Two Brothers

Another Baby Munich, 1920

ON THE SAME day that the two Stengel brothers were born, 24 February 1920, some few hundred miles from Berlin, at the Hofbräuhaus Bierkeller in Munich, another baby came into the world. Like many babies (not least Paulus and Otto themselves), this one was noisy and wild. When it found its voice it was only to shout and to scream, and when it found its fists it was only to beat the air in fury because the world was not as it wished it to be.

Most babies grow up. They develop reason and a conscience, they become socialized. This baby never did. It was the National Socialist German Workers Party, named that day out of the ashes of a previous, failed incarnation. The voice that screamed and the fists that pounded were those of its emerging leader, a thirty-one-year-old corporal in the political unit of the Bavarian Reichswehr. His name was Adolf Hitler.

That fateful night, along with giving the party its new name, Hitler outlined twenty-five points that were to be the ‘inalienable’ and ‘unalterable’ basis of the party programme. Most of these points were quickly forgotten by both Hitler and his rapidly growing party, sops as they were to the quasi-socialist principles of its roots. Other points, however, were very much Hitler’s own and he never wavered in his commitment to them until the moment he drew his last breath. A union of all German-speaking peoples. A complete repudiation of the Treaty of Versailles. And, above all, a ‘settlement’ with the Jews. This was the most crucial point of all and on that cold winter evening the penniless, unknown soldier, voice almost gone after three hours of oration, fists clenched, arms flailing in the air, spit floating in the smoky beams of light, gave notice that the Jews were the source of all Germany’s ills and that he, Adolf Hitler, would be their nemesis. He would deprive every one of them of their Reich citizenship. No Jew would be allowed to hold any official office. No Jew would be allowed to write for a newspaper. And any Jew who had arrived in Germany after 1914 would be instantly deported.

It was heady stuff and the crowd roared their approval. Here at last was a man who knew why Germany had lost the war. Why instead of being victors living fat in Paris and London, decent Germans were paupers eking out their beer and tobacco in Munich.

It was the Jews. Despite being only 0.75 per cent of the population, the Jews, in their fiendish cunning, had done it all and this man would cut the bastards down to size.

No one, not even Hitler himself, imagined that night in 1920 just how much more he would do to them than that.