The Coming of the Third Reich (32 page)

In the rabidly vengeful, ultra-nationalist atmosphere of the months following the Free Corps’ violent suppression of the Munich Revolution, such sentiments were far from unusual. Hitler had by now become a trusted political agent of the army. In this capacity he was sent to report on one of a large range of political groups that sprang up in Munich in this period, to see whether it was dangerous or whether it could be enrolled in the cause of counter-revolution. This was the German Workers’ Party, founded on 5 January 1919 by one Anton Drexler, a locksmith who had previously belonged to the Fatherland Party. Drexler insisted that he was a socialist and a worker, opposed to unearned capital, exploitation and profiteering. But this was socialism with a nationalistic twist. Drexler ascribed the evils he fought to the machinations of the Jews, who had also devised the pernicious ideology of Bolshevism. He directed his appeal not to industrial workers but to the ‘productive estates’, to all those who lived from honest labour.
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In the short run, this meant the lower middle classes, but equally, in a tradition going back to Adolf Stocker’s Christian Social movement in the 1880s and echoing many similar nationalist initiatives in both Germany and Austria before and above all immediately after the war, Drexler’s party sought in the longer term to win the working class over from Marxism and enlist it in the service of the Pan-German cause.

The fledgling party was in fact another creation of the hyperactive Thule Society. There was nothing unusual about Drexler or his tiny party in the far-right hothouse of Munich after the defeat of the Revolution. What was unusual was the attention Hitler aroused when he went to a meeting of the party on 12 September 1919 and spoke passionately from the floor against a previous speaker who had advocated Bavaria’s separation from the Reich. Impressed, Drexler readily acquiesced when Hitler, again acting on the orders of his army superiors, applied to join. Although he later claimed to have been only the seventh person to join the party, he was in fact enrolled as member number 555. This was less impressive than it sounded; the German Workers’ Party membership began, following a habit long established amongst fringe political groups, not with the number 1, but with the number 501, to suggest that it enjoyed a membership of hundreds rather than just a few score.
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Hitler, still encouraged by his superior officers in the army, rapidly became the party’s star speaker. He built on his success to push the party into holding ever larger public meetings, mostly in beer-halls, advertised in advance by brash poster campaigns, and often accompanied by rowdy scenes. By the end of March 1920, now indispensable to the Party, he had clearly decided that this was where his future lay. Demagogy had restored to him the identity he had lost with the German defeat. He left the army and became a full-time political agitator. The appeal of radical antisemitism in counter-revolutionary Munich was obvious, and had already been tapped by a much larger organization with similar views, the German-Racial Defence and Defiance League. This was yet another far-right group that used the swastika as its main political symbol. With its headquarters in Hamburg, the League boasted some 200,000 members all over Germany, drawn from ex-members of the Fatherland Party, from disgruntled ex-soldiers and from nationalist-inclined students, teachers and white-collar workers. It ran a sophisticated propaganda machine, churning out millions of leaflets and putting on mass meetings where the public numbered thousands rather than the hundreds which Drexler’s organization was able to attract.
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The League was far from being the only far-right movement of this kind; another, much smaller one, the German-Socialist Party, led by the engineer Alfred Brunner, also had branches in a number of German cities, though its membership was only a tenth of the size of the League’s. But neither had a speaker whose pulling power in any way compared to Hitler’s.
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While conventional right-wing politicians delivered lectures, or spoke in a style that was orotund and pompous, flat and dull, or rough and brutish, Hitler followed the model of Social Democratic orators such as Eisner, or the left-wing agitators from whom he later claimed to have learned in Vienna. And he gained much of his oratorical success by telling his audiences what they wanted to hear. He used simple, straightforward language that ordinary people could understand, short sentences, powerful, emotive slogans. Often beginning a speech quietly, to capture his audience’s attention, he would gradually build to a climax, his deep, rather hoarse voice would rise in pitch, climbing in a crescendo to a ranting and screaming finale, accompanied by carefully rehearsed dramatic gestures, his face glistening with sweat, his lank, dark hair falling forward over his face as he worked his audience into a frenzy of emotion. There were no qualifications in what he said; everything was absolute, uncompromising, irrevocable, undeviating, unalterable, final. He seemed, as many who listened to his early speeches testified, to speak straight from the heart, and to express their own deepest fears and desires. Increasingly, too, he exuded self-confidence, aggression, belief in the ultimate triumph of his party, even a sense of destiny. His speeches often began with an account of his own poverty-stricken early life, to which he drew an implicit parallel with the downcast, downtrodden and desperate state of Germany after the First World War, then, his voice rising, he would describe his own political awakening, and point to its counterpart in Germany’s future recovery and return to glory. Without necessarily using overtly religious language, Hitler appealed to religious archetypes of suffering, humiliation, redemption and resurrection lodged deep within his listeners’ psyche; and in the circumstances of postwar and post-revolutionary Bavaria, he found a ready response.
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Hitler’s speeches reduced Germany’s complex social, political and economic problems to a simple common denominator: the evil machinations of the Jews. In My Struggle, describing how, in his view, Jewish subversives had undermined the German war effort in 1918, he declared:

