Bavarian Reichswehr, which only loosely acknowledged the precedence of the national authority at this time, and whose loyalties lay firmly in Munich rather than Berlin.90 The president of the Munich Police, Ernst Pöhner, and the Chief of the Political Police, Wilhelm Frick, were NSDAP supporters. Hitler was also in constant contact with the numerous right-wing nationalist groupings which flourished in the city, and congregated around General Ludendorff, a patriotic icon from the war.91 Hitler began to build up a cadre of leaders and advisers who were gathering around the NSDAP and often him personally. Gregor Strasser joined the party in October 1922. That same month, Hitler first met Hermann Göring, a charismatic and well-connected fighter ace, who opened many doors to business and high society.
In other ways, Hitler and the NSDAP sat uneasily in the Munich mainstream, which was dominated by Catholicism and the Bavarian People’s Party (BVP).92 The BVP had complete command of the local parliamentary political scene. All of the sixty-five BVP Landtag deputies were Catholic, six of them clerics; all but one of its twenty Reichstag members were Catholic, two of them clerics.93 While the party was confessionally homogeneous, it was socially diverse, representing Bavarians from all classes, and was determined not to break away from the Reich but also to resist the Weimar Republic’s vision of a more centralized state. Despite his Austrian–essentially south German–roots Hitler found it very difficult to break into this constituency. It was for this reason he attempted to reach out to the churches through his concept of ‘positive Christianity’. Hitler claimed that Jesus had been ‘slandered’ by the same people who were scourging Germany today–the Jews.94 ‘We should follow the example of this man,’ Hitler argued on another occasion, ‘who was born poor in a cabin, who pursued high ideals and whom for this reason the Jews later crucified.’95 ‘The Christian religion is the only possible ethical basis of the German people,’ he said soon after, adding that it was important to avoid any ‘tension between the confessions’, because ‘religious divisions’ had been one of ‘the worst things to happen to the German people’.96 Though Hitler made some headway with Bavarian Catholics in the early 1920s,97 it was a demographic with which he struggled to connect until the end of his life.
Munich was thus an ambivalent habitat for the young NSDAP. It was stony ground for the Nazis not only politically and culturally, but also physically. The authorities began to take an ever dimmer view of Hitler’s activities, especially when these disturbed public order. He spent two stretches in prison. He lost an important ally with the resignation of Ernst Pöhner as president of the Munich Police in September 1921. A month lat
er, Hitler was summoned to police headquarters for a serious caution following a series of street brawls and beer-hall battles.98 The Völkischer Beobachter was repeatedly banned for publishing inflammatory articles.99 In March 1922, after his conviction for a breach of the peace, the Bavarian minister of the interior, Dr Franz Schweyer, seriously considered deporting Hitler to Austria, and the minister president, Count Lerchenfeld, made it clear to Hitler that he was in Bavaria on sufferance.100 The police watched Hitler closely.
Hitler remained determined to establish himself in Munich, but only as a beacon to inspire the rest of Germany and as a base from which to take over the Reich as a whole. ‘Munich must become a model,’ he wrote in January 1922, ‘the school but also the granite pedestal’ of the movement.101 ‘We do not have a Bavarian mission today,’ Hitler announced six months later, ‘rather Bavaria has the most important mission of its entire existence.’ Bavaria, on this reading, was not separate but rather ‘the most German state in the German Reich’. Munich was a sanctuary and a bulwark, certainly, but above all it was a sally-port. The special role Hitler envisaged for Bavaria in Germany was thus not as a separate or autonomous entity, as the federalists and particularists wanted, but as the vanguard of national renewal. ‘Not “away from Berlin”,’ Hitler intoned when discussing the relationship between Bavaria and the Reich, ‘but rather “towards Berlin”’ in order to ‘liberate it from the seducers of the German people’.102 It would soon become clear that was a very different agenda to that of the generally monarchist and particularist Bavarian military and political elites.
At this time, the party had very limited success with big business. To be sure, the former Siemens director Emil Gansser invited Hitler to speak at the ‘National Klub of 1919’ in Berlin. One attendee, the industrialist Ernst von Borsig, was so impressed by Hitler’s apparent ability to bridge the gulf between the national cause and the working class that he invited him back for a second appearance. Hermann Aust, executive of a malt-coffee trading company in the capital, asked him to appear at the Bavarian League of Industrialists in Munich, then at the Herrenklub, and thereafter at the Merchants’ Guild. None of these events led anywhere in financial terms. The reason for Hitler’s lack of success is not hard to find. The NSDAP programme–for example point 13 with its attack on ‘trusts’–was ferociously anti-capitalist and so, as we have seen, was much of Hitler’s rhetoric. Despite Hitler’s willingness to moderate his message to business audiences, emphasizing his anti-French and anti-Bolshevik themes, business was not reassured. Paul Reusch, a major Ruhr baron, noting the Nazi nationalization plan, remarked that ‘we have no reason to support our own gravediggers’. The party remained dependent on donations from the Bavarian Reichswehr, either in cash or in kind in the form of weapons or vehicles, and from a motley group of smaller donors, mainly traders, retailers and small businessmen.103
Given the shortage of funds, the growth of the party and especially its propagandistic reach was impressive. There were significant gains in membership: 4,300 by the end of 1921, and more than 20,000 a year later.104 The party organization was also an important source of funding through membership dues, entry charges for meetings, collections and interest-free loans from members. The party apparat grew, albeit modestly. In 1922, Hitler acquired a private secretary in the shape of Fritz Lauböck, the son of a Nazi in Rosenheim. Attendance at party events also increased, and the message reached a much wider audience. There was a real quantum leap in early 1922, when Hitler regularly spoke to between 2,000 and 6,000 listeners in the larger beer halls. A high point was the Deutsche Tag in Coburg in October, which culminated in a massive brawl with hostile demonstrators.105
Not everyone was persuaded. The records of Hitler’s speeches note many catcalls and interruptions. One of those who went to hear him speak in a beer hall on the Theresienstarsse was Franz Halder, his later chief of the general staff, who does not seem to have understood what Hitler was saying.106 Hitler often had several engagements per night; 30 November and 13 December 1922 were records with ten simultaneous events. It no doubt helped that the party paid Hitler speaker fees for his appearances, which were for a long time his only income after being discharged from the army.
