1924: The Year That Made Hitler (6 page)

Hitler was also inspired by the example of Kemal Pasha, later called Atatürk, who had mounted a successful coup against the Constantinople government from a provincial base in Ankara. In his own putsch attempt, Hitler would combine Mussolini’s and Pasha’s approaches, starting in the provincial base of Munich but with his sights set on the main prize in Berlin.

Hitler thought he had reason to feel good about his chances. Only a week before Mussolini’s bold stroke, Hitler had mounted a brazen flanking move of his own. Invited to participate peacefully with a small delegation in a nationalistic celebration in the north Bavarian town of Coburg, Hitler had arrived on a special train with six
hundred fifty Storm Troopers and, essentially, taken over the town. His forces violently attacked leftist groups that had also come for the parades, earning Hitler the reputation, for the first time, as “liberator” of a city from “red terror.”
²⁵
The heady experience raised Hitler’s confidence to a new high. “From now on I will go my way alone,”
²⁶
he declared.

Though he had made no preparations or given anyone a concrete reason to believe he was ready to strike (
losschlagen
), Hitler had clearly begun to contemplate the idea of a putsch that included a march on Berlin. “Mussolini showed what a minority can do if it is gripped by a righteous nationalistic drive,” argued Hitler to his followers at a “discussion evening” in November 1922.
²⁷
That was enough to get the rumor mill running and discombobulate the Bavarian authorities as 1923 began. Once implanted, the idea of an audacious move took root in Hitler’s mind and became, said one adversary, an “idée fixe.” Hitler’s obsessions almost always were acted upon, sooner or later.

CHAPTER THREE

The Mounting Pressure

“If [Hitler] lets his Messiah complex run away with him, he will ruin us all.”

—
DIETRICH ECKART, 1923

The year that would end with Hitler behind bars—1923—opened with two dramatic events. The first was the January 11 French invasion of the Ruhr region, triggering the Berlin government’s disastrous passive resistance campaign, bloody reprisals by French troops against local saboteurs, and Germany’s catastrophic spiral into hyperinflation. The second, in the same month, was a pivotal confrontation between Hitler and Bavarian authorities over plans for the Nazi Party’s first “national” party convention, scheduled for January 27 to 29 in Munich. Hitler announced a dozen marches and rallies on a single day, with speeches by him at every one; the Nazis would effectively take over Munich for a day, disrupting a city of six hundred fifty thousand. The possibility of major clashes between the Nazis and their archenemies, the Communists and the
Socialists, alarmed the commanders of the military and the state police, the ultimate keepers of internal order. General Otto von Lossow, a severe-looking man who commanded the Reichswehr’s Seventh Division—known as the Bavaria Division—was a Prussian-trained Bavarian whose loyalty was more to Munich than to Berlin. Colonel Hans von Seisser, also a product of the Prussian officer class, headed the Bavarian State Police, a division-sized force that included infantry and mobile units. Apart from possible street battles between political adversaries, Lossow and Seisser were most concerned that Hitler might follow Mussolini’s recent example and launch a putsch. They banned Hitler’s twelve rallies.

All Hitler’s bile, violent instincts, and do-or-die megalomania were aroused by the prohibition. In a stormy confrontation with authorities, Hitler threatened that if the ban were not lifted, he would “march in the first row and take the first bullets” should the army or police try to stop the marches by force. If that happened, he added haughtily, “the Bavarian government would be gone within two hours.”
¹
Storming out of a meeting with Munich police chief Eduard Nortz, Hitler let fly one of his typically grandiose historical metaphors, shouting: “We’ll meet on the fields of Philippi!”
²
(Philippi was the Macedonian battlefield where, in 42
BC
, amid unspeakable gore, Mark Antony defeated the forces of Marcus Brutus; Brutus, Caesar’s assassin, then committed suicide. The event was dramatized in Shakespeare’s
The Life and Death of Julius Caesar,
which Hitler had probably read.)

