5
THE BEERHALL AGITATOR

‘The national workers’ party must provide the basis for the strong assault-force that we are hoping for… I’ve set up very capable young people. A Herr Hitler, for example, has become a motive force, a popular speaker of the first rank. In the Munich branch we have over 2,000 members, compared with under 100 in summer 1919.’

Captain Karl Mayr to the exiled putschist
Wolfgang Kapp, 24 September 1920

‘Are you truly blind to the fact that this man is the leader personality who alone is able to carry through the struggle? Do you think that without him the masses would pile into the Circus Krone?’

Rudolf Heß, replying to critics of Hitler
within the NSDAP, 11 August 1921

Without the Reichswehr’s ‘discovery’ of his talent for nationalist agitation, Hitler had every prospect of returning to the margins of society – an embittered war veteran with little chance of personal advancement. Without his self-discovery that he could ‘speak’, he would not have been able to contemplate the possibility of making a living from politics. But without the extraordinary political climate of post-war Germany, and, quite especially, the unique conditions in Bavaria, Hitler would have found himself in any case without an audience, his ‘talent’ pointless and unrecognized, his tirades of hate without echo, the backing from those close to the avenues of power, on whom he depended, unforthcoming.

When he joined the infant German Workers’ Party in September 1919, he was still, as he himself put it, among the ‘nameless’ – a nobody.¹ Within three years, he was being showered with letters of adulation, spoken of in nationalist circles as Germany’s Mussolini, even compared with Napoleon.² And little more than four years later, he had attained national, not just regional, notoriety as a leader of an attempt to take over the power of the state by force. He had of course failed miserably in this – and his political ‘career’ looked to be (and ought to have been) at an end. But he was now a ‘somebody’. The first part of Hitler’s astonishing rise from anonymity to prominence dates from these years in Munich – the years of his political apprenticeship.

It is natural to presume that such a swift rise even to provincial celebrity status must have been the result of some extraordinary personal qualities. Without doubt, Hitler did possess abilities and traits of character that contributed towards making him a political force to be reckoned with. To ignore them or disparage them totally would be to make the same mistakes of underestimation made by his political enemies, who ridiculed him and regarded him as a mere cipher for the interests of others. But Hitler’s personality and his talents, such as they were, alone do not explain the adulation already being lavished on him by growing numbers in the völkisch camp by 1922. The origins of a leadership cult reflected mentalities and expectations prevalent in some sectors of German society at the time, more than they did special qualities of Hitler. Nor would his abilities as a mob-orator, which were most of what he had to offer at the time, in themselves have been sufficient to have lifted him to a position where he could, even if for a mere few hours – in retrospect, hours of pure melodrama, even farce – head a challenge to the might of the German state. To come this far, he needed influential patrons.

Without the changed conditions, the product of a lost war, revolution, and a pervasive sense of national humiliation, Hitler would have remained a nobody. His main ability by far, as he came to realize during the course of 1919, was that in the prevailing circumstances he could inspire an audience which shared his basic political feelings, by the way he spoke, by the force of his rhetoric, by the very power of his prejudice, by the conviction he conveyed that there was a way out of Germany’s plight, and that only the way he outlined was the road to national rebirth. Another time, another place, and the message would have been ineffective, absurd even. As it was, indeed, in the early 1920s the great majority of the citizens of Munich, let alone of a wider population to whom Hitler was, if at all, only known as a provincial Bavarian hot-head and rabble-rouser, could not be captivated by it. Nevertheless, at this time and in this place, Hitler’s message did capture exactly the uncontainable sense of anger, fear, frustration, resentment, and pent-up aggression of the raucous gatherings in the Munich beerhalls. The compulsive manner of his speaking derived in turn much of its power of persuasion from the strength of conviction that combined with appealingly simple diagnoses of and recipes to Germany’s problems.

Above all, what came naturally to Hitler was to stoke up the hatred of others by pouring out to them the hatred that was so deeply embedded in himself. Even so, this had never before had the effect it was to have now, in the changed post-war conditions. What, in the Men’s Home in Vienna, in the Munich cafés, and in the regimental field headquarters, had been at best tolerated as an eccentricity now turned out to be Hitler’s major asset. This in itself suggests that what had changed above all was the milieu and context in which Hitler operated; that we should look in the first instance less to his own personality than to the motives and actions of those who came to be Hitler’s supporters, admirers, and devotees – and not least his powerful backers – to explain his first breakthrough on the political scene. For what becomes clear – without falling into the mistake of presuming that he was no more than the puppet of the ‘ruling classes’ – is that Hitler would have remained a political nonentity without the patronage and support he obtained from influential circles in Bavaria. During this period, Hitler was seldom, if ever, master of his own destiny. The key decisions – to take over the party leadership in 1921, to engage in the putsch adventure in 1923 – were not carefully conceived actions, but desperate forward moves to save face – behaviour characteristic of Hitler to the end.

It was as a propagandist, not as an ideologue with a unique or special set of political ideas, that Hitler made his mark in these early years. There was nothing new, different, original, or distinctive about the ideas he was peddling in the Munich beerhalls. They were common currency among the various völkisch groups and sects and had already been advanced in all their essentials by the pre-war Pan-Germans. He voiced, and drew together, phobias, prejudice, and resentment as no one else could. What Hitler did was to advertise unoriginal ideas in an original way. Others could say the same thing but make no impact at all. It was less what he said than how he said it that counted. As it was to be throughout his ‘career’, presentation was what mattered. He consciously learnt how to make an impression through his speaking. He learnt how to devise effective propaganda and to maximize the impact of targeting specific scapegoats. He learnt, in other words, that he was able to mobilize the masses. For him this was from the outset the route to the attainment of political goals. The ability to convince himself that his way and no other could succeed was the platform for the conviction that he conveyed to others. Conversely, the response of the beerhall crowds – later the mass rallies – gave him the certainty, the self-assurance, the sense of security, which at this time he otherwise lacked. According to Heinrich Hoffmann, when asked to give a short speech at Hermann Esser’s wedding party in the early 1920s, he refused. ‘I must have a crowd when I speak,’ he explained. ‘In a small intimate circle I never know what to say. I should only disappoint you all, and that is a thing I should hate to do. As a speaker either at a family gathering or a funeral, I’m no use at all.’³ Hitler’s frequently demonstrated diffidence and unease in dealings with individuals contrasted diametrically with his self-confident mastery in exploiting the emotions of his listeners in the theatrical setting of a major speech. He needed the orgasmic excitement which only the ecstatic masses could give him. The satisfaction gained from the rapturous response and wild applause of cheering crowds must have offered compensation for the emptiness of his personal relations. More than that, it was a sign that he was a success, after three decades in which – apart from the pride he took in his war record – he had no achievements of note to set against his outsized ego.

Simplicity and repetition were two key ingredients in his speaking armoury. These revolved around the unvarying essential driving-points of his message: the nationalization of the masses, the reversal of the great ‘betrayal’ of 1918, the destruction of Germany’s internal enemies (above all the ‘removal’ of the Jews), and material and psychological rebuilding as the prerequisite for external struggle and the attainment of a position of world power.⁴ This conception of the path to Germany’s ‘salvation’ and rebirth was already partially devised, at least in embryo, by the date of his letter to Gemlich in September 1919.⁵ Important strands remained, however, to be added. The central notion of the quest for ‘living-space’ in eastern Europe was, for instance, not fully incorporated until the middle of the decade. It was only in the two years or so following the putsch debacle, therefore, that his ideas finally came together to form the characteristic fully-fledged Weltanschauung that thereafter remained unaltered.

But all this is to run ahead of the crucial developments which shaped the first passage of Hitler’s political ‘career’ as the beerhall agitator of an insignificant Munich racist party and the circumstances under which he came to lead that party.

I

The equation of National Socialism with Hitler, the frequently heard claim that it is no more than Hitlerism, always was a quite misleading oversimplification.⁶ That Hitler was indispensable to the rise to and exercise of power of National Socialism is, of course, undeniable. But the phenomenon itself existed before Hitler was heard of, and would have continued to exist if Hitler had remained a ‘nobody of Vienna’.⁷ Much of the pot-pourri of ideas that went to make up Nazi ideology – an amalgam of prejudices, phobias, and Utopian social expectations rather than a coherent set of intellectual propositions – was to be found in different forms and intensities before the First World War, and later in the programmes and manifestos of fascist parties of many European countries. Integral nationalism, anti-Marxist ‘national’ socialism, social Darwinism, racism, biological antisemitism, eugenics, elitism intermingled in varying strengths to provide a heady brew of irrationalism attractive to some cultural pessimists among the intelligentsia and bourgeoisie of European societies undergoing rapid social, economic, and political change in the late nineteenth century. There was nothing especially Teutonic about them, though, naturally, as we noted in an earlier chapter, some of the ideas took on a particular form and developed a specific intonation in Germany and German-speaking Austria.

