Hitler (27 page)

As soon as word came of Drexler's independent action, Hitler returned to Munich. And when the party executive committee, which had gained some self-assurance in the interval, called upon him to justify his behavior, Hitler responded with a sweeping gesture. On July 11 he declared his resignation from the party. In a lengthy statement three days later he heaped violent reproaches upon the other members of the committee, then stated as an ultimatum his conditions for returning to the party. Among other things he demanded the immediate resignation of the executive committee, the “post of First Chairman with dictatorial powers” for himself, and “the party to be purged of the alien elements that have lately intruded into it.” He also insisted that neither the name nor the program of the party could be changed; the absolute precedence of the Munich branch of the party must be preserved; there could be no union with other parties, only the annexation of other parties. And with that stubbornness which presaged the later Hitler he stated: “Concessions on our part are totally out of the question.”
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The degree of prestige and power that Hitler had already attained is evident from the immediate reply of the party executive committee, which was dated the following day. Instead of risking a showdown, it pleaded guilty to Hitler's charges with timid reminders of its former services, bowed completely, and was even ready to sacrifice the incumbent First Chairman, Anton Drexler, to Hitler's wrath. The key passage in the document, in which for the first time the Byzantine tones of subsequent homage sounded, read: “The committee is prepared, in acknowledgment of your tremendous knowledge, your singular dedication and selfless service to the Movement, and your rare oratorical gift, to concede to you dictatorial powers, and will be most delighted if after your re-entry you will take over the position of First Chairman, which Drexler long ago and repeatedly offered to you. Drexler will then remain as your coadjutor in the executive committee and, if you approve, in the same position in the action committee. If you should consider it desirable to have him completely excluded from the Movement, the next annual meeting would have to be consulted on that matter.”

The affair is a good illustration of Hitler's skill at guiding and mastering crises. Its conclusion also shows his characteristic tendency to ruin a triumph by going a step too far. As soon as the party committee had submitted, he called an extraordinary membership meeting on his own initiative, in order to savor his victory to the full. At this point the good-natured Drexler would take no more. On July 25 he went to the Munich police and stated that the signers of the call for the meeting did not belong to the party and therefore had no right to convoke a membership meeting. He also pointed out that Hitler was aiming at revolution and violence, whereas he himself strove to carry out the party aims by legal, parliamentary procedures. The police, however, said they had no authority to intervene. Meanwhile, Hitler found himself under attack from other quarters. An anonymous leaflet appeared, accusing him of having brought “disunion and dissension into our ranks through power madness and personal ambition.” He was thus “doing the business of the Jews and their henchmen.” His aim was “to use the party as a springboard for dirty ends”; undoubtedly he was acting as the tool of obscure backers. There must be a reason why he was so anxious to keep his private life as well as his origins a mystery. “When asked by members what he lives on and what his former occupation was, he always became agitated and flew into a rage... so his conscience cannot be clear, especially since his excess in relations with women, to whom he has often referred to himself as ‘King of Munich,' costs a great deal of money.” A poster that the police would not allow to be displayed repeated these accusations and ended with the battle cry: “The tyrant must be overthrown.”

The dispute was finally smoothed over by the mediation of Dietrich Eckart. At a membership meeting held on July 29, 1921, the crisis was laid to rest. Once again Hitler could not refrain from vaunting his victory. Although Drexler had pounced on the chance afforded by Hitler's resignation to purge Hermann Esser from the party, Hitler insisted that the membership meeting be chaired by Esser, his satellite. Greeted by “applause that would not cease,” Hitler gave so skilled a version of the dispute that almost everyone swung over to his side. Drexler was given the consolation prize of honorary chairmanship, and the bylaws were revised as Hitler wished. His own followers moved into the executive committee; he himself was granted the dictatorial powers he demanded. The NSDAP was in his hand.

That same evening, at the Krone Circus, Hermann Esser hailed Hitler as “our Leader”—
unser Führer.
It was Esser, too, who henceforth held forth with cynical sentimentality in restaurants and taverns as the most zealous preacher of the Führer myth. Simultaneously, Dietrich Eckart in the
Völkische Beobachter
began a well-orchestrated campaign to purvey the same myth. On August 4 he sketched a profile of Hitler as a “selfless, self-sacrificing, devoted and sincere” man, forever “purposeful and alert.” A few days later came another account, this written by Rudolf Hess, which further spiritualized the manly picture. It glorified Hitler's “purest intent,” his strength, his oratory, his admirable fund of knowledge, and clear intellect. The fantastic growth of the Hitler cult is evidenced by another essay, written by Hess a year later, in connection with a contest on the subject: “What will be the nature of the man who will lead Germany back to the summit?” Hess's piece took first prize and contained thoughts such as the following:

 

Profound knowledge in all areas of political life and history, the capacity to draw the right lessons from this knowledge, belief in the purity of his own cause and in ultimate victory, and enormous power of will give him the power of thrilling oratory which evokes joyful enthusiasm from the masses. Where the salvation of the nation is in question, he does not disdain utilizing the weapons of the adversary, demagogy, slogans, processions, etc. He himself has nothing in common with the masses; he is all personality, like every great man.

If necessity commands it, he does not shrink from shedding blood. Great questions are always decided by blood and iron.... He is concerned solely with the attainment of his goal, even if that calls for trampling over closest friends....

Thus we have the portrait of the dictator; keen of mind, clear and true, passionate and then again controlled, cold and bold, scrupulous in decision, fearless in rapid execution of his acts, ruthless toward himself and others, mercilessly hard and then again soft in his love for his people, tireless in work, with a steel fist in a velvet glove, capable ultimately of overcoming even himself.

