Hitler: Ascent, 1889-1939 (22 page)

That gave Hitler the chance to turn the situation to his advantage in one fell swoop, and he seized the opportunity. On 14 July, he told the party committee that he would only rejoin the organisation if six conditions were “strictly fulfilled.” Hitler demanded that an extraordinary party conference be called within a week, at which he would put himself forward as “chairman with dictatorial powers of responsibility,” in order to carry out, with the help of a newly formed action committee, “a ruthless cleansing of the party of all those elements that have intruded upon it.” He also demanded that Munich be irrevocably declared the “seat of the movement,” that no changes in the name of the party and its programme be permitted for the span of six years, and that all efforts to merge with other parties cease immediately. Those who wanted to cooperate with the NSDAP would have to join it, negotiations would require Hitler’s personal approval, and he alone would choose the negotiators. Never again did Hitler want to be overruled and isolated by the majority of the party leadership. His sixth and final demand was that the NSDAP boycott a meeting planned for August in Linz that was intended as a follow-up to the conference in Salzburg the year before.
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Hitler claimed that he was not making his demands because he was thirsty for power, but because without “iron leadership” the NSDAP would soon cease to be a party fighting for national socialism. In reality of course, Hitler was clearly demonstrating that side of his personality which had already emerged when he booted Karl Harrer out of the DAP in January 1920. Hitler’s goal was unlimited power and that meant, first of all, achieving an unrestricted leadership role within his own party.

The majority of the committee members acceded to Hitler’s demands because they thought the party could not do without him. In recognition of his “enormous knowledge, his sacrifices for and contributions to the growth of the movement and his rare rhetorical gift,” the committee was willing to grant him dictatorial powers. It was “utterly delighted” that Hitler wanted to take over the position of chairman, which Drexler had repeatedly offered him.
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On 26 July, Hitler rejoined the NSDAP as member number 3,680.

Hitler’s adversaries did not give up without a fight, however. On the morning of 29 July, the day of the extraordinary party conference, they circulated a pamphlet entitled “Adolf Hitler—Traitor?” It argued that Hitler’s lust for power and personal ambition had seduced him into sowing “dissent and fragmentation” within the party, playing into the hands of “Jewry and its helpers.” It accused Hitler of trying to use the party as a springboard for corrupt purposes and “of trying to grab sole power for himself so that he could push the party in a completely different direction when the moment was right.” Hitler was a “demagogue,” whose only talent was his speaking ability. He also fought in “true Jewish fashion” by twisting the facts. The pamphlet urged party members to resist “this interloping megalomaniac and bigmouth.”
¹⁰³
A poster made by the anti-Hitler faction but prohibited by the Munich police contained the words: “The tyrant must be deposed. And we will not rest until we’ve seen the last of ‘His Majesty Adolf I,’ the current ‘King of Munich.’ ”
¹⁰⁴
The
Münchener Post
gleefully reprinted the pamphlet.

Hitler’s adversaries played right into his hands. When he took to the stage of the Hofbräuhaus that night to excoriate the anonymous authors of the pamphlet, Hitler was applauded “almost without end.” He said he had filed legal charges against his opponents and denied—falsely—that he had ever sought to become party chairman, claiming that he had only given in to a request by Drexler.
¹⁰⁵
The 554 party members in attendance unanimously voted Hitler into that position. Drexler was shunted off into the office of honorary chairman. They also approved Hitler’s amendments to the party charter, which gave the chairman “directorial responsibility,” thereby cementing Hitler’s claim to absolute leadership.
¹⁰⁶

The “Führer party” was born, as was the stylised image of Hitler as the leader of the movement. “No one could have served a cause…more selflessly, sacrificially, passionately and honestly,” Dietrich Eckart wrote in the
Völkischer Beobachter
on 4 August. Hitler’s “iron fist,” he gushed, had put an end to the “spectre” haunting the party. “What else is needed to show that he deserves our trust and to what extent?” Eckart asked.
¹⁰⁷
Hess also took Hitler’s critics to task: “Can you really be so blind as not to see that this man alone has the leadership personality enabling him to wage the battle? Do you really think that the masses would pack Zirkus Krone without him?”
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—

