Hitler (23 page)

The other members had been at home in their small-time situation and were perfectly content to remain there. They were stunned when Hitler began pushing the “dull club” into the public view. October 16, 1919, proved a decisive day both for the German Workers' Party and the new man on its executive committee. At the first public meeting, with 111 persons present, Hitler took the floor as the second speaker of the evening. For thirty minutes, in an ever more furious stream of verbiage, he poured out the hatreds that ever since his days in the home for men had been stored up within him or discharged only in fruitless monologues. As if bursting through the silence and human barriers of many years, the sentences, the delusions, the accusations came tumbling out. And at the end “the people in the small room were electrified.” He had found “what before I had simply felt within me, without in any way knowing it.” Jubilantly, he made the overwhelming discovery: “I could speak!”
⁸

That moment signified—if any specific moment did—the breakthrough to himself, the “hammer-stroke of fate” that shattered the “shell of everyday life.” His sense of release is palpable in the ecstatic tone of his memories of that evening. To be sure, he had tested his oratorical powers repeatedly in the past several weeks, and had become acquainted with his own ability to persuade and convert. But this was the first time he experienced the subjective force of his oratory, the triumphant self-abandonment to the point of sweating and reeling with exhaustion. And as everything with him turned to excess—his fears, his self-confidence, or even his rapture at hearing
Tristan
for the hundredth time—he henceforth fell into a veritable oratorical fury. Aside from or alongside of all political passions, from now on it was this newly awakened craving for vindication on the part of the “poor devil,” as he calls himself in his recollections of the period,
⁹
that drove him again and again to the speaker's platform.

 

Soon after his entrance into the DAP Hitler set about transforming the timid, static group of club members into a noisy publicity-conscious party of struggle. He met opposition chiefly from Karl Harrer, who was wedded to the secret-society notions inherited from the Thule Society and would have liked to continue running the DAP as a little discussion circle. From the start Hitler thought in terms of a mass party. Partly, he could not think otherwise, because he had never been able to accept reduced circumstances, but partly also because he understood why the old conservative parties had failed. Harrer's views were a survival, on an absurd scale, of that tendency to exclusiveness which had been the weakness of the bourgeois parties of notables during the Wilhelmine era. By now such an attitude had alienated the masses of the petty bourgeosie, and the working class as well, from the conservative position.

Even before the end of 1919 the German Workers' Party, at Hitler's insistence, set up its headquarters in a dark, vaultlike cellar room in the Sternecker beer hall. The rent was fifty marks; in co-signing the lease Hitler again gave his occupation as “painter.” A table and a few borrowed chairs were placed in. the room, a telephone installed, and a safe obtained for the membership cards and the party treasury. Soon an old typewriter was added, and a rubber stamp to go with it: when Harrer noticed these beginnings of a veritable bureaucracy, he called Hitler a “megalomaniac.” At the same time Hitler had the executive committee expanded to, first, ten, later, twelve and more members. He brought in a number of followers personally devoted to him; quite often these were fellow soldiers whom he had won over in the barracks. Soon he was able to replace the party's humble handwritten notes by printed invitations. At the same time the party began advertising in the
Münchener Beobachter.
Recruiting pamphlets and leaflets were left in the taverns where the party met. And Hitler in his propaganda tactics now began displaying that entirely unfounded selfassurance, all the more challenging because backed by no reality at all, which would frequently produce his successes in the future. He ventured something totally unusual—he began charging admission to the public meetings of this tiny, unknown party.

His growing reputation as a speaker solidified his position inside the party. By the beginning of the next year he had succeeded in making the refractory chairman, Harrer, resign. Soon afterward, the executive committee, though skeptical and worried about making itself ridiculous, followed the biddings of its ambitious propaganda chief and appealed to the masses. The party issued a call for its first mass meeting, to be held in the Festsaal of the Hofbräuhaus on February 24,1920.