Ideas of a ‘national’, or ‘German’, socialism, in contrast to the international socialism of Marxism, were nothing new in Germany in 1919, though the war had given such notions a strong boost. The liberal pastor Friedrich Naumann had founded a ‘National-Social Association’ in the 1890s with a view to weaning industrial workers from class-struggle and integrating them as the pillars of the new nation-state. The attempt had failed dismally by 1903, and the notion of a ‘German’ socialism came to be wholly associated with the extreme anti-liberal politics of the antisemitic andvölkisch movement. The appeal here was mainly to the lower-middle classes – traders, craftsmen, small farmers, lower civil servants – and rooted in a combination of antisemitism, extreme nationalism, and vehement anti-capitalism (usually interpreted as ‘Jewish’ capitalism).⁸ Similar tendencies in Austria, during the time of Hitler’s youth, were to be found, as we noted in an earlier chapter, in the Schönerer movement. We noted, too, that conflicts between Czech and German workers in Bohemia had already led by 1904 to the establishment of a German Workers’ Party at Trautenau in what came to be known as the Sudetenland, combining völkisch nationalism and anti-Marxist, anti-capitalist socialism.⁹ Hitler acknowledged the foundation, twenty years earlier, of this Austrian National Socialist Party, at his trial after the Putsch, though disclaimed any connection with his own movement.¹⁰ Certainly, there is no hint that he showed any interest in it or even acknowledged its existence during his time in Austria. The similarity of name continued after the war, when the Trautenau party became the German National Socialist Workers’ Party (DNSAP, Deutsche Nationalsozialistische Arbeiterpartei). There were contacts with Hitler’s movement in the early 1920s, but by 1923 the supremacy of the latter was established and in 1926 Hitler became acknowledged as the sole leader of both the Austrian and German branches of the re-established NSDAP.¹¹

The völkisch variant of nationalism remained a minority taste before the First World War, though gaining influential backing through the Pan-Germans, through the dissemination of popular racist works such as those of Theodor Fritsch and Houston Stewart Chamberlain, and through the popularizing of exclusivist and aggressive ethnic nationalism in countless schools and youth organizations. The central strands of völkisch ideology were extreme nationalism, racial antisemitism, and mystical notions of a uniquely German social order, with roots in the Teutonic past, resting on order, harmony, and hierarchy.¹² Most significant was the linkage of a romanticized view of Germanic culture (seen as superior but heavily threatened by inferior but powerful forces, particularly Slavs and Jews), with a social Darwinian emphasis upon struggle for survival, imperialist notions of the need for expansion to the Slavic east in order to safeguard national survival, and the necessity of bringing about racial purity and a new élite by eradicating the perceived arch-enemy of Germandom, the spirit of Jewry.

We have already seen how conditions in the last two years of the war were conducive to the rapid spread of antisemitism and völkisch nationalism, of which it was an integral part. The massive political upheaval and disarray that followed defeat and revolution gave even greater sustenance to the ideas of extreme nationalism. These ideas were represented in a variety of forms by a myriad of different political groups and movements. But of importance, in the changed circumstances, was that völkisch nationalism, in all its extremes, could now blend into more mainstream nationalist forces to offer a frontal ideological rejection of democracy and the Weimar state. The foundations of a rounded anti-democratic ideology, an antithesis to Weimar, were established not in the primitive beer-table discussions of völkisch ‘ thinkers’ and ‘philosophers’, but by neo-conservative writers, publicists and intellectuals such as Wilhelm Stapel, Max Hildebert Boehm, Moeller van den Bruck, Othmar Spann, and Edgar Jung. Ideas of an organic Volk, resting on purity of blood and race, forming a national community (Volksgemeinschaft) that transcended each individual within it, producing a true ‘national’ socialism which was anti-liberal as it was anti-capitalist and anti-bourgeois, binding each individual at the same time to service to that community through subordination to leaders of notable ability, wisdom, and substance, formed central elements of this ideology.¹³

The anti-capitalist and anti-bourgeois ideas of this ensemble naturally did not endear themselves to the conservative nationalists in the German National People’s Party, the DΝVΡ, the mainstream nationalist party which had arisen from the ashes of the old German Conservative Party.¹⁴ And the neo-conservatives generally thought the Nazis were vulgar and primitive. Even so, defeat, revolution, and the establishment of democracy had fostered a climate in which a counter-revolutionary set of ideas could gain wide currency, blending in part both into older forms of conservative nationalism and into the newer, popularized and vulgarized brands of völkisch nationalism. The ‘national disgrace’ felt throughout Germany at the humiliating terms imposed by the victorious Allies and reflected in the Versailles Treaty signed on 28 June 1919, with its confiscation of territory and, even more so, its ‘guilt clause’, enhanced the creation of a mood in which such ideas were certain of a hearing. The first Reichstag election in June the following year, in its calamitous losses for the parties supportive of the new democracy, revealed, as is often said, that Weimar was now ‘a Republic without republicans’ – a notable exaggeration, but expressive of the state’s low esteem in the eyes of a majority of its citizens (including many of its most powerful).¹⁵ The potential was thus provided for extreme nationalism to move from the fringes of politics towards the centre ground.

The crowds that began to flock in 1919 and 1920 to Hitler’s speeches were not motivated by refined theories. For them, simple slogans, kindling the fires of anger, resentment, and hatred, were what worked. But what they were offered in the Munich beerhalls was nevertheless a vulgarized version of ideas which were in far wider circulation. Hitler acknowledged in Mein Kampf that there was no essential distinction between the ideas of the völkisch movement and those of National Socialism.¹⁶ He had little interest in clarifying or systematizing these ideas. Of course, he had his own obsessions – a few basic notions which never left him after 1919, became formed into a rounded ‘world-view’ in the mid-1920s, and provided the driving-force of his ‘mission’ to ‘rescue’ Germany. But ideas held no interest for Hitler as abstractions. They were important to him only as tools of mobilization.

When Hitler joined the German Workers’ Party, it was one of some seventy-three völkisch groups in Germany, most of them founded since the end of the war.¹⁷ In Munich alone there were at least fifteen in 1920.¹⁸ Like the DAP, most of these were small, insignificant organizations. An exception, however, and an important bridge to the early following of the Nazi Party, was the German Nationalist Protection and Defiance Federation (Deutschvölkischer Schutz- und Trutz-Bund), founded at the beginning of 1919 on an initiative of the Pan-German League to amalgamate a number of smaller völkisch associations into an organization capable of winning the masses to the antisemitic movement.¹⁹ Though its headquarters were located in Hamburg, where völkisch ideas were already widespread in the white-collar workers’ union, the Deutschnationaler Handlungsgehilfenverband, it found significant resonance in the heated antisemitic climate in Munich. Its propaganda output was formidable. In 1920 alone it distributed 7.6 million pamphlets, 4.7 million handbills, and 7.8 million stickers.²⁰ As the symbol of the völkisch struggle it chose the swastika. Some of its early membership had drained into it from the short-lived Fatherland Party. Within a year it had expanded from 30,000 to 100,000 members and went on to more than double this to over 200,000 members in the three years of its existence. Prominent among them were former soldiers angered at their treatment after a war allegedly lost through a ‘stab-in-the-back’, artisans feeling their status under threat from the proletariat, teachers attracted to pan-German ideology, and students resentful at their own altered prospects and insulted by national humiliation.²¹Many of its members later found their way into the NSDAP.²² The fact that the Schutz- und Trutzbund was a purely agitatory organization, not allied to any political party, and had no clear political aims hampered its effectiveness. But its rapid expansion was an indication of the growing potential for völkisch ideas – and particularly for the mobilizing force of antisemitism – if they could be ‘marketed’ effectively.

Within the völkisch pool of ideas, the notion of a specifically German or national socialism, tied in with an onslaught on ‘Jewish’ capitalism, had gained ground in the last phase of the war, and spawned both Drexler’s German Workers’ Party and what was soon to become its arch-rival, the German-Socialist Party (Deutschsozialistische Partei).²³ The latter’s founder, Alfred Brunner, a Düsseldorf engineer, had been involved in völkisch politics since 1904. Radical land and finance reform featured in a programme that had many close affinities with the Nazi Party Programme of 1920. By the end of 1919 the DSP had sizeable branches in Düsseldorf, Kiel, Frankfurt am Main, Dresden, Nuremberg, and Munich. Other branches were set up elsewhere, including Berlin, during 1920. By the middle of the year, the party had thirty-five branches and approaching 2,000 members. The organizational spread eventually proved a weakness compared with the regional concentration of the Nazi Party. And attempts to merge the DSP with the Nazi Party in 1920 and 1921 were to form the backcloth to the bitter conflict in the party in summer 1921 that culminated in Hitler taking over the leadership.

Already during the war, Munich had been a major centre of anti-government nationalist agitation by the Pan-Germans, who found a valuable outlet for their propaganda in the publishing house of Julius F. Lehmann – a prominent Munich member of the Fatherland Party – otherwise renowned for the publication of texts on medicine.²⁴ Lehmann was also a member of the Thule Society, a völkisch club of a few hundred well-heeled members, run like a masonic lodge, that had been founded in Munich at the turn of the year 1917–18 out of the pre-war Germanen-Orden, set up in Leipzig in 1912 to bring together a variety of minor antisemitic groups and organizations.²⁵ Its membership list, including alongside Lehmann the ‘economics expert’ Gottfried Feder, the publicist Dietrich Eckart, the journalist and co-founder of the DAP Karl Harrer, and the young nationalists Hans Frank, Rudolf Heß, and Alfred Rosenberg, reads like a Who’s Who of early Nazi sympathizers and leading figures in Munich. The colourful and rich head of the Thule Society, Rudolf Freiherr von Sebottendorff – a cosmopolitan adventurer and a self-styled aristocrat who was actually the son of a train-driver and had made his fortune through shady deals in Turkey and an opportune marriage to a rich heiress – ensured that meetings could be held in Munich’s best hotel, the ‘Vier Jahreszeiten’, and provided the völkisch movement in Munich with its own newspaper, the Münchener Beobachter (renamed in August 1919 as the Völkischer Beobachter, and eventually bought by the Nazis in December 1920). It was from the Thule Society that the initiative arose towards the end of the war to try to influence the working class in Munich. Karl Harrer was commissioned to attempt this, and made contact with a railway workshop locksmith, Anton Drexler. Having been found unfit for military service, Drexler had in 1917 temporarily found an expression of his nationalist and racist sentiments in the Fatherland Party. Then, in March 1918, he had founded a ‘Workers’ Committee for a Good Peace’ in an effort to stir enthusiasm for the war effort among Munich’s working class. He combined his extreme nationalism with an anti-capitalism demanding draconian action against profiteers and speculators. Harrer, a sports-reporter on the right-wingMünchner-Augsburger Abendzeitung, persuaded Drexler and a few others to set up a ‘Political Workers’ Circle’ (Politischer Arbeiterzirkel). The ‘Circle’, a group of usually three to seven members, met periodically for about a year from November 1918 onwards to discuss nationalist and racist themes – such as the Jews as Germany’s enemy, or responsibility for the war and defeat – usually introduced by Harrer.²⁶ Whereas Harrer preferred the semi-secretive völkisch ‘ club’, Drexler thought discussing recipes for Germany’s salvation in such a tiny group had scant value, and wanted to found a political party. He proposed in December the setting up of a ‘German Workers’ Party’ which would be ‘free of Jews (judenrein)’.²⁷ The idea was well received, and, on 5 January 1919, at a small gathering – mainly contacts from the railway yards – in the Fürstenfelder Hof in Munich, the German Workers’ Party was formed. Drexler was elected chairman of the Munich branch (the only one that existed), while Harrer was given the honorary title of ‘Reich Chairman’.²⁸ Only in the more favourable climate after the crushing of the Räterepublik was the infant party able to stage its first public meetings. Attendance was sparse. Ten members were present on 17 May, thirty-eight when Dietrich Eckart spoke in August, and forty-one on 12 September. This was the occasion on which Hitler attended for the first time.²⁹

II

Hitler’s part in the early development of the German Workers’ Party (subsequently the NSDAP) is obscured more than it is clarified by his own tendentious account in Mein Kampf. As usual, this is characterized less by pure invention than by selective memory and distortion of facts. And, as throughout his book, Hitler’s version of events is aimed, more than all else, at elevating his own role as it denigrates, plays down, or simply ignores that of all others involved. It amounts, as always in Hitler’s own account, to the story of a political genius going his way in the face of adversity, a heroic triumph of the will. The story was the core of the ‘party legend’ which in later years Hitler never tired of retelling at inordinate length as the preface to his major speeches. It was that of the political genius who joined a tiny body with grandiose ideas but no hope of realizing them, raising it single-handedly to a force of the first magnitude which would come to rescue Germany from its plight.

