Hitler

generally stopped. Often he spoke into a breathless silence, which from time to time was explosively shattered as if thousands of pebbles suddenly came rattling down on a drum, as one observer described it. Naively, with all the hunger for acclaim of the novice, Hitler enjoyed the stir he caused, enjoyed being the center of attention. “When you go through ten halls,” he admitted to his entourage, “and everywhere people shout their enthusiasm for you— it is an uplifting feeling, you know.” Quite often he would end his performance with an oath of loyalty that he would have the audience repeat after him, or with his eyes fixed upon the ceiling of the hall, his voice hoarse and breaking with emotion, he would cry, “Germany! Germany!”—repeating the word until the crowd fell in with it and the chanting moved on to one of the party’s battle or pogrom songs. Often they would pour out of the hall to march singing through the nocturnal streets. Hitler admitted that after each of his speeches he himself would be “soaking wet and would have lost four to six pounds.” At every meeting his uniform “dyed his underwear blue.”³³

According to his own testimony, it took him two years to learn to handle all the methods of propagandistic domination, so that he felt himself “master in this art.” It has been suggested that he was the first to apply the techniques of American advertising to political struggle. Perhaps the great Barnum was indeed one of his teachers, as Die Weltbuhne later asserted. But the tone of amusement with which the magazine announced this discovery revealed its own blindness. Many supercilious contemporaries from left to right made the same mistake: confusing Hitler’s techniques with his aims and concluding that the aims were laughable because the methods were. He himself never swerved in his determination to overthrow a world and put another in its place; to him there was no incongruity between the techniques of the circus barker and the universal conflagrations and apocalypses he had in mind.

The important figure in the background, the symbol of union throughout the volkisch camp, remained—in spite of Hitler’s oratorical success—General von Ludendorff. With a respectful eye partly cocked toward the general, Hitler was still regarding himself as something of a forerunner preparing the way for someone greater than himself. He, Hitler, playing the role that John the Baptist played for Christ—“a very small sort of St. John,” he called himself—would create a racially united people and a sword for that greater one. But the masses seemed to realize sooner than he himself that he was the one they were waiting for. They streamed to him “as to a Saviour,” a contemporary account notes. There are stories in plenty of “awakenings” and conversions—totalitarian movements are often characterized by such pseudoreligious events. For example, Ernst Hanfstaengl first heard Hitler at this time. He had many objections; nevertheless, he felt that “a new period of life” was beginning for him. The businessman Kurt Luedecke, who for a time was counted among the leading members of Hitler’s entourage and who later was imprisoned in the Oranienburg concentration camp, after his escape abroad described the spell cast on him and innumerable others by Hitler the orator:

Presently my critical faculty was swept away…. I do not know how to describe the emotions that swept over me as I heard this man. His words were like a scourge. When he spoke of the disgrace of Germany, I felt ready to spring on any enemy. His appeal to German manhood was like a call to arms, the gospel he preached a sacred truth. He seemed another Luther. I forgot everything but the man; then, glancing round, I saw that his magnetism was holding these thousands as one.

Of course I was ripe for this experience. I was a man of thirty-two, weary of disgust and disillusionment, a wanderer seeking a cause: a patriot without a channel for his patriotism, a yearner after the heroic without a hero. The intense will of the man, the passion of his sincerity seemed to flow from him into me. I experienced an exaltation that could be likened only to religious conversion.³⁴

From the spring of 1922 on the membership figures began climbing by leaps and bounds. By summer the party had some fifty local groups, and at the beginning of 1923 the Munich business office had to be closed temporarily because it was unable to cope with the mass of applications. Part of this increase was due to an order requiring every “party comrade” to bring in three new members and one subscriber to the Volkische Beobachter every three months. But much of it was surely due to Hitler’s growing skill as an orator and organizer.

