Hitler: A Short Biography. A. Wilson N.

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СКАЧАТЬ the post-war politicians, of the free world as well as of the dictatorships, who depended for their success on their ability to present themselves on screen – a consideration which would have probably ditched the careers of most true political orators or administrative geniuses, from Pericles to Churchill (who was hopeless at TV). ‘The destiny of Peoples can only be changed by a storm of hot passion and only he who carries such passion within himself can arouse it in others. Such passion alone gives its Chosen One the words which like hammer blows can open the gates to the heart of a people. But the man whose passion fails and whose lips are sealed – he has not been chosen by heaven to proclaim its will. Therefore, let the writer remain by his ink-well …’³

      Hitler, together with Pathé, the pioneer of cinematic newsreels, and together with the Hollywood producers and the early pioneers of sound broadcasting, saw that the twentieth century was going to leave behind the printed word. Germany had invented printing. Under Hitler’s dictatorship, Germany would burn its books. Gutenberg’s printing press created a revolution in human consciousness. It created a freedom which no Inquisition or procurator could entirely suppress. With the widespread distribution of printed matter, anyone capable of reading could study, and re-read texts and make up their own minds.

      Hitler was the first and the most hypnotic artist of post-literacy.

      And so it was, in that frenzied atmosphere of post-war German army camps, that Hitler had his first taste of the narcotic of adulation which, throughout a friendless, charmless and loveless thirty years of life, he had presumably craved at the deepest level. Wagner devotee that he was, he was naturally drawn to the politics of mass emotion. Not for him the quietly reasoned hope that by patient collaboration between men and women of good will, the worst features of the Treaty of Versailles could be negotiated; nor, at home, would he have possessed the smallest inclination to support a coalition of liberal opinion to safeguard jobs or institutional life as a more rational alternative to Bolshevism. From the very beginning, he wanted the big music of German nationalism, with all its associated xenophobia, philistine Jew-hatred and quasi-religious emotionalism. There were as many splinter parties of the extreme Right as there were of the extreme Left. As a much-trusted young speaker in the Aufklärungskommando, it was his task and his delight to sniff around in these unsavoury pools in Munich. He lighted upon the tiny German Workers Party, an extreme right-wing sect which had been founded by a Munich locksmith, Anton Drexler, on 7 March 1918. Drexler asked Hitler to join the central committee of the party, and he did so as the seventh member, though his membership number was 555. (It would seem unlikely that there were as many as 100, let alone 500, members at this date.) Karl Harrer, another of the party members, expressed the view, having heard committee member 555 speak in the Hofbräuhaus, one of the bigger beer-cellars in Munich, that Hitler had no gifts as an orator. But his opinion was not shared. The first time Hitler stood on the table of this medieval beer-hall and addressed the drinkers, there was an audience of 111. A little later, he addressed an audience of 200. By August 1920, the party was holding public rallies and had adopted the name by which it would ever afterwards be known – the National Socialist German Workers’ Party. With the whimsical German habit of shortening, nicknames and acronymics, the supporters of the NSDAP – Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei – were called the Nazis.

      Hitler’s chief gift was for public speaking, but he also displayed, during these months, and in the years to come, two qualities which had lain latent and which, for example, his room-mate Kubizek could hardly have guessed at when he saw young Adolf lolling on his scruffy bed feeling sorry for himself in Vienna and doing absolutely nothing.

      One of these gifts was a Machiavellian skill at political manipulation: it took him no time at all to move in on Drexler’s little band of malcontents and make them accept him as their leader. The second thing which he brought to the party in particular, and to life in general, was a taste for violence. An essential colleague in Hitler’s rise to power was Captain Ernst Röhm, a scar-faced homosexual who, as he said in the opening sentence of his memoirs, ‘From my childhood I had only one thought and wish – to be a soldier.’ Röhm loved the company of mindlessly violent street-boys, and with the new party being organized by Hitler and friends, Röhm saw the perfect opportunity for rough stuff on the grand scale. When all-out mob violence was not available, there would always be shop windows to be smashed, Reds to be given bloody noses and Jews to be pummelled in darkened alleys. Röhm had organized a patriotic free army – Freikorps – of men coming out of the army who were determined to fight against the Communists. By bringing these men into the National Socialist movement from the beginning, Röhm not only swelled its ranks. He determined that it should be by definition a cult of violence. His storm-division, Sturmabteilung or SA, could march, in their brown shirts and beneath the swastika emblem which had now been incorporated into the party regalia, as a private army within Germany.

      Röhm attracted discontented ex-soldiers and violent youths into his SA. This in turn made the Nazis, from their inception, a frightening organization. If you criticized them or fell foul of them for whatever reason, you knew that you were risking broken ribs.

      The intimidating power of his movement – and it had become Hitler’s movement from the moment he moved in on Drexler’s party – allowed him to develop his own cult of personality. While the SA frightened his rivals, Hitler could develop his quasi-operatic skills as a public performer. Hitler’s own gift for self-mythologizing was itself of a Wagnerian capacity. ‘In that hour, IT began.’

      ‘It’ – the thing which began with that production of Rienzi, seen in his youth – was among other things a lifelong passion for the music dramas of Richard Wagner. But it was also the capacity to see himself, and politics, as part of a music drama. He concluded the first volume of My Struggle with an account of the first big National Socialist rally in Munich on 24 February 1920. What catches our attention here is not whether any detail of Hitler’s account is true or could be challenged by others, but the way in which he chose, in his book, to present the occasion. He claimed that he alone took charge of the organization of the rally. He advertised it with posters and leaflets. ‘The text was concise and definite, an absolutely dogmatic form of expression being used.’⁴ One of the aims of the rally was to summon the faithful together. But another, equally important to Hitler, was to antagonize the enemy. For this reason he chose to set the swastika emblem in red banners. The propaganda point which he wanted to make was that the centre parties in German politics were no more than useful stooges to the Communists. The effect which he wanted to produce by using red banners was to draw the Communists out for a street battle. He hoped that the police would try to ban his rally, because of the red banners, and that there would then be a pitched battle between National Socialists and Communists. He had an ally in the Chief of Police, Ernst Pöhner, ‘who, in contradistinction to the majority of our so-called defenders of the authority of the State, did not fear to incur the enmity of traitors to the country and the nation but rather courted it as a mark of honour and honesty. For such men hatred of the Jews and Marxists, and the lies and calumnies they spread, was their only source of happiness in the midst of national misery.’

      Hitler tells us in My Struggle that as he strode into the crowds waiting outside the Hofbräuhaus for the rally, and saw over 2,000 people, ‘my heart was nearly bursting with joy’.⁵

      There were various speakers, some of whom were heckled. Then Hitler rose, and he proceeded to tell the audience of his twenty-five points. This was the party manifesto which Hitler and Drexler had thrashed out, including the ripping up of the Treaty of Versailles, the establishment of a Greater Germany formed by the union with Austria, and the abolition of Jewish rights of citizenship. As Hitler spoke on these themes, the hecklers fell silent, and his sentences were received with applause. For a speaker to outline twenty-five points, and to promise in advance that this was his intention, is, to put it mildly, asking a lot of an audience. Yet such was Hitler’s magnetism that this deadly sounding speech clearly had the crowd in raptures. The meeting lasted four hours. СКАЧАТЬ