To be the ‘drummer’ meant everything to Hitler at this time. It was the ‘vocation’ that replaced his dreams of becoming a great artist or architect. It was his main task, practically his sole concern. Not only did it allow full expression to his one real talent. It was also in his eyes the greatest and most important role he could play. For politics to Hitler – and so it would in all essence remain – was propaganda: ceaseless mass mobilization for a cause to be followed blindly, not the ‘art of the possible’.
Hitler owed his rise to at least regional prominence on the nationalist Right in Bavaria not simply to his unparalleled ability as a mob-orator at mass meetings in Munich. As before, this was his chief asset. But linked to this, and of crucial importance, was the fact that he was the head of a movement which, in contrast to the earliest phase of the party’s existence, now came to develop its own substantial paramilitary force and to enter the maelstrom of Bavarian paramilitary politics. It was above all in the peculiar conditions of post-revolutionary Bavaria that the private armies, with the toleration and often active support of the Bavarian authorities, could fully flourish.
The vehemently anti-socialist, counter-revolutionary regime of Minister President Gustav Ritter von Kahr turned Bavaria into a haven for right-wing extremists from all over Germany, including many under order of arrest elsewhere in the country. From a new protected base in Munich, for example, Captain Hermann Ehrhardt, a veteran of orchestrated anti-socialist violence in the Freikorps, including the suppression of the Räterepublik, and a leader of the Kapp Putsch, was able to use his Organisation Consul to build up a network of groups throughout the whole of the German Reich and carry out many of the political murders – there were 354 in all perpetrated by the Right between 1919 and 1922 – that stained the early years of the troubled new democracy. It was Ehrhardt, alongside Ernst Röhm, who was to play a leading role in establishing the NSDAP’s own paramilitary organization, which was to emerge from 1921 onwards into a significant feature of the Nazi Movement and an important factor in paramilitary politics in Bavaria.
Röhm was, more even than Hitler, typical of the ‘front generation’. As a junior officer, he shared the dangers, anxieties, and privations of the troops in the trenches – shared, too, the prejudice and mounting anger levelled at those in staff headquarters behind the lines, at the military bureaucracy, at ‘incapable’ politicians, and at those seen as shirkers, idlers, and profiteers at home. Against these highly negative images, he heroicized the ‘front community’, the solidarity of the men in the trenches, leadership resting on deeds rather than status, and the blind obedience that this demanded. What he wanted was a new ‘warrior’ élite whose actions and achievements had proved their right to rule. Though a monarchist, there was for Röhm to be no return to pre-war bourgeois society. His ideal was the community of fighting men. As for so many who joined the Freikorps and their successor paramilitary organizations, this ideal combined male fantasy with the cult of violence. Like so many, Röhm had gone to war in 1914 in wild enthusiasm, suffered serious facial injury within weeks when shell fragments tore away part of his nose, permanently disfiguring him, had returned to lead his company, but had been forced out of service at the front after being again badly injured at Verdun. His subsequent duties in the Bavarian War Ministry, and as the supply officer of a division, sharpened his political antennae and gave him experience in organizational matters. The trauma of defeat and revolution drove him into counter-revolutionary activity – including service in the Freikorps Epp during its participation in the crushing of the Räterepublik. After brief membership of the German Nationalists, the DNVP, he joined the tiny DAP soon after Hitler, in autumn 1919, and, as he himself claimed, was probably responsible for others from the Reichswehr entering the party. Röhm’s interest continued, however, to be dictated by military and paramilitary, rather than party, politics. He showed no exclusive interest in the NSDAP before the SA became a significant element in paramilitary politics.
