Thinking Small (11 page)

As head of the NSDAP
⁵
, Hitler traveled by car as much as he could through Germany, meeting and speaking to people about his party’s goals. He studied the German people and asked himself
what it was they wanted to hear, what would give them that spark of power he knew they wanted to feel. He was careful in how he timed and planned his
words, gestures, and speech. “The art of propaganda
⁶
lies in understanding the emotional ideas of the great masses,” he would write in
Mein Kampf,
“and finding, through a psychologically correct form, the way to the intention of the broad masses, and thus also to their heart.” These years of speeches were like prolonged practices before a
big game. He nearly always had pictures taken of himself from all angles and sides as he spoke, then afterward he would sit and study these pictures and tally them with the responses of the crowd. He listened to his own voice. He studied his own gestures. He practiced his facial expressions. He came to know his movements very well. He did this for years, noticing and watching the reactions, learning how to control himself, learning what worked.

Even so, in 1923 Adolf Hitler still did not look like much of a threat. He was an extremely busy, almost manic, man who was cobbling together an ideology, but there was a very large gap between the reality of his life and the fantasy he had of it. Certainly he had come a long way. He was the leader of a small but dedicated party; he had some attention, he had colleagues, he had support. But in the wider picture, he was not well-respected or feared. His newfound
confidence was rather shaky too. When he pulled off his big “Beer Hall Putsch,” for instance—the extreme event that he imagined would change the country overnight—he was met with a disturbing wake-up call. Even with war hero General Ludendorff by his side, the whole thing resulted in a disaster and he came off looking naïve and weak.

Hitler had wanted a coup that night, a putsch. He’d planned to take over the government by force, but in the end, his brazen declarations fell flat. The coup didn’t work. Embarrassed, he fled the scene. He was eventually captured and placed in jail for his stunt. Once there, he fell into a deep depression, forced to confront the fact that his fantasy had not become reality, as he’d been so sure that it would. Once again, he thought about taking
his own life. In the prison where he was being held until the trial, he reportedly told the psychologist on hand, “I’m finished. If I had a revolver, I would take it.”
⁷

But then, an unlikely thing happened: The court decided to try him for treason. And just that one word—“treason”—was (in his eyes) the best thing that could have happened to him. The government was taking his attempted coup seriously. He had a voice. Many in the country, alongside Hitler, would now reinterpret the putsch: With the public’s help, he could rewrite the story exactly as he wished. And, in another unexpected twist, he
pleaded guilty to the charges of treason, and did so with pride. He gave the court a loud and clear speech about how the real betrayal in the country had come from the government, not from him. The German people had been betrayed by the First World War, and now he was merely trying to stand up for them, to put their country into more capable hands, he said.

These words might sound dubious today, but at the time, in a country with many disillusioned people who were angry and confused, it resonated. There were those in Germany who knew this man was not to be trusted, but there were also many who were looking for someone with such boldness, someone they could believe in, someone to lift them out of their depression and spiritual doubt. The courtroom was electrified by Hitler’s prolonged and passionate speeches: The
place became a sensationalized stage. And thanks to modern media of the time, that stage was surrounded by men and women from the press. Hitler, a nobody before the trial began, was a known and controversial voice in Germany by the time it ended. People wanted to hear from him; and the number of Nazi sympathizers began to grow.

Hitler was learning how to whip people up into a state of frenzy. As his biographer Ian Kershaw would later write, “Crisis was Hitler’s oxygen.”
⁸
He was developing a philosophy that everything good was based on struggle and on the feeling of struggling toward a common cause. At the time of the trial, he still thought of himself as
“the drummer,” the person who would
use propaganda to set that struggle’s mood and tone; at that point, he did not see himself as an eventual dictator of Germany, though he did feel such a figure would have to rise. “The man who is born to be a dictator is not compelled; he wills it,”
⁹
Hitler told the court. “He is
not driven forward, but drives himself.” And remarkably, such words seem to have cast a spell. Even the majority of the judges did not want to find him guilty once he had delivered his speech. They had to be persuaded to hand Hitler a sentence of five years, only conceding after being assured that he would be eligible for parole.

After the trial, upon reaching Landsberg Prison, Hitler was given a very nice room with a desk. He was allowed to receive gifts, cards, Nazi Party members, and to order and request reading materials at will. He was thirty-five years old now, and the trial had given him his first taste of fame. Hundreds of people lined up to visit him in jail. While there, Hitler read and studied endlessly: “Landsberg was a university paid for by the state,”
¹⁰
he’d later say. While there, he also wrote the first draft of his autobiography,
My Struggle,
or
Mein Kampf.
His original title for it was
Four and a Half Years of Struggle Against Lies, Stupidity and Cowardice.
He worked on it day and night, buoyed by memories of his courtroom show. He’d felt the public’s admiration, and
he wanted more. As he wrote and reflected on the new way he was being seen by those around him, he began to cast himself in a new light: perhaps he wasn’t simply “the drummer”; perhaps
he
was the man who would save Germany, he thought, the man born to be a dictator, reliant on his own will.

