The lack of clarity in Hitler’s comments about the future leadership was, in part, presumably tactical. There was nothing to be gained by alienating possible support through a premature conflict about who would later be supreme leader. As Hitler had stated in October, the leadership question could be left unanswered until ‘the weapon is created which the leader must possess’. Only then would the time be ripe to ‘pray to our Lord God that he give us the right leader’. But it was predominantly a reflection of Hitler’s concept of politics as essentially agitation, propaganda, and ‘struggle’. Organizational forms remained of little concern to him as long as his own freedom of action was not constrained by them. The crucial issue was the leadership of the ‘political struggle’. But it is hard to imagine that Hitler’s self-confidence in this field and his ingrained refusal to compromise would not subsequently have meant his demand for total, unconstrained leadership of the ‘national movement’. At any rate, Hitler’s comments on leadership in the crisis-ridden year of 1923 seem to indicate that his self-image was in a process of change. He still saw himself as the ‘drummer’, the highest calling there was in his eyes. But it would not take much, following his triumph in the trial, to convert that self-image into the presumption that he was the ‘heroic leader’ himself.
II
That was all in the future. Around the beginning of 1923, few, if any, outside the ranks of his most fervent devotees thought seriously of Hitler as Germany’s coming ‘great leader’. But his rise to star status on Munich’s political scene – alongside the Hofbräuhaus, the city’s only notable curiosity, as one newspaper put it – meant that individuals from quite outside his normal social circles began to take a keen interest in him.
Two were converts to the party who were able to open up useful new contacts for Hitler. Kurt Lüdecke, a well-connected former gambler, playboy, and commercial adventurer, a widely-travelled ‘man of the world’, was ‘looking for a leader and a cause’ when he first heard Hitler speak at the rally of the ‘Patriotic Associations’ in Munich in August 1922. Lüdecke was enthralled. ‘My critical faculty was swept away,’ he later wrote. ‘He was holding the masses, and me with them, under a hypnotic spell by the sheer force of his conviction … His appeal to German manhood was like a call to arms, the gospel he preached a sacred truth. He seemed another Luther … I experienced an exaltation that could be likened only to religious conversion … I had found myself, my leader, and my cause.’ According to his own account, Lüdecke used his connections to promote Hitler’s standing with General Ludendorff, a war hero since repulsing the Russian advance into East Prussia in 1914, in effect Germany’s dictator during the last two war years, and now the outstanding figure on the radical Right, whose name alone was sufficient to open further doors to Hitler. He also sang Hitler’s praises to the former Munich chief of police, already an important Nazi sympathizer and protector, Ernst Pöhner. Abroad Lüdecke was able to establish contacts just before the ‘March on Rome’ with Mussolini (who at that time had never heard of Hitler), and in 1923 with Gömbös and other leading figures in Hungary. His foreign bank accounts, and sizeable donations he was able to acquire abroad, proved valuable to the party during the hyperinflation of 1923. He also fitted out and accommodated at his own cost an entire stormtrooper company. Even so, many of Lüdecke’s well-placed contacts were impatient at his constant proselytizing for the NSDAP, and quietly dropped him. And within the party, he was unable to overcome dislike and distrust. He was even denounced to the police by Max Amann as a French spy and jailed under false pretences for two months. By the end of 1923, Lüdecke had used up almost his entire income on behalf of the party.
An even more useful convert was Ernst ‘Putzi’ Hanfstaengl, a six-foot-four-inch-tall, cultured part-American – his mother, a Sedgwick-Heine, was a descendant of a colonel who had fought in the Civil War – from an upper middle-class art-dealer family, Harvard graduate, partner in an art-print publishing firm, and extremely well-connected in Munich salon society. Like Lüdecke, his first experience of Hitler was hearing him speak. Hanfstaengl was greatly impressed by Hitler’s power to sway the masses. ‘Far beyond his electrifying rhetoric,’ he later wrote, ‘this man seemed to possess the uncanny gift of coupling the gnostic yearning of the era for a strong leader-figure with his own missionary claim and to suggest in this merging that every conceivable hope and expectation was capable of fulfilment – an astonishing spectacle of suggestive influence of the mass psyche.’ Hanfstaengl was plainly fascinated by the subaltern, petty-bourgeois Hitler in his shabby blue suit, looking part-way between an NCO and a clerk, with awkward mannerisms, but possessing such power as a speaker when addressing a mass audience. Hanfstaengl remained in part contemptuous of Hitler – not least of his half-baked, cliché-ridden judgements on art and culture (where Hanfstaengl was truly at home and Hitler merely an opinionated know-all). On Hitler’s first visit to the Hanfstaengl home, ‘his awkward use of knife and fork betrayed his background’, wrote (somewhat snobbishly) his host. At the same time, Putzi was plainly captivated by this ‘virtuoso on the keyboard of the mass pysche’. He was appalled at catching Hitler sugaring a vintage wine he had offered him. But, added Hanfstaengl, ‘he could have peppered it, for each naïve act increased my belief in his homespun sincerity’.
