Hitler: Ascent, 1889-1939 (20 page)

And to do that, we can’t have any classes any more, no bourgeois and no workers. We need to become a people of brothers, who are prepared to make sacrifices for the national cause…There should be no drivel about classes and no preferment of one segment of the people in national questions…People who work with their heads and those who work with their hands need to realise that they belong together and that only together can we get our people back on their feet again.
⁵³

That, Hitler said again and again, was the path “to genuine, German socialism in contrast to the class-warfare socialism preached by Jewish leaders.”
⁵⁴

Right from the start, Hitler wanted to eradicate Weimar democracy. “Let’s do away with the party graft that divides our people,” he exclaimed in April 1920. On this topic, too, he called upon widespread anti-democratic and anti-parliamentarian sentiments. He never tired of preaching the merits of “a relentless battle against this entire parliamentary brood, this whole system.”
⁵⁵
Democracy was to be replaced with “a government of power and authority” that would “ruthlessly clean out the pigsty.”
⁵⁶
When he demanded a “dictator who is also a genius…a man of iron who is the embodiment today of the Germanic spirit,” Hitler was speaking to the hearts of his audience.
⁵⁷
Germany, he declared in May 1921, “will only be able to live if the pigsty of Jewish corruption, democratic hypocrisy and socialist betrayal is swept clean by an iron broom—and that broom will be made in Bavaria.”
⁵⁸
Hitler made no secret about what he would do with the post-war revolutionaries. “We demand a German national court, before which all the men of 1918 and 1919 can be held responsible,” he thundered. The police report of a Hitler speech in September 1922 noted “minutes of frenetic applause” after he demanded “a final reckoning with the November criminals.”
⁵⁹

Reading through Hitler’s speeches from the period 1920–22, it seems amazing that he attracted larger and larger audiences with such repeated mantra-like phrases. But perhaps it was the monotonous repetition of his accusations, vows of revenge and promises for the future that was the key to his success.
⁶⁰
In the chapter in
Mein Kampf
that focuses on propaganda, Hitler wrote:

The receptivity of large masses is very limited. Their capacity to understand things is slight whereas their forgetfulness is great. Given this, effective propaganda must restrict itself to a handful of points, which it repeats as slogans as long as it takes for the dumbest member of the audience to get an idea of what they mean.
⁶¹

Hitler’s analysis was hardly original. In fact, it recalled a pre-war book by the Frenchman Gustave Le Bon entitled
The Psychology of the Masses
, which by 1919 was in its third edition. Like Hitler, Le Bon described the masses as stupid, egotistical, feminine, fickle, incapable of accepting criticism and ruled by uncontrollable urges.
⁶²
Hitler presumably became acquainted with Le Bon’s ideas through a book by the Munich neurologist J. R. Rossbach called
The Soul of the Masses
, which appeared in 1919 and quoted the Frenchman extensively.
⁶³

Ironically, therefore, the beer-cellar rabble-rouser, who liked to depict himself as a man of the people, in fact despised the masses, which he regarded as nothing more than a tool to be manipulated to achieve his political ambitions. In this respect, too, Hitler was no exception, but rather a mouthpiece of the cultural pessimism represented in particular by the authors associated with the “conservative revolution” in the Weimar Republic.
⁶⁴
Nonetheless, unlike those theoreticians, Hitler knew how to draw a mass audience, and that in turn attracted the interest of nationalistic conservatives. As the doctor and “racial hygiene” expert Max von Gruber, who like many Munich University professors was an early Nazi sympathiser, recalled: “In upper-middle-class circles, one looked on with delight as Hitler achieved what we could not: winning over the circles of the little people and undermining Social Democracy. We overlooked the dangers his demagoguery presented, were it ever to be successful. The cure was worse than the disease.”
⁶⁵

—

A central motif running through almost all of Hitler’s speeches was his declaration of war on the Jews. From the very beginning, he treated this topic in the most radical of terms. One vivid example was his speech “Why are we anti-Semites?,” given in the Hofbräuhaus on 20 August 1920 in front of 2,000 people. It is the only speech from Hitler’s first year as a political propagandist that has been preserved in its entirety.
⁶⁶
It contains all of the anti-Jewish stereotypes Hitler had picked up in his autodidactic study of works such as Richard Wagner’s “Judaism in Music” (1850), Houston Stewart Chamberlain’s
Foundations of the Nineteenth Century
(1899), Theodor Fritsch’s
Handbook on the Jewish Question
(1907) and Adolf Wahrmund’s
The Law of the Nomad and Today’s Jewish Domination
(1887).
⁶⁷
All in all, the speech was a murky mixture of pseudo-scientific and vulgar anti-Semitic clichés.

