User:Howard C. Berkowitz/AHearly

While Adolf Hitler was not the sole creator of the Nazi Party, he wass present at the creation and most historians agree it would not have formed without him. He joined its predecessor, the German Workers' Party (DAP is the German acronym), and then encouraged it to be renamed the German National Socialist Party, whose German acronym is NDSAP. It was abolished with the end of the war and Hitler.

Giving some background from World War I and its immediate aftermath, this article focuses on his role between the NDSAP's creation in 1920, and its taking control of the German government in 1933.

• Forming the Nazi Party

The key element in Hitler's success in 1932-33 was the decision of powerful non-Nazi conservative nationalists to support his selection as chancellor, since the Nazis did not have a majority in the Reichstag.

Political beginnings 1919-1923

Hitler, who had finished the war in a military hospital after suffering a poison gas attack at the front, had returned to Munich in November 1918. After the war he remained in the army amd assigned to the Information Department, which included both troop education and intelligence collection. He began by taking anti-Bolshevik political education courses, with instructors including the historian Karl Alexander von Miller and the engineer-economist Gottfried Feder. Feder introduced him to international economics. Von Miller found him an effecive speaker to fellow students, but less comfortable with one-to-one converation.

In August 1919, he was an instructor in a political course for troops at Lechfeld, at which he was pleased to discover he could "speak...I could bost of some success: in the course of my lectures I led many hundreds, indeed thousands, of comrades back to their people and fatherland. I 'nationalized' the troops." This was confirmed by independent observers. He became the Information Department expert on Jewry. His first recorded comment on Jewry is in a 16 September 1919 letter, in which he used a biological metaphor, "racial tuberculosis", and rejected "antisemitism on purely emotional grounds" leading to simple pogroms,to an eliminationist "antisemitism of reason...its final aim must be removal of the Jews altogether."

In this capacity he was sent to monitor the DAP’s activities.

He found the DAP reflected his core views of intense antisemitism and pan-German nationalism. In September 1919 Adolf Hitler joined the DAP. He always claimed to be the seventh member, but Anton Drexler, generally accepted as the founder of the DAP, disagreed, although Eckhart's statement needs clarification. In January 1940, Drexler wrote, "No one knows better than yourself, my Fuehrer, that you were never the seventh member of the party, but at best the seventh member of the committee, which I asked you to join as membership director. Drexler claimed that Hitler changed his membership number from 555 to 7, but it must be understood that the party began numbering from 501.

Dietrich Eckhart first attracted him intellectually in the party, and mentored him. He was to meet Houston Stewart Chamberlain in 1923, who influenced much of his thinking.

A rally too far

Julius Streicher speaking to crowd at Beer Hall Putsch, 1923

Political tensions had been rising, both in the Weimar Republic generally and in Bavaria specifically, in 1922 and 1923. Hitler was sentenced to three months' imprisonment in 1922, of which he served four weeks for an incident in which he led Nazis to disrupt a meeting or the Bavarian League and beating its leader. He was carried to the podium on hs first public appearance after release. The local police, previously headed by a Nazi sympathizer, but now by Eduard Nortz, banned a rally in early 1923.

Roehm and von Epp met with General Gustav von Lossow, the Reichwehr commander in Bavaria. The military commander, although dubious about Hitler's personality, said he would consider "the suppression of the nationalist organizations unfortunate for security reasons", Nortz requested the NDSAP to reduce the number of rallies, but Hitler, seeming to agree, ignored it.

The Army, generally, had been marginal in its compliance with the Weimar Republic. It was not clearly subordinate to the Reichstag and the Cabinet. The French occupied the Ruhr in January 1923, and hyperinflation had begun. Hitler saw this as a time of opportunity.

On November 8, Hitler and the Nazis, significantly without giving General Eric Ludendorff an opportunity to coordinate with them, sent a large force into a meeting, at a beer hall used for assemblies, being addressed by Gustav von Kahr, Prime Minister of Bavaria, who, with Army commander von Lossow and state police chief Hans von Seisser, ruled Bavaria. The three made promises, under duress, to Hitler, but quickly left.

The next day, Hitler and Ludendorff led a march on the War Ministry, here Ernst Rohm had been held. It is unclear which side fired first, but sixteen Nazis and three police died. Ludendorff was arrested on the scene, while the wounded Hitler and other Nazis escaped.

1924, and reflections in prison

The Nazis involved were put on treason on 25 February 1924. Hitler was sentenced to five years imprisonment, which he spent, in comfort, in Landsberg Prison, along with associates. He wrote Mein Kampf during that time, and was released after serving nine months.

Hitler wrote his autobiographical Mein Kampf ("My Struggle") while imprisoned after the Beer Hall Putsch; its two volumes were published in 1925 and 1926. He dictated it to Rudolf Hess. Although most critics believe it desperately required editing, Father Bernhard Stempfle did help in this area.

Hitler recounts his personal and intellectual development from childhood to adulthood, including his home life, his student aspirations as an artist, his experience as a soldier on the battlefield, and his evolving political philosophy. Then he lays out the political program of the Nazi movement both theoretically and in terms of German history and the German sociopolitical situation of 1925. Hitler states his goal to realize the German nation's destiny by uniting all Germans geographically and politically into one Reich that is rid of all non-German elements. Geographically he envisions a German homeland stretching out into eastern Europe. For Hitler, the German nation -- the volkisch nation -- comprises only those of pure German blood. The race of Slavs naturally competes with and impinges on the German nation, threatening and constraining its development; Hitler, however, designates the Jews as a singularly vile and cultureless race bent on world destruction through Communism. They will eventually self-destruct, he says.

