Hitler's Charisma (6 page)

Germans were now inspired to look further back into their own history for examples of individual heroes. One of the most popular tourist attractions in Germany was the
Hermannsdenkmal
(Hermann monument) completed in 1875 in the Teutoburg Forest, which commemorated the victory of the German tribes led by Arminius (or Hermann, leader of the Cherusci) over the Roman General Varus and his three legions nearly two thousand years before.

Before the war, many members of the
Wandervogel
, a popular youth movement, called for a heroic leader to rescue Germans from the increasing industrialisation of the country and lead a return to nature. “Their eager, tense, young faces light up,” wrote Peter Viereck of one group of
Wandervogel
, “as, in the light of the campfire, someone reads from his favorite writer: Nietzsche or perhaps Stefan George who, as early as 1907, had pleaded, ‘The Man! The Deed! Volk and high counsel yearn for The Man! The Deed! … Perhaps someone who sat for years among your murderers and slept in your prisons, will stand up and do the deed.’ ”
⁴

Founded in 1901, and inspired by the ideals of a young diplomat, Herman Hoffmann Fölkersamb, the
Wandervogel
grew into the most popular youth movement in pre-war Germany. Subsequently, a number of members of the
Wandervogel
, like Bruno Hähnel, joined the Nazi party and took their youthful idealism with them. “We would sit there [in the countryside] in the evening, and these were big occasions for us, and my wife also took part later; we met when we were very young. And in later life we always thought back to it because for us it was a beautiful time in our lives. Often there was singing, we had singing groups, we had folk dancing groups, both of us, my wife and I both come from the folk dance movement. There was a real feeling of belonging based on the philosophy of the
Wandervogel
. We were something like a protest against the bourgeois world.”
⁵

“It was a reaction against the Emperor Wilhelm era, which was all about industry and commerce,” confirms Fridolin von Spaun, another member of the
Wandervogel
who was to grow into a committed believer in Adolf Hitler. “They were young people, they simply got bored stiff with it and went out into nature and searched in natural surroundings for something which they couldn’t get in their own environment. I joined
quite by chance an association in Elberfeld—this was still during World War One. We went on rambles … we could sing our songs, cook, play, also do sports … It was a spiritual movement.”
⁶

Richard Wagner, another supporter of “spiritual movements” and a protester “against the bourgeois world,” was a hero to many of these
Wandervogel
—just as he was to Adolf Hitler. Wagner’s operas, like
The Ring of the Nibelung
(
Der Ring des Nibelungen
), which contains such epic works as “The Twilight of the Gods” (
Götterdämmerung
), harked back to the great Norse and German saga myths. Hitler was so obsessed with the “heroic” nature of Wagner’s work that he saw the opera
Lohengrin
, featuring a Knight of the Holy Grail, “at least ten times”
⁷
in pre-war Vienna. He even tried—unsuccessfully—to write his own heroic opera called
Wieland the Blacksmith
.

Hitler’s favourite reading in Vienna was
The Sagas of German Heroes
(
Die Deutschen Heldensagen
) and, according to his flatmate, August Kubizek, Hitler “identified himself with the great men of this vanished epoch. Nothing appeared more worthy of the struggle than a life like theirs, full of brave acts of great consequence, the most heroic life possible …”
⁸

More recently, during the First World War, individual leaders had stamped their own names on their units in a demonstration of the importance of the individual “hero.” Hitler himself, for example, joined the 16th Bavarian Reserve Infantry Regiment, but his unit was actually known as the “List” regiment after Colonel Julius von List who commanded the regiment at the start of the war. This tendency to name units after individual commanders grew even stronger with the formation of the paramilitary
Freikorps
units in the immediate aftermath of the end of the First World War. One of the most powerful, for instance, was known as the “Rossbach
Freikorps
” after its commander Gerhard Rossbach, another was the “Ehrhardt Brigade” led by a former captain in the Imperial Navy called Hermann Ehrhardt. Units like these, says Fridolin von Spaun, himself a
Freikorps
member, “depended entirely on their leader’s personality and skills.”
⁹
Moreover, wrote Ludwig Gengler, “The individual commander [of the
Freikorps
] was often called the Führer. He is idolised as the concrete embodiment of all those qualities that the Volunteer wanted to possess in himself. And the Führer is also an abstraction. The Man who will come.”
¹⁰

