Hitler

A Part of the German Future

No other city in Germany had been so shaken by the events and emotions of the revolution and the first postwar weeks as excitable Munich. On November 7, 1918—two days before anything happened in Berlin—the zeal of a few leftists had toppled the thousand-year-old Wittelsbach dynasty. To their own surprise the insurgents found themselves in power. Under the leadership of Kurt Eisner, a bearded bohemian and theater critic of the Münchener Post, they had tried—in all too complete faith in Woodrow Wilson’s statements—“to prepare Germany for the League of Nations” by a revolutionary change of conditions and “to obtain a peace which will save the country from the worst.”

But whatever chances Eisner may have had were nullified by the weakness and inconsistency of the American President and by the hatred of the rightists. Their vilification of the “foreign, racially alien vagabond” and “Schwabing Bolshevist” has lived on to this day.¹ In fact neither he nor a single one of the other new leaders was Bavarian by birth; they were conspicuous types of the antibourgeois and often Jewish intellectual. And in racially conscious Bavaria that sealed the fate of the revolutionary government. Moreover, the barrage of naive spectacle with which Eisner treated the populace, the incessant demonstrations, public concerts, parades of flags, and inspiring speeches about the “realm of light, beauty and reason” did little to consolidate his position. The way he carried out his office evoked as much ridicule as bitterness. Eisner certainly did not win the affection he had hoped for from his “government by kindness.” His utopian promises expressed in broad philosophical terms, which seemed so good on paper, proved hollow at the first puff of reality.

Though he took issue with the extremist leaders of the Spartacists and other such agents of world revolution as Lewien, Eugen Levine, and Axelrod, though he repudiated the anarchistic ravings of the writer Erich Mühsam, and made at least verbal concessions to the separatist sentiments so widespread in Bavaria, none of these moves to the middle could improve his situation. At a socialist conference in Berne he was so impolitic that he spoke of German guilt for the outbreak of the war, and at once found himself the target of an organized campaign. There were loud cries for his elimination and dark threats to the effect that time was running out for him. A staggering electoral defeat shortly afterward forced him to resign. On February 21, as he was on his way to the Landtag to declare his resignation, he was shot in the back and killed by a twenty-two-year-old count, Anton von Arco-Valley.

It was a senseless, superfluous, and disastrous crime. Only a few hours later, during a memorial service for the victim, a radical leftist butcher and waiter named Alois Lindner forced his way into the Landtag and, firing wildly, shot down three persons, including a government minister. The horrified assemblage scattered in panic. But public opinion now took a great swing to the left. Coming so soon after the assassinations of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, the murder of Eisner appeared to be the act of reactionary conspirators bent on regaining their lost power. A state of emergency was imposed on Bavaria, and a general strike proclaimed. When part of the student body hailed Arco-Valley as a hero, the university was closed. Large numbers of hostages were taken, a rigorous censorship introduced, banks and public buildings occupied by Red Army men. Armored cars drove through the streets, swarming with soldiers who blared through bullhorns “Revenge for Eisner!”

For a month executive power was wielded by a Central Council (i.e., soviet) under Ernst Niekisch. Then a parliamentary government was formed. But at the beginning of April news came from Hungary that Bela Kun had seized power and proclaimed the dictatorship of the proletariat. Here was evidence that revolution could succeed outside Russia. Once more the uneasy stability of Bavaria was shaken. A minority of radical leftist enthusiasts, without a mass basis and against the clear will, traditions, and feelings of the public, cried, “Germany is next!” and proclaimed a soviet republic. The poets Ernst Toller and Erich Mühsam, in a decree all too revealing of their romanticism, unworldliness, and weakness as leaders, announced the transformation of the world “into a meadow full of flowers in which each man can pick his share.” Work, subordination, and legalistic thinking were to be abolished. The newspapers were to print poems by Hölderlin or Schiller on the front page alongside the latest revolutionary decrees. The government retreated to Bamberg; Ernst Niekisch and most of the ministers resigned; and the leaderless state was left to the muddled gospel of the poets, who soon found themselves supplanted by a group of hard-boiled professional revolutionaries. Chaos and terrorizing of the citizenry followed.

It was an experience that could not be forgotten. The arbitrary confiscations, the practice of seizing hostages, the curbs on the bourgeoisie, revolutionary whim, and increasing hunger accorded all too well with recent horror stories of the October Revolution in Russia and made so deep an imprint on the popular mind that the bloody atrocities committed by the units of the Reichswehr and Free Corps, which advanced on Munich at the beginning of May, faded into oblivion by contrast. The rightists murdered fifty released Russian prisoners of war near Puchheim, slaughtered a medical column of the soviet army near Starnberg, arrested twenty-one innocent members of a Catholic club in their Munich clubroom, took them to the jail on Karolinenplatz and shot them all down, likewise lined up and shot twelve innocent workmen from Perlach. In addition, there were the leaders of the soviet experiment who were beaten to death or shot: Kurt Eglhofer, Gustav Landauer, Eugen Levine. About these victims little was ever said. On the other hand, eight hostages—members of the conspiratorial radical rightist Thule Society—had been held in the cellar of the Luitpold Gymnasium. A minor functionary, reacting to the crimes of the rightist troops, had them liquidated. For years their memory was repeatedly invoked as an example of the horrors of the Red regime. Wherever the Reichswehr and Free Corps troops appeared, a contemporary diary notes, “the people wave cloths, applaud; everyone looks out the windows; the enthusiasm could not be greater…. Everyone is cheering.”² Bavaria, the land of revolution, now became the land of counterrevolution.

For certain bourgeois groups the experiences of the early postwar months brought a new sense of confidence. For the short-lived revolution revealed the impotence and want of ideas of the German Left, which obviously had more revolutionary enthusiasm than revolutionary courage. The Left as represented by the Social Democrats had proved a force for order; but the leftists who attempted to introduce soviet rule in Bavaria proved to be visionaries who knew nothing about power and nothing about the people. During those months the bourgeoisie, or at any rate the calmer portion of it, for the first time realized that its fears were unjustified, that it could well hold its own beside the supposedly invincible but really naive German working class.

The army officers of middle rank, action-hungry captains and majors, led the way in infusing new spirit into the bourgeoisie. They had enjoyed the war like a wine and were still intoxicated. Although they had often faced superior forces, they did not feel themselves defeated. Called to the aid of the government, they had tamed rebels and refractory soldiers’ councils and crushed the Bavarian soviets. On the unsecured eastern border of Germany they had stood guard against the Poles and Czechs. Then, as they saw it, the Versailles Treaty cutting the army down to 100,000 men had cheated them of their future, reduced their social status, and disgraced their nation. A combination of self-assurance and haplessness sent them into politics. Many of them clung to the glorious freedom of the soldier’s life or hated to give up the profession of arms and the company of males. With their knowledge of organization and the planned application of violence, they now set about combatting the revolution—which had long since been destroyed by the nation’s fears and craving for order.

The private military bands that appeared everywhere soon transformed the country into a bivouac of brutish soldiery who wore the nimbus of political militancy and patriotism. Secure in the possession of machine guns, hand grenades, and cannon kept in an extensive network of secret arms depots, they profited by the impotence of the political institutions and claimed for themselves a considerable share of power—although the size of the share differed in the various regions. In Bavaria, in reaction to the traumatic experiences of the soviet period, they were able to pursue their ends almost unhindered. During the rule of the soviets, the Social Democratic government had called for “organizing the counterrevolution by all possible means.” With such official encouragement, the paramilitary movements sprang up alongside the Reichswehr, intertwined with it in various obscure ways. Colonel (later General) von Epp organized the free corps called the Einwohnerwehr (militia). There were also the Bund Oberland (Oberland League), the officers’ association Eiserne Faust (Iron Fist), the Escherich Organization, the Deutschvolkische Schutz-und Trutzbund (Defense and Defiance League of the German Race), the Verband Altreichsflagge (Flag of the Old Reich Association), the Bayreuth, Wurzburg, and Wolf Free Corps, and a variety of other organizations. Taken together, they represented an ambitious politico-military autonomous power averse to any return to normality.

In addition to the support of the administration and the government bureaucracy, these associations also enjoyed the favor of much of the population. In a society with a military tradition, cross-grained individuals acquire enormous credibility on moral and national issues as soon as they appear in uniform and march in step. Given the chaotic background, the military association appeared to be an exemplary counterpoise, representing a concept of life and order dear to everyone’s heart. Sternly erect, faultlessly in step, the units of Epp’s Free Corps had paraded down Ludwigstrasse, along with units of the Ehrhardt Brigade. The latter had brought back from its battles in the Baltic regions an emblem loudly proclaimed in the unit’s marching song: “With swastika on steel helmet.”

These military groups appealed to the imagination of the public; they embodied something of the glory and security of previous times that were now only nostalgic memories. Bavarian Group Command IV was only expressing prevailing opinion when it issued a directive in June, 1919, referring to the Reichswehr as the “cornerstone” of any “meaningful reestablishment of all domestic affairs.” The parties of the Left made the naive mistake of thinking that the soldiers who had borne the brunt of the suffering shared their own hatred for war. The Right, however, began working on the soldiers’ injured pride and disappointed expectations. They launched a vigorous campaign to this effect.

Among the various activities organized by the propaganda department of the Group Command under bustling Captain Mayr was that course in “civic thinking” which Hitler had been sent to after he had done so well as an informant for the military tribunal. The classes were held at the university and were conducted by reliable nationalists. The object was to indoctrinate a select group of participants with certain historical, economic, and political theories.

In his consistent effort to deny or underplay any influences upon his thinking, Hitler would later imply that this course was important for him not so much for the information it provided as for the contacts he made. “For me the value of the whole affair was that I now obtained an opportunity of meeting a few like-minded comrades with whom I could thoroughly discuss the situation of the moment.” But he admits that in the field of economic theory he learned something new. He attended the lectures of Gottfried Feder, a rightist engineer, and “for the first time in my life I heard a principled discussion of international stock exchange and loan capital.”³

In the strict sense, however, the real importance of the lecture course lay in the effect Hitler made with his vehemence and his particular cast of mind. Up to now his audience had consisted only of ignorant chance listeners. One of the teachers, the historian Karl Alexander von Müller, has described how at the end of the lecture, while the hall was emptying, he found his way blocked by a group that “stood fascinated around a man in their midst who was addressing them without pause and with growing passion in a strangely guttural voice. I had the strange feeling that the man was feeding on the excitement which he himself had whipped up. I saw a pale, thin face beneath a drooping, unsoldierly strand of hair, with close-cropped mustache and strikingly large, light blue eyes coldly glistening with fanaticism.” Called up to the platform after the next lecture, the man came up “obediently, with awkward movements, in a kind of defiant embarrassment, so it seemed to me.” But “the dialogue remained unfruitful.”

Here we already have a picture of the two faces of Hitler: powerfully convincing when carried away by his own rhetoric, bumbling and insignificant in personal confrontation. According to his own story, he had his first, never-to-be-forgotten oratorical triumph when “one of the participants felt obliged to break a lance for the Jews.” Muller had already called Captain Mayr’s attention to the natural orator he had discovered among his students. Now Hitler found himself detailed to a Munich regiment as the “liaison man” of District Command. Shortly afterward, his name appeared on a list of appointees for an “enlightenment squad” attached to the Lechfeld camp for returning soldiers. The squad was there to exert influence on the men, indoctrinating them with nationalistic, anti-Marxist ideas. In addition, the assignment was meant as a “practical course in speaking and agitation” for the squad members.⁴

In the barracks of Camp Lechfeld Hitler developed his gift for oratory and practical psychology. Here he learned to apply his ideological obsessions to current events so that the principles seemed to be irrefutably confirmed and the incidents of the day swelled to a portentous vastness. Some of the opportunistic features that later became incorporated into National Socialist ideology can be traced to this stage of Hitler’s career. As a beginner he was somewhat insecure and had to try out his various obsessions, discovering those that would strike a public response. He soon found what was most effective. “This theme kindled particular interest among the participants; that could be read in their faces,” a camp report on one of Hitler’s talks states. Hitler shared the powerful sense of disillusionment among the returning soldiers, who after years of war saw themselves cheated of everything that had lent greatness and importance to their young lives. They were now seeking explanations for so much wasted heroism, so many squandered victories, so much betrayed confidence. And Hitler offered them a concrete image of the mysterious enemy. His speaking style, we learn from other reports, was marked by “a popular manner,” an “easily comprehensible presentation,” and a passionate “fanaticism.” At the heart of these early speeches were attacks on the group whom he later, in a phrase that was to become a byword, called “the November criminals.” There were bitter denunciations of the “shame of Versailles” and corrupt “internationalism.” Linking it all up was the thesis that a “Jewish-Marxist world conspiracy” was operating in the background.

His aptitude for stringing together bits of ideas from things he had read and half digested and for presenting the result as his own without the slightest intellectual embarrassment, proved its value. One of his talks in Lechfeld repeated “in a very fine, clear and rousing” manner things which he had only recently learned from the class with Gottfried Feder on the relationships between capitalism and Jewry. His intellectual appropriations were as violent as they were lasting. From this period dates Hitler’s first written statement on a specific political question that has come down to us. The subject, significantly, was “the danger Jewry constitutes to our people today.” A former “liaison man” of Munich District Headquarters, Adolf Gemlich, had asked Captain Mayr for a position paper on the subject, and Mayr passed the latter on to his subordinate for reply—addressing him as “My Dear Herr Hitler,” an unusual salutation from a captain to a corporal. Hitler went into the subject at length, beginning with a condemnation of that emotional anti-Semitism which could be based only on chance personal impressions. The kind of anti-Semitism that aspired to become a political movement, he wrote, presupposed “knowledge of facts.”

Four days after receiving this statement, on September 12, 1919, Captain Mayr ordered Hitler to visit one of the small parties among the bewildering array of radical associations and cliques that formed and fell apart with great rapidity, only to coalesce in new groupings. Here was a vast, unused reservoir of response for one seeking a following. The often weird doctrines of these groups showed the blind readiness of the petit bourgeois masses to seize on anything that let them vent their hatreds and promised some way out of social crisis.

A key center of conspiratorial and propagandistic activities, as well as a meeting ground for right extremists, was the Thule Society. Its headquarters was the luxury hotel Vier Jahreszeiten, and it had connections throughout Bavarian society. At times it counted some 1,500 influential members, and it, too, used the swastika as its symbol. Moreover, it controlled its own newspaper, the Münchener Beobachter. Its head was a political adventurer with a rather unsavory past and the sonorous name of Baron Rudolf von Sebottendorf, which he had acquired through adoption by an Austrian nobleman stranded in the Orient. Early in his life Sebottendorf had come under the influence of radical ideologues such as Theodor Fritsch and Lanz von Liebenfels, whose racist mania had also affected young Hitler. His Thule Society, founded in Munich at the beginning of 1918, was a successor to the racist anti-Semitic leagues of the prewar period and followed many of their traditions. Its name, in fact, went back to the Teutonic Thule Sect established in Leipzig in 1912, whose members had to be of “Aryan blood.” That group, rather like a lodge in its procedures, required candidates for admission to answer questions on the hirsuteness of various parts of their body. Candidates also had to present a footprint as evidence of their racial purity.

Sebottendorf’s new Thule Society began its life by launching into violent anti-Semitic propaganda denouncing the Jews as the “mortal foe of the German people.” This was in January, 1918, while the war was still in progress. Later the Society could claim that the bloody and chaotic events of the soviet period were proof of its thesis. Its extravagant slogans contributed greatly to creating that atmosphere of obscene hatred in which racist radicalism could flourish. As early as October, 1918, groups within the Thule Society had forged plans for a rightist uprising. It instigated various assassination attempts against Kurt Eisner, and on April 13, 1918, attempted a putsch against the soviet regime. The Society also maintained connections with the Russian émigré circles that had made Munich their headquarters. A young Baltic student of architecture named Alfred Rosenberg, who had been profoundly affected by the trauma of the Russian Revolution, acted as liaison man. Almost all the actors who were to dominate the Bavarian scene in the following years belonged to the Society, including people who were to be prominent within Hitler’s party. In various connections we encounter the names of Dietrich Eckart, Gottfried Feder, Hans Frank, Rudolf Hess, and Karl Harrer.

At the behest of the Thule Society, Karl Harrer, a sports journalist, together with a machinist named Anton Drexler, had, in October 1918, founded a “Political Workers Circle.” The group described itself as “an association of select persons for the purpose of discussing and studying political affairs.” In fact, it was intended as a bridge between the masses and the nationalistic Right. For a while the membership was limited to a very few of Drexler’s fellow workers. He himself was a quiet, square-set, rather strange man, employed at the Munich workshops of the Federal Railways. As early as March, 1918, this sober, bespectacled machinist had on his own initiative organized a “Free Workers Committee for a Good Peace,” whose program called for fighting usury and rallying the working class behind the war. He had turned against Marxist socialism for its failure to resolve the “national question” either in practice or theory. This, at any rate, was the theme of an article he published titled, “The Failure of the Proletarian International and the Shipwreck of the Idea of Fraternization.” The enthusiasm with which the socialists on both sides had supported the war in August, 1914, had certainly exposed this flaw. A similar perception had led to the founding, in 1904, of the German Workers’ Party (Deutsche Arbeiterpartei—DAP) by German-Bohemian workers in Trautenau. Now Anton Drexler revived that name and founded a party of his own. Its charter members were workmen from his own shop, and its first meeting took place on January 5, 1919, in the Fiirstenfelder Hof. A few days later, on the initiative of the Thule Society, another meeting was held in the Hotel Vier Jahreszeiten, and a national organization for the party was created. Karl Harrer appointed himself “National Chairman.” It was an ambitious title.

Actually, the new party, which hereafter met once a week in the Sternecker beer hall, was very small potatoes. Drexler did occasionally manage to procure a few prominent racists or nationalists as speakers—such as Gottfried Feder or the writer Dietrich Eckart. But the tone of the „ group remained at a dreary, beer-drinking level. Significantly, it did not address itself to the public at all. It was less a political party in the proper sense than a combination, typical for the Munich of those years, of secret society and locals gathering at the pub for their evening pint. A dull and embittered craving for exchange of opinions had brought them together. The lists of participants mention between ten and forty persons. Germany’s shame, the trauma of the lost war, anti-Semitic grumblings, complaints concerning the downfall of order, justice, and morals—these were the themes of the meetings. The “directives” Drexler had read at the initial meeting reveal heartfelt if awkwardly worded resentments toward the rich, the proletarians and Jews, the price gougers and the rabble-rousers. The program called for annual profits being limited to 10,000 marks, for parity representation of the different states in the German Foreign Office, and the right of “skilled workers with a legal residence… to be counted in the middle class.” For happiness lay not “in talk and empty phrases in meetings, demonstrations and elections, but in good work, a full cookpot and a fair chance for the children.”

However philistine and intellectually confused the character of the party as a whole must appear, the first sentence of the “directives” contains an idea that embodied historical experience and a widespread need among the people. It shows that clumsy, crotchety Anton Drexler had grasped the spirit of the age. For the DAP defined itself as a classless “socialist organization led only by German leaders.” Drexler’s “inspired idea” was to reconcile nationalism and socialism. He was neither the only man, nor even the first, to attempt this, and his concern about children and cookpots was a simplistic notion that certainly could not compete with the impressive Marxist systems of historical interpretation. But the moment in which Drexler seized on the idea—in the midst of the emotional crisis of a defeated, insulted country challenged by revolution—and the fact that he happened to meet Adolf Hitler, placed both the idea and the backroom political party which espoused it squarely on the stage of world history.

At the meeting of September 12, 1919, Gottfried Feder addressed the group on the subject: “How and by what means can capitalism be eliminated?” Among the forty-odd persons in the audience was Adolf Hitler, who was there on Captain Mayr’s instructions. While Feder was expatiating on his familiar theses, the guest noted that here was one more of those newly founded groups “like so many others” stifling “in their absurd philistinism.” Accordingly, “when Feder finally stopped talking, I was happy. I had seen enough.”

Nevertheless, Hitler waited for the discussion period, and when one of the visitors urged the separation of Bavaria from the Reich and her union with Austria, he rose in indignation: “I could not help demanding the floor.” He attacked the speaker so passionately that Drexler whispered to the locomotive engineer Lotter, who was sitting beside him: “Man, he has a big mouth; we could use him.” When Hitler, immediately after talking, turned to leave this “dull club,” Drexler hurried after him and asked him to come back soon. He pressed upon Hitler a pamphlet he had written titled My Political Awakening. Hitler has described how, lying in his bunk at the barracks early the following morning and watching the mice go after some crusts of bread he had thrown down for them, he began to read the pamphlet. In Drexler’s accounts of his life he recognized elements in his own experience: exclusion from jobs by union terrorism; earning a wretched living by semiartistic work (in Drexler’s case playing the zither in a night club); and, finally, the great illumination accompanied by feelings of intense anxiety—recognition of the role of the Jewish race as corrupters of the world. These parallels aroused Hitler’s interest, even though the person involved was a worker, as Hitler constantly reiterates.⁶

A few days later he received in the mail an unsolicited membership card bearing the number 555. Partly amused, partly annoyed, partly not knowing quite how to react, he decided to accept the invitation to attend a committee meeting. At the Altes Rosenbad tavern in the Herrenstrasse, “a very rundown place,” he found at a table in the back room “in the dim light of a broken-down gas lamp” several young people. While the tavernkeeper and his wife and one or two guests sat gloomily around in the other room, the group read the minutes “like the presiding committee of a Skat club.” They counted the club treasury (cash on hand: seven marks and fifty pfennigs). They approved the reports and drafted letters to similar associations in North Germany. All in all, “this was club life of the worst manner and sort.”

For two days Hitler pondered, and as always when he reminisced about decisive situations in his life, he spoke of the strain of the decision and emphasized the “hard,” “difficult,” or “bitter” mental effort it cost him. It ended with his entering the German Workers’ Party as board member number 7, responsible for recruitment and propaganda. “After two days of agonized pondering and reflection, I finally came to the conviction that I had to take this step. It was the most decisive resolve of my life. From here there was and could be no turning back.”⁷

On the one hand, this is an example of Hitler’s trick of throwing a bit of dramatic lighting on turning points in his own career that only later became apparent as such. If the moment lacked any outward drama, he could at least portray the decision as the product of solitary, painful struggle. On the other hand, all available sources show him consistently, up to the very end, displaying a singular indecisiveness, a deep-seated fear of fixing on any one course. His later associates describe him as going through a wearing process of vacillation and changes of mind on many questions until he was so exhausted that he finally left things to chance and a toss of a coin. His cult of fate and Providence was a device to rationalize his indecisiveness. It might be said that all his personal and even some of his political decisions were nothing more than evasions, ways to escape alternatives he felt to be threatening. In any case, throughout his life, from his leaving school, his moves to Vienna and Munich, and his volunteering for the army, up to his step into politics, it is not hard to detect the escape motivation. The same is true for much of his behavior during the following years, right down to the hapless postponements of the very end.

The desire to evade the oppressive demands of duty and order in the respectable world, to put off the feared discharge into civilian life dictated all his actions as a returned soldier and gradually led him into the wings of the Bavarian political stage. He looked upon politics as the vocation of one who was without a vocation and wanted to remain so. Now at last he had a field of action that demanded no qualifications other than those he possessed: passion, imagination, organizational talent, and demagogic gifts. In the barracks he wrote and typed away indefatigably at invitations to meetings, which he then delivered personally. He asked for lists of names and addresses and spoke with the persons mentioned. He sought out connections, support, new members.

The results were meager at first. Every unfamiliar face that turned up at meetings was eagerly noted. Hitler’s success was due in considerable part to his being the only one in the organization with unlimited time at his disposal. His prestige rapidly increased in the seven-man party committee, which met once a week at a corner table in the Café Gasteig—later the object of worshipful veneration. The fact was that he had more ideas, was more adept and more energetic than the others in the executive committee.

