BIRTH OF THE NAZI PARTY
On the dark autumn
Sunday of November 10, 1918, Adolf Hitler experienced what out of the depths of
his hatred and frustration he called the greatest villainy of the century (The expression appeared in
the first German edition of Mein Kampf, but was changed to ”revolution” in all
subsequent editions.). A pastor had come bearing unbelievable news for
the wounded soldiers in the military hospital at Pasewalk, a small Pomeranian
town northeast of Berlin, where Hitler was recovering from temporary blindness
suffered in a British gas attack a month before near Ypres. That Sunday
morning, the pastor informed them, the Kaiser had abdicated and fled to
Holland. The day before a republic had been proclaimed in Berlin.
On the morrow, November
11, an armistice would be signed at Compiegne in France. The war had been lost.
Germany was at the mercy of the victorious Allies. The pastor began to sob. ”I
could stand it no longer,” Hitler says in recounting the scene. ”Everything
went black again before my eyes; I tottered and groped my way back to the ward,
threw myself on my bunk, and dug my burning head into my blanket and pillow . .
. So it had all been in vain. In vain all the sacrifices and privations . . .
in vain the hours in which, with mortal fear clutching at our hearts, we
nevertheless did our duty; in vain the death of two millions who died . . . Had
they died for this? . . . Did all this happen only so that a gang of wretched
criminals could lay hands on the Fatherland?”
For the first time
since he had stood at his mother’s grave, he says, he broke down and wept. ”I
could not help it.” Like millions of his fellow countrymen then and forever
after, he could not accept the blunt and shattering fact that Germany had been
defeated on the battlefield and had lost the war. Like millions of other
Germans, too, Hitler had been a brave and courageous soldier. Later he would be
accused by some political opponents of having been a coward in combat, but it
must be said, in fairness, that there is no shred of evidence in his record for
such a charge. As a dispatch runner in the First Company of the 16th Bavarian
Reserve Infantry Regiment, he arrived at the front toward the end of October
1914 after scarcely three months of training, and his unit was decimated in
four days of hard fighting at the first Battle of Ypres, where the British
halted the German drive to the Channel. According to a letter Hitler wrote his
Munich landlord, a tailor named Popp, his regiment was reduced in four days of
combat from 3,500 to 600 men; only thirty officers survived, and four companies
had to be dissolved. During the war he was wounded twice, the first time on
October 7, 1916, in the Battle of the Somme, when he was hit in the leg. After
hospitalization in Germany he returned to the List Regiment – it was named
after its original commander – in March 1917 and, now promoted to corporal,
fought in the Battle of Arras and the third Battle of Ypres during that summer.
His regiment was in the thick of the fighting during the last all-out German
offensive in the spring and summer of 1918. On the night of October 13 he was
caught in a heavy British gas attack on a hill south of Werwick during the last
Battle of Ypres. ”I stumbled back with burning eyes,” he relates, ”taking with
me my last report of the war. A few hours later, my eyes had turned into
glowing coals; it had grown dark around me.” He was twice decorated for
bravery. In December 1914 he was awarded the Iron Cross, Second Class, and in
August 1918 he received the Iron Cross, First Class, which was rarely given to
a common soldier in the old Imperial Army.
One comrade in his unit
testified that he won the coveted decoration for having captured fifteen
Englishmen single-handed; another said it was Frenchmen. The official history
of the List Regiment contains no word of any such exploit; it is silent about
the individual feats of many members who received decorations. Whatever the
reason, there is no doubt that Corporal Hitler earned the Iron Cross, First
Class. He wore it proudly to the end of his life. And yet, as soldiers go, he
was a peculiar fellow, as more than one of his comrades remarked. No letters or
presents from home came to him, as they did to the others. He never asked for
leave; he had not even a combat soldier’s interest in women. He never grumbled,
as did the bravest of men, about the filth, the lice, the mud, the stench, of
the front line. He was the impassioned warrior, deadly serious at all times
about the war’s aims and Germany’s manifest destiny. ”We all cursed him and
found him intolerable,” one of the men in his company later recalled. ”There
was this white crow among us that didn’t go along with us when we damned the
war to hell.”67 Another man described him as sitting ”in the corner of our mess
holding his head between his hands, in deep contemplation. Suddenly he would
leap up and, running about excitedly, say that in spite of our big guns victory
would be denied us, for the invisible foes of the German people were a greater
danger than the biggest cannon of the enemy.”68 Whereupon he would launch into
a vitriolic attack on these ”invisible foes” – the Jews and the Marxists. Had
he not learned in Vienna that they were the source of all evil? And indeed had
he not seen this for himself in the German homeland while convalescing from his
leg wound in the middle of the war? After his discharge from the hospital at
Beelitz, near Berlin, he had visited the capital and then gone on to Munich.
Everywhere he found ”scoundrels” cursing the war and wishing for its quick end.