The bright red poster announcing the meeting did not even mention Hitler's name. The principal speaker of the evening was a true-blue nationalist spokesman, Dr. Johannes Dingfelder, a physician, who wrote in racist publications under the pseudonym of Germanus Agricola. He had developed an economic theory whose twistings bizarrely reflected the shortages of the postwar period. Nature would be going on a production strike, he pessimistically predicted; her yields would diminish, vermin would consume the remainder. Consequently, humanity was on the verge of doom. There was only one way out, a return to racial and national principles. That evening he conjured up this hope again, “quite objectively and often imbued with a profound religious spirit.” Thus the report of the Munich Political Intelligence Service.
¹⁰

Then Hitler spoke. To take advantage of this unique opportunity of publicizing the ideas of the German Workers' Party to a large audience, he had insisted that a program be worked up. He began by inveighing against the Versailles Treaty and the cowardice of the government, then against the general craving for amusement, the Jews, and the “leeches,” namely profiteers and usurers. Then, interrupted frequently by applause or catcalls, he read the program aloud. At the end “some heckler shouted something. This was followed by great commotion. Everyone standing on chairs and tables. Tremendous tumult. Shouts of ‘Get out!' ” The meeting ended in a general uproar. Some members of the radical Left subsequently tramped, loudly cheering the International and the Soviet Republic, from the Hofbräuhaus to the Rathaustor. “Otherwise no disturbance,” the police report stated.

Apparently such turbulence was commonplace, for even the nationalist-racist press took scarcely any notice of the meeting. Only recent finds of source material have made it possible to reconstruct the course of the meeting. Hitler's own myth-making account turned it into a dramatic occasion beginning with a brawl and ending with wild acclaim and mass conversion: “Unanimously and again unanimously” each point of the program was accepted, “and when the last thesis had found its way to the heart of the masses, there stood before me a hall full of people united by a new conviction, a new faith, a new will.” Typically, Hitler reverted to his memory of operatic performances and proclaimed that “a fire was kindled from whose flame one day the sword must come which would regain freedom for the Germanic Siegfried.” He could already hear striding forth “the goddess of inexorable vengeance for the perjured deed of November 9, 1919.” Meanwhile, the nationalist
Münchener Beobachter
merely noted that after Dr. Dingfelder's speech Hitler had “set forth some pointed political ideas” and then announced the program of the DAP.

Nevertheless, in a higher sense the author of
Mein Kampf
was right. For with that mass meeting there began the evolution of Drexler's beer-drinking racist club into Adolf Hitler's mass party. To be sure, he himself had once again had to play a subordinate role. Nevertheless, there had been almost 2,000 persons present, filling the great hall of the Hofbräuhaus. The crowd had been exposed to Hitler's political doctrines, and many had accepted them. Henceforth, more and more, it was his will, his style, his direction that propelled the party and decided its success or failure. Party legend later compared the meeting of February 24, 1920, to Martin Luther's nailing his theses to the door of the church in Wittenberg. In both cases tradition has had to paint its own historically quite dubious picture, because true history tends to scant man's craving for drama and sentimental recollection. But there was some justification for hailing the meeting as the true birthday of the movement, even though no such momentous act had been planned.

 

The program Hitler offered that evening had been drafted by Anton Drexler, probably with some assistance from Gottfried Feder, and then submitted to the executive committee for revision. Hitler's exact part in the framing can no longer be determined, but the sloganlike compactness of several articles shows his editorial influence. The program consisted of twenty-five points and combined in rather arbitrary fashion elements of the older racist ideology with immediate grievances and the national need to deny reality. The consistent factor throughout was strong emotional appeal. Negatives predominated; the program was anticapitalist, anti-Marxist, antiparliamentarian, anti-Semitic, and most decidedly against the way the war had ended. The positive aims, on the other hand—such as the various demands for the protection of the middle class—were mostly vague and tended to add fuel to the anxieties and desires of the little man. For example, all income not earned by work was to be confiscated (Point 11), as well as all war profits (Point 12), and a profit-sharing plan for large industries was to be introduced (Point 14). Another point called for large department stores to be turned over to the communities and rented out “at cheap prices” to small tradesmen (Point 16). Land reform was also demanded, and a ban on speculation in land (Point 17).