The other members had been at home in their small-time situation and were perfectly content to remain there. They were stunned when Hitler began pushing the “dull club” into the public view. October 16, 1919, proved a decisive day both for the German Workers’ Party and the new man on its executive committee. At the first public meeting, with 111 persons present, Hitler took the floor as the second speaker of the evening. For thirty minutes, in an ever more furious stream of verbiage, he poured out the hatreds that ever since his days in the home for men had been stored up within him or discharged only in fruitless monologues. As if bursting through the silence and human barriers of many years, the sentences, the delusions, the accusations came tumbling out. And at the end “the people in the small room were electrified.” He had found “what before I had simply felt within me, without in any way knowing it.” Jubilantly, he made the overwhelming discovery: “I could speak!”⁸

That moment signified—if any specific moment did—the breakthrough to himself, the “hammer-stroke of fate” that shattered the “shell of everyday life.” His sense of release is palpable in the ecstatic tone of his memories of that evening. To be sure, he had tested his oratorical powers repeatedly in the past several weeks, and had become acquainted with his own ability to persuade and convert. But this was the first time he experienced the subjective force of his oratory, the triumphant self-abandonment to the point of sweating and reeling with exhaustion. And as everything with him turned to excess—his fears, his self-confidence, or even his rapture at hearing Tristan for the hundredth time—he henceforth fell into a veritable oratorical fury. Aside from or alongside of all political passions, from now on it was this newly awakened craving for vindication on the part of the “poor devil,” as he calls himself in his recollections of the period,⁹ that drove him again and again to the speaker’s platform.

Soon after his entrance into the DAP Hitler set about transforming the timid, static group of club members into a noisy publicity-conscious party of struggle. He met opposition chiefly from Karl Harrer, who was wedded to the secret-society notions inherited from the Thule Society and would have liked to continue running the DAP as a little discussion circle. From the start Hitler thought in terms of a mass party. Partly, he could not think otherwise, because he had never been able to accept reduced circumstances, but partly also because he understood why the old conservative parties had failed. Harrer’s views were a survival, on an absurd scale, of that tendency to exclusiveness which had been the weakness of the bourgeois parties of notables during the Wilhelmine era. By now such an attitude had alienated the masses of the petty bourgeosie, and the working class as well, from the conservative position.

Even before the end of 1919 the German Workers’ Party, at Hitler’s insistence, set up its headquarters in a dark, vaultlike cellar room in the Sternecker beer hall. The rent was fifty marks; in co-signing the lease Hitler again gave his occupation as “painter.” A table and a few borrowed chairs were placed in. the room, a telephone installed, and a safe obtained for the membership cards and the party treasury. Soon an old typewriter was added, and a rubber stamp to go with it: when Harrer noticed these beginnings of a veritable bureaucracy, he called Hitler a “megalomaniac.” At the same time Hitler had the executive committee expanded to, first, ten, later, twelve and more members. He brought in a number of followers personally devoted to him; quite often these were fellow soldiers whom he had won over in the barracks. Soon he was able to replace the party’s humble handwritten notes by printed invitations. At the same time the party began advertising in the Münchener Beobachter. Recruiting pamphlets and leaflets were left in the taverns where the party met. And Hitler in his propaganda tactics now began displaying that entirely unfounded selfassurance, all the more challenging because backed by no reality at all, which would frequently produce his successes in the future. He ventured something totally unusual—he began charging admission to the public meetings of this tiny, unknown party.

His growing reputation as a speaker solidified his position inside the party. By the beginning of the next year he had succeeded in making the refractory chairman, Harrer, resign. Soon afterward, the executive committee, though skeptical and worried about making itself ridiculous, followed the biddings of its ambitious propaganda chief and appealed to the masses. The party issued a call for its first mass meeting, to be held in the Festsaal of the Hofbräuhaus on February 24,1920.

The bright red poster announcing the meeting did not even mention Hitler’s name. The principal speaker of the evening was a true-blue nationalist spokesman, Dr. Johannes Dingfelder, a physician, who wrote in racist publications under the pseudonym of Germanus Agricola. He had developed an economic theory whose twistings bizarrely reflected the shortages of the postwar period. Nature would be going on a production strike, he pessimistically predicted; her yields would diminish, vermin would consume the remainder. Consequently, humanity was on the verge of doom. There was only one way out, a return to racial and national principles. That evening he conjured up this hope again, “quite objectively and often imbued with a profound religious spirit.” Thus the report of the Munich Political Intelligence Service.¹⁰

Then Hitler spoke. To take advantage of this unique opportunity of publicizing the ideas of the German Workers’ Party to a large audience, he had insisted that a program be worked up. He began by inveighing against the Versailles Treaty and the cowardice of the government, then against the general craving for amusement, the Jews, and the “leeches,” namely profiteers and usurers. Then, interrupted frequently by applause or catcalls, he read the program aloud. At the end “some heckler shouted something. This was followed by great commotion. Everyone standing on chairs and tables. Tremendous tumult. Shouts of ‘Get out!’ ” The meeting ended in a general uproar. Some members of the radical Left subsequently tramped, loudly cheering the International and the Soviet Republic, from the Hofbräuhaus to the Rathaustor. “Otherwise no disturbance,” the police report stated.

Apparently such turbulence was commonplace, for even the nationalist-racist press took scarcely any notice of the meeting. Only recent finds of source material have made it possible to reconstruct the course of the meeting. Hitler’s own myth-making account turned it into a dramatic occasion beginning with a brawl and ending with wild acclaim and mass conversion: “Unanimously and again unanimously” each point of the program was accepted, “and when the last thesis had found its way to the heart of the masses, there stood before me a hall full of people united by a new conviction, a new faith, a new will.” Typically, Hitler reverted to his memory of operatic performances and proclaimed that “a fire was kindled from whose flame one day the sword must come which would regain freedom for the Germanic Siegfried.” He could already hear striding forth “the goddess of inexorable vengeance for the perjured deed of November 9, 1919.” Meanwhile, the nationalist Münchener Beobachter merely noted that after Dr. Dingfelder’s speech Hitler had “set forth some pointed political ideas” and then announced the program of the DAP.

Nevertheless, in a higher sense the author of Mein Kampf was right. For with that mass meeting there began the evolution of Drexler’s beer-drinking racist club into Adolf Hitler’s mass party. To be sure, he himself had once again had to play a subordinate role. Nevertheless, there had been almost 2,000 persons present, filling the great hall of the Hofbräuhaus. The crowd had been exposed to Hitler’s political doctrines, and many had accepted them. Henceforth, more and more, it was his will, his style, his direction that propelled the party and decided its success or failure. Party legend later compared the meeting of February 24, 1920, to Martin Luther’s nailing his theses to the door of the church in Wittenberg. In both cases tradition has had to paint its own historically quite dubious picture, because true history tends to scant man’s craving for drama and sentimental recollection. But there was some justification for hailing the meeting as the true birthday of the movement, even though no such momentous act had been planned.

The program Hitler offered that evening had been drafted by Anton Drexler, probably with some assistance from Gottfried Feder, and then submitted to the executive committee for revision. Hitler’s exact part in the framing can no longer be determined, but the sloganlike compactness of several articles shows his editorial influence. The program consisted of twenty-five points and combined in rather arbitrary fashion elements of the older racist ideology with immediate grievances and the national need to deny reality. The consistent factor throughout was strong emotional appeal. Negatives predominated; the program was anticapitalist, anti-Marxist, antiparliamentarian, anti-Semitic, and most decidedly against the way the war had ended. The positive aims, on the other hand—such as the various demands for the protection of the middle class—were mostly vague and tended to add fuel to the anxieties and desires of the little man. For example, all income not earned by work was to be confiscated (Point 11), as well as all war profits (Point 12), and a profit-sharing plan for large industries was to be introduced (Point 14). Another point called for large department stores to be turned over to the communities and rented out “at cheap prices” to small tradesmen (Point 16). Land reform was also demanded, and a ban on speculation in land (Point 17).

Despite all its opportunistic features this program was not so empty as has sometimes been represented. At any rate, there was a good deal more to it than clever demogogery. It included, at least in the germ, all the essential features of what was to be National Socialist doctrine: the living-space thesis (Point 3), anti-Semitism (Points 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 24), the harmless-sounding and widely acceptable platitudes (Points 10, 18, 24) that could ultimately be made the basis for a totalitarian state—as, for example, the maxim that the common good takes precedence over the good of the individual.¹¹ Much was made of the determination to eliminate the abuses of capitalism, to overcome the false class-struggle confrontations of Marxism, and to bring about the reconciliation of all groups in a powerfully integrated racial community. It would seem that all this possessed a special allure in a country suffering so profoundly from national and social irritations. The idea or formula of “nationalistic socialism,” linking as it did the two paramount concepts of the nineteenth century, could be found at the root of many political programs and drafts for social systems of the time. It turned up in Anton Drexler’s simple autobiographical account of his “political awakening” and in the Berlin lectures of Eduard Stadtler, who as early as 1918 had founded an Anti-Bolshevist League, with the support of industry. It was the subject of one of those enlightenment courses run by the Munich District Command of the Reichswehr and even entered the thinking of Oswald Spengler, whose essay Prussianism and Socialism treated most persuasively of the same theme. Even within Social Democracy the idea had its followers. The disappointment over the failure of the Second International at the outbreak of the war had led a number of independent minds to turn toward a combination of nationalistic and social revolutionary schemes. National Socialism, Its Growth and Its Aims was the title of a bulky theoretical work published in 1919 by one of the founders of the German-Socialist Workers’ Party, a railroad engineer named Rudolf Jung. That work hailed nationalist socialism as the epoch-making political concept that would succeed in checking Marxist socialism. To emphasize their separation from internationalist movements, Jung and his Austrian followers changed the party’s name in May, 1918, to German National Socialist Workers’ Party.

A week after the meeting in the Hofbräuhaus the DAP also changed its name. Borrowing from the related German and Austrian groups, it called itself National Socialist German Workers’ Party (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei—NSDAP) and simultaneously adopted the battle symbol of its Austrian counterparts, the swastika. Dr. Walter Riehl, chairman of the Austrian national socialists, had shortly before set up an “international secretariat” that was to serve as a liaison office for all national socialist parties. There already existed active contacts with various other such groups espousing racial-socialist programs, above all the German Socialist Party of Alfred Brunner, a Düsseldorf engineer. This party tried to be extremely leftish and boasted, “Our demands are more radical than those of the Bolshevists.” It had units in many of the larger cities. The one in Nuremberg was headed by a schoolteacher named Julius Streicher.

On April 1, 1920, Hitler finally left the army, for he at last had an alternative. He was determined to devote himself henceforth entirely to political work, to seize the leadership of the NSDAP, and to build the party according to his own ideas. He rented a room at 41 Thierschstrasse, near the Isar River. Although he spent most of his days in the cellar headquarters of the party he avoided being listed as a party employee. What he lived on was something of a mystery, and enemies within the party soon raised this question. His landlady thought the somber young man monosyllabic and seemingly very busy, a “real bohemian.”

His self-confidence grew, based on his talent for oratory, his coldness, and his readiness to take risks. He had nothing to lose. Ideas as such mattered little to him. In general he was less interested in a concept than in its potential uses, in whether, as he once remarked, it could yield a “powerful slogan.” His total lack of comprehension for thinking without politically malleable substance came out in his outbursts of “detestation” and “profoundest disgust” for the “antiquated folkish theoreticians,” the “bigmouths,” and “idea thieves.” Similarly, he took the floor for his earliest rhetorical displays only when he had something to strike back at polemically. For him it was not evidence that made an idea persuasive but handiness, not truth but the idea’s aptness as a weapon. “Every idea, even the best,” he noted, “becomes a danger if it parades as a purpose in itself, being in reality only a means to one.” Elsewhere he emphasized that in the political struggle force always needs the support of an idea—significantly, he did not put it the other way round. He regarded National Socialism, too, as chiefly a means to his own ambitious ends. It was merely a romantic, attractively vague cue with which he stepped on the stage. The idea of reconciliation implicit in the phrase seemed more modern, closer to the needs of the age, then the slogans of class struggle. The conservative writer Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, who in the early years of the century had promulgated the idea of nationalistic socialism, now declared that it was “certainly a part of the German future.” Its potentiality was above all apparent to the cool politicians who had axes to grind. There were many such men, all competing in the same game. But before long Hitler knew that he himself would be that part of the German future.

Local Triumphs

In those arduous and intoxicated days of his entrance into politics, in the spring of 1920, Hitler was not much more than a local Munich agitator. Night after night he made his way through boisterous smoke-filled taverns to win frequently hostile or scoffing audiences over to his doctrines. His reputation increased steadily. The temper of the city was susceptible to his theatrical style and favored his success as much as the more tangible historical factors.

In the rapture of those first oratorical triumphs, he was capable of extraordinary feats.

His “talent for combination” seized upon the most disparate elements and fitted them together into compact formulas. He learned more from his opponents than from his models or comrades; he always admitted this frankly. He had learned a great deal from the opposite camp; only fools or weaklings feared that in adopting ideas from others they would lose their own. And so he put together Richard Wagner and Lenin, Gobineau, Nietzsche and Le Bon, Ludendorff, Lord Northcliffe, Schopenhauer and Karl Lueger, and formed a composite. The system was arbitrary, queer, full of half-educated rashness, but it had a certain coherence. Mussolini and Italian Fascism also fitted into it, and their importance was to grow. Hitler even took lessons from the so-called Wise Men of Zion; though by now it had been conclusively proved that the “Protocols” were forgeries,¹² that did not lessen the power of their Machiavellian theses.

But Hitler learned his most lasting lessons from Marxism. The energy he devoted to the development of a National Socialist ideology, in spite of his essential indifference to such matters, testifies to the effects of the Marxist model upon him. One of the starting points for his political activity was the insight that the traditional bourgeois type of party could no longer match the force of the leftist mass organizations. Only a similarly organized but even more resolute ideological party would be able to combat Marxism.¹³

Tactically, he learned most from the experiences of the revolutionary period. The Bolshevik take-over and the soviet rule in Bavaria had shown how a handful of determined men could seize power. From Lenin one could learn how to heighten a revolutionary impulse, from German socialists like Friedrich Ebert and Philipp Scheidemann how such an impulse could be wasted. Hitler later declared:

He not only applied everything he took over consistently; he also went much further than his model. In his nature there was an infantile fondness for the grand, surpassing gesture, a craving to impress. He dreamed of superlatives and was bent on having the most radical ideology, just as later on he was bent on having the biggest building or the heaviest tank. He picked up his tactics and his aims, as he later observed, “from all the bushes alongside the road of life.” He himself contributed the harshness and consistency with which he applied everything, the characteristic boldness about taking the last step.

At the beginning he went at things according to a sensible plan. His first task was a personal one, to break out of anonymity, to emerge from the welter of small-time nationalist-racist parties with an unmistakable image. When he recounted party history in his later speeches he would always allude to his unimportant beginnings—evidence of the pain of those days when he had known the pangs of repressed ambition and unrecognized greatness. With a total lack of scruple, which was the real novelty of his public life and which once and for all proclaimed his refusal to abide by any rules or conventions, he now set about making a name for himself—by unceasing activity, by brawls, scandals, and riots, even by terrorism if that would bring him to the forefront. “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.”¹⁵

This intention shaped the style and methods of all he did. The garish red of the party’s banners was chosen not only for its psychological effect but also because it provocatively usurped the traditional color of the Left. The posters also would often be a blatant red. They would have a slogan for headlines and offer a pithy editorial in gigantic format. To further the impression of bigness and forcefulness the NSDAP repeatedly organized street processions. Its leaflet distributors and poster squads went about tirelessly. In acknowledged imitation of leftist propaganda techniques, Hitler had trucks loaded with men ride through the streets. But instead of the fist-swinging, Moscow-oriented proletarians who had spread terror and hatred in bourgeois residential districts, these trucks were manned by disciplined former soldiers who now, after armistice and demobilization, were fighting on in a different fashion under the battle standard of the National Socialist Party. These self-controlled radicals lent the demonstrations an intimidating, paramilitary tone. Soon Hitler was holding these demonstrations in the form of a series of meetings that passed like a wave over Munich, and then over other cities.

Gradually, these soldiers began changing the sociological face of the party. The contemplative groups of beer-drinking workers and small tradesmen were infiltrated by tough types of regular army men accustomed to violence. The earliest membership list of the party registers all of twenty-two professional soldiers among 193 names. Directly affected by the terms of the Versailles Treaty, with its check on the size of the army, they had abruptly found themselves confronting the dreary perils of civilian life. Here was a new party that offered a haven from perplexity and the terrors of being declassed. Within its framework they could satisfy their craving for new forms of comradeship and continue to express the contempt for life as well as death that they had absorbed on the battlefield.

With the aid of these military converts accustomed to strict subordination, discipline, and devotion, Hitler gradually succeeded in providing the party with a firm inner structure. Many of the new men were sent to him by the Munich District Command of the Reichswehr. Later, Hitler would repeatedly assert that he had stood alone, nameless and poor, relying on no one but himself, against a world of enemies. That was far from the truth. From the beginning he received protection from the Reichswehr and the paramilitary organizations. They were what made his rise possible.

Ernst Röhm did more for the NSDAP than anyone else. He held the rank of captain as a political adviser on the staff of Colonel Epp and was the real brain of the disguised military regime in Bavaria. Röhm provided the young National Socialist Party with followers, arms, and funds. His efforts were supported in large measure by the officers of the Allied Supervisory Commission, who favored such illegal activities for various reasons. Partly, they had an interest in maintaining conditions approaching civil war in Germany; partly, they wished to strengthen the military power against the obstreperous Left. Chivalric feelings also played their part: they wanted to oblige their former foes, fellow soldiers who had fought honorably against them.

Röhm was a man who from childhood on had had “only one thought and one wish, to become a soldier.” Toward the end of the war he had served on the General Staff and was an outstanding organizer, but by temperament he belonged in the front lines, though he scarcely looked it. This stocky little fellow with his rather florid, marred face—he had been wounded many times during the war—was a wild daredevil. He divided the human race into soldiers and civilians, friends and foes; he was frank, unsubtle, rough and tough, a straightforward old campaigner with no conscience to speak of. One of his comrades from those days of illegal activity once remarked that Röhm “livened things up” wherever he appeared. But perhaps the converse was just as often true. Certainly no ideological sophistries complicated his old-fashioned Bavarian bluntness. Ceaselessly active, he had a single goal: to magnify the power of the military within the government. With that in mind, he had organized the General Staff department for propaganda and secret partnership with political groups—the department on whose behalf liaison man Adolf Hitler had first attended a meeting of the German Workers’ Party. Impressed, as was almost everyone else, by the oratorical talent of the young agitator, Röhm provided Hitler with his first valuable contacts to politicians and military men. He himself entered the party early, receiving the membership number 623.

The commando element that Röhm’s men had brought into the party was colorfully garnished by the liberal use of symbols and emblems. In Mein Kampf Hitler pretended that the swastika flag was his invention. In fact, one of the party members, the dentist Friedrich Krohn, had designed it for the founding meeting of the Starnberg Ortsgruppe (local party group) in May of 1920. As early as the previous year, in a memorandum, he had recommended using the swastika as “the symbol of national socialist parties.” Once again, Hitler’s own contribution consisted, not of the original idea, but of his instant perception of the symbol’s psychological magic. He therefore raised it to the status of a party emblem and made it obligatory.

Later he would do the same with the “standards,” which he took over from Italian Fascism and conferred upon the storm troops. He introduced “Heil” as a greeting, made a point of military correctness in ranks and uniforms, and in general stressed all formalities: the setting of scenes, the decorative details, the increasingly solemn ceremonials of dedicating flags, reviews, and parades, all the way up to the mass spectacles of the party rallies, where he directed great blocs of human beings against mighty stone backdrops and reveled in the exercise of his demitalents as actor and architect. He spent many hours hunting through old art magazines and the heraldic department of the Munich State Library to find a model for the eagle to be used on the official rubber stamp of the party. His first circular letter as chairman of the NSDAP, dated September 17, 1921, was largely concerned with party symbolism, which he prescribed in loving detail. He instructed the heads of the local groups “to energetically promote the wearing of the party badge. The members are to be continually reminded to go about everywhere and at all times with the party emblem. Jews who take offense at it are to be dealt with at once.”

These two aspects, one ceremonial, the other terroristic, had marked the party from its wretched early beginnings and proved to be an inspired approach on Hitler’s part. The references to brute force by no means repelled; rather, they added a note of strong earnestness to the party program and seemed to fit the historic hour better than the false amiability of traditional party procedures.

Another asset of the NSDAP was its egalitarian character. Nationalist parties of the past had appropriated true patriotic principles for the upper classes, as if only men of property and education had a fatherland. The NSDAP was at once nationalistic and plebeian; rude and ready to brawl, it brought together the idea of nationalism and the gutter. Hitherto, the bourgeoisie had looked upon the masses as a danger against which they had always to be on their guard. The NSDAP seemed to be offering itself as a vanguard of the masses on the side of the bourgeoisie. “We need force to win our battle,” Hitler declared again and again. “Let the others… stretch out in their easy chairs; we are ready to climb on the beer table.” One might not want to follow him oneself; yet here was a fellow who clearly knew how to tame the masses and harness their energies for the right cause.

His own energy seemed inexhaustible. None of his rivals was remotely a match for him. His principle was: a mass meeting every week. And he was not only the organizer of these but the speaker. Of forty-eight meetings held between November, 1919, and November, 1920, he was the speaker at thirty-one. The increasingly rapid tempo of his appearances reflects the growing intensity of his affair with the masses. “Herr Hitler… flew into a fury and screamed so that not much could be understood at the back,” one report records. A poster of May, 1920, announcing his appearance termed him a “brilliant speaker” and promised the visitor “a highly stimulating evening.” Reports from this time on speak of rising attendance figures. Often he talked to 3,000 persons or more. Repeatedly, the recording secretaries noted that when he stepped on the platform in his blue uniform he was “stormily cheered.” The very clumsiness of the summaries reveals the almost hypnotic power the speaker seemed to have over his audience.

Another account, of a speech given on August 28, 1920, in the Hofbräuhaus, reads:

With growing self-assurance the party began touting itself as a supporter of “order” by breaking up meetings of the Left, shouting down speakers, administering “reminders” in the form of beatings, and once forcing a piece of sculpture to be removed from a public exhibition on the grounds that it offended public taste. At the beginning of January, 1921, Hitler assured his audience in the Kindl-Keller “that henceforth the National Socialist movement in Munich will ruthlessly prevent all meetings and lectures—if necessary, by force—which are designed to seditiously affect our already sick folk-comrades.”

The party found such gestures all the easier because now, in addition to the protection it enjoyed from the Munich District Army Command, it had become the “spoiled darling” of the Bavarian state government. In the middle of March, rightist circles in Berlin, headed by the hitherto nameless Dr. Kapp and supported by the Ehrhardt Brigade, had attempted a coup. The attempt had collapsed, partly because of its amateur nature, partly because it was instantly countered by a general strike. A simultaneous attempt of the same sort by the Reichswehr and the Free Corps bands in Bavaria met with more success. On the night of March 13 the bourgeois Social Democratic regime was overthrown by the military and paramilitary forces and replaced by a rightist government under the “strong man” Gustav von Kahr.

The Left retaliated with its classic weapon: a general strike. The radical leftists saw a chance to exploit the situation for their own revolutionary ends and asserted leadership over the strike, principally in central Germany and the Ruhr. Their call for arming the proletariat was greeted enthusiastically. Soon, in a well-co-ordinated way that spoke of careful planning, masses of workers were organized in regular military formations. Between the Rhein and the Ruhr alone a “Red Army” of more than 50,000 men was set up. Within a few days it took over almost the entire industrial area. The weak Reichswehr and police units that opposed its advance were crushed; in places veritable battles were fought. A wave of killing, looting, and arson passed over the country, briefly bringing to light how much class hatred was present, repressed by the half-measures of a semirevolution. Soon, however, the military launched a bloody counterattack. The summary arrests, the shootings, and other acts of vengeance again revealed deep-seated feuds and unresolved conflicts. The country, so often divided and torn by contradictions in the course of its history, more and more desperately craved order and reconciliation. Instead, it found itself sinking ever more helplessly into a morass of hatred, distrust, and anarchy.

Because of the shift in power relationships, Bavaria became the natural center for radical rightist plots—even more than it had previously been. The Allies had repeatedly demanded that the paramilitary bands be dissolved. The Kahr government in Bavaria resisted, for these bands were its strongest support. Gradually, all those irreconcilable enemies of the republic who could ill stand the climate in other parts of Germany poured into the Bavarian militias and private armies, which already numbered more than 300,000 men. Among them were followers of Kapp who had fled Berlin, determined remnants from the dissolved Free Corps of the eastern regions of the Reich, the “National Warlord” Ludendorff, vigilante killers, adventurers, nationalist revolutionaries of various ideological shades. But all were united in their desire to overthrow the hated “Jews’ Republic.” They were able to exploit the traditional Old Bavarian separatism; the Bavarians had a long history of intense dislike for Prussian, Protestant Berlin. They flattered their Bavarian hosts with the slogan Ordnungszelle Bayern (“Bavaria as the mainstay of public order”). With more and more open support from the state government, these paramilitary groups began setting up arms depots, converting castles and monasteries into secret military bases, and plotting assassinations and coups. The conspiratorial whisperings went on constantly; all the groups were engaged in treasonous projects and often worked at cross-purposes.

