‘I was offered an opportunity of speaking before a larger audience; and the thing that I had always presumed from pure feeling without knowing it was now corroborated; I could “speak”.’
Hitler, in Mein Kampf
‘Herr Hitler especially is, I might say, a born popular speaker who, through his fanaticism and his populist style in a meeting, absolutely compels his audience to take note and share his views.’
One of the soldiers addressed by Hitler
at Lechfeld in August 1919
‘Goodness, he’s got a gob. We could use him.’
Anton Drexler, leader of the DAP,
hearing Hitler speak for the first time, in September 1919
On 21 November 1918, two days after leaving hospital in Pasewalk, Hitler was back in Munich. Approaching thirty years of age, without education, career or prospects, his only plans were to stay in the army, which had been his home and had provided for him since 1914, as long as possible. He came back to a Munich he scarcely recognized. The barracks to which he returned were run by soldiers’ councils. The revolutionary Bavarian government, in the shape of a provisional National Council, was in the hands of the Social Democrats and the more radical Independent Social Democrats. The Minister President, Kurt Eisner, was a radical; and he was a Jew. By spring, Eisner was to be assassinated, Bavarian politics to come close to chaos, and Munich for a month in April to be ruled by Soviet-style councils – for the last two weeks of April by Communists looking directly to Moscow for their model. The bloody repression accompanying the ‘liberation’ of Munich by Reichswehr troops and Freikorps (volunteer freebooter formations) was to lead to Hitler’s first involvement in counter-revolutionary activity. In turn this was to mark the beginning of the process which would see him employed by the army as an informant, ‘talent-spotted’ as a ‘born popular speaker’1 by his superior officer in the Reichswehr, and entering politics, still in army service, as a populist agitator in the tiny German Workers’ Party.
One of the most remarkable aspects of the biographical parts of Mein Kampf is how quickly Hitler passed over his own experience of the traumatic revolutionary period in Bavaria. After all, he witnessed for the most part at close quarters the turmoil which so deeply scarred his psyche. He was based in Munich, at the epicentre of events, for the whole period that saw the descent into political chaos following the assassination of Eisner and culminated in the violent end of the ‘councils’ republic’. Yet his entire treatment of the months between the November revolution and the suppression of the Räterepublik covers a mere page of his otherwise expansive book. Finding the soldiers’ councils in charge of his regiment so repelled him, he wrote, that he decided to leave again as soon as possible. He was sent – after volunteering for service is the clear implication – with his closest wartime comrade Ernst Schmidt (whose name he misspells as ‘Schmiedt’) to Traunstein in the east of Bavaria, not far from the Austrian border, where he remained until the camp (which held prisoners of war) was disbanded, returning to Munich in March 1919. During the Räterepublik – the ‘passing rule of the Jews’ as he dubbed it – Hitler claimed he pondered what could be done, but repeatedly realized that, since he was ‘nameless’, he ‘did not possess the least basis for any useful action’. In other words, he did nothing; before, that is, allegedly acting in some way – though he does not describe it, and the whole story has the air of a fabrication – that aroused the disapproval of the Central Council. Accordingly, in his account, he was to have been arrested on 27 April, but drove away with a loaded rifle the three men who had come to take him into custody.2 Finally, he adds that, a few days after the ‘liberation’ of Munich, he was summoned to report to the commission examining the ‘revolutionary occurrences’ within his regiment – his ‘first more or less purely political activity’.3
The gulf between the momentous nature of the events taking place before his eyes and this brief and laconic account came not unnaturally to fuel speculation that Hitler was trying to obfuscate his own actions and conceal a role which might prove embarrassing to the later nationalist hero. It does seem likely that this was indeed his aim, and to a considerable extent he succeeded in it. What Hitler did, how he reacted to the drama unfolding around him in Munich in the first half of 1919, remains for the most part a dark spot in his personal history. Even so, the evidence, patchy in the extreme though it is, reveals one or two surprises.
I
The German Revolution, which had been triggered by the mutinies at Wilhelmshaven and Kiel at the end of October and beginning of November, and rapidly spread to most cities and large towns, reaching the national capital on 9 November, was a messy, largely spontaneous and uncoordinated affair. It arose not, as the Right claimed, from the treacherous machinations of hard-core left-wing revolutionaries, but, as we have already noted, out of massive disaffection and mounting popular protest demanding an end to the war, an end to the hunger and misery at home, and the removal of a monarchy capable of bringing about neither. Following the German request on 3 October for an armistice, which had shocked a German population totally unprepared for defeat, the movement for peace had gathered pace like a bush-fire. The American President Woodrow Wilson had indicated on 23 October, in his third note replying to the German request, that military rulers and autocratic monarchs posed an obstacle to peace negotiations.4 It was only at this stage that revolutionary groups and organizations, until then weak and not numerous, found themselves at the head of a groundswell of popular demand for radical change. Soldiers’ and Workers’ Councils sprang into existence; monarchies tumbled. The House of Wittelsbach, rulers of Bavaria for over seven centuries, was the first German monarchy to fall, on 7 November; the Kaiser himself abdicated on the 9th. The Red Flag fluttered over the palace in Berlin where the Imperial standard had flown.5 But ending the old system was easier than erecting a new one. Almost all the representatives of the mobilized masses wanted democratization. But opinion varied on what that meant in practice, and how to achieve it. Improvisation rather than planning was the hallmark of the Councils Movement.6 The great majority of Councils favoured a move to parliamentary democracy. But the minority wanting more radical solutions by building on and extending the power of the Councils gradually became more extreme in their demands, as the Majority Social Democrats under Friedrich Ebert showed themselves too fearful of what was coming out of the Pandora’s box of potential social change that had been opened; too timid to trust even their own mass support; and too willing to side with the forces of the old order rather than risk more democracy. Nothing was done to meet demands for the socialization of industries (especially mining), the democratization of the army, and drastic reform of the civil service. Instead, the forces of reaction, for a short time in disarray, were allowed to regroup. The splits within the revolutionary movement that had been there from the outset widened alarmingly. In Berlin, the Independents left the government – the Council of People’s Representatives – at the end of December. The move to the right had its most fateful moment in the deployment by the SPD government of troops and counter-revolutionary Freikorps units to suppress the small, ill-organized, and mismanaged so-called ‘Spartacus Rising’, carried out by left radicals, mainly supporters of the newly-formed KPD, in Berlin in early January 1919. The murder of the Spartacist leaders Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg on 15 January was the symbolic sealing of the disastrous rift within the working-class movement that throughout the Weimar Republic prevented any united front being formed against the growing threat of National Socialism.
