2
Again, nothing was more different from Napoleon’s rise to power than that of Adolf Hitler. Napoleon succeeded, a mere four years years after being given command of an army, in becoming master of France at thirty. He did so because of his genius as a soldier and by a coup d’état. After Hitler returned to civilian life it took him thirteen years to capture Germany, through his political skill and by constitutional means. Yet while the two ascents differed, the back-rounds to them bore some striking resemblances.
The Directory ruled France from 1795 until 1799. Power rested in the hands of five Directors, who were elected by the Council of Five Hundred and Council of Ancients. The ‘Thermidorians’ who had toppled Robespierre and now held power passed a law that two-thirds of the Council’s members must have been members of the Convention which had preceded the Directory, making the régime unpopular from the beginning. There was a pervading fear of coups – whether by the Right (who might bring back the monarchy) or by the Left (who wanted the restore the Terror). It was an ineffectual government. There was runaway inflation, while the military situation began to deteriorate.
The Weimar Republic was an equally unhappy régime. Its constitution too was bicameral, but the President had semi-monarchical powers. The burden of the reparations to the victorious allies, the threat of communist revolution and terrible inflation, made it no less fearful. Its governments seemed powerless. The Right despised it.
The world of the Directory was gay and elegant but scarcely admirable. It was perhaps the most decadent period in all French history, dominated by selfish financiers and bankers. Paris swarmed with speculators and grandes horizontales. Weimar had much in common with the Directory. It too was gay and elegant, a time of artistic ferment. Similarly, money was everything. Georg Grosz’s caricatures of profiteers flaunting newly acquired wealth were all too accurate, while war heroes begged at street corners.
Albert Speer describes in his memoirs the mood of all too many German middle-class intellectuals during the 1920s:
Spengler’s Decline of the West had convinced me that we were living in a period of decay strongly similar to the late Roman Empire: inflation, decline of morals, impotence of the German Reich. His essay ‘Prussianism and Socialism’ excited me especially because of the contempt for luxury and comfort it expressed.
Speer feared ‘Spengler’s dark predictions’, did not believe his prophecy of the coming of a new Roman Emperor and thought communist revolution inevitable.
By the autumn of 1795 royalists in Paris felt strong enough to seize power. The troops in the capital were mutinous, their commander, General Menou, parlying with the insurgents – most of them National Guardsmen. Menou was replaced by a Director, Barras, who knew that he himself could not cope. After releasing several hundred ‘guillotine-lickers’, Jacobin extremists, he sought out the little Robespierrist gunner who had been so effective at Toulon. There was some difficulty in finding him, since he was not at his usual shabby restaurant (later Barras claimed he had been negotiating with the royalists) but at the last moment he was appointed to be second-in-command. It was 9.00 p.m. on 13 Vendémiaire [5 October], and the crucial attack was expected early next morning. He at once sent a Major Murat and his squadron galloping off to an artillery park near Neuilly to bring up cannon. When the enemy attacked in the small hours they were cut to ribbons, in the Rue St Honoré, the Place du Carrousel and the Pont Royal; those who took refuge in the church of Saint-Roch were evicted at bayonet-point. Fighting continued until 9.00 a.m. on 14 Vendémiaire when the remaining royalists finally bolted, much to Napoleon’s contempt – ‘forgetting the military honour of Frenchmen’.
Bonaparte’s reward was promotion to full general and command of the Army of the Interior. His real career was about to begin. However, he was too gauche socially to make the most of his opportunities, having no contacts in the ruling circle other than Barras.
This lack was made good by Citizeness Tascher-Beauharnais. A former Vicomtesse, she was a 32-year-old Créole whose husband, a second-rate nobleman, had been guillotined during the Terror because of his inadequate performance as a general of the Republic. Her best friend was Barras’s favourite mistress, Thérèse Thallien – there were not implausible rumours that the pair had danced naked before him – and the Director was certainly one of her lovers. She seems to have slept with many of the régime’s ‘great and good’. Fouché, who ran the security services, was so impressed by her wide acquaintance (‘she knows all Paris’) that he paid her a retainer for useful gossip. When she was on the brink of financial ruin her instinct told her that the little general was a coming man, and she swiftly awakened his voracious sexuality. (An achievement she would live to regret; he is known to have had at least sixteen mistresses.) However, her most useful service to him in career terms was to introduce him to the Directory’s establishment and to convince Barras that her new lover was devoted to him.
