Hitler and his God

Captain Mayr’s Discovery

After the obliteration of the Munich Republic of Councils, an officer appeared in the city who was to play an important part in the making of Adolf Hitler: Staff Captain Karl Mayr. It was the intention of the central government in Berlin as well as of the Army High Command to wipe out all leftist indoctrination in the minds of the soldiers and to replace it with correct patriotic, nationalist ideas. To this end an “information service”, in fact an intelligence and propaganda section, was created by Army Group 4 which covered the whole of Bavaria under the command of the powerful General Arnold von Möhl. Captain Mayr was appointed chief of this propaganda section.

Mayr, “very much radical Right”, was “ambitious, intelligent, a talented organizer and politically involved”; he was also an opponent of the Weimar Republic and an anti-Semite. 16 His network of connections seems to have extended to the most influential centres of German society. He was extraordinarily active, brimming with ideas and initiatives, and his influence was much greater than his rank and function would suggest. Not only did he have access to the highest levels of the Army through General von Möhl, with whom he stood on a confidential footing, he undoubtedly had direct links with the mighty Pan-German League and the Germanenorden, two organizations we will meet further on.

Soon Mayr’s attention was drawn to Corporal Hitler. Not only had Hitler been elected representative of his battalion under the socialist regime, he had also been elected “deputy battalion representative” under the regime of the communist soldier councils. Then, after the Republic of Councils was crushed, in a new turnabout Hitler surprisingly became a member of a commission of inquiry, whose task it was to report on the patriotic fidelity of the soldiers of his battalion under the ephemeral communist regime, to which he himself had acquiesced! No doubt, he was able to turn with the wind and go to any end in order to stay in the army. But his comrades in arms undeniably looked up to him; and as he also had the gift of the gab, Mayr put his name on the list of participants in a “oratory course” for army propagandists, to be held at Munich University from 5 till 12 June 1919.

The teachers of the course were learned doctors and professor-doctors like Karl Alexander von Müller, Karl von Bothmer and Michael Horlacher. Their themes were “the political history of the war”; “Socialism in theory and practice”; “our agricultural situation and the peace conditions”; and “the relation between internal and external politics”. 17 It was there that Hitler for the first time heard educated intellectuals speak on subjects which interested him, and that he learned how those opinions could be fitted together into something like a coherent opinion or world view. The general trend of the lectures was obligatorily social-democratic, as the government was social-democratic, but the deeper tendency was doubtlessly nationalistic, pan-German and anti-Semitic.

Hitler’s mind, at the age of thirty, was not a blank sheet, of course. During his youth in Austria he had imbibed the pan-Germanic ideas of his father, of his history teacher Leopold Pötsch and of Georg von Schönerer, and anti-Semitism was part of the air one breathed there. Besides, young Adolf had always been interested in politics, mainly to voice his spiteful disagreement. In Vienna he had attended sessions of the Austrian parliament and avidly read the newspapers in the cafés, as well as any tract or pamphlet he could lay his hand on. Now the physical presence and the discourse of the esteemed doctors and professors made a lasting impression upon him and put many of his opinions into context.

The lectures were followed by discussion groups. Here Hitler came into his own. He had always been what one might call a profuse “monologist” when agitated, unstoppably pouring the flood of his words over any individual listener as if addressing a crowd. His one close friend during the days in Linz and Vienna, August Kubizek, tells in his reminiscences about Adolf’s frequent outbursts of oratory, and many of Hitler’s companions in the asylum and in the trenches recalled how easily he could be egged on into a thundering diatribe when his opinions were contradicted. Hitler now got the occasion to express his newly acquired knowledge in the discussion groups. Speaking was no longer an idiosyncrasy; it became his assigned duty as an army propagandist who had to educate wrong-thinking leftists into right-thinking German patriots.

K.A. von Müller has narrated how, after one of his lectures, his attention was drawn to a group “spellbound by a man in their midst who, with an unusually guttural voice, talked to them uninterruptedly and with increasing passion. I had the strange feeling that their excitement was caused by him and simultaneously caused him to speak in return. I saw a pale, lean face under an unmilitary strand of hair, with a clipped moustache and striking big, light blue, fanatically cold eyes.” 18 When Müller pointed the man out to Mayr, the captain said casually: “Oh, that’s Hitler from the List Regiment”.

Hitler became Mayr’s star orator. In the middle of August he was sent to Lechfeld, where there was a camp with German soldiers who had been brainwashed in Russian captivity; they were to be mentally turned around before being released into civilian life. The camp had a permanent unit of Mayr’s “information service” under another trained propagandist, Rudolf Beyschlag, a non-commissioned officer who was to be Hitler’s superior for the duration of this assignment. The themes of the lectures were essentially the same as those taught to Mayr’s trainees during the course in oratory. Hitler was praised by his audiences as “a very good and passionate speaker”, “an outstanding and temperamental orator”. 19 It was to this period that he himself referred when he wrote in Mein Kampf the often quoted words: “I could speak.” What he meant was not that he could formulate and orally express his thoughts, for he had done that in countless monologues since his early youth. He meant that he was able to carry along an audience, and this would be of crucial importance for his and Germany’s future.