Hitler wrote contemptuously of the organization he had joined. The state of the party was depressing in the extreme. The committee constituted practically the whole membership. Though it attacked parliamentary rule, its own matters were decided, after ‘interminable argument’, by majority vote. It met in the dingy back rooms of Munich pubs. It had no permanent headquarters. In fact, it had no membership forms, no printed matter, not even a rubber stamp. Invitations to party meetings were handwritten or produced on a typewriter. The same few people turned up.³⁰ Eventually, a move to mimeographed notices brought a modest rise in numbers attending, and funds were raised to allow a newspaper advertisement in the Münchener Beobachter for a meeting on 16October 1919 which attracted 111 people to the Hofbräukeller, the large drinking saloon attached to one of Munich’s big breweries, situated in Wienerstraße to the east of the city centre (and not to be confused with the better-known Hofbräuhaus, located in the city centre itself). The main speaker was a Munich professor, but Hitler – according to his own account – then spoke for the first time in public (apart from to captive audiences in the Lechfeld Camp), for half an hour instead of his scheduled twenty minutes. He electrified his audience and prompted a collection of 300 Marks for the party coffers. He brought some of his army contacts into the movement, breathing much-needed new life into it. The party leaders, Harrer and Drexler, were in his view uninspiring: they were neither good speakers, nor had they served in the war. Hitler and the party leadership were at odds about future strategy. On the basis of his initial success, Hitler insisted on more frequent and larger meetings. He got his way, and these took place in the Eberlbräukeller and the ‘Gasthaus Zum Deutschen Reich’, on Dachauerstraße near the barracks area, with Hitler speaking to bigger audiences and with great success.³¹ By the seventh meeting, a few weeks later, the attendance had swollen to over 400 people. Hitler’s star was now in the ascendant within the party. Early in 1920, his account went on, he urged the staging of the first great mass meeting. Again there were major differences of opinion within the party leadership, doubters arguing that it was premature and would be a disastrous failure. The cautious Harrer, the party’s first chairman, resigned because of his disagreement with Hitler, and was replaced by Drexler. Again, Hitler prevailed. The mass meeting was organized for 24 February 1920 in the Festsaal of the Hofbräuhaus in the centre of Munich. The big, noisy hall on the first floor – above the even rougher and rowdier ‘Schwemme’ down below – had, like all the city’s numerous big drinking establishments, rows of tables stacked with the stone beermugs and benches groaning under the weight of thick-set men in Bavarian short leather trousers while hefty waitresses bustled between the tables delivering foaming litres of beer. When it was not hired out, as it frequently was, for large political meetings, the beer-swilling crowds would sway merrily to drinking songs played by a Bavarian brass band. At political meetings, heavy drinking, prompting verbal interjections and sometimes brawls, was commonplace. Moving to such a venue – a far bigger hall than the infant party had so far used – was risky, courting the embarrassment of a small turn-out.

A good deal of effort was put into designing striking red posters and leaflets advertising the meeting. The party’s programme, to be announced at the meeting, was also printed and distributed. The publicity worked. The huge hall was packed when Hitler arrived at quarter past seven that evening. Still according to his own account, after a first speaker, whose name he does not mention, had spoken, Hitler – chairing the meeting in the absence of Drexler, who had apparently suffered some sort of nervous collapse – took the floor. Clashes between his supporters and those trying to heckle the speaker took place, but Hitler continued speaking, to mounting applause, and expounded the programme, swaying his audience to rapturous and unanimous acclamation of its twenty-five points.³²Finally, declares Hitler in his Mein Kampf version, ‘there stood before me a hall full of people united by a new conviction, a new faith, a new will’. The German hero was setting out on his quest: ‘A fire was kindled from whose flame one day the sword must come which would regain freedom for the Germanic Siegfried and life for the German nation… Thus slowly the hall emptied. The movement took its course.’³³

The story has been aptly described as ‘a heroic legend in half-naturalistic style, young Siegfried warbling his wood-notes wild in Munich beer halls’.³⁴ The legend was framed to portray the beginnings of the Führer figure, Germany’s coming great leader and saviour, as it had emerged by the writing of the first volume of Mein Kampf in 1924. Towering over the weak and vacillating early leaders of the party, certain of himself and of the coming to fruition of his mighty vision, proven successful in his methods, his greatness – so his account was designed to illustrate – was apparent even in these first months after joining the movement. There could be no doubt about his claim to supremacy in the völkisch movement against all pretenders.

After dealing with subsequent successes in building up the party’s following, Hitler returned to the early party history in a later passage in Mein Kampf when, surprisingly briefly and remarkably vaguely, he described his takeover of the party leadership in mid-1921. His terse summary simply indicates that after intrigues against him and ‘the attempt of a group of völkisch lunatics’, supported by the party chairman (Drexler), to obtain the leadership of the party had collapsed, a general membership meeting unanimously gave him leadership over the whole movement. His reorganization of the movement on 1 August 1921 swept away the old, ineffectual quasi-parliamentary way of running party matters by committee and internal democracy, and substituted for it the leadership principle as the organizational basis of the party. His own absolute supremacy was thereby assured.³⁵

Here, it seems, embodied in the description in Mein Kampf, is the realization of Hitler’s ambition for dictatorial power in the movement – subsequently in the German state – which could be witnessed in his early conflicts with Harrer and Drexler, and his rejection of the initial inner-party democratic style. The weakness of lesser mortals, their inability to see the light, the certainty with which he went his own way, and the need to follow a supreme leader who alone could ensure ultimate triumph – these, from the outset, are the dominant themes. The beginning of his claim to leadership can thus be located in the earliest phase of his activity within the party. In turn, this suggests that the self-awareness of political genius was present from the beginning.

Little wonder that, on the basis of this story, the enigma of Hitler is profound. The ‘nobody of Vienna’, the corporal who is not even promoted to sergeant, now appears with a full-blown political philosophy, a strategy for success, and a burning will to lead his party, and sees himself as Germany’s coming great leader. However puzzling and extraordinary, the underlying thrust of Hitler’s self-depiction has found a surprising degree of acceptance.³⁶ But, though not inaccurate in all respects, it requires substantial modification and qualification.

III

The break with Karl Harrer soon came. It was not, however, an early indicator of Hitler’s relentless striving for dictatorial power in the movement. Nor was it simply a matter of whether the party should be a mass movement or a type of closed völkisch debating society.³⁷ A number of völkischorganizations at the time faced the same problem, and attempted to combine an appeal to a mass audience with regular meetings of an exclusive ‘inner circle’. Harrer tended strongly towards the latter, represented by the ‘Workers’ Circle’, which he himself controlled, in contrast to the party’s ‘Working Committee’, where he was simply an ordinary member. But Harrer found himself increasingly isolated. Drexler was as keen as Hitler to take the party’s message to the masses. He later claimed that he, and not Hitler, had proposed announcing the party’s programme at a mass meeting in the Hofbräuhausfestsaal, and that Hitler had initially been sceptical about the prospects of filling the hall.³⁸ As long as Harrer directed the party through his control of the ‘Workers’ Circle’, the question of the more viable propaganda strategy would remain unresolved. It was necessary, therefore, to enhance the role of the Committee, which Drexler and Hitler did in draft regulations that they drew up in December, giving it complete authority and ruling out any ‘superior or side government, whether as a circle or lodge’.³⁹ The draft regulations – bearing Hitler’s clear imprint – determined that the Committee’s members and its chairman should be elected in an open meeting. Their unity, it went on, would be ensured through strict adherence to the programme of the party (which Hitler and Drexler were already preparing). The new regulations were plainly directed against Harrer. But they were not devised as a stepping-stone on the way to Hitler’s supreme power in the party. Evidently, he had no notion of dictatorial party rule at the time. He was ready to accept the corporate leadership of an elected committee. Decisions to stage mass meetings in the next months were, it seems, those of the Committee as a whole, approved by a majority of its members, not Hitler’s alone, though, once Harrer had departed and in view of Hitler’s increasing success in drawing the crowds to listen to his speeches, it is hard to believe that there was any dissension. Harrer alone, it appears, opposed the staging of an ambitious mass meeting in early 1920, and accepted the consequences of his defeat by resigning. Personal animosity also played a role. Harrer, remarkably, thought little of Hitler as a speaker. Hitler was in turn contemptuous of Harrer.⁴⁰

