ADVENT OF THE ”FUEHRER”
In the summer of 1921
the rising young agitator who had shown such surprising talents not only as an
orator but as an organizer and a propagandist took over the undisputed
leadership of the party. In doing so, he gave his fellow workers a first taste
of the ruthlessness and tactical shrewdness with which he was to gain so much
success in more important crises later on.
Early in the summer
Hitler had gone to Berlin to get in touch with North German nationalist
elements and to speak at the National Club, which was their spiritual
headquarters. He wanted to assess the possibilities of carrying his own movement
beyond the Bavarian borders into the rest of Germany. Perhaps he could make
some useful alliances for that purpose. While he was away the other members of
the committee of the Nazi Party decided the moment was opportune to challenge
his leadership. He had become too dictatorial for them.
They proposed some
alliances themselves with similarly minded groups in South Germany, especially
with the ”German Socialist Party” which a notorious Jewbaiter, Julius
Streicher, a bitter enemy and a rival of Hitler, was building up in Nuremberg.
The committee members were sure that if these groups, with their ambitious
leaders, could be merged with the Nazis, Hitler would be reduced in size.
Sensing the threat to
his position, Hitler hurried back to Munich to quell the intrigues of these
”foolish lunatics,” as he called them in Mein Kampf. He offered to resign from
the party. This was more than the party could afford, as the other members of
the committee quickly realized. Hitler was not only their most powerful speaker
but their best organizer and propagandist. Moreover, it was he who was now
bringing in most of the organization’s funds – from collections at the mass
meetings at which he spoke and from other sources as well, including the Army.
If he left, the budding Nazi Party would surely go to pieces. The committee
refused to accept his resignation. Hitler, reassured of the strength of his
position, now forced a complete capitulation on the other leaders. He demanded
dictatorial powers for himself as the party’s sole leader, the abolition of the
committee itself and an end to intrigues with other groups such as Streicher’s.
This was too much for
the other committee members. Led by the party’s founder, Anton Drexler, they
drew up an indictment of the would – be dictator and circulated it as a
pamphlet. It was the most drastic accusation Hitler was ever confronted with
from the ranks of his own party – from those, that is, who had firsthand
knowledge of his character and how he operated.
A lust for power and
personal ambition have caused Herr Adolf Hitler to return to his post after his
six weeks’ stay in Berlin, of which the purpose has not yet been disclosed. He
regards the time as ripe for bringing disunion and schism into our ranks by means
of shadowy people behind him, and thus to further the interests of the Jews and
their friends. It grows more and more clear that his purpose is simply to use
the National Socialist party as a springboard for his own immoral purposes, and
to seize the leadership in order to force the Party onto a different track at
the psychological moment. This is most clearly shown by an ultimatum which he
sent to the Party leaders a few days ago, in which he demands, among other
things, that he shall have a sole and absolute dictatorship of the Party, and that
the Committee, including the locksmith Anton Drexler, the founder and leader of
the Party, should retire. . .
And how does he carry
on his campaign? Like a Jew. He twists every fact . . . National Socialists! Make
up your minds about such characters! Make no mistake. Hitler is a demagogue . .
. He believes himself capable . . . of filling you up with all kinds of tales
that are anything but the truth.
Although weakened by a
silly anti-Semitism (Hitler acting like a Jew!), the charges were substantially
true, but publicizing them did not get the rebels as far as might be supposed.
Hitler promptly brought a libel suit against the authors of the pamphlet, and
Drexler himself, at a public meeting, was forced to repudiate it. In two
special meetings of the party Hitler dictated his peace terms.
The statutes were
changed to abolish the committee and give him dictatorial powers as president.
The humiliated Drexler was booted upstairs as honorary president, and he soon passed
out of the picture (He
left the party in 1923 but served as Vice-President of the Bavarian Diet from
1924 to 1928. In 1930 he became reconciled with Hitler, but he never returned
to active politics. The fate of all discoverers, as Heiden observed, overtook
Drexler.). As Heiden says, it was the victory of the Cavaliers over the Roundheads
of the party. But it was more than that. Then and there, in July 1921, was established the
”leadership principle”
which was to be the law first of the Nazi Party and then of the Third
Reich. The
”Fuehrer” had arrived on the German scene. The ”leader” now set to work to reorganize
the party. The gloomy taproom in the back of the Sterneckerbrau, which to Hitler was more of
”a funeral vault
than an office,” was given up and new offices in another tavern in the
Corneliusstrasse occupied.
