Hitler

tendencies reminded Hitler of the teachings of Lanz von Liebenfels and the Thule Society that had dominated his early years. He had long since freed himself from such things, and in Mein Kampf had expressed biting scorn for the kind of volkisch romanticism that nevertheless lingered on in his imagination. His attitude toward Ludendorff was also colored by jealousy. He was all too aware of the disabilities suffered by a former private first class vis-a-vis a general—especially in so military-minded a country. Finally, Hitler took it as a personal affront that Ludendorff by a military order had detached his personal adjutant, Ulrich Graf, from him. In his first conversation with the general after his release Hitler made a big issue of this. At the same time, as if driven by a demon of quarrelsomeness, he took up arms against the leaders of the North German National Socialist Freedom Movement. These men, Albrecht von Graefe and Count Ernst von Reventlow, had publicly declared that Hitler must not be allowed to regain his former position of power, that he was a talented agitator but not a politician. Hitler now answered Graefe in a letter that not only threw down the gauntlet but was in itself a token of his new selfassurance. In the past, Hitler said, he had been the “drummer” and would be again, but only for Germany and never again for Graefe and his ilk, “so help me God!”

On February 26, 1925, the first issue of the Volkische Beobachter since the putsch appeared. It announced that next day at the Burgerbraukeller, the site of the unsuccessful coup, the National Socialist German Workers’ Party would be founded anew. In his editorial “A New Beginning” and in an article, “Fundamental Directives” for the organization of the party, Hitler upheld his claim to leadership. He refused to make any concessions. With a side glance at the allegations against Esser and Streicher, he declared that the leadership of the party had nothing to do with the morality of its followers, any more than it did with doctrinaire squabbles. Its business was to practice politics. Those who were sniping at him he called “political children.” This strong line proved to be just what was wanted; declarations of loyalty poured in from all over the country.

Strategically, his appearance next day had been carefully thought out. In order to give greater force to his appeal, Hitler had not spoken in public for two months. This had raised to an extraordinary degree the expectations of his adherents and the nervousness of his rivals. He had received no visitors, even rebuffed foreign delegations, and had let it be known that he was throwing all political letters “into the wastebasket unread.” Although the meeting was not to begin until eight o’clock, the first of the audience—admission one mark—arrived by early afternoon. At six o’clock the police had to close the hall; some 4,000 followers had crowded into it.

Many of those present had been battling with each other. But when Hitler entered the hall, he was greeted with that wildly excessive homage that was later to become so common. People climbed on the tables, cheered, waved beer mugs, or joyfully embraced one another. Max Amann chaired the meeting, since Anton Drexler had refused to participate unless Esser and Streicher were expelled from the party. Gregor Strasser, Rohm, and Rosenberg were also among the missing. Hitler addressed all of them, the faltering, the skeptical or the obstinate partisans, in an extremely effective two-hour speech. He began with generalities, hailed the achievements of the Aryan as a creator of culture, discussed foreign policy, held forth on the theme that the peace treaty could be broken, the reparations agreement disavowed, but even so Germany would ultimately die of Jewish blood poisoning. Prey to his old obsession, he impressed his listeners with the fact that on Berlin’s Friedrichstrasse every Jew had a blonde German girl on his arm. Nevertheless Marxism could “be overthrown as soon as it is confronted by a doctrine of superior truthfulness but the same brutality in execution.” He went on to criticize Ludendorff for making enemies everywhere and not realizing that it is possible to speak of one enemy and mean another. Finally he came to the heart of his argument:

If anyone comes and wants to set me conditions, I tell him: My friend, wait awhile until you hear the conditions I am setting you. I’m not wooing the masses, you know. After a year has passed, you be the judges, my party comrades. If I have not acted rightly, then I shall return my office to your hands. But until then this is the rule: I and I alone shall lead the movement, and no one sets me conditions as long as I personally bear the responsibility. And I on the other hand bear all the responsibility for everything that happens in the movement.²⁶

