Hitler: Ascent, 1889-1939 (18 page)

DAP Reich Chairman Harrer viewed Hitler’s aggressive public stance with unease. He would have preferred to continue running the party as a secret sect like the Thule Society. But in December 1919, using a new set of rules that tied down the seven-man party committee to certain principles, Hitler succeeded in stripping Harrer of practically all his power.
⁸⁰
Harrer resigned from his post on 5 January 1920, and together with Anton Drexler, who succeeded Harrer, Hitler began to work on a party programme to be announced at the next mass meeting in February 1920. The twenty-five points the two men hammered out in Drexler’s apartment on Burghausener Strasse 6 contained no original ideas. On the contrary, they were a cross section of ideas in currency among ethnic-chauvinist and anti-Semitic circles at the time. At the top of the agenda (Point 1) was the demand for all ethnic Germans to be united within a greater Germany. This was followed by demands for the revocation of the Treaty of Versailles (Point 2) and the return of Germany’s colonies (Point 3). Point 4 clearly expressed the party’s anti-Semitic orientation, reading “Only an ethnic comrade [
Volksgenosse
] can be a citizen. Only someone who is of German blood, irrespective of religion, can be an ethnic comrade. Thus no Jew can be an ethnic comrade.” This was followed by the demands that Jews in Germany be treated as foreigners under the law (Point 5) and that all further Jewish immigration be halted (Point 8).

Gottfried Feder’s influence made itself felt in demands for “the eradication of work-free, effortless income” (Point 11) and the “confiscation of all wartime profits without exception” (Point 12). Demands for the nationalisation of big business, for profit-sharing and for an expansion of the pension system (Points 13–15) were designed to appeal to the working classes. A promise to communalise large department stores (Point 16) was aimed at the middle classes, and the prospect of land reform (Point 17) at farmers. The programme also contained the slogans “communal welfare comes before selfishness” (Point 24) and “strengthening of central authority” (Point 25), combined with the pledge to fight against “the corrupting parliamentary system” (Point 6). As a whole the programme left no doubt that the aim was to get rid of the democracy of the young Weimar Republic and create an authoritarian government for an ethnic community, which would no longer have any room for Jews.
⁸¹

Drexler and Hitler chose the Hofbräuhaus as the location for announcing this programme, and the DAP advertised the event with garish red posters. Initial fears that not enough people would show up proved to be unfounded. On the evening of 24 February 1920, around 2,000 people squeezed into the Hofbräuhaus’s main first-floor hall. Hitler was the second speaker, but he was the one who really got the crowd whipped up with his attacks on the Treaty of Versailles, Erzberger and, above all, the Jews. The police transcript of the event read: “First chuck the guilty ones, the Jews, out and then we’ll purify ourselves. (Enthusiastic applause.) Monetary fines are no use against the crimes of fencing and usury. (Beatings! Hangings!) How shall we protect our fellow human beings against this band of bloodsuckers? (Hang them!)”
⁸²

Hitler then read out the individual points of the party manifesto, whereupon numerous opponents from the political Left, who were also in attendance, raised their voices in protest. The police observer noted: “There was often great tumult and I was convinced that fights were going to break out at any moment.”
⁸³
Party legend later romanticised the meeting of 24 February into a heroic, foundational act of the Nazi movement. Hitler himself laid the groundwork for this, ending the first volume of
Mein Kampf
with the words: “A fire was sparked, from whose embers the sword would necessarily come which would restore freedom to the German Siegfried and life to the German nation…The hall gradually emptied. The movement was under way.”
⁸⁴
The mainstream Munich press paid little attention to the event: the DAP, which would rename itself the NSDAP on 24 February 1920, was still too insignificant. The thirty-seven-line report on the meeting in the
Münchener Neueste Nachrichten
newspaper failed to mention Hitler by name. Even the
Völkischer Beobachter
(as the
Münchener Beobachter
had been known since late 1919) restricted itself to a brief note.
⁸⁵

On 31 March 1920, Hitler was discharged from the military, but he would continue to remain close to the milieu of the Reichswehr, to which he was indebted for crucial help in starting his political career.
⁸⁶
Over the course of just a few months, the unknown private had made himself irreplaceable as the (NS)DAP’s most effective speaker. This was the first step of his meteoric rise. Hitler’s task now was to expand the party’s base and establish himself at its head. Supported by powerful patrons, the beer-cellar demagogue was about to become a public attraction—in Munich and beyond.