The party’s first mass meeting was initially planned to take place in the Bürgerbräukeller (another large beerhall, on Rosenheimerstraße, just over the river Isar about half a mile south-east of the city centre) in January 1920, but had to be postponed because of a general ban on public meetings at the time.⁴¹ It was rescheduled for the Hofbräuhaus on 24 February. The fear that the meeting would be broken up through planned disturbances by political opponents, anxious to disrupt the first big meeting of a party calling itself a ‘workers’ party’, was probably exaggerated at this early stage in the party’s development. Large antisemitic meetings were nothing new in Munich at the time. Disturbances had to be reckoned with. A high-point of the antisemitic wave of agitation that had begun in Munich in summer 1919 had already taken place: a huge meeting of the Schutz- und Trutzbund on 7 January 1920, attended by 7,000 people, had provoked scenes of uproar.⁴² Corporal Hitler, who made a brief contribution to the ‘discussion’, cannot fail to have been impressed by the resonance of antisemitic agitation – or by the mark on public opinion in Munich made by such a piece of political theatre.⁴³ The main worry of Hitler, as of Drexler, was not that there would be disruption, but that the attendance would be embarrassingly small. This was why, since Drexler recognized that neither he nor Hitler had any public profile, he approached Dr Johannes Dingfelder, not even a party member but well known in Munich völkisch circles, to deliver the main speech, on ‘What We Are Needing’ (Was uns not tut). Hitler’s name was not even mentioned in any of the publicity. Nor was there any hint that the party’s programme would be proclaimed at the meeting.⁴⁴

The twenty-five points of this programme – which would in the course of time be declared ‘unalterable’ and be in practice largely ignored – had been worked out and drafted over the previous weeks by Drexler and Hitler. Discussion was already under way in mid-November 1919; Drexler had a draft ready a month later, and produced a further draft by 9 February, before the final version was produced in time for the Hofbräuhaus meeting.⁴⁵ The content had much in common with the programme of the DSP.⁴⁶ Its points – among them, demands for a Greater Germany, land and colonies, discrimination against Jews and denial of citizenship to them, breaking ‘interest slavery’, confiscation of war profits, land reform, protection of the middle class, persecution of profiteers, and tight regulation of the press – contained little or nothing that was original or novel on thevölkisch Right.⁴⁷ Religious neutrality was included in the attempt to avoid alienating a large church-going population in Bavaria. ‘Common good before individual good’ was an unobjectionable banality. The demand for ‘a strong central power’ in the Reich, and ‘the unconditional authority’ of a ‘central parliament’, though clearly implying authoritarian, not pluralistic, government, gives no indication that Hitler envisaged himself at this stage as the head of a personalized regime. There are some striking omissions. Neither Marxism nor Bolshevism is mentioned. The entire question of agriculture is passed over, apart from the brief reference to land reform. The authorship of the programme cannot fully be clarified.⁴⁸ Probably, the individual points derived from several sources among the party’s leading figures. The attack on ‘interest slavery’ obviously drew on Gottfried Feder’s pet theme. Profit-sharing was a favourite idea of Drexler. The forceful style, in comparison with the more wordy DSP programme, sounds like Hitler’s.⁴⁹ As he later asserted, he certainly worked on it.⁵⁰ But probably the main author was Drexler himself. Certainly, Drexler himself claimed this in the private letter he wrote to Hitler (though did not send) in January 1940. In this letter, he stated that ‘following all the basic points already written down by me, Adolf Hitler composed with me – and with no one else – the 25 theses of National Socialism, in long nights in the workers’ canteen at Burghausenerstraße 6’.⁵¹

Despite worries about the attendance at the party’s first big meeting, some 2,000 people (perhaps a fifth of them socialist opponents) were crammed into the Festsaal of the Hofbräuhaus on 24 February when Hitler, as chairman, opened the meeting.⁵²Dingfelder’s speech was unremarkable. Certainly, it was un-Hitler like in style and tone. The word ‘Jew’ was never mentioned. He blamed Germany’s fate on the decline of morality and religion, and the rise of selfish, material values. His recipe for recovery was ‘order, work, and dutiful sacrifice for the salvation of the Fatherland’. The speech was well received and uninterrupted.⁵³ The atmosphere suddenly livened when Hitler came to speak. His tone was harsher, more aggressive, less academic, than Dingfelder’s. The language he used was expressive, direct, coarse, earthy – that used and understood by most of his audience – his sentences short and punchy. He heaped insults on target-figures like the leading Centre Party politician and Reich Finance Minister Matthias Erzberger (who had signed the Armistice in 1918 and strongly advocated acceptance of the detested Versailles Treaty the following summer) or the Munich capitalist Isidor Bach, sure of the enthusiastic applause of his audience. Verbal assaults on the Jews brought new cheers from the audience, while shrill attacks on profiteers produced cries of ‘Flog them! Hang them!’ When he came to read out the party programme, there was much applause for the individual points. But there were interruptions, too, from left-wing opponents, who had already been getting restless, and the police reporter of the meeting spoke of scenes of ‘great tumult so that I often thought it would come to brawling at any minute’. Hitler announced, to storms of applause, what would remain the party’s slogan: ‘Our motto is only struggle. We will go our way unshakably to our goal.’ The end of Hitler’s speech, in which he read out a protest at an alleged decision to provide 40,000 hundredweight of flour for the Jewish community, again erupted into uproar following further opposition heckling, with people standing on tables and chairs yelling at each other. In the subsequent ‘discussion’, four others spoke briefly, two of them opponents. Remarks from the last speaker that a dictatorship from the Right would be met with a dictatorship from the Left were the signal for a further uproar, such that Hitler’s words closing the meeting were drowned. Around 100 Independent Socialists and Communists poured out of the Hofbräuhaus on to the streets cheering for the International and the Räterepublik and booing the war-heroes Hindenburg and Ludendorff, and the German Nationalists.⁵⁴ The meeting had not exactly produced the ‘hall full of people united by a new conviction, a new faith, a new will’ that Hitler was later to describe.⁵⁵

Nor would anyone reading Munich newspapers in the days following the meeting have gained the impression that it was a landmark heralding the arrival of a new, dynamic party and a new political hero. The press’s reaction was muted, to say the least. The newspapers concentrated in their brief reports on Dingfelder’s speech and paid little attention to Hitler.⁵⁶ Even the Völkischer Beobachter, not yet under party control but sympathetic, was surprisingly low-key. It reported the meeting in a single column in an inside page four days later. Most of the report dealt with Dingfelder’s speech. Hitler’s contribution was summarized in a single sentence: ‘Herr Hitler (DAP) presented some striking political points (entwickelte einige treffende politische Bilder) which evoked spirited applause, but also roused the numerous already prejudiced opponents present to contradiction; and he gave a survey of the party’s programme, which in its basic features comes close to that of the Deutschsozialistische Partei.’⁵⁷

Despite this initial modest impact, it was already apparent that Hitler meetings meant political fireworks. Even in the hothouse of Munich politics, the big meetings of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAΡ), as the movement henceforth called itself, were something different.⁵⁸Hitler wanted above all else to make his party noticed. In this he rapidly succeeded. ‘It makes no difference whatever whether they laugh at us or revile us,’ he later wrote, ‘whether they represent us as clowns or criminals; the main thing is that they mention us, that they concern themselves with us again and again…’⁵⁹ He observed the dull, lifeless meetings of bourgeois parties, the deadening effect of speeches read out like academic lectures by dignified, elderly gentlemen. Nazi meetings, he recorded with pride, were, by contrast, not peaceful. He learnt from the organization of meetings by the Left, how they were orchestrated, the value of intimidation of opponents, techniques of disruption, and how to deal with disturbances. The NSDAP’s meetings aimed to attract confrontation, and as a result to make the party noticed. Posters were drafted in vivid red to provoke the Left to attend.⁶⁰ In mid-1920 Hitler personally designed the party’s banner with the swastika in a white circle on a red background devised to make as striking a visual impact as possible.⁶¹ The result was that meetings were packed long before the start, and the numbers of opponents present guaranteed that the atmosphere was potentially explosive.⁶² To combat trouble, a ‘hall protection’ squad (Saalschutz) was fully organized by mid-1920, became the ‘Gymnastic and Sports Section’ in August 1921, and eventually developed into the ‘Storm Section’ (Sturmabteilung, or SA).⁶³

Only Hitler could bring in the crowds for the NSDAP. To this extent, his self-centred account in Mein Kampf was perfectly correct. It was a month after feeling provoked into joining in the discussion at the DAP meeting on 12 September 1919 before his first ‘performance’ as a party speaker in the Hofbräukeller on 16 October 1919.⁶⁴ The memory of his success, as we have seen, lasted with him. In Mein Kampf he used the almost identical phrase with which he had already described his ‘self-discovery’ in the Lechfeld Camp: ‘What before I had simply felt within me, without in any way knowing it, was now proved by reality: I could speak!’⁶⁵ Though plainly stylized, as the double rendition of this phrase demonstrates, there can be no doubting the self-confidence that flowed through Hitler as a result of the confirmation, for the first time before a non-captive audience, that the way he spoke could stir his audience.

In the company of an individual, Hitler’s egocentric manner could be totally off-putting. An acquaintance at the time, contemptuous of Hitler’s activity as a Reichswehr spy, but forced to suffer an involuntary lecture on the future mission of German artists, could eventually stand no more of the peroration: ‘Tell me, have they shit in your brain and forgotten to flush it?’ he asked, leaving Hitler speechless.⁶⁶ But in front of a beerhall audience Hitler’s style was electrifying.

While in his Nuremberg cell awaiting the hangman, Hans Frank, the ex-Governor General of Poland, recalled the moment, in January 1920, while he was still only nineteen years old (though already committed to the völkisch cause), that he had first heard Hitler speak. The large room was bursting at the seams. Middle-class citizens rubbed shoulders with workers, soldiers, and students. Whether old or young, the state of the nation weighed heavily on people. Germany’s plight polarized opinions, but left few unmoved or disinterested. Most political meetings were packed. But, to Frank – young, idealistic, fervently anti-Marxist and nationalistic – speakers were generally disappointing, had little to offer. Hitler, in stark contrast, set him alight.

