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... RIP Some students of Hitler’s life and of Nazism, who know about the decisive role played by Dietrich Eckart, are of the opinion that Hitler more and more distanced himself from his mentor in the course of 1923. One sign, they say, is the fact that Eckart was replaced by Alfred Rosenberg as editor of the Völkische Beobachter. This argument is not convincing because Eckart’s health... prejudices alone. I am a writer and a poet and I am too old to go along with him any more.” 223 It is nevertheless demonstrable that Eckart went along with Adolf till the very end. When the NSDAP held its first Parteitag , on 27 and 28 January 1923 in Munich, Eckart stood in the place of honour, one pace behind Hitler, to review the parade marching through the snow. This was also the day on which... of them carrying the slogan Deutschland erwache! (Germany awake), a battle cry coined by Eckart as the last line of both stanzas of his “Storm Song”. Plewnia reproduces a facsimile of this song written during a nocturnal session by the author in the guest book of the Bratwurstglöckl on 18 January 1923; Eckart has illustrated the song with a drawing of Hitler striking a martial pose as a flag-bearer ...

... unfinished “dialogue” Eckart wrote a few months earlier, in April and May 1923: Bolshevism from Moses to Lenin: A Dialogue between Adolf Hitler and me . This text is not the rendering of a real dialogue but of a fictitious one, no doubt based – and herein lays its special value – on conversations which must have taken place between the two men. If these pages were pure invention, Eckart would never have... to assume that Eckart intended the “dialogue” as a lasting testimony to his mentorship of Hitler. One possible reason for putting everything down on paper was that his health was declining rapidly. Another reason may have been that Hitler remained no longer satisfied with Eckart’s “metaphysical anti-Semitism” and turned to more tangible justifications of his mission. True, Eckart was a blazing Jew-baiter... convictions, which he had from Eckart, scattered through Hitler’s conversations and nightly musings also in later years. And he will proclaim on several occasions that Nazism has to wage a fight against Bolshevism on the left and against Capitalism on the right because both are strategic instruments of the attempt by the Jews to bring the world under their control. Eckart worded this as follows in his ...

... merits are imperishable”, he said, and: “It is deeply tragic that Dietrich Eckart has not lived to see the rise [of the Nazi Party].” 115 He reminisced about his discovery, thanks to Eckart, of the Obersalzberg and the house there that would become his villa k , and how one night he had woken Eckart up unannounced, and how Eckart had opened the door in his night-shirt, showing his hairy legs. “Today,... air theatre, named after Eckart, in Berlin. There were Dietrich Eckart Societies and Dietrich Eckart Homes in Dortmund and in many other places. His poems were learned by heart in the schools and university students wrote theses on his oeuvre; his birthday was commemorated in the press; his plays were, sometimes at the instigation of the Führer, revived in many theatres. Eckart was made posthumously into... contacted by Eckart. Nor would a cultured man-of-the-world like Ernst Hanfstängl have written: “[Eckart] was a man of education, a poet, whose German version of Peer Gynt remains the standard translation … He it was who had first taken Hitler under his wing in the Party … Eckart has always been one of my favourites, a big bear of a man with sparkling eyes and a genuine sense of humour.” 123 Eckart made ...

... arrival in Munich, Rosenberg went to meet the well-known Dietrich Eckart. They got along at once because of their common interest in mysticism, anti-Semitism and anti-Bolshevism, and Rosenberg became “Eckart’s right hand”, assisting him with the writing and editing of In Plain German. Another of their common interests was occultism, and Eckart introduced the German Balt to the Thule Society in the spring... and race, but from above, in the struggle for a redeeming future against the evil enemy of the world.” 1025 “Streicher had a close relationship with Dinter and was also befriended with Dietrich Eckart”, notes Martin Sobieroj. “The overwhelming impression made by Hitler in the state of possession on those present [during spiritist séances] could explain why Streicher incorporated his followers nearly... also insinuate that some chapters of Mein Kampf were written by Hess, which must have happened in his imagination. Hitler has always been his own man from the time he began to take his distance from Eckart, somewhere in 1923. And he was his own man because he had a direct contact with the highest inspiration, his god: the Lord of the Nations. Hess always protected Karl Haushofer and his son Albrecht ...