But Röhm’s value to the party in engineering its paramilitary connections is hard to overrate. His access both to leading figures on the paramilitary scene and, especially, to weaponry was crucial. His position in control of weapon supplies for the Brigade Epp (the successor to the Freikorps unit, now integrated into the Reichswehr) gave him responsibility for providing the Einwohnerwehr with weapons. The semi-secrecy involved in concealing the extent of weaponry from Allied control – not difficult since there was no occupying army to carry out inspections – also gave Röhm a great deal of scope to build up a large stockpile of mainly small arms in 1920–21. After the dissolution of the Einwohnerwehr, and the official confiscation of weaponry, various paramilitary organizations entrusted him with their weapon supplies. Presiding over such an arsenal, deciding when and if weapons should be handed out, the ‘machine-gun king’, as he became known, was thus in a pivotal position with regard to the demands of all paramilitary organizations. And, through the protection he gained from Epp, Kahr, and the Munich political police, he enjoyed influence beyond his rank on the politics of the nationalist Right.
From the beginning, the dual role of paramilitary organization (initially linked to Ehrhardt) and party shock troops under Hitler’s leadership contained the seeds of the tension that was to accompany the SA down to 1934. The interest of Röhm and Ehrhardt lay on the paramilitary side. Hitler tried to integrate the SA fully into the party, though organizationally it retained considerable independence before 1924. The build-up of the SA was steady, not spectacular, before the second half of 1922. It was after that date, in conditions of rapidly mounting crisis in Bavaria and in the Reich, that the SA’s numbers swelled, making it a force to be reckoned with on the nationalist Right.
Hitler, meanwhile, now undisputed leader of his party, carried on his ceaseless agitation much as before, able to exploit the continued tension between Bavaria and the Reich. The murder of Reich Finance Minister Matthias Erzberger on 26 August 1921 – an indication of the near-anarchism that still prevailed in Germany – and Kahr’s refusal to accept the validity for Bavaria of the state of emergency declared by Reich President Friedrich Ebert, kept things on the boil. Material discontent played its own part. Prices were already rising sharply as the currency depreciated. Foodstuffs were almost eight times more expensive in 1921 than they had been at the end of the war. By the next year they would be over 130 times dearer. And that was before the currency lost all its value in the hyperinflation of 1923.
Hitler’s provocation of his political enemies and of the authorities to gain publicity was stepped up. After one violent clash between his followers and his opponents, he was sentenced in January 1922 to three months’ imprisonment for breach of the peace – two months suspended against future good behaviour (though conveniently forgotten about when the good behaviour did not materialize). Even his powerful friends could not prevent him serving the other month of his sentence. Between 24 June and 27 July 1922 he took up residence in Stadelheim prison in Munich.
Apart from this short interlude, Hitler did not let up with his agitation. Brushes with the police were commonplace. For Hitler, these violent clashes with his opponents were the lifeblood of his movement. They were above all good for publicity. Hitler was still dissatisfied with the coverage – even of a negative kind – he received in the press. Nevertheless, the actions of the NSDAP and its leader ensured that they remained in the public eye. And while his leading supporters hinted darkly at dire consequences if the Bavarian government expelled him from Germany (as he had been warned might happen if the disturbances continued), Hitler made propaganda capital out of the threat of expulsion by pointing to his war record, when he had fought as a German for his country while others had done no more than stay at home and preach politics.
Hitler’s most notable propaganda success in 1922 was his party’s participation in the so-called ‘German Day’ (Deutscher Tag) in Coburg on 14–15 October. Coburg, on the Thuringian border in the north of Upper Franconia and part of Bavaria f
or only two years, was virgin territory for the Nazis. He saw the German Day as an opportunity not to be missed. He scraped together what funds the NSDAP had to hire a special train – in itself a novel propaganda stunt – to take 800 stormtroopers to Coburg. The SA men were instructed by Hitler to ignore explicit police orders, banning a formation march with unfurled banners and musical accompaniment, and marched with hoisted swastika flags through the town. Workers lining the streets insulted them and spat at them. Nazis in turn leapt out of the ranks beating their tormentors with sticks and rubber-truncheons. A furious battle with the socialists ensued. After ten minutes of mayhem, in which they had police support, the stormtroopers triumphantly claimed the streets of Coburg as theirs. For Hitler, the propaganda victory was what counted. The German Day in Coburg went down in the party’s annals. The NSDAP had made its mark in northern Bavaria.
