Hitler

uses as an agitator, to have been rid of such a troublesome and egocentric entity. And the spread of the party that the merger with Dickel’s organization presented offered more than a little compensation.
    But the loss of its sole star performer would have been a major, perhaps fatal, blow to the NSDAP. Hitler’s departure would have split the party. In the end, this was the decisive consideration. Dietrich Eckartwas asked to intervene, and on 13 July Drexler sought the conditions under which Hitler would agree to rejoin the party. It was full capitulation from the party leadership. Hitler’s conditions all stemmed from the recent turmoil in the party. His key demands – to be accepted by an extraordinary members’ meeting – were ‘the post of chairman with dictatorial power’; the party headquarters to be fixed once and for all as Munich; the party programme to be regarded as inviolate; and the end of all merger attempts. All the demands centred upon securing Hitler’s position in the party against any future challenges. A day later the party committee expressed its readiness in recognition of his ‘immense knowledge’, his services for the movement, and his ‘unusual talent as a speaker’ to give him ‘dictatorial powers’. It welcomed his willingness, having turned down Drexler’s offers in the past, now to take over the party chairmanship. Hitler rejoined the party, as member no.3680, on 26 July.
    Even now the conflict was not fully at an end. While Hitler and Drexler publicly demonstrated their unity at a members’ meeting on 26 July, Hitler’s opponents in the leadership had his henchman Hermann Esser expelled from the party, prepared placards denouncing Hitler, and printed 3,000 copies of an anonymous pamphlet attacking him in the most denigratory terms as the agent of sinister forces intent on damaging the party. But Hitler, who had shown once more to great effect how irreplaceable he was as a speaker in a meeting, packed to the last seat, in Circus Krone on 20 July, was now in the driving seat. Now there was no hesitancy. This was Hitler triumphant. To tumultuous applause from the 554 paid-up members attending the extraordinary members’ meeting in the Festsaal of the Hofbräuhaus on 29 July, he defended himself and Esser and rounded on his opponents. He boasted that he had never sought party office, and had turned down the chairmanship on several occasions. But this time he was prepared to accept. The new party constitution, which Hitler had been forced to draft hurriedly, confirmed on three separate occasions the sole responsibility of the First Chairman for the party’s actions (subject only to the membership meeting). There was only one vote against accepting the new dictatorial powers over the party granted to Hitler. His chairmanship was unanimously accepted.
    The reform of the party statutes was necessary, stated the
Völkischer Beobachter
, in order to prevent any future attempt to dissipate the energies of the party through majority decisions. It was the first step ontransforming the NSDAP into a new-style party, a ‘Führer party’. The move had come about not through careful planning, but through Hitler’s reaction to events which were running out of his control. Rudolf Heß’s subsequent assault on Hitler’s opponents in the
Völkischer Beobachter
not only contained the early seeds of the later heroization of Hitler, but also revealed the initial base on which it rested. ‘Are you truly blind,’ wrote Heß, ‘to the fact that this man is the leader personality who alone is able to carry through the struggle? Do you think that without him the masses would pile into the Circus Krone?’

5
The ‘Drummer’
    I
    Hitler was content in the early 1920s to be the ‘drummer’ – whipping up the masses for the ‘national movement’. He saw himself at this time not as portrayed in
Mein Kampf
, as Germany’s future leader in waiting, the political messiah whose turn would arise once the nation recognized his unique greatness. Rather, he was paving the way for the great leader whose day might not dawn for many years to come. ‘I am nothing more than a drummer and rallier,’ he told the neo-conservative writer Arthur Moeller van den Bruck in 1922. Some months earlier, he had reputedly stated, in an interview in May 1921 with the chief editor of the Pan-German newspaper
Deutsche Zeitung
, that he was not the leader and statesman who would ‘save the Fatherland that was