5

The King of Munich

“It was a wonderful time,” Hitler recalled in one of his monologues. “In my memory, it was the best time of all.”
¹
Even long after he had become Reich chancellor, Hitler enjoyed thinking back to the early years of the NSDAP in Munich. He regarded them as the party’s heroic period, the “time of struggle,” in which he and his followers had come together as an oath-bound community and overcome monsters of all varieties. “Our old National Socialists were something wonderful,” Hitler reminisced. “Back then you had little to gain by being in the party and everything to lose.”
²
Hitler largely credited himself with turning the NSDAP from a tiny sect into a player in Bavarian politics within four years. As a “complete unknown,” he boasted, he had set out to “conquer a nation.”
³
Fifteen years later, he would achieve his goal. Nonetheless, the German dictator never forgot that the Bavarian capital had been the springboard for his astonishing career, and he showed his gratitude in August 1935 by granting Munich the title “capital of the movement.”
⁴

Without Hitler, the rise of National Socialism would have been unthinkable. In his absence, the party would have remained one of many ethnic-chauvinist groups on the right of the political spectrum. Nonetheless, the special conditions of the immediate post-war years in both Bavaria and the German Reich were also crucial: without the explosive mixture of economic misery, social instability and collective trauma, the populist agitator Hitler would never have been able to work his way out of anonymity to become a famous politician. The circumstances at the time played into Hitler’s hands, and he was more skilful and unscrupulous about using them than any of his rivals on the nationalist far right.

In March 1920, right-wing opponents of democracy under the leadership of the East Prussian civil servant Wolfgang Kapp and the commander of Reichswehr Group Commando 1 in Berlin, General Baron Walther von Lüttwitz, made the first attempt to topple the Weimar Republic. The putsch collapsed within a few days after workers brought public life to a standstill with a powerful general strike, but in Bavaria counter-revolutionary forces thought the time was ripe to force the government under Johannes Hoffmann to resign. On 16 March, the Landtag elected the government president of Upper Bavaria, Gustav von Kahr, the new Bavarian state president.
⁵

Under Kahr, politics lurched dramatically to the right. Kahr was an outspoken monarchist whose express aim was to turn Bavaria into a “cell of order” in the Reich. He immediately issued an edict to stem the immigration of “Eastern Jews” to Bavaria, with which the government bent to the will of the ethnic-chauvinistic right and encouraged anti-Semitic currents within the populace.
⁶
In the months that followed, Munich became an Eldorado for opponents of the Weimar Republic throughout Germany. Corvette Captain Hermann Ehrhardt, whose naval brigade had formed the military backbone of the Kapp–Lüttwitz putsch and who was wanted by the police, found refuge there, and in his new headquarters in Munich’s Franz-Josef-Strasse, he and some like-minded comrades founded a new secret society, “Organisation Consul,” whose purpose was to murder leading representatives of the Weimar Republic. On 9 June 1921 the USPD faction leader in the Bavarian Landtag, Karl Gareis, became their first victim. On 26 August 1921, the Centre Party politician and the ex-Reich Finance Minister Matthias Erzberger was also killed, and the murder of Foreign Minister Walther Rathenau followed on 24 June 1922. Bogislaw von Selchow, who saw this racist movement as an “elementary, new force” in Germany, laid part of the blame for Rathenau’s murder with the Jewish foreign minister himself. “One should not stir up the embers within the German people in such turbulent times,” he wrote, “by having a member of a foreign race represent them abroad.”
⁷
This was not an isolated voice. The general tenor within nationalist circles was no different.