We still do not know when he will intervene to save us—this “man.” But millions feel that he is coming.
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On August 3, 1921, immediately after Hitler's taking full control of the party, the SA was founded. The initials originally meant Sports Division; only later did they come to stand for
Sturmabteilung
or storm troop. The party opposition had earlier objected to Hitler's surrounding himself with a paid bodyguard of former Free Corps soldiers; they demanded that the group be dissolved “because they want to steal and pillage.” But the SA was not chiefly an organization of discharged soldiers seeking an outlet for their violent instincts. Nor was it principally an instrument of self-defense on the part of the Right, to be pitted against similar terrorist troops maintained by the enemy. It is true that the troops may originally have been intended for some such purpose. For militant fighting forces of the Left did exist—for example, the Social Democratic Erhard Auer Guard. There is a good deal of confirmation for the stories of deliberate riots launched against the NSDAP by the Left. “The Marxist world, which owes more to terrorism for its survival than any other contemporary phenomenon, also resorted to this method in its struggle against our movement,” Hitler once declared in explaining the reasons for creating the SA.

Nevertheless, the SA had a more far-reaching function. From the start it was conceived as an instrument of attack and conquest. According to its founding proclamation, it was to be the “battering-ram” of the movement. Its members were to be trained to obedience and to an unspecified “revolutionary will.” One of Hitler's pet ideas was that the weakness of the bourgeois order vis-à-vis Marxism lay in its principled separation of mind and violence, ideology and terror. The bourgeois politician, he argued, was limited to exclusively intellectual weapons, while the soldier was strictly excluded from politics. The Marxists, on the other hand, “united mind and brutal violence harmoniously.” The SA was to imitate them. In the first issue of the SA's official gazette he called the organization “not only an instrument for the protection of the movement, but also... primarily the training school for the coming struggle for freedom on the domestic front.” Similarly, the
Völkische Beobachter
hailed the SA's “ready-for-action spirit.”

One motive for its creation was the disbanding of the paramilitary “citizen's militias in June 1921 and, a month later, the dissolution of the Oberland Free Corps, just home from Upper Silesia. Many members of these organizations, who at one blow found themselves deprived of the comradeship and glamour of the soldier's life and felt that life had lost its meaning, joined up with the adventure-hungry juveniles who had already become members of the NSDAP. Almost all of the SA members came from the numerically strong petty bourgeoisie that had long been prevented from rising socially and had attained to positions of some leadership only during the war, because of the heavy casualties in the officers' corps. Robust and eager for action, they had expected glorious careers in the postwar period. The terms of the Versailles Treaty, quite aside from all national humiliations, had thrown them back socially. They had ended up teaching in grammar schools, standing behind store counters, at the grilled windows in government offices. Such lives seemed to them narrow, wretched, and utterly unworthy of them. The same impulse to evade normality that had led Hitler to politics now brought them to Hitler.

Hitler himself regarded these recruits, so like him in type, as ideal material for his militant advance guard. In thinking out the tactics of achieving power, he included in his reckoning the resentments, the energy, and the incipient violence of these men. It was one of his psychological adages that uniformed men showing intent of violence had an attractive as well as an intimidating effect. Terrorism could exert a special magnetism. “Cruelty impresses” was the way he once phrased this insight. “People need a good scare. They want to be afraid of something. They want someone to make them afraid, someone to whom they can submit with a shudder. Haven't you noticed, after a brawl at a meeting, that the ones who get beaten up are the first to apply for membership in the party? What is this rot you talk about violence and how shocked you are about torture? The masses want that. They need something to dread.”
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With growing assurance, then, Hitler made brute force figure in the party's image. It brought in members who would perhaps not be fetched by propaganda and the appeal of ceremony.

Hitler may have had this principle in mind when he instigated the so-called Battle in the Hofbräuhaus of November 4, 1921, in which the “myth of the SA” was created. Sizable Social Democratic heckler squads had turned up at an NSDAP demonstration. Hitler later said there were as many as 700 to 800 of the enemy. It happened that the party business office was moving on this day, so that only fifty of the SA men were present at the meeting. Hitler himself has described how he whipped up the nervous little unit by a passionate address. Today was the day of decision, he declared; they must not leave the hall unless they were carried out dead. He would personally strip cowards of their armbands and badges; the best defense was a good attack. In Hitler's own description:

 

The answer was a threefold
Heil
that sounded rougher and hoarser than usual.

Then I went into the hall and surveyed the situation with my own eyes. They were sitting in there, tight-packed, and tried to stab me with their very eyes. Innumerable faces were turned toward me with sullen hatred, while again others, with mocking grimaces, let out cries capable of no two interpretations. Today they would “make an end of us,” we should look out for our guts....

 

In spite of the disruptive forces, however, Hitler managed to talk for an hour and a half and had begun to think he was master of the situation, when suddenly a man jumped up on a chair and shouted the Social Democratic slogan:
“Freiheit!''
(“Freedom”).

 

In a few seconds the whole hall was filled with a roaring, screaming crowd, over which, like howitzer shells, flew innumerable beer mugs, and in between the cracking of chair legs, the crashing of the mugs, bawling, howling and screaming.

It was an idiotic spectacle....

The fracas had not yet begun when my storm troopers—for so they were called from this day on—attacked. Like wolves they flung themselves in packs of eight or ten again and again on their enemies, and little by little actually began to thrash them out of the hall. After only five minutes I saw hardly a one of them who was not covered with blood.... Then suddenly two shots were fired from the hall entrance toward the platform, and wild shooting started. Your heart almost rejoiced at such a revival of old war experiences....

About twenty-five minutes had passed; the hall looked almost as if a shell had struck it. Many of my supporters were being bandaged; others had to be driven away, but we had remained masters of the situation. Hermann Esser, who had assumed the chair this evening, declared:
“The meeting goes on. The speaker has the floor.”
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