These developments proved highly important to the rising National Socialist Party. The military, the paramilitary, and the civilian holders of power all looked upon it with favor, the more so as the party proved itself increasingly successful. After Hitler had been received by Prime Minister von Kahr, one of Hitler’s student followers, Rudolf Hess, addressed a letter to the head of state: “The central point is that H. is convinced that a recovery is possible only if it proves possible to lead the masses, particularly the workers, back to the nationalist cause…. I know Herr Hitler very well personally and am quite close to him. He has a rarely honorable, pure character, full of profound kindness, is religious, a good Catholic. His one goal is the welfare of his country. For this he is sacrificing himself in the most selfless fashion.”

The day of public acceptance had come: The Prime Minister finally mentioned Hitler, in terms of praise, in the Landtag. Pöhner, the police commissioner of Munich, let Hitler do pretty much as he pleased. Roles in the forthcoming drama had been assigned. It became possible to discern the shape of that political constellation which has been called typical of Fascist conquests of power. Henceforth, Hitler was leagued with the conservative power of the Establishment, pledged to it as the advance guard in the fight against the common Marxist enemy. The conservatives thought they would make use of the energies and hypnotic arts of this unruly agitator and, at the proper moment, outmaneuver him by their own intellectual, economic, and political superiority. He, meanwhile, intended to march the battalions he had built up under the benevolent gaze of the ruling powers over the body of the enemy and against his partners in order to seize all the power. Hitler was playing that peculiar game, whose moves were marked by illusions, treacheries, and perjuries, with which he subsequently won almost all his victories and outwitted successively Kahr and Hugenberg, Papen and Chamberlain. On the other hand, his blunders, down to the ultimate failure in the war, were partly due to actions of impatience, petulance, or overconfidence.

The progress of the party was greatly furthered by the purchase of the Völkische Beobachter in December, 1920. Apparently Dietrich Eckart and Ernst Röhm raised the 60,000 reichsmarks that represented the down payment for the financially troubled racist-nationalist semiweekly.¹⁷ Among the donors were many members of respectable Munich society, to which Hitler now found an entry. For this, too, he was indebted to Dietrich Eckart, a man of many connections. A roughhewn and comical figure, with his thick round head, his partiality for good wine and crude talk, Eckart had missed the great success he hoped for as a poet and dramatist. (His best known work was the German version of Ibsen’s Peer Gynt). In compensation he had thrown himself into that bohemian group which indulged in politics. He had founded a political club called the German Citizens Society, but that, too, had come to nought. Another failure was the periodical Auf gut Deutsch (“Plain Speaking”), which, in corrosive language, and with displays of pseudoerudition propounded the familiar anti-Semitic theses. Along with Gottfried Feder, Eckart preached a revolution against “interest slavery” and for “true socialism.” Influenced by Lanz von Liebenfels, he called for a ban on racially mixed marriages and demanded protection for pure German blood. He referred to Soviet Russia as “the Christian-kosher-butchering dictatorship of the Jewish world savior Lenin” and said that what he wanted most was “to load all Jews into a railroad train and drive into the Red Sea with it.”¹⁸

Eckart had met Hitler early. In March, 1920, during the Kapp putsch, both were sent by their nationalist backers to survey the scene in Berlin. Well read and a shrewd psychologist who possessed extensive knowledge consonant with his prejudices, Eckart exerted great influence upon the awkward and provincial Hitler. With his bluff and uncomplicated manner, he was the first cultivated person whom Hitler was able to endure without an upsurge of his deep-seated complexes. Eckart recommended books to Hitler and lent him some, schooled his manners, corrected his language, and opened many doors to him. For a time they were an inseparable pair on the Munich social scene. As early as 1919 Eckart had prophesied the rise of a national savior, “a fellow who can stand the rattle of a machine gun. The rabble has to be scared shitless. I can’t use an officer; the people no longer have any respect for them. Best of all would be a worker who’s got his mouth in the right place…. He doesn’t need much intelligence; politics is the stupidest business in the world.” As far as he was concerned, someone who always had “a tough reply” to the Reds was far to be preferred to “a dozen learned professors who sit trembling on the wet pants seat of facts.” Last but not least: “He must be a bachelor! Then we’ll get the women.” Hitler seemed to him the embodiment of this model, and as early as August, 1921, in an article in the Völkische Beobachter he for the first time hailed him as the Leader. One of the early battle songs of the NSDAP, “Storm, Storm, Storm!” was written by Eckart, and the refrain of every stanza became a party slogan: “Germany, awake!” Hitler repaid Eckart by declaring that he had written “poems as beautiful as Goethe’s.” He publicly called the poet his “fatherly friend” and described himself as a disciple of Eckart. Along with Rosenberg, Eckart seems to have wielded the most lasting ideological influence upon Hitler during that early period. Evidently he also made Hitler aware of his own stature. The second volume of Mein Kampf ends with the poet’s name printed in italics.

The welcome Hitler received in the Munich society to which Dietrich Eckart introduced him was scarcely of a political nature. One of the first ladies to open her salon to him was an American by birth, Catherine Hanfstaengl, mother of a young man named Ernst (“Putzi”) Hanfstaengl, who had fallen under Hitler’s oratorical spell. She herself was by no means nationalistic. Liberals were intrigued by this phenomenon of a young popular orator with Neanderthal views and unpolished manners. His sometimes shocking public behavior made him the more interesting. He had the aura of a prestidigitator, the acrid odor of both the circus and of tragic embitterment, the sharp glitter of a “famous monster.” The common topic of conversation was frequently Richard Wagner; Hitler would rhapsodize at length about Wagner in staccato phrases. The descriptions we have all convey a mixture of eccentricity and clumsiness. With people of importance Hitler was inhibited, brooding, and to some extent servile. During a conversation with Ludendorff at this time he kept raising his backside slightly after each of the general’s sentences, “with a half bow uttering a most respectful, ‘Very well, your Excellency!’ or ‘Quite so, your Excellency!’ ”

His insecurity, the painful sense of being an outsider in bourgeois society, remained with him for a long time. If we are to believe the available accounts, he was eternally bent upon making an impression. He came late; his bouquets of flowers were bigger than others, his bows lower. Intervals of saying nothing alternated abruptly with choleric outbursts. His voice was rough; he made even casual remarks with passion. Once, according to an eyewitness, he had sat silent and weary for about an hour when his hostess happened to drop a friendly remark about the Jews. Only then “did he begin to speak and he spoke without ceasing. After a while he thrust back his chair and stood up, still speaking, or rather yelling, in such a powerful penetrating voice as I have never heard from anyone else. In the next room a child woke up and began to cry. After he had for more than half an hour delivered a quite witty but very one-sided oration on the Jews, he suddenly broke off, went up to his hostess, begged to be excused and kissed her hand as he took his leave.”¹⁹ His social awkwardness reflected his irreparably distorted relationship to bourgeois society. The reek of the home for men clung to his clothing for a long time. When Pfeffer von Salomon—later to become his chief storm troop leader—met him for the first time, Hitler was wearing an old tailcoat, tan shoes, and carrying a knapsack on his back. The Free Corps leader was so unpleasantly impressed that he did not wish to be introduced to this person. Ernst Hanfstaengl recalled that Hitler wore with his blue suit a purple shirt, brown vest and crimson tie; the holster of his revolver made a conspicuous bulge at his hip. Hitler was quite slow in learning to stylize his appearance and to do justice to his conception of himself as grand tribune of the people down to his weird uniform. Even then, the picture he presented betrayed deep insecurity. It combined elements from his long-ago dreams of being a Rienzi with touches of Al Capone and General Ludendorff; the result was something preposterous. But even this effect could be interpreted in a number of ways. Some observers thought Hitler was trying to exploit his insecurity and was using his very awkwardness as a means of self-dramatization. At any rate, he seemed concerned less with making his appearance attractive than with making it memorable.

How he struck others at this time can be seen in the following thumbnail sketch by the historian Karl Alexander von Müller, who met Hitler at a coffee hour at Erna Hanfstaengl’s, Ernst’s sister. Also present was Abbot Alban Schachleiter, who was curious to meet the rising politician. “My wife and I provided part of the decor. The four of us were already sitting at the polished mahogany table by the window when the bell rang. Through the open door I could see him in the narrow hallway politely and almost servilely greeting our hostess, laying aside riding whip, velour hat and trench coat, finally unbuckling his cartridge belt with revolver attached and likewise hanging it on the clothes hook. It all looked very odd, reminiscent of Karl May’s American Indian novels.[4] As yet we did not know how precisely each of these trivialities in clothing and behavior was even then calculated for effect, as were the strikingly close-cropped mustache, which was narrower than the unpleasantly wide-nostriled nose…. The look in his eyes already expressed a consciousness of public success; but something curiously awkward still clung to him, and one had the uneasy feeling that he sensed it and resented anyone’s noticing it. His face, too, was still thin and pale, with something like an expression of suffering. But the protruding watery-blue eyes sometimes stared with inflexible hardness, and above the base of his nose, between the curve of the thick eyebrows, a clotted bulge bespoke a fanatical will. This time, too, he spoke very little; most of the time he listened with marked attentiveness.”²⁰

Now that he was attracting attention, women began to take an interest in him. Most of them were aging ladies who sensed problems behind the inhibitions and complexes of the magnetic young orator, tensions that knowledgeable ministrations could release. Hitler himself later commented on the jealousies among those women who thronged so eagerly and maternally around him. He knew one, he remarked, “whose voice grew hoarse from agitation whenever I exchanged so much as a few words with another woman.” One of them, Carola Hoffmann, widow of a secondary-school teacher, who lived in the Munich suburb of Solln, made a sort of home for him and earned herself the title of “Hitler-Mutti”—Hitler’s Mom. Frau Bruckmann, wife of the publisher of Houston Stewart Chamberlain and a lady descended from an ancient noble line, also took him under her wing. So did the wife of Bechstein, the piano manufacturer. “I wished he were my son,” she said, and later, in order to be allowed to visit him in prison, she alleged that she was his adoptive mother. All of them taken together, their houses, their parties, widened the area around him and helped to make his name known.

Within the party, on the other hand, he continued to remain within a circle comprising middle-class philistines and semicriminal bullies who answered his need for aggression and physical violence. Among his rare close friends were Emil Maurice, a typical barroom and meeting-hall brawler, and Christian Weber, a hulking, paunchy former horse dealer who had worked as a bouncer in a notorious taproom and regularly carried a riding whip, as Hitler did. Ulrich Graf, a butcher’s apprentice, also belonged to his immediate following, which served as a kind of bodyguard. So also did Max Amann, Hitler’s former sergeant, a blunt, capable businessman, who became business manager for the party and the party’s publishing house. Noisy and sedulously attentive, these men surrounded Hitler all the time. Evenings after meetings the troop of them would drop in at the Osteria Bavaria or the Bratwurstglöckl near the Frauenkirche, or talk for hours over coffee and cake at the Cafe Heck on Galeriestrasse, where a table was permanently reserved for Hitler in the dusky back of the room, from which he could watch what went on in the restaurant without being observed himself. He was already beginning to find solitude painful; he constantly needed people around him—audience, guards, servants, drivers, but also entertainers, art lovers and storytellers like the photographer Heinrich Hoffmann or Ernst Hanfstaengl. These were the people who gave to his “court” its special coloration compounded of “the bohemian world and the condottiere style.” He was not averse to having himself referred to as the “King of Munich.” It would be the small hours of the morning before he would return to his furnished room on Thierschstrasse.

The dominant figure in the entourage that formed so early around Hitler was young Hermann Esser. He had done some newspaper work and been a press secretary for the Reichswehr District Headquarters. Aside from Hitler, he was the only person in the party at that time with a talent for demagogy. He was “a noisemaker who is almost better at that business than Hitler… a demon speechmaker, though from a lower circle of hell.” He was intelligent, cunning, with a knack for vivid and popular phrases. As a yellow journalist he could invent endless stories about Jews and profiteers. The decent petty bourgeois members of the party were soon objecting to the “swineherd tone” of his publicity campaigns. But he clung to his simple-minded radicalism; while still a schoolboy in Kempten, he had demanded that the soldiers’ soviet there “string up” a number of citizens. Along with Dietrich Eckart, he was one of the earliest and most zealous authors of the Hitler myth. Hitler himself at times seemed worried about Esser; possibly Esser’s intellectual gangsterism rubbed him the wrong way. If the sources are accurate, he repeatedly declared that he knew Esser was “a scoundrel” and was keeping him only as long as he needed him.

In a good many respects Esser resembled Julius Streicher, the Nuremberg schoolmaster, who was making a reputation as the spokesman for a scurrilous kind of pornographic anti-Semitism. Streicher seemed obsessed by wild fantasies of ritual murders, Jewish lust, world conspiracy, miscegenation, and lascivious black-haired devils panting after the innocent flesh of Aryan women. It is true that Streicher was more stupid and limited than Esser, but locally he could rival even Hitler, whom he had at first violently opposed.

Hitler, on the other hand, went to considerable trouble to win over Streicher. He wanted, of course, to make use of Streicher’s popularity for his own ends. But he probably also felt a common bond with the man, for did they not share the same complexes and obsessions? Up to the last, Hitler remained loyal to Julius Streicher, despite the revulsion the man aroused. During the war he once remarked that Dietrich Eckart had called Streicher a fool, but that he himself could not share the objections to Streicher’s paper, Der Stürmer. Actually, he said, “Streicher idealized the Jews.”²¹

Cohorts such as these gave the party a narrow character, in spite of all its mass activities, and locked it within a shallow and philistine sphere. By contrast, Air Captain Hermann Göring, the last commander of the legendary Richthofen fighter squadron, gave a gentlemanly tone to Hitler’s entourage. A sturdy, jovial man with a booming voice, he was free of those twisted psychopathic traits that characterized the average member of Hitler’s following. Göring had joined the party because it promised to satisfy his need for action and comradeship, not, as he stressed, because of the “ideological junk.” He was traveled, widely connected, and, when he appeared with his attractive Swedish wife, he seemed to awaken the astonished party members to the fact that human beings also existed outside of Bavaria.

Göring shared certain larcenous tendencies with Max Erwin von Scheubner-Richter, an adventurer with a checkered past and a knack for lucrative undercover political deals. Especially in the early years Hitler owed to Scheubner-Richter’s talent for raising funds much of the financial basis for his activities. According to a note in an official file, Scheubner-Richter succeeded in digging up “enormous sums of money.” He hovered in the background, surrounded by mystery; but at the same time he had vast social assurance, was a great talker, and maintained connections with many industrialists, with the House of Wittelsbach, with Grand Duke Kyrill, and with high prelates. His influence on Hitler was considerable; he was the only one of those killed at the Feldherrnhalle on November 9, 1923, whom Hitler held to be irreplaceable.

Scheubner-Richter was another of the many Baltic Germans who, together with a group of radical rightist Russian emigrants, played a large part in the early history of the NSDAP. Later, Hitler jokingly remarked that the Völkische Beobachter in those years should have been subheaded “Baltic Edition.” Alfred Rosenberg had originally met Scheubner-Richter in Riga. At that time Rosenberg was an unpolitical student deeply concerned with Schopenhauer, Richard Wagner, architectural matters and the philosophical doctrines of India. It took the Russian Revolution to shape his ideology, a mixture of anti-Bolshevist and anti-Semitic elements in about equal proportions. The picture of the horrors of Judaism and Bolshevism that Hitler painted derived partly from Rosenberg, even down to its metaphors, and Rosenberg was always considered the party’s expert on Russia. Generally speaking, however, too much has been made of his being “chief ideologist of the NSDAP.” His principal contribution was the thesis that Communism and world Judaism were identical. He may also have led Hitler to abandon his initial demand for a return of the German colonies and to look instead to the expanses of Russia for Lebensraum. But then their ways parted. For Hitler remained a pragmatist, for whom ideology was only a tool. Rosenberg, on the other hand, was a monomaniac who held these doctrines with almost religious fervor and continued to build them into intellectual systems of majestic absurdity.

Within a year after proclamation of the program the party could look back upon some impressive success. It had held more than forty meetings in Munich and almost as many again in the surrounding countryside. Local party groups had been founded in Starnberg, Rosenheim, Landshut, Pforzheim and Stuttgart. The membership had multiplied more than tenfold. What an impression this made on the nationalist-racist movement as a whole is evident from a letter written by a “Brother Dietrich” of the Munich Order of Teutons to a likeminded friend in Kiel in February, 1921. “Show me a place,” he wrote, “in which your party has held 45 mass meetings in the course of a year. The Munich Local Group now counts more than 2,500 members and some 45,000 followers. Can any of your local groups boast of nearly as many?” He added that he had corresponded with brothers of the order in Cologne, Wilhelmshaven, and Bremen, and “all took the view… that the Hitler party is the party of the future.”

This growth took place against the backdrop of the Versailles Treaty, whose provisions came into force step by step, each new step striking the Germans as a fresh insult. Along with this came the wild inflation and growing economic distress. In January, 1921, an Allied reparations conference decided to exact a total of 216 billion gold marks from Germany, to be paid over a period of forty-two years. During that period Germany would also be required to turn over to the Allies 12 per cent of her exports. In Munich a crowd of 20,000 assembled on the Odeonsplatz for a protest demonstration, under the sponsorship of the patriotic associations, the Free Corps and the NSDAP. When the organizers refused to let Hitler speak, he promptly announced a mass demonstration of his own for the following night. To the cautious-minded Drexler and Feder this seemed almost insane. But Hitler sent beflagged trucks through the city carrying groups bellowing slogans, and had posters drawn up advertising a mass meeting at the Krone Circus on February 30. “Herr Adolf Hitler,” the announcement read, “will speak on ‘Future or Doom!’ ” These were the very terms in which he had cast the problem at the time he decided he must enter politics. When he entered the huge tent, it was jammed with 6,500 persons who cheered him wildly and after his speech broke into the national anthem.

Since that occasion Hitler had been waiting for the opportunity to make himself master of the party, which owed so much to him. The party leadership, to be sure, was not too pleased with its propaganda chief’s impetuosity, and an entry in the party log dated February 22, 1921, noted: “Request Herr Hitler to restrain his activity.” But when Gottfried Feder grumbled at Hitler’s increasing arrogance, Anton Drexler told him that “every revolutionary movement must have a dictatorial head and I consider our Hitler to be the one person most suitable for that post in our movement, though I myself would not be prepared for that reason to be pushed into the background.” Five months later that very thing was to happen. Both circumstances and his opponents played into Hitler’s hands, for throughout his career enemies would be Hitler’s most effective allies. With a mixture of coldbloodedness, cunning, and resolution, with that readiness to take great risks even for small goals, which he was to exhibit time and again in critical situations, he succeeded in gaining control of the NSDAP while strengthening his, claim to leadership of the entire nationalist-racist movement.

The summer crisis of 1921 started with negotiations between the NSDAP and rival völkisch parties, especially the German Socialist Party. These negotiations, aiming at closer co-operation, had been going on for months. But Hitler’s intransigence blocked all efforts at alliance. He demanded nothing less than the total submission of the other parties and would not even concede them the right of corporate entry into the National Socialist Party. He insisted instead that the other groups must dissolve and their members enter his party on an individual basis. Drexler could not understand Hitler’s obstinacy; therein lay the whole difference between the instinct for unconditional power and the conciliatory temperament of a club founder. Hitler must have counted on his enemies in the party leadership using his absence for an ill-considered step when, in the early part of the summer, he went to Berlin for six weeks. Hermann Esser and Dietrich Eckart remained behind as his accomplices and kept him continually informed. Urged on by certain members of the party who wanted to cut the “fanatical would-be big shot” down to size, well-meaning Drexler used this period of Hitler’s absence to resume negotiations on the union, or at least the collaboration, of all the socialist rightist parties.

In Berlin, meanwhile, Hitler spoke at the Nationalist Club and established ties with conservative and radical rightists. He met Ludendorff and Count Reventlow, whose French wife, the former Baroness d’Allemont, introduced him to the former Free Corps leader Walter Stennes—describing Hitler as the “coming Messiah.” The hectic madness of Berlin, which was then entering its famous, or notorious, twenties, only heightened Hitler’s dislike for the city. He despised its greed and its frivolity, comparing conditions there with those of declining Rome in the Late Empire. There, too, he said, “racially alien Christianity” had taken advantage of the city’s weakness, as Bolshevism today was battening on the moral decay of Germany. The speeches of those early years are full of attacks upon metropolitan vice, corruption, and excess, as he had observed them on the glittering pavements of Friedrichstrasse or the Kurfürstendamm. “They amuse themselves and dance to make us forget our misery,” he cried on one occasion. “It is no accident that new amusements are constantly being invented. They want to artificially enervate us.” As if he were once again seventeen years old and arriving in Vienna, he stood baffled and alienated by the phenomenon of the big city, lost in so much noise, turbulence, and miscegenation. He really felt at home only in provincial circumstances and was, despite all his sense of being an outsider, permanently fixated upon provincial moral rectitude. Urban night life could only be an invention of the racial archfoe, a systematic attempt “to turn upside down the most natural hygienic rules of a race. The Jew makes night into day; he stages the notorious night life and knows quite well that it will slowly but surely… destroy one man physically, another mentally, and place hatred in the heart of a third because he must look on while others revel.” The theaters, he continued, “those halls which a Richard Wagner once wanted darkened in order to call forth the ultimate degree of sanctitude and solemnity” and “liberate the individual from grief and misery”—those theaters had become “hotbeds of vice and shamelessness.” He saw the city populated by white slavers, and love, “which for millions of others means supreme happiness or the greatest unhappiness,” perverted to a commodity, “nothing more than a deal.” In the city everything w.as being undermined and debased; he deplored the mockery of family life, the decay of religion. “One who has lost both these in this age of basest treachery and fraud has only two remaining possibilities: either he despairs and hangs himself, or he becomes a scoundrel.”²²

As soon as word came of Drexler’s independent action, Hitler returned to Munich. And when the party executive committee, which had gained some self-assurance in the interval, called upon him to justify his behavior, Hitler responded with a sweeping gesture. On July 11 he declared his resignation from the party. In a lengthy statement three days later he heaped violent reproaches upon the other members of the committee, then stated as an ultimatum his conditions for returning to the party. Among other things he demanded the immediate resignation of the executive committee, the “post of First Chairman with dictatorial powers” for himself, and “the party to be purged of the alien elements that have lately intruded into it.” He also insisted that neither the name nor the program of the party could be changed; the absolute precedence of the Munich branch of the party must be preserved; there could be no union with other parties, only the annexation of other parties. And with that stubbornness which presaged the later Hitler he stated: “Concessions on our part are totally out of the question.”²³

The degree of prestige and power that Hitler had already attained is evident from the immediate reply of the party executive committee, which was dated the following day. Instead of risking a showdown, it pleaded guilty to Hitler’s charges with timid reminders of its former services, bowed completely, and was even ready to sacrifice the incumbent First Chairman, Anton Drexler, to Hitler’s wrath. The key passage in the document, in which for the first time the Byzantine tones of subsequent homage sounded, read: “The committee is prepared, in acknowledgment of your tremendous knowledge, your singular dedication and selfless service to the Movement, and your rare oratorical gift, to concede to you dictatorial powers, and will be most delighted if after your re-entry you will take over the position of First Chairman, which Drexler long ago and repeatedly offered to you. Drexler will then remain as your coadjutor in the executive committee and, if you approve, in the same position in the action committee. If you should consider it desirable to have him completely excluded from the Movement, the next annual meeting would have to be consulted on that matter.”