The man with whom Hans Frank’s fate would be bound for the next quarter of a century was dressed in a shabby blue suit, his tie loosely fastened. He spoke clearly, in impassioned but not shrill tones, his blue eyes flashing, occasionally pushing back his hair with his right hand. Frank’s most immediate feeling was how sincere Hitler was, how the words came from the heart and were not just a rhetorical device. ‘He was at that time simply the grandiose popular speaker without precedent – and, for me, incomparable,’ wrote Frank.

I was strongly impressed straight away. It was totally different from what was otherwise to be heard in meetings. His method was completely clear and simple. He took the overwhelmingly dominant topic of the day, the Versailles Diktat, and posed the question of all questions: What now German people? What’s the true situation? What alone is now possible? He spoke for over two-and-a-half hours, often interrupted by frenetic torrents of applause – and one could have listened to him for much, much longer. Everything came from the heart, and he struck a chord with all of us… He uttered what was in the consciousness of all those present and linked general experiences to clear understanding and the common wishes of those who were suffering and hoping for a programme. In the matter itself he was certainly not original… but he was the one called to act as spokesman of the people… He concealed nothing… of the horror, the distress, the despair facing Germany. But not only that. He showed a way, the only way left to all ruined peoples in history, that of the grim new beginning from the most profound depths through courage, faith, readiness for action, hard work, and devotion to a great, shining, common goal… He placed before the protection of the Almighty in the most serious and solemn exhortation the salvation of the honour of the German soldier and worker as his life-task… When he finished, the applause would not die down… From this evening onwards, though not a party member, I was convinced that if one man could do it, Hitler alone would be capable of mastering Germany’s fate.⁶⁷

Whatever the pathos of these comments, they testify to Hitler’s instinctive ability, singling him out from other speakers relaying a similar message, to speak in the language of his listeners, and to stir them through the passion and – however strange it might now sound to us – the apparent sincerity of his idealism.

Rising attendances, as he noted in Mein Kampf, followed in the next weeks, between his first appearance as main speaker – on one of his favourite topics, ‘Brest-Litovsk and Versailles?’ – in the Eberlbräukeller in November 1919, and the big Hofbräuhaus meeting in February 1920. This was merely a prelude to Hitler’s growing success and mounting reputation as the party’s star speaker. By the end of 1920 he had addressed over thirty mass meetings – mostly of between 800 and 2,500 persons – and spoken at many smaller internal party gatherings.⁶⁸ In early February 1921 he would speak at the biggest meeting so far – over 6,000 people in the Circus Krone, which could accommodate the biggest indoor crowds in Munich, near the Marsfeld just to the west of the city centre.⁶⁹ Until mid-1921 he spoke mainly in Munich, where the propaganda and organization of the meetings would ensure a satisfactory turn-out, and where the right atmosphere was guaranteed. But, not counting the speeches made during a fortnight’s visit to Austria in early October, he held ten speeches outside the city in 1920, including one in Rosenheim where the first local group of the party outside Munich had just been founded. It was largely owing to Hitler’s public profile that the party membership increased sharply from 190 in January 1920 to 2,000 by the end of the year and 3,300 by August 1921.⁷⁰ He was rapidly making himself indispensable to the movement.

IV

Hitler spoke from rough notes – mainly a series of jotted headings with key words underlined.⁷¹ As a rule, a speech would last around two hours or more.⁷² In the Festsaal of the Hofbräuhaus he used a beer table on one of the long sides of the hall as his platform in order to be in the middle of the crowd – a novel technique for a speaker which helped create what Hitler regarded as a special mood in that hall.⁷³ The themes of his speeches varied little: the contrast of Germany’s strength in a glorious past with its current weakness and national humiliation – a sick state in the hands of traitors and cowards who had betrayed the Fatherland to its powerful enemies; the reasons for the collapse in a lost war unleashed by these enemies, and behind them, the Jews; betrayal and revolution brought about by criminals and Jews;⁷⁴ English and French intentions of destroying Germany, as shown in the Treaty of Versailles – the ‘Peace of shame’, the instrument of Germany’s slavery; the exploitation of ordinary Germans by Jewish racketeers and profiteers; a cheating and corrupt government and party system presiding over economic misery, social division, political conflict, and ethical collapse; the only way to recovery contained in the points of the party’s programme – ruthless showdown with internal enemies and build-up of national consciousness and unity, leading to renewed strength and eventual restored greatness.⁷⁵ The combination of traditional Bavarian dislike of the Prussians and the experience of the Räterepublik in Munich meant that Hitler’s repeated onslaught on the ‘Marxist’ government in Berlin was certain to meet with an enthusiastic response among the still small minority of the local population drawn to his meetings.

While Hitler basically appealed to negative feelings – anger, resentment, hatred – there was also a ‘positive’ element in the proposed remedy to the proclaimed ills. However platitudinous, the appeal to restoration of liberty through national unity, the need to work together of ‘workers of the brain and hand’ (Zusammenarbeiten des Geistes- und Handarbeiters),⁷⁶ the social harmony of a ‘national community’, and the protection of the ‘little man’ through the crushing of his exploiters, were, to go from the applause they invariably produced, undeniably attractive propositions to Hitler’s audiences.⁷⁷ And Hitler’s own passion and fervour successfully conveyed the message – to those already predisposed to it – that no other way was possible; that Germany’s revival would and could be brought about; and that it lay in the power of ordinary Germans to make it happen through their own struggle, sacrifice, and will.⁷⁸ The effect was more that of a religious revivalist meeting than a normal political gathering.⁷⁹

What Hitler was saying had long belonged to the standard repertoire of nationalist and völkisch speakers. It was as good as indistinguishable from what the Pan-Germans had been preaching for years. And though Hitler was invariably up-to-date in finding easy targets in the daily politics of the crisis-ridden Republic, his main themes were tediously repetitive. Some, in fact, often taken for granted to be part of Hitler’s allegedly unchanging ideology were missing altogether at this stage. There was, for example, not a single mention of the need for ‘living-space’ (Lebensraum) in eastern Europe.⁸⁰ Britain and France were the foreign-policy targets at this time. Indeed, Hitler jotted among the notes of one of his speeches, in August 1920, ‘brotherhood towards the east’ (Verbrüderung nach Osten).⁸¹ Nor did he clamour for a dictatorship. Such a demand occurs in only one speech in 1920, on 27 April, in which Hitler declared that Germany needed ‘a dictator who is a genius’ if it were to rise up again.⁸² There was no implication that he himself was that person.⁸³ Surprisingly, too, his first outright public assault on Marxism did not occur before his speech at Rosenheim on 21 July 1920 (though he had spoken on a number of occasions before this of the catastrophic effects of Bolshevism in Russia, for which he blamed the Jews).⁸⁴ And, remarkably, even race theory – where Hitler drew heavily for his ideas from well-known antisemitic tracts such as those of Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Adolf Wahrmund, and, especially, the arch-popularizer Theodor Fritsch (one of whose emphases was the alleged sexual abuse of women by Jews) – was explicitly treated in only one speech by Hitler during 1920.⁸⁵

This scarcely meant, however, that Hitler neglected to attack the Jews. On the contrary: the all-devouring manic obsession with the Jews to which all else is subordinated – not observable before 1919, never absent thereafter – courses through almost every Hitler speech at this time. Behind all evil that had befallen or was threatening Germany stood the figure of the Jew.⁸⁶ In speech after speech he lashed the Jews in the most vicious and barbaric language imaginable.

Genuine socialism, declared Hitler, meant to be an antisemite.⁸⁷ Germans should be ready to enter into a pact with the devil to eradicate the evil of Jewry.⁸⁸ But, as in his letter to Gemlich the previous autumn, he did not see emotional antisemitism as the answer.⁸⁹ He demanded internment in concentration camps to prevent ‘Jewish undermining of our people’,⁹⁰ hanging for racketeers,⁹¹ but ultimately, as the only solution – similar to the Gemlich letter – the ‘removal of the Jews from our people’.⁹² The implication, as in his explicit demands with regard to Ostjuden,⁹³ was their expulsion from Germany. This was undoubtedly how it was understood. But, as with some pre-war antisemites, the language itself was both terrible and implicitly genocidal in its biological similes.⁹⁴ ‘You don’t talk about what to do with parasites (Trichinen) and bacilli. Parasites and bacilli are also not reared. They are as quickly and fully as possible destroyed (vernichtet).’ This was not Hitler. It was Paul de Lagarde, leading oriental scholar and specialist in Semitic languages, in 1887, writing of how, in his view, Jews should be treated.⁹⁵ The atmosphere had become immeasurably more menacing towards the Jews when Hitler deployed similar terminology over thirty years later. ‘Don’t think that you can combat racial tuberculosis,’ he declared in August 1920, ‘without seeing to it that the people is freed from the causative organ of racial tuberculosis. The impact of Jewry will never pass away, and the poisoning of the people will not end, as long as the causal agent, the Jew, is not removed from our midst.’⁹⁶

His audiences loved it. More than anything else, these attacks evoked torrents of applause and cheering.⁹⁷ His technique – beginning slowly, plenty of sarcasm, personalized attacks on named targets, then a gradual crescendo to a climax – whipped his audiences into a frenzy.⁹⁸ His speech in the Festsaal of the Hofbräuhaus on 13 August 1920 on ‘Why Are We Antisemites?’ – his only speech that year solely relating to the Jews and probably intended as a basic statement on the topic – was interrupted fifty-eight times during its two hours’ duration by ever wilder cheering from the 2,000 strong audience.⁹⁹ To go from a report on another Hitler speech a few weeks later, the audience would have been mainly drawn from white-collar workers, the lower-middle class, and better-off workers, with around a quarter women.¹⁰⁰

At first, Hitler’s antisemitic tirades were invariably linked to anti-capitalism and attacks on ‘Jewish’ war profiteers and racketeers, whom he blamed for exploiting the German people and causing the loss of the war and the German war dead. He later claimed, in a horrific passage of Mein Kampf, that a million German lives lost at the front would have been saved if ‘twelve to fifteen thousand of these Hebrew corrupters of the people had been held under poison gas’.¹⁰¹ The influence of Gottfried Feder can be seen in the distinction Hitler drew between essentially healthy ‘industrial capital’ and the real evil of ‘Jewish finance capital’.¹⁰²

There was no link with Marxism or Bolshevism at this stage. Contrary to what is sometimes claimed, Hitler’s antisemitism was not prompted by his anti-Bolshevism; it longpredated it.¹⁰³ There was no mention of Bolshevism in the Gemlich letter of September 1919, where the ‘Jewish Question’ is related to the rapacious nature of finance capital.¹⁰⁴ Hitler spoke in April and again in June 1920 of Russia being destroyed by the Jews, but it was only in his Rosenheim speech on 21 July that he explicitly married the images of Marxism, Bolshevism, and the Soviet system in Russia to the brutality of Jewish rule, for which he saw Social Democracy preparing the ground in Germany.¹⁰⁵ Hitler admitted in August 1920 that he knew little of the real situation in Russia.¹⁰⁶ But–perhaps influenced above all by Alfred Rosenberg, who came from the Baltic and experienced the Russian Revolution at first hand,¹⁰⁷ but probably also soaking up images of the horror of the Russian civil war which were filtering through to the German press¹⁰⁸ – he plainly became preoccupied with Bolshevik Russia in the second half of the year.¹⁰⁹ The dissemination of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion – the forgery about Jewish world domination, widely read and believed in antisemitic circles at the time – probably also helped to focus Hitler’s attention on Russia.¹¹⁰ These images appear to have provided the catalyst to the merger of antisemitism and anti-Marxism in his ‘world-view’ – an identity which, once forged, never disappeared.

