Hitler and his God

Turmoil

In a Germany in turmoil and with something like half the population inimical towards its social-democratic government, there was a spate of national and local coups by the Far Right as well as by the Far Left. Besides the revolutions in Munich there were other leftist bids for power in Berlin (the Spartacus Revolt), Hamburg, the Rhineland, Swabia, Thuringia and elsewhere. The “Kapp Putsch” in March 1920 was a right-wing, reactionary revolt against the Weimar Republic. The pan-German journalist Wolfgang Kapp (1868-1922), whom we have met as an acquaintance of Mayr and Eckart, was its figurehead, but its military leader was General von Lüttwitz, supported by one of the most ruthless Free Corps, Captain Ehrhardt’s Marine Brigade.

The Ehrhardt Brigade marched into Berlin; the government troops refused to fire on the Free Corps soldiers who had been their comrades during the war; the government fled and Lüttwitz proclaimed a new, revolutionary government with Kapp as Chancellor. But the legal government called for a general strike of all workers against the right-wing putchists: “Strike, stop working, prevent the return of bloody reaction. Not a hand must move, not a single worker must help the military dictatorship. General strike all along the line! Workers, unite!” 159 For once all the workers, Socialists as well as Communists, took heed and acted in unison. Berlin was paralyzed. Five days later Kapp announced his resignation and fled to Sweden, as did Erich Ludendorff who had supported him, while most of the other putschists trekked southwards, to Bavaria.

The relevance of this event to our story is that Mayr and Eckart deemed the putsch sufficiently important to contact Kapp in Berlin, with the intention to coordinate with his coup an eventual rightist revolt in Bavaria. Mayr borrowed a light airplane from the Reichswehr, and Eckart, with “his collaborator” Hitler, flew to Berlin on 16 March. (Toland writes: “The weather was so turbulent that despite the pilot’s skill Hitler kept vomiting … When they touched down at Berlin the wan Hitler vowed that he would never, never fly again.” 160) But on their arrival at the centre of the capital the coup was already fizzling out and the Ehrhardt Brigade was marching in the opposite direction, back to their quarters on the outside of the city. Eckart profited of the occasion to introduce Hitler for the first time to some influential friends in Berlin. Afterwards they will travel there on several occasions.

When in December 1923 the financial situation of the Völkische Beobachter became so critical that the newspaper had to be sold, Hitler jumped to the occasion. He alerted Drexler, but the person who directed the operation of gathering the necessary funds was again Dietrich Eckart. The Völkische Beobachter (a title sometimes translated as “Racial Observer”) will later on be the main organ of the Nazi party till the very end. Its first editor was – who else? – Dietrich Eckart.

In Rosenbaum’s Explaining Hitler we obtain a glimpse of the political atmosphere in Munich at the time of Hitler’s rising. The written histories of Hitler’s life and of the Nazi party always zoom in so closely on their subject that it seems to occupy the whole stage, or at least centre stage, of life in Germany at the time. But the movement launched by Mayr, Eckart, Hitler and others was one of the many irrational undertakings in an irrational time – irrational not only in matters of politics but also in matters sociological, ideological and religious. The times were out of joint, not only in Germany, but all the same very much so in the land of Goethe and Kant. Hitler, driven by the power of his “obsessions”, was an intriguing figure of the kind which fascinated the masses. And the more his fame spread, the more he was attacked by the enemy on the left, in Munich particularly by a socialist newspaper, the Münchener Post.

The Nazis called the Münchener Post “the poison kitchen”. “The journalists of this newspaper were the first to focus sustained critical attention on Hitler from the very first moment this strange spectre emerged from the beer-hall back rooms”, writes Rosenbaum. “They were the first to tangle with him, the first to ridicule him, the first to investigate him, the first to expose the seamy underside of his party, the murderous criminal behaviour masked by its pretensions to being a political movement. They were the first to attempt to alert the world to the nature of the rough beast slouching toward Berlin … Their duel with Hitler lasted a dozen years and produced some of the sharpest, most penetrating insights into his character, his mind and method, then or since. Much of their work has been forgotten, but not much has been surpassed. And, as the name Poison Kitchen suggests, they succeeded in getting under Hitler’s skin.” 161 One of the first actions of the Nazis during the putsch of 1923 was the destruction of the offices and presses of the Münchener Post, as it was again in 1933 as soon as Hitler had become Chancellor.