Soon, Hitler was a regular guest at Hanfstaengl’s home, where he gorged himself on cream-cakes, paying court to Hanfstaengl’s attractive wife, Helene, in his quaint, Viennese style. She took Hitler’s attentions in her stride. ‘Believe me, he’s an absolute neuter, not a man,’ she told her husband. Putzi himself believed, for what it was worth, that Hitler was sexually impotent, gaining substitute gratification from his intercourse with the ‘feminine’ masses. Hitler was taken by Putzi’s skills as a pianist, especially his ability to play Wagner. He would accompany Putzi by whistling the tune, marching up and down swinging his arms like the conductor of an orchestra, relaxing visibly in the process. He plainly liked Hanfstaengl – his wife even more so. But the criterion, as always, was usefulness. And above all Hanfstaengl was useful. He became a type of ‘social secretary’, providing openings to circles far different from the petty-bourgeois roughnecks in Hitler’s entourage who gathered each Monday in the Café Neumaier.
Hanfstaengl introduced Hitler to Frau Elsa Bruckmann, the wife of the publisher Hugo Bruckmann, a Pan-German sympathizer and antisemite who had published the works of Houston Stewart Chamberlain. Hitler’s ingratiating manners and social naïvety brought out the mother instinct in her. Whether it was the wish to afford him some protection against his enemies that persuaded her to make him a present of one of the dog-whips he invariably carried around is not clear. (Oddly, his other dog-whip – the first he possessed – had been given to him by a rival patroness, Frau Helene Bechstein, while a third heavy whip, made from hippopotamus hide, which he later carried, was given to him by Frau Büchner, the landlady of the Platterhof, the hotel where he stayed on the Obersalzberg.) Everyone who was someone in Munich would be invited at some stage to the soirées of Frau Bruckmann, by birth a Romanian princess, so that Hitler was brought into contact here with industrialists, members of the army and aristocracy, and academics. In his gangster hat and trenchcoat over his dinner jacket, touting a pistol and carrying as usual his dog-whip, he cut a bizarre figure in the salons of Munich’s upper-crust. But his very eccentricity of dress and exaggerated mannerisms – the affected excessive politeness of one aware of his social inferiority – saw him lionized by condescending hosts and fellow-guests. His social awkwardness and uncertainty, often covered by either silence or tendency to monologues, but at the same time the consciousness of his public success that one could read in his face, made him an oddity, affording him curiosity value among the patronizing cultured and well-to-do pillars of the establishment.
Hitler was also a guest from time to time of the publisher Lehmann, for long a party sympathizer. And the wife of piano manufacturer Bechstein – to whom he had been introduced by Eckart – was
another to ‘mother’ Hitler, as well as lending the party her jewellery as surety against 60,000 Swiss Francs which Hitler was able to borrow from a Berlin coffee merchant in September 1923. The Bechsteins, who usually wintered in Bavaria, used to invite Hitler to their suite in the ‘Bayerischer Hof’, or to their country residence near Berchtesgaden. Through the Bechsteins, Hitler was introduced to the Wagner circle at Bayreuth. He was transfixed at the first visit, in October 1923, to the shrine of his ultimate hero at Haus Wahnfried, where he tiptoed around the former possessions of Richard Wagner in the music-room and library ‘as though he were viewing relics in a cathedral’. The Wagners had mixed views of their unusual guest, who had turned up looking ‘rather common’ in his traditional Bavarian outfit of lederhosen, thick woollen socks, red and blue checked shirt, and ill-fitting short blue jacket. Winifred, the English-born wife of Wagner’s son Siegfried, thought he was ‘destined to be the saviour of Germany’. Siegfried himself saw Hitler as ‘a fraud and an upstart’.