The affair is a good illustration of Hitler’s skill at guiding and mastering crises. Its conclusion also shows his characteristic tendency to ruin a triumph by going a step too far. As soon as the party committee had submitted, he called an extraordinary membership meeting on his own initiative, in order to savor his victory to the full. At this point the good-natured Drexler would take no more. On July 25 he went to the Munich police and stated that the signers of the call for the meeting did not belong to the party and therefore had no right to convoke a membership meeting. He also pointed out that Hitler was aiming at revolution and violence, whereas he himself strove to carry out the party aims by legal, parliamentary procedures. The police, however, said they had no authority to intervene. Meanwhile, Hitler found himself under attack from other quarters. An anonymous leaflet appeared, accusing him of having brought “disunion and dissension into our ranks through power madness and personal ambition.” He was thus “doing the business of the Jews and their henchmen.” His aim was “to use the party as a springboard for dirty ends”; undoubtedly he was acting as the tool of obscure backers. There must be a reason why he was so anxious to keep his private life as well as his origins a mystery. “When asked by members what he lives on and what his former occupation was, he always became agitated and flew into a rage… so his conscience cannot be clear, especially since his excess in relations with women, to whom he has often referred to himself as ‘King of Munich,’ costs a great deal of money.” A poster that the police would not allow to be displayed repeated these accusations and ended with the battle cry: “The tyrant must be overthrown.”

The dispute was finally smoothed over by the mediation of Dietrich Eckart. At a membership meeting held on July 29, 1921, the crisis was laid to rest. Once again Hitler could not refrain from vaunting his victory. Although Drexler had pounced on the chance afforded by Hitler’s resignation to purge Hermann Esser from the party, Hitler insisted that the membership meeting be chaired by Esser, his satellite. Greeted by “applause that would not cease,” Hitler gave so skilled a version of the dispute that almost everyone swung over to his side. Drexler was given the consolation prize of honorary chairmanship, and the bylaws were revised as Hitler wished. His own followers moved into the executive committee; he himself was granted the dictatorial powers he demanded. The NSDAP was in his hand.

That same evening, at the Krone Circus, Hermann Esser hailed Hitler as “our Leader”—unser Führer. It was Esser, too, who henceforth held forth with cynical sentimentality in restaurants and taverns as the most zealous preacher of the Führer myth. Simultaneously, Dietrich Eckart in the Völkische Beobachter began a well-orchestrated campaign to purvey the same myth. On August 4 he sketched a profile of Hitler as a “selfless, self-sacrificing, devoted and sincere” man, forever “purposeful and alert.” A few days later came another account, this written by Rudolf Hess, which further spiritualized the manly picture. It glorified Hitler’s “purest intent,” his strength, his oratory, his admirable fund of knowledge, and clear intellect. The fantastic growth of the Hitler cult is evidenced by another essay, written by Hess a year later, in connection with a contest on the subject: “What will be the nature of the man who will lead Germany back to the summit?” Hess’s piece took first prize and contained thoughts such as the following:

On August 3, 1921, immediately after Hitler’s taking full control of the party, the SA was founded. The initials originally meant Sports Division; only later did they come to stand for Sturmabteilung or storm troop. The party opposition had earlier objected to Hitler’s surrounding himself with a paid bodyguard of former Free Corps soldiers; they demanded that the group be dissolved “because they want to steal and pillage.” But the SA was not chiefly an organization of discharged soldiers seeking an outlet for their violent instincts. Nor was it principally an instrument of self-defense on the part of the Right, to be pitted against similar terrorist troops maintained by the enemy. It is true that the troops may originally have been intended for some such purpose. For militant fighting forces of the Left did exist—for example, the Social Democratic Erhard Auer Guard. There is a good deal of confirmation for the stories of deliberate riots launched against the NSDAP by the Left. “The Marxist world, which owes more to terrorism for its survival than any other contemporary phenomenon, also resorted to this method in its struggle against our movement,” Hitler once declared in explaining the reasons for creating the SA.

Nevertheless, the SA had a more far-reaching function. From the start it was conceived as an instrument of attack and conquest. According to its founding proclamation, it was to be the “battering-ram” of the movement. Its members were to be trained to obedience and to an unspecified “revolutionary will.” One of Hitler’s pet ideas was that the weakness of the bourgeois order vis-à-vis Marxism lay in its principled separation of mind and violence, ideology and terror. The bourgeois politician, he argued, was limited to exclusively intellectual weapons, while the soldier was strictly excluded from politics. The Marxists, on the other hand, “united mind and brutal violence harmoniously.” The SA was to imitate them. In the first issue of the SA’s official gazette he called the organization “not only an instrument for the protection of the movement, but also… primarily the training school for the coming struggle for freedom on the domestic front.” Similarly, the Völkische Beobachter hailed the SA’s “ready-for-action spirit.”

One motive for its creation was the disbanding of the paramilitary “citizen’s militias in June 1921 and, a month later, the dissolution of the Oberland Free Corps, just home from Upper Silesia. Many members of these organizations, who at one blow found themselves deprived of the comradeship and glamour of the soldier’s life and felt that life had lost its meaning, joined up with the adventure-hungry juveniles who had already become members of the NSDAP. Almost all of the SA members came from the numerically strong petty bourgeoisie that had long been prevented from rising socially and had attained to positions of some leadership only during the war, because of the heavy casualties in the officers’ corps. Robust and eager for action, they had expected glorious careers in the postwar period. The terms of the Versailles Treaty, quite aside from all national humiliations, had thrown them back socially. They had ended up teaching in grammar schools, standing behind store counters, at the grilled windows in government offices. Such lives seemed to them narrow, wretched, and utterly unworthy of them. The same impulse to evade normality that had led Hitler to politics now brought them to Hitler.

Hitler himself regarded these recruits, so like him in type, as ideal material for his militant advance guard. In thinking out the tactics of achieving power, he included in his reckoning the resentments, the energy, and the incipient violence of these men. It was one of his psychological adages that uniformed men showing intent of violence had an attractive as well as an intimidating effect. Terrorism could exert a special magnetism. “Cruelty impresses” was the way he once phrased this insight. “People need a good scare. They want to be afraid of something. They want someone to make them afraid, someone to whom they can submit with a shudder. Haven’t you noticed, after a brawl at a meeting, that the ones who get beaten up are the first to apply for membership in the party? What is this rot you talk about violence and how shocked you are about torture? The masses want that. They need something to dread.”²⁵ With growing assurance, then, Hitler made brute force figure in the party’s image. It brought in members who would perhaps not be fetched by propaganda and the appeal of ceremony.

Hitler may have had this principle in mind when he instigated the so-called Battle in the Hofbräuhaus of November 4, 1921, in which the “myth of the SA” was created. Sizable Social Democratic heckler squads had turned up at an NSDAP demonstration. Hitler later said there were as many as 700 to 800 of the enemy. It happened that the party business office was moving on this day, so that only fifty of the SA men were present at the meeting. Hitler himself has described how he whipped up the nervous little unit by a passionate address. Today was the day of decision, he declared; they must not leave the hall unless they were carried out dead. He would personally strip cowards of their armbands and badges; the best defense was a good attack. In Hitler’s own description:

In spite of the disruptive forces, however, Hitler managed to talk for an hour and a half and had begun to think he was master of the situation, when suddenly a man jumped up on a chair and shouted the Social Democratic slogan: “Freiheit!” (“Freedom”).

In fact, from that day on Hitler had the floor in Munich in a much broader sense. According to his own statement, the streets henceforth belonged to the NSDAP, and with the beginning of the following year the SA carried its successes deeper and deeper into the rest of Bavaria. On weekends it undertook propaganda drives through the countryside. It organized noisy marches, at first marked only by the armband, then in gray windbreakers, carrying knobby walking sticks, parading through villages and booming out the SA’s special songs. According to one of Hitler’s early followers, they deliberately made themselves look “as savage and martial as possible.” They pasted slogans on the walls of houses and factories, brawled with their opponents, tore down black, red, and gold flags, or organized commando strikes against black marketeers or capitalist profiteers. Their songs and slogans had a bloodthirsty ring. At a meeting in the Biirgerbrau they passed around a collection box marked: “Donate for the massacres of Jews.” As so-called peacemakers, they broke up meetings or concerts that displeased them. “We’re brawling our way to greatness,” was the SA’s whimsical slogan. And it became apparent that the unspeakably rowdy conduct of the storm troopers was no hindrance to the growth of the party—just as Hitler had thought. Violence did not undercut the attractiveness of the movement even among the solid, honest petty bourgeoisie. The breakdown of standards caused by war and revolution is not the only explanation for this phenomenon. Hitler’s party could also count on a certain characteristically Bavarian coarseness; it became the political embodiment of that coarseness. The meeting-hall battles with their flailing chair legs and whirling beer mugs, the “massacres,” the murderous songs, the large-scale brawls—it was all a Gaudi (great fun). Significantly, it was just at this period that the term “Nazi” came into being. Although actually an abbreviation of National Socialist, in Bavarian ears it sounded like the nickname for Ignaz; thus it had a homey, familiar quality and showed that the party had won a place for itself in the public mind.

The generation of soldiers who had fought in the war and had formed the initial core of the SA was soon followed by younger groups. The combination of promised violence, elitist association of men, and conspiratorial ideology always exerted a strong allure. “There are two things that can unite men,” Hitler declared in a public speech at this time: “common ideals, common scoundrelism.”²⁷ The SA offered both, inextricably entwined. In the course of 1922 the SA, organized in groups of 100 men, grew by such leaps and bounds that by autumn the eleventh group, consisting entirely of students, was set up under the leadership of Rudolf Hess. That same year a group from the former Rossbach Free Corps, under Lieutenant Edmund Heines, joined the SA as a separate unit. With all these special formations, the storm troop took on an increasingly military aspect. Rossbach himself set up a bicyclists’ section. There was an intelligence unit, a motorized squad, an artillery section, and a cavalry corps.

Except for a generalized nationalistic belligerence, the SA did not develop any distinctive ideology (contrary to what many participants have said in their reminiscences). When it paraded through the streets under waving banners, it was certainly not marching toward a new social order. It had no utopian ideas, merely an enormous restiveness; no goal but dynamic energy, which often ran out of control. Strictly speaking, most of those who joined its columns were not even political soldiers. Rather, their temper was that of mercenaries, and the high-sounding political phrases were only a cloak for their nihilism, their restlessness, and their craving for something to which they could subordinate themselves. Their ideology was action at all costs. In keeping with the spirit of male comradeship and homosexuality that permeated the SA, the average storm trooper gave his allegiance not to a program, but to an individual, “a leader personality.” Hitler, in fact, wanted it so. In a proclamation he had stipulated: “Let only those apply who wish to be obedient to the leaders and are prepared, if need be, to meet death.”

Nevertheless, this indifference toward ideology made the SA into a hard conspiratorial core free from any factionalism and ready for any order or commitment whatsoever. Here was a source of strength that the traditional bourgeois parties lacked, and which gave a monolithic cast to the party as a whole. The party could thus take in a wide variety of elements actuated by many disparate resentments and complexes. The more disciplined and reliable the storm trooper core was, the more Hitler could broaden his appeals to virtually all groups in the population.

This factor accounts in large part for the curiously heterogeneous sociological basis of the NSDAP. It appeared to have no real class character. Certainly the petty bourgeois groups gave the party many of its characteristic features, and in spite of the name “Workers’ Party,” several points in Hitler’s original program formulated the anxieties and panic of the lower middle class, its fears of being overwhelmed economically by large concerns and department stores, and the little man’s resentment of easily acquired wealth, of profiteers and the owners of capital. The party’s strident propaganda was also pointedly aimed at the lower middle class. Alfred Rosenberg, for example, hailed this class as the only group that “still opposed the world-wide betrayal.” Hitler had not forgotten the lessons he had learned in Vienna from Karl Lueger. Lueger, as Hitler wrote, had mobilized the “middle class menaced with destruction, and thereby assured himself a following that was difficult to shake, whose spirit of sacrifice was as great as its fighting power.”²⁸

But the various membership lists of that early period in the party’s history reveal a rather different picture. Government officials or white-collar workers made up about 30 per cent of the membership. There was an almost equal percentage of skilled and unskilled workers, 16 per cent tradesmen, a good many of them proprietors of small and middle-sized independent businesses, who hoped the NSDAP would shield them from the pressure of the unions. The remainder consisted of soldiers, students, and professionals. The leadership consisted largely of representatives of urban bohemianism. A party directive of 1922 required every local group to reflect the sociological distribution of its region, and the local leadership was to contain no more than one third academics.

The significant fact is that the party attracted people of every origin, every sociological coloration, and developed its dynamism as a movement unifying antagonistic groups, interests, and feelings. In August, 1921, the National Socialists of the German-language area held an international meeting in Linz, Austria, at which they described themselves as a “class party.” But this was done in Hitler’s absence. He had always regarded the NSDAP as strictly opposed to class conflict; his point was that racial conflict was to replace class antinomies. “Along with members of the middle class and the bourgeoisie, very many workers have also followed the National Socialist banner,” a police report of December, 1922, stated. “The old socialist parties view the NSDAP as a grave danger to their continued existence.” What provided a common denominator for the many contradictions and antagonisms within the party was its embittered defensiveness toward the proletariat and toward the bourgeoisie, toward capitalism as well as Marxism. “For a class-conscious worker there is no room in the NSDAP, any more than there is for a status-conscious bourgeois,” Hitler declared.

On the whole, it was a mentality rather than a class which marked the convert to National Socialism in those early days: it was an ostensibly nonpolitical but actually proauthoritarian and leadership-hungry state of mind, and one which could be found in all classes and subgroups. Under the changed conditions of the republic people of this sort found themselves in a sad plight. Their anxiety complexes were reinforced because the new political form established no authority that could claim their attachment and future loyalty. These people had always owed part of their sense of personal value to identification with the political order. But this present state meant nothing to them. Their stern ideal of order and respect, which they had doggedly preserved through all the chaos of the times, seemed to them challenged by the very constitution of the republic, by democracy and freedom of the press, the clash of opinions and the horse trading among parties. The world had become incomprehensible to them. In their dismay they hit on the National Socialist Party, which was in fact the political incarnation of their own perplexities tricked out with an air of resolution. It was, of course, a paradox that they should have felt their craving for order, morality, and faith best answered by the spokesmen of the Hitler party, so many of whom came from obscure and irregular backgrounds. Yet Hitler understood them. One summary of an early Hitler speech runs: “He compared prewar Germany, in which order, cleanliness and rectitude prevailed, with the present-day Germany of the revolution.’’ The nation had a deeply rooted instinct for rules and discipline; it wanted the world orderly or it did not want the world at all. To this instinct the rising demagogue appealed, and he met with growing approval when he called the republic a negation of German history and the German character. This republic, he said, was the business, the career, the cause of a minority; the majority wanted “peace but no pigsty.”

The inflation gave Hitler endless material for slogans. Devaluation of the mark had not yet reached the grotesque extremes of the summer of 1923, but it had already led to the virtual expropriation of a large part of the middle class. As early as the beginning of 1920, the mark had fallen to a tenth of its prewar value; two years later it was worth only a hundredth of that value and was referred to as the “pfennig mark.” In this way the state, which since the war had accumulated debts of 150 billion marks and saw new tolls approaching in the still pending reparations negotiations, escaped its obligations. So did all other debtors. Borrowers, tradesmen, and industrialists, above all, the virtually tax-free firms producing for export and paying extremely low wages profited from the inflation. They had a stake in a continuing decline in the value of the currency, and at the very least did nothing to check it. Borrowing cheap money, which with the advancing devaluation they could pay back even more cheaply, they speculated brazenly against their own currency. Clever speculators made fortunes within a few months. Almost out of nothing they created vast economic empires. The sight of such expansion was all the more outrageous because these successes went hand in hand with the impoverishment and proletarianization of whole social groups, the holders of debt certificates, pensioners, and small savers.

The dimly sensed connection between the fantastic careers of some capitalists and the mass impoverishment sowed a feeling among the victims of having been mocked by society. That feeling turned into lasting bitterness. Just as lasting was the belief that the state had ceased to be an unselfish, just, and honest institution. That had been the traditional picture of the state; but now it was seen to have gone into fraudulent bankruptcy by means of the inflation, thus cheating its citizens. Among the little people with a firm faith in the ethics of orderliness, this realization was perhaps even more devastating than the loss of their modest savings. Under the succession of blows, the world in which they had lived austerely, contentedly, and soberly vanished irrevocably. The protracted crisis sent them in search of a figure in whom they could again believe and a will they could obey. The republic could not satisfy this need: that was in fact its problem. Hitler’s success as an agitator was due only partly to his oratorical skill. More important was his attunement to the moods of neurotically agitated philistines and his sense of what they wanted from him. He himself regarded this faculty as the true secret of the great orator: “He will always let himself be borne along by the great masses in such a way that instinctively the very words come to his lips that he needs to speak to the hearts of his audience.”²⁹

What the nation at the moment was experiencing for the first time—the succession of disenchantment, decline, and declassing, together with the search for scapegoats on whom to heap the blame—Hitler had long ago gone through. Ever since he had been turned down at the Academy he had known the anguish of a reality that ran counter to his longings and his expectations. Now he could translate his own complexes and discontents to a superindividual plane. Were it not for this congruence between the personal and the social-pathological situation, Hitler could never have wielded such hypnotic power over his fellow citizens. But he had long ago memorized all their reasons and pretexts; he knew the formulas, had long ago discovered the villain. No wonder his hearers were electrified by his words. What captivated them was not the logic of his arguments nor the pithiness of his slogans and images, but the sense of shared experiences, shared sufferings and hopes. The failed bourgeois Adolf Hitler could communicate with them on the level of a common distress. Their aggressions brought them together. To a great extent his special charisma, a mixture of obsessiveness, passionate banality, and vulgarity derived from his sharing. He proved the truth of Jacob Burckhardt’s saying that history sometimes loves to concentrate itself in a single human being, whom the world thereupon obeys; time and the man enter into a great, mysterious covenant.

The “mysteriousness” that Hitler cultivated was, however—like all his alleged instinctual reactions—amply supplemented by rational factors. Though he early discovered his mediumistic powers, he continued to improve his techniques. A series of photos show him posing in the stagey style of the period. Ludicrous though the pictures are, they nevertheless reveal how much of his demagogic magic he acquired by careful practice.

Thus he early began to develop a special style for his public appearances. From start to finish he stressed the theatrical element. Blaring sound trucks and screaming posters would announce a “great public giant demonstration.” Elements of spectacle borrowed from circus and grand opera were cleverly combined with edifying ceremonial reminiscent of church ritual. Parades of banners, march music, welcoming slogans, communal singing, and repeated cries of “Heil” formed the framework for the Führer’s speech. All these histrionic elements built up the suspense and made the speech seem a kind of annunciation. The party guidelines for meetings were constantly improved and handed down in courses for speakers and written directives until no detail was left to chance. Hitler himself would check the acoustics of all the important meeting halls in Munich, to determine whether the Hackerbrau, say, called for a louder voice than the Hofbräuhaus or the Kindl-Keller. He noted the atmosphere, the ventilation, and the tactical arrangement of the rooms. The official guidelines mentioned that a hall should always be too small and that at least a third of the audience should consist of the party’s own followers. To ward off the impression of being a petty bourgeois movement and to win the trust of the workers, Hitler occasionally waged a “struggle against the trousers crease” among his followers, and sent them to the demonstrations without ties and collars. Some party members were ordered to attend his opponents’ training courses and learn what the enemy was up to.³⁰

From 1922 on he began holding series of eight, ten, or twelve rallies on a single evening, at each of which he would appear as the principal speaker. This procedure suited his quantity complex as well as his passion for repetition. An eyewitness of one such serial demonstration at the Munich Lowenbrau has given the following description of it:

The structure of his speeches scarcely varied. First came denunciations of the present period, intended to tune up the audience and establish initial contact with it. “Bitterness has become general; people are beginning to notice that what was promised in 1918 has not turned into anything of dignity and beauty.” Thus he opened a speech in September, 1922. There followed historical reviews, a spelling out of the party program, and attacks on Jews, November criminals, or lying politicians. The cheering of the audience or of an official claque would send him into a mounting state of excitement that would last until he reached those exultant appeals for unity with which he always ended. In between, he would tuck in whatever the heat of the moment, the applause, the vapors of beer, or the general atmosphere suggested. With each successive meeting he grasped more surely and translated more accurately the vibrations of that atmosphere: The fatherland’s humiliation, the sins of imperialism, the envy of neighbors, the “communalization of the German woman,” the smearing of Germany’s past, the shallow, commercialized, and debauched West from which had come the republic, the disgraceful dictated peace of Versailles, the Allied control commissions, nigger music, bobbed hair, and modern art, but neither work, security, nor bread. “Germany is starving on democracy!” he cried. For he could coin memorable phrases. In addition, his obscure metaphors, his great use of mythic allusion gave his rantings an air of profundity. Out of trifling local incidents he could construct dramas of universal import. Thus he could prophesy: “What is beginning today will be greater than the World War. It will be fought out on German soil for the entire world. There are only two possibilities: We will be the sacrificial lamb or victors!”

In the past sober Anton Drexler would have been there and would sometimes hear such rhapsodic outbursts and to Hitler’s annoyance put in a final word to bring things into perspective. But now there was no longer anyone around to remonstrate when a wildly gesticulating Hitler vowed to tear the peace treaty to shreds if he took power, or let it be known that he would not shrink from another war with France, or conjured up the vision of a mighty German Reich stretching “from Königsberg to Strassburg and from Hamburg to Vienna.” His ever-larger audiences proved that what people wanted to hear was precisely such wild challenges. “The thing is not to renounce or to accept, but to venture what is seemingly impossible.” The general view of Hitler as an unprincipled opportunist does not do justice either to his daring or his originality. His courage in voicing “forbidden” opinions was extraordinary. Precisely that gave him the aura of manliness, fierceness, and sovereign contempt, which befitted the image of the Great Leader.

The role in which he soon cast himself was that of the outsider; in times of public discontent such a role had great potential. Once, when the Münchener Post termed him “the wiliest agitator making mischief in Munich today,” Hitler replied with: “Yes, we want to work people up, we’re agitators all right!” In the beginning he may well have been pained by the plebeian, quarrelsome features of his public career. But once he realized that certain crudenesses made him more popular in the circus tent and more interesting in the salons, he identified with those qualities without apology. When he was criticized for the dubious company he kept, he replied that he would rather be a German tramp than a French count. “They say we’re a bunch of anti-Semitic rowdies. So we are, we want to stir up a storm! We don’t want people to sleep, but to know a thunderstorm is brewing. We won’t let our Germany be crucified. Call us brutes if you want to. But if we save Germany, we’ll have carried out the greatest deed in the world.”

The frequency of religious metaphors and motifs in his rhetoric reflects childhood emotions: recollections of his experience as acolyte in Lambach monastery, when he was stirred to the depths by images of suffering and despair against a background of triumphant belief in salvation. He admired the Catholic Church for its genius in devising such combinations, and he learned what he could from it. Without the least scruple or any consciousness of blasphemy he took over “my Lord and Saviour” for his anti-Semitic tirades: “As a Christian and a man I read, in boundless love, through the passage which relates how the Lord at last rallied his strength and reached for the whip to drive the usurers, the brood of adders and otters, out of the temple! Profoundly moved, today, after two thousand years, I recognize the tremendous import of his fight to save the world from the Jewish poison—I see it most powerfully shown by the fact that because of it he had to bleed to death on the cross.”

The narrow range of the emotions he played upon corresponded to the monotony of structure in his speeches. There is no saying how much of this was deliberate, how much due to personal fixation. When we read some of these addresses—although they have been considerably revised—we are struck by their repetitiveness. From the multitude of resentments that filled him he extracted always the same meanings, the same accusations, and vows of revenge. “There is only defiance and hate, hate and again hate!” he once cried out. The word was obsessive with him. He would, for instance, cry out for the enemy’s hatred; he longed to have the enemy’s hate fall upon him, he declared. Or: “To achieve freedom takes pride, will, defiance, hate and again hate!”

