Hitler and his God

The Corporal Joins a Party

In Mein Kampf Hitler tells his first and fateful contact with the DAP, on 12 September 1919, as follows: “One day I received an order from my superiors to investigate the nature of an association which was apparently political. It called itself ‘The German Labour Party’ and was soon to hold a meeting at which Gottfried Feder would speak. I was ordered to attend this meeting and report on the situation … I decided to attend the meeting of this Party which had hitherto been entirely unknown to me.” 87 These few lines have lived on as part of the Hitler myth, suggesting that his first contact with the DAP was coincidental. Yet there are sound reasons to see Hitler’s debut in politics in a very different way.

The Thule was a secret society and so was, as we just saw, its “workers’ circle” which had become the DAP, contrived by Harrer more as a lodge than as an ordinary political party. A footnote in Ralph Manheim’s English translation of Mein Kampf reads: “As part of the party’s policy deliberately to restrict membership so as to maintain its esoteric quality, attendance at its meetings was usually by invitation …” 88 Hitler was now no longer only a Reichswehr propagandist, he was also an agent in military intelligence, commissioned to spy on the frenzied and often shady political hustle and bustle in Munich. How had he been informed about the date and venue, the Sterneckerbräu, of the secret DAP’s meeting on 12 September? Moreover, how could he enter that meeting without an introduction? He was but a corporal still wearing uniform. And he was accompanied by three other military men, for we find in Joachimsthaler: “On that day, Friday 12 September 1919, 43 persons were present, according to the attendance list, among whom, as companions of Hitler, Sergeant Alois Grillmeier and two propagandists of the Gruko [Gruppenkommando], Ewald Bolle and Alois Knodn.” 89

The chief speaker at the meeting in question was Gottfried Feder, author of a Manifest for the Breaking of the Interest Slavery of Money, a cranky theory which at the time made a deep impression on the German anti-Semites, including Hitler, who remarks: “Feder’s lecture was known to me from the courses [for propagandists at Munich University].” In fact, Feder was standing in for Dietrich Eckart, a “guest” of Thule who had recently become a member of the DAP and was well known to Captain Mayr. “The speaker was to have been Eckart, but he was ill.” 90 And here we meet again with an old acquaintance, the inventor of the sidereal pendulum, Wilhelm Gutberlet. “Dr. Wilhelm Gutberlet (1870-1933), medical doctor at Munich, member of Thule and eminent astrologer, sat by the side of Hitler [at the 12 September meeting], and wrote a long report on him for Dietrich Eckart.” 91

Hitler’s flaming retort towards the end of the meeting to a certain professor Baumann, who had dared to defend the idea of an alliance between Bavaria and Austria, both Catholic, against Protestant Prussia, may have been less impromptu than Hitler himself would have us think. “At this juncture I felt bound to ask for permission to speak and to tell the learned gentleman what I thought. The result was that the honourable gentleman who had last spoken slipped out of his place, like a whipped cur, without uttering a sound. While I was speaking the audience listened with an expression of surprise on their faces.” 92 The corporal had demonstrated his oratory skill and passed muster. He was invited to become a member of the DAP and joined the party a few days later.

Most of the recently published experts on this period in Hitler’s life agree that he, in his appearance on the political scene, was supported by the Reichswehr and by the Thule Society. “Hitler wanted to conceal”, in his chapter on the German Worker’s Party in Mein Kampf, “that the initiative of his joining the DAP had not been taken by himself”, writes Ralph Reuth. 93 Ian Kershaw, in this connection, refers to Captain Mayr: “In a little noticed piece of evidence, [Hitler’s] Reichswehr boss Captain Mayr later claimed that he had ordered Hitler to join the German Worker’s Party to help foster its growth. For this purpose, Mayr went on, [Hitler] was provided at first with funds … and, contrary to normal practice about members of the Reichswehr joining political parties, was allowed to stay in the army.” 94 Anton Joachimsthaler also says that Hitler was ordered by Mayr to have a look at the DAP “and even to establish contact with them … One may accept that Captain Mayr has advised Hitler to join the DAP, if he has not instigated him to do so, that he generously supported him in his subsequent political activities in the DAP, and that he gave him further assignments”. 95 “Hitler was as representative of the Reichswehr smuggled into the DAP”, according to Orzechowski, who also writes: “The members of the occult Thule Society helped Hitler into the saddle.” 96

