Hitler

the pre-war Germanen-Orden, set up in Leipzig in 1912 to bring together a varietyof minor antisemitic groups and organizations. Its membership list, including alongside Lehmann the ‘economics expert’ Gottfried Feder, the publicist Dietrich Eckart, the journalist and co-founder of the DAP Karl Harrer, and the young nationalists Hans Frank, Rudolf Heß, and Alfred Rosenberg, reads like a
Who’s Who
of early Nazi sympathizers and leading figures in Munich. The colourful and rich head of the Thule Society, Rudolf Freiherr von Sebottendorff – a cosmopolitan adventurer and self-styled aristocrat who was actually the son of a train-driver and had made his fortune through shady deals in Turkey and an opportune marriage to a rich heiress – ensured that meetings could be held in Munich’s best hotel, the ‘Vier Jahreszeiten’, and provided the
völkisch
movement in Munich with its own newspaper, the
Münchener Beobachter
(renamed in August 1919 as the
Völkischer Beobachter
, and eventually bought by the Nazis in December 1920). It was from the Thule Society that the initiative arose towards the end of the war to try to influence the working class in Munich. Karl Harrer was commissioned to attempt this, and made contact with a railway workshop locksmith, Anton Drexler. Having been found unfit for military service, Drexler had in 1917 temporarily found an expression of his nationalist and racist sentiments in the short-lived but huge, rabidly pro-war Fatherland Party. Then, in March 1918, he had founded a ‘Workers’ Committee for a Good Peace’ in an effort to stir enthusiasm for the war effort among Munich’s working class. He combined his extreme nationalism with an anti-capitalism demanding draconian action against profiteers and speculators. Harrer, a sports-reporter on the right-wing
Münchner-Augsburger Abendzeitung
, persuaded Drexler and a few others to set up a ‘Political Workers’ Circle’ (Politischer Arbeiterzirkel). The ‘Circle’, a group of usually three to seven members, met periodically for about a year from November 1918 onwards to discuss nationalist and racist themes – such as the Jews as Germany’s enemy, or responsibility for the war and defeat – usually introduced by Harrer. Whereas Harrer preferred the semi-secretive
völkisch
‘club’, Drexler thought discussing recipes for Germany’s salvation in such a tiny group had scant value, and wanted to found a political party. He proposed in December the setting up of a ‘German Workers’ Party’ which would be ‘free of Jews’. The idea was well received, and, on 5 January 1919, at a small gathering – mainly contacts from the railway yards – in the Fürstenfelder Hof in Munich, the German Workers’ Party was formed. Drexler was electedchairman of the Munich branch (the only one that existed), while Harrer was given the honorary title of ‘Reich Chairman’. Only in the more favourable climate after the crushing of the Räterepublik was the infant party able to stage its first public meetings. Attendance was sparse. Ten members were present on 17 May, thirty-eight when Dietrich Eckart spoke in August, and forty-one on 12 September. This was the occasion on which Hitler attended for the first time.
    VII
    Hitler’s part in the early development of the German Workers’ Party (subsequently the NSDAP) is obscured more than it is clarified by his own tendentious account in
Mein Kampf
. And, as throughout his book, Hitler’s version of events is aimed, more than all else, at elevating his own role as it denigrates, plays down, or simply ignores that of all others involved. It amounts to the story of a political genius going his way in the face of adversity, a heroic triumph of the will. In his own version, he had joined a tiny body with grandiose ideas but no hope of realizing them, raising it single-handedly to a force of the first magnitude which would come to rescue Germany from its plight. Towering over the weak and vacillating early leaders of the party, certain of himself and of the coming to fruition of his mighty vision, proven successful in his methods, his greatness – so his account was designed to illustrate – was apparent even in these first months after joining the movement. There could be no doubt about his claim to supremacy in the
völkisch
movement against all pretenders.
    After dealing with subsequent successes in building up the party’s following, Hitler returned to the early party history in a