The revolution in Bavaria had preceded that in the rest of the Reich. It took place in circumstances and developed in ways that were to leave a profound mark on Hitler, and to fit more than the events in Berlin into what became the Nazi caricature of the 1918 revolution. It was more radical, with the leadership in the hands of the Independents; it degenerated into near anarchy, then into a short-lived attempt to create a Communist-run Soviet-style system; this in turn led to a few days – though a few days which seared the consciousness of Bavarians for many years to come – that amounted to a mini-civil war, ending in bloodshed and brutality; and a number of the revolutionary leaders happened to be Jewish, some of them east European Jews with Bolshevik sympathies and connections. Moreover, the leader of the Bavarian revolution, the Jewish journalist and left-wing socialist Kurt Eisner, a prominent peace-campaigner in the USPD since the split with the Majority Social Democrats in 1917, together with some of his USPD colleagues, had unquestionably tried to stir up industrial unrest during the ‘January Strike’ in 1918, and had been arrested for his actions. That was to fit nicely into the Right’s ‘stab-in-the-back’ legend. The same was true of Eisner’s subsequent publication of official Bavarian documents revealing Germany’s complicity in Austria’s ultimatum to Serbia in July 1914, which fed right-wing allegations of treason against him and his entourage even after the Minister President’s assassination in February 1919.7
When, with a cry of ‘off to the barracks’, workers, peasants, soldiers, and sailors attending a huge peace demonstration on Munich’s Theresienwiese on 7 November 1918, addressed by Eisner, had headed for the city’s main garrison area, they had met with no resistance from the troops.8 There was relatively little genuine revolutionary fervour in the barracks, but nevertheless as good as no opposition to the revolution, and no support left for the monarchy. War-weariness was the main determinant of the mood. ‘These people wanted neither continued war nor revolutionary tribunals and burning stately homes,’ wrote one eye-witness, long after the events. ‘They wanted to get home to their farms and workshops.’9 Without support from the army, the monarchy was finished. The ailing King Ludwig III and his family fled that night. Hitler, over two decades later, was to remark that at least he had to thank the Social Democrats for ridding him of ‘these courtly interests’.10
The provisional government that was soon constituted under Eisner’s leadership was from the outset a highly unstable coalition, mainly composed of the radical but largely idealistic USPD and the ‘moderate’ SPD (which had not even wanted a evolution).11Moreover, it stood no chance of mastering the daunting social and economic problems it faced. Without support from the countryside, in a largely rural province, the provisioning problems alone could not be tackled. But the price of any such support was the abandonment of radical land-reform plans. Conditions continued to worsen. The political turmoil mounted. Elections in January reduced the USPD to a rump. Rapidly, and predictably, the radicals had lost support above all in the Bavarian countryside – massively disaffected, but remaining at the same time innately and overwhelmingly conservative. The assassination of Eisner by a young, aristocratic former officer, currently a student at Munich University, Graf Anton von Arco-Valley, on 21 February 1919, provided then the signal for a deterioration into chaos and near anarchy.12
With ‘Red Guards’ tramping the corridors and rooms of the Wittelsbach Palace ‘where once maids-in-waiting and powdered lackeys had fawned attendance on their royal masters’,13 a meeting in the one-time bedroom of the Queen of Bavaria, dominated by members of the USPD and anarchists, proclaimed a ‘Councils Republic’ in Bavaria. Majority Socialists and Communists – the latter dubbing it a ‘Pseudo-Councils Republic’ (Scbeinräterepublik) – refused to participate.14 An attempt to unseat it by using troops loyal to the elected government, now exiled in Bamberg, failed on 13 April. But the initial failure of the counter-revolution simply strengthened the resolve of the revolutionary hot-heads and ushered in the last phase of the Bavarian revolution: the full Communist takeover in the second, or ‘real’ Räterepublik – an attempt to introduce a Soviet-style system in Bavaria. ‘Today, Bavaria has finally erected the dictatorship of the proletariat’, ran the proclamation of the new Executive Council under the direction of the Communist Eugen Leviné, a veteran of the 1905 Russian revolution.15 It lasted little more than a fortnight. But it ended in violence, bloodshed, and deep recrimination, imposing a baleful legacy on the political climate of Bavaria.