A few days after grabbing party power, Hitler founded his own paramilitary organisation: the SA. The beginnings of the National Socialist storm troopers lie in 1920, when the DAP/NSDAP began to organise security for their meetings to prevent them from being disrupted by “Marxist hecklers.” Later that year the security forces became the NSDAP’s “gymnastics and sports division.” The growth of the organisation was accelerated by the dissolution of the Bavarian citizens’ militias, to which President von Kahr had been forced to agree by the Allies and the Reich government. Most of the militiamen joined “patriotic” associations like the League of Bavaria and the Reich, which considered themselves home-front defence organisations, but some also went into the Nazi Party’s Security Service. Now, in early August 1921, Hitler ordered that the “gymnastics and sports division” be transformed into the party’s battle-ready army. Its mission was to “put its strength as a battering ram at the disposal of the movement” and to “embody the idea of a free people defending itself.”
¹⁰⁹

A key figure in this development was Reichswehr Captain Ernst Röhm. Born in 1887 as the son of a railway official, Röhm was a typical front-line officer who had trouble adjusting to civilian life after 1918. He had been wounded three times during the war: a bit of shrapnel had taken off half his nose, and his cheek bore the scars of a grazing shot. His dismay at Germany’s defeat and the left-wing revolution led him to align himself with the counter-revolutionary forces; like Hess he was one of the activists of the Epp Freikorps. In late 1919, he became member number 623 of the DAP and he soon came into close contact with Hitler: he was one of the few party comrades allowed to address Hitler informally after he became Führer.

Röhm replaced Mayr as Hitler’s most important connection to the Reichswehr. As a staff officer in the Epp Brigade, as the Freikorps was known after it had been absorbed into the regular military, he supplied the citizens’ militias with weapons, ammunition and military hardware, and after the militias were disbanded, he ensured that these were not turned over to the Allies. Röhm thus had a secret arsenal at his disposal, which could be distributed as needed to paramilitary organisations.
¹¹⁰
He now played a central role in transforming the
Sturmabteilung
(SA), as it became known in September 1921, into precisely such an organisation. “You too shall be trained as a storm troop,” Hitler told his SA men in October 1921. “We must be strong not only in words, but in deeds against our enemy, the Jew.”
¹¹¹
Starting in the autumn of 1921, the SA not only protected NSDAP events but began disrupting those of the Nazis’ political enemies and beating up Jews on the streets.
¹¹²
Even years later, Hitler still felt compelled to defend the SA’s use of violence. Politics back then was “made on the street,” he proclaimed in one of his monologues as Führer, saying that he had explicitly sought out people with no scruples about behaving brutally.
¹¹³

The SA spread fear and terror throughout Munich. In mid-September 1921, they broke up a meeting of the Bavaria League in the Löwenbräukeller, battering the organisation’s leader, engineer Otto Ballerstedt, and throwing him off the stage so that his head started bleeding.
¹¹⁴
That had legal consequences. In January 1922, Hitler was sentenced to three months in Stadelheim prison for inciting public violence, although he only ended up serving a little more than a month, from 24 June to 27 July. “At least he has a cell to himself,” Hess reported. “He can work, make his own food, receive visitors twice a week…and read newspapers. The peace and quiet is good for his nerves and his voice.”
¹¹⁵

In September 1921 Gustav von Kahr resigned as president after deputies in the Bavarian Landtag, including those from his own party, the BVP, withdrew their support for him. Police President Pöhner, one of Hitler’s most determined supporters, also left office. Under Kahr’s successor, Count Hugo Lerchenfeld-Köfering, relations between Berlin and Munich improved somewhat, and the Munich police began to pay more attention to the activities of the NSDAP and the SA. In late October, Hitler was summoned and told that he could face deportation from Bavaria if he did not keep his men under control. He pledged “to do everything in his power to head off unrest.”
¹¹⁶
That was an empty promise. On 4 November, a pitched battle took place in the Hofbräuhaus, with the SA brutally throwing protestors, largely left-wing workers, out of the beer hall. “My heart almost cries out with joy when I recall the old battle experiences,” Hitler wrote in
Mein Kampf
.
¹¹⁷
Nazi propaganda later transformed “the Battle of the Hofbräuhaus” into a trial by fire for the SA. In any case, the violence paid off. The NSDAP’s political enemies were intimidated, and SA gangs unabashedly roamed Munich’s streets. “We’ll beat our way to the top” was one of their slogans.
¹¹⁸
Even Reich President Friedrich Ebert got a taste of the Nazis’ domination of Munich’s public spaces when he paid an official visit to the Bavarian capital on 12 and 13 June 1922. No sooner had he arrived at the train station than he was yelled and spat at. The British consul general reported that Ebert was booed wherever he went and that there was no state guard or raising of flags in his honour.
¹¹⁹