The rapid growth in the party during the latter part of 1922 and especially in 1923 that had made it a political force in Munich, its closer connections with the ‘patriotic associations’, and the wider social contacts which now arose meant that funding flowed more readily to the NSDAP than had been the case in its first years. Now, as later, the party’s finances relied heavily upon members’ subscriptions together with entrance-fees and collections at meetings. The more came to meetings, the more were recruited as members, the more income came to the party, to permit yet more meetings to be held. Propaganda financed propaganda.
But even now, the party’s heavy outgoings were difficult to meet, and funding was not easy to drum up in conditions of rip-roaring inflation. There was a premium on donations made in hard foreign currency. Lüdecke and Hanfstaengl, as already noted, were useful in this regard. Hanfstaengl also financed with an interest-free loan of 1,000 dollars – a fortune in inflation-ridden Germany – the purchase of two rotary presses that enabled the Völkischer Beobachter to appear in larger, American-style format. Rumours, some far wide of the mark, about the party’s finances were repeatedly aired by opponents in the press. Even so, official inquiries in 1923 revealed considerable sums raised from an increasing array of benefactors.
One important go-between was Max Erwin von Scheubner-Richter, born in Riga, linguistically able, with diplomatic service in Turkey during the war, and later imprisoned for a time by Communists on his return to the Baltic. After the war he had participated in the Kapp Putsch, then, like so many counter-revolutionaries, made his way to Munich, where he joined the NSDAP in autumn 1920. A significant, if shadowy, figure in the early Nazi Party, he used his excellent connections with Russian émigrés, such as Princess Alexandra, wife of the Russian heir to the throne Prince Kyrill, to acquire funds directed at Ludendorff and, through him, deflected in part to the NSDAP. Other members of the aristocracy, including Frau Gertrud von Seidlitz, who used monies from foreign stocks and shares, also contributed to Nazi funds. Hitler was almost certainly a co-beneficiary (though probably in a minor way) of the generous gift of 100,000 Gold Marks made by Fritz Thyssen, heir to the family’s Ruhr steelworks, to Ludendorff, but Germany’s leading industrialists, apart from Ernst von Borsig, head of the Berlin locomotive and machine-building firm, showed little direct interest in the Nazis at this time. Police inquiries which remained inconclusive suggested that Borsig and car-manufacturers Daimler were among other firms contributing to the party. Some Bavarian industrialists and businessmen, too, were persuaded by Hitler to make donations to the movement.
Valuable funds were also attained abroad. Anti-Marxism and the hopes in a strong Germany as a bulwark against Bolshevism often provided motive enough for such donations. The Völkischer Beobachter’s new offices were financed with Czech Kronen. An important link with Swiss funds was Dr Emil Gansser, a Berlin chemist and long-standing Nazi supporter, who engineered a gift of 33,000 Swiss Francs from right-wing Swiss benefactors. Further Swiss donations followed a visit from Hitler himself to Zurich in the summer of 1923. And from right-wing circles in the arch-enemy France, 90,000 Gold Marks were passed to Captain Karl Mayr, Hitler’s first patron, and from him to the ‘patriotic associations’. It can be presumed that the NSDAP was among the beneficiaries. In addition to monetary donations, Röhm saw to it that the SA, along with other paramilitary organizations, was well provided with equipment and weapons from his secret arsenal. Whatever the financial support, without Röhm’s supplies an armed putsch would scarcely have been possible.
In November 1922, rumours were already circulating that Hitler was planning a putsch. By January 1923, in the explosive climate following the French march into the Ruhr, the rumours in Munich of a Hitler putsch were even stronger. The crisis, without which Hitler would have been nothing, was deepening by the day. In its wake, the Nazi movement was expanding rapidly. Some 35,000 were to join between February and November 1923, giving a strength of around 55,000 on the eve of the putsch. Recruits came from all sections of society. Around a third were workers, a tenth or more came from the upper-middle and professional classes, but more than a half belonged to the crafts, commercial, white-collar, and farming lower-middle class. Most had joined the party out of protest, anger, and bitterness as the economic and political crisis mounted. The same was true of the thousands flocking into the SA. Hitler had won their support by promising them action. The sacrifices of the war would be avenged. The revolution would be overturned. He could not hold them at fever-pitch indefinitely without unleashing such action. The tendency to ‘go for broke’ was not simply a character-trait of Hitler; it was built into the nature of his leadership, his political aims, and the party he led. But Hitler was not in control of events as they unfolded in 1923. Nor was he, before 8 November, the leading player in the drama. Without the readiness of powerful figures and organizations to contemplate a putsch against Berlin, Hitler would have had no stage on which to act so disastrously. His own role, his actions – and reactions – have to be seen in that light.