In conditions of a proclaimed ten-day general strike, a ‘Red Army’ of around 20,000 workers and soldiers drawn mainly from Munich’s big factories and army garrison was gathered under the command of the twenty-three-year-old sailor and ‘veteran’ of the Kiel Mutiny, Rudolf Eglhofer. But it was without hope against the Prussian and Württemberg troops, combined with Bavarian Freikorps units, that now massed around Munich. The day after Eglhofer, on 29 April, had proclaimed the ‘dictatorship of the Red Army’, eight (including a woman) of the ‘Red Army’s’ prisoners, among them several from the völkisch Thule-Gesellschaft, held as hostages in the Luitpold-Gymnasium, together with two captured soldiers from the government troops, were badly maltreated then shot by their captors. The fateful order for the shooting had been given as retaliation for atrocities committed by the encroaching ‘White Guard’ on the outskirts of Munich. News of the shooting of the hostages spread like wildfire, horrified the city, and incited the counter-revolutionary army to speed up its assault on Munich, and to undertake drastic and savage reprisals. The street-fighting in the city centre of Munich and in some working-class districts was bloody. Flame-throwers, heavy artillery, armoured vehicles, even aircraft, were deployed in a short but merciless civil war. The victims of the ‘White Guard’ included fifty-three Russian prisoners-of-war who had had nothing whatsover to do with the Räterepublik but were driven into a quarry and summarily dispatched, a group of first-aiders mown down as supposed revolutionaries, twelve civilian SPD supporters in the working-class district of Perlach who had been denounced by political enemies, and twenty-one members of the Catholic St Joseph’s Association, mistaken for Spartacists. For several days, terror ruled Munich’s streets. All involved in the socialist experiment had to fear for their lives. When Munich was finally ‘liberated’ on 3 May, the death-toll numbered at least 606 persons, 335 of them civilians. Of the leaders of the Räterepublik, only the Russian-born Communist Max Levien escaped the clutches of the right-wing backlash. Eglhofer and the Jewish anarchist and writer Gustav Landauer were murdered by Freikorps troops; Leviné was executed for high treason (amid a storm of protest and a one-day general strike in Berlin); the anarchist Jewish writer Erich Mühsam was sentenced to fifteen years; Ernst Toller, another Jewish writer, to five years. In all, the draconian sentences meted out totalled some 6,000 years: sixty-five of those indicted were sentenced to hard labour, 1,737 to periods of imprisonment, and 407 to lighter internment.16
It would be hard to exaggerate the impact on political consciousness in Bavaria of the events between November 1918 and May 1919, and quite especially of the Räterepublik. At its very mildest, it was experienced in Munich itself as a time of curtailed freedom, severe food shortages, press censorship, general strike, sequestration of foodstuffs, coal, and items of clothing, and general disorder and chaos.17 But, of more lasting significance, it went down in popular memory as a ‘rule of horror’ (Schreckensherrschaft) 18imposed by foreign elements in the service of Soviet Communism. In reality, the revolutionaries had achieved nothing – beyond gaining some genuine .support from Munich’s soldiers and workers. Neither the threat to confiscate private property nor the creation of a new political and social order had any prospect of implementation. The shooting of the hostages in the Luitpold-Gymnasium was deplorable, and horrified the Munich bourgeoisie. But it paled alongside the atrocities perpetrated by the ‘liberating’ troops, which were regarded with relative equanimity as ‘restoring order’.
However, as so often, images were more telling than reality. And the image, constructed and massively shored up by rightist propaganda throughout the Reich as well as in Bavaria itself, was that of alien – Bolshevik and Jewish – forces taking over the state, threatening institutions, traditions, order, and property, presiding over chaos and mayhem, perpetrating terrible acts of violence, and causing anarchy of advantage only to Germany’s enemies. Even more moderate press organs painted much the same picture. The mainstream newspaper of Munich’s middle class, the Münchner Neueste Nachrichten, spoke of the ‘aims and methods of Russian Bolshevism’, ‘Russian emissaries’, ‘Bolshevik agents’, the ‘practice of asiatic Bolshevism’, and ‘foreign agitators’. It placed the blame for the ‘criminal atrocities’ and the ‘bestial slaughter of innocent hostages’ squarely on the ‘communist leaders’. Any leniency shown towards such ‘criminals’ would be ‘a sin against the laws of humanity and justice’, it was stated. In contrast, the troops who had ‘liberated’ Munich from the ‘red terror’ had, it was claimed, ‘in strict discipline’ restored ‘the spirit of order’.19
A mere eighteen months after the Russian Revolution and fuelled by reports of the terrible civil war taking place in Russia (in which the Bolsheviks eventually defeated their counter-revolutionary enemies, but only after immense mortalities and unspeakable savagery on both sides), it is not hard to recognize how penetrating and pervasive the neurotic fear of Bolshevism was in a rural province of deeply ingrained conservatism, and in politically polarized towns and cities. The real gainers from the disastrous weeks of the Räterepublik were the radical Right, which had been given the fuel to stoke the fear and hatred of Bolshevism among the Bavarian peasantry and middle classes.20 Not least, extreme counter-revolutionary violence had come to be accepted as a legitimate response to the perceived Bolshevik threat and now became a regular feature of the political scene.
Its flirt with left-wing socialism over, Bavaria turned in the following years into a bastion of the conservative Right and a magnet for right-wing extremists throughout Germany. Though their political tendencies differed sharply, ‘white-blue’ Bavarian separatists, ‘black-white-red’ nationalists, and völkisch extremists found common cause in their hatred of the Bolshevik (and broader ‘Marxist’) Left.21 And the Bavarian Reichswehr became a stronghold of reactionary, anti-Republican, counter-revolutionary forces, which were strengthened still further after March 1920, when the leaders of the failed right-wing Kapp Putsch and their paramilitary organizations found a haven awaiting them in Bavaria. These were the conditions in which the ‘making of Adolf Hitler’ could take place.