Oddly, even as he was writing
Mein Kampf,
thus solidifying his politics of racism and authoritarian angst, he was also having a revelation about the power of the democratic vote. While in jail, Hitler decided that the Nazi Party would have to come to power the legal way. Whereas before the Beer Hall coup, he’d felt that force was the only way to gain control, he now decided that his power must be given to him by the people of Germany themselves, by their
votes. Hitler was also very concerned with getting Germany back into a place of international respect again.
To him, that meant breaking the Treaty of Versailles and proceeding with rearmament. A prime motivating factor for Hitler’s every move would be revenge for the capitulation and punishment Germany suffered at the end of the First World War. He would speak about it incessantly, with the promise that such humiliation would not happen again.

Hitler’s reverence and enthusiasm for motor cars was also closely connected to his plan to return Germany to a position of international power. He would find a way to combine two things he felt very passionate about—the automobile and national power. Already, it was common knowledge around the Nazi offices that if Hitler could not be found, he was probably at one of two places: the nearby car showroom where his new friend Jakob Werlin worked or the auto
racetrack. Even before the 1923 Beer Hall Putsch, before jail, before the NSDAP was much of anything at all, Hitler had forced the party to stretch their limited funds in order to acquire two cars, both from the Austrian-born Werlin.

Jakob Werlin, a stocky man with hard eyes, first met Hitler in Munich, where the Nazi offices were located. There was a printing shop where Hitler used to go each time he needed to make flyers or posters for an upcoming lecture or rally the Nazis had planned. In the very same building as that printer, there was a Daimler-Benz showroom, and Hitler could never pass by without looking at the cars. Werlin worked there, and the printer knew him well. “I’ve
brought a new customer for you!”
¹¹
the printer said on the day he introduced Werlin and Hitler. The two quickly became friends, talking and negotiating over Daimler’s cars. One of the cars Hitler acquired from Werlin was candy-apple red, an unusual thing at the time, but Hitler wanted to make a statement with it. When Hitler was taken to jail, this car was
confiscated. From prison, he told the Party they would have to buy him another one, and he wrote to Werlin asking questions about what he currently had in the showroom, and what it might be possible to buy. He thought of perhaps acquiring a
Daimler-Benz 11/40, or a 16/50 that had a roaring engine he especially liked. He wanted the car to be gray, and he wanted “wire wheels” on it. He also asked Werlin if he could get a special deal on the car, saying
that he’d have to find a loan in order to purchase it because the legal fees he now owed were “making his hair stand on end.”
¹²

Hitler loved cars in ways that had nothing to do with his own ambitions, but while he was in jail, he began to think of the automobile in a political sense. He read automotive magazines and sketched out designs for possible cars. His favorite book at the time was the autobiography of Henry Ford.
¹³
Ford became a hero to Hitler. He even hung a life-size picture
of the American on his office wall. It was (in large part) from Ford that he got his idea for giving Germany a People’s Car.

The Model T, that “single, wonderful car” that the Ford company had first produced back in 1908 had, by 1923, grown into millions of cars and thus become the world’s first car for the common man, the first car to be made for, and driven by, a class of people who were not necessarily elite or rich. Ford’s customers were farmers, artisans, housewives; people with essential, everyday jobs. The Model T was a car that these people could both
afford and understand, and they adopted it as their own.

Ford had accomplished this feat by introducing the moving assembly line into his new Highland Plant in Michigan, an innovation that increased output while at the same time lowering production costs and making automobiles more affordable. In 1914, Ford had also introduced new conditions for workers, raising wages considerably (his revolutionary “$5 a day” policy doubled the average wage in one stroke) while at the same time shortening the workday to an
average of eight hours rather than the usual ten or twelve. These policies would eventually become the manufacturing standard for factories all over the world, providing the structural template for the modern automotive company, as well as the guiding example for the size and style of an automotive factory. It was a mode of business built on efficiency and speed. As Brinkley writes of Ford’s first Highland
Park plant that opened in 1910, “No sooner did production start up than the company’s executives began prowling the factory floors
¹⁴
looking for ways to save time, money and manpower through future mechanization … it was corporate development through unceasing improvement—and that, in essence, constitutes what came to be called Fordism, the restless approach to management that would sweep the industrialized world.…”

The Model T had taken nearly a decade to steadily spread through the country, but the point was, it
had
spread. Nearly fifteen million Model T’s had been sold by the time Hitler went to jail, and nothing comparable had been attempted successfully in Europe. News of the car traveled slowly to the majority of people in Europe, but even for those in the know (and there were certainly people in Europe who bought and drove Model Ts), there was not a great
deal of professional desire to create a similar car. In Europe, the conditions were very different and it was thought that the American model simply would not work. The American landscape and its mass of potential consumers differed greatly from the small European countries and their
comparatively limited means of making a cheap car
and
a profit: With fewer people to buy the car, there was less of a reason to make one. But Hitler began to see the potential
political points he could gain by being the one to bring the German people such an automobile.

Still, Hitler certainly was not the first to think Germany’s future would be in a car for the common man. Inspired and intelligent men like Josef Ganz and Hans Ledwinka had been championing and writing about the People’s Car for years. In 1923, for instance, the very same year that Hitler was taken to jail, the following was written in the
Automobil-Revue
: