Hitler: Ascent, 1889-1939 (21 page)

The two men developed a close, almost symbiotic relationship. As Joachim Fest noted, Eckart was “the first person from an educated, upper-middle-class background whose presence Hitler could tolerate without his deep-seated complexes breaking out.”
⁷⁸
Eckart helped the 30-year-old, who was eager to learn and still malleable, write his first print articles. “Stylistically I was still an infant,” Hitler would later admit.
⁷⁹
Eckart also encouraged his anti-Semitic convictions and opened the doors to wealthy Munich personages. Last but not least, he supported Hitler and the NSDAP financially. In December 1920, Eckart allowed the party to use his house and property as security for a 60,000-mark Reichswehr fund loan in order to acquire the
Völkischer Beobachter
.
⁸⁰
Hitler was effusive in his expressions of gratitude: “Without your helpful intervention, this would not have worked. Indeed, I believe that our prospects of acquiring a newspaper would have been postponed for many months. I am so attached to the movement in body and soul that you can hardly imagine how happy I am at achieving a goal we have desired for so long.”
⁸¹
In October 1921, after he had been made editor-in-chief of the
Völkischer Beobachter
, Eckart reciprocated with a copy of his
Peer Gynt
translation dedicated to his “dear friend” Adolf Hitler.
⁸²

Their relationship dramatically cooled in the course of 1922, however. The more confident and composed Hitler became, the less need he had for a political mentor. In March 1923, Hitler transferred the editorship of the
Völkischer Beobachter
to Alfred Rosenberg
.
Nonetheless, Hitler maintained fond memories of his friend, who died of a heart attack in late December 1923. The second volume of
Mein Kampf
concludes with an elegy to the man, “who was one of the best and who devoted his life to awakening his and our people with his writing, his thinking and, finally, his deeds.”
⁸³
Years later, Hitler confided to his secretary Christa Schroeder that he had never again found a friend with whom he felt so deeply connected in “a harmony of thinking and feeling.” His friendship with Eckart was “one of the best things he had experienced in the 1920s.”
⁸⁴
In his monologues, Hitler deemed Eckart’s services “imperishable,” honouring him as “a guiding light of the early National Socialist movement.”
⁸⁵

Dietrich Eckart was the man who introduced Hitler to Alfred Rosenberg. Born in 1893 in Russian Reval (today’s Tallinn) as the son of a merchant, Rosenberg completed a degree in architecture in Moscow during the war. In November 1918 he moved to Munich, where he became part of the so-called “Baltic Mafia,” alongside Riga-born Max Erwin von Scheubner-Richter and the illustrator of chauvinistic pamphlets Otto von Kursell.
⁸⁶
In Moscow Rosenberg had experienced the Russian Revolution first-hand and considered it the work of Jews. The first article he wrote for Eckart’s
Auf gut deutsch
bore the headline “The Russian-Jewish Revolution.” One of his first works,
Russia’s Gravediggers
, began with a passage programmatically entitled “Jewish Bolshevism” which clearly defined the enemy with which Rosenberg was obsessed and which he continued to attack in countless publications. His 1922 book
Plague in Russia
explicitly aimed at opening his contemporaries’ eyes to the gruesomeness of the “Jewish-Bolshevik experiment.”

Rosenberg’s nightmare scenarios had a huge impact on Hitler. Beginning in the summer of 1920, Hitler’s speeches clearly reveal that he began to see revolutionary Russia through the lens of Rosenberg’s writings and with reference to the
idée fixe
of a global Jewish conspiracy. “Russia has been completely abandoned to starvation and misery,” Hitler proclaimed in June 1920, “and no one is to blame but the Jews.” By the end of that month, Hitler was arguing that Bolshevism actually brought about the opposite of what it promised: “Those who are on top in Russia are not the workers but, without exception, Hebrews.” Hitler spoke of a “Jewish dictatorship” and a “Moscow Jew government” sucking the life out of the Russian people and called on the NSDAP to become “a battering ram of German character” against the “dirty flood of Jewish Bolshevism.”
⁸⁷
Hitler’s anti-Semitism had initially contained a strain of anti-capitalism. Now it acquired an additional, anti-Bolshevist dimension. With that, the later German dictator’s world view was essentially complete.