Not least, as already indicated, the history of the Bavarian revolution was almost tailor-made for Nazi propaganda. Not just the legend of the ‘stab-in-the-back’, but the notion of an international Jewish conspiracy could be made to sound plausible in the light of the Munich Räterepublik. Though right-wing extremism had no stronger traditions in Bavaria than elsewhere up to this point, the new climate provided it with unique opportunities and the favour of a sympathetic establishment. Many of Hitler’s early followers were deeply influenced by the experience of the turbulent months of post-revolutionary Bavaria. For Hitler himself, the significance of the period of revolution and Räterepublik in Munich can hardly be overrated. It has been said that Hitler did not decide to become a politician; rather, through the revolution and the rule of the Councils, politics came to him, into the barracks.22 It is time to explore the truth of that assertion.
II
On his return to Munich on 21 November 1918, Hitler had been assigned to the 7th Company of the 1st Reserve Battalion of the 2nd Infantry Regiment, where, a few days later, he met up again with several wartime comrades. A fortnight later, he and one of these comrades, Ernst Schmidt, were among the fifteen men from his Company (and 140 men in all) assigned to guard duties at the Traunstein prisoner-of-war camp. Probably, as Schmidt later recounted, Hitler suggested they let their names go forward when volunteers were called for to make up the deputation.23 Hitler, remarked Schmidt, did not have much to say about the revolution, ‘but it was plain enough to see how bitter he felt’. Both, according to Schmidt, were repelled by the changed conditions in the Munich barracks, now in the hands of the Soldiers’ Councils, where old standards of authority, discipline, and morale had collapsed.24 If that was indeed the reason for volunteering, Hitler and Schmidt could have found no improvement on reaching Traunstein. The camp, meant to contain 1,000 prisoners but much overcrowded, was also run by the Soldiers’ Councils which Hitler allegedly so detested. Discipline was poor, and the guards, according to one source, included some of the worst elements among the troops who – like Hitler – saw the army ‘as a means of maintaining a carefree existence at the expense of the state’.25 Hitler and Schmidt had an easy time of things, mainly on gate-duty, at Traunstein. They were there in all for almost two months, during which time the prisoners-of-war, mainly Russians, were transported elsewhere. By the beginning of February the camp was completely cleared and disbanded. Probably in late January, as Schmidt hinted, Hitler returned to Munich.26 He certainly returned no later than mid-February (not March, as he himself stated), since, on 12 February, his own military record shows that he was assigned to the 2nd Demobilization Company to await discharge.27
In general, as we have noted, the demobilization of the German army was carried out remarkably swiftly and efficiently.28 All Hitler’s close wartime comrades, including Ernst Schmidt, were discharged well before he was.29 That Hitler himself was able to avoid discharge until March 1920 owed everything to his increasing involvement, from the late spring of 1919, in political work for the Reichswehr, out of which his entry into politics was to emerge. Meanwhile, he was keen to take whatever opportunity presented itself to stay in the army as long as possible.
For just over two weeks, beginning on 20 February, he was assigned to guard duty at the Hauptbahnhof, where a unit of his company was responsible for maintaining order, particularly among the many soldiers travelling to and from Munich. During this period the guard command at the station was the subject of an investigatory commission examining numerous instances of maltreatment of persons arrested. Whether Hitler was involved is not known, though he cannot fail to have been a witness to the violence and brutality.30 Beyond guard duties, Hitler, Schmidt, and the others in their demobilization company had as good as nothing to do. They were able to earn 3 Marks a day testing old gas-masks, which gave them enough money for the occasional visit to the opera.31Normal earnings appear to have been about 40 Marks a month – with food and accommodation provided, certainly enough to keep body and soul together.32 The future outside the army looked distinctively less rosy.
As we have noted, Hitler spoke of his involvement in the investigatory commission following the suppression of the Räterepublik as his first political activity. Evidence recently come to light of Hitler’s actions during the revolutionary era does not accord with this assertion. It also helps to suggest why Hitler was so reticent about his behaviour during the months that the ‘November criminals’, as he later repeatedly called them, ruled Munich.
A routine order of the demobilization battalion on 3 April 1919 referred to Hitler by name as the representative (Vertrauensmann) of his company. The strong likelihood is, in fact, that he had held this position since 15 February. The duties of the representatives(Vertrauensleute) included cooperation with the propaganda department of the socialist government in order to convey ‘educational’ material to the troops.33 Hitler’s first political duties took place, therefore, in the service of the revolutionary regime run by the SPD and USPD. It is little wonder that he later wished to say little of his actions at this time.
In fact, he would have had to explain away the even more embarrassing fact of his continued involvement at the very height of Munich’s ‘red dictatorship’. On 14 April, the day after the Communist Räterepublik had been proclaimed, the Munich Soldiers’ Councils approved fresh elections of all barrack representatives to ensure that the Munich garrison stood loyally behind the new regime. In the elections the following day Hitler was chosen as Deputy Battalion Representative.34 Not only, then, did Hitler do nothing to assist in the crushing of Munich’s ‘Red Republic’; he was an elected representative of his battalion during the whole period of its existence.
