Hitler (22 page)

 

And the facts are: First, Jewry is unequivocally a race and not a religious community. By thousands of years of inbreeding, frequently undertaken in the narrowest circles, the Jew in general has preserved his race and its peculiarity more keenly than many of the peoples among whom he lives. And thus results the fact that among us a non-German, alien race lives, not willing and also not able to sacrifice its racial peculiarities, to deny its own way of feeling, thinking and striving, and which nevertheless possesses all the political rights we do ourselves. If the Jew's feelings move in purely material realms, even more so does his thinking and striving.... Everything that prompts man to strive for higher things, whether religion, socialism, democracy, all that is to him only a means to the end of satisfying his craving for money and dominance. The consequences of his activity become the racial tuberculosis of nations.

And from this the following results: Anti-Semitism on purely emotional grounds will find its ultimate expression in the form of pogroms. The anti-Semitism of reason, however, must lead to the planned judicial opposition to and elimination of the privileges of the Jews.... Its ultimate goal, however, must absolutely be the removal of the Jews altogether. Only a government of national power and never a government of national impotence will be capable of both.
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Four days after receiving this statement, on September 12, 1919, Captain Mayr ordered Hitler to visit one of the small parties among the bewildering array of radical associations and cliques that formed and fell apart with great rapidity, only to coalesce in new groupings. Here was a vast, unused reservoir of response for one seeking a following. The often weird doctrines of these groups showed the blind readiness of the petit bourgeois masses to seize on anything that let them vent their hatreds and promised some way out of social crisis.

 

A key center of conspiratorial and propagandistic activities, as well as a meeting ground for right extremists, was the Thule Society. Its headquarters was the luxury hotel Vier Jahreszeiten, and it had connections throughout Bavarian society. At times it counted some 1,500 influential members, and it, too, used the swastika as its symbol. Moreover, it controlled its own newspaper, the
Münchener Beobachter.
Its head was a political adventurer with a rather unsavory past and the sonorous name of Baron Rudolf von Sebottendorf, which he had acquired through adoption by an Austrian nobleman stranded in the Orient. Early in his life Sebottendorf had come under the influence of radical ideologues such as Theodor Fritsch and Lanz von Liebenfels, whose racist mania had also affected young Hitler. His Thule Society, founded in Munich at the beginning of 1918, was a successor to the racist anti-Semitic leagues of the prewar period and followed many of their traditions. Its name, in fact, went back to the Teutonic Thule Sect established in Leipzig in 1912, whose members had to be of “Aryan blood.” That group, rather like a lodge in its procedures, required candidates for admission to answer questions on the hirsuteness of various parts of their body. Candidates also had to present a footprint as evidence of their racial purity.

Sebottendorf's new Thule Society began its life by launching into violent anti-Semitic propaganda denouncing the Jews as the “mortal foe of the German people.” This was in January, 1918, while the war was still in progress. Later the Society could claim that the bloody and chaotic events of the soviet period were proof of its thesis. Its extravagant slogans contributed greatly to creating that atmosphere of obscene hatred in which racist radicalism could flourish. As early as October, 1918, groups within the Thule Society had forged plans for a rightist uprising. It instigated various assassination attempts against Kurt Eisner, and on April 13, 1918, attempted a putsch against the soviet regime. The Society also maintained connections with the Russian
émigré
circles that had made Munich their headquarters. A young Baltic student of architecture named Alfred Rosenberg, who had been profoundly affected by the trauma of the Russian Revolution, acted as liaison man. Almost all the actors who were to dominate the Bavarian scene in the following years belonged to the Society, including people who were to be prominent within Hitler's party. In various connections we encounter the names of Dietrich Eckart, Gottfried Feder, Hans Frank, Rudolf Hess, and Karl Harrer.

