Hitler

a frenzy. His speech in the Festsaal of the Hofbräuhaus on 13 August 1920 on ‘Why are we Antisemites?’ – his only speech that year
solely
relating to the Jews and probably intended as a basic statement on the topic – was interrupted fifty-eight times during its two hours’ duration by ever wilder cheering from the 2,000-strong audience. To go from a report on another Hitler speech a few weeks later, the audience would have been mainly drawn from white-collar workers, the lower-middle class, and better-off workers, with around a quarter women.
    At first, Hitler’s antisemitic tirades were invariably linked to anti-capitalism and attacks on ‘Jewish’ war profiteers and racketeers, whom he blamed for exploiting the German people and causing the loss of the war and the German war dead. The influence of Gottfried Feder can be seen in the distinction Hitler drew between essentially healthy ‘industrial capital’ and the real evil of ‘Jewish finance capital’.
    There was no link with Marxism or Bolshevism at this stage. Contrary to what is sometimes claimed, Hitler’s antisemitism was not prompted by his anti-Bolshevism; it long predated it. There was no mention of Bolshevism in the Gemlich letter of September 1919, where the ‘Jewish Question’ is related to the rapacious nature of finance capital. Hitler spoke in April and again in June 1920 of Russia being destroyed by the Jews, but it was only in his Rosenheim speech on 21 July that he explicitly married the images of Marxism, Bolshevism, and the Soviet system in Russia to the brutality of Jewish rule, for which he saw Social Democracy preparing the ground in Germany. Hitler admitted in August1920 that he knew little of the real situation in Russia. But – perhaps influenced above all by Alfred Rosenberg, who came from the Baltic and had experienced the Russian Revolution at first hand, but probably also soaking up images of the horror of the Russian civil war which were filtering through to the German press – he plainly became preoccupied with Bolshevik Russia in the second half of the year. The dissemination of the
Protocols of the Elders of Zion
– the forgery about Jewish world domination, widely read and believed in antisemitic circles at the time – probably also helped to focus Hitler’s attention on Russia. These images appear to have provided the catalyst to the merger of antisemitism and anti-Marxism in his ‘world-view’ – an identity which, once forged, never disappeared.
    IX
    Hitler’s speeches put him on the political map in Munich. But he was still very much a local taste. And however much noise he made, his party was still insignificant compared with the established socialist and Catholic parties. Moreover, though it is going too far to see him as no more than the tool of powerful vested interests ‘behind the scenes’, without influential backers and the ‘connections’ they could provide his talents as a mob-agitator would not have got him very far.
    Though Hitler had already signalled his intention of making a living as a political speaker, he was, in fact, until 31 March 1920 still drawing pay from the army. His first patron, Captain Mayr, continued to take a close interest in him and, if his later account can be believed, provided limited funding towards the staging of the mass meetings. At this time, Hitler was still serving both the party and the army. In January and February 1920, Mayr had ‘Herr Hittler’ lecturing on ‘Versailles’ and ‘Political Parties and their Significance’ in the company of distinguished Munich historians Karl Alexander von Müller and Paul Joachimsen to Reichswehr soldiers undertaking ‘citizenship education courses’. In March, during the Kapp Putsch, when a short-lived armed coup had attempted to overthrow the government, forcing it to flee from the Reich capital, he sent him with Dietrich Eckart to Berlin to instruct Wolfgang Kapp on the situation in Bavaria. They arrived too late. The Right’s first attempt to take over the state had already collapsed. But Mayr wasundeterred. He retained both his contact with Kapp and his interest in Hitler. He still had hopes, so he told Kapp six months later, that the NSDAP – which he thought of as his own creation – would become the ‘organization of national radicalism’, the advance-guard of a future, more successful, putsch. He wrote to Kapp, now exiled in Sweden:
    The national workers’ party must provide the basis for the