Slackers abounded, and who were they but Jews? ”The offices,” he found, ”were
filled with Jews. Nearly every clerk was a Jew and nearly every Jew was a clerk
. . . In the year 1916-17 nearly the whole production was under control of Jewish
finance . . . The Jew robbed the whole nation and pressed it beneath his
domination . . . I saw with horror a catastrophe approaching . . . ” Hitler
could not bear what he saw and was glad, he says, to return to the front. He
could bear even less the disaster which befell his beloved Fatherland in
November 1918. To him, as to almost all Germans, it was ”monstrous” and
undeserved.
The German Army had not
been defeated in the field. It had been stabbed in the back by the traitors at
home.
Thus emerged for Hitler,
as for so many Germans, a fanatical belief in the legend of the ”stab in the
back” which, more than anything else, was to undermine the Weimar Republic and
pave the way for Hitler’s ultimate triumph. The legend was fraudulent. General
Ludendorff, the actual leader of the High Command, had insisted on September
28, 1918, on an armistice ”at once,” and his nominal superior, Field Marshal
von Hindenburg, had supported him. At a meeting of the Crown Council in Berlin
on October 2 presided over by Kaiser Wilhelm II, Hindenburg had reiterated the
High Command’s demand for an immediate truce. ”The Army,” he said, ”cannot wait
forty-eight hours.” In a letter written on the same day Hindenburg flatly
stated that the military situation made it imperative ”to stop the fighting.”
No mention was made of any ”stab in the back.” Only later did Germany’s great
war hero subscribe to the myth. In a hearing before the Committee of Inquiry of
the National Assembly on November 18, 1919, a year after the war’s end, Hindenburg
declared, ”As an English general has very truly said, the German Army was
’stabbed in the back.’ ” (The attribution of the myth to an English general was hardly factual.
Wheeler-Bennett, in Wooden Titan: Hindenburg, has explained that, ironically,
two British generals did have something to do – inadvertently – with the
perpetration of the false legend. ”The first was Maj. Gen. Sir Frederick
Maurice, whose book The Last Four Months, published in 1919, was grossly
misrepresented by reviewers in the German press as proving that the German Army
had been betrayed by the Socialists on the Home Front and not been defeated in
the field.” The General denied this interpretation in the German press, but to
no avail. Ludendorff made use of the reviews to convince Hindenburg. ”The other
officer,” says Wheeler-Bennett, ”was Maj. Gen. Malcolm, head of the British
Military Mission in Berlin, Ludendorff was dining with the General one evening,
and with his usual turgid eloquence was expatiating on how the High Command had
always suffered lack of support from the Civilian Government and how the
Revolution had betrayed the Army. In an effort to crystallize the meaning of
Ludendorff’s verbosity into a single sentence, General Malcolm asked him: ’Do
you mean, General, that you were stabbed in the back?’ Ludendorff’s eyes lit up
and he leapt upon the phrase like a dog on a bone. ’Stabbed in the back?’ he
repeated. ’Yes, that’s it exactly. We were stabbed in the back.’”)
In point of fact, the
civilian government headed by Prince Max of Baden, which had not been told of
the worsening military situation by the High Command until the end of
September, held out for several weeks against Ludendorffs demand for an
armistice.
One had to live in
Germany between the wars to realize how widespread was the acceptance of this
incredible legend by the German people. The facts which exposed its deceit lay
all around. The Germans of the Right would not face them. The culprits, they
never ceased to bellow, were the ”November criminals” – an expression which
Hitler hammered into the consciousness of the people. It mattered not at all
that the German Army, shrewdly and cowardly, had maneuvered the republican
government into signing the armistice which the military leaders had insisted
upon, and that it thereafter had advised the government to accept the Peace
Treaty of Versailles. Nor did it seem to count that the Social Democratic Party
had accepted power in 1918 only reluctantly and only to preserve the nation
from utter chaos which threatened to lead to Bolshevism. It was not responsible
for the German collapse. The blame for that rested on the old order, which had
held the power.
But millions of Germans refused to concede this. They had to find scapegoats for the defeat and for their humiliation and misery. They easily convinced themselves that they had found them in the ”November criminals” who had signed the surrender and established democratic government in the place of the old autocracy. The gullibility of the Germans is a subject which Hitler often harps on in Mein Kampf. He was shortly to take full advantage of it.
When the pastor had
left the hospital in Pasewalk that evening of November 10, 1918, ”there
followed terrible days and even worse nights” for Adolf Hitler. ”I knew,” he
says, ”that all was lost. Only fools, liars and criminals could hope for mercy
from the enemy. In these nights hatred grew in me, hatred for those responsible
for this deed . . . Miserable and degenerate criminals! The more I tried to
achieve clarity on the monstrous event in this hour, the more the shame of
indignation and disgrace burned my brow. What was all the pain in my eyes
compared to this misery?” And then: ” My own fate became known to me. I decided
to go into politics.”
As it turned out, this
was a fateful decision for Hitler and for the world.
The prospects for a
political career in Germany for this thirty-year-old Austrian without friends
or funds, without a job, with no trade or profession or any previous record of
regular employment, with no experience whatsoever in politics, were less than
promising, and at first, for a brief moment, Hitler realized it. ”For days,” he
says, ”I wondered what could be done, but the end of every meditation was the
sober realization that I, nameless as I was, did not possess the least basis
for any useful action.”