These were lighter and roomier. An old Adler typewriter was purchased on the installment
plan, and a safe, filing cabinets, furniture, a telephone and a full-time paid secretary
were gradually acquired.
Money was beginning to
come in. Nearly a year before, in December of 1920, the party had acquired a
run-down newspaper badly in debt, the Voelkischer Beobachter, an anti-Semitic
gossip sheet which appeared twice a week. Exactly where the sixty thousand
marks for its purchase came from was a secret which Hitler kept well, but it is
known that Eckart and Roehm persuaded Major General Ritter von Epp, Roehm’s
commanding officer in the Reichswehr and himself a member of the party, to
raise the sum. Most likely it came from Army secret funds. At the beginning of
1923 the Voelkischer Beobachter became a daily, thus giving Hitler the
prerequisite of all German political parties, a daily newspaper in which to
preach the party’s gospels. Running a daily political journal required
additional money, and this now came from what must have seemed to some of the
more proletarian roughnecks of the party like strange sources. Frau Helene
Bechstein, wife of the wealthy piano manufacturer, was one. From their first
meeting she took a liking to the young firebrand, inviting him to stay at the
Bechstein home when he was in Berlin, arranging parties in which he could meet
the affluent, and donating sizable sums to the movement. Part of the money to
finance the new daily came from a Frau Gertrud von Seidlitz, a Bait, who owned
stock in some prosperous Finnish paper mills.
In March 1923, a
Harvard graduate, Ernst (Putzi) Hanfstaengl, whose mother was American and
whose cultivated and wealthy family owned an artpublishing business in Munich,
loaned the party one thousand dollars against a mortgage on the Voelkischer
Beobachter (1). This was a fabulous sum in marks in those inflationary days and
was of immense help to the party and its newspaper.
But the friendship of
the Hanfstaengls extended beyond monetary help. It was one of the first
respectable families of means in Munich to open its doors to the brawling young
politician. Putzi became a good friend of Hitler, who eventually made him chief
of the Foreign Press Department of the party. An eccentric, gangling man, whose
sardonic wit somewhat compensated for his shallow mind, Hanfstaengl was a
virtuoso at the piano and on many an evening, even after his friend came to
power in Berlin, he would excuse himself from the company of those of us who
might be with him to answer a hasty summons from the Fuehrer. It was said that
his piano-playing – he pounded the instrument furiously – and his clowning
soothed Hitler and even cheered him up after a tiring day. Later this strange
but genial Harvard man, like some other early cronies of Hitler, would have to flee
the country for his life.
Most of the men who
were to become Hitler’s closest subordinates were low in the party or would
shortly enter it. Rudolf Hess joined in 1920. On of a German wholesale merchant
domiciled in Egypt, Hess had spent the first fourteen years of his life in that
country and had then come to the Rhineland for his education. During the war he
served for a time in the List Regiment with Hitler – though they did not become
acquainted then – and after being twice wounded became a flyer. He enrolled in
the University of Munich after the war as a student of economics but seems to
have spent much of his time distributing anti-Semitic pamphlets and fighting
with the various armed bands then at loose in Bavaria. He was in the thick of
the firing when the soviet regime in Munich was overthrown on May 1, 1919, and
was wounded in the leg. One evening a year later he went to hear Hitler speak,
was carried away by his eloquence and joined the party, and soon he became a close
friend, a devoted follower and secretary of the leader. It was he who
introduced Hitler to the geopolitical ideas of General Karl Haushofer, then a
professor of geopolitics at the university.
Hess had stirred Hitler
with a prize-winning essay which he wrote for a thesis, entitled ”How Must the
Man Be Constituted Who Will Lead Germany Back to Her Old Heights?”
Where all authority has
vanished, only a man of the people can establish authority . . . The deeper the
dictator was originally rooted in the broad masses, the better he understands
how to treat them psychologically, the less the workers will distrust him, the
more supporters he will win among these most energetic ranks of the people.