As commander of the Army of the Interior he had responsibility for law and order in Paris, where he swiftly purged its police of royalist personnel and shut the Jacobin Panthéon Club. On 9 March 1796 he married Josephine Tascher-Beauharnais; he was under the delusion that she was very rich, he needed her contacts and her house and he was also genuinely in love with her. A week before he had been given command of the Army of Italy, an appointment which his brother Lucien described as ‘Barras’s dowry’ for Josephine. His orders were to mount a campaign over the Alps as part of an overall offensive against Austria; his role was to distract the enemy while Jourdan and Moreau, whose armies numbered 160,000 men, marched on Vienna – Bonaparte had only 36,000 troops and was not expected to advance very far. The plan was drawn up by Carnot, once the Terror’s ‘architect of victory’.
General Bonaparte arrived at his headquarters in Nice at the end of March 1796. His chilly reception by his generals is legendary; so too is the way he brought them to heel. They had thought he was no better than an intriguer who owed everything to Barras’s favour, that the projected campaign was unworkable. Augereau, who had begun life as a footman and served in the Russian Army; Masséna, who had been a smuggler; La Harpe, a tough Swiss mercenary; Sérurier, who had become an ensign in 1754, when he was twelve; Berthier, who had been promoted colonel in 1778 during the American war – none of these were men to be easily cowed by a ‘wild haired little runt’ of twenty-six. Yet, as Augereau admitted, something about Bonaparte frightened them. (Each was to become one of his marshals.) What angered Napoleon was not his generals’ attitude but the poor equipment and morale of his men, who were ragged and starving. His first step was to distribute a week’s supply of bread, meat and spirits, while he complained to Paris about their miserable condition. Yet they were good material, many being mountaineers from Dauphiné (like today’s Chasseurs Alpins), or southern hillmen. On St Helena he claimed to have issued the following order of the day:
Soldiers! You are badly fed, almost naked. I am going to lead you into the most fertile plains in the world where you will find big cities and wealthy provinces. You will win honour, fame and riches.
He had never led an army in the field before. He faced 70,000 Austrians and Sardinians, well-equipped regulars full of confidence, who controlled the Alpine passes. Going into the mountains, he attacked the Austrians at Montenotte on 12 April, inflicting 3,000 casualties, hitting them again at Dego two days later. In between these victories he smashed the Sardinians at Millesimo, capturing an entire corps. These battles were fought in the rain, nearly two thousand feet up. He routed the last Sardinian army at Mondovi on 21 April, whereupon their king asked for an armistice. It was the first example of blitzkrieg – the lightning war which destroys an enemy in a flash.
Next came the turn of the Austrians, whom Bonaparte broke at the bridge of Lodi over the river Adda on 10 May, he himself leading the final charge over the bridge. He began to suspect that a brilliant destiny lay before him. (‘I saw the world spin away beneath me, as if I had been borne up into the air,’ he told General Gourgaud years later.) On 15 May he rode into Milan, capital of the Austrian duchy of that name. In July Field Marshal von Würmser attacked on two fronts in an attempt to relieve Mantua. Napoleon defeated Quasdanovich at Lonato on 3 August and Würmser himself two days afterwards at Castiglione, capturing 20,000 men with 50 cannon. Despite reinforcements, Würmser had to take refuge in Mantua. Ironically, the main French offensive against Austria had ground to a halt – Jourdan defeated by Archduke Karl, Moreau retreating. A new Austrian general, Alvinzi, attacked Bonaparte in November, but after a battle lasting three days was routed at the bridge of Arcole. He returned in January 1797, to be beaten again at Rivoli. Mantua surrendered in February.
Napoleon now advanced into the Tyrol, aiming for Vienna. He reached Semmering, only 100 kilometres from the Imperial capital. On 18 April the Emperor sued for peace, whereupon Bonaparte went back to Italy and took Venice. At the Treaty of Campo Formio France secured the greatest diplomatic triumph of her entire history. The Austrians surrendered Belgium, besides recognizing the French puppet régime in northern Italy known as the Cisalpine Republic and the incorporation into France of the left bank of the Rhine. They were compensated with Venice.
