Hitler

as an economics expert. His lecture on the ‘breaking of interest slavery’ (a slogan Hitler recognized as having propaganda potential), on which he had already published a ‘manifesto’ – highly regarded in nationalist circles – distinguishing between ‘productive’ capital and ‘rapacious’ capital (which he associated with the Jews), made a deep impression on Hitler, and eventually led to Feder’s role as the economics ‘guru’ of the early Nazi Party. The history lectures were delivered by the Munich historian Professor Karl Alexander von Müller, who had known Mayr at school. Following his first lecture, he came across a small group in the emptying lecture hall surrounding a man addressing them in a passionate, strikingly guttural, tone. He mentioned to Mayr after his next lecture that one of his trainees had natural rhetorical talent. Von Müller pointed out where he was sitting. Mayr recognized him immediately: it was ‘Hitler from the List Regiment’.
    Hitler himself thought this incident – he said he had been roused to intervene by one of the participants defending the Jews – had led directly to his deployment as an ‘educational officer’
(Bildungsoffizier)
. However, he was never a
Bildungsoffizier
, but remained a mere informant, a
V-Mann
. Plainly, the incident helped to focus Mayr’s attention on Hitler. But it was certainly Mayr’s regular close observation of Hitler’s activity for his department rather than a single incident that led to the latter’s selection as one of a squad of twenty-six instructors – all drawn from the participants in the Munich ‘instruction courses’ – to be sent to conduct a five-day course at the Reichswehr camp at Lechfeld, near Augsburg. The course, beginning on 20 August 1919, the day after Hitler’s arrival in the camp, was arranged in response to complaints about the political unreliability of men stationed there, many having returned from being held as prisoners-of-war and now awaiting discharge. The task of the squad was to inculcate nationalist and anti-Bolshevik sentiments in the troops, described as ‘infected’ by Bolshevism and Spartacism. It was in effect the continuation of what the instructors themselves had been exposed to in Munich.
    Alongside the commander of the unit, Rudolf Beyschlag, Hitler undertook the lion’s share of the work, including helping to stir discussion ofBeyschlag’s lectures on, for example, ‘Who Bears the Guilt for the World War?’ and ‘From the Days of the Munich Räterepublik’. He himself gave lectures on ‘Peace Conditions and Reconstruction’, ‘Emigration’, and ‘Social and Economic Catchwords’. He threw himself with passion into the work. His engagement was total. And he immediately found he could strike a chord with his audience, that the way he spoke roused the soldiers listening to him from their passivity and cynicism. Hitler was in his element. For the first time in his life, he had found something at which he was an unqualified success. Almost by chance, he had stumbled across his greatest talent. As he himself put it, he could ‘speak’.
    Participants’ reports on the course confirm that Hitler was not exaggerating the impact he made in Lechfeld: he was without question the star performer. A central feature of his demagogic armoury was antisemitism. In his ferocious attacks on the Jews, he was, however, doing no more than reflect sentiments which were widespread at the time among the people of Munich, as reports on the popular mood demonstrated. The responses to Hitler’s addresses at Lechfeld indicate how accessible the soldiers were to his way of speaking. The commander of the Lechfeld camp, Oberleutnant Bendt, even felt obliged to request Hitler to tone down his antisemitism, in order to prevent possible objections to the lectures as provoking antisemitic agitation. This followed a lecture by Hitler on capitalism, in which he had ‘touched on’ the ‘Jewish Question’. It is the first reference to Hitler speaking publicly about the Jews.
    Within the group, and certainly in the eyes of his superior, Captain Mayr, Hitler must have acquired the reputation of an ‘expert’ on the ‘Jewish Question’. When Mayr was asked, in a letter of 4 September 1919 from a former participant on one of the ‘instruction courses’, Adolf Gemlich from Ulm, for clarification of the ‘Jewish Question’, particularly in relation to the policies of the Social Democratic