He himself has nothing
in common with the mass; like every great man he is all personality . . . When
necessity commands, he does not shrink before bloodshed. Great questions are
always decided by blood and iron . . . In order to reach his goal, he is
prepared to trample on his closest friends . . . The lawgiver proceeds with terrible
hardness . . . As the need arises, he can trample them [the people] with the
boots of a grenadier . . .
No wonder Hitler took
to the young man. This was a portrait perhaps not of the leader as he was at
the moment but of the leader he wanted to become – and did. For all his
solemnity and studiousness, Hess remained a man of limited intelligence, always
receptive to crackpot ideas, which he could adopt with great fanaticism. Until
nearly the end, he would be one of Hitler’s most loyal and trusted followers
and one of the few who was not bitten by consuming personal ambition.
Alfred Rosenberg,
although he was often hailed as the ”intellectual leader” of the Nazi Party and
indeed its ”philosopher,” was also a man of mediocre intelligence. Rosenberg
may with some truth be put down as a Russian. Like a good many Russian
”intellectuals,” he was of Baltic German stock. The son of a shoemaker, he was
born January 12, 1893, at Reval (now Tallinn) in Estonia, which had been a part
of the Czarist Empire since 1721. He chose to study not in Germany but in
Russia and received a diploma in architecture from the University of Moscow in
1917. He lived in Moscow through the days of the Bolshevik revolution and it
may be that, as some of his enemies in the Nazi Party later said, he flirted
with the idea of becoming a young Bolshevik revolutionary. In February 1918,
however, he returned to Reval, volunteered for service in the German Army when
it reached the city, was turned down as a ”Russian” and finally, at the end of
1918, made his way to Munich, where he first became active in White Russian
emigre circles. Rosenberg then met Dietrich Eckart and through him Hitler, and
joined the party at the end of 1919. It was inevitable that a man who had
actually received a diploma in architecture would impress the man who had
failed even to get into a school of architecture. Hitler was also impressed by
Rosenberg’s ”learning,” and he liked the young Bait’s hatred of the Jews and
the Bolsheviks. Shortly before Eckart died, toward the end of 1923, Hitler made
Rosenberg editor of the Voelkischer Beobachter, and for many years he continued
to prop up this utterly muddled man, this confused and shallow ”philosopher,”
as the intellectual mentor of the Nazi movement and as one of its chief
authorities on foreign policy.
Like Rudolf Hess,
Hermann Goering had also come to Munich some time after the war ostensibly to
study economics at the university, and he too had come under the personal spell
of Adolf Hitler. One of the nation’s great war heroes, the last commander of
the famed Richthofen Fighter Squadron, holder of the Pour le Merite, the
highest war decoration in Germany, he found it even more difficult than most
war veterans to return to the humdrum existence of peacetime civilian life. He
became a transport pilot in Denmark for a time and later in Sweden. One day he
flew Count Eric von Rosen to the latter’s estate some distance from Stockholm
and while stopping over as a guest fell in love with Countess Rosen’s sister,
Carin von Kantzow, nee Baroness Fock, one of Sweden’s beauties. Some
difficulties arose. Carin von Kantzow was epileptic and was married and the
mother of an eight-year-old son. But she was able to have the marriage
dissolved and marry the gallant young flyer. Possessed of considerable means,
she went with her new husband to Munich, where they lived in some splendor and
he dabbled in studies at the university.
But not for long. He
met Hitler in 1921, joined the party, contributed generously to its treasury
(and to Hitler personally), threw his restless energy into helping Roehm
organize the storm troopers and a year later, in 1922, was made commander of
the S.A. A swarm of lesser-known and, for the most part, more unsavory
individuals joined the circle around the party dictator. Max Amann, Hitler’s
first sergeant in the List Regiment, a tough, uncouth character but an able
organizer, was named business manager of the party and the Voelkischer
Beobachter and quickly brought order into the finances of both. As his personal
bodyguard Hitler chose Ulrich Graf, an amateur wrestler, a butcher’s apprentice
and a renowned brawler. As his ”court photographer,” the only man who for years
was permitted to photograph him, Hitler had the lame Heinrich Hoffmann, whose
loyalty was doglike and profitable, making him in the end a millionaire.
Another favorite
brawler was Christian Weber, a horse dealer, a former bouncer in a Munich dive
and a lusty beer drinker. Close to Hitler in these days was Hermann Esser,
whose oratory rivaled the leader’s and whose Jew-baiting articles in the
Voelkischer Beobachter were a leading feature of the party newspaper.