With his compulsion to magnify everything, he saw gigantic corruption at work in the most ordinary affairs, detected a comprehensive strategy of treason. Behind every Allied note, every speech in the French Chamber of Deputies, he saw the machinations of the enemy of mankind. Head thrown back, outstretched arm before him, index finger pointing at the ground and twitching up and down—in this characteristic pose Adolf Hitler, still no more than a local Bavarian curiosity, orated himself into a state of frenzy in which he pitted himself against the government, against conditions in Germany, and in fact against the condition of the entire world: “No, we forgive nothing; we demand revenge!”³²

He had no sense of the ridiculous and despised ridicule’s reputedly fatal effects. He had not yet adopted the imperious attitudes of later years; and since he felt that as an artist he was alienated from the masses, he often made deliberate efforts at popular behavior. At such times he would wave a beer mug at his audience or try to check the uproar he was kindling by a clumsy “Sh…, sh…” Apparently his large audiences were there more for the excitement than for political reasons; at any rate, in contrast to the tens of thousands who came to mass meetings, there were still only 6,000 registered members of the party at the beginning of 1922. But he was listened to. People sat motionless, eyes riveted upon him. After his first few words the thump of the beer mugs generally stopped. Often he spoke into a breathless silence, which from time to time was explosively shattered as if thousands of pebbles suddenly came rattling down on a drum, as one observer described it. Naively, with all the hunger for acclaim of the novice, Hitler enjoyed the stir he caused, enjoyed being the center of attention. “When you go through ten halls,” he admitted to his entourage, “and everywhere people shout their enthusiasm for you—it is an uplifting feeling, you know.” Quite often he would end his performance with an oath of loyalty that he would have the audience repeat after him, or with his eyes fixed upon the ceiling of the hall, his voice hoarse and breaking with emotion, he would cry, “Germany! Germany!”—repeating the word until the crowd fell in with it and the chanting moved on to one of the party’s battle or pogrom songs. Often they would pour out of the hall to march singing through the nocturnal streets. Hitler admitted that after each of his speeches he himself would be “soaking wet and would have lost four to six pounds.” At every meeting his uniform “dyed his underwear blue.”³³

According to his own testimony, it took him two years to learn to handle all the methods of propagandistic domination, so that he felt himself “master in this art.” It has been suggested that he was the first to apply the techniques of American advertising to political struggle. Perhaps the great Barnum was indeed one of his teachers, as Die Weltbühne later asserted. But the tone of amusement with which the magazine announced this discovery revealed its own blindness. Many supercilious contemporaries from left to right made the same mistake: confusing Hitler’s techniques with his aims and concluding that the aims were laughable because the methods were. He himself never swerved in his determination to overthrow a world and put another in its place; to him there was no incongruity between the techniques of the circus barker and the universal conflagrations and apocalypses he had in mind.

The important figure in the background, the symbol of union throughout the völkisch camp, remained—in spite of Hitler’s oratorical success—General von Ludendorff. With a respectful eye partly cocked toward the general, Hitler was still regarding himself as something of a forerunner preparing the way for someone greater than himself. He, Hitler, playing the role that John the Baptist played for Christ—“a very small sort of St. John,” he called himself—would create a racially united people and a sword for that greater one. But the masses seemed to realize sooner than he himself that he was the one they were waiting for. They streamed to him “as to a Saviour,” a contemporary account notes. There are stories in plenty of “awakenings” and conversions—totalitarian movements are often characterized by such pseudoreligious events. For example, Ernst Hanfstaengl first heard Hitler at this time. He had many objections; nevertheless, he felt that “a new period of life” was beginning for him. The businessman Kurt Luedecke, who for a time was counted among the leading members of Hitler’s entourage and who later was imprisoned in the Oranienburg concentration camp, after his escape abroad described the spell cast on him and innumerable others by Hitler the orator:

From the spring of 1922 on the membership figures began climbing by leaps and bounds. By summer the party had some fifty local groups, and at the beginning of 1923 the Munich business office had to be closed temporarily because it was unable to cope with the mass of applications. Part of this increase was due to an order requiring every “party comrade” to bring in three new members and one subscriber to the Völkische Beobachter every three months. But much of it was surely due to Hitler’s growing skill as an orator and organizer.

In order to meet the needs of disoriented people, the NSDAP tried to create close links between the party and the personal lives of the members. In this respect it was once more drawing on the tested practices of socialist parties. But the rite of the weekly evening talkfests, at which attendance was obligatory, the joint outings, concerts, or solstice festivals, the singing, the cookouts, and saluting, in addition to the various forms of bland sociability that developed in party headquarters and storm troop barracks—all this went far beyond the model and appealed more directly to the human craving for solidarity. The movement’s greatest task, Hitler declared, was to provide “these seeking and erring masses” with the opportunity “at least somewhere once more to find a place where their hearts can rest.”

At first Hitler’s policy had been to enlarge the party at all costs. But after a while he took another line, establishing new local groups only when a capable leader in whom he personally had confidence could be found, one who could satisfy the craving for authority so obviously crying out for fulfillment.

For the party aimed at being more than an organization for specific political purposes. It never forgot, in its concern with the affairs of the day, that in addition to giving the members a deeply serious interpretation of the world it must also provide them with a touch of that banal contentment so conspicuously missing in the misery and isolation of everyday living. In its effort to be all at once homeland, center of existence, and source of knowledge the party was already manifesting its later claims to totality.

Within a year the NSDAP thus developed into “the strongest power factor in South German nationalism,” as one observer wrote. The North German party groups, too, showed such marked growth, inheriting membership from the disintegrating German Socialist Party. When, in June, 1922, the Foreign Minister, Walter Rathenau, was assassinated by nationalist conspirators, some German states, such as Prussia, Baden, and Thuringia, decided to ban Hitler’s party. In Bavaria, however, the experiences of the soviet period had not been forgotten; the NSDAP, as the most radical anti-Communist party, was not molested. In fact, many of Hitler’s followers held top positions in the Munich police force, including Police Commissioner Pöhner and Oberamtmann (Chief Bailiff) Frick, his specialist in political affairs. These two men quashed any protests against the NSDAP, kept the party informed of planned actions against it, and if the police had after all to intervene, took care that such actions came to nothing. Frick later admitted that the police could easily have suppressed the party at this time, but that “we held our protecting hand over the NSDAP and Herr Hitler.” And Hitler himself remarked that without the assistance of Frick he would “never have been out of the clink.”³⁵

Hitler found himself imperiled only once, when Bavarian Interior Minister Schweyer raised the question of having the troublesome alien agitator deported to Austria. A conference in 1922 among the leaders of all the government parties had agreed that the rowdy bands in the streets of Munich, the brawls, the constant molesting of the citizenry, were becoming intolerable. But Erhard Auer, the leader of the Social Democrats, opposed deportation on the grounds that it would be a violation of “democratic and libertarian principles.” So Hitler was allowed to go on denouncing the republic as a “sanctuary for foreign swindlers,” threatening the administration that when he came to power “may God have mercy on you!” and proclaiming that there could be “only one punishment: the rope” for the treasonous leaders of the Social Democratic Party. Whipped up by his demagogy, the city of Munich became an enclave of antirepublicanism, buzzing with rumors of coups, civil war, and restoration of the monarchy. When Reich President Friedrich Ebert visited Munich in the summer of 1922, he was met at the railroad station with boos, jeers, and the display of red bathing trunks. (The President had been so unwise as to let himself be photographed, along with Noske, his Defense Minister, in a bathing suit. In the authoritarian-minded German nation, the loss of dignity was catastrophic.) Chancellor Wirth’s advisors warned him to cancel a planned trip to Munich. At the same time, Hindenburg was being greeted with ovations, and transportation of the body of Ludwig III, the last Wittelsbach monarch, who had died in exile, brought the whole city out into the streets, awash in tears of mourning and nostalgia.

His successes within Munich encouraged Hitler to undertake his first bold stroke outside the city. In mid-October, 1922, the patriotic societies of Coburg organized a demonstration, to which they invited Hitler. It was suggested that he come with “some companions.” Hitler interpreted this phrase in his customary brazen manner. Intending to take over and dominate the demonstration, he set out in a special train with some 800 men, a display of standards, and a sizable contingent of band musicians. On arrival he was asked not to march into the city in a solid formation. According to his own report, he “flatly refused” the request and ordered his men to march in formation “with bands playing.” Growing hostile crowds formed along both sides of the street. But since the expected mass riot did not begin, they had no sooner reached the meeting hall when Hitler ordered his units to march back the way they had come. Moreover, he added a theatrical touch that brought the tension to an intolerable height: the bands stopped playing and the men marched only to throbbing drumrolls. This time the predictable street battle erupted. It dragged on in a series of small skirmishes all through the day and into the night, and ultimately the National Socialists emerged as the victors.

This was the first of those challenges to the political authorities that were to dominate the following years. Significantly, Cohurg became one of the most reliable NSDAP bases. The participants in the trip were honored by a special medal struck as a memorial to the occasion. The braggadocio of Hitler’s men during the following weeks repeatedly led to rumors of coups. Finally, Interior Minister Schweyer sent for Hitler and issued a grave warning. If there were any resort to force, Schweyer said, he would order the police to shoot. But Hitler assured him he would “never as long as I live make a putsch.” He gave the minister his word of honor.

Such incidents as this, however, encouraged him to think that he could call the next move. All these bans, summonses, and warnings were evidence of how far he had come, starting from nothing. In his emotional states he envisioned a historic role for himself. For confirmation there were Mustafa Kemal Pasha’s seizure of power in Ankara and Mussolini’s recent march on Rome. All keyed up, he listened to an informant describe how the black shirts, thanks to their enthusiasm, resolution, and the benevolent passivity of the army, had marched tempestuously to victory, snatching one city after the other from the “Reds.” Later Hitler spoke of the enormous impetus this “turning point in history” had given him. Very much as in his boyhood, he let himself be carried away on the wings of imagination. At such times he would vividly see the swastika banner “fluttering over the Schloss in Berlin as over the peasant’s hut.” Or during some quiet coffee break he would casually remark, returning from some distant dream world, that in the next war “the first order of business would be to seize the grain-growing areas of Poland and the Ukraine.”

Coburg had given him fresh confidence. “From now on I will go my way alone,” he declared. Only a short time before he had still thought of himself as a harbinger and dreamed that “one day someone will come along, with an iron cranium and possibly with filthy boots, but with a pure conscience and strong fist, who will put an end to the blabber of these armchair heroes and give the nation deeds.” Now, tentatively at first, he began to think of himself as the coming man and actually ended by comparing himself to Napoleon. His army superiors during the war would not promote him to a noncom on the ground that he would be incapable of arousing respect. Now, by his extraordinary and ultimately devastating capacity to evoke loyalty, he demonstrated his talent for leadership. For it was solely for his sake that his followers went to the lengths they did; it was only with eyes on him that they were ready to stake their lives, trample over their own compunctions, and from the very beginning to commit crimes. He liked to be called “Wolf” in his intimate circle; the name, he decided, was the primitive Germanic form of Adolf. It accorded, moreover, with his jungle image of the world and suggested the qualities of strength, aggressiveness, and solitariness. He also used “Wolf” as a pseudonym occasionally and later gave it to the sister who ran his household. And when it was decided to establish the Volkswagen plant, Robert Ley declared: “We shall name the town Wolfsburg, after you, my Führer.”³⁶

He early developed a sense that all his actions were taking place under the eyes of the “goddess of history.” Though his real party membership number was 555, he invariably claimed to be member number 7. This not only raised his status as an early member but gave him the nimbus of a magic number. Along with this he began blotting out his private life. He made a principle of not inviting even the most intimate members of his entourage to his home. He tried as far as possible to keep them apart from one another. Meeting one of his early acquaintances in Munich at this time, he urgently begged him “never to give information to anyone, not even his closest party comrades, about his youth in Vienna and Munich.” He tried out poses, attitudes, posturings; at the start he often made rather a botch of them and showed the strain of trying to be what he was not. But even in the later years close study will separate out the strands, show the constant alternation between rehearsed self-control and attacks of literally senseless rage, between Caesaristic postures and lax stupefaction, between his artificial and his natural existence. In this early phase of the process of stylization he seemed unable to hold to his image consistently. He had only begun to sketch it, and the various elements were hardly congruous. An Italian Fascist at the time saw him as “a Julius Caesar with Tyrolean hat.”

Still and all, he had very nearly attained the dream of his youth. He was living unattached, without the bother of an occupation, subject only to his own whims; he was “master of his time” and, moreover, his drama, explosive effects, glitter and applause. It was an artist’s life, more or less. He drove fast cars, cut something of a figure at various salons, and was at home in the “great world” among aristocrats, captains of industry, notables, and scientists. There were moments when he thought of settling for bourgeois security within the present framework. He would not ask much, he commented at such times: “All I desire is for the movement to keep going and for me to make a living as chief of the Völkische Beobachter.”

But those were moods. Such modesty did not really suit his nature. He had no sense of proportion; some demon was constantly driving him to the edge of the possible and beyond. “Everything in him urged him on to radical and total solutions,” the friend of his youth had concluded. Now another observer tersely called him a fanatic, “with a streak of craziness in him. Now that he is being pampered, he is altogether out of control.”

Certainly the period of painful obscurity was over, and in hindsight Hitler had come an amazingly long way. Even the neutral onlooker must be astounded at the personal progress he had made in the past three years. He was quite a different person from the pallid and inconsequential drifter he had been at thirty. His life seemed to be made out of two wholly separate pieces. With extraordinary boldness and coldness, he had emerged from his condition as underling. All he needed now was to become a little more polished, to get used to his new part. Everything else suggested that he was on the point of entering a new and larger sphere of action to which he was entirely equal. At any rate Hitler had proved able to cope with whatever came his way, taking in at a glance people, motivations, forces, ideas, and bending everything to his own aim—the enlarging of his power.

Not unreasonably, his biographers have tended to look for a particular “breakthrough experience.” They have spoken of incubation periods, the disappearance of some block or other, and even demonic powers. But perhaps he was now no different from what he had been, except that he had found some key to himself and been able to reshuffle the unchanged existing elements of his personality into a new arrangement, so that the oddball was transformed into a magnetic demagogue, the “dreamer” into the man of action. He was the catalyst of the masses; without contributing anything new, he set in motion enormous accelerations and crises. But the masses in turn catalyzed him; they were his creation and he, simultaneously, was their creature. “I know,” he said to his public in phrases of almost Biblical ring, “that everything you are, you are through me, and everything I am, I am through you alone.”

In that lies the explanation for the peculiar rigidity which was present almost from the start. In fact Hitler’s world view had not changed since his days in Vienna, as he himself was wont to declare. For the elements remained the same; all that the masses’ grand cry of reveille did was to charge that world view with enormous tension. But the emotions themselves, the fears and obsessions, were fixed. Hitler’s taste in art also, and even his personal preferences, remained what they had been in the days of his boyhood and youth: Tristan and starchy foods, neoclassicism, anti-Semitism, Karl Spitzweg, and a weakness for cream cake. Though he later declared that while in Vienna he had been “in respect to thinking a babe-in-arms,” in a sense he had always remained so. If we compare the drawings and painstaking water colors of the twenty-year-old postcard painter with those of the First World War soldier or with those of the Chancellor twenty years later, their quality hardly differs. No personal experience, no process of development is reflected in these tight little sketches. As if petrified, Hitler remained what he had been.

Yet it may be that these immature features were essential for Hitler’s successes. From the summer of 1923 on, the nation reeled from one crisis and emergency to the next. Under such circumstances, fortune favored only the man who despised circumstances, who instead of engaging in politics challenged fate, and who promised not to improve conditions but to overturn them radically and thoroughly. “I guarantee you,” Hitler phrased it, “that the impossible always succeeds. What is unlikeliest is surest.”

Challenging the Powers that Be

Hitler had planned a party rally in Munich for the end of January, 1923. He meant to turn it into an intimidating demonstration of his own power. Five thousand SA men had been summoned to Munich from all over Bavaria. They would parade before their Führer on the Marsfeld, or Field of Mars, on the outskirts of town, forming the honor guard for the first solemn dedication of the standards. Concurrently, mass meetings were to be held in no fewer than twelve halls in the city. To increase the popular appeal, the party had hired bands, folk-dance ensembles, and the comedian Weiss Ferdl. The sheer size of the affair, combined with the rumors of a Nazi putsch that had been circulating for weeks, underlined Hitler’s mounting importance as a political figure.

The way the Bavarian authorities reacted to Hitler’s defiant and challenging proclamations revealed their growing perplexity vis-à-vis the Nazi party. The party’s rise had been so rapid that the exact nature of it as a force on the political scene remained undefined. On the one hand, it did assume a nationalist stance and manifested laudable energy in its antagonism to the Left. Yet, at the same time, it had no respect for authorities and was constantly violating the public order that it claimed to desire above all else. In 1922 the authorities sentenced Hitler to three months’ imprisonment—partly because they were determined to show him that there were limits which they would not allow him to breach. He and his followers had disrupted a meeting of the Bayernbund (Bavarian League) and given its leader, the engineer Otto Ballerstedt, a severe beating. Hitler served only four weeks of the sentence. When he made his first public appearance after his release, he was “carried to the podium amidst applause which seemed as if it would never end.” The Völkische Beobachter called him “the most popular and most hated man in Munich.” The situation involved risks that even Hitler must have found difficult to calculate. The year 1923 was characterized by his repeated efforts to clarify his relationship to the power structure. He tested it from a number of angles, at times taking a wooing tone, at times a threatening one.

The authorities did not know how to deal with this man who was at once somewhat suspect and gratifyingly nationalistic. They finally struck a compromise with their own ambivalence: they issued a ban against the outdoor ceremony of dedicating the standards and forbade half the mass meetings already announced by Hitler. Conversely, they also banned the rally that the Social Democrats had called for the preceding day. Yet Eduard Nortz, who had replaced the Nazi sympathizer Ernst Pöhner as police commissioner, remained unmoved when Hitler pleaded that the ban would be worse than a heavy blow to the nationalist movement, that it would be a disaster for the entire fatherland. Nortz, gray-haired and cool, answered that even patriots had to bow to the government’s decrees. Hitler flew into a rage and began to shout that he would hold the SA march anyway, that he was not afraid of the police, that he himself would march at the head of the column and let himself be shot. But the commissioner did not give way. Instead, he hastily convened a session of the Council of Ministers, which proclaimed a state of emergency. That automatically banned all the activities planned for the party rally. The time had come to remind the leader of the National Socialists of the rules of the political game.

Hitler was in despair. It seemed to him that his whole political future was at stake. For one of the rules as he understood them was that he might challenge the government with impunity, since his demands were only a radical extension of the government’s own wishes.

At this point the Reichswehr, which had stood by the party since Drexler’s time, entered the picture. Röhm and Ritter von Epp had finally succeeded in persuading the Bavarian Reichswehr commander, General von Lossow, to meet with Hitler. By now nervous and unsure of himself, Hitler was prepared to make considerable concessions. He promised Lossow that he would “report to his Excellency” on January 28, immediately after the party rally. Lossow, who had been rather put off by Hitler’s eccentric manner, finally agreed to inform the government that he would consider “the suppression of the nationalist organizations unfortunate for security reasons.” The ban was then in fact lifted. To save face, however, Nortz requested the leader of the NSDAP at a second meeting to reduce the number of meetings to six and to stage the dedication of the standards not on the Marsfeld, but inside the nearby Krone Circus. Hitler, realizing that he had won this match, vaguely indicated compliance. Then, under the slogan of Deutschland erwache! (“Germany, awake!”), he held all twelve mass meetings. The dedication of the standards, which he himself had designed, took place on the Marsfeld after all, in the presence of 5,000 storm troopers. There was a driving snowstorm. “Either the National Socialist German Workers’ Party is the coming movement in Germany,” Hitler thundered, “in which case not even the devil can stop it, or it is not, and deserves to be destroyed.” Battalions of exuberant SA men marched past walls and kiosks covered with proclamations of the state of emergency. With them marched several military bands, and the storm troopers roared out their songs defaming the “Jew Republic.” When they reached Schwanthalerstrasse, Hitler reviewed the units, most of whom now wore uniforms.

It was a telling triumph over governmental authority, and it prepared the ground for the conflicts of the following months. Many observers saw these events as proof that Hitler’s rhetorical gifts were matched by his political adroitness. Moreover, his nerves seemed tougher than those of his adversaries. For a long time people had merely smiled at his furious intensity. Now they began to be impressed, and the party’s ranks, so long made up of the resentful and the naive, began to be swelled by people with a keen instinct for the wave of the future. Between February and November, 1923, the National Socialist Party enrolled a good 35,000 new members, while the SA grew to nearly 15,000. The party now had assets of 173,000 gold marks.³⁷ An intensive program of propaganda and activities covering all of Bavaria was developed. From February 8 on, the Völkische Beobachter began appearing as a daily. The name of Dietrich Eckart, who was overworked and ill, remained on the masthead for a few more months, but by the beginning of March the real editor of the newspaper was Alfred Rosenberg.

Hitler had found both the civil and military authorities all too accommodating. Their attitude may be traced in part to the troubles that had recently gripped the country. In the first half of January, France, still full of hatred and suspicion for her neighbor, had insisted on claiming its rights under the Treaty of Versailles and had occupied the Rhineland. Germany was at once plunged into full-scale economic crisis, which had been threatening the country since 1918. The unrest of the early postwar period, the heavy burden of reparations, the general flight of capital, and especially the lack of any reserves, had made it extremely difficult for the economy to recover from the war. To make matters worse, the behavior of the radical rightists and leftists had repeatedly undermined what little confidence other countries might have had in Germany’s stability. It was no coincidence that the mark took its first dramatic plunge in June, 1922, after Walther Rathenau, the German Foreign Minister, was assassinated. But now the French occupation set off that mad inflationary spiral that made life so grotesque and destroyed everyone’s surviving faith in the social order. People grew used to living in an “atmosphere of the impossible.” The inflation meant the collapse of an entire world, with all its assumptions, its norms, and its morality. The consequences were incalculable.

For the moment, however, public interest centered primarily on the attempt at national self-assertion. The paper money, whose value was ultimately to be measured by mere weight, seemed only a fantastic underscoring of events in the Rhineland. On January 11 the government issued a call for passive resistance. German government employees were instructed not to obey orders from the occupation authorities. French troops advancing into the Ruhr encountered huge crowds of Germans grimly singing “Die Wacht am Rhein.” The French answered the challenge with a series of well-chosen humiliations. Occupation courts meted out Draconian punishments for acts of defiance. Many clashes heightened the anger on both sides. At the end of March French troops fired into a crowd of workers demonstrating on the grounds of the Krupp plant in Essen. Thirteen demonstrators were killed and over thirty wounded. Almost half a million persons joined in the funeral for the victims. A French military tribunal tried and convicted the head of the firm and eight of his principal subordinates and imposed prison sentences of fifteen to twenty years.

Episodes of this sort produced a sense of common purpose such as had not been felt in Germany since 1914. But beneath the cloak of national unity the divergent forces attempted to turn the situation to their own advantage. The outlawed paramilitary organizations seized the opportunity to come out into the open and supplement the program of passive resistance with direct action. The radical Left made a strong bid to regain the positions it had lost in Saxony and Central Germany, while the Right fortified its power base in Bavaria. These were the times in which armed proletarian companies faced units of the Ehrhardt Free Corps with leveled weapons on the borders of Bavaria. In many of the larger cities food demonstrations took on the character of riots. In the meantime the French and Belgians were exploiting the disarray in the west to encourage a separatist movement which, however, soon collapsed for want of a clear rationale. The republic, created only four years earlier under adverse circumstances and never more than precariously maintained, seemed on the point of breakdown.

Hitler expressed his new self-confidence in a bold and provocative gesture: he withdrew the NSDAP from the front for national unity and warned his bewildered followers that anyone who took active part in the resistance against France would be expelled from the party. Some such expulsions were actually carried out. To members who objected he gave this explanation: “If they haven’t caught on that this idiocy about a common front is fatal for us, they’re beyond help.” Although he was aware of some of the questionable aspects of this stand, his particular perspective and his sense of tactics told him that he must not line up with the others. The Nazi party could not make common cause with members of the bourgeoisie, Marxists, and Jews; it could not afford to be submerged in the anonymity of the national resistance movement. Hitler feared that the struggle for the Ruhr would unite the people behind the government and strengthen the regime. But he could also hope that his obstructionist tactics would sow confusion and thus further his long-range ambitions for a takeover: “As long as a nation does not drive out the murderers within its own borders,” he wrote in the Völkische Beobachter, “success in its dealings with other countries remains impossible. While spoken and written protests are hurled against the French, the real enemy of the German people lurks within its gates.” With remarkable inflexibility, considering the popular mood, and even in the face of Ludendorff’s overwhelming authority, he went on insisting that Germany had first to come to grips with the enemy within. Early in March the army chief of staff, General von Seeckt, inquired whether Hitler would be willing to attach his forces to the Reichswehr if a policy of active resistance were adopted. Hitler replied curtly that first the government would have to be overthrown. Two weeks later he made the same point to a representative of German Chancellor Cuno: “Not down with France, but down with the traitors to the Fatherland, down with the November criminals; that must be our slogan!”

