Hitler

days, much of his time was spent lounging around cafés in Munich. He specially liked the Café Heck in Galerienstraße, his favourite. In a quiet corner of the long, narrow room of this coffee-house, frequented by Munich’s solid middle class, he could sit at his reserved table, his back to the wall, holding court among the new-found cronies that he had attracted to the NSDAP. Among those coming to form an inner circle of Hitler’s associates were the young student Rudolf Heß, the Baltic-Germans Alfred Rosenberg (who had worked on Eckart’s periodical since 1919) and Max Erwin von Scheubner-Richter (an engineer with excellent contacts to wealthy Russian émigrés). Certainly by the time Putzi Hanfstaengl, the cultured part-American who became his Foreign Press Chief, came to know him, late in 1922, Hitler had a table booked every Monday evening at the old-fashioned Café Neumaier on the edge of the Viktualienmarkt. His regular accompaniment formed a motley crew – mostly lower-middle class, some unsavoury characters among them. Christian Weber, aformer horse-dealer, who, like Hitler, invariably carried a dog-whip and relished the brawls with Communists, was one. Another was Hermann Esser, formerly Mayr’s press agent, himself an excellent agitator, and an even better gutter-journalist. Max Amann, another roughneck, Hitler’s former sergeant who became overlord of the Nazi press empire, was also usually there, as were Ulrich Graf, Hitler’s personal bodyguard, and, frequently, the ‘philosophers’ of the party, Gottfried Feder and Dietrich Eckart. In the long room, with its rows of benches and tables, often occupied by elderly couples, Hitler’s entourage would discuss politics, or listen to his monologues on art and architecture, while eating the snacks they had brought with them and drinking their litres of beer or cups of coffee. At the end of the evening, Weber, Amann, Graf, and Lieutenant Klintzsch, a paramilitary veteran of the Kapp Putsch, would act as a bodyguard, escorting Hitler – wearing the long black overcoat and trilby that ‘gave him the appearance of a conspirator’ – back to his apartment in Thierschstraße.
    Hitler scarcely cut the figure of a mainstream politician. Not surprisingly, the Bavarian establishment regarded him largely with contempt. But they could not ignore him. The old-fashioned monarchist head of the Bavarian government at the time, Minister President Gustav Ritter von Kahr, who had assumed office on 16 March 1920 following the Kapp Putsch and aimed to turn Bavaria into a ‘cell of order’ representing true national values, thought Hitler was a propagandist and nothing more. This was a not unjustifiable assessment at the time. But Kahr was keen to gather ‘national forces’ in Bavaria in protest at the ‘fulfilment policy’ of Reich Chancellor Wirth. And he felt certain that he could make use of Hitler, that he could control the ‘impetuous Austrian’. On 14 May 1921 he invited a delegation from the NSDAP, led by Hitler, to discuss the political situation with him. It was the first meeting of the two men whose identical aim of destroying the new Weimar democracy was to link them, if fleetingly, in the ill-fated putsch of November 1923 – a chequered association that would end with Kahr’s murder in the ‘Night of the Long Knives’ at the end of June 1934. Whatever Kahr’s disdain for Hitler, his invitation to a meeting in May 1921 amounted to recognition that the latter was now a factor in Bavarian politics, proof that he and his movement had to be taken seriously.
    Rudolf Heß, still studying at Munich under the geopolitician Professor Karl Haushofer, introverted and idealistic, and already besotted withHitler, was part of the delegation. Three days later, unsolicited and unprompted by Hitler, he wrote a lengthy letter to Kahr, describing Hitler’s early life and eulogizing about his political aims, ideals, and skills. Hitler, he wrote, was ‘an unusually decent, sincere character, full of kind-heartedness, religious, a good Catholic’, with only one aim: ‘the welfare of his country’. Heß went on to laud Hitler’s self-sacrifice in this cause, how he received not a penny from the movement itself but made his living purely from the fees he received for other speeches he occasionally made.
    This was the official line that Hitler himself had put out the previous September in the
Völkischer Beobachter
. It was quite disingenuous. On no more than a