Hitler

Hamburg, anti-Marxist to the core, his verbal assault on the Left was music to the ears.
    Hitler reduced it to a simple formula: if the Marxist ‘world-view’ was not ‘eradicated’, Germany would never rise again. The task of the National Socialist Movement was straightforward: ‘the smashing and annihilation of the Marxist
Weltanschauung
’. Terror must be met with terror. The bourgeoisie itself was incapable of defeating the threat of Bolshevism. It needed a mass movement as intolerant as that of the Marxists themselves to do it. Winning the masses rested on two premisses. The first was to recognize their social concerns. But in case his audience thought this was back-door Marxism, Hitler was quick to reassure them: social legislation demanded ‘the promotion of the welfare of the individual in a framework that guaranteed retention of an independenteconomy’. ‘We are all workers,’ he stated. ‘The aim is not to get higher and higher wages, but to increase production, because that is to the advantage of each individual.’ His audience was unlikely to disagree with such sentiments. The second premiss was to offer the masses ‘a programme that is unalterable, a political faith that is unshakeable’. The usual party programmes, manifestos, and philosophies of bourgeois parties would not win them over. Hitler’s contempt for the masses was plain. ‘The broad mass is feminine,’ he stated, ‘one-sided in its attitude; it knows only the hard “either-or”.’ It wanted only a single viewpoint upheld – but then with all available means, and, he added, now mixing his genders and pointing to what is normally taken to be a more masculine characteristic, ‘does not shrink from using force’. What the mass had to feel was its own strength. Among a crowd of 200,000 in Berlin’s Lustgarten, the individual felt no more than ‘a small worm’, subject to mass-suggestion, aware only of those around him being prepared to fight for an ideal. ‘The broad masses are blind and stupid and don’t know what they are doing,’ he claimed. They were ‘primitive in attitude’. For them, ‘understanding’ offered only a ‘shaky platform’. ‘What is stable is emotion: hatred.’ The more Hitler preached intolerance, force, and hatred, as the solution to Germany’s problems, the more his audience liked it. He was interrupted on numerous occasions during these passages with cheers and shouts of ‘bravo’. At the end there was a lengthy ovation, and cries of ‘Heil’.
    National revival through terroristic anti-Marxism built on the cynical manipulation and indoctrination of the masses: that was the sum total of Hitler’s message to the upper-crust of the Hamburg bourgeoisie. Nationalism and anti-Marxism were scarcely peculiarities of the Nazis alone. Nor did they amount in themselves to much of an ideology. What distinguished Hitler’s approach to his Hamburg audience was not the ideas themselves, but the impression of fanatical will, utter ruthlessness, and the creation of a nationalist movement resting on the support of the masses. And it was plain from the enthusiastic response that selective terror deployed against ‘Marxists’ would meet with little or no opposition from the élite of Germany’s most liberal city.
    Back among his ‘own sort’, little or nothing had changed. The tone was very different from that adopted in Hamburg. In closed party meetings or, after the speaking ban had been lifted in early 1927, once more in Munich beerhalls and the Circus Krone, the attacks on the Jewswere as vicious and unconstrained as ever. In speech after speech, as before the putsch, he launched brutal assaults against the Jews, bizarrely depicted both as the wire-pullers of finance capital and as poisoning the people with subversive Marxist doctrine. Explicit attacks on the Jews occurred more frequently and extensively in 1925 and 1926 than in the subsequent two years. Antisemitism seemed now rather more ritualist or mechanistic. The main stress had moved to anti-Marxism. But only the presentation of his ideas had been modified to some extent; their meaning had not. His pathological hatred of Jews was unchanged. ‘The Jew is and remains the world enemy,’ he once more asserted in an article in the
Völkischer Beobachter
in February 1927, ‘and his weapon, Marxism, a plague of mankind.’
    Between 1926 and 1928, Hitler became more preoccupied with the ‘question of [living] space’
(Raumfrage)
and