Hitler: Ascent, 1889-1939 (17 page)

Karl Mayr was not only aware of Hitler’s anti-Semitic views, but seems to have shared them. On 10 September 1919, the captain told Hitler to answer a letter from a former course participant, Adolf Gemlich. Gemlich had asked for advice as to whether Jews represented “a national danger,” and if so, what approach the ruling Social Democrats were taking to this threat.
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Hitler’s extensive reply, dated 16 September, can be regarded with utter justification as
the
key document in his early biography. It featured all of the anti-Semitic prejudices he had acquired in the preceding months, including the idea that Jews were “a racial and not a religious community,” combined into one neurotic complex. As a race, Hitler argued, Jews were incapable of assimilating. “After thousands of years of inbreeding,” he wrote to Gemlich, “the Jew has generally preserved his race and its innate traits better than most of the people in whose midst he lives.” As a disciple of Gottfried Feder, Hitler saw boundless greed, the “dance around the golden calf,” as one of those characteristics. “His power is the power of money, which in the form of interest infinitely reproduces itself in his hands without any effort on his part,” Hitler instructed Gemlich. “Everything that inspires people to strive for something higher—be it religion, socialism or democracy—is for a Jew just a means serving the end of satisfying monetary greed and the desire to rule. His effect on other peoples is that of racial tuberculosis.”
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Hitler put on the airs of the coolly rational analyst, arguing that political anti-Semitism should not be based on outbursts of emotion, which would only lead to pogroms. In this regard, Hitler was taking sides in a debate between “cultural” and “pogrom” anti-Semitism unleashed by the Leipzig anti-Semite Heinrich Pudor in August 1919. Pudor had argued against combating Jews solely with laws and regulations, demanding that all means, including pogroms, should be used to break “Jewish tyranny.”
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The anti-Semitic German-Nationalist Protection and Defiance Federation had distanced itself from this “incitement to pogroms” and revived the demand of the Pan-Germanic League for Jews to be legally classified as foreigners.
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Hitler, too, preferred what he called “the anti-Semitism of reason” to “emotional anti-Semitism.” The former, he wrote to Gemlich, would necessarily lead to a “controlled legal fight against and eradication of Jewish advantages.” Only a “government of national strength,” he added, would be able to achieve this end. In his view, Germany’s current government was too dependent on Jews, who had been, after all, “the driving forces of revolution.”
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Hitler would never lose sight of the central goal of removing Jews from German society, and it was by no means the eccentric idea of a lone individual. There was a large amount of consensus among the reconstituted army, the Reichswehr, and the Freikorps that this was a desirable objective. Mayr agreed with Hitler’s “very clear explanations,” expressing reservations only about the mention of the “interest problem.” Interest, Mayr objected, was not a Jewish invention, but rather a fundamental institution of property and an element of healthy business acumen—one had to combat excesses but not, as Feder did, “throw the baby out with the bathwater.” On the other hand, Mayr completely agreed that “what people call the ruling social democracy was completely chained to Jewry.” He also reaffirmed that “all harmful elements—including the Jews—should be cast out or quarantined like pathogens.”
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On 12 September 1919, four days before he composed his letter to Gemlich, Hitler attended his first meeting of the German Workers’ Party (Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, DAP). One day, Hitler wrote in
Mein Kampf
, he had received orders from his superiors to investigate this political association.
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Historians have therefore often assumed that Hitler was essentially acting as an undercover agent at Mayr’s behest, but that view has been disproven. Mayr was already quite well informed about the DAP and the culture surrounding it and would have had no need for such information. And Hitler certainly did not spy on the organisation. As the attendance list makes clear, Hitler came not alone, but in the company of several comrades from the Lechfeld commando. Their presence there is more likely to have reflected Reichswehr Group Commando 4’s interest in gaining influence over the DAP.