How to interpret this evidence is, nevertheless, not altogether clear. Since the Munich garrison had firmly backed the revolution since November, and again in April supported the radical move to the Räterepublik, the obvious implication must be that Hitler, in order to have been elected as a soldiers’ representative, voiced in these months the views of the socialist governments he later denounced with every fibre of his body as ‘criminal’. At the very least it would appear that he could not have put forward strongly opposed views. Already in the 1920s, and continuing into the 1930s, there were rumours, never fully countered, that Hitler had initially sympathized with the Majority SPD following the revolution. Since the rumours tended to come from left-wing journalists, seeking to discredit Hitler, they were presumably not taken too seriously. But comments, for example, in the socialist Münchener Post in March 1923 that Hitler had assisted in the indoctrination of troops in favour of the democratic-republican state match the evidence, which we have noted, that he served, probably from February 1919 onwards, in such a capacity as Vertrauensmann of his company.35 Similar rumours circulated in the socialist press in the early 1930s.36 Ernst Toller reported that a fellow-prisoner also interned for involvement in the Räterepublik had met Hitler in a Munich barracks during the first months after the revolution, and that the latter had then been calling himself a Social Democrat.37 Konrad Heiden remarked that, during the time of the Councils Republic, Hitler had, in heated discussions among his comrades, voiced support for the Social Democratic government against that of the Communists. There were even reported rumours – though without any supportive evidence – that Hitler had spoken of joining the SPD.38 In a pointed remark when defending Esser in 1921 against attacks from within the party, Hitler commented: ‘Everyone was at one time a Social Democrat.’39
In itself, Hitler’s possible support for the Majority Social Democrats in the revolutionary upheaval is less unlikely than it might at first sight appear. The political situation was extremely confused and uncertain. A number of strange bedfellows, including several who later came to belong to Hitler’s entourage, initially found themselves on the Left during the revolution. Sepp Dietrich, later a general in the Waffen-SS and head of Hitler’s SS-Leibstandarte, was elected chairman of a Soldiers’ Council in November 1918. Hitler’s long-time chauffeur Julius Schreck had served in the ‘Red Army’ at the end of April 1919.40 Hermann Esser, one of Hitler’s earliest supporters, who became the first propaganda chief of the NSDAP, had been for a while a journalist on a Social Democratic newspaper.41 Gottfried Feder, whose views on ‘interest slavery’ so gripped Hitler’s imagination in summer 1919, had sent a statement of his position to the socialist government headed by Kurt Eisner the previous November.42 And Balthasar Brandmayer, one of Hitler’s closest wartime comrades and a later fervent supporter, recounted how he at first welcomed the end of the monarchies, the establishment of a republic, and the onset of a new era. His subsequent disillusionment was all the greater. ‘Unfortunately,’ he added, ‘we only changed the marionettes,’ while the people continued to slave and starve. ‘We hadn’t bled for a councils government(Räteregierung)’; ‘ the thanks of the Fatherland were missing,’ he concluded bitterly.43 Similar sentiments, in which, as was the case with Brandmayer, aggressive nationalism and antisemitism intermingled with a form of radicalism born of a sense of social grievance that was rapidly switched from the old monarchical regime to the new republic itself, were widespread following the war. Ideological muddle-headedness, political confusion and opportunism combined frequently to produce fickle and shifting allegiances.
That, as has been implied, Hitler was inwardly sympathetic to Social Democracy and formed his own characteristic racist-nationalist Weltanschauung only following an ideological volte-face under the influence of his ‘schooling’ in the Reichswehr after the collapse of the Räterepublik is, however, harder to believe.44 Certainly, he welcomed the removal of the monarchies through the revolution.45 But even accepting that it is difficult to determine when, precisely, he became a pathological antisemite, the evidence of his early pan-German sympathies, antagonism towards Social Democracy, belligerent militarism, and aggressive xenophobia rules out any genuine attuning to the aims, policies, and ideas of the SPD after 1918. If, as seems almost certain, Hitler felt compelled to lean outwardly towards the Majority Social Democrats during the revolutionary months, it was not prompted by conviction but by sheer opportunism aimed at avoiding for as long as possible demobilization from the army.
A number of pointers towards Hitler’s opportunism exist from this period. In Pasewalk, he did not denounce to his superiors (as patriotic duty would have demanded) the sailors who arrived in the hospital preaching sedition and revolution.46 On leaving the hospital, he avoided committing himself politically, and made no attempt to join any of the numerous Freikorps units which sprang up to engage in the continued fighting on the eastern borders of the Reich and the suppression of left-wing radicalism within Germany, not least in Munich itself. After his return to Munich from Traunstein in February 1919, he most likely took part, since his regiment had issued orders to participate, in a demonstration march of about 10,000 left-wing workers and soldiers in Munich. Probably in April 1919, with Munich ruled by the Communist Councils, he wore, along with almost all the soldiers of the Munich garrison, the revolutionary red armband.47 That Hitler stood back and took no part whatsoever in the ‘liberation’ of Munich from the Räterepublik is said to have brought him later scornful reproaches from Ernst Rohm (who was to head the Nazi stormtroopers), Ritter von Epp (after 1933 Reich Governor in Bavaria), and even Rudolf Heß (who would serve as Hitler’s private secretary and subsequently become Deputy Leader of the Party).48
Whatever his opportunism and passivity, Hitler’s antagonism to the revolutionary Left was probably evident to those around him in the barracks during the months of mounting turmoil in Munich. If indeed, as was later alleged, he voiced support for the Social Democrats in preference to the Communists,49 it was presumably viewed as a choice of the lesser of two evils, or even, by those in Hitler’s unit who knew him of old, as an opportune adjustment betraying none of his real nationalist, pan-German sympathies. Ernst Schmidt, for example, who by then had been discharged but was still in regular touch with him, spoke later of Hitler’s ‘utter repugnance’ at the events in Munich.50 The nineteen votes cast for ‘Hittler’ on 16 April, electing him as the second company representative – the winner, Johann Blüml, received thirty-nine votes – on the Battalion Council, may well have been from those who saw him in this light.51 That there were tensions within the barracks, and between the soldiers’ elected representatives, might be read out of the subsequent denunciation by Hitler of two colleagues on the Battalion Council at the Munich tribunal investigating the actions of the soldiers of his regiment during the Räterepublik.52 Hitler was probably known to those around him, at the latest towards the end of April, for the counter-revolutionary he really was, whose actual sympathies were indistinguishable from those of the ‘white’ troops preparing to storm the city. One plausible, if unsubstantiated, story has him jumping on a chair to exhort his battalion to remain neutral in the imminent fighting, exclaiming that ‘we are not a revolutionary guard for Jews who have come over here’.53 Significant, above all, is that within a week of the end of the rule of the Councils, Hitler had been nominated – by whom is not known – to serve on a three-man committee to explore whether members of the Reserve Battalion of the 2nd Infantry Regiment had been actively involved in the Räterepublik.54 This speaks in favour of the recognition within his battalion of his deep antagonism to ‘red’ rule. At any rate, his new role now prevented Hitler being discharged, along with the rest of the Munich garrison, by the end of May 1919.55 More importantly, it brought him for the first time into the orbit of counter-revolutionary politics within the Reichswehr. This, rather than any psychological trauma in Pasewalk at the news of the defeat, any dramatic decision to rescue Germany from the ‘November criminals’, was, within the following months, to open up his path into the maelstrom of extreme right-wing politics in Munich.