V

Hitler’s speeches put him on the political map in Munich. But he was still very much a local taste. And however much noise he made, his party was still insignificant compared with the established socialist and Catholic parties. Moreover, though it is going too far to see him as no more than the tool of powerful vested interests ‘behind the scenes’, without influential backers and the ‘connections’ they could provide his talents as a mob-agitator would not have got him very far.

Though Hitler had already signalled his intention of making a living as a political speaker, he was, in fact, until 31 March 1920 still drawing pay from the army. His first patron, Captain Mayr, continued to take a close interest in him and, if his later account can be believed, provided limited funding towards the staging of the mass meetings.¹¹¹ At this time, Hitler was still serving both the party and the army. In January and February 1920, Mayr had ‘Herr Hittler’ lecturing on ‘Versailles’ and ‘Political Parties and their Significance’ in the company of distinguished Munich historians Karl Alexander von Müller and Paul Joachimsen to Reichswehr soldiers undertaking ‘citizenship education courses’.¹¹² In March, during the Kapp Putsch, when a short-lived armed coup had attempted to overthrow the government, forcing it to flee from the Reich capital, he sent him with Dietrich Eckart to Berlin to instruct Wolfgang Kapp on the situation in Bavaria. They arrived too late. The Right’s first attempt to take over the state had already collapsed. But Mayr was undeterred. He retained both his contact with Kapp and his interest in Hitler. He still had hopes, so he told Kapp six months later, that the NSDAΡ – which he thought of as his own creation – would become the ‘organization of national radicalism’, the advance-guard of a future, more successful, putsch.¹¹³ He wrote to Kapp, now exiled in Sweden:

The national workers’ party must provide the basis for the strong assault-force (Stoßtrupp) that we are hoping for. The programme is still somewhat clumsy and also perhaps incomplete. We’ll have to supplement it. Only one thing is certain: that under this banner we’ve already won a good number of supporters. Since July of last year I’ve been looking… to strengthen the movement… I’ve set up very capable young people. A Herr Hitler, for example, has become a motive force, a popular speaker (Volksredner) of the first rank. In the Munich branch we have over 2,000 members, compared with under 100 in summer 1919.¹¹⁴

Early in 1920, before Hitler had left the Reichswehr, Mayr had taken him along to meetings of the ‘Iron Fist’ club for radical nationalist officers, founded by Captain Ernst Röhm. Hitler had been introduced to Rohm by Mayr, probably the previous autumn.¹¹⁵Interested in a variety of nationalist parties, particularly with a view to winning the workers to the nationalist cause, Röhm had attended the first meeting of the DAP addressed by Hitler on 16 October 1919 and had joined the party shortly afterwards. Now Hitler came into far closer contact with Röhm, who rapidly came to replace Mayr as the key link with the Reichswehr. Röhm had been responsible for arming the volunteers and ‘civil defence’ (Einwohnerwehr) units in Bavaria and had in the meantime become an important player in paramilitary politics, with excellent connections in the army, the ‘patriotic associations’, and throughout the völkisch Right. He was, in fact, at this time, along with his fellow officers on the Right, far more interested in the massive Einwohnerwehren, with a membership of over quarter of a million men, than he was in the tiny NSDAP. Even so, he provided the key contact between the NSDAP and the far larger ‘patriotic associations’ and offered avenues to funding which the constantly hard-up party desperately needed.¹¹⁶ His connections proved invaluable – increasingly so from 1921 onwards, when his interest in Hitler’s party grew.

Another important patron at this time was the völkisch poet and publicist Dietrich Eckart.¹¹⁷ More than twenty years older than Hitler, Eckart, who had initially made his name with a German adaptation of Peer Gynt, had not been notably successful before the war as a poet and critic. Possibly this stimulated his intense antisemitism. He became politically active in December 1918 with the publication of his antisemitic weekly Aufgut deutsch (In Plain German), which also featured contributions from Gottfried Feder and the young emigré from the Baltic, Alfred Rosenberg. He spoke at DAΡ meetings in the summer of 1919, before Hitler joined,¹¹⁸ and evidently came to regard the party’s new recruit as his own protege. Hitler himself was flattered by the attention paid to him by a figure of Eckart’s reputation in völkisch circles. In the early years, relations between the two were good, even close. But for Hitler, as ever, it was Eckart’s usefulness that counted. As Hitler’s self-importance grew, his need for Eckart declined and by 1923, the year of Eckart’s death, the two had become estranged.¹¹⁹

At first, however, there could be no doubt of Eckart’s value to Hitler and the NSDAP. Through his well-heeled connections, Eckart afforded the beerhall demagogue an entrée into Munich ‘society’, opening for him the door to the salons of wealthy and influential members of the city’s bourgeoisie. And through his financial support, and that of his contacts, he was able to offer vital assistance to the financially struggling small party. Since membership fees did not remotely cover outgoings, the party was dependent upon help from outside. It came in part from the owners of Munich firms and businesses, including the publisher Lehmann. Some aid continued to come from the Reichswehr. Mayr’s office paid for the 3,000 brochures, attacking the detested Versailles Treaty (seen not just on the extreme Right as cripplingly punitive and humiliating for Germany), which Lehmann had published for the party in June 1920.¹²⁰ But Eckart’s role was crucial. He arranged, for example, the funding from his friend, the Augsburg chemist and factory-owner Dr Gottfried Grandel, who also backed the periodical Aufgut deutsch, for the plane that took him and Hitler to Berlin at the time of the Kapp Putsch. Grandel later served as a guarantor for the funds used to purchase the Völkischer Beobachter and turn it into the party’s own newspaper in December 1920.¹²¹

The party leadership had been looking to buy the near-bankrupt Beobachter since the summer to provide the wider publicity that was needed. But it was only in mid-December, when rival bidders for the newspaper emerged, that Hitler moved. Together with Hermann Esser and the deputy party-chairman Oskar Körner, he turned up in an agitated state at Drexler’s flat at two o’clock in the morning on 17 December claiming the Beobachter was ‘in danger’, that it was about to fall into Bavarian separatists’ hands. Drexler’s mother was wakened up to make coffee, and around the kitchen table it was decided that Drexler would first thing the next morning call on Eckart to persuade him to encourage his wealthy contacts to provide the financial backing to acquire the newspaper. Hitler, meanwhile, would seek out Dr Grandel in Augsburg. Six hours later, Drexler was drumming an irritable Eckart out of bed, disgruntled at being awakened so early. They were soon on their way to see General von Epp. Eckart convinced the latter how vital it was to gain possession of the Beobachter and stood guarantor with his house and property for the 60,000 Marks which Epp provided from the funds of the Reichswehr. Other sources yielded a further 30,000 Marks, and Drexler himself, earning 35 Marks a week, took over the remaining debts of 113,000 Marks before, that afternoon, becoming the legal owner of the Völkischer Beobachter.¹²² Thanks to Eckart, the Reichswehr, and in no small measure to Drexler himself, Hitler now had his newspaper. His thanks to Eckart were suitably fulsome.¹²³

VI

To the Munich public, by 1921, Hitler was the NSDAP. He was its voice, its representative figure, its embodiment. Asked to name the party’s chairman, perhaps even politically informed citizens might have guessed wrongly. But Hitler did not want the chairmanship. Drexler offered it him on a number of occasions. But Hitler refused.¹²⁴ Drexler wrote to Feder in spring 1921, stating ‘that each revolutionary movement must have a dictatorial head, and therefore I also think our Hitler is the most suitable for our movement, without wanting to be pushed into the background myself’.¹²⁵But for Hitler, the party chairmanship meant organizational responsibility. He had – this was to remain the case during the rise to power, and when he headed the German state – neither aptitude nor ability for organizational matters. Organization he could leave to others; propaganda – mobilization of the masses – was what he was good at, and what he wanted to do. For that, and that alone, he would take responsibility. Propaganda, for Hitler, was the highest form of political activity. He had learnt at first from the Social Democrats as well as from the antisemites of the Schutz- und Trutzbund. He probably also learnt from Gustave Le Bon’s tract on crowd psychology – though most likely at second hand.¹²⁶But most of all he learnt from his own experience of the power of the spoken word, given the right political climate, the right crisis atmosphere, and a public ready to trust in political faith more than reasoned argument. In Hitler’s own conception, propaganda was the key to the nationalization of the masses, without which there could be no national salvation. It was not that propaganda and ideology (Weltanschauung) were distinctive entities for him. They were inseparable, and reinforced each other. An idea for Hitler was useless unless it mobilized. The self-confidence he gained from the rapturous reception of his speeches assured him that his diagnosis of Germany’s ills and the way to national redemption was right – the only one possible. This in turn gave him the self-conviction that conveyed itself to those in his immediate entourage as well as those listening to his speeches in the beerhalls. To see himself as ‘drummer’ of the national cause was, therefore, for Hitler a high calling. It was why, before the middle of 1921, he preferred to be free for this role, and not to be bogged down in the organizational work which he associated with the chairmanship of the party.¹²⁷

