Hitler's Charisma (3 page)

Fridolin von Spaun was so appalled at what he perceived as Karl Liebknecht’s “lust for power” in Berlin in January 1919 that he subsequently joined a
Freikorps
unit in order to fight back against the Communist revolutionaries. In the wake of the destruction of order at the end of the war, a number of these paramilitary
Freikorps
had been formed in an attempt to suppress the Left-wing revolution. These groups consisted mostly of ex-soldiers who had responded to the call of their old commander. And it was
Freikorps
units—rather than the established German army or police—who played the most important role in suppressing the revolution in Berlin in January 1919 and who then became the initial guarantors of the new German Republic. Many of the figures who were later to become infamous as Nazis—Heinrich Himmler, Rudolf Höss and Gregor Strasser among them—were active in the
Freikorps
around this time. But, significantly, Adolf Hitler was not.

In
Mein Kampf
, Hitler wrote that as he lay in bed in hospital in Pasewalk in November 1918, temporarily blinded
¹⁴
after a gas attack, he was overwhelmed with the feeling that the circumstances of the end of the war represented “the greatest villainy of the century.”
¹⁵
As he saw it, an alliance of Marxists and Jews had come together in an attempt to topple the Fatherland. It was this moment, he wrote, that was decisive in his decision to “go into politics.”

The attractions of such a dramatic story in the formation of a myth are obvious. The noble soldier from the front line, betrayed by corrupt and self-serving politicians, now decides to devote his life to saving his country. Everything fits. But whilst fictional tales can work like this, life seldom does. And the evidence is that Hitler’s great “mission” was not formed here at all.

Hitler left hospital on 17 November 1918 and returned to Munich.
He found the city in the midst of seismic change. Ten days before, on 7 November, a demonstration in Munich’s Theresienwiese park organised by the Socialist politician, Erhard Auer, had led to revolution. The spark had been lit by a journalist and anti-war campaigner called Kurt Eisner. He had incited soldiers who were attending the demonstration to mutiny against their officers and take control of their own barracks. “Workers councils” and “Soldiers councils” were formed to bring order to the revolution, and the hereditary monarchy of Bavaria, the house of Wittelsbach, was deposed. Munich now became a Socialist Republic under the leadership of Kurt Eisner.

Hitler later expressed in
Mein Kampf
his repulsion for the way events had transpired in his beloved Munich; hardly surprising, since Kurt Eisner was both Jewish and a Socialist. However, his actions at the time were very different. Unlike thousands of other Germans like Fridolin von Spaun, who joined paramilitary
Freikorps
units to fight the Communist revolution, Hitler decided to remain in the army. Then, after a brief spell out of Munich guarding a prisoner-of-war camp, he is to be found in early 1919 back in the city serving in his unit at a time when Munich was still under the control of Kurt Eisner.
¹⁶
And when the ill-fated “Soviet Republic” of Bavaria was declared a few weeks later, led by fanatical Communists like Eugen Levine (who, like Eisner, was Jewish), documents show that Hitler was elected as a representative of his battalion
¹⁷
—something that would scarcely have been possible if he had opposed the Communist revolution.

There were clear alternative actions available to Hitler at this time—he could have tried to leave the army and join a
Freikorps
or, at the very least, decided to have as little to do with the Communist regime in Munich as possible. Hitler’s failure to do any of this casts severe doubts on his subsequent protestations in
Mein Kampf
that he possessed a fanatical political “mission” in early 1919. Yet only a few months later, in the autumn of that year, when Hitler wrote his first political statement, it dripped with hatred against the Jews and fitted consistently with views that he was to express for the rest of his life.

What changed, between Hitler’s apparent acceptance of the Communist revolution in Munich in April 1919 and the expression of his hatred against the Jews in September, was the political situation.
Freikorps
units entered Munich on 1 May 1919 in order to retake the city. The “Soviet Republic” of Bavaria soon crumbled—but not before the Communists
had murdered around twenty hostages. The
Freikorps
’ revenge was bloody and extensive, and at least one-thousand people were killed. The city was traumatised by this experience with Left-wing revolution and would now swiftly embrace the forces of the Right. As did Adolf Hitler. Shortly after the fall of the Communist government in Bavaria, Hitler was part of a new soldiers’ committee investigating if members of his regiment had given practical support to the regime. Hitler’s brief flirtation with the institutions of the Left was over for good.