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The party was one of many ethnically chauvinist, nationalist groups that evolved after 1918 from the Pan-Germanic League, the most influential right-wing agitation group of the pre-war and war years. The Thule Society in Munich was one of their organisational nuclei, and it was run by its chairman, the dubious figure of Baron Rudolf von Sebottendorff, like a secret lodge. Its members encompassed Munich bigwigs like the publisher Julius F. Lehmann, one of the founders of the Munich chapter of the Pan-Germanic League, and several lesser-known adherents of right-wing ethnic chauvinism who would later play a role in the development of Nazi ideology. They included Feder, the journalist Dietrich Eckart, and the students Hans Frank, Rudolf Hess and Alfred Rosenberg.
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The Thule Society provided a platform for counter-revolutionary activities. It used the swastika as its symbol and had its own newspaper, the
Münchener Beobachter
. It did not just restrict its appeal to middle-class circles, but also reached out to blue-collar workers. One of its founders, the sports journalist Karl Harrer, was charged with establishing contact with the locomotive mechanic Anton Drexler, who had made a name for himself during the war as a follower of the nationalist German Fatherland Party and who had founded the “Free Workers’ Committee for a Just Peace” in March 1918.
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Together Harrer and Drexler established a “political workers’ circle,” out of which the DAP was born on 5 January 1919. Drexler became the chairman of the Munich chapter, and Harrer took over the office of “Reich chairman”—a pompous title considering that the newly formed party had only thirty members and would remain a fringe group in the months to come.
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A grand total of forty-one people attended the DAP meeting at the Sterneckerbräu tavern on 12 September. Feder spoke on the topic “How and by what means can we get rid of capitalism?” Hitler was already familiar with Feder’s ideas, so he spent the time observing the audience. “The impression it made on me was neither good nor bad,” Hitler would write in
Mein Kampf
. “It was just another one of many newly formed associations.” After the lecture, when Hitler was about to leave, one of those in attendance, a Professor Baumann, vigorously argued that Bavaria should break away from Prussia and join the Republic of Austria. Hitler felt he had no choice but to speak out and rebuff the “educated gentleman” in no uncertain terms, whereupon Baumann left the tavern “with his tail between his legs.”
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But Hitler’s version of events does not square with reality—the name Baumann only appears on the attendance lists a couple of months later.
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It seems more likely that Hitler spoke, as he had in the Lechfeld camp, in an attempt to impress those around him. After the meeting, Drexler followed Hitler and gave him a copy of his pamphlet “My Political Awakening.” “That one’s got quite a mouth on him! We could use that!” the party chairman was supposed to have remarked.
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The next day Hitler read Anton Drexler’s pamphlet and recognised a number of details from his own “political awakening.” What seems to have impressed him most, though, was the idea of fusing nationalism and socialism, of freeing the working classes from the “false teachings” of Marxism and winning them over for the nationalist cause. To his surprise, Hitler wrote in
Mein Kampf
, a week later he received a postcard informing him that he had been accepted as a member of the DAP and inviting him to take part in the party’s next committee meeting. But what he experienced in a shabby tavern in Herrnstrasse exceeded his most pessimistic expectations: “It was clubby small-mindedness…Notwithstanding a couple of general ideas, they had nothing. No political programme, no pamphlet, nothing at all printed up, not even membership cards or one lousy stamp. All they had was faith and goodwill.”
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Why did Hitler join a political party that he himself described as a “mixture of a lodge and an early evening drinking club”?
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The rudimentary nature of the group seems to have been part of the appeal. “Such a ridiculously small entity with a couple of members,” Hitler wrote, “had not yet ossified into an ‘organisation’ but rather remained open to each individual finding something to do.”
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In other words, the DAP offered Hitler the opportunity to get ahead quickly and shape the party according to his own ideas.

With his characteristic fondness for superlatives, in
Mein Kampf
Hitler described his decision to join the DAP as the “most decisive resolution” of his life.
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Some have pointed out that as a member of Germany’s new armed forces, the Reichswehr, Hitler was prohibited from joining a political organisation, but this is incorrect: Hitler was, in fact, still a member of the old German army.
