Hitler: Ascent, 1889-1939 (16 page)

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What did Hitler do and think in those dramatic weeks between Eisner’s assassination and the demise of the Soviet Republic? In
Mein Kampf
, he barely mentioned it, and his silence fuelled speculation early on that he was trying to gloss over an unpleasant chapter in his biography—that is, the fact that he had initially sided with the leftists. Konrad Heiden lent credence to this idea in the mid-1930s when he asserted that Private Hitler and his comrades had defended the Social Democrats against the Communists.
¹⁸
What is beyond doubt is the fact that on 3 April 1919 Hitler was elected the liaison of his demobilisation battalion, something that would never have happened had he publicly opposed the revolution. But can we therefore conclude that Hitler must have been close to the Majority Social Democrats?
¹⁹

It would be extremely bizarre for Hitler to support the political party to which he had developed such an aversion in his Vienna days and which he had come to loathe even more during wartime. Thus it must have been tactics, not conviction, that made him seemingly lean towards the Majority Social Democrats in the first months of the revolution. After 9 November 1918, the MSPD represented the last hope of everyone who feared that the revolution would lead to a socialist remaking of society. Indeed, the majority of Germany’s conservative middle classes supported the MSPD’s call for quick elections on national and local levels. They did so not because they had suddenly been converted into passionate adherents of parliamentary democracy but because they wanted to preserve the traditional social order and private property. In Bavaria, it was Eisner’s great rival Auer who had become “the best hope of those fundamentally opposed to the revolution.”
²⁰
In his later monologues, Hitler occasionally praised Auer and other MSPD leaders: “In the case of the leaders of 1918, I draw a distinction. Some of them ended up in it like Pilate in the Creed. They never intended to spark a revolution. Noske was one, as were Ebert, Scheidemann, Severing, and Auer in Bavaria.”
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Joachim Fest argued plausibly that Hitler’s behaviour in the spring of 1919 was a mixture of “desperation, passivity and opportunistic adaptation.”
²²
It is possible (although the photographic evidence is not incontrovertible) that Hitler was part of the funeral procession of 26 February in which Eisner’s body was carried through Munich city centre to the Eastern Cemetery.
²³
During the two Bavarian soviet republics, Hitler neither volunteered to join the Hoffmann government in Bamberg nor did he attach himself to one of the many Freikorps units. On 13 April, the day of the Palm Sunday putsch, he allegedly urged his comrades to keep out of the fighting: “We’re no pack of revolutionary guards for a gang of vagrant Jews!”
²⁴
But this anecdote may be apocryphal. Hitler’s second election as liaison on 15 April, two days after the declaration of the second Bavarian Soviet Republic, shows in any case that he was not an open opponent of the revolution.
²⁵
He seems to have already learned the art of disguise, refusing to take a stand, and may have kept a low profile in the reasonable belief that the soviet experiment would be short-lived. But the story he told in
Mein Kampf
, of having attracted the displeasure of the Communist authorities and of forcibly resisting the threat to arrest him on 27 April 1919, appears to be entirely fictional.
²⁶

Immediately after the demise of the council government, Hitler dropped his guard and openly aligned himself with the counter-revolutionaries. On 9 May, we suddenly find him as a member of a three-person commission charged with investigating the behaviour of his regiment’s soldiers during the two soviet republics. In
Mein Kampf
he described this as “my first more or less purely political activity.”
²⁷
He had no qualms about informing on comrades who, in contrast to himself, had shown genuine sympathy for the revolution. He denounced Georg Dufter, who had been elected along with him to the battalion council of the 1st Demobilisation Company on 15 April, as the “worst and most radical rabble-rouser within the regiment…who had constantly spread propaganda for the soviet republic.”
²⁸
Hitler was rewarded for these services. When his company was disbanded in early May, he was able to avoid being discharged from the army. From June 1919 onwards, he was a member of the demobilisation office of the 2nd Infantry Regiment.
²⁹
This post was to prove enormously significant in his political career.

The Hoffmann government only returned to Munich in late August 1919. From early May until then, power rested with the military, in particular with Reichswehr Group Commando 4, which was formed on 11 May under General Arnold von Möhl and to which all army units stationed in Bavaria were subordinated. An edict of 20 May defined the army’s main priority as being able “to carry out, in conjunction with the police, stricter surveillance of the populace and [to] recognise its moods and potential points of resistance early enough so that the ignition of any new unrest can be discovered and extinguished in its inception.”
³⁰
The “intelligence department” of the Group Commando, which was headed as of late May by Captain Karl Mayr, was charged with carrying out this mission. Mayr, an ambitious and scheming officer, was to become the “midwife of Hitler’s political career.”
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Hitler initially attracted Mayr’s attention with his work on the investigatory commission. “When I first met him, he was like a tired stray dog looking for a master,” wrote the anonymous author of an article that appeared in a U.S. magazine in 1941 and who we can reasonably assume was Mayr.
³²
For his part, the army captain was looking for reliable liaisons who could spread “counter-propaganda” among the troops, educating them about the dangers of Bolshevism and reigniting the spirit of nationalism and militarism. A list likely drawn up by the intelligence department in early July featured the name “Hittler [
sic
], Adolf.”
³³
But before Private Hitler could get to work, he was sent on a training course. He was not, as had been previously assumed, part of the first such course, which took place from 5 to 12 June at Munich University. He participated in the third one held from 10 to 19 July in the Museum Society’s space at the Palais Porcia.
³⁴