... 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... 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. ...

... still more garbled by the disoriented and dispirited social conditions in post-war Germany, that Dietrich Eckart met Corporal Hitler. Anton Drexler, with Karl Harrer founder of the DAP, “knew the völkisch-nationalistic and aggressively anti-Semitic [Eckart] … since early summer 1919”. Eckart himself remembered later: “At the beginning of 1919 I received the visit of Anton Drexler shortly after he... weeks or months later I met with Hitler for the first time.” 152 Taking into account that Wilhelm Gutberlet had to report to Eckart about Hitler’s doings at the DAP meeting on 12 September, when illness prevented Eckart from speaking, it stands to reason that the first Eckart-Hitler encounter took place before that date, probably several weeks before. We recall that Captain Mayr became interested in... Regiment in the last days of May or the first of June, before the start of the oratory course for army propagandists. Mayr knew Eckart, from whom he bought copies of In Plain German for distribution among the military. We may presume that Mayr introduced Hitler to Eckart in June or at the latest in July, and that both agreed that this Austrian Corporal with the Iron Cross and the gift of the gab might ...

... Dietrich Eckart. It is remarkable how his reputation is improving among the younger German historians who at last begin to realize his crucial role in German history. Eckart is no longer seen as a “coffeehouse intellectual and drug addict”, but as “the éminence grise of the DAP” (Hesemann), “the founding father of the NSDAP” and “a respected member of the better society in Munich” (Bärsch). Eckart was... he never held out hopes of heaven, that he did not threaten them with hell: all is temporal.” 1004 Eckart supported the DAP before 12 September 1919, for he had already given several talks in this “workers’ circle” of the Thule Society. He also knew Hitler before that date, for it was he, Eckart, who was scheduled to give another talk on that day; being prevented by illness he had himself replaced... at Munich University. The probable link was Captain Mayr; he knew Eckart personally, for he bought copies from him of In Plain German and distributed them clandestinely in the Reichswehr. Mayr, like many other military officers, had also connections with the Thule Society. The point is that this leaves very little time for Eckart to coach the man whom he called “my Adolf” and with whom he developed ...

... man who one day will set Germany free”, that Eckart introduced his protégé to the higher strata of Munich society. Some of its well-heeled members were Brothers and Sisters of the Thule Society; others were prominent and moneyed nationalists and Pan-Germans, like the publisher Julius Lehmann; still others belonged to the wealthy circles to which Eckart had access in his personal name and in the name... was narrower than the unpleasantly wide-nostriled nose.” 173 Eckart introduced Hitler to the same kind of circles in Berlin and to the Wagner clan in Bayreuth, whom he knew well, for he had been a newspaper critic at the Festspiele for several years. Hamann, in her recent book Winifred Wagner, or Hitler’s Bayreuth , calls Eckart “a Wagnerian”, which reveals another interest he shared with Hitler... hand of Dietrich Eckart, who kept up a front of the rowdy Bavarian beer drinker, jumping on tables and bellowing his poem: Sturm! Sturm! Sturm! – but who seems to have seen the real Hitler in the corporal long before anybody else did, and who guided his first steps on his fateful way. “As Führer we need a man who does not run away when he hears the sound of a machine gun”, Eckart is reported to ...

... patience, “he” was there and would soon make himself known. Significantly, Eckart would publish this poem a second time on 25 August 1921 in the Völkischer Beobachter , the NSDAP paper of which he was the editor, after Hitler had demanded and been assigned dictatorial powers in the Party thanks to the intervention of Eckart. Heinrich Himmler would later say: “[Hitler] came to us in our deepest need... proceeds with terrible hardness … One day we shall have our new, Greater Germany, embracing all those who are of German blood …” 679 The man who actually proclaimed Hitler “the Führer” was Dietrich Eckart. After having become acquainted with Hitler, he published on 5 December 1919 in his magazine In Plain German a poem entitled Geduld (patience). In this poem he stated that the unknown, expected ...

... 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... 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... 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; ...