Napoleon returned to France at the end of 1797 to receive an ecstatic welcome. He had won 18 pitched battles, captured 170 enemy colours and given his country a position surpassing that under Louis XIV at his most glorious. In addition he had sent home large consignments of bullion, together with countless art treasures. The street in which he lived was renamed ‘Rue de la Victoire’.
While he was at Milan he had issued a proclamation, on 20 May 1796:
Respect for property and personal security; respect for the religion of countries: these are the sentiments of the government of the French republic, and of the army of Italy. The French, victorious, consider the nations of Lombardy as their brothers.
His achievement appeared a little differently to those who were not French. William Pitt may have been biased, but a speech which he gave some years later (on 3 February 1800) to the House of Commons gave an undeniably objective account of ‘the horrors committed in Italy during the campaign of 1796-97’. He reminded Members of Parliament that:
In testimony of this fraternity, and to fulfil the solemn pledge of respecting property, this very proclamation [of Milan] imposed on the Milanese a provisional contribution to the amount of twenty millions of livres, or near one million sterling; and successive exactions were levied on that single state to the amount, in the whole, of near six millions sterling. The regard to religion and to the customs of the country were manifested with the same scrupulous fidelity. The churches were given up to indiscriminate plunder. Every religious and charitable fund, every public treasure was confiscated. The country was made the scene of every species of disorder and rapine. The priests, the established form of worship, all the objects of religious reverence, were openly insulted by the French troops…
The Prime Minister continued:
But of all the disgusting and tragical scenes which took place in Italy, in the course of the period I am describing, those which passed at Venice are perhaps the most striking.
He accused the French of deliberately goading the Venetians into rising against them and into issuing a proclamation hostile to France, Napoleon had then invaded Venice, installing a government on the ‘democratic’ French model, which he guaranteed with a treaty. Pitt states, accurately, that as soon as the treaty had been signed the French sacked and plundered the Arsenal and the Doges’ Palace, besides demanding huge sums in cash from the inhabitants. He adds:
not more than four months afterwards, this very republic of Venice, united by alliance to France, the creature of Buonaparte himself, from whom it had received the present of French liberty, was by the same Buonaparte transferred under the treaty of Campo Formio, to ‘that iron yoke of the proud House of Austria’, to deliver it from which he had represented in the first proclamation to be the great object of all his operations.
Understandably, the Directory were extremely uneasy about General Bonaparte. Not only was he hero-worshipped but he had shown alarming independence, ignoring its instructions – as when he demanded the surrender of Lombardy by the Austrians or declared war on Venice. Not only had he kept semi-regal state in his headquarters in the castle outside Milan, dining in public and never emerging without an escort of 300 lancers, but he had paid journalists to project his image to the French at home as well as among his men in the field. The Courrier de l’Armée d’Italie (on sale in Paris, and distributed free to soldiers) praised the exploits and personality of ‘The First General of the Great Nation.’ Other newspapers which he subsidized wrote in the same strain. Yet the Directors had only survived because of him; when royalists tried to bring down the Directory in 1797 Bonaparte’s men led by Augereau purged the Councils at bayonet-point on 18 Fructidor (4 September). Many of the Republic’s generals were suspected, with reason, of royalist or Jacobin sympathies. Moreover, when Napoleon returned to Paris he assumed a studiedly modest air, dressing in civilian clothes.
Bonaparte was ordered to plan the invasion of England. He approached the project in no light-hearted manner. But after personally reconnoitring the Channel coast he concluded by 23 February:
To carry out a descent on England without mastery of the sea would be the boldest and most difficult operation ever undertaken … The right moment to prepare for this exhibition has been lost, perhaps for ever.
Instead he proposed an expedition to Egypt. This was more than a mere flight of romantic fancy, and was inspired by calculations which were far from purely military. The overall strategy was to cut Britain’s main trade route to India – even to provide a base from which to recommence the struggle for the sub-continent lost by France years before. More subtly, the expedition would enhance his prestige at home. The French were attracted by the glamour of the East, they had not forgotten that the first French colonies had been the Crusader states, and that St Louis had tried to conquer Egypt, while there was a fashionable taste for Egyptology. Above all, it was far away, removed from the sordid atmosphere of the Directors’ domestic politics. Whatever Napoleon may have said afterwards, he had no intention of ‘assuming the turban’ and becoming a new Caliph. His ultimate motives for the Egyptian adventure were political, and he had every intention of returning to France.