He made no secret that
for a time he lived well off the generosity of some of his mistresses. A
notorious blackmailer, resorting to threats to ”expose” even his own party
comrades who crossed him, Esser became so repulsive to some of the older and
more decent men in the movement that they demanded his expulsion. ”I know Esser
is a scoundrel,” Hitler retorted in public, ”but I shall hold on to him as long
as he can be of use to me.”87 This was to be his attitude toward almost all of
his close collaborators, no matter how murky their past – or indeed their
present. Murderers, pimps, homosexual perverts, drug addicts or just plain
rowdies were all the same to him if they served his purposes.
He stood Julius
Streicher, for example, almost to the end. This depraved sadist, who started
life as an elementary-school teacher, was one of the most disreputable men
around Hitler from 1922 until ] 939, when his star finally faded. A famous
fornicator, as he boasted, who blackmailed even the husbands of women who were
his mistresses, he made his fame and fortune as a blindly fanatical
anti-Semite. His notorious weekly, Der Stuermer, thrived on lurid tales of
Jewish sexual crimes and Jewish ”ritual murders”; its obscenity was nauseating,
even to many Nazis. Streicher was also a noted pornographist. He became known
as the ”uncrowned King of Franconia” with the center of his power in Nuremberg,
where his word was law and where no one who crossed him or displeased him was
safe from prison and torture. Until I faced him slumped in the dock at
Nuremberg, on trial for his life as a war criminal, I never saw him without a
whip in his hand or in his belt, and he laughingly boasted of the countless
lashings he had meted out. Such were the men whom Hitler gathered around him in
the early years for his drive to become dictator of a nation which had given
the world a Luther, a Kant, a Goethe and a Schiller, a Bach, a Beethoven and a
Brahms, On April 1, 1920, the day the German Workers’ Party became the National
Socialist German
Workers’ Party – from which the abbreviated name ”Nazi” emerged – Hitler left
the Army for good. Henceforth he would devote all of his time to the Nazi
Party, from which neither then nor later did he accept any salary.
How, then, it might be
asked, did Hitler live? His fellow party workers themselves sometimes wondered.
In the indictment which the rebel members of the party committee drew up in
July 1921, the question was bluntly posed: ”If any member asks him how he lives
and what was his former profession, he always becomes angry and excited. Up to
now no answer has been supplied to these questions. So his conscience cannot be
clean, especially as his excessive intercourse with ladies, to whom he often
describes himself as ’King of Munich,’ costs a great deal of money.” Hitler
answered the question during the subsequent libel action which he brought
against the authors of the pamphlet. To the question of the court as to exactly
how he lived, he replied, ”If I speak for the National Socialist Party I take
no money for myself. But I also speak for other organizations . . . and then of
course I accept a fee. I also have my midday meal with various party comrades
in turn. I am further assisted to a modest extent by a few party comrades.”
Probably this was very
close to the truth. Such well-heeled friends as Dietrich Eckart, Goering and
Hanfstaengl undoubtedly ”lent” him money to pay his rent, purchase clothes and
buy a meal. His wants were certainly modest. Until 1929 he occupied a two-room
flat in a lower-middle-class district in the Thierschstrasse near the River
Isar. In the winter he wore an old trench coat – it later became familiar to
everyone in Germany from numerous photographs. In the summer he often appeared
in shorts, the Lederhosen which most Bavarians donned in seasonable weather. In
1923 Eckart and Esser stumbled upon the Platterhof, an inn near Berchtesgaden,
as a summer retreat for Hitler and his friends. Hitler fell in love with the
lovely mountain country; it was here that he later built the spacious villa,
Berghof, which would be his home and where he would spend much of his time
until the war years.
There was, however,
little time for rest and recreation in the stormy years between 1921 and 1923.
