Hitler

government, he passed it to Hitler – whom he evidently regarded highly – for an answer. Hitler’s well-known reply to Gemlich, dated 16 September 1919, is his first recorded written statement about the ‘Jewish Question’. He wrote that antisemitism should be based not on emotion, but on ‘facts’, the first of which was that Jewry was a race, not a religion. Emotive antisemitism would produce pogroms, he continued; antisemitism based on ‘reason’ must, on the other hand, lead to the systematicremoval of the rights of Jews. ‘Its final aim,’ he concluded, ‘must unshakeably be the removal of the Jews altogether.’
    The Gemlich letter reveals for the first time key basic elements of Hitler’s
Weltanschauung
which from then on remained unaltered to the last days in the Berlin bunker: antisemitism resting on race theory; and the creation of a unifying nationalism founded on the need to combat the external and internal power of the Jews.
    IV
    Following his success at Lechfeld, he was by this time plainly Mayr’s favourite and right-hand man. Among the duties of the informants assigned to Mayr was the surveillance of fifty political parties and organizations ranging from the extreme Right to the far Left in Munich. It was as an informant that Hitler was sent, on Friday, 12 September 1919, to report on a meeting of the German Workers’ Party in Munich’s Sterneckerbräu. He was accompanied by at least two former comrades from Lechfeld. The speaker was to have been the
völkisch
poet and publicist Dietrich Eckart, but he was ill and Gottfried Feder stood in to lecture on the ‘breaking of interest slavery’. According to his own account, Hitler had heard the lecture before, so took to observing the party itself, which he held to be a ‘boring organization’, no different from the many other small parties sprouting in every corner of Munich at that time. He was about to leave when, in the discussion following the lecture, an invited guest, a Professor Baumann, attacked Feder and then spoke in favour of Bavarian separatism. At this Hitler intervened so heatedly that Baumann, totally deflated, took his hat and left even while Hitler was still speaking, looking ‘like a wet poodle’. The party chairman, Anton Drexler, was so impressed by Hitler’s intervention that at the end of the meeting he pushed a copy of his own pamphlet,
My Political Awakening
, into his hand, inviting him to return in a few days if he were interested in joining the new movement. ‘Goodness, he’s got a gob. We could use him,’ Drexler was reported to have remarked. According to Hitler’s own account, he read Drexler’s pamphlet in the middle of a sleepless night, and it struck a chord with him, reminding him, he claimed, of his own ‘political awakening’ twelve years earlier. Within a week of attending the meeting, he then received a postcardinforming him that he had been accepted as a member, and should attend a committee meeting of the party a few days later to discuss the matter. Though his immediate reaction, he wrote, was a negative one – he allegedly wanted to found a party of his own – curiosity overcame him and he went along to a dimly-lit meeting of the small leadership group in the Altes Rosenbad, a shabby pub in Herrenstraße. He sympathized with the political aims of those he met. But he was appalled, he later wrote, at the small-minded organization he encountered – ‘club life of the worst manner and sort’, he dubbed it. After a few days of indecision, he added, he finally made up his mind to join. What determined him was the feeling that such a small organization offered ‘the individual an opportunity for real personal activity’ – the prospect, that is, of quickly making his mark and dominating it.
    Some time during the second half of September, Hitler joined the German Workers’ Party, and was given the membership number 555. He was not, as he always claimed, the seventh member. As the first party leader, Anton Drexler, put it in a letter addressed to Hitler in January 1940, but never sent:
    No one knows better than you yourself, my Führer, 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 recruitment director
(Werbeobmann)
. And a few years ago I had to complain to a party office that your first proper membership card of the DAP … was falsified, with the number 555 being erased and number 7