The outrage felt throughout Germany at the punitive sum of 226 thousand million Gold Marks to be paid in reparations, imposed by the Paris Conference at the end of January 1921, ensured there would be no let-up in agitation.¹²⁸ This was the background for the biggest meeting that the NSDAP had until then staged, on 3 February in the Circus Krone. Hitler risked going ahead with the meeting at only one day’s notice, and without the usual advance publicity. In a rush, the huge hall was booked and two lorries hired to drive round the city throwing out leaflets.¹²⁹ This was another technique borrowed from the ‘Marxists’, and the first time the Nazis had used it. Despite worries until the last minute that the hall would be half-empty and the meeting would prove a propaganda débâcle, more than 6,000 turned up to hear Hitler, speaking on ‘Future or Ruin’ (Zukunft oder Untergang), denounce the ‘slavery’ imposed on Germans by the Allied reparations, and castigate the weakness of the government for accepting them.¹³⁰ ‘The known leader of the antisemites, Hitler’ had less success three days later when, as third speaker at a mass rally of 20,000 members of the ‘patriotic associations’ in Odeonsplatz, he made no impact with his ‘party-political tendencies’.¹³¹

Hitler wrote that after the Circus Krone success he increased the ΝSDAΡ’s propaganda activity in Munich still further.¹³² And indeed the propaganda output was impressive. Hitler spoke at twenty-eight major meetings in Munich and twelve elsewhere (nearly all still in Bavaria), apart from several contributions to ‘discussions’, and seven addresses to the newly-formed SA in the latter part of the year. Between January and June 1921 he also wrote thirty-nine articles for the Völkischer Beobachter, and from September onwards contributed a number of pieces to the party’s internal information leaflets (Mitteilungsblätter).¹³³ Of course, he had the time in which to devote himself solely to propaganda. Unlike the other members of the party leadership, he had no other occupation or interest.

Politics consumed practically his entire existence. When he was not giving speeches, or preparing them, he spent time reading. As always, much of this was the newspapers – giving him regular ammunition for his scourge of Weimar politicians. He had books – a lot of them popular editions – on history, geography, Germanic myths, and, especially, war (including Clausewitz) on the shelves of his shabby, sparsely furnished room at 41 Thierschstraße, down by the Isar.¹³⁴ But what, exactly, he read is impossible to know. His lifestyle scarcely lent itself to lengthy periods of systematic reading. He claimed, however, to have read up on his hero Frederick the Great, and pounced on the work of his rival in the völkisch camp, Otto Dickel, a 320-page treatise on Die Auferstehung des Abendlandes (The Resurrection of the Western World), a mystical tract attempting to turn Spengler’s pessimism on its head, immediately on its appearance in 1921 in order to be able to castigate it.¹³⁵

Otherwise, as it had been since the Vienna days, much of his time was spent lounging around cafés in Munich. According to his photographer Heinrich Hoffmann, he specially liked the Café Heck in Galerienstraße, his favourite. In a quiet corner of the long, narrow room of this coffee-house, frequented by Munich’s solid middle class, he could sit at his reserved table, his back to the wall, holding court among the new-found cronies that he had attracted to the ΝSDAΡ.¹³⁶ Among those coming to form an inner circle of Hitler’s associates were the young student Rudolf Heß, the Baltic-Germans Alfred Rosenberg (who had worked on Eckart’s periodical since 1919) and Max Erwin von Scheubner-Richter (an engineer with excellent contacts to wealthy Russian emigrés).¹³⁷ Certainly by the time Putzi Hanfstaengl, the cultured part-American who became his Foreign Press Chief, came to know him, late in 1922, Hitler had a table booked every Monday evening at the old-fashioned Café Neumaier on the edge of the Viktualienmarkt.¹³⁸ His regular accompaniment formed a motley crew – mostly lower-middle class, some unsavoury characters among them. Christian Weber, a former horse-dealer, who, like Hitler, invariably carried a dog-whip and relished the brawls with Communists, was one. Another was Hermann Esser, formerly Mayr’s press agent, himself an excellent agitator, and an even better gutter journalist. Max Amann, another roughneck, Hitler’s former sergeant who became overlord of the Nazi press empire, was also usually there, as were Ulrich Graf, Hitler’s personal bodyguard, and, frequently, the ‘philosophers’ of the party, Gottfried Feder and Dietrich Eckart. In the long room, with its rows of benches and tables, often occupied by elderly couples, Hitler’s entourage would discuss politics, or listen to his monologues on art and architecture, while eating the snacks they had brought with them and drinking their litres of beer or cups of coffee.¹³⁹ At the end of the evening, Weber, Amann, Graf, and Lieutenant Klintzsch, a veteran of the Ehrhardt-Brigade who had taken part in the Kapp Putsch, would act as a bodyguard, escorting Hitler – wearing the long black overcoat and trilby that ‘gave him the appearance of a conspirator’ – back to his apartment in Thierschstraße.¹⁴⁰

Hitler scarcely cut the figure of a mainstream politician. Not surprisingly, the Bavarian establishment regarded him largely with contempt. But they could not ignore him. The old-fashioned monarchist head of the Bavarian government at the time, Minister President Gustav Ritter von Kahr, who had assumed office on 16 March 1920 following the Kapp Putsch and aimed to turn Bavaria into a ‘cell of order’ representing true national values, thought Hitler was a propagandist and nothing more. This was a not unjustifiable assessment at the time. But Kahr was keen to gather ‘national forces’ in Bavaria in protest at the ‘fulfilment policy’ of Reich Chancellor Wirth. And he felt certain that he could make use of Hitler, that he could control the ‘impetuous Austrian’.¹⁴¹ On 14 May 1921 he invited a delegation from the NSDAP, led by Hitler, to discuss the political situation with him. It was the first meeting of the two men whose identical aim of destroying the new Weimar democracy was to link them,.if fleetingly, in the ill-fated putsch of November 1923 – a chequered association that would end with Kahr’s murder in the ‘Night of the Long Knives’ at the end of June 1934. Whatever Kahr’s disdain for Hitler, his invitation to a meeting in May 1921 amounted to recognition that the latter was now a factor in Bavarian politics, proof that he and his movement had to be taken seriously.

Rudolf Heß, still studying at Munich under the geopolitician Professor Karl Haushofer, introverted and idealistic, and already besotted with Hitler, was part of the delegation. Three days later, unsolicited and unprompted by Hitler, he wrote a lengthy letter to Kahr, describing Hitler’s early life and eulogizing about his political aims, ideals, and skills. Hitler, he wrote, was ‘an unusually decent, sincere character, full of kind-heartedness, religious, a good Catholic’, with only one aim: ‘the welfare of his country’. Ηeß went on to laud Hitler’s self-sacrifice in this cause, how he received not a penny from the movement itself but made his living purely from the fees he received for other speeches he occasionally made.¹⁴²

This was the official line that Hitler himself had put out the previous September in the Völkischer Beobachter. It was quite disingenuous. On no more than a handful of occasions did he speak at nationalist meetings other than those of the ΝSDAΡ.¹⁴³ The fees from these alone would certainly not have been enough to keep body and soul together. Rumours about his income and lifestyle were avidly taken up on the Left. Even on the völkisch Right there were remarks about him being chauffeured around Munich in a big car, and his enemies in the party raised questions about his personal financial irregularities and the amount of time the ‘king of Munich’ spent in an expensive lifestyle cavorting with women – even women smoking cigarettes.¹⁴⁴ In fact, Hitler was distinctly touchy about his financial affairs. He repeated in court in December 1921 in a libel case against the socialist Münchener Post that he had sought no fees from the party for sixty-five speeches delivered in Munich.¹⁴⁵ But he accepted that he was ‘supported in a modest way’ by party members and ‘occasionally’ provided with meals by them.¹⁴⁶ One of those who looked after him was the first ‘Hitler-Mutti’, Frau Hermine Hofmann, the elderly widow of a headmaster, who plied Hitler with endless supplies of cakes and turned her house at Solln on the outskirts of Munich for a while into a sort of unofficial party headquarters.¹⁴⁷ A little later the Reichsbahn official Theodor Lauböck – founder of the Rosenheim branch of the NSDAP, but subsequently transferred to Munich – and his wife saw to Hitler’s well-being, and could also be called upon to put up important guests of the party.¹⁴⁸ In reality, the miserable accommodation Hitler rented in Thierschstraße, and the shabby clothes he wore, belied the fact that even at this date he was not short of well-to-do party supporters. With the growth of the party and his own expanding reputation in 1922–3, he was able to gain new and wealthy patrons in Munich high society.

VII

The party was, however, perpetually short of money. It was on a fund-raising mission in June 1921 to Berlin by Hitler, to try (in the company of the man with the contacts, Dietrich Eckart) to find backing for the ailing Völkischer Beobachter, that the crisis which culminated in Hitler’s takeover of the party leadership unfolded.¹⁴⁹

The background was shaped by moves to merge the NSDAP with the DSP. To go from the party programmes, despite some differences of accent, the two völkisch parties had more in common than separated them. And the DSP had a following in north Germany, which the Nazi Party, still scarcely more than a small local party, lacked. In itself, therefore, there was certainly an argument for joining forces. Talks about a possible merger had begun the previous August in a gathering in Salzburg, attended by Hitler, of national socialist parties from Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia and Poland.¹⁵⁰ A number of overtures followed from the DSP leaders between then and April 1921. At a meeting in Zeitz in Thuringia at the end of March, Drexler – presumably delegated by the NSDAP, but plainly in the teeth of Hitler’s disapproval – even agreed to tentative proposals for a merger and – anathema to Hitler – a move of the party headquarters to Berlin.¹⁵¹ Hitler responded with fury to Drexler’s concessions, threatened to resign from the party, and succeeded ‘amid unbelievable anger’ in reversing the agreement reached at Zeitz.¹⁵² Eventually, at a meeting in Munich in mid-April, amidst great rancour and with Hitler in a towering rage, negotiations with the DSP collapsed. The DSP was in no doubt that Hitler, the ‘fanatical would-be big shot’, whose successes had gone to his head, was solely responsible for the NSDAP’s obstructionism. Hitler, dismissive of notions of a specific political programme to be implemented, interested only in agitation and mobilization, had set his face rigidly from the outset against any possible merger. To Hitler, the similarities in programme were irrelevant. He objected to the way the DSP had rushed to set up numerous branches without solid foundations, so that the party was ‘everywhere and nowhere’, and to its readiness to resort to parliamentary tactics.¹⁵³ But the real reason was a different one. Any merger was bound to threaten his supremacy in the small but tightly-knit NSDAP. That he was so fearful of losing his dominance is a further pointer probably to Hitler’s personal as well as to his political insecurity.