The purpose of all this activity was not the creation of a party organization capable of winning elections, still less that of a force capable of mounting an armed challenge to the Weimar Republic. Instead, Hitler’s main aim remained the establishment of ideological coherence in the movement. ‘The final strength of a movement,’ he claimed in mid February 1922, lay ‘not in the number of its local groupings but in its internal cohesion’. The constant reiteration of agreed positions generated loyalty and fervour. For example, when the authorities expressed doubts that the ‘Gymnastics Section’ of the SA was just engaged in physical exercise, Hitler responded by saying that party members as a whole also exercised ‘if only with [their] mouths’. He remained adamantly opposed to contesting elections. Hitler claimed that ‘there was no fruitful work to be done in parliament’, and that ‘individual National Socialists would be corrupted by the swamp of parliamentarism’.107
Throughout the early 1920s, therefore, Hitler used his speeches to rehearse and develop his ideology. During this period his words–which were, of course, acts in themselves–were more important than his deeds. The recent defeat and its causes remained the central preoccupation. Hitler repeated his conviction that the war had been caused by an Anglo-American capitalist conspiracy. Sometimes, he attributed the ‘original sin’ to Britain, whose commercial and colonial ‘envy’ of the Reich had driven a ‘policy of encirclement’ against Germany, and whose press had vilified her before and during the war as a nation of Huns and barbarians. On other occasions, he targeted the United States. ‘Not least because the social welfare and the cultural development [of the German Empire] was a thorn in the eyes of the American trust-system,’ he thundered in March 1921, ‘we had to disappear from view.’ Hitler repeatedly contrasted ‘Germany’s social culture’ with American capitalism. He reserved particular scorn for US president Woodrow Wilson as the ‘agent of international high finance’.108
The collapse of 1918 was explained in part through enemy strength, in part through enemy guile, and in part through German weakness or stupidity. Hitler was under no illusion about the ‘superior leadership of the enemy’, which nearly crushed the Reich in 1915–1916, when ‘an enemy who was twice or three times as strong in terms of numbers and equipment’ assaulted ‘a practically reserve-less’ German front line. Fighting France, and especially the British Empire, was bad enough, but what had ultimately tipped the scales was US intervention. This, Hitler was convinced, would have taken place with or without the U-boat war. Having previously been a ‘passive’ supporter of the Entente through the supply of armaments, the Americans intervened when Britain and France were on the verge of defeat in order not to lose the ‘billions’ which it was owed by the Allies. ‘America was called in,’ he claimed, ‘and the power of international big capital thereby became openly involved.’ Not only did the Entente have massive demographic and industrial resources at its disposal, Hitler argued, but it had also ‘tortured’ Germany through a ‘hunger blockade’ against the civilian population.109
All this was made much worse, in Hitler’s view, by mistaken German strategy and the internal weakness of the Reich. The principal diplomatic error, he argued, was ‘Germany’s loyalty for better and for worse towards the scruffy Habsburg state’ and the resulting failure to achieve a compromise peace with Russia. There was also an increasing sense of the baleful role played by Marxism, a ‘poisonous’ doctrine which had first paralysed and then corrupted the German people to the marrow. The German will to resist had been further undermined by calculated Allied deception. Once again, it was Wilson who was singled out for the most obloquy, as the man whose broken promises of fair treatment under the Fourteen Points had caused the Reich to give up when further resistance was not only possible but essential. Wilson, he said simply, w
as the ‘cause of the collapse’, the man who had brought the overwhelming power of the United States to bear on the Reich, and the Pied Piper who had convinced the Germans to lay down their arms on the basis of a fair peace.110
What linked all these explanations in Hitler’s mind was the power and the malevolence of the Jews, the main controllers of an ‘international capitalism’ that needed ‘ever more objects of exploitation’. It was they who under their Jewish ringleader Lord Northcliffe (who was in fact not only not Jewish but a fervent anti-Semite) had whipped up the British press into a frenzy against Germany before 1914. It was the ‘international Jewish newspaper corporations’, Hitler claimed, who had prevented a Russo-German rapprochement. It was they who owned the large American companies supplying the Allied war effort and who tricked the ‘peaceful’ American people into war with Germany against their better natures and best interests. It was the Jews who tried to manipulate Germany’s food supply and who ‘precipitated the revolution through hunger’. All this happened because the ‘New York Stock Exchange’–the ‘Headquarters of World Jewry’–was determined to crush Germany, the last remaining Nationalstaat which was ‘not yet completely ruled by stock exchanges’.111 In short, Hitler remained firmly wedded to the idea of a deadly synthesis between world Jewry, international capitalism and Anglo-America as Germany’s nemesis.
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