At the behest of the Thule Society, Karl Harrer, a sports journalist, together with a machinist named Anton Drexler, had, in October 1918, founded a “Political Workers Circle.” The group described itself as “an association of select persons for the purpose of discussing and studying political affairs.” In fact, it was intended as a bridge between the masses and the nationalistic Right. For a while the membership was limited to a very few of Drexler's fellow workers. He himself was a quiet, square-set, rather strange man, employed at the Munich workshops of the Federal Railways. As early as March, 1918, this sober, bespectacled machinist had on his own initiative organized a “Free Workers Committee for a Good Peace,” whose program called for fighting usury and rallying the working class behind the war. He had turned against Marxist socialism for its failure to resolve the “national question” either in practice or theory. This, at any rate, was the theme of an article he published titled, “The Failure of the Proletarian International and the Shipwreck of the Idea of Fraternization.” The enthusiasm with which the socialists on both sides had supported the war in August, 1914, had certainly exposed this flaw. A similar perception had led to the founding, in 1904, of the German Workers' Party (Deutsche Arbeiterpartei—DAP) by German-Bohemian workers in Trautenau. Now Anton Drexler revived that name and founded a party of his own. Its charter members were workmen from his own shop, and its first meeting took place on January 5, 1919, in the Fiirstenfelder Hof. A few days later, on the initiative of the Thule Society, another meeting was held in the Hotel Vier Jahreszeiten, and a national organization for the party was created. Karl Harrer appointed himself “National Chairman.” It was an ambitious title.

Actually, the new party, which hereafter met once a week in the Sternecker beer hall, was very small potatoes. Drexler did occasionally manage to procure a few prominent racists or nationalists as speakers—such as Gottfried Feder or the writer Dietrich Eckart. But the tone of the „ group remained at a dreary, beer-drinking level. Significantly, it did not address itself to the public at all. It was less a political party in the proper sense than a combination, typical for the Munich of those years, of secret society and locals gathering at the pub for their evening pint. A dull and embittered craving for exchange of opinions had brought them together. The lists of participants mention between ten and forty persons. Germany's shame, the trauma of the lost war, anti-Semitic grumblings, complaints concerning the downfall of order, justice, and morals—these were the themes of the meetings. The “directives” Drexler had read at the initial meeting reveal heartfelt if awkwardly worded resentments toward the rich, the proletarians and Jews, the price gougers and the rabble-rousers. The program called for annual profits being limited to 10,000 marks, for parity representation of the different states in the German Foreign Office, and the right of “skilled workers with a legal residence... to be counted in the middle class.” For happiness lay not “in talk and empty phrases in meetings, demonstrations and elections, but in good work, a full cookpot and a fair chance for the children.”

However philistine and intellectually confused the character of the party as a whole must appear, the first sentence of the “directives” contains an idea that embodied historical experience and a widespread need among the people. It shows that clumsy, crotchety Anton Drexler had grasped the spirit of the age. For the DAP defined itself as a classless “socialist organization led only by German leaders.” Drexler's “inspired idea” was to reconcile nationalism and socialism. He was neither the only man, nor even the first, to attempt this, and his concern about children and cookpots was a simplistic notion that certainly could not compete with the impressive Marxist systems of historical interpretation. But the moment in which Drexler seized on the idea—in the midst of the emotional crisis of a defeated, insulted country challenged by revolution—and the fact that he happened to meet Adolf Hitler, placed both the idea and the backroom political party which espoused it squarely on the stage of world history.

 

At the meeting of September 12, 1919, Gottfried Feder addressed the group on the subject: “How and by what means can capitalism be eliminated?” Among the forty-odd persons in the audience was Adolf Hitler, who was there on Captain Mayr's instructions. While Feder was expatiating on his familiar theses, the guest noted that here was one more of those newly founded groups “like so many others” stifling “in their absurd philistinism.” Accordingly, “when Feder finally stopped talking, I was happy. I had seen enough.”