He had returned to
Munich at the end of November 1918, to find his adopted city scarcely
recognizable. Revolution had broken out here too. The Wittelsbach King had also
abdicated. Bavaria was in the hands of the Social Democrats, who had set up a
Bavarian ”People’s State” under Kurt Eisner, a popular Jewish writer who had
been born in Berlin. On November 7, Eisner, a familiar figure in Munich with
his great gray beard, his pince-nez, his enormous black hat and his diminutive
size, had traipsed through the streets at the head of a few hundred men and,
without a shot being fired, had occupied the seat of parliament and government
and proclaimed a republic. Three months later he was assassinated by a young
right-wing officer, Count Anton Arco-Valley. The workers thereupon set up a
soviet republic, but this was short-lived. On May 1, 1919, Regular Army troops
dispatched from Berlin and Bavarian ”free corps” (Freikorps) volunteers entered
Munich and overthrew the Communist
A few generals were courageous enough to say so. On August 23, 1924, the Frankfurter
Zeitung published an
article by General Freiherr von Schoenaich analyzing the reasons for Germany’s
defeat. He came to ”the irresistible
conclusion that we owe our ruin to the supremacy of our military authorities
over civilian authorities . . . In fact, German militarism simply
committed suicide.” (Quoted by Telford
Taylor in Sword and Swastika, p. 16.)” regime, massacring several hundred
persons, including many non-Communists, in revenge for the shooting of a dozen
hostages by the soviet. Though a moderate Social Democratic government under
Johannes Hoffmann was nominally restored for the time being, the real power in
Bavarian politics passed to the Right.
What was the Right in
Bavaria at this chaotic time? It was the Regular Army, the Reichswehr; it was
the monarchists, who wished the Wittelbachs back. It was a mass of
conservatives who despised the democratic Republic established in Berlin; and
as time went on it was above all the great mob of demobilized soldiers for whom
the bottom had fallen out of the world in 1918, uprooted men who could not find
jobs or their way back to the peaceful society they had left in 1914, men grown
tough and violent through war who could not shake themselves from ingrained
habit and who, as Hitler, who for a while was one of them, would later say,
”became revolutionaries who favored revolution for its own sake and desired to
see revolution established as a permanent condition.”
Armed free-corps bands
sprang up all over Germany and were secretly equipped by the Reichswehr At
first they were mainly used to fight the Poles and the Baits on the disputed
eastern frontiers, but soon they were backing plots for the overthrow of the
republican regime. In March 1920, one of them, the notorious Ehrhardt Brigade,
led by a freebooter, Captain Ehrhardt, occupied Berlin and enabled Dr. Wolfgang
Kapp (Kapp was born in
New York on July 24, 1868.), a mediocre politician of the extreme Right,
to proclaim himself Chancellor. The Regular Army, under General von Seeckt, had
stood by while the President of the Republic and the government fled in
disarray to western Germany. Only a general strike by the trade unions restored
the republican government.
In Munich at the same
time a different kind of military coup d’etat was more successful. On March 14,
1920, the Reichswehr overthrew the Hoffmann Socialist government and installed
a right-wing regime under Gustav von Kahr. And now the Bavarian capital became
a magnet for all those forces in Germany which were determined to overthrow the
Republic, set up an authoritarian regime and repudiate the Diktat of
Versailles. Here the condottieri of the free corps, including the members of
the Ehrhardt Brigade, found a refuge and a welcome. Here General Ludendorff
settled, along with a host of other disgruntled, discharged Army officers. (At the war’s end Ludendorff
fled to Sweden disguised in false whiskers and blue spectacles. He returned to
Germany in February 1919, writing his wife: ”It would be the greatest stupidity
for the revolutionaries to allow us all to remain alive. Why, if ever I come to
power again there will be no pardon. Then with an easy conscience, I would have
Ebert, Scheidemann and Co. hanged, and watch them dangle.” (Margaritte Ludendorff,
Als ich Ludendorffs Fran war, p. 229.) Ebert was the first President and
Scheidemann the first Chancellor of the Weimar Republic. Ludendorff, though
second-in-command to Hindenburg, had been the virtual dictator of Germany for
the last two years of the war.)
Here were plotted the
political murders, among them that of Matthias Erzberger, the moderate Catholic
politician who had had the courage to sign the armistice when the generals
backed out; and of Walther Rathenau, the brilliant, cultured Foreign Minister,
whom the extremists hated for being a Jew and for carrying out the national
government’s policy of trying to fulfill at least some of the provisions of the
Versailles Treaty. It was in this fertile field in Munich that Adolf Hitler got
his start. When he had come back to Munich at the end of November 1918, he had found
that his battalion was in the hands of the ”Soldiers’ Councils.” This was so
repellent to him, he says, that he decided ”at once to leave as soon as possible.”
