1924: The Year That Made Hitler (5 page)

Hitler was expanding his base. His message appealed not just to disenfranchised working-class people, but especially to the petite bourgeoisie who were one notch above blue-collar workers yet
fearful of slipping down the ladder. He also had appeal to wealthy conservatives, especially anti-Semites—the fanatical “street public of the higher classes,” as one observer put it.
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Adding to his speaking platform and his party newspaper, Hitler began developing other physical trappings of a real political group. With a fine feel for mass psychology and stirring symbols, he created a party identity based on the swastika, oceans of flags, and party uniforms. Drawn originally from auspicious Hindu symbolism, and used by many religions and cults over the centuries, the swastika motif had been adopted by race-minded groups like the ultra-Germanic Thule Society as an emblem of Nordic supremacy. After painstaking examination of numerous sketches and drafts, Hitler personally selected the party flag’s primary colors: a red field, a white circle, and a starkly simple, tilted black swastika in the center. Given the complex and ornate swastikas then in circulation, Hitler’s choice of the boldest, plainest look was a stroke of advertising genius. The Nazi flag made a strong statement, was easy to recognize, even at a distance, and, when necessary, inspired fear. Hitler explained his choices: “The red expressed the social-justice idea underlying the movement; white, the nationalistic belief. And the swastika signified the mission assigned to us—the struggle for the victory of Aryan mankind.”
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In addition, the red field was a sly provocation of the Communists and Social Democrats, who thought they owned that color. By misleading some leftists into gatherings advertised in bright red, thought Hitler, the Nazis could “demolish their positions and thus get into a dialogue with these people.”
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Like most of the activist groups in Munich—including the Communists and the Socialists—the Nazis also had created their own version of a “hall protection unit.” These were armed roughnecks who could start and stop beer hall brawls with competitors or any other disruptive elements. Originally tagged the “Sport and Gymnastics
Section” of the party, the unit’s name, after a few mutations, became the
Sturmabteilung
—the Storm Section, or Storm Troopers, shortened to SA in German. Carrying brass knuckles and rubber truncheons, the Storm Troopers, with Hitler participating, displayed their chops in no uncertain terms in September 1921 when they attacked the meeting of a separatist group called the Bavaria League and beat its leader, Otto Ballerstedt, to a bloody mess. He later brought charges against Hitler, who was found guilty of breach of the peace and served one month of a three-month sentence (then was paroled) in summer 1922.

In forming the Storm Troopers, “I specially looked for people of disheveled appearance,” said Hitler, describing a rough bunch that could take on dirty work. Such recruits were not hard to find in the postwar subculture of “militant ultra-masculinity” that sprang from the German army’s rapid demobilization and the parallel growth of free-booting militias, wrote one historian.
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These “jolly rogues,” as Hitler called them, would play a critical role in the putsch that still lay more than a year in the future.
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By then, they were operating under the command of a new member of the Nazi Party, Captain Hermann Göring.

The years that led to Hitler’s 1923 putsch saw an accumulation of followers, hangers-on, and beer hall bruisers who would become his inner circle, his personal entourage and his fellow-putschists. Hermann Göring was one of its key members. A famous World War I flying ace with twenty-two kills and the
Pour le Mérite,
Germany’s highest medal, Göring had returned to Germany after a few postwar years as a private pilot and barnstormer in Denmark and Sweden.
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He was looking for a new adventure. Though enrolled as a student at the University of Munich, the flashy, large-living Göring was drawn to politics, a world
in which he thought he might make a splash. Shopping around the Munich political scene, he finally chose the Nazis, not so much for their program and politics but because he thought he could be a bigger player in a smaller party—and history proved him right.

Hitler, for his part, was delighted the day the swashbuckling Göring walked into the run-down Nazi Party headquarters and offered his services. Within a short time, Hitler had put Göring in charge of the growing but disorganized Storm Troopers, which the former flier quickly shaped into a formidable force.

Another University of Munich student named Rudolf Hess, also a World War I airman, had already glommed on to Hitler. Born in Alexandria, Egypt, to a prosperous German businessman and his wife, Hess was under the influence of Professor Karl Haushofer, renowned for his theories of geopolitics. Through Hess, Hitler later incorporated Haushofer’s views into his
Lebensraum
(“living space”) policies, the justification for his World War II invasion of Russia.
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Good-looking but moody (“I am an odd mixture,” Hess wrote to his fiancée), Hess was involved with the Thule Society, which another attendee described as a wealthy “club of ‘intellectualities’ dealing with Germanic history.”
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Among the Nazis, Hess found his role as Hitler’s personal assistant and amanuensis—a calling which would soon make him Hitler’s closest comrade in prison and, later, deputy Führer of the Nazi Party. In Munich, neglecting his studies, Hess hung around Nazi headquarters and tried to keep the erratic and peripatetic party leader on schedule.

