Hitler

confined to Germany. The emergence of the Duce cult in Italy provides an obvious parallel. But the German images naturally had their own flavour, drawing on particular elements of the political culture of the nationalist Right. And the crisis-ridden nature of the Weimar state, detested by so many powerful groups in society and unable to win the popularity and support of the masses, guaranteed that such ideas, which in a more stable environment might have been regarded with derision and confinedto the lunatic fringe of politics, were never short of a hearing. Ideas put into circulation by neo-conservative publicists, writers, and intellectuals were, in more vulgarized form, taken up in paramilitary formations and in the varied groupings of the bourgeois youth movement. The model of Mussolini’s triumph in Italy now offered the opening for such ideas to be incorporated into the vision of national revival preached by the National Socialists.
    The Führer cult was not yet the pivot of the party’s ideology and organization. But the beginnings of a conscious public profiling of Hitler’s leadership qualities by his entourage, with strong hints in his own speeches, dates back to the period following Mussolini’s ‘March on Rome’. Hitler was beginning to attract fawning excesses of adulation – even stretching to grotesque comparisons with Napoleon – from admirers on the nationalist Right. The ground for the later rapid spread of the Führer cult was already well fertilized.
    There had been no trace of a leadership cult in the first years of the Nazi Party. The word ‘leader’
(‘Führer’)
had no special meaning attached to it. Every political party or organization had a leader – or more than one. The NSDAP was no different. Drexler was referred to as the party’s ‘Führer’, as was Hitler; or sometimes both in practically the same breath. Once Hitler had taken over the party leadership in July 1921, the term ‘our leader’
(‘unser Führer’)
became gradually more common. But its meaning was still interchangeable with the purely functional ‘chairman of the NSDAP’. There was nothing ‘heroic’ about it. Nor had Hitler endeavoured to build up a personality cult around himself. But Mussolini’s triumph evidently made a deep impression on him. It gave him a role-model. Referring to Mussolini, less than a month after the ‘March on Rome’, Hitler reportedly stated: ‘So will it be with us. We only have to have the courage to act. Without struggle, no victory!’ However, the reshaping of his self-image also reflected how his supporters were beginning to see their leader. His followers portrayed him, in fact, as Germany’s ‘heroic’ leader before he came to see himself in that light. Not that he did anything to discourage the new way he was being portrayed from autumn 1922 onwards. It was in December 1922 that the
Völkischer Beobachter
for the first time appeared to claim that Hitler was a special kind of leader – indeed
the
Leader for whom Germany was waiting. Followers of Hitler leaving a parade in Munich were said ‘to have found something which millions are yearning for, a leader’. ByHitler’s thirty-fourth birthday, on 20 April 1923, when the new head of the SA, Hermann Göring – thirty years old, Bavarian born but at the latest from the time of his military training in Berlin a self-styled Prussian, handsome (at this time), wildly egocentric, well-connected and power-hungry, bringing the glamour of the World War decorated flying ace as well as important links to the aristocracy to the Nazi Movement – labelled him the ‘beloved leader of the German freedom-movement’, the personality cult was unmistakable. Political opponents scorned it. That it was not without its mark on Hitler himself is plain. Eckart told Hanfstaengl, while on holiday with Hitler near Berchtesgaden in the Bavarian alps bordering on Austria in May 1923, that Hitler had ‘megalomania halfway between a Messiah complex and Neroism’, after he had allegedly compared the way he would deal with Berlin with Christ throwing money-changers out of the temple.
    During 1923 there are indications in Hitler’s speeches that his self-perception was changing. He was now much more preoccupied than he had been in earlier years with leadership, and the qualities needed in the coming Leader of Germany. At no time before his imprisonment in Landsberg did he unambiguously claim those qualities for himself. But a number of