1924: The Year That Made Hitler (2 page)

In the early 1920s, a crashing economy drove the longing among some groups for the return of a strongman—maybe even of the monarchy itself. Nineteen twenty-three was Germany’s worst year since the crushing 1918 defeat in war. The country’s hyperinflated currency reached 4.2
trillion
marks per dollar—a loaf of bread cost 200 billion marks, one egg about 80 billion marks;
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a theater ticket
sometimes could be had not for money but for two eggs. Worse, people’s savings were destroyed, and farmers, despite a bumper crop, refused to release their produce for prices that were nearly meaningless by the next day. The food shortages sparked food riots. The German government reacted to the inflationary spiral by simply printing more and more money; people sometimes carried it in wheelbarrows to go shopping.

Internally, Germany was riven by deep and bitter political antagonisms. Extremists on the left (Communists) and on the right (nationalists and race-based parties called
völkisch
) competed for space with numerous parties in between. In 1920, a right-wing coup d’état led by Walther von Lüttwitz and Wolfgang Kapp—it became known as the Kapp Putsch—had taken Berlin for four days, chasing the government from town before falling apart. Political violence was rampant, beginning with the 1919 assassinations of the Communist leaders (then called Spartacists) Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg. Between 1919 and 1922, right-wing groups committed more than three hundred fifty political murders, adding to a mood of “moral indifference to violence” that characterized the early years of the Weimar Republic.
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A right-wing hit squad called Organisation Consul took credit for the assassinations of Matthias Erzberger, the German politician who signed the 1918 World War I armistice, and Walther Rathenau, Germany’s foreign minister and a Jew.

Discontent was also fueled by Germany’s uncertain place in the world. The loss of Alsace-Lorraine to France and key parts of Upper Silesia to Poland through the 1919 Treaty of Versailles rankled most Germans. Still more, they were enraged by the occupation by mainly French forces of the Rhineland beginning in 1918 and, more recently, in Germany’s industrial heartland, the Ruhr region. In
January 1923, Belgian and French troops—six full divisions,
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some of them Senegalese soldiers from the French African colonies—occupied the coal-and-steel-producing Ruhr area, which included the key cities of Düsseldorf, Duisburg, and Essen. The incursion was officially a reprisal for Germany’s failure to meet postwar reparations payments, but many believed that French prime minister Raymond Poincaré was mainly looking for a convenient excuse to carve out a buffer zone along Germany’s western border with France, Belgium, and the Netherlands, while gaining access to German coal fields. This aggressive rearrangement of territory was opposed by the British. Since a large part of the overdue reparations payment was supposed to be made in coal and wooden telegraph poles, one British politician groused: “No more damaging use of wood has occurred since the Trojan Horse.”
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Either way, the upheavals and uncertainties generated an atmosphere ripe for revolution, putsch, and violence. The Berlin government called for passive resistance to the French invaders; workers walked off their jobs. Some Germans mounted active resistance and sabotage; some were caught, tried, and executed by French firing squads. A right-wing saboteur named Albert Leo Schlageter, captured and shot, became a national martyr and a Nazi hero. The political defiance felt good to the Germans but had disastrous economic results: all-important industrial production came nearly to a standstill and unemployment was rampant. To cover lost salaries and benefits, the government resorted to printing even more money, further weakening the hyperinflated currency. Hunger strikes broke out in Berlin, Hamburg, Cologne, and other cities, forcing German police and troops to fire on starving Germans.

The rapid post–World War I demobilization had flooded the labor market with more than five million men, many without jobs
or prospects, but all trained in one skill: fighting. And they had plenty to fight about. People felt their culture, politics, and social structures were at risk, driven by centrifugal forces they could not control. The Weimar Republic’s “normal state was crisis,” wrote historian Gordon Craig.
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Insulted and humiliated by the “sole war guilt” clause of the 1919 Treaty of Versailles, Germans were saddled with a $12.5 billion reparations obligation they felt was ruinous. Even the onset of the Golden Twenties—a flowering of avant-garde culture, mainly in Berlin—was seen in many parts of Germany, especially Bavaria, as proof of decadence and disintegration in the capital.