In order to meet the needs of disoriented people, the NSDAP tried to create close links between the party and the personal lives of the members. In this respect it was once more drawing on the tested practices of socialist parties. But the rite of the weekly evening talkfests, at which attendance was obligatory, the joint outings, concerts, or solstice festivals, the singing, the cookouts, and saluting, in addition to the various forms of bland sociability that developed in party headquarters and storm troop barracks—all this went far beyond the model and appealed more directly to the human craving for solidarity. The movement’s greatest task, Hitler declared, was to provide “these seeking and erring masses” with the opportunity “at least somewhere once more to find a place where their hearts can rest.”

At first Hitler’s policy had been to enlarge the party at all costs. But after a while he took another line, establishing new local groups only when a capable leader in whom he personally had confidence could be found, one who could satisfy the craving for authority so obviously crying out for fulfillment.

For the party aimed at being more than an organization for specific political purposes. It never forgot, in its concern with the affairs of the day, that in addition to giving the members a deeply serious interpretation of the world it must also provide them with a touch of that banal contentment so conspicuously missing in the misery and isolation of everyday living. In its effort to be all at once homeland, center of existence, and source of knowledge the party was already manifesting its later claims to totality.

Within a year the NSDAP thus developed into “the strongest power factor in South German nationalism,” as one observer wrote. The North German party groups, too, showed such marked growth, inheriting membership from the disintegrating German Socialist Party. When, in June, 1922, the Foreign Minister, Walter Rathenau, was assassinated by nationalist conspirators, some German states, such as Prussia, Baden, and Thuringia, decided to ban Hitler’s party. In Bavaria, however, the experiences of the soviet period had not been forgotten; the NSDAP, as the most radical anti-Communist party, was not molested. In fact, many of Hitler’s followers held top positions in the Munich police force, including Police Commissioner Pohner and Oberamtmann (Chief Bailiff) Frick, his specialist in political affairs. These two men quashed any protests against the NSDAP, kept the party informed of planned actions against it, and if the police had after all to intervene, took care that such actions came to nothing. Frick later admitted that the police could easily have suppressed the party at this time, but that “we held our protecting hand over the NSDAP and Herr Hitler.” And Hitler himself remarked that without the assistance of Frick he would “never have been out of the clink.”³⁵

Hitler found himself imperiled only once, when Bavarian Interior Minister Schweyer raised the question of having the troublesome alien agitator deported to Austria. A conference in 1922 among the leaders of all the government parties had agreed that the rowdy bands in the streets of Munich, the brawls, the constant molesting of the citizenry, were becoming intolerable. But Erhard Auer, the leader of the Social Democrats, opposed deportation on the grounds that it would be a violation of “democratic and libertarian principles.” So Hitler was allowed to go on denouncing the republic as a “sanctuary for foreign swindlers,” threatening the administration that when he came to power “may God have mercy on you!” and proclaiming that there could be “only one punishment: the rope” for the treasonous leaders of the Social Democratic Party. Whipped up by his demagogy, the city of Munich became an enclave of antirepublicanism, buzzing with rumors of coups, civil war, and restoration of the monarchy. When Reich President Friedrich Ebert visited Munich in the summer of 1922, he was met at the railroad station with boos, jeers, and the display of red bathing trunks. (The President had been so unwise as to let himself be photographed, along with Noske, his Defense Minister, in a bathing suit. In the authoritarian-minded German nation, the loss of dignity was catastrophic.) Chancellor Wirth’s advisors warned him to cancel a planned trip to Munich. At the same time, Hindenburg was being greeted with ovations, and transportation of the body of Ludwig III, the last Wittelsbach monarch, who had died in exile, brought the whole city out into the streets, awash in tears of mourning and nostalgia.

His successes within Munich encouraged Hitler to undertake his first bold stroke outside the city. In mid- October, 1922, the patriotic societies of Coburg organized a demonstration, to which they invited Hitler. It was suggested that he come with “some companions.” Hitler interpreted this phrase in his customary brazen manner.