Hitler

Bechstein, while a third heavy whip, made from hippopotamus hide, which he later carried, was given to him by Frau Büchner, the landlady of the Platterhof, the hotel where he stayed on the Obersalzberg.) Everyone who was someone in Munich would be invited at some stage to the soirées of Frau Bruckmann, by birth a Romanian princess, so that Hitler was brought into contact here with industrialists, members of the army and aristocracy, and academics. In his gangster hat and trenchcoat over his dinner jacket, touting a pistol and carrying as usual his dog-whip, he cut a bizarre figure in the
salons
of Munich’s upper-crust. But his very eccentricity of dress and exaggerated mannerisms – the affected excessive politeness of one aware of his social inferiority – saw him lionized by condescending hosts and fellow-guests. His social awkwardness and uncertainty, often covered by either silence or tendency to monologues, but at the same time the consciousness of his public success that one could read in his face, made him an oddity, affording him curiosity value among the patronizing cultured and well-to-do pillars of the establishment.
    Hitler was also a guest from time to time of the publisher Lehmann, for long a party sympathizer. And the wife of piano manufacturer Bechstein – to whom he had been introduced by Eckart – was another to ‘mother’ Hitler, as well as lending the party her jewellery as surety against 60,000 Swiss Francs which Hitler was able to borrow from a Berlin coffee merchant in September 1923. The Bechsteins, who usually wintered in Bavaria, used to invite Hitler to their suite in the ‘Bayerischer Hof’, or to their country residence near Berchtesgaden. Through the Bechsteins, Hitler was introduced to the Wagner circle at Bayreuth. He was transfixed at the first visit, in October 1923, to the shrine of his ultimate hero at Haus Wahnfried, where he tiptoed around the former possessions of Richard Wagner in the music-room and library ‘as though he were viewing relics in a cathedral’. The Wagners had mixed views of their unusual guest, who had turned up looking ‘rather common’ in his traditional Bavarian outfit of lederhosen, thick woollen socks, red and blue checked shirt, and ill-fitting short blue jacket. Winifred, the English-born wife of Wagner’s son Siegfried, thought he was ‘destined to be the saviour of Germany’. Siegfried himself saw Hitler as ‘a fraud and an upstart’.
    The rapid growth in the party during the latter part of 1922 and especially in 1923 that had made it a political force in Munich, itscloser connections with the ‘patriotic associations’, and the wider social contacts which now arose meant that funding flowed more readily to the NSDAP than had been the case in its first years. Now, as later, the party’s finances relied heavily upon members’ subscriptions together with entrance-fees and collections at meetings. The more came to meetings, the more were recruited as members, the more income came to the party, to permit yet more meetings to be held. Propaganda financed propaganda.
    But even now, the party’s heavy outgoings were difficult to meet, and funding was not easy to drum up in conditions of rip-roaring inflation. There was a premium on donations made in hard foreign currency. Lüdecke and Hanfstaengl, as already noted, were useful in this regard. Hanfstaengl also financed with an interest-free loan of 1,000 dollars – a fortune in inflation-ridden Germany – the purchase of two rotary presses that enabled the
Völkischer Beobachter
to appear in larger, American-style format. Rumours, some far wide of the mark, about the party’s finances were repeatedly aired by opponents in the press. Even so, official inquiries in 1923 revealed considerable sums raised from an increasing array of benefactors.
    One important go-between was Max Erwin von Scheubner-Richter, born in Riga, linguistically able, with diplomatic service in Turkey during the war, and later imprisoned for a time by Communists on his return to the Baltic. After the war he had participated in the Kapp Putsch, then, like so many counter-revolutionaries, made his way to Munich, where he joined the NSDAP in autumn 1920. A significant, if shadowy, figure in the early Nazi Party, he used his excellent connections with Russian émigrés, such as Princess Alexandra, wife of the Russian heir to the throne Prince Kyrill, to acquire funds directed at Ludendorff and, through him, deflected