At first the expedition was a triumphant success. Malta was captured en route, its unfortunate Knights being evicted from the island which had been their home for 250 years. The land of the Pharaohs was conquered with ease, the feudal army of its Mameluke rulers being routed in a colourful victory beneath the Pyramids. An Institut Egyptien was founded on the model of the Institut de France. French savants made such brilliant archaeological discoveries as the Rosetta Stone – the key to Egyptian hieroglyphs. There were rumours that, like Alexander the Great, Bonaparte was contemplating the conquest of Persia and India. The harsh reality was that Turkish troops and the British Navy soon confined him to Egypt. Nelson blew the French fleet out of the water at the battle of the Nile in August 1798, and his ships ruled the Mediterranean. Napoleon marched into Syria, and was checked at Acre. He was trapped. Should he try to return to France there was every chance of his being intercepted and imprisoned in Britain until the defeat of France.
At the end of 1918 Corporal Hitler, his eyesight restored, left hospital in Pomerania and rejoined his regiment at Munich. It is likely he went by way of Berlin, where he may even have seen the Freikorps crushing the Spartacists. (When their machine-guns fired down the streets terrified Berliners queued up in long lines behind lamp-posts to escape the bullets.) He was certainly in Munich during the fighting which finally destroyed the Bavarian Socialist Republic, though he stayed in the List Regiment’s barracks throughout. As a reliable man with ‘sound’ political views, he was ordered to attend a course of lectures meant to ‘inculcate certain fundamental principles on which the soldier could base his political ideas’ – i.e. loyalty to Reichswehr and Fatherland – after which he was made an ‘instruction orderly’ with the task of lecturing the troops. In Mein Kampf he tells how as a schoolboy he had suspected he might be an orator, while during his days in the flop-house he had sometimes ranted at the inmates; Hanisch says that the sight of a rabble-rouser on the silent screen (in Kellerman’s The Tunnel) drove him all but demented. Now ‘I was able to confirm what I had hitherto merely felt, namely that I had a talent for public speaking.’
In September 1919 he was ordered to investigate one of the little political parties which had recently emerged, the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP). The President was a machinist from the local railway works, Anton Drexler. Its message was the need to synthesize nationalism and socialism. Shortly after, Hitler joined the party as its fifty-fifth member, an indication of its size. The new recruit spoke again and again, his first important speech being at the party’s first public meeting in October, attended by 111 people. He spoke for thirty minutes in the small beer-cellar. The impression he made convinced him beyond doubt that ‘I could speak.’
Early in 1920 he was entrusted with the Party’s propaganda. By skilful use of posters and leaflets he attracted an audience of two thousand people to ‘the first great mass-meeting under the auspices of the new movement’. Here he presented the Party’s programme. Among its national policies were the inclusion of all Germans in a Grossdeutschland; the abrogation of the Treaty of Verseilles; denying German nationality to Jews; and the prohibition of immigration. Socialism was represented by demands for the confiscation of war profits, profit-sharing, increased old-age pensions; agricultural land reform, replacing the regular army by a citizens’ militia, and the confiscation of unearned income. He was rewarded by wild applause. On 1 April 1920 he left the Reichswehr, in the autumn the movement became the Nationalist Socialist German Workers’ Party (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, or NSDAP), in December a newspaper was bought, the Völkischer Beobachter, and on 29 July 1921 after driving Drexler out Hitler became leader of the Party – that evening a member saluted him with the words ‘unser Führer’.