Hitler began his address with the contention that, unlike the northern European Aryan races, Jews were incapable of any productive work and cultural achievement. Because they had never been able to form a state, they had no alternative but to live as “nomads…parasites on the bodies of other peoples…as a race within other races and a state within other states.” Driven by their two most prominent racial characteristics, “Mammonism and materialism,” they had accumulated enormous wealth “without putting in the sweat and effort required of all other mortals.” With that, Hitler arrived at his favourite subject, international “interest and stock-market capital,” which dominated “practically the entire world…with sums of money growing beyond all measure and—what’s worst—with the effect of corrupting all honest work.” The National Socialists, Hitler claimed, had come forth to combat this destructive force by “awakening, augmenting and inciting the instinctual antipathy of our people for Jewry.” As he had previously argued in his letter to Adolf Gemlich in September 1919, Hitler defined his ultimate, unchangeable goal as “the removal of Jews from our people.”

The police report noted that Hitler was rewarded with lengthy applause and calls of approval at this juncture. All in all, he was interrupted fifty-six times during his two-hour speech by positive audience outbursts. It seems that he had precisely tapped into the anti-Semitic mood that had spread like a highly contagious fever through the Bavarian capital after the demise of the soviet republic. A reporter sent to the event by the Social Democratic
Münchener Post
newspaper wrote: “You have to grant Hitler one thing: he’s the cagiest of the rabble-rousers plying their unholy trade in Munich at the moment.”
⁶⁸

It was a small step from global “stock-market and interest capital” holding Germany in its vice-like grip to the nightmare of a “worldwide Jewish conspiracy.” With the publication in German of the
Protocols of the Elders of Zion
in 1919, conspiracy theory had become a stock element of ethnic-chauvinistic German propaganda. This pamphlet, which soon ran through 100,000 copies, contained fake reports about alleged secret meetings at the first Zionist Congress in Basle, Switzerland, in 1897, which had supposedly yielded strategies for establishing global Jewish dominance. In his notes for a meeting on 12 August 1921, Hitler mentioned the
Protocols
for the first time.
⁶⁹
A report on a speech Hitler gave on 21 August 1921 in Rosenheim, where the first NSDAP chapter outside Munich had been founded on 18 April 1920, also read: “Hitler shows from the book
The Elders of Zion
…that establishing their rule, by whatever means, has always been and will always be the Semites’ goal.”
⁷⁰

By 1920 at the latest, the supposed Jewish drive to rule the world had become a fixed part of Hitler’s world view. “The only Jewish goal—global domination,” Hitler noted in early December. By September 1921, he was jotting down: “The question of questions, Jewry’s struggle for world domination, it’s a new crime.” The conclusions Hitler drew from this idea were unambiguous, and he repeatedly and unmistakably shared them with his audiences: “The German people can only be free and healthy if it is liberated from Jewish bandits.” The “resolution of the Jewish question” was “the main issue” for National Socialists.
⁷¹
Thus even in the early 1920s, no resident of Munich who had attended a Hitler speech or read about one in the newspapers could have been in any doubt about what Hitler intended to do with the Jews. But hardly anyone seems to have disapproved. On the contrary, storms of applause greeted precisely the most anti-Semitic passages of Hitler’s speeches, strongly suggesting that they were the source of much of the speaker’s appeal. When he demanded that Jews be “removed” from Germany by some unspecified means, therefore, Hitler and his audience were on the same wavelength. Both were carried away by the racist wishful thinking of a fully homogenous ethnic community.