Nevertheless, Hitler waited for the discussion period, and when one of the visitors urged the separation of Bavaria from the Reich and her union with Austria, he rose in indignation: “I could not help demanding the floor.” He attacked the speaker so passionately that Drexler whispered to the locomotive engineer Lotter, who was sitting beside him: “Man, he has a big mouth; we could use him.” When Hitler, immediately after talking, turned to leave this “dull club,” Drexler hurried after him and asked him to come back soon. He pressed upon Hitler a pamphlet he had written titled
My Political Awakening.
Hitler has described how, lying in his bunk at the barracks early the following morning and watching the mice go after some crusts of bread he had thrown down for them, he began to read the pamphlet. In Drexler's accounts of his life he recognized elements in his own experience: exclusion from jobs by union terrorism; earning a wretched living by semiartistic work (in Drexler's case playing the zither in a night club); and, finally, the great illumination accompanied by feelings of intense anxiety—recognition of the role of the Jewish race as corrupters of the world. These parallels aroused Hitler's interest, even though the person involved was a worker, as Hitler constantly reiterates.
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A few days later he received in the mail an unsolicited membership card bearing the number 555. Partly amused, partly annoyed, partly not knowing quite how to react, he decided to accept the invitation to attend a committee meeting. At the Altes Rosenbad tavern in the Herrenstrasse, “a very rundown place,” he found at a table in the back room “in the dim light of a broken-down gas lamp” several young people. While the tavernkeeper and his wife and one or two guests sat gloomily around in the other room, the group read the minutes “like the presiding committee of a
Skat
club.” They counted the club treasury (cash on hand: seven marks and fifty pfennigs). They approved the reports and drafted letters to similar associations in North Germany. All in all, “this was club life of the worst manner and sort.”

For two days Hitler pondered, and as always when he reminisced about decisive situations in his life, he spoke of the strain of the decision and emphasized the “hard,” “difficult,” or “bitter” mental effort it cost him. It ended with his entering the German Workers' Party as board member number 7, responsible for recruitment and propaganda. “After two days of agonized pondering and reflection, I finally came to the conviction that I had to take this step. It was the most decisive resolve of my life. From here there was and could be no turning back.”
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On the one hand, this is an example of Hitler's trick of throwing a bit of dramatic lighting on turning points in his own career that only later became apparent as such. If the moment lacked any outward drama, he could at least portray the decision as the product of solitary, painful struggle. On the other hand, all available sources show him consistently, up to the very end, displaying a singular indecisiveness, a deep-seated fear of fixing on any one course. His later associates describe him as going through a wearing process of vacillation and changes of mind on many questions until he was so exhausted that he finally left things to chance and a toss of a coin. His cult of fate and Providence was a device to rationalize his indecisiveness. It might be said that all his personal and even some of his political decisions were nothing more than evasions, ways to escape alternatives he felt to be threatening. In any case, throughout his life, from his leaving school, his moves to Vienna and Munich, and his volunteering for the army, up to his step into politics, it is not hard to detect the escape motivation. The same is true for much of his behavior during the following years, right down to the hapless postponements of the very end.

The desire to evade the oppressive demands of duty and order in the respectable world, to put off the feared discharge into civilian life dictated all his actions as a returned soldier and gradually led him into the wings of the Bavarian political stage. He looked upon politics as the vocation of one who was without a vocation and wanted to remain so. Now at last he had a field of action that demanded no qualifications other than those he possessed: passion, imagination, organizational talent, and demagogic gifts. In the barracks he wrote and typed away indefatigably at invitations to meetings, which he then delivered personally. He asked for lists of names and addresses and spoke with the persons mentioned. He sought out connections, support, new members.

The results were meager at first. Every unfamiliar face that turned up at meetings was eagerly noted. Hitler's success was due in considerable part to his being the only one in the organization with unlimited time at his disposal. His prestige rapidly increased in the seven-man party committee, which met once a week at a corner table in the Café Gasteig—later the object of worshipful veneration. The fact was that he had more ideas, was more adept and more energetic than the others in the executive committee.