There was more to this swift success than his genius as a demagogue and innate political skill. The régime and political climate in Bavaria were by nature sympathetic to forceful right-wingers. Both the Reichswehr and the Freikorps smiled benevolently on him, the latter providing many recruits. Among the ‘officers and gentlemen’ who joined him were Ernst Röhm, Hermann Goering and Franz-Xavier, Ritter von Epp. All had distinguished war records; Captain Rohm (who entered the Party even before Hitler) had been badly wounded in front-line fighting in the trenches before serving on the General Staff. The air-ace Major Goering (a Prussian, the only one of the three who was not a Bavarian) was admired throughout Germany as last squadron-leader of Richthofen’s Jagdstaffel, whose bravery and 43 ‘kills’ had been recognized by the Pour le Mérite, the supreme Hohenzollern award for gallantry. Major General von Epp, last commander of the Bavarian Royal Guard and now commander of the Bavarian Reichswehr, had been knighted for his bravery. Paradoxically, the ‘undeserved defeat’ of 1918 had enhanced the glamour of the military, already high enough in German esteem. By an odd irony the Reichswehr (most of whose officers were devoted monarchists) was the Weimar Republic’s guarantee of stability, its safeguard against coups by Right or Left. And if the Freikorps did not exactly endear themselves to Reds, they were much appreciated by the Right. Militarism was in fashion, bands playing everywhere. Inevitably the new Party acquired a paramilitary organization, uniforms, ranks and the swastika standard being soon adopted. It also took to street fighting; the communists, already adepts at this, provided a perfect target for aggression, an activity which attracted still more veterans. Furthermore, while it had some distinguished members and a command structure, the Party was essentially egalitarian, offering the same comradeship which had existed in the trenches. On the whole the Bavarian middle classes were inclined to welcome an organization like the NSDAP as a defence against Russian-style revolution.
Until 1924 Germany was in chaos. Weak Social Democrat governments in Berlin and the state capitals were constantly threatened by a right-wing putsch or Bolshevik revolution. Most army officers, senior civil servants and academics were monarchists, while communists still hoped for a Soviet system. Early in 1923 the French occupied the Rhineland. In the same year inflation assumed astronomic proportions; the German mark collapsed, ruining a large part of the middle class overnight. Major Buchrucker, a war hero, attempted a right-wing coup in Berlin but was crushed by General von Seeckt, commander-in-chief of the Reichswehr. For a time Seeckt contemplated installing himself as Chancellor. Led by Ernst Thälmann, the communists rose in Hamburg, while left-wing extremists gained control of Saxony and Thuringia. Everywhere there were noisy demands for the dictatorship of the proletariat, Red ‘militia’ being put down bloodily by the Reichswehr in several areas.
The political (if not financial) situation in Bavaria differed from that in the rest of Germany. Here the reaction in this Catholic and largely agricultural state against Eisner’s short-lived socialist republic had brought to power a régime of the extreme Right, its key figures being the prime minister Gustav von Kahr, the local commander of the Reichswehr, General Otto von Lossow, and the chief of police Hans von Seisser. They detested Social Democrats. There were rumours that Bavaria would secede from the Reich to which it had only been united for fifty years, rumours of a new Austro-Bavarian state under the able Crown Prince Rupprecht. Army officers began to take a new oath of loyalty, to Bavaria. Moreover, all right-wing paramilitary groups were encouraged, including National Socialists.
The Party’s membership, organization and influence increased rapidly during 1922-3. Two paramilitary groups were absorbed, Röhm’s Kriegsbanner and Friedrich Weber’s Oberland Bund. Major Goering, who lived in Munich with his Swedish wife Karen, was given command of the stormtroopers; these were being trained to use fists instead of guns, like Italian Fascists. Hitler acquired a peculiarly effective rabble-rouser in the vicious person of Julius Streicher, a ranting schoolmaster from Nuremberg noted for sadistic treatment of his pupils. Every party member was encouraged by Mussolini’s march on Rome.
By March 1923 General von Lossow was offering to support a Fascist-style march on Berlin. However, in May he changed his mind, threatening Hitler with arrest if he attempted one, forcing him to give his word that he was not planning a putsch. Adolf did so. He spent the early summer planning one, and waiting for a further deterioration in Germany’s overall situation.
In August 1923 Hitler addressed a full-scale parade of his storm-troopers for the first time. To the music of two military bands they marched on to the great Königsplatz in Munich, where a joint rally by various paramilitary groups was taking place. He denounced the ‘November criminals’ who had betrayed Germany in 1918, and his voice hoarse with excitement, ended by screaming ‘Deutschland erwachel’ – ‘Germany, awake!’ According to Karl Ludecke, who was present, this strangely delivered speech had an undeniably impressive impact.