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Nor was he the seventh member of the DAP, as legend had it, but the seventh member of the committee Drexler had asked him to join as a general recruitment specialist. As of February 1920, the party began to maintain an alphabetical membership list, which began with the number 501 to give the impression that it had more members than it did; Hitler’s membership number was 555.
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From the very beginning Hitler’s goal was to turn what was a sect-like regulars’ table at a tavern into an effective political party. In October 1919 a DAP office was set up in a side room at the Sterneckerbräu. It contained a typewriter used to compose flyers for meetings. Hitler told later of distributing the flyers himself, and of the number of listeners gradually rising “from eleven to thirteen, then seventeen, twenty-three and thirty-four.”
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By the middle of the month, the party gambled on attracting a larger audience. When it published an ad in the
Münchener Beobachter
for an event in the city’s Hofbräuhaus, more than a hundred people turned up. Hitler was the second speaker of the evening. For the 30-year-old, his first public speech was a watershed, and his memories of it in
Mein Kampf
nearly repeat the passage about the episode in the Lechfeld camp: “I talked for thirty minutes, and what I used to sense internally without really knowing it was now confirmed by reality: I could speak well.”
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These lines were written five years after the fact, but they still communicate the euphoria Hitler must have felt when he discovered his great gift. The positive response of his audience gave him the validation that made up for the many disappointments of his early years. Max Amann no longer recognised Hitler when he ran into him around this time. “There was an unfamiliar fire burning in him,” Amann recalled after the war. “I was at two or three of his meetings…He yelled and indulged in histrionics. I’d never seen the like of it. But everyone said, ‘This fellow means what he says.’ He was drenched in sweat, completely wet. It was unbelievable.”
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More and more people began attending DAP events, and in no time, Hitler advanced to become the party’s star speaker. On 13 November 1919, before an audience of 130 in the Eberlbräu beer cellar, Hitler used his strongest language yet to condemn the Treaty of Versailles, which had been signed at the end of June. “As long as the earth has existed,” Hitler thundered, “no people have ever been forced to declare themselves willing to sign such a shameful treaty.” The person who wrote up a report of the event for the Munich police noted someone yelling out “The work of Jews!” at this point. Hitler combined his criticism of the treaty with scabrous personal attacks on Reich Finance Minister Matthias Erzberger, who had signed the armistice agreement in the woods of Compiègne on 11 November 1918. Hitler bellowed that he was certain that “the man who had hung such a treaty around our necks would not be in his post for much longer and would not even be a schoolteacher in Buttenhausen (cry from the audience: He’ll get it like Eisner).”
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Indeed, Erzberger would be forced by right-wing nationalists to resign in 1920, and he would be murdered in 1921. The
Münchener Beobachter
reported that “repeated frenetic applause greeted Hitler’s graceful speech.”
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Hitler’s rise within the DAP did not escape the notice of the Reichswehr. In late October 1919 a position as an assistant to the educational officer was created for him in the staff of the 41st Rifleman’s Regiment at Prinz Arnulf Garrison. Hitler later described himself as an “educational officer,” which was impossible since as a private he would never have been allowed to hold an officer’s position.
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While maintaining his connection to Karl Mayr in the intelligence department of the Group Commando, he increasingly shifted his focus to propaganda activities for the DAP. On 10 December, he spoke in the Deutsches Reich restaurant. The title of his talk was “Germany as it faces its worst humiliation.” He made no bones about who he considered responsible for military defeat and revolution: “the Jews, who alone are profiting from it and don’t shy away from inciting civil war with their rabble-rousing and base agitation.” Hitler insisted on the idea of “Germany for Germans!”
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He was even more outspoken at a meeting on 16 January 1920. “We refuse to tolerate our destiny being ruled by a foreign race,” Hitler thundered. “We demand a stop to Jewish immigration.”
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Any intimation that Hitler moderated his anti-Semitism at the beginning of his political career is completely mistaken. From the very start, he appeared as a radical anti-Semite—and this was precisely why he seems to have appealed to his audience. The anti-Semitism boiling over in Munich in the autumn of 1919 ensured that Hitler’s speeches would resonate with his listeners.