Despite all its opportunistic features this program was not so empty as has sometimes been represented. At any rate, there was a good deal more to it than clever demogogery. It included, at least in the germ, all the essential features of what was to be National Socialist doctrine: the living-space thesis (Point 3), anti-Semitism (Points 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 24), the harmless-sounding and widely acceptable platitudes (Points 10, 18, 24) that could ultimately be made the basis for a totalitarian state—as, for example, the maxim that the common good takes precedence over the good of the individual.
¹¹
Much was made of the determination to eliminate the abuses of capitalism, to overcome the false class-struggle confrontations of Marxism, and to bring about the reconciliation of all groups in a powerfully integrated racial community. It would seem that all this possessed a special allure in a country suffering so profoundly from national and social irritations. The idea or formula of “nationalistic socialism,” linking as it did the two paramount concepts of the nineteenth century, could be found at the root of many political programs and drafts for social systems of the time. It turned up in Anton Drexler's simple autobiographical account of his “political awakening” and in the Berlin lectures of Eduard Stadtler, who as early as 1918 had founded an Anti-Bolshevist League, with the support of industry. It was the subject of one of those enlightenment courses run by the Munich District Command of the Reichswehr and even entered the thinking of Oswald Spengler, whose essay
Prussianism and Socialism
treated most persuasively of the same theme. Even within Social Democracy the idea had its followers. The disappointment over the failure of the Second International at the outbreak of the war had led a number of independent minds to turn toward a combination of nationalistic and social revolutionary schemes.
National Socialism, Its Growth and Its Aims
was the title of a bulky theoretical work published in 1919 by one of the founders of the German-Socialist Workers' Party, a railroad engineer named Rudolf Jung. That work hailed nationalist socialism as
the
epoch-making political concept that would succeed in checking Marxist socialism. To emphasize their separation from internationalist movements, Jung and his Austrian followers changed the party's name in May, 1918, to German National Socialist Workers' Party.

A week after the meeting in the Hofbräuhaus the DAP also changed its name. Borrowing from the related German and Austrian groups, it called itself National Socialist German Workers' Party (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei—NSDAP) and simultaneously adopted the battle symbol of its Austrian counterparts, the swastika. Dr. Walter Riehl, chairman of the Austrian national socialists, had shortly before set up an “international secretariat” that was to serve as a liaison office for all national socialist parties. There already existed active contacts with various other such groups espousing racial-socialist programs, above all the German Socialist Party of Alfred Brunner, a Düsseldorf engineer. This party tried to be extremely leftish and boasted, “Our demands are more radical than those of the Bolshevists.” It had units in many of the larger cities. The one in Nuremberg was headed by a schoolteacher named Julius Streicher.

On April 1, 1920, Hitler finally left the army, for he at last had an alternative. He was determined to devote himself henceforth entirely to political work, to seize the leadership of the NSDAP, and to build the party according to his own ideas. He rented a room at 41 Thierschstrasse, near the Isar River. Although he spent most of his days in the cellar headquarters of the party he avoided being listed as a party employee. What he lived on was something of a mystery, and enemies within the party soon raised this question. His landlady thought the somber young man monosyllabic and seemingly very busy, a “real bohemian.”

His self-confidence grew, based on his talent for oratory, his coldness, and his readiness to take risks. He had nothing to lose. Ideas as such mattered little to him. In general he was less interested in a concept than in its potential uses, in whether, as he once remarked, it could yield a “powerful slogan.” His total lack of comprehension for thinking without politically malleable substance came out in his outbursts of “detestation” and “profoundest disgust” for the “antiquated folkish theoreticians,” the “bigmouths,” and “idea thieves.” Similarly, he took the floor for his earliest rhetorical displays only when he had something to strike back at polemically. For him it was not evidence that made an idea persuasive but handiness, not truth but the idea's aptness as a weapon. “Every idea, even the best,” he noted, “becomes a danger if it parades as a purpose in itself, being in reality only a means to one.” Elsewhere he emphasized that in the political struggle force always needs the support of an idea—significantly, he did not put it the other way round. He regarded National Socialism, too, as chiefly a means to his own ambitious ends. It was merely a romantic, attractively vague cue with which he stepped on the stage. The idea of reconciliation implicit in the phrase seemed more modern, closer to the needs of the age, then the slogans of class struggle. The conservative writer Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, who in the early years of the century had promulgated the idea of nationalistic socialism, now declared that it was “certainly a part of the German future.” Its potentiality was above all apparent to the cool politicians who had axes to grind. There were many such men, all competing in the same game. But before long Hitler knew that he himself would be that part of the German future.