In September he held another parade at Bayreuth. He took the opportunity to visit Richard Wagner’s 86-year-old widow and son at the Villa Wahnfried. Both welcomed him ecstatically, Cosima kissing him and Siegfried explaining that they admired him deeply. (In January 1942 he was to recall ‘In addition to all Wagner’s gifts, Cosima was femininity personified and her charm had its effect on all who visited Wahnfried.’) He was also greeted by the composer’s son-in-law, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, the son of an admiral in the Royal Navy, who believed that Germany’s sacred mission was to convert the world to Wagnerian Teutonism. He told Hitler that he was ‘God-given’. The latter undoubtedly read Chamberlain’s book Foundations of the Nineteenth Century, and the writer’s attitude must have contributed to his mixed feelings about the English. Afterwards Chamberlain wrote to him, telling him that he had played John the Baptist to Adolf’s Messiah. Hitler treasured the memory of this delightful first visit to his hero’s shrine, to which he was to return again and again. ‘I was on Christian-name terms with them all,’ he recounted years later. ‘I love them all and I also love Wahnfried … the ten days of the Bayreuth season were always one of the blessed seasons of my life.’ Wagnerian encouragement confirmed him in his sense of destiny.
The Nazi putsch of 1923 has generally been dismissed as crackbrained. Nevertheless, it was not entirely impracticable. The plan was to secure control of the Bavarian government and then, with Munich for a base, march on Berlin and seize power – like Mussolini’s march the previous year. The Weimar Republic’s authority seemed so brittle, disorder so widespread, that the scheme appeared to have a fair chance of success. General Ludendorff, second only to Hindenburg as a military leader during the war, agreed to accompany the march.
On the evening of 8 November Kahr, Lossow and Seisser attended a meeting of three thousand civil servants in the huge Bürgerbräukeller in Munich. Hitler slipped into the hall with a small bodyguard. Kahr was addressing the assembly when at 8.30 p.m. sixty steel-helmeted storm-troopers burst in, setting up machine-guns at the exits. Pandemonium broke out. Hitler, wearing a trench-coat, jumped on to a table and fired two shots from a revolver. There was silence. He bellowed, ‘The National Revolution has begun! There are six hundred men occupying this hall. No one is to leave. The Reichswehr barracks and the police barracks have been occupied. The Reichswehr and the police have joined the swastika flag. The Bavarian government is deposed! The Reich government is deposed!’ None of this was true, but his hearers believed him. Kahr, Lossow and Seisser were taken into an office. Hitler waved his revolver, yelling at them, ‘I have three bullets for you gentlemen and one for me!’ They were unimpressed, but then Ludendorff entered and they agreed to do anything he wanted, accepting ministerial posts in the Reich’s new government – which Hitler was to head, and in which Ludendorff would be commander of the Reichswehr. All that remained to be done was to march on Berlin.
However, Kahr and his two colleagues succeeded in leaving the Bürgerbräukeller, changed their minds and set about crushing the putsch. Next morning Hitler and Ludendorff – the former under the impression that he was about to become dictator of Germany – led three thousand armed men (their rifles were without firing-pins) into the centre of Munich. Then the police opened fire. General Ludendorff simply walked straight on and through the police, who dared not stop so imposing a figure. However, Scheubner-Richter, marching arm in arm with Hitler, fell to the ground mortally wounded and wrenching his leader’s arm from its socket. In all 16 stormtroopers died and three policemen were killed; there were many wounded, Goering receiving a terrible injury in his groin. Hitler, half fainting with pain and nearly deranged, was driven to a friend’s house in the nearby village of Uffing, where he hid in the attic. (He hoped to escape to Austria, regarding his political career as finished.) Here he was arrested on 11 November and taken to the prison at Landsberg.
Hitler was in despair after his arrest, terrified for weeks at what might happen to him – perhaps a life sentence. In prison at Landsberg he went on a long hunger-strike, refusing to speak. However, he succeeded in turning his trial – which began on 24 February 1924 – into the trial of Kahr, Lossow and Seisser rather than of himself. He rejected the charge of treason, and denounced the ‘November criminals’. At moments the packed courtroom applauded him, and even the judges were won over. Lossow called him a liar, but it made no difference. Hitler was helped by Ludendorff standing beside him in the dock. (The Marshal was acquitted.) He played his cards brilliantly, presenting himself as a war veteran and, ‘patriotic front soldier’ who wanted to be ‘the destroyer of Marxism’. Throughout the hearing flowers and chocolates arrived by the gross from new admirers. By the end of the trial the entire courtroom was under the spell of his oratory, even if some must have smiled at his description of himself as a ‘man who is born to be a dictator’. He received the minimum sentence, five years, together with a strong recommendation for speedy parole – for which he would become eligible in six months’ time – on account of his ‘patriotic motives and honourable intentions’.