III
On 11 May 1919, under the command of Generalmajor von Möhl, the Bayerische Reichswehr Gruppenkommando Nr. 4 (‘Gruko’ for short) was created from the Bavarian units that had been involved in the crushing of the Räterepublik.56 With the Bavarian government ‘exiled’ in Bamberg until the end of August, Munich – its centre crammed with barricades, barbed wire, and army control-points – was throughout the spring and summer a city effectively under military rule.57 Recognizing twin tasks of extensive surveillance of the political scene and combating by means of propaganda and indoctrination ‘dangerous’ attitudes prevalent in the transitional army, Gruko took over in May 1919 the ‘Information Department’ (Nachrichtenabteilung, Abt. Ib/P) which had been immediately established in Munich at the suppression of the Räterepublik. The ‘education’ of the troops in a ‘correct’ anti-Bolshevik, nationalist fashion was rapidly regarded as a priority, and ‘speaker courses’ were devised in order to train ‘suitable personalities from the troops’ who would remain for some considerable time in the army and function as propaganda agents(Propagandaleute) with qualities of persuasion capable of negating subversive ideas.58 The organization of a series of ‘anti-Bolshevik courses’, beginning in early June, was placed in the hands of Captain Karl Mayr, who, a short while earlier, on 30 May, had taken over the command of the Information Department.59 Mayr, one of the ‘midwives’ of Hitler’s political ‘career’,60 could certainly have claimed prime responsibility for its initial launch.
The first of Hitler’s many patrons, Mayr had a maverick career which saw him swing from active engagement on the extreme counter-revolutionary Right – he was an important Bavarian link with the putschist Wolfgang Kapp in 1920 – to become a strong critic of Hitler and an active figure in the Social Democrat paramilitary organization, the Reichsbanner. He fled to France in 1933, but was later captured by the Nazis, and died in Buchenwald concentration camp in February 1945. In 1919, his influence in the Munich Reichswehr extended beyond his rank as captain, and he was endowed with considerable funds to build up a team of agents or informants, organize the series of ‘educational’ courses to train selected officers and men in ‘correct’ political and ideological thinking, and finance ‘patriotic’ parties, publications, and organizations.61 Mayr first met Hitler in May 1919, after the crushing of the ‘Red Army’. Hitler’s involvement in his battalion’s investigations into subversive actions during the Räterepublik may have drawn him to Mayr’s attention. And as we have noted, Hitler had already been engaged in propaganda work in his barracks earlier in the spring – though on behalf of the Socialist government. He had the right credentials and ideal potential for Mayr’s purposes. When he first met Hitler, Mayr wrote much later, ‘he was like a tired stray dog looking for a master’, and ‘ready to throw in his lot with anyone who would show him kindness… He was totally unconcerned about the German people and their destinies.’62
The name ‘Hittler Adolf’ appears on one of the early lists of names of informants (V-Leute, or V-Männer) drawn up by the Information Department Ib/P at the end of May or beginning of June 1919. Within days he had been assigned to the first of the anti-Bolshevik ‘instruction courses’, to take place in Munich University between 5 and 12 June 1919. For the first time, Hitler was to receive here some form of directed political ‘education’. This, as he acknowledged, was important to him; as was the fact that he realized for the first time that he could make an impact on those around him. Here he heard lectures from prominent figures in Munich, hand-picked by Mayr, partly through personal acquaintance, on ‘German History since the Reformation’, ‘The Political History of the War’, ‘Socialism in Theory and Practice’, ‘Our Economic Situation and the Peace Conditions’, and ‘The Connection between Domestic and Foreign Policy’. Among the speakers, too, at the specific insistence of Mayr (since he was not originally scheduled to deliver a lecture), was Gottfried Feder, who had made a name for himself among the Pan-Germans as an economics expert. His lecture on the ‘breaking of interest slavery’ (a slogan Hitler recognized as having propaganda potential), on which he had already published a ‘manifesto’ – highly regarded in nationalist circles – distinguishing between ‘productive’ capital and ‘rapacious’ capital (which he associated with the Jews), made a deep impression on Hitler, and eventually led to Feder’s role as the economics ‘guru’ of the early Nazi Party.63 The history lectures were delivered by the Munich historian Professor Karl Alexander von Müller, who had known Mayr at school. Following his first lecture, he came across a small group in the emptying lecture hall surrounding a man addressing them in a passionate, strikingly guttural, tone. He mentioned to Mayr after his next lecture that one of his trainees had natural rhetorical talent. Müller pointed out where he was sitting. Mayr recognized him immediately: it was ‘Hitler from the List Regiment’.64
Hitler himself thought this incident – he said he had been roused to intervene by one of the participants defending the Jews – had led directly to his deployment as an ‘educational officer’ (Bildungsoffizier). However, he was never a Bildungsoffizier, but a V-Mann, which he had been since the late May or early June.65 Plainly, the incident helped to focus Mayr’s attention on Hitler. But it was certainly Mayr’s regular close observation of Hitler’s activity for his department rather than a single incident that led to the latter’s selection as one of a squad of twenty-six instructors – all drawn from the participants in the Munich ‘instruction courses’ – to be sent to conduct a five-day course at the Reichswehr camp at Lechfeld, near Augsburg. The course, beginning on 20 August 1919, the day after Hitler’s arrival in the camp, was arranged in response to complaints about the political unreliability of men stationed there, many having returned from being held as prisoners-of-war and now awaiting discharge. The task of the squad was to inculcate nationalist and anti-Bolshevik sentiments in the troops, described as ‘infected’ by Bolshevism and Spartacism.66 It was in effect the continuation of what the instructors themselves had been exposed to in Munich.