In a separate meeting with General Lossow, Hitler argued for lifting the ban and promised, on his “word of honor,” that he had no plans for a putsch.
³
In 1920s Germany, a word of honor—
Ehrenwort
—was taken seriously as a binding promise. On the basis of Hitler’s
Ehrenwort,
Lossow, Seisser, and Police Chief Nortz backed down, but they tried to preserve a shred of their authority by
telling Hitler he could hold six, not twelve, rallies, and that his spectacular planned outdoor ceremony to consecrate the colors of the Storm Troopers must be moved indoors, to the Circus Krone. Hitler accepted this half-loaf, then blithely proceeded with his original plan; he held twelve meetings and an outdoor review of six thousand uniformed Nazis on the Marsfeld parade ground near the Circus Krone. Stunned by Hitler’s audacity, the authorities did not interfere. Faced with the armed power of the state, Hitler had stood his ground and won, and everyone knew it. The stand-down by Lossow and Seisser was a major propaganda victory for Hitler, and an embarrassment for the men in uniform.

Hitler’s aggressive posture caught the attention of no less a figure than General Hans von Seeckt, commander in chief of the Reichswehr, the German army. Based in Berlin, the country’s top military man wielded huge political influence despite the truncation of the military class by the Treaty of Versailles, which limited Germany to one hundred thousand troops with only four thousand officers—a force thought to be large enough to suppress internal unrest, but not to wage war on Germany’s neighbors. Despite its relatively small size, the Reichswehr under Seeckt gained the reputation of being a “state within a state.”
⁴
In a moment of political turmoil, with the government under threat from restive paramilitaries and rebellious army units, the worried German president, Friedrich Ebert, asked Seeckt whom the Reichswehr stood behind; the unsmiling, monocled general in the stiff gray uniform replied: “The Reichswehr stands behind me.” Seeckt was, in short, the man with the guns.
⁵

In March 1923, Seeckt was persuaded to meet with the upstart former private who was causing Lossow and Seisser so much heartburn. For four hours, during a visit to Munich, the Prussian officer listened patiently, or stonily, to Hitler’s familiar ravings about the “November criminals,” the perfidious Jews, the need for a great man
to take over. According to the accounts of Colonel Hans-Harald von Selchow, Seeckt’s adjutant who was present, the Austrian high school dropout lectured Germany’s top military officer on history and comparisons of Germany’s fate with that of other nations that had saved themselves by drastic action. Swinging into his radical rhetoric, Hitler told Seeckt: “We National Socialists will see to it that the members of the present Marxist regime in Berlin will hang from the lampposts. We will send the Reichstag up in flames, and when all is in flux we will turn to you, Herr General, to assume leadership of all German workers.”
⁶

To many, this might have been a tempting offer. But even though the old-fashioned Prussian general favored a right-wing government, he wanted no part of lamppost hangings and extreme rhetoric from a fire-breathing beer hall politician. According to Selchow, Seeckt simply replied: “From today forward, Herr Hitler, we have nothing more to say to one another!” Seeckt left for Berlin.
⁷

By now Hitler had built a reputation as an iron man who stood up to bourgeois politicians. Nazi Party membership, by local standards, was soaring—from twenty thousand to fifty-five thousand in 1923 alone.
^*
A Hitler speech in Munich was now always promoted on wall posters as a
Riesenversammlung
—a “gigantic gathering”—and indeed it was. With his apocalyptic predictions, pat solutions, and unvarnished appeal to mass emotions, Hitler was able to fill the Circus Krone with up to six thousand listeners.

These listeners were eager to hear facile explanations for their mounting misery, and Hitler knew just where to place the blame. Pointing the finger at the stab-in-the-back civilians, especially Jews,
who “betrayed” the “frontline fighters” in 1918 and thereby caused Germany to lose the war, Hitler vilified the current German government and the Weimar constitution as illegitimate. His was becoming the loudest voice among the numerous Weimar Republic rejectionists on both extremes of German politics—Communists on the left, ultranationalists and unreconstructed monarchists on the right. Hitler made proximate bugaboos of “Big Capital” and “internationalists,” meaning all leftists who promoted the socialist international brotherhood. He denounced France and Britain and poured scorn on the “swindle” of Woodrow Wilson’s unrealized Fourteen Points. He painted a rosy picture of prewar Germany in contrast to its current “disgrace and defeat.”
⁸
He made complicated things simple. “Political agitation must be primitive,” he said.
⁹