He spent the winter doing guard duty at a prisoner-of-war camp at Traunstein,
near the Austrian border. He was back in Munich in the spring. In Mein Kampf he
relates that he incurred the ”disapproval” of the left-wing government and
claims that he avoided arrest only by the feat of aiming his carbine at three
”scoundrels” who had come to fetch him. Immediately after the Communist regime
was overthrown Hitler began what he terms his ”first more or less political
activity.” This consisted of giving information to the commission of inquiry
set up by the 2nd Infantry Regiment to investigate those who shared responsibility
for the brief soviet regime in Munich.
Apparently Hitler’s
service on this occasion was considered valuable enough to lead the Army to
give him further employment. He was assigned to a job in the Press and News
Bureau of the Political Department of the Army’s district command. The German
Army, contrary to its traditions, was now deep in politics, especially in
Bavaria, where at last it had established a government to its liking. To
further its conservative views it gave the soldiers courses of ”political
instruction,” in one of which Adolf Hitler was an attentive pupil. One day,
according to his own story, he intervened during a lecture in which someone had
said a good word for the Jews. His anti-Semitic harangue apparently so pleased
his superior officers that he was soon posted to a Munich regiment as an educational
officer, a Bildungsoffizier, whose main task was to combat dangerous ideas – pacifism,
socialism, democracy; such was the Army’s conception of its role in the
democratic Republic it had sworn to serve.
This was an important
break for Hitler, the first recognition he had won in the field of politics he
was now trying to enter. Above all, it gave him a chance to try out his
oratorical abilities – the first prerequisite, as he had always maintained, of
a successful politician. ”All at once,” he says, ”I was offered an opportunity
of speaking before a larger audience; and the thing that I had always presumed
from pure feeling without knowing it was now corroborated: I could ’speak.’”
The discovery pleased him greatly even if it came as no great surprise. He had
been afraid that his voice might have been permanently weakened by the gassing
he had suffered at the front. Now he found it had recovered sufficiently to
enable him to make himself heard ”at least in every corner of the small squad rooms.”
This was the beginning of a talent that was to make him easily the most
effective orator in Germany, with a magic power, after he took to radio, to
sway millions by his voice.
One day in September
1919, Hitler received orders from the Army’s Political Department to have a
look at a tiny political group in Munich which called itself the German Workers’
Party. The military were suspicious of workers’ parties, since they were
predominantly Socialist or Communist, but this one, it was believed, might be
different. Hitler says it was ”entirely unknown” to him. And yet he knew one of
the men who was scheduled to speak at the party’s meeting which he had been
assigned to investigate.
A few weeks before, in
one of his Army educational courses, he had heard a lecture by Gottfried Feder,
a construction engineer and a crank in the field of economics, who had become
obsessed with the idea that ”speculative” capital, as opposed to ”creative” and
”productive” capital, was the root of much of Germany’s economic trouble. He
was for abolishing the first kind and in 1917 had formed an organization to
achieve this purpose: the German Fighting League for the Breaking of Interest
Slavery. Hitler, ignorant of economics, was much impressed by Feder’s lecture.
He saw in Feder’s appeal for the ”breaking of interest slavery” one of the
”essential premises for the foundation of a new party.” In Feder’s lecture, he
says, ”I sensed a powerful slogan for this coming struggle.”
But at first he did not
sense any importance hi the German Workers’ Party. He went to its meeting
because he was ordered to, and, after sitting through what he thought was a
dull session of some twenty-five persons gathered in a murky room in the
Sterneckerbrau beer cellar, he was not impressed. It was ”a new organization
like so many others. This was a time,” he says, ”in which anyone who was not
satisfied with developments . . . felt called upon to found a new party.
Everywhere these organizations sprang out of the ground, only to vanish
silently after a time. I judged the German Workers’ Party no differently.”74
After Feder had finished speaking Hitler was about to leave, when a ”professor”
sprang up, questioned the soundness of Feder’s arguments and then proposed that
Bavaria should break away from Prussia and found a South German nation with
Austria. This was a popular notion in Munich at the time, but its expression
aroused Hitler to a fury and he rose to give ”the learned gentleman,” as he
later recounted, a piece of his mind. This apparently was so violent that,
according to Hitler, the ”professor” left the hall ”like a wet poodle,” while
the rest of the audience looked at the unknown young speaker ”with astonished
faces.” One man – Hitler says he did not catch his name – came leaping after
him and pressed a little booklet into his hands.
This man was Anton
Drexler, a locksmith by trade, who may be said to have been the actual founder
of National Socialism. A sickly, bespectacled man, lacking a formal education,
with an independent but narrow and confused mind, a poor writer and a worse
speaker, Drexler was then employed in the Munich railroad shops. On March 7,
1918, he had set up a ”Committee of Independent Workmen” to combat the Marxism of
the free trade unions and to agitate for a ”just” peace for Germany. Actually,
it was a branch of a larger movement established in North Germany as the
Association for the Promotion of Peace on Working-Class Lines (the country was
then and would continue to be until 1933 full of countless pressure groups with
highfalutin titles).