Alongside the commander of the unit, Rudolf Beyschlag, Hitler undertook the lion’s share of the work, including helping to stir discussion of Beyschlag’s lectures on, for example, ‘Who Bears the Guilt for the World War?’ and ‘From the Days of the Munich Räterepublik’. He himself gave lectures on ‘Peace Conditions and Reconstruction’, ‘Emigration’, and ‘Social and Political-Economic Catchwords’.67 He threw himself with passion into the work. His engagement was total. And he immediately found he could strike a chord with his audience, that the way he spoke roused the soldiers listening to him from their passivity and cynicism. Hitler was in his element. For the first time in his life, he had found something at which he was an unqualified success. Almost by chance, he had stumbled across his greatest talent. As he himself put it, he could ‘speak’:
I started out with the greatest enthusiasm and love. For all at once I was offered an opportunity of speaking before a larger audience; and the thing that I had always presumed from pure feeling without knowing it was now corroborated; I could ‘speak’… And I could boast of some success: in the course of my lectures I led many hundreds, indeed thousands, of comrades back to their people and fatherland. I ‘nationalized’ the troops…68
Participants’ reports on the course confirm that Hitler was not exaggerating the impact he made in Lechfeld: he was without question the star performer. Ewald Bolle, who had served on an airship, wrote that Beyschlag’s lectures did not go down as well ‘as the passionate (temperamentvollen)lectures (with examples from life) of Herr Hitler’. Gunner Hans Knoden thought Hitler especially ‘revealed himself to be an excellent and passionate speaker and captured the attention of all the listeners with his comments’. And stretcher-bearer Lorenz Frank wrote: ‘Herr Hitler especially is, I might say, a born popular speaker who, through his fanaticism and his populist style (populäres Auftreten) in a meeting, absolutely compels his audience to take note and share his views.’69
A central feature of Hitler’s demagogic armoury at Lechfeld was antisemitism. In his ferocious attacks on the Jews, he was, however, doing no more than reflect sentiments which were widespread at the time among the people of Munich, as reports on the popular mood demonstrated. One vicious comment – ‘All [the Jews] deserve to be hanged. They are guilty of the war’ – made in a Munich tram met with the approval of all other passengers. A worker in a train travelling from Munich to Lindau thought the troops ought to have opened fire on the Jews on 1 May. People said major pogroms against the Jews were as certain to come as the revolution had been. Other reports on popular opinion in August and September 1919 also recorded demands to hang all the Jews together with comments that ‘the Jews are at present the greatest danger for all working Germans’, and that ‘only when the Reich is liberated from this malicious, treacherous vermin’ could Germany’s revival be contemplated. Among the troops the feelings were no different. The responses to Hitler’s addresses at Lechfeld indicate how accessible the soldiers were to his way of speaking.70The commander of the Lechfeld Camp, Oberleutnant Bendt, even felt obliged to request Hitler to tone down his antisemitism, in order to prevent possible objections to the lectures as provoking antisemitic agitation (Judenhetze). This followed a lecture by Hitler on capitalism, in which Hitler had ‘touched on’ the ‘Jewish Question’.71 It is the first reference to Hitler speaking publicly about the Jews.
Within the group, and certainly in the eyes of his superior, Captain Mayr, Hitler must have acquired the reputation of an ‘expert’ on the ‘Jewish Question’. When Mayr was asked, in a letter of 4 September 1919 from a former participant on one of the ‘instruction courses’, Adolf Gemlich from Ulm, for clarification of the ‘Jewish Question’, particularly in relation to the policies of the Social Democratic government, he passed it to Hitler – whom he evidently regarded highly – for an answer.72 Hitler’s well-known reply to Gemlich, dated 16 September 1919, is his first recorded written statement about the ‘Jewish Question’. He wrote that antisemitism should be based not on emotion, but on ‘facts’, the first of which was that Jewry was a race, not a religion. Emotive antisemitism would produce pogroms, he continued; antisemitism based on ‘reason’ must, on the other hand, lead to the systematic removal of the rights of Jews. ‘Its final aim,’ he concluded, ‘must unshakably be the removal of the Jews altogether.’73
The Gemlich letter reveals for the first time key basic elements of Hitler’s Weltanschauung which from then on remained unaltered to the last days in the Berlin bunker: antisemitism resting on race theory; and the creation of a unifying nationalism founded on the need to combat the external and internal power of the Jews. The fact that Hitler expressly utilized in his letter the arguments of Gottfried Feder, on whom he continued to lavish praise in Mein Kampf, suggests that Feder’s ideas on ‘interest slavery’ and capitalism provided for Hitler the key ideological breakthrough, enabling him to rationalize and confirm his long-standing prejudice with a ‘scholarly’ type of argument.74
IV