Of importance for the crisis in the party that was to erupt three months later was the fact that, although he had succeeded in torpedoing the merger, Hitler had encountered significant opposition from within his own movement on the part of those who were by no means convinced that a strategy based on no more than a constant barrage of agitation would ultimately prove successful. It was not simply, as has often been claimed, a matter of the old party leadership against the Hitler clique, thrusting for power. There were genuine differences about political strategy. Four or five members of the committee were sceptical about Hitler’s approach, and favoured more traditional völkisch methods. Gottfried Feder, no less, complained bitterly to Drexler about Hitler’s crude style of propaganda and criticized the chairman’s conciliatory attitude towards him. But Drexler replied by defending both Hitler and his approach.¹⁵⁴ Personal factors also played a part. Hitler knew he was the only star the party had, and was not reticent in exploiting the power this gave him. But, as the July crisis was to show, there were those on the party’s committee who bitterly resented his special position and the way he was using this to veto all suggestions on the future of the party that did not meet with his approval.

Hitler’s actions were not, as they have again often been seen, part of a preconceived scheme to take over the party leadership. As we have already noted, Hitler had several months earlier turned down the offer to become a member of a small ‘action committee’, and even the chairmanship of the party. In spring 1921, he made no attempt to initiate a takeover of the party leadership, though the conditions for such a move were by no means unfavourable. Instead of a calculated, rational strategy to secure his position, his response was highly emotional, prima-donna-like. But behind the bluster, he betrayed signs of uncertainty, hesitancy, and inconsistency. The hypersensitivity to personal criticism, the inability to engage in rational argument and, instead, rapid resort to extraordinary outbursts of uncontrolled temper, his extreme aversion to any institutional anchoring: these features of an unbalanced personality repeatedly manifested themselves to the end of his days. At this time, they indicated that, far from taking clear, decisive steps to shape events as he wanted them to develop – which an organized move to take over the leadership would have allowed – he was largely reacting to developments outside his own control.¹⁵⁵ This was to be the case, too, in the July crisis.

Though the merger with the DSP had been fended off for the time being, an even bigger threat, from Hitler’s point of view, arose while he was away in Berlin. Dr Otto Dickel, who had founded in March 1921 in Augsburg another völkisch organization, the Deutsche Werkgemeinschaft, had made something of a stir on the völkisch scene with his book Die Auferstehung des Abendlandes (The Resurrection of the Western World). Dickel’s mystic völkisch philosophizing was not Hitler’s style, and, not surprisingly, met with the latter’s contempt and angry dismissal.¹⁵⁶ But some of Dickel’s ideas – building up a classless community through national renewal, combating ‘Jewish domination’ through the struggle against ‘interest slavery’ – bore undeniable similarities to those of both the NSDAP and the DSP. And Dickel, no less than Hitler, had the conviction of a missionary and, moreover, was also a dynamic and popular public speaker. Following the appearance of his book, which was lauded in the Völkischer Beobachter, he was invited to Munich, and – with Hitler absent in Berlin – proved a major success before a packed audience in one of Hitler’s usual haunts, the Festsaal of the Hofbräuhaus. Other speeches were planned for Dickel. The NSDAP’s leadership was delighted to find in him a second ‘outstanding speaker with a popular touch’ (volkstümlichen und ausgezeichneten Redner).¹⁵⁷

Hitler, meanwhile, was still in Berlin. He failed to turn up at a meeting with a DSP representative on I July for further merger talks, and did not return to Bavaria until ten days later. He had evidently by then got wind of the alarming news that a delegation of the NSDAP’s leaders was due to have talks there with Dickel and representatives of the Augsburg and Nuremberg branches of the Deutsche Werkgemeinschaft. He appeared before the NSDAP delegates themselves arrived, beside himself with rage, threatening the Augsburg and Nuremberg representatives that he would see that a merger was stopped. But when his own people eventually turned up, his uncontrolled fury subsided into sulky silence. Three hours of suggestions from Dickel for the formation of a loose confederation of the different groups and recommendations for improvements to the NSDAP’s programme prompted numerous outbursts from Hitler before, being able to stand it no longer, he stormed out of the meeting.¹⁵⁸

If Hitler hoped his tantrums would convince his colleagues to drop the negotiations, he was mistaken. They were embarrassed by his behaviour and impressed by what Dickel had to offer. Even Dietrich Eckart thought Hitler had behaved badly. It was accepted that the party programme needed amending, and that Hitler ‘as a simple man’, was not up to doing this. They agreed to take back Dickel’s proposals to Munich and put them to the full party committee.¹⁵⁹

Hitler resigned from the party in anger and disgust on II July. In a letter to the committee three days later, he justified his move on the grounds that the representatives in Augsburg had violated the party statutes and acted against the wishes of the members in handing over the movement to a man whose ideas were incompatible with those of the NSDAP. ‘I will and can not be any longer a member of such a movement,’ he declared.¹⁶⁰ Hitler had resigned ‘for ever’ from the party’s committee in December 1920.¹⁶¹ As we have noted, he threatened resignation yet again following the Zeitz conference in late March 1921. The histrionics of the prima donna were part and parcel of Hitler’s make-up – and would remain so. It would always be the same: he only knew all-or-nothing arguments; there was nothing in between, no possibility of reaching a compromise. Always from a maximalist position, with no other way out, he would go for broke. And if he could not get his way he would throw a temper-tantrum and threaten to quit. In power, in years to come, he would sometimes deliberately orchestrate an outburst of rage as a bullying tactic. But usually his tantrums were a sign of frustration, even desperation, not strength. It was to be the case in a number of future crises. And it was so on this occasion. The resignation was not a carefully planned manoeuvre to use his position as the party’s star performer to blackmail the committee into submission. It was an expression of fury and frustration at not getting his own way. His threat of resignation had worked before, after the Zeitz conference. Now he was risking his only trump card again. Defeat would have meant the party’s amalgamation in Dickel’s planned ‘Western League’ (Abendländischer Bund) and left Hitler with only the option – which he seems to have contemplated – of setting up a new party and beginning again.¹⁶² There were those who would have been glad, whatever his uses as an agitator, to have been rid of such a troublesome and egocentric entity. And the spread of the party that the merger with Dickel’s organization presented offered more than a little compensation.

But the loss of its sole star performer would have been a major, perhaps fatal, blow to the NSDAP. His departure would have split the party. In the end, this was the decisive consideration. Dietrich Eckart was asked to intervene, and on 13 July Drexler sought the conditions under which Hitler would agree to rejoin the party. It was full capitulation from the party leadership. Hitler’s conditions all stemmed from the recent turmoil in the party. His key demands – to be accepted by an extraordinary members’ meeting – were ‘the post of chairman with dictatorial power’; the party headquarters to be fixed once and for all as Munich; the party programme to be regarded as inviolate; and the end of all merger attempts.¹⁶³ All the demands centred upon securing Hitler’s position in the party against any future challenges. A day later the party committee expressed its readiness in recognition of his ‘immense knowledge’, his services for the movement, and his ‘unusual talent as a speaker’ to give him ‘dictatorial powers’. It welcomed his willingness, having turned down Drexler’s offers in the past, now to take over the party chairmanship. Hitler rejoined the party, as member no.3680, on 26 July.¹⁶⁴

Even now the conflict was not fully at an end. While Hitler and Drexler publicly demonstrated their unity at a members’ meeting on 26 July,¹⁶⁵ Hitler’s opponents in the leadership had his henchman Hermann Esser expelled from the party and prepared placards denouncing Hitler, and had printed 3,000 copies of an anonymous pamphlet attacking him in the most denigratory terms as the agent of sinister forces intent on damaging the party.¹⁶⁶ But Hitler, who had shown once more to great effect how irreplaceable he was as a speaker in a meeting, packed to the last seat, in Circus Krone on 20 July, was now in the driving seat.¹⁶⁷ Now there was no hesitancy. This was Hitler triumphant. To tumultuous applause from the 554 paid-up members attending the extraordinary members’ meeting in the Festsaal of the Hofbräuhaus on 29 July, he defended himself and Esser and rounded on his opponents. He boasted that he had never sought party office, and had turned down the chairmanship on several occasions. But this time he was prepared to accept. The new party constitution, which Hitler had been forced to draft hurriedly, confirmed on three separate occasions the sole responsibility of the First Chairman for the party’s actions (subject only to the membership meeting). There was only one vote against accepting the new dictatorial powers over the party granted to Hitler. His chairmanship was unanimously accepted.¹⁶⁸

The reform of the party statutes was necessary, stated the Völkischer Beobachter, in order to prevent any future attempt to dissipate the energies of the party through majority decisions.¹⁶⁹ It was the first step on transforming the NSDAP into a new-style party, a ‘Führer party’. The move had come about not through careful planning, but through Hitler’s reaction to events which were running out of his control. Rudolf Heß’s subsequent assault on Hitler’s opponents in the Völkischer Beobachter contained the early seeds of the later heroization of Hitler, but also revealed the initial base on which it rested. ‘Are you truly blind,’ wrote Heß, ‘to the fact that this man is the leader personality who alone is able to carry through the struggle? Do you think that without him the masses would pile into the Circus Krone?’¹⁷⁰