It has become standard to see Hitler’s behavior as totally unscrupulous and unprincipled. But here is an instance in which he stood steadfastly by his principles, even though this meant exposing himself to unpopularity and misunderstanding. He himself saw this stand as one of the crucial decisions of his career. His allies and backers—people of prestige and staunch conservatives—always looked upon him as one of their own, as nationalist and conservative as themselves. But in his very first political decision of any magnitude Hitler brushed away all the false alliances, from Kahr to Papen, and showed that when the chips were down he would act like a true revolutionary. Without hesitation he took a revolutionary posture rather than a nationalistic one. Indeed, in later years he never reacted any differently. As late as 1930 he asserted that if the Poles invaded Germany, he would give up East Prussia and Silesia temporarily rather than aid the existing regime by helping to defend German territory. To be sure, he also asserted that he would despise himself if “the moment a conflict broke out he were not first and foremost a German.” But in actual fact he differed from his adherents in that he remained cool and consistent and did not allow his own patriotic tirades to shape his strategy. He turned his scorn against the passive resistance movement which, he said, proposed to “kill the French by loafing.” He also ridiculed those who thought France could be overcome by sabotage: “What would France be today,” he shouted, “if there were no internationalists in Germany, but only National Socialists? What if we had no weapons but our fists? If sixty million people were as one in passionately loving their Fatherland—those fists would sprout guns.”

Hitler was certainly no less incensed against the French than the other forces and parties in Germany. What he objected to was not the resistance per se but the fact that it was only passive and therefore a halfway measure. There were also the other political factors already mentioned that determined his refusal to go along with the other nationalist parties. Underlying his stand was the conviction that no consistent and successful foreign policy could be pursued unless a united and revolutionary nation stood behind it. This view reversed the whole political tradition of the Germans, for it asserted the primacy of domestic rather than foreign policy. When the passive resistance began to crumble, Hitler made a passionate speech describing what a true resistance campaign would have been like. The drastic tone of his suggestions anticipates the kind of orders he was to give in March, 1945, for “Operation Scorched Earth”:

Few of Hitler’s contemporaries understood his decision not to participate in the struggle over the Ruhr. The decision lent plausibility to the rumor that French funds were behind the NSDAP’s conspicuous expansion of its organization. For it was obvious to everyone that the party was increasing its propaganda and outfitting its members with new uniforms and arms. But no concrete proof of such French backing has ever been found—and, in fact, it is still hard to specify which political or economic interests were trying to exert influence over the growing party. Nevertheless, the party’s lavish expenditures, especially after Hitler took over the leadership, were so conspicuously out of all proportion to its numbers that there was every reason to look around for financial backers. Suspicions of this sort are not merely traceable to the “devil theory” of the Left, which could explain its defeat by “counter-historical National Socialism” only by positing a grim conspiracy of monopoly capitalism.

The National Socialists themselves lent encouragement to the most fantastic theories by practicing a psychotic form of secrecy concerning their financial resources. Throughout the Weimar years there was a series of libel cases springing from various charges; after 1933 the records of these cases were spirited away or destroyed. From the very beginning it was an unwritten law of the party that no records should be kept of contributions. Financial transactions were rarely noted in the journal of the party business office; when they were, there would usually be a note: “To be handled by Drexler personally.” In October, 1920, Hitler, presiding over a meeting in the Münchener Kindl-Keller, issued strict orders against anyone’s making notes on the details of a transaction he had just described.³⁹

There is no doubt that the party’s basic income derived from membership dues, small donations, the sale of tickets for Hitler’s speeches, or collections made at rallies, which might often amount to several thousand marks. Some of the early party members, like Oskar Körner, owner of a small toy store, who was killed in front of the Feldherrnhalle on November 9, 1923, all but ruined themselves in the interest of the party. Shop owners offered special discounts to the party, while others made gifts of jewelry or works of art. Spinster ladies who attended evening rallies were sometimes so emotionally shaken by the personality of Hitler that they made the National Socialist Party the beneficiary under their wills. Prosperous well-wishers like the Bechsteins, the Bruckmanns, or Ernst Hanfstaengl sometimes came forth with sizable gifts. The party also found ways to coax more funds out of its membership than just the regular dues. It floated interestfree loan certificates that the members were supposed to buy and sell to others. According to police records, no fewer than 40,000 loan certificates, each for ten marks, were issued in the first half of 1921 alone.⁴⁰

Nevertheless, the party suffered from a chronic shortage of funds during the early years. Even as late as the middle of 1921 it could not afford to hire a treasurer. According to the story of an early member, the poster brigades could not even buy the necessary paste. In the fall of 1921 Hitler had to cancel plans for a major rally in the Krone Circus for lack of funds. The financial predicament began to improve in the summer of 1922, when the party’s feverish activity brought it more into the forefront. Henceforth the party could count on a wide circle of financial benefactors and supporters, not party adherents in the strict sense, but rather representatives of the wealthy middle class, which felt vulnerable to the threat of Communist revolution. These people were ready to support any anti-Communist group, from the Free Corps and nationalist leagues on the right to the crank causes that proliferated within protest journalism. It would probably be correct to say that they were less interested in giving Hitler a boost than in promoting the most vigorous antirevolutionary force they could find.

Hitler owed his connections with the influential and monied segments of Bavarian society to Dietrich Eckart and Max Erwin von Scheubner-Richter. Another such sponsor was probably Ludendorff, who himself received considerable sums from industrialists and large landowners and doled this money out among the militant nationalist-racist organizations as he saw fit. While Ernst Röhm was mobilizing funds, weapons, and equipment for the Reichswehr, Dr. Emil Gansser, a friend of Dietrich Eckart’s, put Hitler in touch with a group of big businessmen and bankers belonging to the Nationalist Club (Nationalklub). In 1922 Hitler had his first chance to present his plans to them. Among the principal contributors to the party’s funds were the locomotive manufacturer Borsig, Fritz Thyssen of Consolidated Steel (Vereinigte Stahlwerke), Privy Councilor Kirdorf, and executives of the Daimler Company and the Bavarian Industrialists Association (Bayrischer Industriellenverband). Support from Czechoslovak, Scandinavian, and Swiss sources was also forthcoming for this dynamic party that was attracting so much attention. In the fall of 1923 Hitler went to Zurich and allegedly returned “with a steamer trunk stuffed with Swiss francs and American dollars.”⁴¹ The mysterious and ingenious Kurt W. Luedecke obtained considerable sums from as yet undetermined sources, and among other things set up his “own” SA company consisting of fifty men. Cash flowed in from persons in Hungary as well as from Russian and Baltic-German émigrés. During the inflation some party functionaries were paid in foreign currencies. Among these were Julius Schreck, the SA staff sergeant who was later to be Hitler’s chauffeur, and the SA Chief of Staff Lieutenant Commander Hoffmann. Even a bordello on Berlin’s Tauen-tzienstrasse did its bit for the nationalist cause. At the urging of Scheubner-Richter, it had been set up by a former army officer; the profits went to swell the party till in Munich.⁴²

The motives behind these contributions were highly diverse. It is true that without this support Hitler could not have launched his expensive spectacles after the summer of 1922. But it is also true that he made no binding commitments to any of his backers. The aggrieved leftists never believed in the anticapitalist stance of the National Socialists. It was all too inarticulate and irrational. And, in fact, Nazi anticapitalist ranting against usurers, speculators, and department stores never went beyond the perspective of superintendents and shopkeepers. Nevertheless, the Nazis’ sense of outrage was all the more convincing because of their lack of any impressive system. They objected to the morality rather than the material possessions of the propertied classes. This passage from one of the early party speechifiers indicates the psychological effectiveness of the irrational anticapitalist appeal to the desperate masses: “Be patient just a little longer. But then, when we sound the call for action, spare the savings banks, for they are where we working people have put our pennies. Storm the commercial banks! Take all the money you find there and throw it into the streets and set fire to the huge heaps of it! Then use the crossbars of the streetcar lines to string up the black and the white Jews!”

Hitler made similar speeches, similarly emotion-laden, against the grim background of mass suffering caused by the inflation. Again and again, he inveighed against the lies of capitalism, even while his funds were coming from big business. Max Amann, the party’s business manager, was interrogated by the Munich police shortly after the putsch attempt of November, 1923. He insisted, not without pride, that Hitler had given his backers “only the party platform” in return for their contributions. This may seem hard to credit; nevertheless, there is reason to think that the only agreements he made were on tactical lines. For the concept of corruption seems strangely alien to this man; it does not accord with his rigidity, his mounting self-confidence, and the force of his delusions.

The National Socialists had emerged victorious from their showdown with the government at the beginning of January. They found themselves top dog among the radical rightist groups in Bavaria and celebrated by a wave of meetings, demonstrations, and marches even rowdier and more aggressive than those of the past. The air was thick with rumors of coups and uprisings. With impassioned slogans Hitler fed a general expectation of some great change impending. At the end of April he gave a speech urging the “workers of the head and the workers of the fist” to close ranks in order to create “the new man… of the coming Third Reich.” Anticipating the imminent test of strength, the NSDAP had struck up an alliance in early February with a number of militant nationalist organizations. The new partners included the Reichsflagge (Reich Banner), led by Captain Heiss; the Bund Oberland (Oberland League); the Vaterländischer Verein München (Munich Patriotic Club); and the Kampfverb and Niederbayern (Lower Bavarian League of Struggle). Joint authority was vested in a committee known as the Arbeitsgemeinschaft der vaterländischen Kampfverbände (Provisional Committee of the Patriotic Leagues of Struggle), with Lieutenant Colonel Hermann Kriebel in charge of military co-ordination. The arrangements had been worked out by Ernst Röhm.

The National Socialists had thus created a counterpoise to the existing coalition of nationalist groups known as the VW, Vereinigte Vaterländische Verbände Bayerns (Union of Bavarian Patriotic Associations). Under the leadership of former Prime Minister von Kahr and the Gymnasium Professor Bauer, the VVV united the most disparate elements: Bavarian separatists, Pan-Germans, and various brands of racists. On the other hand, the black-white-red Kampfbund (League of Struggle) led by Kriebel represented a more militant, more radical, more “Fascist” group, which took its inspiration and its goals from Mussolini or Kemal Pasha Atatürk. However, Hitler was soon to learn how dubious it was to gain outside support at the price of what had been absolute personal control. The lesson came on May 1 when, impatient and drunk with his latest success, Hitler attempted another showdown with the government.

His attempt to impose a program on the Kampfbund had already met with failure because his partners’ slow-moving soldier mentality could not follow his wild flights of fancy. In the course of the spring he had been forced to look on as Kriebel, Röhm, and the Reichswehr pried the SA away from him. He had created the SA as a revolutionary army directly responsible to him, but now Kriebel and Röhm were trying to turn the SA into a secret reserve for the so-called Hundred Thousand Man Army (the Treaty of Versailles limited the official German army to 100,000 men). They were drilling the standards (as the three regiment-sized units were called) and staging night maneuvers or parades. Hitler appeared at these affairs only as an ordinary civilian, sometimes giving a speech, but virtually unable to assert leadership. He noted with annoyance that the storm troops were being stripped of their ideological cast and downgraded to mere military reserve units. A few months later, in order to regain authority, Hitler instructed his old fellow soldier, former Lieutenant Josef Berchtold, to organize a kind of staff guard to be named Stosstrupp (Shock Troop) Hitler. This was the origin of the SS.

At the end of April Hitler and the Kampfbund decided that the annual May 1 rallies by the leftist parties were to be taken as a provocation and should be stopped by any and all methods. They themselves would organize their own mass demonstrations for that day, and celebrate the fourth anniversary of the crushing of the Munich soviet republic. The vacillating Bavarian government under von Knilling would seem to have learned nothing from its experience in January. It half yielded to the Kampfbund’s demand. The Left would be allowed to hold a mass meeting on the Theresienwiese but forbidden all street processions. Hitler therefore staged one of his tried-and-true fits of rage and, repeating his ruse of January, tried to play off the military authorities against the civilian government. By April 30 the situation had become almost unbearably tense. Kriebel, Bauer, and the newly appointed leader of the SA, Hermann Göring, lodged a vigorous protest with the government and demanded that a state of emergency be declared in the face of leftist agitation. Meanwhile Hitler and Röhm once more went to General von Lossow and insisted not only that the Reichswehr intervene but also that, as prearranged, weapons belonging to the patriotic associations be distributed to them. (These weapons were now stored in the government armories.) To Hitler’s astonishment, the general curtly refused both requests. He knew his duty to the security of the state, he declared stiffly. Anyone stirring up disorder would be shot. Colonel Seisser, the head of the Bavarian Landespolizei (state police) took a similar line.

Hitler had once more worked himself into an almost hopeless position. His only choice seemed to be to back down on the whole issue. But, true to his character, he refused to concede defeat. Instead, he doubled his stake. He had already warned Lossow that the “Red rallies” would take place only if the demonstrators marched “over his dead body.” Some of this was histrionics, but there was always a measure of dead earnest in Hitler’s statements. He was ready to cut off his escape routes and face up to the alternatives of all or nothing.

At any rate, Hitler had the preparations intensified. Weapons, munitions, and vehicles were collected feverishly. Finally, the Reichswehr was tricked by a sudden coup. In direct defiance of Lossow’s orders, Hitler sent Röhm and a small group of SA men to the barracks. Explaining that the government feared leftist disorders on May 1, they helped themselves to carbines and machine guns. Such open preparations for a putsch sowed alarm among some of Hitler’s nationalist allies. There were open clashes within the Kampfbund, but in the meantime events had caught up with the actors. Obeying Hitler’s announcement of an emergency, party stalwarts from Nuremberg, Augsburg, and Freising had arrived in Munich. Many of them were armed. A group from Bad Tolz came with an old field cannon hitched to their truck. The units from Landshut, led by Gregor Strasser and Heinrich Himmler, brought along several light machine guns. All these groups were acting in anticipation of the revolutionary uprising they had been dreaming of for years and which Hitler had repeatedly promised them. They were expecting a “wiping out of the November disgrace,” as the grim slogan had it. When Police Commissioner Nortz issued a warning to Kriebel, the answer was: “I can no longer turn back; it is too late… whether or not blood flows.”

Before dawn on May 1, the patriotic leagues were gathering in Munich at the Oberwiesenfeld, at the Maximilianeum, and at several other key locations throughout the city to quell the socialist coup that was allegedly brewing. Hitler arrived at the Oberwiesenfeld a little later. The place had the look of a military encampment. Hitler, too, looked martial; he was wearing a helmet and his Iron Cross, First Class. His entourage included Göring, Streicher, Rudolf Hess, Gregor Strasser, and Gerhard Rossbach, who was in command of the Munich SA. While the storm troopers began drilling in preparation for orders to launch real attacks, the leaders conferred. Confusion reigned; there was considerable dissension, growing nervousness and dismay, because the expected signal from Röhm had failed to come.

In the meantime, the trade unions and parties of the Left were celebrating their May Day rites on the Theresienwiese. Their slogans were the time-honored revolutionary ones, but the general temper was harmonious and public-spirited. Since the police had cordoned off the side of the Oberwiesenfeld facing the city, the expected clashes did not take place. But Röhm himself was at this moment standing at attention before his commander, General von Lossow, who had learned of the trickery at the barracks and was greatly enraged. Shortly after noon, Captain Röhm, escorted by Reichswehr and police contingents, appeared at the Oberwiesenfeld. He transmitted Lossow’s orders: the stolen weapons were to be surrendered on the spot. Strasser and Kriebel urged an immediate attack, reasoning that a civil war situation would bring the Reichswehr over to their side. But Hitler gave in. He found a way to save face by arranging to have his men return the weapons to the barracks. But the defeat was unmistakable, and even the flamboyant language with which he addressed his followers that evening in the Krone Circus could not blot it out.

This would seem to have been the first personal crisis in Hitler’s rise to power. True, he had a certain justification for blaming his defeat on the attitude of some of his allies, particularly the squeamish and stiff-necked nationalist organizations. But he must have recognized that the behavior of his partners had also exposed certain weaknesses and mistakes of his own. Above all, he had misread the situation. The Reichswehr, whose might had made him strong and whose co-operation he had counted on, had suddenly turned into an enemy.

It was the first painful reverse after years of steady progress, and Hitler disappeared from public view for several weeks. He took refuge with Dietrich Eckart in Berchtesgaden. Plagued by self-doubt, he only occasionally appeared to give a speech. Once or twice he went to Munich for a bit of distraction. Up to this point he had acted largely instinctively, by hit and miss and imitation. Now, in the light of that disastrous May 1, he conceived the outlines of a consistent strategy: the concept of a “fascist revolution” that takes place not in conflict but in concert with government power—what has been aptly described as “revolution by permission of His Excellency the President.”⁴³ He put some of his thoughts down on paper. These ruminations were later incorporated into Mein Kampf.

He had also to contend with the reaction of the public. “It is generally recognized that Hitler and his men have made fools of themselves,” one report put it. Even an “assassination plot” against “the great Adolf” (as the Münchener Post had ironically dubbed him), a plot uncovered by Hermann Esser at the beginning of July and described with great fanfare in the Völkische Beobachter, could do little to revive Hitler’s popularity—especially since similar revelations had been published in April and had subsequently been exposed as fabrications by the National Socialists. “Hitler no longer captures the imagination of the German people,” wrote a correspondent for the New York German-language newspaper Staatszeitung. Another shrewd observer noted early in May that Hitler’s star seemed “to be waning.”

Currents of this sort cannot have been lost on Hitler, brooding in the solitude of Berchtesgaden. This would help explain his extraordinary retreat, his refusal to try to re-establish contact with Lossow or to inject a new spirit into the leaderless party and the Kampfbund. Gottfried Feder, Oskar Körner, and a few other long-time followers attempted to rouse him, above all urging him to break with “Putzi” Hanfstaengl, who had introduced the virtuous Hitler to “lovely ladies” who went about “in silk underwear” calling for more and more “champagne parties.” But Hitler hardly heard what they were saying. He let himself sink into his old state of lethargy and disgust. Yet he took some interest in the court case growing out of the events of May 1 and now pending before the Munich Landgericht (superior court). If the judgment went against him, Hitler would have to serve the two-month sentence he had received for the Ballerstedt affair. What was worse, Minister of the Interior Schweyer would undoubtedly rule that Hitler had broken his parole and would have him expelled from Bavaria.

Hitler bestirred himself enough to send a petition to the state prosecutor. He knew that he had friends within the power structure. It was to them that he appealed. “For weeks now I have been the victim of savage vilification in the press and the Landtag,” he wrote. “But because of the respect I owe my Fatherland I have not attempted to defend myself publicly. Therefore I can only be grateful to Providence for this chance to defend myself fully and freely in the courtroom.” He menacingly indicated, moreover, that he • was going to hand his petition over to the press.

The implications were clear enough, and the state prosecutor quickly passed the petition on, with an anxious note appended, to Minister of Justice Gurtner. The latter was a strong nationalist who had not forgotten certain old pacts and promises made to the National Socialists. Had he not even referred to them as “flesh of our flesh”? The nation’s plight was worsening from day to day, with galloping inflation, general strikes, the battle of the Ruhr, hunger riots, and mounting agitation by the Left. In view of all this, there seemed good reason to show leniency toward a leader of national stature, even if said leader was part of the problem. Without informing the Minister of the Interior, who had several times inquired about the case, Gurtner let the state prosecutor know that he considered it advisable to have the case postponed “until a calmer period.” On August 1, 1923, the investigation was temporarily suspended, and on May 22 of the following year the charges were dropped.

Nevertheless, Hitler’s loss of prestige was not easily rectified. That became apparent in early September, when the patriotic organizations celebrated one of their “German Days,” this one on the anniversary of the victory at Sedan, which had ended the Franco-Prussian War. A great parade was held in Nuremberg, complete with flags, wreaths, and retired generals. The attendance ran into the hundreds of thousands, all temporarily ecstatic with the feeling of having overcome national humiliation. The police report of the incident had a highly unbureaucratic, emotional ring: “Roaring cries of ‘Heil!’ swirled around the guests of honor and their entourage. Countless arms with waving handkerchiefs reached out for them; flowers and bouquets rained on them from all sides. It was like the jubilant outcry of hundreds of thousands of despairing, beaten, downtrodden human beings suddenly glimpsing a ray of hope, a way out of their bondage and distress. Many, men and women both, stood and wept….”

According to this report, the National Socialists formed one of the largest contingents among the 100,000 marchers. But at the center of the cheering stood General Ludendorff. Hitler, caught in the sway of the mass demonstration but also aware of the ground he had lost in the recent past, declared himself ready for a new alliance. He joined with the Reichsflagge group under Captain Heiss, and the Bund Oberland under Friedrich Weber, to form the Deutscher Kampfbund—a new version of the older league of nationalist parties. This time, however, there was no longer any question of Hitler’s assuming the principal role. What had damaged his status was not so much the defeat of May 1 as his withdrawal from Munich afterward. For as soon as he was no longer on the scene to cause a sensation, his name, his authority, his demagogic powers all faded away. The indefatigable Röhm had to campaign for three weeks before he was able to persuade the leaders of the Kampfbund to relinquish the leadership in political affairs to Hitler.

The turning point came when the national government decided that the struggle at the Ruhr was draining the country’s energies to no avail. On September 24, six weeks after becoming Chancellor, Gustav Stresemann called off the passive resistance movement and resumed reparations payments to France. During all the preceding months Hitler had spoken out against the passive resistance, but his revolutionary aims now required him to brand the administration’s unpopular step a piece of cowardly, despicable treason and to exploit the situation to the full for the purpose of undermining the government. On the very next day he met with the leaders of the Kampfbund: Kriebel, Heiss, Weber, Göring, and Röhm. In a stormy two-and-a-half hour speech he unfolded his plans and visions, ending with the plea that he be given the leadership of the Deutscher Kampfbund. As Röhm later reported, Heiss was in tears as he, extended his hand to Hitler. Weber, too, was moved, while Röhm himself wept and trembled, as he says, from the depth of his emotion. Convinced that matters were moving toward a climax, he resigned from the Reichswehr the very next day and threw his lot in entirely with Hitler.

Hitler’s plan apparently was to make such a show of decisiveness as to overwhelm all skepticism. He immediately ordered his 15,000 SA men on emergency alert. To enhance the prestige of his own organization, all members of the NSDAP were to resign from whatever other nationalist groups they might belong to. He launched a program of hectic activity. As with all his moves, however, the real aim of all the plans, tactics, and commands seemed to be a veritable explosion of propaganda, a turbulent spectacle. He projected no fewer than fourteen simultaneous mass meetings for September 27, with himself making a personal appearance at all fourteen to whip emotions to fever pitch. Certainly the ultimate aims of the Kampfbund were plain enough: liberation “from bondage and shame,” a march on Berlin, establishment of a nationalist dictatorship, and eradication of the “accursed enemies within.” Hitler had flung down the challenge to the government three weeks earlier in his speech of September 5, when he said: “Either Berlin will march and end up in Munich, or Munich will march and end up in Berlin. A Bolshevist North Germany cannot exist side by side with a nationalist Bavaria.” But whether he was planning a putsch at that point or was merely carried away by his own rhetoric has never been clear. There is reason to believe that he intended to take his cue from the effect that he had on the crowds. With his characteristic overestimation of propaganda methods, he must have counted on the government’s being swayed by the passion of the masses. “Out of the endless battles of words,” he declared, “the new Germany will be born.” In any case, members of the Kampfbund received secret orders not to leave Munich and were issued the password to be used if a real coup were attempted.

But the Munich government acted before Hitler could. Some specifically Bavarian grievances and separatist tendencies had combined with rumors of an impending putsch and distrust of the “Marxist” national government to produce, for the Bavarian government, an intolerable situation. On September 26 Prime Minister von Knilling declared a state of emergency and appointed Gustav von Kahr as state commissioner with dictatorial powers. Von Kahr, an instrument of the Reichswehr, had briefly headed a right-wing government in Bavaria in 1920. He now declared that he welcomed the co-operation of the Kampfbund but warned Hitler against what he called “private initiatives.” The fourteen rallies could not be permitted. Hitler was beside himself with rage. As head of the Kampfbund, the most powerful paramilitary organization on the scene, Hitler had begun to think himself the equal and partner of the government. With one stroke Kahr had reduced him to a public nuisance. In one of those tantrums later to become so famous, ranting and raving until he almost blacked out, Hitler threatened revolution. That would have meant breaking his own ground rules, which called for moving in concert with the power of the state. Only in the course of an all-night session were Röhm, Pöhner, and Scheubner-Richter able to dissuade him from a coup d’état.