On returning to Munich following the end of the Lechfeld course on 25 August, the commander Rudolf Beyschlag had been accused of not distributing 500 Marks, meant to be given to the course instructors. The case for the instructors was made by Hitler, now evidently the spokesman for his group. Following his success at Lechfeld and in the light of Beyschlag’s disgrace, he was by this time plainly Mayr’s favourite and right-hand man.75 Among the duties of the V-Men assigned to Mayr was the surveillance of fifty political parties and organizations ranging from the extreme Right to the far Left in Munich.76 It was in his capacity as V-Man that Hitler was sent, on Friday, 12 September 1919, to report on a meeting of the German Workers’ Party in Munich’s Sterneckerbräu. He was accompanied by at least two former comrades from Lechfeld.77 The speaker was to have been the völkisch poet and publicist Dietrich Eckart, but he was ill and Gottfried Feder stood in to lecture on the ‘breaking of interest slavery’. According to his own account, Hitler had heard the lecture before, so took to observing the party itself, which he took to be a ‘boring organization’, no different from the many other small parties sprouting in every corner of Munich at that time. He was about to leave when, in the discussion following the lecture, an invited guest, a Professor Baumann, attacked Feder and then spoke in favour of Bavarian separatism. At this Hitler intervened so heatedly that Baumann, totally deflated, took his hat and left even while Hitler was still speaking, looking ‘like a wet poodle’.78 The Party Chairman, Anton Drexler, was so impressed by Hitler’s intervention that at the end of the meeting he pushed a copy of his own pamphlet, My Political Awakening, into his hand, inviting him to return in a few days if he were interested in joining the new movement. ‘Goodness, he’s got a gob. We could use him’ (Mensch, der hat a Gosch’n, den kunnt ma braucha’), Drexler was reported to have remarked.79 According to Hitler’s own account, unable to sleep he read Drexler’s pamphlet in the early hours, and it struck a chord with him, reminding him, he claimed, of his own ‘political awakening’ twelve years earlier. Within a week of attending the meeting, he then received a postcard informing him that he had been accepted as a member, and should attend a committee meeting of the party a few days later to discuss the matter.80 Though his immediate reaction, he wrote, was a negative one – he allegedly wanted to found a party of his own81 – curiosity overcame him and he went along to a dimly-lit meeting of the small leadership group in the Altes Rosenbad, a shabby pub in Herrenstraße. He sympathized with the political aims of those he met. But he was appalled, he later wrote, at the small-minded organization he encountered – ‘club life of the worst manner and sort’, he dubbed it.82After a few days of indecision, he added, he finally made up his mind to join. What determined him was the feeling that such a small organization offered ‘the individual an opportunity for real personal activity’ – the prospect, that is, of quickly making his mark and dominating it.83
Some time during the second half of September, Hitler joined the German Workers’ Party, and was given the membership number 555. He was not, as he always claimed, the seventh member.84 As the first party leader, Anton Drexler, put it in a letter addressed to Hitler in January 1940, but never sent:
No one knows better than you yourself, my Führer, that you were never the seventh member of the party, but at best the seventh member of the committee, which I asked you to join as recruitment director (Werbeobmann). And a few years ago I had to complain to a party office that your first proper membership card of the DAP, bearing the signatures of Schüssler and myself, was falsified, with the number 555 being erased and number 7 entered.85
Like so much of what Hitler had to say in Mein Kampf about his earlier life, his account of entering the party cannot be taken at face value, and was devised, like everything else, to serve the Führer legend that was already being cultivated. And whatever Hitler wrote about wrangling for days about whether or not to join the DAP, the decision might not ultimately have been his to take. In a little noticed piece of evidence, his Reichswehr boss Captain Mayr later claimed that he had ordered Hitler to join the German Workers’ Party to help foster its growth. For this purpose, Mayr went on, he was provided at first with funds – around the equivalent of 20 gold Marks a week – and, contrary to normal practice about members of the Reichswehr joining political parties, was allowed to stay in the army.86 He was able to do this, drawing his army pay as well as speaker fees, until his discharge on 31 March 1920. This already enabled him – in contrast to the other DAP leaders who had to fit politics around their normal jobs – to devote all his time to political propaganda.87 Now, on leaving the army, his confidence boosted by his early successes as a DAP speaker in the Munich beerhalls, he was in a position to do what, since he had made his mark in the anti-Bolshevik course at Munich University and worked with Mayr as a Reichswehr propagandist and informant, had emerged as a ready-made career opening to replace the fantasies of becoming a great architect and the realities of returning to an existence as a small-time painter of street scenes and tourist attractions. Without Captain Mayr’s ‘talent-spotting’, Hitler might never have been heard of. As it was, if only on the beerhall fringes, he could now become a full-time political agitator and propagandist. He could do for a living the only thing he was good at doing: speaking.
The path from Pasewalk to becoming the main attraction of the DAP had not been determined by any sudden recognition of a ‘mission’ to save Germany, by strength of personality, or by a ‘triumph of the will’. It had been shaped by circumstance, opportunism, good fortune, and, not least, the backing of the army, represented through Mayr’s important patronage. It was indeed the case, as we have seen, that Hitler did not come to politics, but that politics came to him – in the Munich barracks.88 Hitler’s contribution, after making his mark through a readiness to denounce his comrades following the Räterepublik, had been confined to an unusual talent for appealing to the gutter instincts of his listeners, in the Lechfeld Camp, then in the Munich beerhalls, coupled with a sharp eye to exploiting the main chance of advancement. These ‘qualities’ would prove invaluable in the coming years. They would help to win him increasing power and support within the infant Nazi movement. Not least, they would make him attractive to the broader nationalist Right, which had made its home in Bavaria and was seeking to build up its challenge to the democratic Republic it so detested. Powerful patrons in Munich would come to recognize in Hitler an indispensable ‘drummer’ for the nationalist cause. It was a mantle which Hitler, in the early 1920s, was proud to bear.