Drexler never recruited
more than forty members, and in January 1919 he merged his committee with a
similar group, the Political Workers’ Circle, led by a newspaper reporter, one
Karl Harrer. The new organization, which numbered less than a hundred, was
called the German Workers’ Party and Harrer was its first chairman. Hitler, who
has little to say in Mein Kampf of some of his early comrades whose names are
now forgotten, pays Harrer the tribute of being ”honest” and ”certainly widely
educated” but regrets that he lacked the ”oratorical gift.” Perhaps Harrer’s
chief claim to fleeting fame is that he stubbornly maintained that Hitler was a
poor speaker, a judgment which riled the Nazi leader ever after, as he makes
plain in his autobiography. At any rate, Drexler seems to have been the chief
driving force in this small, unknown German Workers’ Party. The next morning
Hitler turned to a perusal of the booklet which Drexler had thrust into his
hands. He describes the scene at length in Mein Kampf. It was 5 A.M. Hitler had
awakened and, as he says was his custom, was reclining on his cot in the barracks
of the 2nd Infantry Regiment watching the mice nibble at the bread crumbs which
he invariably scattered on the floor the night before. ”I had known so much
poverty in my life,” he muses, ”that I was well able to imagine the hunger and
hence also the pleasure of the little creatures.” He remembered the little
pamphlet and began to read it. It was entitled ”My Political Awakening.”
To Hitler’s surprise,
it reflected a good many ideas which he himself had acquired over the years.
Drexler’s principal aim was to build a political party which would be based on
the masses of the working class but which, unlike the Social Democrats, would
be strongly nationalist. Drexler had been a member of the patriotic Fatherland
Front but had soon become disillusioned with its middleclass spirit which
seemed to have no contact at all with the masses. In Vienna, as we have seen,
Hitler had learned to scorn the bourgeoisie for the same reason – its utter
lack of concern with the working – class families and their social problems.
Drexler’s ideas, then, definitely interested him.
Later that day Hitler
was astonished to receive a postcard saying that he had been accepted in the German
Workers’ Party. ”I didn’t know whether to be angry or to laugh,” he remembered
later. ”I had no intention of joining a ready-made party, but wanted to found
one of my own. What they asked of me was presumptuous and out of the question.”
He was about to say so in a letter when ”curiosity won out” and he decided to
go to a committee meeting to which he had been invited and explain in person
his reasons for not joining ”this absurd little organization.”
The tavern in which the
meeting was to take place was the Alte Rosenbad in the Herrenstrasse, a very
run-down place . . . I went through the ill-lit dining room in which not a soul
was sitting, opened the door to the back room, and there I was face to face
with the Committee. In the dim light of a grimy gas lamp four young people sat
at a table, among them the author of the little pamphlet, who at once greeted
me most joyfully and bade me welcome as a new member of the German Workers’
Party. Really, I was somewhat taken aback. The minutes of the last meeting were
read and the secretary given a vote of confidence. Next came the treasury
report – all in all the association possessed seven marks and fifty pfennigs –
for which the treasurer received a vote of confidence. This too was entered in
the minutes. Then the first chairman read the answers to a letter from Kiel,
one from Duesseldorf, and one from Berlin and everyone expressed approval. Next
a report was given on the incoming mail . . . Terrible, terrible! This was club
life of the worst manner and sort. Was I to join this organization? Yet there
was something about these shabby men in the ill-lit back room that attracted
him: ”the longing for a new movement which should be more than a party in the
previous sense of the word.” That evening he returned to the barracks to ”face
the hardest question of my life: should I join?” Reason, he admits, told him to
decline. And yet . . . The very unimportance of the organization would give a
young man of energy and ideas an opportunity ”for real personal activity.”
Hitler thought over what he could ”bring to this task.” That I was poor and
without means seemed to me the most bearable part of it, but it was harder that
I was numbered among the nameless, that
I was one of the millions whom chance permits to live or summons out of
existence without even their closest neighbors condescending to take any notice
of it. In addition, there was the difficulty which inevitably arose from my
lack of schooling.
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. Adolf Hitler was then and there enrolled as
the seventh member of the committee of the German Workers’ Party. There were
two members of this insignificant party who deserve mention at this point; both
were to prove important in the rise of Hitler. Captain Ernst Roehm, on the
staff of the Army’s District Command VII in Munich, had joined the party before
Hitler. He was a stocky, bull-necked, piggish-eyed, scar-faced professional
soldier – the upper part of his nose had been shot away in 1914 – with a flair
for politics and a natural ability as an organizer. Like Hitler he was
possessed of a burning hatred for the democratic Republic and the ”November
criminals” he held responsible for it. His aim was to re-create a strong nationalist
Germany and he believed with Hitler that this could be done only by a party
based on the lower classes, from which he himself, unlike most Regular Army
officers, had come. A tough, ruthless, driving man – albeit, like so many of
the early Nazis, a homosexual – he helped to organize the first Nazi strong-arm
squads which grew into the S.A., the army of storm troopers which he commanded
until his execution by Hitler in 1934. Roehm not only brought into the budding
party large numbers of ex-servicemen and free-corps volunteers, who formed the
backbone of the organization in its early years, but, as an officer of the
Army, which controlled Bavaria, he obtained for Hitler and his movement the
protection and sometimes the support of the authorities. Without this help,
Hitler probably could never have got a real start in his campaign to incite the
people to overthrow the Republic. Certainly he could not have got away with his
methods of terror and intimidation without the tolerance of the Bavarian government
and police.
