Hitler

entered.
    Like so much of what Hitler had to say in
Mein Kampf
about his earlier life, his account of entering the party cannot be taken at face value, and was devised, like everything else, to serve the Führer legend that was already being cultivated. And whatever Hitler wrote about wrangling for days about whether or not to join the DAP, the decision might not ultimately have been his to take. In a little noticed piece of evidence, his Reichswehr boss Captain Mayr later claimed that he had
ordered
Hitler to join the German Workers’ Party to help foster its growth. For this purpose, Mayr went on, he was provided at first with funds – around the equivalent of 20 gold Marks a week – and, contrary to normal practice about members of the Reichswehr joining political parties, was allowed to stay in the army. He was able to do this, drawing his army pay as well as speaker fees, until his discharge on 31 March 1920. Thisalready enabled him – in contrast to the other DAP leaders who had to fit politics around their normal jobs – to devote all his time to political propaganda. Now, on leaving the army, his confidence boosted by his early successes as a DAP speaker in the Munich beerhalls, he was in a position to do what, since he had made his mark in the anti-Bolshevik course at Munich University and worked with Mayr as a Reichswehr propagandist and informant, had emerged as a ready-made career-opening to replace the fantasies of becoming a great architect and the realities of returning to an existence as a small-time painter of street scenes and tourist attractions. Without Captain Mayr’s ‘talent-spotting’, Hitler might never have been heard of. As it was, if only on the beerhall fringes, he could now become a full-time political agitator and propagandist. He could do for a living the only thing he was good at doing: speaking.
    The path from Pasewalk to becoming the main attraction of the DAP had not been determined by any sudden recognition of a ‘mission’ to save Germany, by strength of personality, or by a ‘triumph of the will’. It had been shaped by circumstance, opportunism, good fortune, and, not least, the backing of the army, represented through Mayr’s important patronage. Hitler did not come to politics; politics came to him – in the Munich barracks. His contribution, after making his mark through a readiness to denounce his comrades following the Räterepublik, had been confined to an unusual talent for appealing to the gutter instincts of his listeners, in the Lechfeld camp, then in the Munich beerhalls, coupled with a sharp eye to exploiting the main chance of advancement. These ‘qualities’ would prove invaluable in the coming years.
    V
    Without the Reichswehr’s ‘discovery’ of his talent for nationalist agitation, Hitler had every prospect of returning to the margins of society – an embittered war veteran with little chance of personal advancement. Without his self-discovery that he could ‘speak’, Hitler would not have been able to contemplate the possibility of making a living from politics. But without the extraordinary political climate of post-war Germany, and, quite especially, the unique conditions in Bavaria, Hitler would have found himself in any case without an audience, his ‘talent’ pointlessand unrecognized, his tirades of hate without echo, the backing from those close to the avenues of power, on whom he depended, unforthcoming.
    When he joined the infant German Workers’ Party in September 1919, he was still, as he himself put it, among the ‘nameless’ – a nobody. Within three years, he was being showered with letters of adulation, spoken of in nationalist circles as Germany’s Mussolini, even compared with Napoleon. And little more than four years later, he had attained national, not just regional, notoriety as a leader of an attempt to take over the power of the state by force. He had of course failed miserably in this – and his political ‘career’ looked to be (and ought to have been) at an end. But he was now a ‘somebody’. The first part of Hitler’s astonishing rise from anonymity to prominence dates from these years in Munich – the years of his political apprenticeship.
    It is natural to presume that such a swift rise even to provincial celebrity status must have been the result of some extraordinary personal qualities. Without doubt, Hitler
did
possess abilities and traits of character that contributed towards making him a