There is a further, previously unknown indication that Hitler’s hateful anti-Semitic tirades were not just a populist strategy but reflected the core of his political convictions. In August 1920, Hitler received a visit from a young Munich law student, Heinrich Heim, who would later go on to be a ministerial counsel and an adjutant of Martin Bormann, responsible for taking notes during Hitler’s monologues in his headquarters. Hitler had made an “extraordinarily good” impression on him, Heim reported in a letter. He had been “friendly and earnest, a deep, distinguished character blessed with the strongest will.” As far as the “Jewish question” was concerned, Heim describes Hitler’s views as follows:

One has to root out the bacterium in order to restore the body’s natural defences. As long as the Jew remains active it will not be possible to break down the masses into rational individuals…and make them immune to his influence. He utterly rules out a Germanification of Jews in a larger or smaller sense. As long as Jews remain with their pernicious effects, Germany cannot convalesce. When it comes to the existence or non-existence of a people, one cannot draw a line at the lives of blinkered ethnic comrades and even less so at the lives of a hostile, dangerous, foreign tribe.
⁷²

Hitler would cling to his conviction that his battle against Jews was a matter of life or death right up until his suicide in his bunker in Berlin in late April 1945. In Vienna he had got to know anti-Semitic clichés and prejudices without identifying with them. Imperial Germany’s military defeat, which nationalist circles explained by scapegoating Jews in particular, no doubt also reinforced Private Hitler’s anti-Semitic leanings. But it was the experience of left-wing revolution and right-wing counter-revolution in Munich in 1918 and 1919 which vehemently radicalised anti-Jewish resentment in the Bavarian capital and made Hitler into what he would remain for the rest of his life: a fanatic anti-Semite whose primary political mission was to expunge a “dangerous, foreign tribe.”

—

Even after Hitler was discharged from the military in late March 1920, Captain Mayr kept supporting his protégé wherever he could. In September 1920, Mayr wrote to Wolfgang Kapp, the unsuccessful leader of the putsch who had fled to Sweden, that the NSDAP should “provide the basis for the strong assault troop we envision.” The party’s programme, he conceded, was “somewhat amateurish and full of holes,” but it would get better, and he had assembled a number of “very capable young men,” above all Hitler, who was “a motivational force” and a “first-rate popular speaker.” Mayr concluded his letter by pointing out that the National Socialists’ Munich chapter now had 2,000 members, compared to fewer than a hundred in the summer of 1919.
⁷³

In late March 1920, Mayr had arranged for Hitler and the right-wing journalist Dietrich Eckart to fly to Berlin to support the provisional government declared by the putsch, but they arrived after the attempted coup d’état had already collapsed. “The way you look and talk—people are going to laugh at you,” was the alleged reaction of Captain Waldemar Pabst, one of the men behind the murders of Communist leaders Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht in January 1919 and a co-organiser of the 1920 putsch, when he saw Hitler and Eckart.
⁷⁴
Pabst would not be alone in underestimating Hitler. Indeed, the fact that the conservative elites often failed to appreciate Hitler’s ability to influence people and get his way was a major factor in his success.

Dietrich Eckart was more than Hitler’s travelling companion: he was one of the most important mentors of his early political career. Eckart was twenty years Hitler’s senior, and Ernst Hanfstaengl remembered him as “a perfect example of an old-fashioned Bavarian with the appearance of a walrus.”
⁷⁵
Eckart had unsuccessfully tried to make a career for himself as a playwright in pre-war Berlin but his only success had been a translation of Ibsen’s
Peer Gynt
. In 1915, he moved to Munich and joined the city’s pan-Germanic and nationalist circles. Beginning in December 1918, with the support of the Thule Society, he began publishing the magazine
Auf gut deutsch
(In Plain-spoken German), which soon became a platform for anti-Semitic authors. In August 1919, he gave a lecture to the members of the DAP, although he never joined either that party or the NSDAP. He met Hitler sometime in the winter of 1919–20 and liked what he saw, although it is no doubt a legend that the first time Eckart encountered Hitler, he proclaimed, “That’s Germany’s next great man—one day the whole world will talk about him.”
⁷⁶
But he did immediately appreciate Hitler’s extraordinary rhetorical gift and his immense appeal to the masses. Testifying to the Munich police after the Beer Hall Putsch in November 1923, Eckart said that he had recognised right from the start that Hitler was “the right man for the whole movement.”
⁷⁷