All this is undeniably confirmed in letters from Captain Mayr to Wolfgang Kapp, the front man of the rightist “Kapp Putsch” in 1920. (The letters, by the way, prove again that Captain Karl Mayr was one link in a wide nationalist network, and that there existed a coordinated interaction between the nationalist organizations against the social-democratic government.) It is here that Mayr writes that he had daily contact with Hitler for more than fifteen months. And he continues: “We are building the organization of national radicalism. The national worker’s party (DAP) must constitute the foundation of the strong storm troop we hope to form … I have been trying to strengthen the movement since July [1919] … I have set going very tough young people … Hitler has become a moving force … I agree fully with Mister Hitler that what is called the social-democracy of the government is completely at the mercy of the Jews … All harmful elements must, like breeders of illness, be expelled or isolated – which goes for the Jews too …” 97

Hitler’s first visit to the DAP was not the casual occurrence it is still generally supposed to have been. This can also be deduced from some statements in his autobiography in spite of the smokescreen with which he tries to conceal the truth. The last words of chapter 7, “The Revolution”, are the often quoted: “As to me, I decided to become a politician.” 98 This decision is supposed to have been taken in the Pasewalk hospital, at the end of the deep depression which overtook him on learning that Germany had lost the war and that the country had become a republic overnight. Hitler’s statement is untrue and even nonsensical. At Pasewalk his social isolation was nearly absolute; at the age of twenty-nine his heroic years as a soldier were wiped out by the German defeat; he had no future, no professional competence, no relatives or friends who could help him, and no means whatsoever. He himself confesses: “That I was poor and without means seems to me the most bearable part, but it was harder that I was numbered among the nameless, that I was one of the millions whom chance permits to live or summons out of existence without even their closest neighbours condescending to take any notice of it. In addition, there was the difficulty which eventually arose from my lack of schooling.” 99 We may find a clue to what really happened at Pasewalk further on in our story.

But then the providential turnabout happened to Hitler, and now, in September 1919, he was entering politics. Surprisingly, “on joining the DAP he had very concrete ideas about the aims he was going to pursue”. 100 “This absurd little group with its few members [the DAP] seemed to me to possess one advantage”, he writes, “that it had not frozen into an ‘organization’, but left the individual an opportunity for real personal activity. Here it was still possible to work, and the smaller the movement, the more readily it could be put into the proper form. Here the context, the goal and the road could still be determined, which in the existing great parties was impossible from the outset.” 101 And he declares: “I had no intention of joining a ready-made party, but wanted to found one of my own.” 102 Max Amann, who had been Hitler’s sergeant in the army, met the corporal by chance “somewhere in the spring of 1920”. “He was still wearing his military uniform”, remembers Amann. “To my question what he was becoming, he answered that he was now an educational officer in the Reichswehr … He did, however, not find any satisfaction in this occupation. It was his intention to enter the political life and to found his own political party.” 103 (What we have seen before allows us to adjust Amann’s recollection and to place the encounter in early autumn 1919.)

Where had Hitler got the idea to found a party – he who was “a man from nowhere”, and who was himself very much aware of the fact? “The so-called ‘intelligentsia’ still looks down with infinite superciliousness on anyone who has not been through the prescribed schools and allowed them to pump the necessary knowledge into him. The question of what a man can do is never asked, but rather: what has he learned? ‘Educated’ people look upon any imbecile who is plastered with a number of academic certificates as superior to the ablest young fellow who lacks these precious documents.” (*Mein Kampf* 104) This feeling of social inferiority was ingrained in Hitler and he will, in spite of his authoritarian predispositions, always bear a grudge against ‘educated people’.

From where did he have the idea that “it was a new ideology and not a new election slogan that had to be proclaimed”? How came that he, who initially participated in meetings attended by no more than thirty, forty people, “thought from the very beginning on the scale of a party for the masses”? 105 There are secrets in between the lines of Mein Kampf which are part of the “enigma” that keeps the historians guessing. Why would, for Hitler, joining an insignificant group of rightist fanatics and their sympathizers be “the hardest question of my life” – he for whom survival from one day to the next had been the most urgent problem on his mind? And has joining a political party, especially one hidden in the dingy darkness of a second-rate beer hall, ever been for anybody “a decision that would be for good, with no turning back”, as Hitler says it was for him? 106 A man who had some answers to these questions was Dietrich Eckart.