As well as this historical predisposition towards a belief in the individual “hero,” there was for Hitler and the Nazi party in the early 1920s
concrete evidence of just how a heroic “Man who will come” could influence an entire country. In Italy, Benito Mussolini, who like Hitler had been wounded during the First World War and had then become active in violent extreme nationalistic politics, had formed a Fascist party in 1919 to fight the influence of Socialists and Communists. Here was proof of how a “heroic” leader could fight his way out of obscurity.

In those early years, it was a drunken writer called Dietrich Eckart who most helped Adolf Hitler develop into someone who could be Germany’s answer to Benito Mussolini. Hitler first met Eckart at the second meeting of the German Workers’ party he attended in the autumn of 1919. Irascible, bald and looking older than a man in his early fifties, Eckart was a virulent anti-Semite who, like Hitler, felt that Germany had been betrayed by the way the war ended and the peace treaty of Versailles. His hatred of the Jews was such that he remarked that he would like “to load all Jews into a railway train and drive into the Red Sea with it.”
¹¹
But, unlike Hitler, Eckart was well connected in sophisticated Munich social circles and comparatively wealthy—his plays, particularly his version of Ibsen’s
Peer Gynt
, had made him a considerable amount of money. And Eckart had been waiting for a man like Hitler. In 1919 Eckart had said that Germany needed a leader who was a “fellow who can stand the rattle of a machine gun. The rabble has to be scared shitless. I can’t use an officer; the people no longer have any respect for them. Best of all would be a worker who’s got his mouth in the right place … He doesn’t need much intelligence; politics is the stupidest business in the world.”
¹²
So, not surprisingly, Eckart immediately saw the potential Hitler possessed. Here was a simple soldier—the defiant voice of the dispossessed and defeated. A simple soldier, moreover, who had been decorated for heroism and received the Iron Cross. After his first meeting with Hitler, Eckart remarked: “This is the coming man of Germany, one day the world will speak of him.”
¹³

Eckart introduced Hitler to wealthy potential patrons in Munich, and he became a particular hit with women of a certain age—one widow fussed around him so much that she became known as
Hitler-Mutti
(“Hitler’s mum”). Eckart, before his death from a heart attack in 1923, also helped Hitler and the fledgling Nazi party financially, raising the money to buy a newspaper to propagate the Nazi viewpoint, the
Völkischer Beobachter
.

But perhaps the greatest practical assistance that Eckart gave to Adolf Hitler was to support him when his dominant role in the Nazi party came
under threat in the summer of 1921. Anton Drexler had been flirting with the idea of merging the Nazi party with other similar groups like the German Socialist Party (the DSP). Drexler saw this as an obvious way to grow the party swiftly. Then, in the summer of 1921, he became impressed with the work of a philosophy professor at the University of Augsburg called Otto Dickel. Professor Dickel had written
Resurgence of the West
, a book which contained similar ideas to those expressed in the twenty-five points of the Nazi programme agreed the previous year, although Dickel expressed his own views with greater intellectual weight. When Drexler heard Dickel speak he—and others in the Nazi party—were keen that some form of alliance be struck with him and his own party, the
Abendländischer Bund
(Western League).

All this manoeuvring occurred when Hitler was out of Munich, and he was subsequently outraged to discover what had been discussed in his absence. Hitler walked out of a meeting with Dickel in fury and quit the Nazi party altogether. Once again he had shown that he was both unwilling and unable to participate in intellectual debate.