Hitler practicing speaking, circa 1933

While Mein Kampf, in retrospect, should have served as a warning of the ambitions of Hitler, it may have been underestimated, in the English-speaking countries, by poor translations. German studies were the first academic field of Emily Overend Lorimer, possibly best known as a WWI analyst of the Middle East, assisting her British diplomat husband, David Lorimer. Unusually for a woman of her time, she studied German culture before she was married. In her opinion, the first English translations of Mein Kampf, which left out many of the sections on Hitler's ideas of foreign relations. When it was the British conventional wisdom that Hitler and his followers were not a serious threat, she concentrated on Nazi writings and came to a very different conclusion. In 1939, she published the book, What Hitler Wants.

Hitler dominates the party

By 1924, certain elements of Hitler's worldview (Weltanschauung) had fully crystallized, namely his concept of history as a racial struggle and the threat of Marxism. He considered Communism to be a Jewish conspiracy, and often referred to "Jewish-Bolshevik Commissars"; the Commissar Order for the Russian Front was an even more certain death sentence for Communist leaders than for Jews.

He was developing a variant on traditional socialism, in which race replaced class.

Party organization, 1925

While Hitler worked on the second volume of Mein Kampf in early 1925, after a public speaking ban was put into effect, he sent Gregor Strasser to organize the party in Northern Germany. Strasser disliked three of the Bavarian leaders that Kershaw called "detested" in the North: Max Ammann, Hermann Esser, and Julius Streicher. The north also objected to Philip Bouhler's desire for centralized control.

Some of the northerners, such as Joseph Goebbels, were more socialistic and thus Strasser was sympathetic. While Strasser was antisemitic, he was not seen as a reactionary. Others, while they recognized Hitler as the party leader, were concerned he was developing a cult of personality. The Working Association of the North and West was not intended as a challenge to him, but it became so — Strasser and Goebbels saw it as a way to replace the Party's 1920 Programme.

=Taking control of the party

He spent his time working on the second volume of Mein Kampf, leaving Strasser organize, because he was not interested in day-to-day issues. but in expressing a long-term goal. The book reflected a considerable understanding of crowd psychology, for which Toland believes he drew upon Sigmund Freud's Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego. Hitler had also changed his foreign policy; he had regarded France as the principal enemy of Germany after the First World War, but wrote "we stop the endless German movement to the south and west, and turn our gaze upward to the land in the east." He meant Russia, under the "yoke of the Jew".

In a Christmas celebration, he said "Christ was the greatest early fighter in the battle against the world enemy, the Jews." Hitler did not consider Jesus a Jew, but, due to immaculate conception, only a nonpracticing half Jew. Modestly, he observed "The work that Christ started but could not finish, I — Adolf Hitler — will conclude."

At the end of February 1926, he was allowed to speak to a private gathering in Hamburg, principally to seek financial suppport. His delivery was aimed at the solid citizen, and only after he connected with them on logic, did he become emotional about the need to destroy Marxism.

Hitler had been a natural orator with small groups, but Hanfstaengl and others coached him in improving his delivery; the rare photograph shows him practicing. In March 1927, Saxony was the first large state to allow him to speak in public, with the understanding it not be in Munich. His first speech indeed was well away, but he spoke there three days later. A police reporter covering him in Munich thought the he applause was directed to the speaker, not the speech.

By June 1926, Hitler had captivated Goebbels. Goebbels was to join the headquarters in November, headed by Hess as secretary, Franz Xaver Schwarz as treasurer, and Bouhler as secretary general. Hitler recruited Franz Pfeffer von Salomon to head the SA, replacing Roehm, and presenting a new image:

In order to prevent the SA to taking on any secret character from the start, it should not be hidden and should march under a bright sky to destroy all myths that it is a 'secret organization'...we must show the Marxists that the future boss of the streets is National Socialism, just as National Socialism will be the boss of the state.

After the 1927 election, in which the Nazis did poorly although did send 11 delegates to the Reichstag, he began his relationship with Geli Raubal. Whatever the circumstances, there is no question that her 1931 death had an enormous effect on him. During this time, he also wrote what became known as Hitler's Secret Book, which would not appear for 32 years. It was more intensely antisemitic than Mein Kampf, and may have been an even stronger warning of The Holocaust.

Apparently recalling the heroic cancer treatment of his mother, he used it as a metaphor for foreign policy.

If a man appears to have cancer and is unconditionally doomed to die, it would be senseless to refuse an

operation, because the percentage of the possibility of success is slight, and because the patient, even should it be successful, will not be a hundred percent healthy. It would be still more senseless were the surgeon to perform the operation itself only with limited or partial energy in consequence of these limited possibilities. But

it is this senselessness that these men expect uninterruptedly in domestic and foreign policy matters.

In this period, he consulted with a Party member psychiatrist, to allay "a fear of cancer.

For Hitler, the notion of Lebensraum (living space) and the idea of a heroic Führer, underdeveloped in 1924, became fully crystallized by 1928. Hitler offered only "distant goals" not a "blueprint for rule." There is scant evidence to support the notion that he was a conscious modernizer; his goal was to destroy Marxism and re-create the Volksgemeinschaft (folk community) that supposedly existed in the past. This community concept was the basis for much propaganda, but "But propaganda alone could not have sustained the Nazi Party and its ideology over a period of 12 years. There is now considerable evidence to suggest that nazi policies and propaganda reflected many of the aspirations of large sections of the population."