In the summer of 1920, the man who had pulled the strings behind the failed putsch, the retired general Erich Ludendorff, also moved to Munich. His residence, a luxurious villa in the south of the city, now became a focal point for counter-revolutionary activities throughout Bavaria.
⁸
Tolerated by the authorities, countless paramilitary organisations were permitted to lead their shady existences in the southern German state, including the citizens’ militias that had been founded after the demise of the Bavarian Soviet Republic and soon numbered 300,000 men. The presence of this counter-revolutionary private army had enormous influence on everyday life and political culture in Munich in the early 1920s. “They institutionalised Bavaria’s rejection of the Versailles settlement and its hatred for the Weimar Republic,” writes the historian David Clay Large. “Above all, they despised Berlin as Germany’s new mecca of left-wing politics, multiethnic society, and avant-garde culture.”
⁹

Extremists who wanted to topple the state were encouraged by Munich Police President Ernst Pöhner and the director of Political Division VI, Wilhelm Frick, who looked the other way when confronted with the assassinations carried out by Organisation Consul. Hitler and the NSDAP also enjoyed the protection of these two officials right from the start. They had held a “protective hand” over the National Socialist Party and Hitler, Frick testified at the trial after the Beer Hall Putsch of 1923, because they were seen as the “seed of renewal in Germany.”
¹⁰
Hitler realised how much he owed these early supporters. In
Mein Kampf
, he praised Pöhner and Frick for being “Germans first and civil servants second.”
¹¹
In late March 1942, Hitler would compliment Frick as someone who had “always behaved beyond reproach, helpfully pointed the way and enabled the party to maximise its effect.”
¹²

Already in the first year of its existence, the NSDAP became the most active of the ethnic-chauvinist groups in Munich. Hardly a week passed without a meeting or a rally. Since the quantum leap of 24 February 1920, party events were now held at the largest beer halls: the Hofbräuhaus, the Bürgerbräukeller, the Kindlkeller and the Hackerbräukeller. Audience sizes ranged from 800 to 2,500—in the second half of 1920, levels of 3,000 were reached. In December 1920, the Bavarian District Defence Commando VII concluded with satisfaction that “the lively activity of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party in arranging meetings…has a beneficial, patriotic effect.”
¹³
On 3 February 1921, the NSDAP staged their first event in the Zirkus Krone on Marsstrasse, at the time the largest covered arena in Munich. More than 6,000 people gathered there to hear Hitler speak. “The hall lay in front of me like a gigantic shell,” he recalled in
Mein Kampf
. “After the first hour, ever louder eruptions of spontaneous applause were beginning to interrupt me. After two hours they ebbed away again and the consecrated silence fell that I later experienced over and over in this space…For the first time, we left the realms of an ordinary, everyday party.”
¹⁴

It was Hitler who drew in the crowds week after week. In 1920 alone, he appeared as the main speaker twenty-one times, and he served as a member of panel discussions on numerous other occasions. He also appeared in the Bavarian countryside, as the NSDAP sought to expand its appeal beyond Munich: in the early autumn of 1920, he also made four speeches during the Austrian election campaign. Taken together, it was a gruelling workload.
¹⁵
Hitler’s main priority at this point was to attract attention to his still relatively small party and secure its place in the public sphere. “Who cares whether they laugh at us or insult us, treating us as fools or criminals?” Hitler wrote in
Mein Kampf
. “The point is that they talk about us and constantly think about us.”
¹⁶
The better known the party became, the more its membership rolls swelled—from 190 members in January 1920 to 675 in May, and from 2,500 in January 1921 to 3,300 in August. Hitler was optimistic. There was no reason “to doubt the party’s rise because of its small size at present,” he told the chairman of the recently formed local Nazi chapter in Hanover, Gustav Seifert, in October 1921.
¹⁷