The relatively recent discovery of this evidence about Hitler’s unlikely relationship with Munich’s Left-wing revolution has resulted, understandably, in a number of different attempts to explain his actions. Perhaps Hitler was subsequently a “turncoat,”
¹⁸
and his actions a sign of an “extremely confused and uncertain”
¹⁹
situation, one which served to illustrate that Hitler’s life could still “have developed in different directions.”
²⁰

So how can we best understand Hitler’s actions during this period? Is it possible that his tacit support for the Socialist revolution in Bavaria was a con? That Hitler was in his heart consistent to previously held extreme Right-wing beliefs, but was just going along with events, perhaps acting as a spy in order to best learn about his opponents? This, no doubt, is the explanation Hitler himself would have given, had he been forced to. He would have felt extremely vulnerable to the charge that this history demonstrates that he was merely like most other human beings, blown about by what happened to happen.

However, there is no persuasive evidence to support the view that Hitler was pursuing some kind of Machiavellian strategy in these months immediately after the end of the war—quite the contrary. Captain Karl Mayr, head of the army’s “Information” department in Munich (tasked with “re-educating” soldiers in the wake of the Socialist revolution), met Hitler in the spring of 1919, and his later recollection was clear: “At this time Hitler was ready to throw in his lot with anyone who would show him kindness. He never had that ‘Death or Germany’ martyr spirit which later was so much used as a propaganda slogan to boost him. He would have worked for a Jewish or a French employer just as readily as for an Aryan. When I first met him he was like a tired stray dog looking for a master.”
²¹

Mayr was an unusual character. He later swung from the extreme Right wing of German politics to become a Social Democrat and a fierce
opponent of Hitler. He was eventually to die in a Nazi concentration camp in 1945. And while some of his later attacks on Hitler seem exaggerated to the point of fancifulness—he claimed, for instance, that Hitler was so stupid he could not write his own speeches—there seems little reason to doubt his impressions on first meeting Hitler in May 1919. In fact, they offer the most convincing explanation of Hitler’s conduct at the time.

So, Hitler, it appears, was not a cunning political operator in early 1919. He was simply an ordinary soldier, dispirited by a lost war, confused and uncertain as to what fate now had in store for him, and content to stay on as long as he could in the army, the only home and employment he had. Which is not to say that he was a blank canvas. Hitler did already believe in certain political principles—like Pan-Germanism—and his time in pre-war Vienna in particular had exposed him to a variety of virulent anti-Semitic influences. But it was the next few months of tuition as one of Mayr’s agents of “re-education” that would allow him to crystallise his thinking.

Hitler’s task was to speak to other soldiers about the dangers of Communism and the benefits of nationalism. And in order to be trained to do this Hitler attended a special course at the University of Munich between 5 and 12 June 1919. Here he listened to a variety of lectures, including those on the “Political History of the War” and “Our economic situation”
²²
all positioned in the “correct” anti-Bolshevik way. By all accounts Hitler lapped up all this eagerly and then regurgitated it to other German soldiers at a camp near Augsburg in August.

In particular, Hitler gave vent to vicious anti-Semitic views in his speeches, linking the Jews with Bolshevism and the Munich revolution. This was scarcely an original thought—it was common among Right-wing extremists in Germany at the time—and it was this grossly simplistic equation of Judaism with Communism that was the wellspring for much of the anti-Semitic prejudice in the wake of the First World War. “The people sent to Bavaria to set up a [Communist] councils’ regime,” says Fridolin von Spaun, also a convinced anti-Semite, “were almost all Jewish. If you look at the names of the people who played a part there. Naturally we also knew from Russia, that the Jews there were in a very influential position … the Marxist theory also originated with a Jew [i.e., Karl Marx], on which Lenin supposedly built.”
²³

Hitler had previously been exposed to harsh anti-Semitic rhetoric, for instance from the mayor of Vienna, Karl Lueger, but contrary to the view Hitler expressed in
Mein Kampf
, there is no compelling contemporary evidence that proves he was a committed anti-Semite before the end of the war. That he was undoubtedly expressing strong anti-Semitic views by August 1919 is clear, but by then, of course, he had attended the lectures organised by Mayr and witnessed the mood of many in Munich in response to the short-lived Soviet republic which had been established in the city.