It was Hitler’s second major success in Franconia within a few days. On 8 October, Julius Streicher, head of the Nuremberg branch of the Deutsche Werkgemeinschaft, had written to Hitler offering to take his sizeable following, together with his newspaper the Deutscher Volkswille, into the NSDAP. In the wake of the Coburg triumph, the transfer took place on 20 October. Streicher, a short, squat, shaven-headed bully, born in 1885 in the Augsburg area, for a time a primary school teacher as his father had been, and, like Hitler, a war veteran decorated with the Iron Cross, First Class, was utterly possessed by demonic images of Jews. Shortly after the war he had been an early member of the DSP (German-Socialist Party), as antisemitic as the NSDAP, though he had left it in 1921. His newspaper Der Stürmer, established in 1923 and becoming notorious for its obscene caricatures of evil-looking Jews seducing pure German maidens and ritual-murder allegations, would – despite Hitler’s personal approving comments, and view that ‘the Jew’ was far worse than Streicher’s ‘idealized’ picture – for a while be banned even in the Third Reich. Streicher was eventually tried at Nuremberg, and hanged. Now, back in 1922, in a step of vital importance for the development of the NSDAP in Franconia, in the northern regions of Bavaria, he subordinated himself personally to Hitler. The rival völkisch movement was fatally weakened in Franconia. The Nazi Party practically doubled its membership. From around 2,000 members about the beginning of 1921 and 6,000 a year later, the party was overnight some 20,000 strong. More than that: the Franconian countryside – piously Protestant, fervently nationalist, and stridently antisemitic – was to provide the NSDAP with a stronghold far greater than was offered by its home city of Munich in the Catholic south of Bavaria, and a symbolic capital in Nuremberg – later designated the ‘city of the Reich Party Rallies’. It was little wonder that Hitler was keen to express his gratitude to Streicher publicly in Mein Kampf.
Even so, it was striking that, away from his Munich citadel, Hitler’s power was still limited. He was the undisputed propaganda champion of the party. But away from his Munich base, his writ still did not always run.
This was in itself ample reason for the interest which his Munich following began to show in building up the leadership cult around Hitler. A significant boost to the aura of a man of destiny attaching itself to Hitler came from outside Germany. Mussolini’s so-called ‘March on Rome’ on 28 October 1922 – fictitious though it was in the Fascist legend of a bold ‘seizure of power’ – nevertheless deeply stirred the Nazi Party. It suggested the model of a dynamic and heroic nationalist leader marching to the salvation of his strife-torn country. The Duce provided an image to be copied. Less than a week after the coup d’état in Italy, on 3 November 1922, Hermann Esser proclaimed to a packed Festsaal in the Hofbräuhaus: ‘Germany’s Mussolini is called Adolf Hitler.’ It marked the symbolic moment when Hitler’s followers invented the Führer cult.
The spread of fascist and militaristic ideas in post-war Europe meant that ‘heroic leadership’ images were ‘in the air’ and by no means confined to Germany. The emergence of the Duce cult in Italy provides an obvious parallel. But the German images naturally had their own flavour, drawing on particular elements of the political culture of the nationalist Right. And the crisis-ridden nature of the Weimar state, detested by so many powerful groups in society and unable to win the popularity and support of the masses, guaranteed that such ideas, which in a more stable environment might have been regarded with derision and confined to the lunatic fringe of politics, were never short of a hearing. Ideas put into circulation by neo-conservative publicists, writers, and intellectuals were, in more vulgarized form, taken up in paramilitary formations and in the varied groupings of the bourgeois youth movement. The model of Mussolini’s triumph in Italy now offered the opening for such ideas to be incorporated into the vision of national revival preached by the National Socialists.