If at the beginning of the war and during the war twelve or fifteen thousand of these Hebrew corrupters of the people had been held under poison gas, as happened to hundreds of thousands of our very best German workers in the field, the sacrifice of millions at the front would not have been in vain. On the contrary: twelve thousand scoundrels eliminated in time might have saved the lives of a million real Germans, valuable for the future. But it just happened to be in the line of bourgeois ‘statesmanship’ to subject millions to a bloody end on the battlefield without batting an eyelid, but to regard ten or twelve thousand traitors, profiteers, usurers, and swindlers as a sacred national treasure and openly proclaim their inviolability.
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Such uncompromising radicalism lent Hitler’s public meetings a revivalist fervour that was hard for less demagogic politicians to emulate. The publicity he won was enhanced by the tactic of advertising them with red posters, to attract the left, with the result that protests from socialist listeners often degenerated into fisticuffs and brawls.

In the climate of postwar counter-revolution, national brooding on the ‘stab-in-the-back’, and obsession with war profiteers and merchants of the rapidly mushrooming hyperinflation, Hitler concentrated especially on rabble-rousing attacks on ‘Jewish’ merchants who were supposedly pushing up the price of goods: they should all, he said, to shouts of approval from his audiences, be strung up.
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Perhaps to emphasize this anti-capitalist focus, and to align itself with similar groups in Austria and Czechoslovakia, the party changed its name in February 1920 to the National Socialist German Workers’ Party; hostile commentators soon abbreviated this to the word ‘Nazi’, just as the enemies of the Social Democrats had abbreviated the name of that party earlier on to ‘Sozi’. Despite the change of name, however, it would be wrong to see Nazism as a form of, or an outgrowth from, socialism. True, as some have pointed out, its rhetoric was frequently egalitarian, it stressed the need to put common needs above the needs of the individual, and it often declared itself opposed to big business and international finance capital. Famously, too, antisemitism was once declared to be ‘the socialism of fools’. But from the very beginning, Hitler declared himself implacably opposed to Social Democracy and, initially to a much smaller extent, Communism: after all, the ‘November traitors’ who had signed the Armistice and later the Treaty of Versailles were not Communists at all, but the Social Democrats and their allies.
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The ‘National Socialists’ wanted to unite the two political camps of left and right into which, they argued, the Jews had manipulated the German nation. The basis for this was to be the idea of race. This was light years removed from the class-based ideology of socialism. Nazism was in some ways an extreme counter-ideology to socialism, borrowing much of its rhetoric in the process, from its self-image as a movement rather than a party, to its much-vaunted contempt for bourgeois convention and conservative timidity. The idea of a ‘party’ suggested allegiance to parliamentary democracy, working steadily within a settled democratic polity. In speeches and propaganda, however, Hitler and his followers preferred on the whole to talk of the ‘National Socialist movement’, just as the Social Democrats had talked of the ‘workers’ movement’ or, come to that, the feminists of the ‘women’s movement’ and the apostles of prewar teenage rebellion of the ‘youth movement’. The term not only suggested dynamism and unceasing forward motion, it also more than hinted at an ultimate goal, an absolute object to work towards that was grander and more final than the endless compromises of conventional politics. By presenting itself as a ‘movement’, National Socialism, like the labour movement, advertised its opposition to conventional politics and its intention to subvert and ultimately overthrow the system within which it was initially forced to work.