Hitler’s skill at galvanizing his audiences and striking deeper emotional chords than other politicians lay not merely in his demagoguery, but also in his ability to see beyond the political issues of the day to underlying themes and yearnings of his listeners. While he could rail with the best of them about the French occupation, inflation, unemployment, and the feckless government in Berlin, he also reached for something larger and broader—“a sense of greatness”—that resonated on a personal level among people feeling confused and buffeted by events beyond their control. “The question of the recovery of the German people is not a question of economic recovery,” he wrote in an internal party memorandum. “Rather it is a matter of regaining an inner feeling among the people, the only thing that can lead again to national greatness and, through that, to economic welfare.”
¹⁰
Hitler was selling the goodness and the potential of the German people, not just a stronger mark and fair wages. When he denounced the “outrages” of the Treaty of Versailles, ranted about “usury against the people,” and rhapsodized about the “culture-creating” qualities of Germanic peoples, listeners felt he was talking
about
them,
not about abstractions. Whatever the wrongs of World War I and whatever the merits of assigning “sole war guilt” to Germany as a collective, Germans as individuals did not feel that they were any worse than the French, the Belgians, or anyone else. Their self-esteem was shattered and offended, but Hitler’s speeches offered them a different picture of themselves as strong and honorable people. He cleverly branded the Nazi undertaking a “freedom movement.” This ingenious emotional strategy transformed his events into mass entertainments with an overlay of religious fervor, like revivalist tent meetings. Posters advertising the gatherings even had a negative religious tilt: “Jews not admitted,” they read.

Hitler did more than appeal to emotions, though; he made arguments that had people nodding their heads. His heady brew of nationalism, social Darwinism, and biological anti-Semitism was served up with a stiletto intellect and a prodigious historical memory. “In a very short time I learned how to knock the enemy’s weapons out of his own hands,” wrote Hitler. Hitler’s particular joy was preaching to his opponents and tormentors. Other politicians, he noticed, “made speeches to people who were already in agreement with them. But that missed the point: all that counted was using propaganda and enlightenment to convince people who… came from a different point of view.” Hitler already understood the importance of wooing the independents.

The beer hall preacher was adding to his propagandistic bag of tricks, too: He used rousing music to warm up the crowds and rolling waves of flags and uniforms to induce a sense of shared community and militant purpose. He consciously staged prima donna–style late arrivals and approached the stage directly through the audience, not from the behind the podium. He began to fetishize the newly adopted raised-arm Nazi salute copied from Mussolini, who got it from the Romans. In a pre-radio, pre-television era, with
no intermediating machine between speaker and audience, such crowd-pleasing devices were effective techniques for building a bond, even if momentary. Hitler’s talents were ideally suited for a visceral connection with mobs of people, who went home with an afterglow of political enthusiasm undiluted by a television or radio report, or even by pictures in the next day’s newspaper since almost none were printed at the time. And Hitler made sure his picture did not appear in those that were printed; he understood the value of maintaining an aura of mystery and initially forbade anyone to photograph him. When Heinrich Hoffmann, his future friend and court photographer, in 1922 attempted an unauthorized picture of Hitler on the street, the Nazi leader’s bodyguards attacked Hoffmann and exposed his photo plate. It would be another year, in September 1923, before the world got its first look at Hitler from an Associated Press photograph taken at a rally in Nuremberg.
¹¹

Hitler had honed his speaking style as well: a slow start, wandering through history, followed by Wagnerian crescendos and bombastic finales. Practicing before mirrors (and later in front of Hoffmann’s camera), he had developed a repertoire of theatrical gestures to dramatize his points—the extended fist, the pleading hands, a toss of his forelock as sweat poured from his brow. “His technique resembled the thrusts and parries of a fencer,” noted Hanfstaengl.
¹²
Then, just as dramatically as he had entered, Hitler would depart through the crowd as a final anthem was played by a band. Lingering for argument and discussion could, he believed, “completely undo hours of oratorical labor.”
¹³
People came to be carried away by the man who could speak from sketchy notes for up to three hours, and they were.