In any case, events had long since caught up with Hitler’s intentions. For in the meantime the cabinet in Berlin, headed by President Ebert, a socialist, had met to discuss the situation. Kahr had been closely identified with the separatist and monarchist trends. He had emphasized the “Bavarian mission of saving the Fatherland,” which would involve the overthrow of the republic, the establishment of a conservative, authoritarian regime, and so much Bavarian autonomy that Bavaria would once more be ruled by a king. Thus it was understandable that the national government should feel considerable concern when Kahr was named state commissioner. With the country in desperate straits, with Communism raising its head in Saxony and Hamburg while separatism gained influence in the west, the harassed government might well see the events in Munich as the signal for total collapse.

In this tense and murky situation, the future of the country depended on the Reichswehr. Its commander, General von Seeckt, was himself often mentioned in rightist circles as a possible dictator. With the composure of one who knows the ultimate power rests with him, he made a late entrance to the cabinet meeting. Asked by Ebert where the Reichswehr stood at this moment, he replied: “The Reichswehr, Mr. President, stands behind me.” For one brief moment the real power relationships were blindingly illuminated. Nevertheless, at this point he displayed loyalty to the political authorities. A nationwide state of emergency was declared, and executive power throughout the Reich was given to Seeckt. In the weeks to come he proved capable of even-handed dealing with the disruptive forces of both Right and Left.

On September 29 there was a rising of the “Black Reichswehr,” the illegal reserve of the regular army. Threatened with suppression since the end of the struggle for the Ruhr, the Black Reichswehr now tried to stage a coup which would trigger an action by the entire Right, including the legal Reichswehr. The operation was hasty and poorly co-ordinated, and Seeckt quickly put an end to the rebellion. With that threat out of the way, Seeckt took resolute steps to stamp out leftist unrest in Saxony, Thuringia, and Hamburg. Then he turned to the test of strength with Bavaria.

In Bavaria, meanwhile, Hitler had after all managed to bring Kahr nearly over to his side. Seeckt had demanded that the Völkische Beobachter be banned for publishing an incendiary and libelous article. But neither Kahr nor Lossow made the slightest move against the newspaper. Nor did they obey an order to arrest Rossbach, Captain Heiss, and Naval Captain Ehrhardt. Lossow was thereupon stripped of his office; but in open defiance of the Constitution, State Commissioner von Kahr promptly named him regional commander of the Bavarian Reichswehr. Kahr went on to sharpen the challenge and bring the strife between Bavaria and the central government to a head. A warrant for the arrest of Captain Ehrhardt, the former Free Corps leader, had been issued by the Reichsgericht (federal court). Not only was he not arrested, but Kahr summoned him from his Salzburg hiding place and directed him to accelerate preparations for a march on Berlin. The date set was November 15.

These provocative gestures were accompanied by strong words. Kahr himself denounced the Weimar Constitution for being totally un-German and described the administration as a “colossus with feet of clay.” He represented himself as the embodiment of the nationalist cause in the decisive battle with the internationalist-Marxist-Judaic front. The situation played directly into Hitler’s hands, for now the power holders in Bavaria had aligned themselves on the side of the extremist they had tried to curb. When Seeckt demanded Lossow’s resignation, all the nationalist organizations placed themselves at Hitler’s disposal for the final reckoning with the government in Berlin.

Hitler saw himself presented with great and unexpected opportunities. In an interview with the Corriere d’Italia he predicted that the winter would bring a decision. He went several times in rapid succession to see General von Lossow, with whom he now could take an easy tone; they had common interests and common enemies, he happily declared, while Lossow in his turn assured the rabble-rouser that he “agreed completely with Hitler on nine out of ten points.” Somewhat against his will, the commander of the Bavarian Reichswehr found himself caught up in a conspiracy. As an unpolitical soldier, he was unhappy in this role. Hitler, who soon had to propel the general the way he wanted him to go, could perceive the dilemma: “A military leader with such far-reaching powers who disobeys his commander-in-chief must be ready either to face the ultimate consequences or to remain a common mutineer and rebel,” he later declared.

Coming to an agreement with Kahr proved more difficult. Hitler could not forget the injury he had received from the state commissioner on September 26, whereas Kahr was aware that he had been appointed partly to bring this hothead “to blue-and-white [i.e., Bavarian loyalist] reason.” Indeed, throughout his dealings with Hitler he remained on the lookout for the proper moment to issue the talented troublemaker “orders to withdraw from politics.”

Despite the tensions on both sides, the confrontation with the federal government brought the two men together. When they disagreed, it was over the question of leadership and the timing of the attack. Kahr, who soon joined Lossow and Hans von Seisser, chief of the Bavarian state police, in a “triumvirate” of legal power holders, tended to be cautious in spite of his bold words. But Hitler was pressing for action. “The German people are asking only one question: ‘When do we strike?’ ” he raved, and went on to describe the coming action in almost apocalyptic terms:

Both factions devoted the month of October to preparing for the fray. The atmosphere was heavy with secrecy, intrigue, and deep mutual distrust. Councils of war were held almost continuously, plans of action forged, passwords coined. In a more serious vein, weapons were collected and military exercises staged. By the beginning of October the rumors of a Hitler putsch had become so persistent that Lieutenant Colonel Kriebel, the military commander of the Kampfbund, felt it necessary to address a letter to Bavarian Prime Minister von Knilling denying any intentions of overthrowing the national government. Walls bloomed with slogans and counterslogans, and “the march to Berlin” became a magic formula that seemed to promise an end to all problems. Hitler fanned the flames with his own brand of rhetoric: “This November Republic is nearing its end. We begin to hear the soft rustling which heralds a storm. And this storm will break, and in it this Republic will experience a transformation one way or another. The time is ripe.”⁴⁵

Hitler seemed fairly sure that Kahr could be relied on. But he suspected the triumvirate of intending to launch the operation without him or of meaning, to replace his revolutionary slogan of “On to Berlin!” with the Bavarian separatist cry of “Away from Berlin!” At times he must have feared that there might be no action at all. There is some evidence that he started thinking early in October of ways to force his partners to attack and have himself put in command of the assault. But he never doubted that the people would follow him rather than Kahr once the fight was on. He despised the members of the so-called ruling class, their bland assumption of superiority, their inability to move the masses, whom he could so masterfully sway. In an interview he referred to Kahr as a “feeble prewar bureaucrat.” True, the triumvirate officially held power, but he, Hitler, had on his side the “national commander” Ludendorff, “the army corps on two legs,” whose political obtuseness Hitler had quickly recognized and learned to exploit. By now his self-confidence tended to go beyond all bounds. He compared himself to the French statesman Gambetta and Mussolini; it did not matter that his partners treated him as a laughable figure or that Kriebel explained to a visitor that of course Hitler could not be considered for a leadership position, since he had nothing in his head but his own propaganda. Hitler, on the other hand, told one of the high officers close to Lossow that he felt himself called to save Germany, although he would need Ludendorff to win over the Reichswehr. “In politics he will not interfere with me in the slightest…. Did you know that Napoleon also surrounded himself with insignificant men when he was setting himself up as consul?”

By the second half of October the plans for a march on Berlin began to take more definite shape. On October 16 Kriebel signed an order for strengthening the border guard to the north; this was represented as a security measure in response to the disturbances in Thuringia. The actual directive, however, was cast in military terminology: there are references to “deployment areas” and “opening of hostilities,” “offensive morale,” “spirit of pursuit,” and “annihilation of the enemy forces.” The directive in fact was tantamount to a mobilization order. The volunteers meanwhile were using a map of Berlin as the basis of their war games. Speaking to the cadets of the Infantry Academy, Hitler told them: “Your highest obligation under your oath to the flag, gentlemen, is to break that oath.” The speech received thunderous applause. To put further pressure on their partners, the National Socialists called upon members of the state police to join the SA. Hitler later noted that from sixty to eighty mortars, howitzers, and heavy artillery pieces had come out of hiding and been added to the common arsenal. At a debate at the Kampfbund on October 23 Göring presented details for the “Offensive Against Berlin,” and recommended, among other things, that blacklists be drawn up: “The most vigorous forms of terror must be employed; anyone who creates the slightest obstruction must be shot. It is essential that the leaders decide now which individuals must be eliminated. As soon as the decree is issued at least one person must be shot immediately as an example.”

On October 24 Lossow summoned representatives of the Reichswehr, the state police, and the patriotic organizations to a meeting at District Headquarters, so that he could present the Reichswehr’s plans of mobilization for the march on Berlin. The code name of the operation was Sunrise. He had also invited Hermann Kriebel, the military leader of the Kampfbund, but Hitler had been omitted, along with the leadership of the SA. In response, Hitler promptly staged a “grand military review,” of which we have a contemporary description: “All over the city the beat of drums and peals of band music could be heard from early in the morning. As the day wore on, one saw uniformed men everywhere with Hitler’s swastika on their collars… Kahr must have understood the implications, for he issued an announcement “in order to put down the many rumors in circulation” that he totally refused to enter into any negotiations with the present national government.

The only question seemed to be who would strike first and thus receive “the victor’s laurel at the Brandenburg Gate” from the redeemed nation. Even while the excitement mounted, a certain regional quality gave the whole thing a comic cast, a dash of cowboy-and-Indian gamesmanship. Seemingly forgetful of issues, the protagonists blustered that the time had come “to march and finally solve certain problems in the manner of Bismarck.” Others hailed the Ordnungszelle Bayern (“Bavaria as the mainstay of public order”) or the “Bavarian fist” that would have to “clean up that Berlin pigsty.” The image of Berlin as a great Babylon was often invoked; it had a cozily familiar ring, and many a speaker won the hearts of his listeners by promising the “sturdy Bavarians a punitive expedition to Berlin, conquest of the apocalyptic Great Whore, and perhaps a bit of a fling with her.” A reliable informant from the Hamburg area let Hitler know that “on the day of reckoning millions of North Germans” would be on his side. There was widespread confidence that once Munich had led the way, all of Germany’s tribes and regions would join in and that a “springlike uprising of the German people like that of 1813” was just around the corner. On October 30 Hitler withdrew his pledge to Kahr not to press forward on his own.

Even now Kahr could not make up his mind to act. Perhaps he had never meant, any more than Lossow, to attempt to overthrow the government by force. It seems far more likely that the triumvirate encouraged the bellicose preparations in order to prod Seeckt and the conservative nationalist “gentlemen from the North” into imposing their own dictatorship. If the venture went well, the Bavarians would then join in and see to it that Bavarian interests were given their due. Early in November Kahr and Lossow sent Colonel Seisser to Berlin to feel out the situation. His report, however, proved disappointing: no action was to be hoped for, and Seeckt especially had responded very coolly.

Thereupon the triumvirate called in the leaders of the patriotic organizations on November 6 and peremptorily informed them that they, the heads of government, were directing the forthcoming operation and would smash any private initiatives. This was their final attempt to regain control. Hitler was excluded from this meeting as well. That same evening the Kampfbund resolved to seize the next opportunity for striking, thus bringing the triumvirate and as many of the undecided as possible to join in a contagious rush on Berlin.

This decision is often cited as proof of Hitler’s theatrical, overwrought, megalomaniac temperament. There is a tendency to make the operation seem ridiculous by the use of such terms as “Beer-hall Putsch,” “Political Fasching,” and so on. To be sure, the undertaking had its comic aspect. Nevertheless, it also reveals Hitler’s knack for sizing up a situation, his courage, and his tactical consistency.

In actual fact Hitler no longer had a choice on the evening of November 6. Since the defeat of May 1, from which he had barely recovered, the call to act was almost unavoidable. Otherwise he would jeopardize the very quality that made him unique among the profusion of parties and politicians: the radical, almost existential seriousness of his sense of outrage. It was his unyieldingness and refusal to compromise that made him impressive and credible. As leader of the Kampfbund he had acquired command over a striking force whose will to act was no longer fragmented by collective leadership. And finally, the storm troopers themselves were impatiently pressing for action.

Their restlessness had various causes. They were professional soldiers, who after weeks of conspiratorial preparations were all keyed up for action. Some of the paramilitary organizations, which had been on battle alert for weeks, had taken part in the “fall maneuvers” of the Reichswehr, but now all their funds had been used up. Hitler’s treasury was also exhausted, and the men were going hungry.

The pressures on Hitler become the more apparent from the statement made by Wilhelm Bruckner, the commander of the Munich SA regiment, at a secret session of the subsequent trial:

In a discussion with Seisser at the beginning of November, Hitler himself said that something had to be done immediately or the troops of the Kampfbund would be driven by economic necessity into the Communist camp.

Hitler had not only to worry about the morale of his troops; the mere passage of time also had its dangers. The revolutionary discontent threatened to evaporate; it had been strained far too long. Meanwhile, the end of the struggle for the Ruhr and the defeat of the Left had brought a turn toward normality. Even the inflation seemed about to be checked, and the spirit of revolution seemed to be vanishing along with the crisis. There was no question that Hitler’s effectiveness was entirely bound up with national distress. So to hesitate now would be fatal, even if certain pledges he had made stood in his way. These did not trouble him so much as a flaw in the plan: contrary to his principles he would have to venture on the revolution without the approval of the Prime Minister of Bavaria.

Nevertheless, he hoped that sufficient boldness on his part would extort this approval, and even the Prime Minister’s participation. “We were convinced that action would only come if desire were backed up by will,” Hitler later told the court. The sum total of significant reasons for action was thus counterweighed only by the risk that the coup might fail to ignite the courage of the triumvirate. It would seem that Hitler gave little thought to this danger, for he felt that he would only be forcing the triumvirate into something it had been planning in any case. In the end the entire undertaking foundered on this one point. The episode showed up the weakness of Hitler’s sense of reality. He himself, to be sure, never accepted this charge; on the contrary, he was always somewhat proud of his disdain for reality. He quoted Lossow’s statement that he would take part in a coup d’état only if the odds were 51 to 49 for a successful outcome as an example of hopeless enslavement to reality.

Yet there were other reasons besides the calculable ones that spoke in favor of action; in fact, the course of history has shown Hitler to have been right in a broader sense. For the undertaking that ended in debacle nevertheless turned out to be the decisive breakthrough on Hitler’s way to power.

At the end of September, in the midst of all the hectic preparations and maneuverings for position, Hitler had staged a “German Day” in Bayreuth and used the occasion to present himself at Wahnfried, the home of the Wagners. Deeply moved, he had gone through the rooms, sought out the Master’s study, and stood a long time before the grave in the garden. Then he was introduced to Houston Stewart Chamberlain, who had married one of Richard Wagner’s daughters and through his books had been a formative influence on Hitler. It was a poor sort of interview with the partially paralyzed, speechless old man; yet Chamberlain sensed the quality of the visitor. Writing to him a week later, on October 7, he lauded Hitler not as the precursor for someone greater, but as the savior himself, the key figure of the German counterrevolution. He had expected to meet a fanatic, he wrote, but now his instinct told him that Hitler was of a higher order, more creative and, despite his palpable force of will, not a man of violence. The meeting, Chamberlain added, had set his soul at rest, for “the fact that in the hour of her greatest need Germany should produce a Hitler is a sign that she is yet alive.”⁴⁷

To the demagogue at that very moment facing a crucial decision, those words came as the answer to his doubts, as a benediction from the Bayreuth Master himself.

The Putsch

The two days leading up to November 8 were filled with nervous activity. Everyone negotiated with everyone else, Munich reverberated with warlike preparations and rumors. The Kampfbund’s original plan called for staging a major night maneuver north of Munich on November 10; the next morning they would march into the city, still pretending to be an ordinary parade, and on reaching the center would proclaim the nationalist dictatorship, thus forcing Kahr, Lossow, and Seisser to commit themselves. While consultations were still going on, it was learned that Kahr was planning to deliver an important address on the evening of November 8 in the Bürgerbraukeller; the cabinet, Lossow, Seisser, the heads of all the government agencies, industrial leaders and directors of the patriotic organizations were invited. Fearing that Kahr might get the jump on him, Hitler revised all his plans at the last moment and decided to act the following day. The SA and the Kampfbund units were mobilized in great haste, and the stage was set.

The meeting was to begin at 8:15 P.M. Dressed in a black dress suit, wearing his Iron Cross, Hitler drove to the Bürgerbraukeller. Next to him in the recently acquired red Mercedes sat Alfred Rosenberg and Ulrich Graf, as well as the unsuspecting Anton Drexler, for whom this was to be the last appearance with Hitler’s coterie. For reasons of secrecy he had been told that the group was driving out to the country for a meeting. When Hitler now revealed that he was going to strike at 8:30, Drexler replied shortly and testily that he wished Hitler luck in his undertaking but he himself would have nothing to do with it.

A large crowd was milling about in front of the Bürgerbraukeller, so large that Hitler feared he might be unable to storm the meeting, which was already under way. Hitler summarily ordered the police officer on duty to clear the area. Kahr was well into his speech, evoking the image of the “new man” as the “moral justification for dictatorship,” when Hitler appeared in the door of the beer hall. According to eyewitness accounts, he was extremely agitated. In a moment some trucks full of SA men roared up, and the troops swarmed out to cordon off the building in good warlike style. With his typical love for the theatrical gesture, Hitler held up a beer stein, and as a heavy machine gun made its appearance at his side, he took a dramatic swallow, then dashed the stein to the floor, and with a pistol in his raised hand stormed into the middle of the hall at the head of an armed squad. As steins crashed onto the floor and chairs toppled, Hitler leaped up on a table, fired his famous shot into the ceiling to catch the crowd’s attention, and forced his way through the dumfounded throng to the podium. “The national revolution has begun,” he cried. “The hall is surrounded by 600 heavily armed men. No one may leave the premises. Unless quiet is restored immediately, I shall have a machine gun placed in the gallery. The Bavarian government and the national government have been overthrown, and a provisional national government is being formed. The barracks of the Reichswehr and the state police have been occupied; the Reichswehr and the state police are already approaching under the swastika flag.” He then told Kahr, Lossow, and Seisser “in a harsh tone of command,” the account goes, to follow him into the next room. The crowd inside the hall began calming down, only spluttering now and then, “Playacting!” or “South America!” The SA, however, suppressed such remarks in its own special fashion. Meanwhile, Hitler, in a bizarre scene, attempted to win the reluctant representatives of state power over to his side.

Despite the contradictions and obscurities, the basic outlines of events are fairly plain. Gesturing wildly with his pistol, Hitler first threatened the three men that not one of them would leave the room alive, then excused himself with considerable formality for having had to create a fait accompli in such an unusual manner. He had only wanted to make it easier for the gentlemen to assume their new posts. To be sure, their only choice was to co-operate: Pöhner had been named the Bavarian Prime Minister with dictatorial powers; Kahr was to be state administrator; he himself was taking over the presidency of the new national government. Ludendorff was to command the national army in its march on Berlin, and Seisser had been appointed minister of police. In mounting excitement he exclaimed, “I know that you gentlemen find this step difficult, but the step must be taken. I shall have to make it easier for you to get set for the leap. Each of you must assume his allotted position; whoever fails to do so has forfeited his right to exist. You must fight with me, triumph with me—or die with me. If things go wrong I have four bullets in this pistol: three for my collaborators should they desert me, and the last bullet for myself.” To emphasize his point he theatrically pressed the pistol against his forehead and swore: “If I am not victorious by tomorrow afternoon, I am a dead man.”

To Hitler’s astonishment his three prisoners hardly seemed impressed. Kahr especially proved equal to the situation. With visible distaste for this whole melodrama, he replied, “Herr Hitler, you can have me shot, you can shoot me yourself. But whether or not I die is of no consequence to me.” Seisser upbraided Hitler for having broken his word of honor. Lossow said nothing. Meanwhile, Hitler’s henchmen stood at all the doors and windows and occasionally gestured menacingly with their rifles.

For a moment it seemed as though the calm indifference of the three might spell the doom of the entire operation. Meanwhile, Scheubner-Richter had dashed off in the Mercedes to fetch Ludendorff, who had not been let in on the secret. Hitler now hoped that Ludendorff, with his authority, would turn the trick. Nervous and somewhat shaken by his failure to convince Kahr and the other two, Hitler returned to the crowd, where he felt surer of himself. The historian Karl Alexander von Muller was present and has described the indignation of the prominent people in the audience at being trapped in the hall and bullied by the crude SA men. And now the leader was forcing his way through to the podium, a pretentious young man of obscure origins who seemed somewhat cracked and yet had some sort of appeal for the common man. There he stood, ludicrous in his tail coat, looking much like a waiter by contrast with the urbane, complacent notables in the audience—and in a masterly speech he turned “the mood of the meeting completely inside out… like a glove, with just a few words. I have seldom experienced anything of the kind. When he stepped up to the podium, the noise was so great that he could not be heard. He fired a shot. I can still see the gesture. He took the Browning out of his rear pocket…. He had actually come in to apologize for taking so long, for he had promised that people would be free to go in ten minutes.” But no sooner was he standing before the crowd and noting how the faces all turned his way, expecting something from him, and the voices subsided, than he regained his self-confidence.

In actual fact he did not have much to tell the gathering. In a peremptory tone he simply announced what up to then had been largely his own fantasy: the new names, the new offices, and a series of proposals. “The task of the provisional German national government is to muster the entire might of this province and the additional help of all the German states for the march on that sinful Babylon, Berlin, for the German people must be saved. I will now put the question before you: out there are three men, Kahr, Lossow, and Seisser. The decision to act has cost them severe inner struggle. Are you in agreement with this solution of the German question? You can see that what guides us is not self-interest, not egotism. Rather, we wish to take up the cudgels for our German fatherland, at the eleventh hour. We want to rebuild Germany as a federation in which Bavaria shall receive her rightful due. Tomorrow morning will either find Germany with a German nationalist government—or us dead!” Hitler’s persuasiveness as well as his clever trick of implying that Kahr, Lossow, and Seisser were already won over created what the eyewitness calls a complete turnabout; Hitler left the hall “with the authorization of the gathering to tell Kahr that the whole assembly would stand behind him if he joined in.”

In the meantime, Ludendorff had arrived, testy at Hitler’s elaborate secrecy as well as at not having been consulted when posts were assigned, so that he had received only command of the army. Without preliminaries, he launched into speech, urging the three men to shake hands on the coup; he himself had also been taken by surprise, but a great historical event hung in the balance. Only now, under the personal sway of the legendary national figure did the men begin to give in, one by one. Lossow, like a good soldier, took Ludendorff’s recommendation as a command; Seisser followed his lead; and only Kahr stubbornly refused. When Hitler offered Kahr, as the supreme inducement, the promise that “the people will kneel down before you,” Kahr replied dryly that such a thing meant nothing to him. This little exchange between the two men points up all the difference between Hitler’s hunger for stagy triumphs and the experienced politician with his sober grasp of power relationships.

But in the end Kahr yielded to the pressures from all around him and submitted. The five returned to the hall to put on a show of brotherhood. The semblance of unity was enough to fire the audience. As the spectators climbed up on chairs and applauded tumultuously, the actors shook hands. Ludendorff and Kahr appeared pale and stiff, while Hitler seemed to be “glowing with joy,” as the report tells us, “blissful… that he had succeeded in persuading Kahr to co-operate.” For a short, precious moment the thing he had long dreamed of seemed achieved. He had come so far! Here he stood, the focal point of cheers, flanked by dignitaries whose approval gave him such satisfaction after all he had suffered in Vienna. At his side stood Kahr and the other most powerful men in the country, as well as the great General Ludendorff. And he, as the national dictator designate, towered above them all—he, Hitler, the man without a profession, the failure. “It will seem like a fairy tale to later ages,” he was fond of saying, amazed himself at the bold upturn in his fortunes. In fact he could rightly say that no matter how this putsch gamble turned out, he would no longer be performing on provincial stages; he had stepped out on the great national stage. With great emotion, he concluded, “Now I am going to carry out what I swore to myself five years ago today when I lay blind and crippled in the army hospital: neither to rest nor to sleep until the November criminals have been hurled to the ground, until on the ruins of the present pitiful Germany has been raised a Germany of power and greatness, of freedom and glory. Amen!” And as the crowd shouted and applauded, the others, too, had each to give a short speech. Kahr muttered a few vague phrases of allegiance to the monarchy, the Bavarian homeland, and the German fatherland. Ludendorff spoke of a turning point in history and, though still infuriated by Hitler’s behavior, assured the assemblage: “Deeply moved by the majesty of this moment and taken by surprise, I place myself of my own accord at the disposal of the German national government.”

