Hitler

party’s participation in the so-called ‘German Day’ (
Deutscher Tag
) in Coburg on 14–15 October. Coburg, on the Thuringian border in the north of Upper Franconia and part of Bavaria for only two years, was virgin territory for the Nazis. He saw the German Day as an opportunity not to be missed. He scraped together what funds the NSDAP had to hire a special train – in itself a novel propaganda stunt – to take 800 stormtroopers to Coburg. The SA men were instructed by Hitler to ignore explicit police orders, banning a formation march with unfurled banners and musical accompaniment, and marched with hoisted swastika flags through the town. Workers lining the streets insulted them and spat at them. Nazis in turn leapt out of the ranks beating their tormentors with sticks and rubber-truncheons. A furious battle with the socialists ensued. After ten minutes of mayhem, in which they had police support, the stormtroopers triumphantly claimed the streets of Coburg as theirs. For Hitler, the propaganda victory was what counted. The German Day in Coburg went down in the party’s annals. The NSDAP had made its mark in northern Bavaria.
    It was Hitler’s second major success in Franconia within a few days. On 8 October, Julius Streicher, head of the Nuremberg branch of the Deutsche Werkgemeinschaft, had written to Hitler offering to take his sizeable following, together with his newspaper the
Deutscher Volkswille
, into the NSDAP. In the wake of the Coburg triumph, the transfer took place on 20 October. Streicher, a short, squat, shaven-headed bully, born in 1885 in the Augsburg area, for a time a primary school teacher as his father had been, and, like Hitler, a war veteran decorated with the Iron Cross, First Class, was utterly possessed by demonic images of Jews. Shortly after the war he had been an early member of the DSP (German-Socialist Party), as antisemitic as the NSDAP, though he had left it in 1921. His newspaper
Der Stürmer
, established in 1923 and becoming notorious for its obscene caricatures of evil-looking Jews seducing pure German maidens and ritual-murder allegations, would – despite Hitler’s personal approving comments, and view that ‘the Jew’ was far worse than Streicher’s ‘idealized’ picture – for a while be banned even in the Third Reich. Streicher was eventually tried at Nuremberg, and hanged. Now, back in 1922, in a step of vital importance for thedevelopment of the NSDAP in Franconia, in the northern regions of Bavaria, he subordinated himself personally to Hitler. The rival
völkisch
movement was fatally weakened in Franconia. The Nazi Party practically doubled its membership. From around 2,000 members about the beginning of 1921 and 6,000 a year later, the party was overnight some 20,000 strong. More than that: the Franconian countryside – piously Protestant, fervently nationalist, and stridently antisemitic – was to provide the NSDAP with a stronghold far greater than was offered by its home city of Munich in the Catholic south of Bavaria, and a symbolic capital in Nuremberg – later designated the ‘city of the Reich Party Rallies’. It was little wonder that Hitler was keen to express his gratitude to Streicher publicly in
Mein Kampf
.
    Even so, it was striking that, away from his Munich citadel, Hitler’s power was still limited. He was the undisputed propaganda champion of the party. But away from his Munich base, his writ still did not always run.
    This was in itself ample reason for the interest which his Munich following began to show in building up the leadership cult around Hitler. A significant boost to the aura of a man of destiny attaching itself to Hitler came from outside Germany. Mussolini’s so-called ‘March on Rome’ on 28 October 1922 – fictitious though it was in the Fascist legend of a bold ‘seizure of power’ – nevertheless deeply stirred the Nazi Party. It suggested the model of a dynamic and heroic nationalist leader marching to the salvation of his strife-torn country. The Duce provided an image to be copied. Less than a week after the
coup d’état
in Italy, on 3 November 1922, Hermann Esser proclaimed to a packed Festsaal in the Hofbräuhaus: ‘Germany’s Mussolini is called Adolf Hitler.’ It marked the symbolic moment when Hitler’s followers invented the Führer cult.
    The spread of fascist and militaristic ideas in post-war Europe meant that ‘heroic leadership’ images were ‘in the air’ and by no means