... Party. The man who discovered the real Hitler was Dietrich Eckart. We find his presence at every important point in Hitler’s career until Eckart’s death in the last days of 1923. Eckart literally made Hitler, an expression which cannot be too strong if we consider the exceptional honours rendered by the Führer to his “fatherly friend”. Eckart was indeed Hitler’s “godfather”, i.e. his discoverer, initiator... secret organizations. His influence must have been at least this important, for otherwise it is unthinkable that Hitler would have used his name as the organ-point with which Mein Kampf ends . Eckart, albeit a staunch individualist, was also an exemplary person of his time. He was after all a poet, playwright and prolific publicist with an active social life. He was a militant nationalist, acquainted... Germanenorden saw itself as the answer to the clandestine bodies and schemes fomented by the world conspiration of “the Elders of Zion”.) If the German aspiration is clearly discernible in Dietrich Eckart, so is the “occult” way in which he tutored his pupil Adolf Hitler. “Occult” here means not only “hidden”; it refers literally to the practice of the occult sciences. The testimonies of Hitler’s ...

... necessity of “the removal of the Jews”. As we have seen in the first chapters of this book, Hitler’s hatred of the Jews seems to have been a phenomenon with a sudden origin in which his mentor Dietrich Eckart was involved and for which he was possibly responsible. It can hardly have been a coincidence that the Austrian corporal without a future contacted the German Workers’ Party, founded as an initiative... respectfully to write a letter on the Jewish problem for the enlightenment of a fellow army propagandist. The line of Hitler’s anti-Semitic development can clearly be followed in his daily tutoring by Eckart, “the spiritual godfather of Nazism” (Wistrich); in his study and memorization of the anti-Semitic literature, of which Fritsch’s Antisemiten-Katechismus alone provided him with 650 pages of quotations; ...

... Vorsehungsglaube und Sendungsbewusstsein des deutschen Diktators , p. 131. 117 Most of the data in the following paragraphs are from Margarete Plewnia’s biography of Eckart: Auf dem Weg zu Hitler – Der ‘völkische’ Publizist Dietrich Eckart . 118 Rudolf von Sebottendorff, op. cit., p. 77. 119 Margarete Plewnia, op. cit., pp. 37 ff. 120 Id., p. 35. 121 Id., p. 47. 122 Ibid. 123 Ernst ...

... fact that the Lord of Falsehood, who possessed Hitler, also represents Ignorance, Suffering and Death, and that these four aspects were therefore features of his personality. Falsehood. One of Eckart and Hitler’s recurrent themes was Schopenhauer’s saying that the Jew was “the great master of the lie”. When browsing through Mein Kampf we have found that Hitler systematically applied the methods... the lower strata of the human character, which were the only ones the masses had access to. And the intellectuals have always been the target of the brute political force. Hitler, well informed by Eckart of the theories of Le Bon, Sorel, and similar-minded authors of that time, was aware of all this and wrote about it in Mein Kampf. It was his intention to go forward by setting the clock back and ...

... Konrad Heiden called them “the armed human scum of five destructive years”. 184 The link between the Ehrhardt Brigade and the Hitler movement was Captain Ernst Röhm, one of those, with Mayr and Eckart, who made Hitler possible. Longerich calls him the “foster father” of the SA. “His conceptions of society were dominated by military categories; he shared the contempt of everything civil and looked... the latent homoeroticism in the youth movement and the Männerbünde , the men’s leagues, including Army and Free Corps. Röhm had become a member of the DAP shortly after Hitler. Again the jovial Eckart played a role in attracting this powerful and capable officer who would organize the fighting troops of the Party and provide them with arms when the situation so required. In fact, officer Ernst Röhm ...

... be inspired by the bodily reincarnated blood.” 446 Alfred Rosenberg (1893-1946), the German Balt who had fled the conflagration of the Russian Revolution and been introduced to Hitler by Dietrich Eckart, was another admirer of Houston Chamberlain . The pale, zealotic intellectual Rosenberg fitted badly in the rude and crude entourage of Adolf Hitler, was loved by none and hated by many, and was in... Society, who acted as the most anti-Semitic promoter of The Protocols of the Wise Men of Zion, as well in his contributions to the Völkische Beobachter , the Nazi newspaper of which he succeeded Eckart as the editor in 1923, as in his other prolific writings, e.g. The Protocols of the Wise Men of Zion and Jewish World Politics. Though Hitler spoke sometimes scathingly of him in private, officially ...