Hitler’s brain trust also included Max Amann, the former soldier who had been Private Hitler’s commanding sergeant on the western front in World War I. Amann, a “rough fellow” who relished a beer hall brawl, became Hitler’s all-purpose publishing guru. Hitler made him business manager of
Völkischer Beobachter
and, later, his book publisher;
Mein Kampf
made millions for both of
them. Amann was head of the iron-fisted Reich Press Association, which controlled the press during the Third Reich.

Besides Dietrich Eckart, the
Peer Gynt
translator and all-around roué who mentored Hitler, several other men of intellect were drawn to the fiery young orator and his dynamic movement. Alfred Rosenberg, an Estonian-German with a Russian education and pretensions to literary greatness, became a devotee and editor of the
Völkischer Beobachter.
Hitler read and was influenced by Rosenberg’s anti-Semitic tract,
Die Spur des Juden im Wandel der Zeiten
(The Track of the Jew Through the Ages). The bald and severe Max Erwin von Scheubner-Richter, another well-educated German of Baltic origin, also added a touch of urbanity to Hitler’s raw-edged crowd, providing both brainpower and connections to money through the wealthy Russian émigré network. Between them, Rosenberg and Scheubner-Richter strongly influenced Hitler’s growing belief that “a gang of Jewish literary figures”—like Leon Trotsky and other Jewish Bolshevists—were behind the murders of “thirty million” victims of Communism in Russia. Increasingly, Hitler’s anti-Semitism rested on invocations of the Russian horror and his reading of the scurrilous forgery
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,
possibly given to him by Rosenberg. “The ‘blood Jew’ introduces a scaffold in the place of a parliament, [brings] the destruction of the intelligentsia and, finally, Bolshevism,” he liked to say.
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Rosenberg later played a key role in shaping the Third Reich’s draconian race laws.

But Hitler’s personal taste, like his political fascination with moving the masses rather than the elites, often trended socially downward. In his frequent after-hours gatherings in cafés around Munich, Hitler included his bodyguard, Ulrich Graf, a former butcher, and Christian Weber, an overweight former pub bouncer
and horse dealer.
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His sometime driver and frequent café companion was a darkly handsome watchmaker from northern Germany named Emil Maurice (who would later be discovered to be of Jewish origin and dropped from the inner circle). A photographer named Heinrich Hoffmann, who understood early that Hitler could be a gold mine for him, became part of Hitler’s Munich rat pack. This merry band, in various mutations, could be seen afternoons or evenings in places like the elegant Café Heck adjoining the Royal Gardens on the Galerienstrasse; the old Café Neumaier in the central city (where Hitler had a regular Monday night table); and at the Osteria Bavaria, an Italian bistro that also served some Alpine dishes, just a couple blocks from the
Völkischer Beobachter
headquarters in the Schellingstrasse. One thing observers of the group always noted: Hitler did almost all the talking.

A late but important arrival to the charmed circle around Hitler was Ernst Hanfstaengl. A German-American art book publisher’s son who had attended Harvard, Hanfstaengl stood out because of his height (six feet, four inches), his prognathous jaw, and his air of cultivation. Called Putzi (“little boy”) as an ironic nickname, Hanfstaengl had been asked to attend a Hitler speech in November 1922 by his old Harvard friend Captain Truman Smith. Then deputy military attaché in the American embassy in Berlin, Smith had been in Munich and met personally with Hitler, and the young officer had been impressed with the Nazi leader’s ability to deliver “a full-length speech” every time he was asked a simple question—“as if he had pressed a gramophone switch.”
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Smith wanted Hanfstaengl to find out how Hitler sounded when he gave a real speech. Hanfstaengl attended a Hitler appearance and was overwhelmed: he called it a “masterly performance” with “innuendo and irony I have never heard matched.” Following the speech, Hanfstaengl
introduced himself to Hitler, and the two found a quick affinity. “I agree with ninety-five percent of what you said and would very much like to talk to you about the rest sometime,” said Hanfstaengl.