As the meeting broke up, Prime Minister von Knilling, the ministers present, and the police commissioner were arrested. The leader of the SA student company, Rudolf Hess, took charge of transferring the prisoners to the villa of the rightist publisher Julius Lehmann. Meanwhile, Hitler was called away to deal with some minor crisis outside the barracks of the engineers. As soon as he left the room, at about 10:30 P.M., Lossow, Kahr, and Seisser said comradely good-byes to Ludendorff and disappeared. When Scheubner-Richter and Hitler returned, they immediately expressed suspicion. But Ludendorff snapped that he forbade them” to doubt a German officer’s word of honor. Some two hours earlier, Seisser had protested that Hitler in launching the putsch had broken his word of honor. Honor was certainly a fetish with these people. They were crippled by their high principles, while Hitler, the new man, respected nothing but the pragmatics of power. For years he had been piously using these bourgeois principles and platitudes of honor, solemnly invoking rules that he despised, at the same time recognizing their erosion. This gave him a great advantage vis-à-vis a class unable to free itself from principles in which it no longer believed. But on this night Hitler had run into “opponents who answered breach of faith with breach of faith, and won the game.”⁴⁸

All the same, it was a great night for Hitler, rich in the elements he loved best: drama, cheering, defiance, the euphoria of action, and the supreme ecstasy that comes of half-realized dreams, an ecstasy that no reality can yield. In the anniversary ceremony he was to stage in later years, he would attempt to recapture the momentousness of this evening. “Now better times are coming,” he said extravagantly to Röhm as he embraced him. “We shall all work day and night on the great task of rescuing Germany from shame and suffering.” He issued a proclamation to the German people and two decrees establishing a special tribunal to try political crimes, and declaring “the scoundrels who engineered the betrayal of November 9, 1918,” outlaws from this day: it was every citizen’s duty “to deliver them dead or alive into the hands of the völkisch national government.”

In the meantime countermeasures were already under way. Lossow had met with his officers. They greeted him with the rather menacing remark that they assumed the show of solidarity with Hitler had been sheer bluff. Whatever the vacillating general’s real position may have been, in the face of his outraged officers he abandoned any thoughts he may have had of really undertaking a putsch. Shortly afterward, Kahr issued a proclamation rescinding his statements in the Bürgerbräukeller; they had been wrung from him at gunpoint, he claimed. He declared the National Socialist Party as well as the Kampfbund dissolved. Hitler, all unsuspecting and reveling in his role, was mobilizing his forces for the great march on Berlin. The state commissioner general had already given orders that no Hitler followers should be allowed to enter Munich. One SA shock troop, carried away by revolutionary fervor, smashed the premises of the Münchener Post, the Social Democratic newspaper. Other units were rampaging, taking hostages, and looting a bit at random, while Röhm seized control of the District Army Command headquarters on Schónfeldstrasse. Once that was done, no one quite knew what to do next. A light, wet snow began to fall. Midnight came, and still Hitler had no word from Kahr and Lossow. He began to grow uneasy. Messengers were sent out but failed to return. Frick seemed to have been arrested, and somewhat later Pöhner could not be found. Hitler began to realize that he had been tricked.

As always, when he found himself blocked or disappointed, Hitler’s sensitive nervous system gave way. With the collapse of this one project, all his projects collapsed. In the wee hours of the morning Streicher turned up at the Bürgerbraukeller and urged Hitler to address an impassioned appeal to the masses and thus seize the initiative again. According to Streicher’s story, Hitler stared at him wide-eyed and then scrawled a statement handing “the entire organization” over to Streicher, as if he had completely given up.⁴⁹ He then went through a strange alternation of moods, first apathy, then violent despair, histrionics that anticipated the convulsions and rages of later years. Finally he let himself be persuaded to order a demonstration the following day. “If it comes off, all’s well, if not, we’ll hang ourselves,” he declared, and this statement, too, anticipated those of later years, when he swung from one extreme to another, from total victory to downfall, from conquest of the world to suicide. However, a group he had dispatched to sound out the general mood returned with a favorable report, and Hitler instantly regained hope, exuberance, and faith in the power of agitation: “Propaganda, propaganda,” he exclaimed, “now it all depends on propaganda!” He promptly slated fourteen mass meetings for the coming evening, at each of which he would appear as the principal speaker. The day after that, an enormous rally would be held on the Kónigsplatz, where tens of thousands would celebrate the national uprising. As dawn broke, he was giving instructions for posters to be printed for these events.

This last-ditch effort was not merely a typical Hitler reaction; it represented the only avenue still left to him. Most historians have concluded that Hitler failed as a revolutionary at the decisive moment. Such criticism, however, ignores Hitler’s basic assumptions and goals.⁵⁰ True, his nerves gave way, but it would not have been consistent with his policy for him to try to occupy telegraph offices and ministries, railroad stations and barracks. He had never planned a revolutionary take-over in Munich; rather, he had intended to march against Berlin, with Munich’s might behind him. His resigned attitude, after this one night, was more realistic than his critics would have us believe. For he saw that the loss of his partners rendered the entire undertaking impossible. He apparently did not hope for any turnabout as a result of the demonstration and the planned wave of propaganda; all he counted on was that a massive show of support would serve to protect the erstwhile conspirators from reprisals. Now and then, during one of the wild shifts of mood he went through that night, Hitler must have dreamed of sweeping the masses along and heading for Berlin after all, leaving Munich aside. Drunk with such visions, Hitler conceived the plan of sending patrols through the streets shouting, “Show the flag!” “Then we’ll see if we don’t whip up some enthusiasm!”

And in fact the prospects for a “March on Berlin” were by no means unfavorable. As became clear the next morning, public sentiment was clearly on the side of Hitler and the Kampfbund. From numerous apartment house windows and even from City Hall and public buildings the swastika flag fluttered, and the newspaper accounts of the events in the Bürgerbraukeller had an approving tone. Many people came to the campaign headquarters the Kampfbund had set up in various parts of the city, while in the barracks the lower rank officers and the enlisted men frankly expressed their sympathy with Hitler’s plans for the march. The speakers whom Streicher had sent around were met with hearty applause in the strangely feverish atmosphere of that bleak November morning.

But during these hours Hitler was isolated from the public, cut off from the impetus and encouragement he might have received from the crowds. Thus, as the day wore on, he began to have second thoughts; even at this early stage in his career he appeared to be entirely dependent on the masses for increasing or diminishing his assurance, energy, and courage. Early in the morning he had sent the Kampfbund’s communications director, Lieutenant Neunzert, to Crown Prince Rupprecht in Berchtesgaden to ask him to act as intermediary. Now he was waiting inactively for Neunzert’s return. He also feared that a demonstration might lead to a clash with armed soldiers and police and thus repeat the debacle of May 1 in a far more fatal manner. Ludendorff finally put an end to Hitler’s temporizing with an energetic, “We shall march!” Toward noon several thousand persons lined up behind the standard bearers. The leaders and officers were sent to the head of the line: Ludendorff appeared in civilian clothes; Hitler had thrown a trench coat over his tail coat of the previous evening. Beside him stood Ulrich Graf and Scheubner-Richter; then came Dr. Weber, Kriebel, and Göring. “We set out convinced that this was the end, one way or another,” Hitler later remarked. “I remember someone who said to me as we were coming down the steps, ‘this finishes it!’ Everyone had that same conviction.” They set out singing.

On the Isar bridge the procession was met by a strong detachment of state police, but Göring intimidated the policemen with the threat that if a single shot was fired, all the hostages would be killed instantly. As the policemen wavered, they found themselves being pushed aside by the columns of sixteen men abreast, surrounded, disarmed, spat, upon, and cuffed by the crowd. In front of the Munich City Hall Streicher was just delivering a speech from the top of a staircase; the crowd was large. How grave a juncture this was for Hitler can be measured from the fact that he, to whom the masses had rushed as “to a savior,” marched silently on this day. He had taken Scheubner-Richter’s arm as if he needed support; this, too, was an odd gesture, scarcely according with his image of a Führer. Amidst the cheering of the crowd the procession swung haphazardly into the narrow streets of the Old City; when it neared the Residenzstrasse the lead party began to sing “O Deutschland hoch in Ehren” (“Oh, Germany high in honor”). At the Odeonsplatz the procession again encountered a police cordon.

What happened next is not exactly clear. From the confusion of accounts, some fanciful, some in the nature of apologies, agreement prevails on only one point: a single shot rang out, provoking a steady exchange of fire that lasted only about sixty seconds. The first to fall was Scheubner-Richter, fatally wounded. In his fall, he pulled Hitler with him, wrenching his arm out of joint. Oskar Korner, the former vice-chairman of the party, was hit, as was Chief Magistrate von der Pfordten. When it was all over, fourteen members of the procession and three policemen lay dead or dying on the street, and many others, including Hermann Göring, had been wounded. Amidst the hail of bullets, while all were dropping to the ground or scurrying for cover, Ludendorff stalked upright, trembling with rage, through the police cordon. The day might possibly have ended differently had a small band of determined men followed him; but no one did. It was certainly not cowardice that forced many to the ground; it was the rightists’ respect for the legitimate representatives of government authority. With grandiose arrogance the general stood waiting for the commanding officer and allowed himself to be arrested. Brückner, Frick, Drexler, and Dr. Weber also submitted to arrest. Rossbach fled to Salzburg, Hermann Esser to Czechoslovakia. In the course of the afternoon Ernst Röhm also capitulated; earlier he had occupied army headquarters, after a short exchange of gunfire that had cost two members of the Kampfbund their lives. His standard bearer on this particular day was a young man with a somewhat girlish face and wearing glasses, the son of a respected Munich gymnasium headmaster. The young man’s name was Heinrich Himmler. In a farewell march, the company paraded silently through the streets, unarmed, the men carrying their dead on their shoulders. Then it disbanded. Röhm himself was arrested.

Ludendorff’s heroic bearing had cast an unflattering light on Hitler, whose nerves had again failed him. The reports of his followers are contradictory only in small details: they agree that even while the situation was still fluid, he scrambled up from the pavement and took to his heels, leaving behind him the dead and wounded. His later excuse that in the confusion he had thought Ludendorff had been killed was hardly impressive, for in that event there would have been even more reason for him to stay. In the midst of the general chaos he managed to escape with the help of an ambulance. A few years later he concocted the legend that he had carried a child out of the firing line to safety; he even produced the child. But the Ludendorff circle demolished this legend before Hitler himself abandoned it. He reached Uffing on the Staffelsee, about thirty-five miles from Munich, where he took refuge in Ernst Hanfstaengl’s country house and nursed the painful sprained shoulder he had suffered in the course of the battle. Broken in spirit, he kept repeating that the time had come to put an end to things and shoot himself, but the Hanfstaengls managed to dissuade him. Two days later he was arrested and taken off to the fortress of Landsberg am Lech. “His face was pale and hunted, with a wild lock of hair falling into it.” Concerned with his image even in the depths of defeat, he had the officer of the arrest party pin the Iron Cross First Class to his lapel before he was led off.

Once behind bars he remained in a state of total despondency. At first he believed “that he was going to be shot.” In the following days Amann, Streicher, Dietrich Eckart, and Drexler were also brought in. Scattered about in various Munich jails were Dr. Weber, Pöhner, Dr. Frick, Röhm, and others. The government had not dared to arrest Ludendorff. Hitler himself apparently felt he was in the wrong simply because he had survived. In any case, he considered his cause lost. For a few days he considered—how seriously it is impossible to say—cheating the firing squad by starving himself to death in a hunger strike. Anton Drexler later claimed credit for talking him out of this plan. The widow of his slain friend, Frau von Scheubner-Richter, also helped him come through the depression of this period. For the shots fired in front of the Feldherrnhalle meant not only the sudden end of three years of progress that had verged on the miraculous; it also meant a terrible collision with reality. Hitler’s whole system of tactics had been demolished.

Characteristically enough, he regained his spirits when it became apparent that an ordinary court trial was in the offing. He instantly saw his chance for playing a dramatic role. Later he referred to the defeat of November 9, 1923, as “perhaps the greatest stroke of luck in my life.” As part of the good fortune he must have included the opportunity offered by this trial, which shook him out of his despondency and cast him in his favorite role, that of gambler. Once more he could stake everything on a single card. The disaster of the bungled putsch could be converted into a demogogic triumph.

The trial for high treason opened on February 24, 1924, in the former Infantry School on Blutenburgstrasse. Throughout the proceedings, all parties were tacitly agreed “on no account to bring up the ‘central facts’ of the events under discussion.” The defendants were Hitler, Ludendorff, Röhm, Frick, Pöhner, Kriebel, and four other participants, while Kahr, Lossow, and Seisser appeared as witnesses. Hitler made maximum capital of this strange confrontation, which corresponded so little to the complicated alliances of the recent past. He did not want to follow the example of the perpetrators of the Kapp putsch, who had all pleaded innocent: “Thereupon every man raised his hand to swear that he had known nothing. He had had no plans and no intentions. This was what destroyed the bourgeois world: the fact that they did not have the courage to affirm their deed, to stand before the judge and say, ‘Yes, this is what we did, we wanted to overthrow this state.’ ” Hitler, on the contrary, openly acknowledged his intentions, but rejected the charge of high treason:

None of those under attack knew how to answer these arguments. Hitler managed not only to turn the trial into a “political carnival,” in the phrase of one journalist, but also to reverse the roles of accuser and accused, so that the state prosecutor found himself forced to defend the former triumvirate. The presiding judge did not seem exactly displeased at these developments. He did not object to any of the denunciations and challenges hurled at the “November criminals,” and only when the applause from the audience became too stormy did he issue a mild rebuke. Even when Pöhner referred to Germany’s President as “Ebert Fritze” and maintained that he was in no way bound by the laws of the Weimar Republic, the judge did not demur. As one of the Bavarian ministers stated at the cabinet meeting of March 4, the court had “never yet shown itself to be on any side but that of the defendants.”⁵²

Under these circumstances Kahr and Seisser soon lost hope. The former state commissioner looked fixedly before him and ascribed the responsibility for everything to Hitler. He kept falling into contradictions and did not seem to realize that he was playing into Hitler’s hands. Only Lossow resisted energetically. Time and again he accused his antagonist of lying: “No matter how often Herr Hitler says so, it is not true.” Speaking with the full arrogance of his class he described the Führer of the NSDAP as “tactless, limited, boring, sometimes brutal, sometimes sentimental, and unquestionably inferior.” He had a psychiatrist certify that Hitler “considers himself the German Mussolini, the German Gambetta, and his following, which has inherited the Byzantine manners of the monarchy, speaks of him as the German messiah.” Hitler occasionally shouted Seisser down. For this he received no “penalty for contempt of court,” which, the presiding judge declared, would have only “slight practical value.” Instead, he was simply asked to control himself. Even the chief prosecutor interspersed his charges with tributes to Hitler, remarking on his “unique gifts as an orator,” and holding that it would be “unjust to describe him as a demagogue.” Benevolently the prosecutor stated: “He has always kept his private life impeccable, something which merits particular note, given the temptations to which he, as the celebrated leader of the party, was naturally subject…. Hitler is a highly gifted man, who has risen from humble beginnings to achieve a respected position in public life, the result of much hard work and dedication. He has devoted himself to the ideas he cherishes, to the point of self-sacrifice. As a soldier he did his duty to the utmost. He cannot be accused of having used the position he created for himself in any self-serving way.”

All of this helped Hitler turn the trial to his own purposes. Still, one should not fail to mark the boldness with which Hitler faced the proceedings, even after so recent a defeat. He assumed responsibility for the whole sorry operation and thus contrived to justify his actions in the name of higher patriotic and historic duty. Unquestionably, this was one of his “most impressive political accomplishments.” In his concluding speech, which is of a piece with his self-confident tone throughout the trial, he referred to a remark by Lossow, who described him as a mad “propagandist and rabble-rouser”:

The assumption being, of course, that he had every right to call himself a great man. Such unabashed self-aggrandizement did not fail to have its effect, and made Hitler from the very outset the central figure of the trial. True, the official transcript followed the “proper” order of rank to the bitter end, listing Ludendorff before Hitler; but the desire of all parties to avert any blame from the distinguished general again redounded to Hitler’s advantage. He was quick to recognize this. With his claim to sole responsibility he thrust himself past Ludendorff into the vacant position of leader of the entire völkisch movement. And as the trial went on, he managed to wipe out the desperado character of the undertaking. Similarly, he was unable to gloss over his own passive and confused behavior on the morning of the demonstration. More and more the events took on the’ semblance of a cleverly planned and daringly executed masterstroke. “The operation of November 8 did not fail,” he told the court, thus laying the ground for the future legend. As he came to the end of his statement, he prophesied his ultimate victory in politics and history in visionary terms:

The verdict handed down by the Munich Volksgericht was not so far removed from the verdict of “the eternal court of history” that Hitler had invoked. The presiding judge had a hard time cajoling the three lay judges into passing any guilty verdict at all; he had to assure them that Hitler would certainly be pardoned before serving his full sentence. The reading of the verdict was a real event for Munich society. The courtroom was crowded with spectators ready to applaud this troublemaker with so many friends in high places. The verdict once more laid stress on the “pure patriotic motives and honorable intentions” of the defendant, but sentenced him to a minimum of five years in prison. However, he would become eligible for parole after six months. Ludendorff was acquitted. The law called for the deportation of any troublesome foreigner, but the court decided to waive this in the case of a man “who thinks and feels in such German terms as Hitler.” This decision called forth a storm of approving bravos from the audience. When the judges had filed out, Brückner raised the cry: “It’s up to us now!” Hitler appeared at a window of the court building to show himself to the cheering crowd. Bouquets of flowers were piling up in the room behind him. The state had once again lost the match.

Nevertheless, it seemed as though Hitler’s period of ascent was over. To be sure, immediately after November 9, there had been mass demonstrations in Munich in his favor. The elections to the Bavarian Landtag as well as to the Reichstag brought sizable gains for the völkisch forces. Yet the party, or the front that had taken its place after it was banned, began to show the effects of Hitler’s absence. It would seem that only his personal magic and Machiavellian gifts held it together. It broke down into jealous, bitterly hostile factions of little significance. Drexler was already accusing Hitler of “destroying the party for good with his insane putsch.” The party had drawn its strength principally from general discontent; toward the end of 1923 this element was in somewhat shorter supply. Conditions in the country began to stabilize. The inflation was overcome, and the “happy years” of the so far ill-fated republic commenced. The events of November 9, though local in character, in a way represented the turning point in the larger drama of the Weimar Republic; they marked the end of the postwar period. The shots fired in front of the Feldherrnhalle seemed to introduce a new sobriety and draw the gaze of the nation away from dreams and delusions and back to reality.

For Hitler himself and the history of his party the debacle also proved a turning point, for the tactical and personal lessons he drew from it were to guide his entire future course. Later on, he would stage a memorial procession year after year, marching to the Königsplatz, where he called on the victims of that grim November day to rise from their bronze caskets and come to the last reveille. This may be explained not merely in terms of his love for theater, his penchant for turning historical event into political spectacle. It may also be seen as the act of a successful politician paying tribute to one of his most instructive experiences, indeed to “perhaps the greatest stroke of good luck” in his life, the “real birthday” of the party. For the first time the name of Hitler reached far beyond the boundaries of Bavaria. The party acquired martyrs, a legend, the romantic aura of persecuted loyalty, and the nimbus of stern resolve. “Let there be no mistake about it,” Hitler would stress in a later memorial address, “had we not acted then, I would never have been able… to found a revolutionary movement. People would have justifiably told me: you talk like all the others and you act as little as they.”

At the same time, Hitler’s dropping to the ground before the guns of the police at the Feldherrnhalle had clarified once and for all his relationship to government. The events of November 23 taught him that it was hopeless to attempt to conquer a modern state by violent means. His struggle for power would succeed only if he based it on the Constitution, he concluded. Of course, this did not mean any real deference to the Constitution on Hitler’s part; rather, it meant cloaking his illegal acts in the guise of legality. In subsequent years he left no doubt that all his protestations of loyalty to the Constitution were valid only for this interim period; he spoke openly of the time of reckoning that would follow. As early as September 24, 1923, Scheubner-Richter had stated in a memorandum: “The nationalist revolution must not precede the acquisition of political power; rather, control over the nation’s police constitutes the prerequisite to the nationalist revolution.” Hitler transformed himself into a man of strict law and order. Thus he won the good opinion of dignitaries and powerful institutions, and veiled his revolutionary intentions with untiring protestations of how well he was determined to behave and how dearly he cherished tradition. He muted his earlier aggressive tone, only now and then dropping into it for the shock effect. For he purported to seek not the defeat but the co-operation of the state. This pose deceived many observers and interpreters, and continued to deceive them. “Adolphe Légalité,” as some of his witty contemporaries dubbed him, could well be taken for a boring, reactionary petty bourgeois.

Hitler’s new strategy called for a changed relationship to the Reichswehr. He attributed his defeat on November 9 in no small part to his inability to win over the leaders of the army and the police. In his concluding words before the Munich court he already intimates the goal of his future tactics : “The hour will come,” he cried to the courtroom, “when the Reichswehr will be on our side.” With this goal in mind, he firmly consigned his own party army to a secondary role. But at the same time he freed his storm troops from their dependency on the army; the SA was to be neither a part nor a rival of the Reichswehr.

Hitler emerged from the defeat at the Feldherrnhalle, therefore, with a good deal more than a clearly formulated tactical recipe. His relationship to politics in general had changed. Up to this time he had distinguished himself by his categorical refusal to compromise, by his radical alternatives. He had behaved “like a force of nature,” had thought of politics—drawing his model from the battle fronts—as storming the enemy positions, breaking through the lines, fighting at close quarters, and coming out in the end either victorious or dead. Only now did Hitler seem to grasp the meaning and the opportunities of the political game, the tactical dodges, the sham compromises and maneuvers by which one played for time. Only now did he progress beyond his emotionally overcharged, naively demagogic, “artistic” relationship to politics. The image of the agitator carried away by events and by his own impulsive reactions was replaced by that of the cool and methodical technician of power. The unsuccessful putsch of November 9 marks an important caesura: it concludes Hitler’s political apprenticeship. In fact, strictly speaking, it marks Hitler’s first real entry into politics.

Hans Frank, Hitler’s lawyer, and later governor of Poland, remarked at the Nuremberg trials that Hitler’s “entire historical life,” the “substance of his whole personality” were revealed in the course of the November putsch. The most striking qualities are the jumble of contradictory states of mind and the whipping up of his own emotions, which are so in character with the hysterical daydreaming and egotistic fantasies of the adolescent city planner, composer, and inventor—as are the sudden collapse, the desperate gambler’s grandiose gesture of abdication, the headlong plunge into apathy. In September he had told his entourage: “Do you know Roman history? I am Marius and Kahr is Sulla; I am the leader of the people, but he represents the ruling class. This time, however, Marius will win.” But with the first signs of difficulty he had dropped everything. He was not the man of action but its herald. He could set himself great tasks, that was clear, but his nerves were not equal to his lust for action. He had predicted a “battle of the Titans” and then disgracefully taken to his heels, “not wanting to have anything more to do with this mendacious world,” as he explained in court. He had once more played for highest stakes—and lost.

Yet he saved himself through rhetoric. His version of the incident revealed how little he understood reality and how well he understood how to present reality, color it, mold it to his propagandist purposes. The elements of the gambler and the knight-errant were always present, as well as his propensity for the hopeless situation, the lost cause. In every critical juncture during 1923 Hitler had shown a pathological tendency not to leave himself any tactical options. He seemed always to be seeking out a wall to have at his back. He was always doubling his stakes, which were already too high for him. One might well consider this a suicidal mentality. Then again, he would always pour scorn on other politicians who tried to follow a prudent course, calling them “political Tom Thumbs.” He had nothing but contempt for those who “never expose themselves to extreme strain.” Bismarck’s description of politics as the art of the possible Hitler considered “a cheap excuse.” We can see a consistency, too, in the fact that from 1905 on he repeatedly threatened to take his own life. But he kept postponing the act until the very last moment, until the alternatives of world power or downfall ceased to exist, and nothing remained but a sofa in the shelter under the Berlin chancellery. Certainly much of his behavior continued to seem overwrought and verged on grandiose farce. But are we only projecting from later experience when we see the high-strung actor of that early phase already surrounded by an aura of catastrophe?

On that ambiguous noon of November 9, 1923, when the procession of demonstrators neared the Odeonsplatz, a passer-by had asked whether the man at the head of the marching column was “really that fellow from the street corner.” Now “that fellow” had entered history.