... to find words for his hate of the Jews. Books like Theodor Fritsch’s Handbook of the Jewish Question provided him with an inexhaustible stockpile of anti-Semitic libel through the centuries, and Eckart, who had used much of it in his magazine In Plain German , was an admired teacher. If the Aryan was the highest being in a human form, the Jew was the lowest; in fact, he was not even subhuman and... destructive instrument of deathly delusion. Hitler’s apocalyptic view of the final global war between the deceitful and the true “chosen people” was in certain of its aspects still indebted to Dietrich Eckart, who had conceived of a struggle between good (the Aryan side) and evil (the Jewish side) in humanity as a whole and in each of its members in particular. But Hitler had now recast these principles... of the century (which resulted in a massive exodus of East-European Jews), Hitler borrowed the reasonings to turn his “intellectual anti-Semitism” into an “exterminationist” anti-Semitism. Of this Eckart most probably would never have dared to dream despite his hardened prejudices; it may have been the cause of his suspicion that his pupil began to suffer from a serious case of folie de grandeur. ...

... refugees, many of whom had connections with the rightist extremists. It may have been In Plain German which led Rosenberg to Dietrich Eckart, who accepted him as his collaborator, although Rosenberg’s first language was Russian and his German still very poor. And Eckart introduced him to Hitler. Rosenberg was strongly influenced by Houston Chamberlain’s The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century , which... ploys as those recommended to the imaginary Wise Men of Zion. A phrase which Hitler in Mein Kampf often applied to the Jews was “great masters of the lie”. This expression had been often used by Eckart, who copied it from their admired philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer. The phrase is, in fact, perfectly applicable to Hitler himself. He had an instinct to sense and play on the weaknesses of human nature ...

... may be true but does not mean that he frequented him from that date – and that he went to visit him in Landsberg “every Wednesday”. Rudolf Hess was one of the three people, together with Dietrich Eckart and Albert Speer, with whom Hitler developed an intimate relationship, naturally with each one in his own way. Ernst Hanfstängl has described Hitler’s reaction on the evening he had been released from... Mayr’s article was written after his flight from Germany (and published after his internment in a concentration camp), he may have sought to involve only the Nazi potentates, conveniently forgetting Eckart and the role he himself had played at the time. And the “unknown way” in which Hess “got Hitler in that frenetic state” is easy to guess, for it must have been the same way in which the medium Hitler ...

... inspector.) As we have seen, what Germany needed according to Rosenberg was “a religion without Jewishness, without intermediaries, without dualism: a German religion of the deepest inwardness. And Meister Eckart was its initiator.” 2 The disturbing word in this quotation is the word “German”. Meister Eckhart was no doubt of German origin, although the Germany of 1300 was very different from what is meant... made the easier choice. × Several top Nazis had their favourite mystic. For Rosenberg it was Eckhart, for Dietrich Eckart it had been Tauler, and Himmler is said to have always had a copy of the Bhagavad Gita in his pocket. As the remainders of Hitler’s personal library show, he was fascinated by Christ. ...

... by figures like Dietrich Eckart, an admirer of the mystic Johannes Tauler, Arthur Dinter, who wanted to bring the Reformation to a successful end, and Joseph Goebbels, the Catholic who projected his apocalyptic expectations on Hitler and his Third Reich. There was a pronounced tendency towards occultism in Rudolf von Sebottendorff, Master of the Thule Society, and Eckart and Rudolf Hess, both members ...

... for all to hear. A militant anti-Semite, he had held one of the very first Jew-baiting speeches as early as 1914, at the Zirkus Busch in Berlin, to a crowd of five thousand. He befriended Dietrich Eckart in Munich and Julius Streicher in Nuremberg, and corresponded from 1916 till 1921 extensively with Houston Chamberlain, whose Foundations he considered a revelation. Dinter had been an officer... the capacity of Aryan women to reproduce anything but racially polluted offspring”, 500 a theme which will be repeated ad nauseam by Julius Streicher. Dinter became acquainted with Hitler through Eckart and Streicher. At one time he greeted the moustachioed ex-corporal as “the Führer by God’s grace, sent by heaven to the German people”. He would become Gauleiter, i.e. regional leader, of Thuringia ...