“I’m sure we shall not have to quarrel about the odd five percent,” replied Hitler. At first, that would be true.
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Hanfstaengl soon joined Hitler’s inner clique. Since he had leisure and means, he became Hitler’s main walk-around guy in Munich. Because he spent so much time with Hitler, Hanfstaengl had more insights into the leader’s ascetic lifestyle than most. Hitler “lived like a down-at-the-heels clerk” in his tiny rented room in the Thierschstrasse near the meandering Isar River, noted Hanfstaengl. The linoleum-covered floor had a few “threadbare rugs,” but the large anteroom that Hitler shared with his landlady had only one redeeming feature, an upright piano. There, Hanfstaengl, an accomplished pianist, sometimes banged out tunes and learned Hitler’s tastes. “I played a Bach fugue,” wrote Hanfstaengl, with Hitler “nodding his head in vague disinterest.” But when Hanfstaengl switched to Wagner, Hitler’s favorite musical maestro and one of his political heroes, things changed. “I started the prelude to the
Meistersinger.
This was it. This was Hitler’s meat. He knew the thing absolutely by heart and could whistle every note of it in a curious penetrating vibrato, but completely in tune.” Not surprisingly, Hitler also thrilled to Hanfstaengl’s old Harvard fight songs, ending in “Rah! Rah! Rah!”
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Hanfstaengl’s relationship with Hitler became so close that the well-connected publishing scion found a way to lend the Nazi Party one thousand U.S. dollars. This was a whopping sum in inflation-racked Germany, and it enabled the
Völkischer Beobachter
to purchase two broadsheet rotary presses so that it could appear in a broader, more impressive format.
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Hanfstaengl also introduced
Hitler to high society, inviting him to dinner and making connections to potential supporters and donors like the family of Fritz-August von Kaulbach, a renowned artistic clan.
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Hitler’s native Austrian charm emerged, and though he was sometimes mildly maladroit (Hanfstaengl caught him putting sugar in his wine), he was generally a hit, especially with the ladies.

Besides Helene Bechstein, the wife of the piano manufacturer, the women besotted with Hitler included another wealthy spouse introduced to Hitler by Dietrich Eckart. She was Else Bruckmann, the wife of Hugo Bruckmann, a conservative publisher who had a large mansion in Munich’s monument district. Else Bruckmann, by birth a Romanian princess, was a noted salon hostess; an invitation to her soirées was a badge of arrival in Munich society—and Hitler received many, becoming a kind of prize curiosity at her gatherings. Both women, Bechstein and Bruckmann, managed to direct frequent infusions of their husbands’ cash to Hitler. They sometimes found roundabout ways to move assets in his direction. One night at the luxurious Bechstein dwelling in Berlin, Edwin Bechstein rebuffed Hitler’s entreaties over dinner for a new donation; funds were short, he said. Yet as Hitler was leaving, Mrs. Bechstein managed to press upon him some of her glittering jewelry for easy conversion to cash. Later she added pricey paintings from her private collection to her largesse. Though never openly involved with a woman, and unmarried until the last two days of his life, Hitler had a near-mystical appeal to many women.

By fall 1922, rumors of a Hitler putsch were already bubbling up in Munich, a full year before Hitler actually made his move. The talk of a coup d’état was fanned not so much by anything Hitler had said or done, but by a dramatic event outside Germany. In October 1922, Benito Mussolini and his Fascisti Party had managed to take
over the Italian government with a sudden coup that began, people said, with a “march on Rome.” As historians have since pointed out, the march was more symbolic than real and ended with a negotiated takeover. But the myth and vivid imagery of a popular march stuck, especially in Germany, and especially with a would-be revolutionary like Hitler. Viewing Mussolini’s bold stroke as “one of the turning points in history,” Hitler instantly translated the notion of a march on Rome into its German analog: a march on Berlin.
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With dreams of gathering all the military forces in Bavaria behind him—the powerful right-wing paramilitaries plus the Reichswehr’s Bavaria Division and the military-style Bavarian State Police—Hitler would stage a grand march from Munich to Berlin to spark a “national uprising” and take power. He would lead both a military force and a great moral cause—the German “rebirth” he longed for—to the gates of Berlin, toppling all before it. Hitler was a ruthless, brilliant propagandist and a hopeless romantic: The cinematic quality of a march on Berlin appealed to both those instincts. He did not just want to bring down the Weimar Republic, he wanted to replace it in grand style—as Mussolini had done.