Hitler

applause for the individual points. But there were interruptions, too, from left-wing opponents, who had already been getting restless, and the police reporter of the meeting spoke of scenes of ‘great tumult so that I often thought it would come to brawling at any minute’. Hitler announced, to storms of applause, what would remain the party’s slogan: ‘Our motto is only struggle. We will go our way unshakeably to our goal.’ The end of Hitler’s speech, in which he read out a protest at an alleged decision to provide 40,000 hundredweight of flour for the Jewish community, again erupted into uproar following further opposition heckling, with people standing on tables and chairs yelling at each other. In the subsequent ‘discussion’, four others spoke briefly, two of them opponents. Remarks from the last speaker that a dictatorship from the Right would be met with a dictatorship from the Left were the signal for a further uproar, such that Hitler’s words closing the meeting were drowned. Around 100 Independent Socialists and Communists poured out of the Hofbräuhaus on to the streets cheering for the International and the Räterepublik and booing the war-heroes Hindenburg and Ludendorff, and the German Nationalists. The meeting had not exactly produced the ‘hall full of people united by a new conviction, a new faith, a new will’ that Hitler was later to describe.
    Nor would anyone reading Munich newspapers in the days following the meeting have gained the impression that it was a landmark heralding the arrival of a new, dynamic party and a new political hero. The press’s reaction was muted, to say the least. The newspapers concentrated in their brief reports on Dingfelder’s speech and paid little attention to Hitler. Even the
Völkischer Beobachter
, not yet under party control but sympathetic, was surprisingly low-key. It reported the meeting in a single column in an inside page four days later.
    Despite this initial modest impact, it was already apparent that Hitler meetings meant political fireworks. Even in the hothouse of Munich politics, the big meetings of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP), as the movement henceforth called itself, were something different. Hitler wanted above all else to make his party noticed.In this he rapidly succeeded. ‘It makes no difference whatever whether they laugh at us or revile us,’ he later wrote, ‘whether they represent us as clowns or criminals; the main thing is that they mention us, that they concern themselves with us again and again …’ He observed the dull, lifeless meetings of bourgeois parties, the deadening effect of speeches read out like academic lectures by dignified, elderly gentlemen. Nazi meetings, he recorded with pride, were, by contrast,
not
peaceful. He learnt from the organization of meetings by the Left, how they were orchestrated, the value of intimidation of opponents, techniques of disruption, and how to deal with disturbances. The NSDAP’s meetings aimed to attract confrontation, and as a result to make the party noticed. Posters were drafted in vivid red to provoke the Left to attend. In mid-1920 Hitler personally designed the party’s banner with the swastika in a white circle on a red background, devised to make as striking a visual impact as possible. The result was that meetings were packed long before the start, and the numbers of opponents present guaranteed that the atmosphere was potentially explosive. To combat trouble, a ‘hall protection’ squad was fully organized by mid-1920, became the ‘Gymnastic and Sports Section’ in August 1921, and eventually developed into the ‘Storm Section’ (Sturmabteilung, or SA).
    Only Hitler could bring in the crowds for the NSDAP. In front of a beerhall audience his style was electrifying. While in his Nuremberg cell awaiting the hangman, Hans Frank, the ex-Governor General of Poland, recalled the moment, in January 1920, while he was still only nineteen years old (though already committed to the
völkisch
cause), that he had first heard Hitler speak. The large room was bursting at the seams. Middle-class citizens rubbed shoulders with workers, soldiers, and students. Whether old or young, the state of the nation weighed heavily on people. Germany’s plight polarized opinions, but left few unmoved or disinterested. Most political meetings were packed. But, to Frank – young, idealistic, fervently anti-Marxist and nationalistic – speakers were