Nonetheless, there is no sign that Hitler was now play-acting with regard to his anti-Semitism. The power and force with which he expressed his views were those of a full-fledged believer.

Hitler was thirty years old. And it is only at this point, in the summer of 1919, that one can detect in the historical record the first reference to any “charismatic” quality that he might possess. At the army camp at Augsburg a number of soldiers remarked positively on Hitler’s ability as a lecturer. One of them, a gunner called Hans Knoden, wrote that Hitler “turned out to be a brilliant and spirited speaker who compels the whole audience to follow his exposition. On one occasion he was unable to finish a longer speech [in the time available] and asked the audience if they were interested in listening to his talk after their daily service—immediately everyone agreed. It was obvious that the men’s interest was aroused.”
²⁴

Hitler had always despised debate and only wanted to lecture. However, before the war there had not been a willing audience for his harangues about opera or architecture. But now there were people who were prepared to listen to his opinions about Germany’s immediate post-war predicament. Hitler had always been certain in his judgements and unwilling to listen to argument. And in this crisis many were predisposed to welcome such inflexibility.

Many of Hitler’s views were now recognisably those of the future Führer of the German people. On 16 September 1919, for example, Hitler wrote, at the request of Captain Mayr, an anti-Semitic statement that was uncompromisingly nasty. He said that Jews “produce a racial tuberculosis among nations” and that the aim must be the “removal of the Jews altogether” from Germany.
²⁵

Four days before writing this letter, Hitler had attended a political meeting in the Leiber Room of the Sterneckerbräu beer hall in Munich.
As part of his work for Captain Mayr, Hitler had been told to observe and report on fringe political parties—and they didn’t come much more “fringe” than this one: the “German Workers’ party.” It was little more than a discussion club, formed in January 1919 by a thirty-five-year-old locksmith called Anton Drexler and a journalist called Karl Harrer. They had decided that they both wanted to push an anti-Semitic, anti-Bolshevik, pro-worker agenda of the kind which was already commonplace on the Right. Drexler had previously been a member of the “Fatherland Party” which had been established by Wolfgang von Kapp two years before, one of countless other similar Right-wing groups around at the time—like the “German Nationalist Protection and Defiance Federation” and the “Thule Society.”

Only a couple of dozen people were in the Leiber Room that night, and when Hitler spoke out against the call for Bavaria to declare independence from the rest of Germany he made an immediate impression. Drexler spotted Hitler’s rhetorical talents and urged him to join the tiny party. It was the moment when Adolf Hitler and what was to become the Nazi party came together.

Over the next few weeks, Hitler revealed that he was possessed of a “mission”: to proclaim the ways in which Germany could be rebuilt from the ruins of defeat. But he did not yet announce that he himself was the great leader who would personally accomplish this task. Though already, in his 16 September letter attacking the Jews, he had pointed to the need for Germany to become an autocratic state ruled by autocratic individuals: “This rebirth will be set in motion not by the political leadership of irresponsible majorities under the influence of party dogmas or of an irresponsible press, nor by catchwords and slogans of international coinage, but only through the ruthless action of personalities with a capacity for national leadership and an inner sense of responsibility.”
²⁶
The man, it seems, had found his mission—but it was not a mission he had been pre-ordained to have.

After his arrival in the Sterneckerbräu, Hitler’s life changed. He had been tossed around tempestuous seas and now he had found a harbour. For the rest of his life he would pretend that he had always been destined to arrive in this place.