At the end, face flushed with excitement, he called upon the members of the audience to bury their enmities, forget the past, and put an end to the conflicts within the movement. He did not ask for obedience, did not offer any bargains; he simply demanded submission or withdrawal from the movement. The ecstatic cheering at the end confirmed his resolve to shape the NSDAP into a tightly organized party under his sole command. In the midst of this display of enthusiasm Max Amann stepped forward and called out to the crowd: “The quarreling must stop. Everyone for Hitler!” Suddenly all the old foes thronged to the platform: Streicher, Esser, Feder, Frick, the Thuringian gauleiter Dinter, the Bavarian faction leader Buttmann. In a spectacular scene, before thousands of people shouting and waving and climbing on tables and chairs, they ostentatiously shook hands with one another. Streicher stammered something about a “godsend,” and Buttmann—who only recently had taken sharp issue with Hitler at a meeting of the Landtag faction—testified that all the doubts he had felt when he arrived “melted away inside me when the Fuhrer spoke.” What the dominant figure of Ludendorff had been unable to accomplish, what Graefe, Strasser, Rosenberg, and Rohm individually or in conjunction with one another had failed to do, Hitler accomplished with a few strokes. The experience strengthened his self-confidence as well as his authority. Buttmann’s phrase had been used occasionally before, though it had been applied also to Ludendorff and other competitors for leadership. From this day on, however, Hitler was the only one indisputably known as “the Fuhrer.”

As soon as Hitler had asserted his control over the party, he set about accomplishing his second goal: organizing the Nazi party into a pliable and vigorous instrument for his tactical aims. While still in Landsberg he had, in a cynical mood, commented to one of his followers: “When I resume active work, it will be necessary to pursue a new policy. Instead of working to achieve power by an armed coup, we shall have to hold our noses and enter the Reichstag against the Catholic and Marxist deputies. If out-voting them takes longer than out-shooting them, at least the results will be guaranteed by their own Constitution! Any lawful process is slow.”²⁷

The business was far slower and more toilsome than Hitler had imagined, and was accompanied by repeated setbacks, obstacles, and conflicts. As luck would have it, he himself was to blame for the first severe setback. The Bavarian government had taken note of his remark that one could speak of one enemy and mean another and had interpreted it—just as it was meant—as proof of his inveterate hostility to the Constitution. It also resented his remark that either the enemy would pass over his dead body or he over the enemy’s. “It is my wish,” he had continued, “that the swastika flag shall be my shroud if next time the struggle lays me low.” This sort of talk cast such question on his pledge to be law-abiding that the authorities in Bavaria, and soon afterward in most of the other German states, simply forbade him to make public speeches. In conjunction with his parole, with the ever-present threat of deportation, and with the changes in the general situation, this ban seemed to put an end to all his prospects. It came as a surprise and a terrible reversal, for it seemed to scotch his idea of working with the government.

Nevertheless, Hitler seemed totally unperturbed. A year and a half before, in the summer of 1923, a setback would have thrown him off balance, would have thrust him back into the lethargy and weaknesses of his youth. Now he remained unaffected. He did not even seem to mind the personal consequences of the ban on public speaking: the loss of his chief source of income. He depended instead on fees for the editorials he was now writing for the party press. In addition, he frequently addressed groups of from forty to sixty guests at the home of his friends, the Bruckmanns, where the small audience and the absence of intoxicants produced a new atmosphere that called for another style of propaganda. Contemporary observers all report the changes Hitler seems to have undergone during his imprisonment, the sterner, more rigorous expression that gave a new stamp to his countenance. “The thin, pale, sickly, often seemingly empty face was more forcefully composed; the strong bony structure from brow to chin emerged more distinctly; what formerly might have given the effect of sentimentality had yielded to an unmistakable note of hardness.”

He had also acquired that arrogant tenacity which would serve him well through all misfortunes, enabling him to keep going throughout the period of stagnation and persist until the march to victory began at the outset of the thirties. In the summer of 1925, when his hopes were at their nadir, a meeting of party leaders discussed a motion to appoint a deputy for him; he would not hear of it, on the infuriating ground that the movement would stand or fall with him alone.