Dietrich Eckart,
twenty-one years older than Hitler, was often called the spiritual founder of
National Socialism. A witty journalist, a mediocre poet and dramatist, he had
translated Ibsen’s Peer Gynt and written a number of unproduced plays. In
Berlin for a time he had led, like Hitler in Vienna, the bohemian vagrant’s
life, become a drunkard, taken to morphine and, according to Heiden, been
confined to a mental institution, where he was finally able to stage his dramas,
using the inmates as actors. He had returned to his native Bavaria at the war’s
end and held forth before a circle of admirers at the Brennessel wine cellar in
Schwabling, the artists’ quarter in Munich, preaching Aryan superiority and
calling for the elimination of the Jews and the downfall of the ”swine” in
Berlin. ”We need a fellow at the head,” Heiden. who was a working newspaperman in
Munich at the time, quotes Eckart as declaiming to the habitues of the Brennessel
wine cellar in 1919, ”who can stand the sound of a machine gun. The rabble need
to get fear into their pants. We can’t use an officer, because the people don’t
respect them any more. The best would be a worker who knows how to talk . . .
He doesn’t need much brains . He must be a bachelor, then we’ll get the women.”
What more natural than
that the hard-drinking poet (Eckart died of overdrinking in December 1923) should find in
Adolf Hitler the very man he was looking for? He became a close adviser to the rising
young man in the German Workers’ Party, lending him books, helping to improve
his German – both written and spoken – and introducing him to his wide circle
of friends, which included not only certain wealthy persons who were induced to
contribute to the party’s funds and Hitler’s living but such future aides as
Rudolf Hess and Alfred Rosenberg. Hitler’s admiration for Eckart never flagged,
and the last sentence of Mein Kampf is an expression of gratitude to this
erratic mentor: He was, says Hitler in concluding his book, ”one of the best,
who devoted his life to the awakening of our people, in his writings and his
thoughts and finally in his deeds.” Such was the weird assortment of misfits who
founded National Socialism, who unknowingly began to shape a movement which in
thirteen years would sweep the country, the strongest in Europe, and bring to
Germany its Third Reich. The confused locksmith Drexler provided the kernel,
the drunken poet Eckart some of the ”spiritual” foundation, the economic crank
Feder what passed as an ideology, the homosexual Roehm the support of the Army
and the war veterans, but it was now the former tramp, Adolf Hitler, not quite thirty-one
and utterly unknown, who took the lead in building up what had been no more
than a back-room debating society into what would soon become a formidable
political party.
All the ideas which had
been bubbling in his mind since the lonesome days of hunger in Vienna now found
an outlet, and an inner energy which had not been observable in his make-up
burst forth. He prodded his timid committee into organizing bigger meetings. He
personally typed out and distributed invitations.
Later he recalled how
once, after he had distributed eighty of these, ”we sat waiting for the masses
who were expected to appear. An hour late, the ’chairman’ had to open the ’meeting.’
We were again seven, the old seven.” But he was not to be discouraged. He
increased the number of invitations by having them mimeographed. He collected a
few marks to insert a notice of a meeting in a local newspaper. ”The success,”
he says, ”was positively amazing. One hundred and eleven people were present.”
Hitler was to make his first ”public” speech, following the main address by a
”Munich professor.” Harrer, nominal head of the party, objected. ”This
gentleman, who was certainly otherwise honest,” Hitler relates, ”just happened
to be convinced that I might be capable of doing certain things, but not of
speaking. I spoke for thirty minutes, and what before I had simply felt within
me, without in any way knowing it, was now proved by reality: I could speak!”81
Hitler claims the audience was ”electrified” by his oratory and its enthusiasm
proved by donations of three hundred marks, which temporarily relieved the party
of its financial worries. At the start of 1920, Hitler took over the party’s
propaganda, an activity to which he had given much thought since he had
observed its importance in the Socialist and Christian Social parties in Vienna.
He began immediately to organize by far the biggest meeting ever dreamt of by
the pitifully small party. It was to be held on February 24, 1920, in the
Fest-saal of the famous Hofbrauhaus, with a seating capacity of nearly two
thousand. Hitler’s fellow committeemen thought he was crazy. Harrer resigned in
protest and was replaced by Drexler, who remained skeptical. (Harrer also was opposed to
Hitler’s violent anti-Semitism and believed that Hitler was alienating the
working-class masses. These were the real reasons why he resigned.)
Hitler emphasizes that he personally conducted the preparations. Indeed the
event loomed so large for him that he concludes the first volume of Mein Kampf
with a description of it, because, he explains, it was the occasion when ”the
party burst the narrow bonds of a small club and for the first time exerted a
determining influence on the mightiest factor of our time: public opinion.”