Along with Eckart and Rosenberg, the university student Rudolf Hess was a party member of the first hour, but he did not provide political advice or ideological slogans: he was one of the still-rare breed of Hitler disciples. Born in 1894 in Alexandria as the son of a wealthy German merchant, Hess had also volunteered for military service in 1914 and experienced the end of the war as a pilot in a fighting squadron on the Western Front. Typically for his generation, Hess had trouble readjusting to civilian life. He joined the Thule Society and helped overthrow the Bavarian Soviet Republic as part of Franz Ritter von Epp’s Freikorps. He, too, met Hitler through Eckart, and in early June 1920 he became a member of the NSDAP. While still enrolled at the University of Munich, where he studied with, among others, the professor of geography and originator of geopolitics, Karl Haushofer, he became one of Hitler’s most devoted followers. “I spend nearly every day with Hitler,” he told his parents in September 1920, and the following April he wrote to his cousin: “Hitler…has become a dear friend. A splendid person!…He comes from a humble background and has acquired a vast knowledge on his own, which I greatly admire.” Hess described what attracted him to Hitler’s political programme as follows: “His fundamental idea is to build a bridge between various classes of the people and to establish socialism on a national basis. That of course automatically includes battling against Jewry.”
⁸⁸

In May 1921, Hess accompanied Hitler as an NSDAP delegation was invited to exchange ideas with President von Kahr—a clear signal that the Bavarian government was beginning to take the National Socialists seriously as a political force. Hitler declared that his only mission was “to convert radical workers to a nationalist frame of mind” and asked that he be allowed to continue his work “undisturbed.” Kahr was impressed. “These warmly made and upstanding, truthful declarations,” the president wrote in his unpublished memoirs, made an “excellent impression.”
⁸⁹
After that meeting, without Hitler’s knowledge, Hess wrote a long letter to Kahr in which he praised the NSDAP’s propagandist as someone who combined “a rare sensitivity for the public mood, keen political instincts and enormous strength of will.” That, Hess explained, was why Hitler had so quickly become “an equally feared and respected personality in political battles and a man whose power extended much further than the public suspects.” Hess concluded his letter with the words: “He is a rare, scrupulously honourable and pure character, full of deeply felt goodness: he is religious and a good Catholic. He has only one goal: the welfare of the country.”
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—

Not all of the leading members of the NSDAP shared Hess’s worshipful enthusiasm. For many, Hitler’s industriousness was a thorn in their sides. Some were jealous, while others feared that his activism and the blunt nature of his propaganda were leading the party down a political dead end. In the spring of 1921, tension increased within the leadership. The main issue was the NSDAP’s efforts to merge with like-minded ethnic-chauvinist parties and groups. One of the first targets was the German Socialist Party (Deutsche Sozialistische Partei, or DSP) which had been founded, also under the patronage of the Thule Society, by the mechanical engineer Alfred Brunner. Its programme scarcely differed from that of the NSDAP. The DSP also advocated the idea of a nationalist socialism to combat “Jewish” capitalism, although their anti-Semitism was less aggressive and their activity extended to northern Germany instead of being virtually restricted to Munich and Bavaria. By mid-1920 the DSP had 35 local chapters with 2,000 members. Like the NSDAP, it was little more than a fringe party on the far right; it seemed only logical for the two to join forces.
⁹¹

Previously, the NSDAP had insisted on maintaining its independence and had rebuffed all attempts by the DSP to make contact. Nonetheless, in early August 1920, at a conference of national socialists from Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia in Salzburg, an agreement seemed to be in the offing. A coordination committee was established to pave the way for the merger. Hitler, who spoke at Salzburg, had apparently succumbed to the enthusiasm for unity. In any case, he carried with him a card signed by party chairman Drexler, which proudly announced “the unification of all national socialists in the German-language realm.”
⁹²
But the NSDAP’s propagandist quickly distanced himself from the Salzburg agreements. In January 1921, he summarised his reasons for opposing the fusion of the NSDAP with the DSP. By founding so many local chapters, Hitler argued, the DSP had “so splintered its strength that it’s everywhere and nowhere at once.” He also criticised it “for losing itself in the democratic principle,” because the party had been willing to participate in parliamentary elections. By contrast Hitler demanded that the NSDAP rely on radical, anti-parliamentarian mass propaganda.
⁹³