Nowhere were these issues more hotly debated than in Bavaria. Home to Hitler’s Nazis and numerous other bitterly nationalistic parties and groups, Bavaria was the unruly renegade in the German federation, constantly making special demands, refusing to accept national rulings, and threatening separation or partial secession by establishing its own currency, postal system, or railroad network. The second-largest state after Prussia, Bavaria was the Weimar Republic’s bête noire, the putsch capital of Germany. The Free State, as it called itself, had suffered through uprising and turmoil since 1918, when a left-wing march led by a shaggy-bearded intellectual named Kurt Eisner had successfully chased the Bavarian king out of his palace overnight. Within three months, after a failed attempt at socialist government, Eisner had been assassinated on a Munich sidewalk. More mayhem followed. To the horror of middle-class Munichers, a Bavarian Soviet Republic held power for three weeks, only to be ousted in another spasm of violence involving right-wing Freikorps troops sent from outside Bavaria. Atrocities were committed on both sides.

Ever since, Bavaria had been leaning hard to the right, attracting
more and more militant nationalists and potential revolutionaries like Hitler and his anti-democratic Nazi Party. The revolutionaries were also anti-revolutionary; they refused to accept the legitimacy of the November 1918 republican revolution. “If I stand here as a revolutionary,” Hitler would later remark, “I also stand against revolution and [political] crime.”
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Hitler, along with many others on the radical right, called the revolutionaries of 1918 “the November criminals.” To riled-up members of the
Frontgemeinschaft
—the frontline brotherhood that had fought so long in the World War I trenches—it was the Berlin civilians who had stabbed them in the back. “Unbeaten on the battlefield” was their motto. One of their chief heroes, General Erich Ludendorff, the great strategist of World War I, had also moved from Berlin to Bavaria, where he drifted into hard-core, race-based politics. Bavaria even gave sanctuary to Captain Hermann Ehrhardt, a leader of the Kapp Putsch who was wanted for arrest by the national government in Berlin. With the Berlin governments often dominated by Social Democrats—considered Marxists by the conservative Bavarians—Munich became the favored stomping grounds of the
völkisch
parties, a movement based on pro-German, anti-Semitic racism.
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Pushing a hard line, a new conservative government in 1920 announced that Bavaria would become “a bastion of order”—an enclave of peace and respectability, especially for right-wing parties, in the morass of leftism that seemed to dominate the rest of Germany. Bavaria was, as always, a land apart.

For Hitler, Bavaria was a kind of heaven. A born Austrian, Hitler had grown up in the provincial town of Linz. But he spent five formative years, from age eighteen to twenty-four, in Vienna, the Austrian capital. There, he lived as a failed artist and drifter. Rejected twice by the Austrian Academy of the Fine Arts and lacking a high school diploma, Hitler was from 1908 to 1913 reduced to scratching out a living by drawing or painting postcard-style scenes for tourists, selling his wares on the Viennese streets or to small art dealers, mainly Jews.
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He was downwardly mobile, moving from a cheap shared room to a shabby single room to two different men’s shelters (one of them partially funded by well-off Jewish families). In autumn 1909, he apparently became a vagrant, spending at least a few miserable nights in twenty-four-hour cafés and on park benches, later claiming “frostbite on fingers, hands and feet” as a result.
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Partly because of these privations, Hitler called Vienna “the hardest but most thorough school of my life.”
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Politically, Hitler became steeped in the frothing nationalist and anti-Semitic politics of prewar Vienna—a city with a prosperous, well-established Jewish elite, plus a more recent torrent of poor Jewish immigrants fleeing pogroms in the East. Impressed by the political style of Vienna’s radically anti-Jewish mayor, Karl Lueger, Hitler also became an adherent of the Pan-German movement promoted years earlier by Austrian Georg Ritter von Schönerer. Schönerer was a rabid nationalist and anti-Semite who believed all German-speaking peoples belonged together in a single Greater Germany. Schönerer felt that German speakers, although they were the ruling class in the Austro-Hungarian empire, were being marginalized because they were outnumbered by non-Germans—Czechs, Slavs, and Magyars. In that same spirit, Hitler deplored what he called “Austria’s Slavization” by the Hapsburg royalty.
¹⁶

