Hitler

in Berlin was certain to meet with an enthusiastic response among the still small minority of the local population drawn to his meetings.
    While Hitler basically appealed to negative feelings – anger, resentment, hatred – there was also a ‘positive’ element in the proposed remedy to the proclaimed ills. However platitudinous, the appeal to restoration of liberty through national unity, the need to collaborate of ‘workers of the brain and hand’, the social harmony of a ‘national community’, and the protection of the ‘little man’ through the crushing of his exploiters, were, to go from the applause they invariably produced, undeniably attractive propositions to Hitler’s audiences. And Hitler’s own passion and fervour successfully conveyed the message – to those already predisposed to it – that no other way was possible; that Germany’s revivalwould and could be brought about; and that it lay in the power of ordinary Germans to make it happen through their own struggle, sacrifice, and will. The effect was more that of a religious revivalist meeting than a normal political gathering.
    Though Hitler was invariably up-to-date in finding easy targets in the daily politics of the crisis-ridden Republic, his main themes were tediously repetitive. Some, in fact, often taken for granted to be part of Hitler’s allegedly unchanging ideology, were missing altogether at this stage. There was, for example, not a single mention of the need for ‘living space’
(Lebensraum)
in eastern Europe. Britain and France were the foreign-policy targets at this time. Indeed, Hitler jotted among the notes of one of his speeches, in August 1920, ‘brotherhood towards the east’. Nor did he clamour for a dictatorship. Such a demand occurs only in one speech in 1920, on 27 April, in which Hitler declared that Germany needed ‘a dictator who is a genius’ if it were to rise up again. There was no implication that he himself was that person. Surprisingly, too, his first outright public assault on Marxism did not occur before his speech at Rosenheim on 21 July 1920 (though he had spoken on a number of occasions before this of the catastrophic effects of Bolshevism in Russia, for which he blamed the Jews). And, remarkably, even race theory – where Hitler drew heavily for his ideas from well-known antisemitic tracts such as Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Adolf Wahrmund, and, especially, the arch-popularizer Theodor Fritsch (one of whose emphases was the alleged sexual abuse of women by Jews) – was explicitly treated in only one speech by Hitler during 1920.
    This scarcely meant, however, that Hitler neglected to attack the Jews. On the contrary: the all-devouring manic obsession with the Jews to which all else is subordinated – not observable before 1919, never absent thereafter – courses through almost every Hitler speech at this time. Behind all evil that had befallen or was threatening Germany stood the figure of the Jew. In speech after speech he lashed the Jews in the most vicious and barbaric language imaginable.
    Genuine socialism, declared Hitler, meant to be an antisemite. Germans should be ready to enter into a pact with the devil to eradicate the evil of Jewry. But, as in his letter to Gemlich the previous autumn, he did not see emotional antisemitism as the answer. He demanded internment in concentration camps to prevent ‘Jewish undermining of our people’, hanging for racketeers, but ultimately, as the only solution – similar tothe Gemlich letter – the ‘removal of the Jews from our people’. The implication, as in his explicit demands with regard to
Ostjuden
(usually poor refugees from persecution in eastern Europe), was their expulsion from Germany. This was undoubtedly how it was understood. But the language itself was both terrible and implicitly genocidal in its biological similes. ‘Don’t think that you can combat racial tuberculosis,’ he declared in August 1920, ‘without seeing to it that the people is freed from the causative organ of racial tuberculosis. The impact of Jewry will never pass away, and the poisoning of the people will not end, as long as the causal agent, the Jew, is not removed from our midst.’
    His audiences loved it. More than anything else, these attacks evoked torrents of applause and cheering. His technique – beginning slowly, plenty of sarcasm, personalized attacks on named targets, then a gradual crescendo to a climax – whipped his audiences into