Hitler was not even
scheduled as the main speaker, This role was reserved for a certain Dr.
Johannes Dingfelder, a homeopathic physician, a crackpot who contributed
articles on economics to the newspapers under the pseudonym of ”Germanus
Agricola,” and who was soon to be forgotten. His speech was greeted with
silence; then Hitler began to speak. As he describes the scene: There was a
hail of shouts, there were violent clashes in the hall, a handful of the most
faithful war comrades and other supporters battled with the disturbers . . .
Communists and Socialists . . . and only little by little were able to restore
order. I was able to go on speaking. After half an hour the applause slowly
began to drown out the screaming and shouting . . . When after nearly four
hours the hall began to empty I knew that now the principles of the movement which
could no longer be forgotten were moving out among the German people.
In the course of his
speech Hitler had enunciated for the first time the twentyfive points of the
program of the GermanWorkers’ Party. They had been hastily drawn up by Drexler,
Feder and Hitler. Most of the heckling at Hitler had really been directed
against parts of the program which he read out, but he nevertheless considered
all the points as having been adopted and they became the official program of
the Nazi Party when its name was altered on April 1, 1920, to the National
Socialist German Workers’ Party. Indeed, for tactical reasons Hitler in 1926
declared them ”unalterable.”
They are certainly a
hodgepodge, a catchall for the workers, the lower middle class and the
peasants, and most of them were forgotten by the time the party came to power.
A good many writers on Germany have ridiculed them, and the Nazi leader himself
was later to be embarrassed when reminded of some of them. Yet, as in the case
of the main principles laid down in Mein Kampf, the most important of them were
carried out by the Third Reich, with consequences disastrous to millions of
people, inside and outside of Germany.
The very first point in
the program demanded the union of all Germans in a Greater Germany. Was this
not exactly what Chancellor Hitler would insist on and get when he annexed
Austria and its six million Germans, when he took the Sudetenland with its
three million Germans? And was it not his demand for the return of German
Danzig and the other areas in Poland inhabited predominantly by Germans which
led to the German attack on Poland and brought on World War II? And cannot it
be added that it was one of the world’s misfortunes that so many in the
interwar years either ignored or laughed off the Nazi aims which Hitler had
taken the pains to put down in writing? Surely the anti-Semitic points of the
program promulgated in the Munich beer hall on the evening of February 24,
1920, constituted a dire warning. The Jews were to be denied office and even
citizenship in Germany and excluded from the press. All who had entered the
Reich after August 2, 1914, were to be expelled.
A good many paragraphs
of the party program were obviously merely a demagogic appeal to the mood of
the lower classes at a time when they were in bad straits and were sympathetic
to radical and even socialist slogans. Point 11, for example, demanded abolition
of incomes unearned by work; Point 12, the nationalization of trusts; Point 13,
the sharing with the state of profits from large industry; Point 14, the
abolishing of land rents and speculation in land. Point 18 demanded the death
penalty for traitors, usurers and profiteers, and Point 16, calling for the
maintenance of ”a sound middle class,” insisted on the communalization of
department stores and their lease at cheap rates to small traders. These
demands had been put in at the insistence of Drexler and Feder, who apparently
really believed in the ”socialism” of National Socialism. They were the ideas
which Hitler was to find embarrassing when the big industrialists and landlords
began to pour money into the party coffers, and of course nothing was ever done
about them.
There were, finally,
two points of the program which Hitler would carry out as soon as he became
Chancellor. Point 2 demanded the abrogation of the treaties of Versailles and
St. Germain. The last point, number 25, insisted on ”the creation of a strong
central power of the State.” This, like Points I and 2 demanding the union of
all Germans in the Reich and the abolition of the peace treaties, was put into
the program at Hitler’s insistence and it showed how even then, when his party
was hardly known outside Munich, he was casting his eyes on further horizons
even at the risk of losing popular support in his own bailiwick.
Separatism was very
strong in Bavaria at the time and the Bavarians, constantly at odds with the
central government in Berlin, were demanding less, not more, centralization, so
that Bavaria could rule itself. In fact, this was what it was doing at the
moment; Berlin’s writ had very little authority in the states. Hitler was
looking ahead for power not only in Bavaria but eventually in the Reich, and to
hold and exercise that power a dictatorial regime such as he already envisaged
needed to constitute itself as a strong centralized authority, doing away with
the semiautonomous states which under the Weimar Republic, as under the
Hohenzollern Empire, enjoyed their own parliaments and governments. One of his
first acts after January 30, 1933, was to swiftly carry out this final point in
the party’s program which so few had noticed or taken seriously. No one could
say he had not given ample warning, in writing, from the very beginning. Inflammatory
oratory and a radical, catchall program, important as they were for a fledgling
party out to attract attention and recruit mass support, were not enough, and
Hitler now turned his attention to providing more – much more.