Another noteworthy fact during his mission in Lechfeld was that Hitler, for the first time, began to attack the Jews, so vehemently that he had to be restrained by his superiors, who, however much they might agree with him, were after all serving a social-democratic government. The commandant of the Lechfeld camp wrote to Army Group 4: “Concerning a very beautiful, clear and temperamental lecture on capitalism by Corporal Hitler, who on this occasion touched upon the Jewish question … The thought was uttered that the [propaganda] section had been founded by Gruppenkommando Möhl to function as a military unit. Yet as the Jewish problem was very clearly expounded [by Hitler] with special consideration of the Germanic standpoint, then such a discussion could easily give the Jews a pretext to label the lectures anti-Jewish propaganda. I found it therefore necessary to instruct that the utmost care should be taken in the discussion of the problem, and that too explicit references to the race that is foreign to the German people should be omitted as much as possible.” 20

Although anti-Semitism was imprinted upon the German mind, the subject was not mentioned by the instructors at Munich University. It has, moreover, been shown by Brigitte Hamann that Hitler was not an actively conscious anti-Semite during his Vienna years, where he had friendly relations with Jews among the inmates of the men’s hostel and among the shopkeepers who sold his water colour paintings. Where, then, or by whom had he been infected with these vehement anti-Judaic feelings?

That by that time he was regarded an authority on anti-Semitic matters is documented by a short letter written to him by Captain Mayr on 10 September 1919. In this letter Mayr asks Hitler to answer a question put to him in writing by Adolf Gemlich, another of Mayr’s military propagandists. The question was: “What is the attitude of the social-democratic government towards the Jews? Are the Jews also included in the socialist programme of “equal rights” of the peoples, even so when one considers them to be a threat to the Volkstum [the people as a race]?” 21 In his request to answer in his place Captain Mayr addresses his subordinate, a corporal, as Sehr verehrter Herr Hitler. This is usually translated as “Dear Sir”. But the tone of the German formula is much more reverential, for it says literally: “Very respected Mister Hitler”. Joachim Fest, a German, finds this “an unusual salutation from a captain to a corporal”, 22 and so does Werner Maser, also a German, who writes that it is “unusually respectful”.

Hitler’s answer not only reflects the sources of his newly acquired thoughts, it also documents the fact that his thinking had now been ordered into a pattern which will remain, as far as the Jews are concerned, the basis of his ideology, his real “granite foundation”, till the last day of his life. There is the foreignness and the danger represented by the Jewish people; there is the affirmation that the Jews are a race, not a religious community; and there is the statement that the ultimate aim of the struggle against the Jews must be, “unshakeably”, their elimination – whatever this word my have meant to Hitler in 1919. 23

Mayr has written that he had daily contact with Hitler for more than fifteen months, i.e. from June 1919 till September of the next year. Hitler, acting on his innate despotic impulse, had already managed to push Beyschlag aside. He was “a frequent visitor to the War Ministry and ranked as a member of Mayr’s political staff … Mayr decided to use his discovery for greater things.” 24 Indeed, on 12 September 1919, Hitler was sent to a conference room in a Munich beer house to report on a small loge-like group that called itself “German Workers Party” (DAP). As the saying goes: the rest is history.

A comparison of the dates is telling. Mayr’s respectful request to his corporal was written on 10 September; Hitler’s answer was sent to Gemlich on 17 September; Hitler’s first contact with the DAP, founded by the Thule Society, took place on 12 September. Clearly Hitler had covered a considerable stretch on the road of his ambitions since 6 June, the day Captain Mayr had reacted so casually: “Oh, that’s Hitler from the List Regiment” and the day he treated his corporal with such respect. “The process [of the formation of Hitler’s ideology] started in the year 1919, or becomes for the first time discernible in this year. In no earlier notes does one find even the smallest hint of the later concepts … One may even conclude that Hitler did not have any interest in politics [before 1919] … One is not even sure that at that time he was already an anti-Semite …” (Eberhard Jäckel 25)

It is evident that in the summer months of 1919 an important change took place in Hitler’s life. Sebastian Haffner calls this period “an unexplainable gap”. Konrad Heiden writes: “In these months a transformation took place in Hitler”, and he wonders about “the mysterious circumstances that transformed him”. 26 John Lukacs is of the same opinion: “The year 1919 was a decisive milestone, indeed a turning point in [Hitler’s] life.” 27 While Ian Kershaw writes that “without Captain Mayr’s ‘talent spotting’ Hitler might never have been heard of”. 28 “In this period in Munich lies the key of Hitler’s entrance into politics”, 29 confirms Joachim Fest. Finally, there is Hitler’s own confirmation in 1941, in the course of a conversation in which he unwittingly contradicted several untruthful statements in Mein Kampf: “My programme originated in 1919.” 30 By “programme” he did not mean the NSDAP party programme, which was composed in 1920, but the basics of his personal thinking, his ideology.