III
Hitler’s incessant barrage of anti-government propaganda was nearly undermined by an event that invoked national unity in January 1923: the French occupation of the Ruhr. On this occasion at least, the Reich government seemed to be acting firmly – and acting with mass popular support – through its campaign of ‘passive resistance’ against the occupation. Attacks on the Berlin government at this juncture seemed unpromising. Undeterred, Hitler saw advantage to be gained from the French occupation. As usual, he went on a propaganda offensive.
On the very day of the French march into the Ruhr he spoke in a packed Circus Krone. ‘Down with the November Criminals’ was the title of his speech. It was not the first time he had used the term ‘November Criminals’ to describe the Social Democrat revolutionaries of 1918. But from now on, the slogan was seldom far from his lips. It showed the line he would take towards the Ruhr occupation. The real enemy was within. Marxism, democracy, parliamentarism, internationalism, and, of course, behind it all the power of the Jews, were held by Hitler to blame for the national defencelessness that allowed the French to treat Germany like a colony.
The propaganda offensive was stepped up with preparations for the NSDAP’s first ‘Reich Party Rally’, scheduled to take place in Munich on 27–29 January. It brought confrontation with the Bavarian government, so frightened about rumours of a putsch that on 26 January it declared a state of emergency in Munich, but so weak that it lacked the power to carry through its intended ban on the rally. At the meetings during the rally, Hitler could once more appear self-confident, certain of success, to the masses of his supporters. The whole rally had been devised in the form of a ritual homage-paying to the ‘leader of the German freedom-movement’. The leadership cult, consciously devised to sustain maximum cohesion within the party, was taking off. According to a newspaper report, Hitler was greeted ‘like a saviour’ when he entered the Festsaal of the Hofbräuhaus during one of his twelve speeches on the eve
ning of 27 January. In the feverish atmosphere in the Löwenbraukeller the same evening, he was given a similar hero’s welcome as he entered the hall, deliberately late, shielded by his bodyguard, arm outstretched in the salute – probably borrowed from the Italian Fascists (and by them from Imperial Rome) – which would become standard in the Movement by 1926.
Hitler’s near-exclusive concentration on propaganda was not Röhm’s approach, while the latter’s emphasis on the paramilitary posed a latent threat to Hitler’s authority. At the beginning of February, Röhm founded a ‘Working Group of the Patriotic Fighting Associations’ (Arbeitsgemeinschaft der Vaterländischen Kampfverbände) comprising, alongside the SA, the Bund Oberland, Reichsflagge, Wikingbund, and Kampfverband Niederbayern. Direct military control was in the hands of retired Oberstleutnant Hermann Kriebel, previously a chief of staff in the Bavarian Einwohnerwehr. The formations were trained by the Bavarian Reichswehr – not for incorporation in any defence against further inroads by the French and Belgians (the threat of which was by this time plainly receding), but evidently for the eventuality of conflict with Berlin. Once subsumed in this umbrella organization, the SA was far from the biggest paramilitary grouping and there was little to distinguish it from the other bodies. In a purely military organization, it had only a subordinate role. The conversion of the SA to a paramilitary organization now not directly or solely under his own control was not to Hitler’s liking. But there was nothing he could do about it. However, Hitler was pushed by Röhm into the foreground of the political leadership of the ‘Working Community’. He it was who was asked by Röhm to define the political aims of the ‘Working Community’. He was now moving in high circles indeed. In early 1923 he was brought into contact by Röhm with no less than the Chief of the Army Command of the Reichswehr, General Hans von Seeckt (who remained, however, distinctly unimpressed by the Munich demagogue, and unprepared to commit himself to the demands for radical action in the Ruhr conflict for which Hitler was pressing). Röhm also insisted to the new Bavarian Commander, General Otto Hermann von Lossow, that Hitler’s movement, with its aim of winning over the workers to the national cause, offered the best potential for building a ‘patriotic fighting front’ to upturn the November Revolution.