There was a party to build and to keep control of in the face of jealous rivals
as unscrupulous as himself. The N.S.D.A.P. was but one of several right-wing
movements in Bavaria struggling for public attention and support, and beyond,
in the rest of Germany, there were many others. There was a dizzy succession of
events and of constantly changing situations for a politician to watch, to
evaluate and to take advantage of. In April 1921 the Allies had presented
Germany the bill for reparations, a whopping 132 billion gold marks – 33
billion dollars – which the Germans howled they could not possibly pay. The
mark, normally valued at four to the dollar, had begun to fall; by the summer
of 1921 it had dropped to seventy-five, a year later to four hundred, to the
dollar Erzberger had been murdered in August 1921. In June 1922, there was an
attempt to assassinate Philipp Scheidemann, the Socialist who had proclaimed the
Republic. The same month, June 24, Foreign Minister Rathenau was shot dead in
the street. In all three cases the assassins had been men of the extreme Right.
The shaky national government in Berlin finally answered the challenge with a
special Law for the Protection of the Republic, which imposed severe penalties
for political terrorism. Berlin demanded the dissolution of the innumerable
armed leagues and the end of political gangsterism. The Bavarian government,
even under the moderate Count Lerchenfeld, who had replaced the extremist Kahr
in 1921, was finding it difficult to go along with the national regime in
Berlin. When it attempted to enforce the law against terrorism, the Bavarian
Rightists, of whom Hitler was now one of the acknowledged young leaders,
organized a conspiracy to overthrow Lerchenfeld and march on Berlin to bring
down the Republic. The fledgling democratic Weimar Republic was in deep
trouble, its very existence constantly threatened not only from the extreme
Right but from the extreme Left.
1.
In his memoirs,Unheard Witness, Hanfstaengl says
that he was first steered to Hitler by an American. This was Captain Truman
Smith, then an assistant military attache at the American Embassy in Berlin. In
November 1922 Smith was sent by the embassy to Munich to check on an obscure
political agitator by the name of Adolf Hitler and his newly founded National
Socialist Labor Party. For a young professional American Army officer, Captain Smith
had a remarkable bent for political analysis. In one week in Munich, November
15- 22, he managed to see Ludendorff, Crown Prince Rupprecht and a dozen
political leaders in Bavaria, most of whom told him that Hitler was a rising
star and his movement a rapidly growing political force. Smith lost no time in
attending an outdoor Nazi rally at which Hitler spoke. ”Never saw such a sight
in my life!” he scribbled in his diary immediately afterward. ”Met Hitler,” he
wrote, ”and he promises to talk to me Monday and explain his aims.” On the Monday,
Smith made his way to Hitler’s residence – ”a little bare bedroom on the second
floor of a run-down house,” as he described it – and had a long talk with the
future dictator, who was scarcely known outside Munich. ”A marvelous
demagogue!” the assistant U.S. military attache began his diary that evening.
”Have rarely listened to such a logical and fanatical man.” The date was
November 22, 1922. Just before leaving for Berlin that evening Smith saw
Hanfstaengl, told him of his meeting with Hitler and advised him to take a look
at the man. The Nazi leader was to address a rally that evening and Captain
Smith turned over his press ticket to Hanfstaengl. The latter, like so many
others, was overwhelmed by Hitler’s oratory, sought him out after the meeting
and quickly became a convert to Nazism. Back in Berlin, which at that time took
little notice of Hitler, Captain Smith wrote a lengthy report which the embassy
dispatched to Washington on November 25, 1922. Considering when it was written,
it is a remarkable document. The most active political force in Bavaria at the
present time [Smith wrote] is the National Socialist Labor Party. Less a
political party than a popular movement, it must be considered as the Bavarian
counterpart to the Italian fascist! . . . It has recently acquired a political
influence quite disproportionate to its actual numerical strength. . . Adolf
Hitler from the very first has been the dominating force in the movement, and
the personality of this man has undoubtedly been one of the most important factors
contributing to its success . . . His ability to influence a popular assembly is
uncanny. In private conversation he disclosed himself as a forceful and logical
speaker, which, when tempered with a fanatical earnestness, made a very deep impression
on a neutral listener. Colonel Smith, who later served as American military
attache in Berlin during the early years of the Nazi regime, kindly placed his
diary and notes of his trip to Munich at the disposal of this writer. They have
been invaluable in the preparation of this chapter. Hanfstaengl spent part of
World War II in Washington, ostensibly as an interned enemy alien but actually
as an ”adviser” to the United States government on Nazi Germany. This final
role of his life, which seemed so ludicrous to Americans who knew him and Nazi
Germany, must have amused him.
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