The Führer cult was not yet the pivot of the party’s ideology and organization. But the beginnings of a conscious public profiling of Hitler’s leadership qualities by his entourage, with strong hints in his own speeches, dates back to the period following Mussolini’s ‘March on Rome’. Hitler was beginning to attract fawning excesses of adulation – even stretching to grotesque comparisons with Napoleon – from admirers on the nationalist Right. The ground for the later rapid spread of the Führer cult was already well fertilized.
There had been no trace of a leadership cult in the first years of the Nazi Party. The word ‘leader’ (‘Führer’) had no special meaning attached to it. Every political party or organization had a leader – or more than one. The NSDAP was no different. Drexler was referred to as the party’s ‘Führer’, as was Hitler; or sometimes both in practically the same breath. Once Hitler had taken over the party leadership in July 1921, the term ‘our leader’ (‘unser Führer’) became gradually more common. But its meaning was still interchangeable with the purely functional ‘chairman of the NSDAP’. There was nothing ‘heroic’ about it. Nor had Hitler endeavoured to build up a personality cult around himself. But Mussolini’s triumph evidently made a deep impression on him. It gave him a role-model. Referring to Mussolini, less than a month after the ‘March on Rome’, Hitler reportedly stated: ‘So will it be with us. We only have to have the courage to act. Without struggle, no victory!’ However, the reshaping of his self-image also reflected how his supporters were beginning to see their leader. His followers portrayed him, in fact, as Germany’s ‘heroic’ leader before he came to see himself in that light. Not that he did anything to discourage the new way he was being portrayed from autumn 1922 onwards. It was in December 1922 that the Völkischer Beobachter for the first time appeared to claim that Hitler was a special kind of leader – indeed the Leader for whom Germany was waiting. Followers of Hitler leaving a parade in Munich were said ‘to have found something which millions are yearning for, a leader’. By Hitler’s thirty-fourth birthday, on 20 April 1923, when the new head of the SA, Hermann Göring – thirty years old, Bavarian born but at the latest from the time of his military training in Berlin a self-styled Prussian, handsome (at this time), wildly egocentric, well-connected and power-hungry, bringing the glamour of the World War decorated flying ace as well as important links to the aristocracy to the Nazi Movement – labelled him the ‘beloved leader of the German freedom-movement’, the personality cult was unmistakable. Political opponents scorned it. That it was not without its mark on Hitler himself is plain. Eckart told Hanfstaengl, while on holiday with Hitler near Berchtesgaden in the Bavarian alps bordering on Austria in May 1923, that Hitler had ‘megalomania halfway between a Messiah complex and Neroism’, after he had allegedly compared the way he would deal with Berlin with Christ throwing money-changers out of the temple.
During 1923 there are indications in Hitler’s speeches that his self-perception was changing. He was now much more preoccupied than he had been in earlier years with leadership, and the qualities needed in the coming Leader of Germany. At no time before his imprisonment in Landsberg did he unambiguously claim those qualities for himself. But a number of passages in his speeches hint that the edges of what distinguished the ?
??drummer’ from the ‘Leader’ might be starting to blur.
On 4 May 1923, in a speech castigating the parliamentary system as the ‘downfall and end of the German nation’, Hitler gave the clearest hint to date of how he saw his own role. With reference to Frederick the Great and Bismarck, ‘giants’ whose deeds contrasted with those of the Reichstag, ‘Germany’s grave-digger’, he declared: ‘What can save Germany is the dictatorship of the national will and national determination. The question arises: is the suitable personality to hand? Our task is not to look for such a person. He is a gift from heaven, or is not there. Our task is to create the sword that this person will need when he is there. Our task is to give the dictator, when he comes, a people ready for him!’
In an interview with the British Daily Mail on 2 October 1923, Hitler was reported as saying: ‘If a German Mussolini is given to Germany … people would fall down on their knees and worship him more than Mussolini has ever been worshipped.’ If he was seeing himself – as his followers were seeing him – as the ‘German Mussolini’, then he was apparently beginning to associate the greatness of national leadership with his own person. He felt by this time, so he said, ‘the call to Germany’s salvation within him’, and others detected ‘outright Napoleonic and messianic allures’ in what he said.