By replacing class with race, and the dictatorship of the proletariat with the dictatorship of the leader, Nazism reversed the usual terms of socialist ideology. The synthesis of right and left was neatly symbolized in the Party’s official flag, personally chosen by Hitler in mid-1920: the field was bright red, the colour of socialism, with the swastika, the emblem of racist nationalism, outlined in black in the middle of a white circle at the centre of the flag, so that the whole ensemble made a combination of black, white and red, the colours of the official flag of the Bismarckian Empire. In the wake of the 1918 Revolution these came to symbolize rejection of the Weimar Republic and all it stood for; but by changing the design and adding the swastika, a symbol already used by a variety of far-right racist movements and Free Corps units in the postwar period, the Nazis also announced that what they wanted to replace it with was a new, Pan-German, racial state, not the old Wilhelmine status quo.
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By the end of 1920, Hitler’s early emphasis on attacking Jewish capitalism had been modified to bring in ‘Marxism’, or in other words Social Democracy, and Bolshevism as well. The cruelties of the civil war and ‘red terror’ in Lenin’s Russia were making an impact, and Hitler could use them to lend emphasis to common far-right views of the supposedly Jewish inspiration behind the revolutionary upheavals of 1918-19 in Munich. Nazism would also have been possible, however, without the Communist threat; Hitler’s anti-Bolshevism was the product of his antisemitism and not the other way round.
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His principal political targets remained the Social Democrats and the vaguer spectre of ‘Jewish capitalism’. Borrowing the stock arguments of antisemitism from before the war, Hitler declared in numerous speeches that the Jews were a race of parasites who could only live by subverting other peoples, above all the highest and best of all races, the Aryans. Thus they divided the Aryan race against itself, both organizing capitalist exploitation on the one hand and leading the struggle against it on the other.
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The Jews, he said in a speech delivered on 6 April 1920, were ‘to be exterminated’; on 7 August the same year he told his audience that they should not believe ‘that you can fight a disease without killing the cause, without annihilating the bacillus, and do not think that you can fight racial tuberculosis without taking care that the people are free of the cause of racial tuberculosis’. Annihilation meant the violent removal of the Jews from Germany by any means. The ‘solution of the Jewish question’, he told his listeners in April 1921, could only be solved by ‘brute force’. ‘We know’, he said in January 1923, ‘that if they come to power, our heads will roll in the sand; but we also know that when we get our hands on power: “Then God have mercy on you!” ’
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THE BEER-HALL PUTSCH

I

At the end of the First World War, General Erich Ludendorff, Germany’s military dictator for the last two years or so of the conflict, thought it prudent to remove himself from the political scene for a while. Dismissed from office on 25 October 1918 after a bitter row with the newly appointed last, liberal government of the Kaiser, he lingered on for a while in Berlin, then, donning dark glasses and false whiskers, he slipped across the Baltic to Sweden to sit out the Revolution. By February 1919 he evidently thought the worst was over and returned to Germany. Such was the prestige he had gained in the war that he quickly became the figurehead of the radical right. A Pan-German annexationist in 1914-18, and a rabid opponent of the Peace Settlement, he immediately began conspiring to overthrow the new Republican order. Gathering a group of his former aides around him, he lent his support to the short-lived putsch mounted against the government in Berlin by Wolfgang Kapp and the Free Corps in March 1920, and when this failed, left for the more congenial atmosphere of Munich. Here he soon came into contact with the ultra-nationalist circle that had by now gathered round the previously unknown figure of Adolf Hitler.
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