Hitler: A Short Biography. A. Wilson N.

so it was, in that frenzied atmosphere of post-war German army camps, that Hitler had his first taste of the narcotic of adulation which, throughout a friendless, charmless and loveless thirty years of life, he had presumably craved at the deepest level. Wagner devotee that he was, he was naturally drawn to the politics of mass emotion. Not for him the quietly reasoned hope that by patient collaboration between men and women of good will, the worst features of the Treaty of Versailles could be negotiated; nor, at home, would he have possessed the smallest inclination to support a coalition of liberal opinion to safeguard jobs or institutional life as a more rational alternative to Bolshevism. From the very beginning, he wanted the big music of German nationalism, with all its associated xenophobia, philistine Jew-hatred and quasi-religious emotionalism. There were as many splinter parties of the extreme Right as there were of the extreme Left. As a much-trusted young speaker in the Aufklärungskommando, it was his task and his delight to sniff around in these unsavoury pools in Munich. He lighted upon the tiny German Workers Party, an extreme right-wing sect which had been founded by a Munich locksmith, Anton Drexler, on 7 March 1918. Drexler asked Hitler to join the central committee of the party, and he did so as the seventh member, though his membership number was 555. (It would seem unlikely that there were as many as 100, let alone 500, members at this date.) Karl Harrer, another of the party members, expressed the view, having heard committee member 555 speak in the Hofbräuhaus, one of the bigger beer-cellars in Munich, that Hitler had no gifts as an orator. But his opinion was not shared. The first time Hitler stood on the table of this medieval beer-hall and addressed the drinkers, there was an audience of 111. A little later, he addressed an audience of 200. By August 1920, the party was holding public rallies and had adopted the name by which it would ever afterwards be known – the National Socialist German Workers’ Party. With the whimsical German habit of shortening, nicknames and acronymics, the supporters of the NSDAP – Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei – were called the Nazis.

      Hitler’s chief gift was for public speaking, but he also displayed, during these months, and in the years to come, two qualities which had lain latent and which, for example, his room-mate Kubizek could hardly have guessed at when he saw young Adolf lolling on his scruffy bed feeling sorry for himself in Vienna and doing absolutely nothing.

      One of these gifts was a Machiavellian skill at political manipulation: it took him no time at all to move in on Drexler’s little band of malcontents and make them accept him as their leader. The second thing which he brought to the party in particular, and to life in general, was a taste for violence. An essential colleague in Hitler’s rise to power was Captain Ernst Röhm, a scar-faced homosexual who, as he said in the opening sentence of his memoirs, ‘From my childhood I had only one thought and wish – to be a soldier.’ Röhm loved the company of mindlessly violent street-boys, and with the new party being organized by Hitler and friends, Röhm saw the perfect opportunity for rough stuff on the grand scale. When all-out mob violence was not available, there would always be shop windows to be smashed, Reds to be given bloody noses and Jews to be pummelled in darkened alleys. Röhm had organized a patriotic free army – Freikorps – of men coming out of the army who were determined to fight against the Communists. By bringing these men into the National Socialist movement from the beginning, Röhm not only swelled its ranks. He determined that it should be by definition a cult of violence. His storm-division, Sturmabteilung or SA, could march, in their brown shirts and beneath the swastika emblem which had now been incorporated into the party regalia, as a private army within Germany.

      Röhm attracted discontented ex-soldiers and violent youths into his SA. This in turn made the Nazis, from their inception, a frightening organization. If you criticized them or fell foul of them for whatever reason, you knew that you were risking broken ribs.

      The intimidating power of his movement – and it had become Hitler’s movement from the moment he moved in on Drexler’s party – allowed him to develop his own cult of personality. While the SA frightened his rivals, Hitler could develop his quasi-operatic skills as a public performer. Hitler’s own gift for self-mythologizing was itself of a Wagnerian capacity. ‘In that hour, IT began.’

      ‘It’ – the thing which began with that production of Rienzi, seen in his youth – was among other things a lifelong passion for the music dramas of Richard Wagner. But it was also the capacity to see himself, and politics, as part of a music drama. He concluded the first volume of My Struggle with an account of the first big National Socialist rally in Munich on 24 February 1920. What catches our attention here is not whether any detail of Hitler’s account is true or could be challenged by others, but the way in which he chose, in his book, to present the occasion. He claimed that he alone took charge of the organization of the rally. He advertised it with posters and leaflets. ‘The text was concise and definite, an absolutely dogmatic form of expression being used.’⁴ One of the aims of the rally was to summon the faithful together. But another, equally important to Hitler, was to antagonize the enemy. For this reason he chose to set the swastika emblem in red banners. The propaganda point which he wanted to make was that the centre parties in German politics were no more than useful stooges to the Communists. The effect which he wanted to produce by using red banners was to draw the Communists out for a street battle. He hoped that the police would try to ban his rally, because of the red banners, and that there would then be a pitched battle between National Socialists and Communists. He had an ally in the Chief of Police, Ernst Pöhner, ‘who, in contradistinction to the majority of our so-called defenders of the authority of the State, did not fear to incur the enmity of traitors to the country and the nation but rather courted it as a mark of honour and honesty. For such men hatred of the Jews and Marxists, and the lies and calumnies they spread, was their only source of happiness in the midst of national misery.’

      Hitler tells us in My Struggle that as he strode into the crowds waiting outside the Hofbräuhaus for the rally, and saw over 2,000 people, ‘my heart was nearly bursting with joy’.⁵

      There were various speakers, some of whom were heckled. Then Hitler rose, and he proceeded to tell the audience of his twenty-five points. This was the party manifesto which Hitler and Drexler had thrashed out, including the ripping up of the Treaty of Versailles, the establishment of a Greater Germany formed by the union with Austria, and the abolition of Jewish rights of citizenship. As Hitler spoke on these themes, the hecklers fell silent, and his sentences were received with applause. For a speaker to outline twenty-five points, and to promise in advance that this was his intention, is, to put it mildly, asking a lot of an audience. Yet such was Hitler’s magnetism that this deadly sounding speech clearly had the crowd in raptures. The meeting lasted four hours. ‘As the masses streamed towards the exits, crammed shoulder to shoulder, shoving and pushing, I knew that a movement was now set afoot among the German people which would never pass into oblivion.’⁶

      He saw it, however, in operatic terms. ‘A fire was enkindled from whose glowing heat the sword would be fashioned which would restore freedom to the German Siegfried and bring back life to the German nation.’⁷

      Henceforth, the German people were seen as an orchestra whom he could conduct, as a great chorus who could sing his compositions. During the two or three years after the war, the government in Berlin suffered many setbacks. Politicians, and political activists on the Left, continued to see Germany’s problems in purely political terms. Hitler never did this. Kubizek as an adolescent had been surprised by Hitler’s outburst after Rienzi because he had never heard him speak of politics before. We see no sign of politics as such interesting him throughout his twenties. As it happened, he would show consummate skill at political negotiation with those who thought, by their greater levels of sophistication or experience, that they could bamboozle or somehow use him. They would invariably find that he had wrong-footed them. For the time being, however, there was no need to paint in the details of his picture. He needed only the broad wash. Finer shading would come later.

      In the summer of 1921, Hitler spent some time in Berlin among various nationalist groups and proposed a merger between the NSDAP and the German Socialist Party, run by Alfred Brunner, a Düsseldorf engineer, and the bullying