... Antichrist.” If there is a solution of this mystery, it should be looked for in the occurrences at the time of Hitler’s “turnabout” when, in 1919, and under the influence of Captain Mayr and Dietrich Eckart, he suddenly turned out to be an expert in anti-Semitism, and a personality interesting enough to be pushed into a position from where he could give shape to his mission and his message, and go out ...

... colourful mixture of all expressions and explorations of the human spirit has lead many commentators on that period to stick the label “bohemian” on Schwabing, which is as misleading as calling Dietrich Eckart a comical, half-crazed poet. For sure, the whole fauna of the bohemian scene was present at Schwabing, but the place, like Montmartre and Ascona, was one of the cultural centres of Europe were the ...

... Picker, Henry: Hitlers Tischgespräche im Führerhauptquartier Pletsch, Carl: Young Nietzsche – Becoming a Genius Plewnia, Margarete: Auf dem Weg zu Hitler – Der ‘völkische’ Publizist Dietrich Eckart. Poliakov, Léon: Histoire de l’antisémitisme I Poliakov, Léon: Histoire de l’antisémitisme II Poliakov, Léon: Le mythe aryen Purani, A.B.: Evening Talks with Sri Aurobindo ...

... inhabited by Jews. ‘Know, Christian’, wrote Luther, ‘that next to the devil thou hast no enemy more cruel, more venomous and violent than a true Jew.’ Hitler himself, in that early dialogue with Dietrich Eckart, asserted that the later, anti-Semitic Luther was the genuine one. Luther’s protective authority was invoked by the Nazis when they came to power, and his anti-Semitic writings enjoyed a revival of ...

... his villa on a mountain in the Bavarian Alps, the Obersalzberg, just above Berchtesgaden and very near to Salzburg. 1 Hitler had discovered Berchtesgaden in 1922 through – whom else? – Dietrich Eckart, who went there in hiding when he was wanted by the authorities for libellous writings in his anti-Semitic magazine In Plain German. Hitler too began taking to this wonderful region, dominated by ...

... theocratic pan-German realm, wherein non-German interests would play no part. Within thirty-five years this vision was instituted as the foreign policy of the Third Reich.” 698 The well-read Dietrich Eckart was familiar with List’s publications, a fact which we find confirmed in Ralph Reuth’s Hitler biography, and communicated this knowledge, along with much more, to his Austrian pupil. There is also ...

... reformulated at the time of his instruction and his activities as a propagandist. And here all the evidence converges on the well-read, well-informed, well-connected and fanatic anti-Semite Dietrich Eckart. Before carrying on with our story, a last and rather surprising source of influence on Hitler’s mind should be mentioned: the German author Karl May, fertile writer of some seventy adventure stories ...

... exhortation was not its literal meaning; having fought a war, mourned its dead, being shaken by revolts and obliged to fight for its daily sustenance, Germany had had no time to fall asleep. What the Eckart-Hitler slogan meant was that Germany must regain its place and power as the foremost nation of the world, that it must rebuild all means necessary to occupy its rightful place on the globe after having ...

... their forgetting”: they would applaud him frantically nonetheless. This proved that his insight in the psychology of the masses was right, whether he got it from Gustave Le Bon or Georges Sorel via Eckart, from reading The Protocols of the Wise Men of Zion , or from his own intuition and experience. Hitler, the theatre man, was a genius at mass psychology, which made him a genius at propaganda; and ...

... organically so as to fill up the framework of that fundamental Weltanschauung which he already possesses.” 749 The “amplification” in Hitler’s ideas is easy to follow. He started in Munich, under Eckart’s guidance, with the adamant conviction that the Germans were the Herrenmenschen ; that he was the one come to lead them towards the fulfilment of their Volkhood and their highest aims; and that the ...