In the wake of Walther Rathenau’s murder on 24 June 1922, relations between Berlin and Munich deteriorated again. One day after it had been passed by the Reichstag, the Bavarian government lifted Ebert’s Law on the Protection of the Republic, which allowed the state to ban organisations that called for political assassinations or tried to overthrow democracy. In its stead, a new ordinance was proclaimed, whose most important provision was that Bavarian criminals should not be brought up in front of the new Republic Criminal Court in Leipzig. Still Bavaria’s far-right-wing associations thought that Munich had made too many concessions to Berlin, and on 16 August they staged a major demonstration on Munich’s Königsplatz. The NSDAP marched to it in closed-rank formation, led by the SA. Hitler, the event’s second speaker, pilloried the attempt to “subject Bavaria to Berlin’s course” and demanded an “extraordinary law…against international exploitation and usury.”
¹²⁰
By then it was abundantly clear that the beer-cellar rabble-rouser and his movement could no longer be ignored as a major player on the political Right.

The growing Nazi influence was even more apparent at a “Germany Day” event staged by the Union of Fatherland Associations in the northern Bavarian city of Coburg on 14 and 15 October 1922. Hitler had been invited to speak, and he arrived in a specially chartered train with 800 SA men. City leaders asked him to help avoid confrontations with left-wing groups by not entering the city in closed formation accompanied by marching music, but Hitler refused. The inevitable followed. The SA’s martial posturing provoked pitched street battles in which the storm troopers showed that they deserved their reputation as brutal thugs. In the end, Hitler crowed in
Mein Kampf
, “there wasn’t a trace of anything red left on the streets.”
¹²¹
Coburg would become a Nazi hotspot, and Germany’s later Reich chancellor ordered a special medal to be made up for those who had participated in the orgy of violence.

Such undeniable propaganda successes helped the NSDAP expand. Local Nazi chapters were founded in a number of cities and towns beyond Munich.
¹²²
In October 1922 Julius Streicher, who like Hitler was a rabid anti-Semite, subordinated his Nuremberg chapter of the German Works Community to the NSDAP. With that, the DSP’s resistance to being swallowed by Hitler’s party dissolved. Hitler’s insistence that others join
him
had proved a success. By the end of 1922, the NSDAP had around 20,000 members, and its radius of action now went beyond Bavaria’s borders.
¹²³
The party’s new headquarters at Corneliusstrasse 12, which had replaced the old Sterneckerbräu ones in November 1921, were an increasingly busy hive of various types of activity.

Most of the new party members came from the lower middle classes. The largest group were artisans (20 per cent) followed by small businessmen and shopkeepers (13.6), white-collar workers (11.1) and farmers (10.4). Unskilled labourers represented only 9.5 per cent, and specialised workers 8.5.
¹²⁴
The NSDAP was thus essentially a middle-class movement, and the proportion of university graduates, students and professors in Munich was striking.
¹²⁵
Conversely, despite the fact that their propaganda was explicitly directed at blue-collar workers, the Nazis did not do well with that demographic group. In a letter to Reichswehr Major Konstantin Hierl in July 1920, Hitler admitted that it was “difficult to win over workers who have belonged to the same [socialist] organisations for decades.” Nonetheless, Hitler reiterated that the NSDAP’s goal was to become “a popular movement not a class organisation.”
¹²⁶
But in 1922, the party was far from achieving that aim, no matter how Hess may have tried to give the contrary impression in a description of a Hitler appearance in Zirkus Krone. Hess did, however, provide a clear vision of the Nazi ideal: “The blue-collar worker sits next to the factory owner, and the judge next to the hansom cab driver. Nowhere do you see a scene like this nowadays.” There was no way of holding back Nazism, Hess predicted, because it is “born itself of the working classes.”
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