Karl Mayr exploited his connections in lining up the speakers, including his old school chum, the nationalist historian Karl Alexander von Müller, who lectured about post-Reformation German history and the political history of the world war.
³⁵
Also taking part was Müller’s brother-in-law, the engineer Gottfried Feder from Murnau, who had created a stir in pan-Germanic, chauvinist circles in Munich with his May 1919 “Manifesto on Breaking the Interest Slavery of Money.” The self-appointed economic theorist saw Mammonism—people’s fixation on money and the drive to acquire more and more of it—as the main evil of his times. Feder put the blame on the lending practices of the financial markets, which he regarded as being in the hands of Jews. Breaking “interest slavery” meant making it impossible for people to earn a living from their capital without working and taking up the cause of “creative” capital against “money grabbing.” On 6 June, Feder gave his first lecture in front of 300–400 people, who kept interrupting him with applause. He returned for the July course.
³⁶
Hitler was impressed, writing in
Mein Kampf
: “For the first time in my life I fundamentally got to grips with international stock-market and loan capital.”
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Feder’s theories, which combined anti-capitalist with anti-Semitic resentments, would become an integral part of the Nazi Party’s early ideology.

In his memoirs, Müller recalled that as the hall was emptying after his lecture, a group of people remained behind, transfixed by a man who was speaking to them with growing passion and an unusual guttural voice. “I had the strange feeling that he had got them excited and at the same time that their interest had given him his voice,” remembered the historian. “I saw a pale, drawn face underneath a decidedly unmilitary shock of hair, with a trimmed moustache and remarkably large, light blue, fanatically cold, gleaming eyes.”
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For the first time, someone had remarked on what was Hitler’s greatest skill: his oratorical ability. “Do you know that one of your trainees is a natural-born public speaker?” Müller asked Mayr, who then invited Hitler to join them. “The man came up to the podium, moving awkwardly, as if both defiant and embarrassed. Our conversation yielded nothing of interest.”
³⁹
The future champion of the German people had not yet grown into that role. His public bearing did not match his natural speaking ability. Being in the presence of a famous history professor must also have daunted Hitler and reminded him of his failure at school. On more than one occasion in
Mein Kampf
, Hitler’s inferiority complex in this regard led him to excoriate “the so-called ‘intelligentsia’ who…in their never-ending arrogance look down on everyone who hasn’t been run through the obligatory schools and been pumped full of the necessary knowledge.”
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Mayr did not care about Hitler’s lack of diplomas: he immediately took to the private. In late July 1919, when an “educational commando” was formed to hold anti-Bolshevik classes at the temporary camp in Lechfeld for soldiers returning from the front, Hitler was named one of twenty-six instructors.
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During the five-day course from 20 to 25 August, Hitler not only gave lectures with titles such as “Conditions of Peace and Reconstruction” and “Very Social and Economic Political Catchphrases,” he also spoke during the discussions following the other lectures.
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These days at Lechfeld were Hitler’s political initiation. For the first time in his life, he received affirmation and recognition from a larger circle of people, and he realised the effect his speaking ability could have on an audience. “I began with enthusiasm and passion,” he wrote five years later in
Mein Kampf
. “I suddenly had the opportunity to talk to a larger audience, and what I had always instinctively assumed without knowing was confirmed: I could ‘speak well.’ ”
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Several people on the course confirmed this impression. “Herr Hittler [
sic
] especially,” one attendee remarked, “is a born public speaker, whose commitment and natural demeanour commands the attention of an audience and forces its members to think.”
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Hitler’s first recorded anti-Semitic statement comes from his time in Lechfeld. The director of the camp, First Lieutenant Walther Bendt, reported that during a “nice, clear, impassioned lecture…about capitalism” Hitler had touched upon “the Jewish question.”
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Hitler had obviously adopted some of the ideas in Feder’s talk, but he also incorporated the radical anti-Semitic sentiments that were spreading like an epidemic, particularly among soldiers, in Munich and elsewhere in Bavaria.
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Even mainstream conservative circles had attacked Eisner as a tool of “Jewish Bolshevism,” and after Munich’s “liberation” the hate campaign was directed against other prominent representatives of the soviet governments who had Jewish backgrounds, such as Toller, Leviné, Mühsam and Towia Axelrod. In May 1919, the
Bayrisches Bauernblatt
newspaper, the main organ of the Christian Farmers’ Association, which was published by the BVP politician Georg Heim, wrote: “The gallery of famous men from the time of the soviet republics is a picture album full of criminals. Foreign riff-raff, mostly from the district office of Jerusalem, have targeted the innocent Bavarian people as an object of exploitation and have filled their pockets.”
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The soviet republics were frequently described as a “Jewish tyranny” and conflated with the
bête noire
of Bolshevism. In October 1919, in light of the anti-Semitic propaganda spreading throughout society, the intelligence department of the Munich police deemed an anti-Jewish pogrom “entirely possible.”
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On the other hand, police authorities typically dismissed complaints from the leaders of the Jewish community and the Central Association of German Citizens of the Jewish Faith by claiming that “hatred of Jewishness has been greatly encouraged by the fact that most Communist leaders are Jewish.”
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Like a sponge, Hitler sucked up popular anti-Jewish sentiments and the anti-Semitic slogans of ethnically chauvinist brochures and pamphlets.
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His turn towards fanatical anti-Semitism, which he would later claim had originated in Vienna, actually took place amidst the revolution and counter-revolution in Munich. From then on, the
bête noire
of “the Jew” as the incarnation of all evil occupied the centre of his racist world view, and he expressed this idea with such unmistakable clarity in Lechfeld that Walther Bendt had to tell him to be more moderate to avoid creating the impression of Jew-baiting. Hitler was ordered to be more “careful in discussing the Jewish question,” and to “avoid making overly direct references to this race, which is foreign to the German people.”
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