Young Hitler, now twenty, was horrified by the sight of
incomprehensible, multilingual debates, with occasional cross-cultural screaming, in the polyglot parliament in Vienna.
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He immersed himself in the teeming city’s German-nationalist newspapers, proselytizing pamphlets and extremist pulp like
Ostara,
a racist periodical, that Hitler almost certainly bought or picked up free in the “cheap people’s café” that he said he frequented. He developed a militant aversion to Marxism—“a tool for the destruction of the nation state and the creation of Jewish world tyranny,
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Hitler called it—and to Austria’s Social Democratic Party. He rejected the party’s focus on organized labor and international working-class solidarity rather than on race-based nationalism, though he later claimed to have learned his own successful combination of propaganda and force (“terror”) from the Socialists.
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After a year of what he called “tranquil observation,” Hitler rejected parliamentary democracy as a fatally flawed form of government that could only lead to mob rule from the left. “Today’s Western democracy is the forerunner of Marxism,” he wrote.

Hitler began to regard as anathema all forces on the left, and to associate Jews with the power and growth of these forces. His first truly anti-Semitic feelings, he claimed, were aroused by the sudden notice of an Eastern Jew on a Vienna street—“an apparition in a black caftan and black hair locks.”
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Since only a blind person could not have noticed Orthodox Jews all over Vienna at the time, this smacks of a stylized eureka moment to dramatize Hitler’s developmental tale. Yet while most historians believe this anecdote is made up or drawn from numerous experiences, many accept Hitler’s general assertion that his obsessive, political anti-Semitism began in Vienna
²¹
—the view he would put forth in
Mein Kampf
and during his 1924 treason trial. Yet others argue that, for lack of corroborating evidence to support his version of events, Hitler’s anti-Semitism only became “manifest, radical and active,” as historian Othmar
Plöckinger put it, after World War I in Munich. In their view, Hitler’s elaborate description of his politicization during his Vienna period was fabricated to fit the invented image of a naive young man reacting to real conditions, not the reality of an aimless war veteran looking for work as a politician. In this interpretation, Hitler only seized on anti-Semitism “as the winning horse in the existing political environment,” notes historian Roman Töppel.
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But that gets ahead of the story.

In May 1913, after five hard years in the Austrian capital and after receiving a small inheritance on his twenty-fourth birthday, Hitler left Vienna for Munich—the fulfillment of his dream to live in an all-German environment surrounded by monumental architecture and a spirit of artistic creativity. Munich became the place to which Hitler was “more attached… than any other spot in the world,” he claimed.
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“This time before [World War I] was by far the happiest and most contented period of my life.”
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Hitler later claimed to have moved to Germany “mainly for political reasons”—his dislike of the Austro-Hungarian hybrid state. But relocating to Munich appealed to Hitler for another reason: he was trying to stay one step ahead of Austrian authorities who wanted to draft him into their army, where he would have to serve three years on active duty followed by seven years in the reserves and two more in the national guard.

In Munich, the city he would now consider his true home for the rest of his life, the poorly educated Hitler was again without real work. Again, he sketched and painted postcards and tourist scenes for sale on the streets and in Munich’s raucous beer halls. Again, he lived alone in a simple, cheap sublet room. Again, he was a marginal figure without personal or professional prospects. Then Hitler’s fortunes took an even worse turn. In January 1914, the Austrian draft
board caught up with Hitler and demanded his appearance in Linz for military induction. He was even arrested for one night. Hitler dodged around with pleas and letters. Finally, he arranged to report just across the Austrian border in Salzburg. There, to his immense relief, he failed the physical examination. The pallid and puny Adolf Hitler, future war maker and mass murderer, was pronounced “too weak” to be a medic and “unfit to handle weapons.”
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Hitler had, as so often happened during his developmental years, barely escaped a fate that might have kept him unknown and unfeared for life.