propaganda techniques, Hitler had trucks loaded with men ride through the streets. But instead of the fist- swinging, Moscow-oriented proletarians who had spread terror and hatred in bourgeois residential districts, these trucks were manned by disciplined former soldiers who now, after armistice and demobilization, were fighting on in a different fashion under the battle standard of the National Socialist Party. These self-controlled radicals lent the demonstrations an intimidating, paramilitary tone. Soon Hitler was holding these demonstrations in the form of a series of meetings that passed like a wave over Munich, and then over other cities.
Gradually, these soldiers began changing the sociological face of the party. The contemplative groups of beer-drinking workers and small tradesmen were infiltrated by tough types of regular army men accustomed to violence. The earliest membership list of the party registers all of twenty-two professional soldiers among 193 names. Directly affected by the terms of the Versailles Treaty, with its check on the size of the army, they had abruptly found themselves confronting the dreary perils of civilian life. Here was a new party that offered a haven from perplexity and the terrors of being declassed. Within its framework they could satisfy their craving for new forms of comradeship and continue to express the contempt for life as well as death that they had absorbed on the battlefield.
With the aid of these military converts accustomed to strict subordination, discipline, and devotion, Hitler gradually succeeded in providing the party with a firm inner structure. Many of the new men were sent to him by the Munich District Command of the Reichswehr. Later, Hitler would repeatedly assert that he had stood alone, nameless and poor, relying on no one but himself, against a world of enemies. That was far from the truth. From the beginning he received protection from the Reichswehr and the paramilitary organizations. They were what made his rise possible.
Ernst Rohm did more for the NSDAP than anyone else. He held the rank of captain as a political adviser on the staff of Colonel Epp and was the real brain of the disguised military regime in Bavaria. Rohm provided the young National Socialist Party with followers, arms, and funds. His efforts were supported in large measure by the officers of the Allied Supervisory Commission, who favored such illegal activities for various reasons. Partly, they had an interest in maintaining conditions approaching civil war in Germany; partly, they wished to strengthen the military power against the obstreperous Left. Chivalric feelings also played their part: they wanted to oblige their former foes, fellow soldiers who had fought honorably against them.
Rohm was a man who from childhood on had had “only one thought and one wish, to become a soldier.” Toward the end of the war he had served on the General Staff and was an outstanding organizer, but by temperament he belonged in the front lines, though he scarcely looked it. This stocky little fellow with his rather florid, marred face—he had been wounded many times during the war—was a wild daredevil. He divided the human race into soldiers and civilians, friends and foes; he was frank, unsubtle, rough and tough, a straightforward old campaigner with no conscience to speak of. One of his comrades from those days of illegal activity once remarked that Rohm “livened things up” wherever he appeared. But perhaps the converse was just as often true. Certainly no ideological sophistries complicated his old-fashioned Bavarian bluntness. Ceaselessly active, he had a single goal: to magnify the power of the military within the government. With that in mind, he had organized the General Staff department for propaganda and secret partnership with political groups—the department on whose behalf liaison man Adolf Hitler had first attended a meeting of the German Workers’ Party. Impressed, as was almost everyone else, by the oratorical talent of the young agitator, Rohm provided Hitler with his first valuable contacts to politicians and military men. He himself entered the party early, receiving the membership number 623.
The commando element that Rohm’s men had brought into the party was colorfully garnished by the liberal use of symbols and emblems. In
Later he would do the same with the “standards,” which he took over from Italian Fascism and conferred upon the storm troops. He introduced
These two aspects, one ceremonial, the other terroristic, had marked the party from its wretched early beginnings and proved to be an inspired approach on Hitler’s part. The references to brute force by no means repelled; rather, they added a note of strong earnestness to the party program and seemed to fit the historic hour better than the false amiability of traditional party procedures.
Another asset of the NSDAP was its egalitarian character. Nationalist parties of the past had appropriated true patriotic principles for the upper classes, as if only men of property and education had a fatherland. The NSDAP was at once nationalistic and plebeian; rude and ready to brawl, it brought together the idea of nationalism and the gutter. Hitherto, the bourgeoisie had looked upon the masses as a danger against which they had always to be on their guard. The NSDAP seemed to be offering itself as a vanguard of the masses on the side of the bourgeoisie. “We need force to win our battle,” Hitler declared again and again. “Let the others… stretch out in their easy chairs; we are ready to climb on the beer table.” One might not want to follow him oneself; yet here was a fellow who clearly knew how to tame the masses and harness their energies for the right cause.
His own energy seemed inexhaustible. None of his rivals was remotely a match for him. His principle was: a mass meeting every week. And he was not only the organizer of these but the speaker. Of forty-eight meetings held between November, 1919, and November, 1920, he was the speaker at thirty-one. The increasingly rapid tempo of his appearances reflects the growing intensity of his affair with the masses. “Herr Hitler… flew into a fury and screamed so that not much could be understood at the back,” one report records. A poster of May, 1920, announcing his appearance termed him a “brilliant speaker” and promised the visitor “a highly stimulating evening.” Reports from this time on speak of rising attendance figures. Often he talked to 3,000 persons or more. Repeatedly, the recording secretaries noted that when he stepped on the platform in his blue uniform he was “stormily cheered.” The very clumsiness of the summaries reveals the almost hypnotic power the speaker seemed to have over his audience.
The meeting began at 7:30 and ended at 10:45 P.M. The lecturer delivered an address on Judaism. The lecturer pointed out that everywhere one looks there are Jews. All Germany is ruled by Jews. It is a shame that German labor, brain workers and manual laborers both, let themselves be so hounded by the Jews. Naturally because the Jew has the money. The Jew sits in the government and schemes and smuggles. When he has his pockets full again he again hounds the workers back and forth so that again and again he comes out on top and we poor Germans put up with it all. He went on to talk about Russia also…. And who arranged all that? Only the Jew. Therefore Germans be united and fight against the JEWS, For they’ll eat our last crust from under our noses…. The speaker’s concluding words: Let us wage the struggle until the last Jew is removed from the German Reich and even though it comes to a coup and even more to another revolution…. The lecturer received great applause. He also denounced the press… since at the last meeting one of those dirty journalists wrote everything down.
Another account, of a speech given on August 28, 1920, in the Hofbrauhaus, reads:
The lecturer Hitler explained how things stood for us before the war and how they are now. On usurers