Not all of the NSDAP’s leaders agreed. Indeed, the majority felt that the prospects for the merger with the DSP had not been exhausted and shared the DSP’s frustration with “the fanatic upstart” who was trying to put the brakes on the fusion of the two parties.
⁹⁴
In late March 1921, Drexler made a surprise appearance at the DSP party conference in the town of Zeitz and provisionally agreed to sanction a merger. The leadership of the unified party would move to Berlin. Hitler, who had not been consulted, was outraged, threatening to resign from the party if the plan was carried out. He succeeded in postponing the decision, but the issue remained up in the air. Indeed, in the spring of 1921, Hitler was neither able nor willing to take the drastic steps needed to resolve it. His behaviour during this period bears all the hallmarks of uncertainty and indecisiveness. He interpreted the unfamiliar resistance from the party leadership, including Drexler, as a personal attack and was correspondingly thin-skinned. “As a man who still mistrusted himself and his prospects, he was full of inferiority complexes towards all those who had already become something or were about to surpass him,” former Freikorps leader Gerhard Rossbach recalled. “He was subservient and uncertain, often crude when he felt he was being curtailed.”
⁹⁵

Hitler opposed all attempts to fuse ethnic-nationalist parties because he was afraid of losing the starring role his rhetorical skills had earned him in the NSDAP. Soon he also felt threatened from another quarter, the German Works Association, which was founded in March 1921 by the Augsburg University lecturer Otto Dickel. Dickel had created a stir in far-right circles with his book
The Resurrection of the West
, a reply to Oswald Spengler’s
The Decline of the West
.
⁹⁶
In June 1921, while Hitler was in Berlin with Eckart trying to raise funds for the chronically underfunded NSDAP, the party invited Dickel to hold a lecture in the Hofbräuhaus, the site of Hitler’s greatest triumphs. Here Dickel met with an enthusiastic response, and a subsequent party newsletter welcomed the arrival of another “popular and powerful speaker.”
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A party meeting was arranged in Augsburg for 10 July to discuss merging with both the Nuremberg chapter of the DSP and Dickel’s German Works Association. Hitler got wind of the discussion while still in Berlin and arrived in Augsburg in advance of the NSDAP delegation and threatened to prevent “any form of unification.” During the three hours of discussions, Hitler repeatedly exploded in anger, ultimately storming out of the hall in a rage, much to the embarrassment of his party comrades. He resigned from the NSDAP the following day.
⁹⁸

Hitler’s emotional reaction is understandable: he saw his political existence threatened. The fact that a lecturer with a doctorate seemed about to steal his thunder must have summoned up all of the hatred for teachers and professors he had accumulated in Linz and Vienna. In a letter of 5 January 1922 to the tiny NSDAP chapter in Hanover, Hitler would express his “profound satisfaction” that the group had eventually rebuffed Dickel and his organisation: “Your negative opinion of our so-called educated people, who take every idiot down this precarious path, is unfortunately all too justified…A Dr. Dickel who is simultaneously a Works Association mouthpiece and a scion of the West is of no importance to us. On the other hand, a Dickel who claims to be a National Socialist, if only in his mind, is an enemy and needs to be combated.”
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Hitler’s reaction to his perceived competition presaged how he would later behave in crisis situations.
¹⁰⁰
He was risking everything. After humming and hawing for months about fundamental decisions, he suddenly issued an “all or nothing” ultimatum—in the hope that he would be able to blackmail the party leadership. It is possible that Hitler’s political career could have ended abruptly in June 1921, had Eckart not intervened. Anton Drexler, who was torn between his distaste for Hitler’s prima donna posturing and his fear of losing his biggest public draw, eventually relented and asked Hitler under what circumstances he would return to the party.