Hitler: A Short Biography. A. Wilson N.

Hitler immediately threatened to resign – the last thing, by this stage, which the Munich nationalists could survive. The bumbling right-wing Bavarians were appalled by his behaviour, accusing Hitler of ‘a lust for power and personal ambition’.⁸ The character assessment was obviously true, even if their paranoid assertion that Hitler was being manipulated by the Jews was wide of the mark. He successfully sued the newspaper which printed this material. Drexler and Harrer were distressed, because they wanted to thrash out, point by point, where and how they might differ from Brunner and Streicher’s German Socialist Party, and whether or not they were a fundamentally anti-capitalist organization. For Hitler, such divisive stuff was of no interest. He did not care for details. ‘Any idea’, he wrote in My Struggle, ‘may be looked upon as a source of danger if it be looked upon as an end in itself …’⁹

      Although Hitler’s few ideas were in fact held very forcefully – international Jewish conspiracy, need for expansion into the East for Lebensraum, infallibility of Darwin’s theories, and so forth – it never much troubled him if his ideas were self-contradictory. For example, he deplored both the financiers who manipulated international markets and the Bolsheviks who wished to overthrow them, and saw both of them as part of the same Jewish threat. What he had to offer was not a political programme but an opera, a black-hearted drama into which he wished to suck as many people as possible. Once they had heard it, and allowed its mad music to enter their souls, the German people would be spellbound. Discussion of detailed political ideas was always the undoing of little backstreet parties such as Drexler had founded. As Hitler himself later enunciated, it matters not how idiotic the creed. What matters is the firmness with which it is enunciated.¹⁰ Nor was this viewpoint entirely cynical. Hitler had many faults, both as a man and as a politician. He was an incurable liar. He was brutal and cruel. He had none of the normal instincts of decency or kindliness. But he was not – as were some of the other Nazis who helped him into power, such as Goebbels or Speer – a cynical man. Although he distrusted almost everyone else – perhaps actually everyone – he believed in himself. And the great movement which he in some senses invented – embracing a national recovery based on poorly defined feelings of irrational uplift – actually depended for its success on its intellectual incoherence. He drew to himself those who hated Jews for being sinister men smoking cigars in boardrooms and bleeding Germany of its savings, and those who hated Jews for being red-eyed scavengers plotting the overthrow of capitalism and the manufacturing industry. He drew to himself those with a sense that he was protecting family values and religion, and those who thought – or rather felt – that he was the voice of the modern, the embodiment of Darwinian rationalism which had seen off religion. He drew to himself above all those who, through all the confused early years of the Weimar Republic, still felt the bitter wound of defeat in war, the dreadful unfairness of the Treaty, the sheer incredibility of the fact that the finest army in Europe, never defeated in the field, should have been written off as a failure – at the behest of a bespectacled Princeton professor, an unprincipled Welsh philandering liberal, and a deeply cynical old Frenchman who was determined to punish Germany for his own and his country’s contemptible defeat by Prussia in 1870. To all these people Hitler offered the most tempting of Class A narcotics, that is, Hope. No wonder that on 29 July 1921, when he saw off his rivals and backbiting enemies in the tin-pot little NSDAP, there was first heard the description of him as Unser Führer: Our Leader.

       THREE My Struggle

      Throughout the autumn of 1922, there were painful negotiations between Germany and the Allied powers about the payment of reparations. The German Government pleaded with the Allies but the French were adamant. Germany must pay. When Germany defaulted, French troops moved into the industrial Ruhr district on 11 January 1923. This was Germany’s industrial heartland. It accounted for eighty per cent of the country’s steel and pig-iron production and more than eighty per cent of its coal.¹ With the paralysis, or effectual confiscation, of German means of production, there was even less chance of meeting the cruel French demands for payment. The Germans adopted a policy of passive resistance to the French.

      The German mark lost its value on the international currency markets. By 1 July, the rate of exchange with the dollar had risen to 160,000 marks, by 1 August to a million, by 1 November to 130,000 million. The ultimate capitalist nightmare had fallen on the German middle classes. Their savings were worth nothing. With inflation running at this level even the simplest commodities of life became unaffordable, and it really was the case that people needed a wheelbarrow to carry enough paper money to buy a simple week’s groceries. Germany had been allowed, by the international community, to sink into a situation where there was no stability of any kind.

      The army, in particular, and the ex-Freikorps officers, such as Ernst Röhm, favoured a military solution to the country’s problems: a march on Berlin, and a war of revenge against the French. Hitler, who already had his sights on real political power, could see that such talk was nonsense. If they attempted to fight France yet again, they would be defeated. If, however, they fought the German Republican Government, and created the greatest possible mayhem, they could only be marching in the right direction – in the direction where power lay. To make their objectives too specific at this stage would be to risk defeat. He must be seen to move from triumph to triumph. At the same time, he must not be seen as a supporter of the status quo, so that illegal street fighting or fisticuffs with the Reds would do his reputation no harm at all.

      By now Hitler was beginning to collect around him the grotesque gang of misfits and semi-criminals who would, for a nightmarish decade, be the most powerful political clique in Europe. There was Julius Streicher, whose shaven head was an ugly pink sea urchin. This short, stocky primary school teacher ran a newspaper, Der Stürmer, with a line in anti-Jewish fantasy lurid even by the standards of southern Germany. The pages of Der Stürmer reflected a mind which was filled with bandy-legged Jews seducing pure German maidens, and money-grubbing Jews eating or murdering Christian babies.

      Then there was the preposterous figure of Hermann Göring, a pampered, overweight kleptomaniac. He loved uniforms and when the Nazis achieved power, he appeared in ever more fantastical Ruritanian costumes, with epaulettes the dimension of elaborate Bavarian pastries, and rows of medals. He had been a flying ace in the war, which gave him contact with members of the aristocracy. He was more ‘class’ than most other members of the movement, a fact which in the initial stages gave him a certain clout. When Lord Halifax met him in 1936 he said that he was ‘a composite personality – film star, great landowner interested in his estate, prime minister, party manager, head gamekeeper at Chatsworth’.²

      On May Day 1923 there was a peaceful march by the socialists through the centre of Munich. Hitler, clad in a steel helmet and wearing his Iron Cross, which he had won for being, in effect, little more than an obedient postman, accompanied by Göring, and a group of others – Streicher, Rudolf Hess and Gregor Strasser – stood ready to lead 20,000 storm-troopers (SA) to break up the socialists. But at the agreed signal, Captain Röhm did not come to their help. It was a serious humiliation for Hitler. His SA troops handed back their arms to the local army barracks. Meanwhile, in Berlin, the economic and political situation worsened. Wilhelm Cuno resigned as Chancellor to be replaced by Gustav Stresemann. There were strikes. There were riots by Communists. Trains and trucks were regularly raided by the hungry. The country was more or less in a state of anarchy.

      On 2 September 1922, the anniversary of the defeat of France at Sedan in 1870, there was a huge demonstration in Nuremberg presided over by General Ludendorff, the distinguished old war general. On 26 September, Stresemann announced that the government was calling off the passive resistance plan and pleaded once more for a negotiated settlement with the French. Hitler put his own 15,000 storm-troopers on alert.

      The State Governor in Munich, Gustav von Kahr, asked for, and received, Hitler’s solemn assurance that he was not planning an anti-government putsch. There followed one of Hitler’s characteristically whopping lies. The world would get