The first signs of his
peculiar genius began to appear and make themselves felt. What the masses
needed, he thought, were not only ideas – a few simple ideas, that is, that he
could ceaselessly hammer through their skulls – but symbols that would win
their faith, pageantry and color that would arouse them, and acts of violence
and terror, which if successful, would attract adherents (were not most Germans
drawn to the strong?) and give them a sense of power over the weak.
In Vienna, as we have
seen, he was intrigued by what he called the ”infamous spiritual and physical
terror” which he thought was employed by the Social Democrats against their
political opponents.
Now he turned it to good purpose in his own anti-Socialist party. At first ex-servicemen were assigned to the meetings to silence hecklers and, if necessary, toss them out. In the summer of 1920, soon after the party had added ”National Socialist” to the name of the ”German Workers’ Party” and became the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, or N.S.D.A.P., as it was now to be familiarly known, Hitler organized a bunch of roughneck war veterans into ”strong-arm” squads, Ordnertruppe, under the command of Emil Maurice, an ex-convict and watchmaker. On October 5, 1921, after camouflaging themselves for a short time as the ”Gymnastic and Sports Division” of the party to escape suppression by the Berlin government, they were officially named the Sturmabteilung, from which the name S.A. came.
The storm troopers,
outfitted in brown uniforms, were recruited largely from the freebooters of the
free corps and placed under the command of Johann Ulrich Klintzich, an aide of
the notorious Captain Ehrhardt, who had recently been released from
imprisonment in connection with the murder of Erzberger. These uniformed
rowdies, not content to keep order at Nazi meetings, soon took to breaking up
those of the other parties. Once in 1921 Hitler personally led his storm
troopers in an attack on a meeting which was to be addressed by a” Bavarian
federalist by the name of Ballerstedt, who received a beating. For this Hitler
was sentenced to three months in jail, one of which he served. This was his first
experience in jail and he emerged from it somewhat of a martyr and more popular
than ever. ”It’s all right,” Hitler boasted to the police. ”We got what we
wanted. Ballerstedt did not speak.” As Hitler had told an audience some months
before, ”The National Socialist Movement will in the future ruthlessly prevent
– if necessary by force – all meetings or lectures that are likely to distract the
minds of our fellow countrymen.
In the summer of 1920
Hitler, the frustrated artist but now becoming the master propagandist, came up
with an inspiration which can only be described as a stroke of genius. What the
party lacked, he saw, was an emblem, a flag, a symbol, which would express what
the new organization stood for and appeal to the imagination of the masses,
who, as Hitler reasoned, must have some striking banner to follow and to fight
under. After much thought and innumerable attempts at various designs he hit
upon a flag with a red background and in the middle a white disk on which was
imprinted a black swastika. The hooked cross – the haken-kreuz – of the
swastika, borrowed though it was from more ancient times, was to become a
mighty and frightening symbol of the Nazi Party and ultimately of Nazi Germany.
Whence Hitler got the idea of using it for both the flag and the insignia of
the party he does not say in a lengthy dissertation on the subject in Mein
Kampf.
The hakenkreuz is as
old, almost, as man on the planet. It has been found in the ruins of Troy and
of Egypt and China. I myself have seen it in ancient Hindu and Buddhist relics
in India. In more recent times it showed up as an official emblem in such
Baltic states as Estonia and Finland, where the men of the German free corps
saw it during the fighting of 1918-19. The Ehrhardt Brigade had it painted on
their steel helmets when they entered Berlin during the Kapp putsch in 1920.
Hitler had undoubtedly seen it in Austria in the emblems of one or the other
anti-Semitic parties and perhaps he was struck by it when the Ehrhardt Brigade
came to Munich. He says that numerous designs suggested to him by party members
invariably included a swastika and that a ”dentist from Sternberg” actually
delivered a design for a flag that ”was not bad at all and quite close to my
own.” For the colors Hitler had of course rejected the black, red and gold of
the hated Weimar Republic. He declined to adopt the old imperial flag of red,
white and black, but he liked its colors not only because, he says, they form
”the most brilliant harmony in existence,” but because they were the colors of a
Germany for which he had fought. But they had to be given a new form, and so a
swastika was added.
Hitler reveled in his
unique creation. ”A symbol it really is!” he exclaims in Mein Kampf. ”In red we
see the social idea of the movement, in white the nationalist idea, in the
swastika the mission of the struggle for the victory of the Aryan man.”
Soon the swastika
armband was devised for the uniforms of the storm troopers and the party
members, and two years later Hitler designed the Nazi standards which would be
carried in the massive parades and would adorn the stages of the mass meetings.
Taken from old Roman designs, they consisted of a black metal swastika on top
with a silver wreath surmounted by an eagle, and, below, the initials NSDAP on
a metal rectangle from which hung cords with fringe and tassels, a square
swastika flag with ”Deutschland Erwache! (Germany Awake!)” emblazoned on it.
This may not have been
”art,” but it was propaganda of the highest order. The Nazis now had a symbol
which no other party could match. The hooked cross seemed to possess some
mystic power of its own, to beckon to action in a new direction the insecure
lower middle classes which had been floundering in the uncertainty of the first
chaotic postwar years. They began to flock under its banner.
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