Initially, Eckart had been interested in what Dickel could add to the party—not least intellectual respectability—but once Hitler resigned he did his best to convince him to return. And return Hitler did, but on his own terms as the unquestioned dictator of the Nazi party. Eckart then splashed his own support for Hitler across the front page of the
Völkischer Beobachter
.
¹⁴

It was a significant moment on Hitler’s journey: he was no longer just drumming up support for an as-yet-unknown future leader of Germany, he was now positioning himself as potentially that leader. Hitler had demonstrated that he was not prepared to share power—and would take whatever consequences might come from his refusal to collaborate. And what is just as significant is that others began to accept Hitler’s own valuation of himself. Dietrich Eckart, for example, would have preferred to have involved Professor Dickel in the Nazi party, but once Hitler refused, then Eckart was forced to choose, and in the process accept, that Hitler be given undisputed power within the Nazi movement. Hitler was now able to portray himself as a “hero” partly because others could see his intransigence as in part “heroic.” Hitler could often be a very difficult character to deal with, but in that difficulty lay—potentially—a powerful appeal. After all, who expects “heroes” to be reasonable people?

The following year—1922—the Nazi party began growing by acquisition. In October 1922 Hitler managed to convince the supporters of the
Deutsche Werkgemeinschaft
in Nuremberg to subordinate themselves within the Nazi party—not in a loose alliance as had been proposed the year before, but recognising that Hitler was now their leader. Hitler was always to be grateful to the leader of the
Deutsche Werkgemeinschaft
in Nuremberg for arranging this—a man called Julius Streicher.

Streicher had heard Hitler speak the year before, and had been transfixed. “I had never seen the man before,” he said in evidence at his trial after the war. “And there I sat, an unknown among unknowns. I saw this man shortly before midnight, after he had spoken for three hours, drenched in perspiration, radiant. My neighbour said he thought he saw a halo around his head, and I experienced something which transcended the commonplace.”
¹⁵

Streicher was an appalling character. In 1923 he would start publishing
Der Stürmer
, a sadistic semi-pornographic newspaper committed to the most disgusting anti-Semitic pictures and stories. But Streicher was not untypical of the kind of people who were now linking themselves with Hitler. Other influential figures in the Nazi party now included Christian Weber, a former nightclub bouncer, Hermann Esser, an aggressive Jew-baiter, and Ernst Röhm, a dissolute captain in the German Army who later wrote that “I wanted to serve a
Volk
of fighters, not a people of poets and dreamers.”
¹⁶
All of these men would go on to hold senior positions in the Nazi party—and all of them were disreputable thugs. These kind of violent low-life characters would no doubt have agreed with the view Hermann Göring expressed at his war crimes trial, when he said that he joined the Nazi party in the early 1920s because he was a “revolutionary.” Otto Strasser’s view was that—simply put—“Hitler enjoys their company, for they confirm his profound conviction that man is essentially vile.”
¹⁷

Ernst Röhm, in particular, was a crucial figure in those early days of the Nazis, in part because he helped organise weapons for the fledgling paramilitary wing of the Nazi party, the SA—the
Sturmabteilung
or stormtroopers. The SA was officially established in November 1921, but almost from the first days of the party a number of Nazi thugs—many former soldiers—had “protected” party meetings in beer halls by chucking out anyone who heckled Hitler, and it was from this group of bouncers that the SA developed.
¹⁸

It was into this violent and seedy mix that news came in October 1922 that Benito Mussolini had become Prime Minister of Italy, a moment that energised the revolutionaries in the Nazi party. For if an ultra-nationalist leader could suddenly gain power in Italy, then why not in Germany? On 3 November 1922, just days after Mussolini’s success in Italy, Hermann Esser stated to a crowd at the Nazi haunt of the Hofbräuhaus Beer Hall in Munich that “Germany’s Mussolini is called Adolf Hitler.”
¹⁹
The following month, December 1922, the
Völkischer Beobachter
published an article that proclaimed that Adolf Hitler was no mere “drummer” but the leader who would rescue Germany.
²⁰

The following year, 1923, Hitler seized the opportunity to demonstrate his credentials as a heroic revolutionary. But—and this is a recurring theme of his rise to power—in order to do so he needed to exploit a crisis in the German state. Fortunately for Hitler, in 1923 Germany faced just such a crisis when the French occupied the Ruhr, the industrial region in the west of Germany. Under the terms of the Versailles treaty the Germans were forbidden from stationing troops in this area, so the French faced little concerted opposition when they moved on to German territory on 11 January 1923. The French Prime Minister, Raymond Poincaré, had taken this drastic course of action because the Germans had defaulted on deliveries of coal and timber due to France as part of reparations payments.