Landsberg-am-Lech, as Adolf Hitler experienced it, was more like a rest-home than a prison. Admittedly his cell was spartan but it was roomy compared with the cells of modern British and American gaols, and filled with flowers and delicacies; he was constantly receiving whole hams, strings of sausages and rich cakes, which he shared with his fellow-inmates. Among these was Rudolf Hess, the son of a German merchant in Cairo, who had served in the German Air Force during the War. He was able to eat with them in the common-room, and to exercise with them in the gymnasium. Even the unsupplemented prison diet was excellent, and wine or beer could be bought. The attitude of the warders was notably friendly, most of them becoming Nazis. He was allowed to receive letters and newspapers as well as a stream of visitors. He never forgot how ‘Houston Stewart Chamberlain wrote to me so nicely when I was in prison’.
He read voraciously, and it is often said that in some ways Landsberg fulfilled the function of a university for him. He wrote a book, Mein Kampf (‘My Struggle’), which he dictated to Hess, who typed it. The work is partly autobiographical, partly a political treatise. It has been variously described a ‘a ragbag of ideas’ or ‘a blue-print for world conquest’, neither description being altogether accurate. Certainly it is nauseatingly anti-Semitic, and states unequivocally that one day racially pure Germans will inevitably rule the world. Yet some of the personal detail is vivid and absorbing. The point about Mein Kampf is that it was perfectly attuned to the prejudices of those Germans who believed they had been betrayed in November 1918, or of those ruined by the inflation, the author having a demonic facility for finding scapegoats.
Hitler was released from this far from unpleasant sojourn at Landsberg on 19 December 1924. Unquestionably his political situation had deteriorated. The Party had survived, but was tending to split into rival groups, while it was banned throughout Germany – he himself was not allowed to speak in public until 1927. Worst of all (from the Nazi point of view) Weimar had learnt how to cope with the economic situation and ended the inflation. Prosperity began to return for the first time since 1914, while the diplomacy of the Chancellor, Gustav Stresemann, gained new prestige for Germany. The present writer’s father, who was living in Berlin, wrote in August 1926:
the financial and general position of Germany is improving with astonishing rapidity. At the same rate Germany will have regained her old position within fifteen or twenty years. There is still a shortage of liquid capital, but that is a natural sequel to the German inflation. The feeling towards England is, on the whole, good, but the hatred against France is very bitter.6
The paramilitary organizations melted away. The Weimar Republic seemed to have to have found its feet.
The Nazis became a fringe party with a membership of less than 30,000 and considerable financial problems. The writer of the letter quoted above saw a group of stormtroopers demonstrating in Mannheim in 1927, and noticed that their uniforms were cheap and shoddy, their transport ramshackle. There were dangerously individualist interpretations of the Hitlerian gospel, notably by Gregor and Otto Strasser in Berlin, who tried to make the Party concentrate as much on socialism as on nationalism. Adolf outmanoeuvred them by detaching their most able adherent, the hitherto fanatically socialist Dr Josef Goebbels, who wrested control of the Berlin Party organization from them. Although the Nazis survived, they did not have enough money to organize a full-scale rally during 1927. In the elections the following year they secured only 2.5 per cent of the vote, less than a million. Many senior members despaired, like Rohm, who joined the Bolivian army. None the less there were a few useful recruits, such as a slavishly obedient young chicken-farmer called Heinrich Himmler. By 1929 Adolf Hitler, the would-be dictator of Germany, was a figure of some derision.
Again, nothing could have been more dissimilar than the early progress of Napoleon and Hitler. The former was a triumphant conqueror and national hero at twenty-six, the latter still a political adventurer with little more than an abortive coup behind him when he entered his forties.
The risk is terrible yet unavoidable; one can only escape from anarchy through despotism, and risk finding the same man first a saviour then a destroyer, in the certain knowledge that from now on one is going to be the pawn of an unknown will … this is the bitter fruit of social dissolution.
Hippolyte Taine, Les Origines de la France contemporaine
What is the ape to the man? A jest or a thing of shame. So shall man be to the Superman – a jest or a thing of shame.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Also Sprach Zarathustra