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Part One
REBIRTH AND REBUILDING
(1925–1928)
Scarcely a week passed, but a huge procession of starving excitable men would march through the streets. There was a constant tension in the air. One government followed another. The Marxists held huge mass meetings. The population was split up into tiny parties. The atmosphere was teeming with all sorts of plans. There was no unity of purpose anywhere.
— A government clerk who joined the Nazi Party, 19261
This horrible sense of insecurity kills people. You get trained in a skill, and afterward you are out on the street. . . . You have a horrible feeling of uselessness.
— Paul R., a twenty-year-old cabinetmaker2
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Herr Hitler is, if I may say so, a born popular speaker.
—German army recruit, 1919
It was the unlikeliest moment in the unlikeliest of venues. On a winter night in 1925, a convicted traitor was mounting a political comeback in the same beer hall where he had committed treason only sixteen months before. Surrounded by delirious supporters, welcomed by a Bavarian band blasting his favorite marching tunes, and protected by a massive turnout of Munich’s finest — one of Germany’s largest police forces — Adolf Hitler, at thirty-five, was serving notice that he was back.
The fiery-eyed Nazi leader had been written off in 1923 when he attempted a coup d’état that failed. Now, improbably, he was staging his own rebirth. It was just the kind of bold stroke that had appealed to the dreamy Austrian throughout his checkered and ill-directed life.
Adolf Hitler was born in 1889 in the tiny Austrian burg of Braunau am Inn. He was the fourth child of the third wife of a local customs official, Alois Hitler, who drank heavily and often beat his sons and his wife. While taking his morning wine one day at the local pub, Alois keeled over, dead at the age of sixty-five; Adolf was only thirteen. Released from his father’s dominance, the restless teenager quit school three years later, at sixteen, and declared himself an artist who also had an interest in architecture. For two years, he drew and painted everything in sight, and redesigned (in his head) every major building in Linz, the town where his father had relocated the family when Hitler was nine years old. Then, at eighteen, young Hitler migrated to the bright lights of Vienna, Austria’s capital. There the headstrong youth met his comeuppance: he was summarily rejected for admission to the renowned Academy of Fine Arts. “Test drawing unsatisfactory — few heads,” noted the examiners.1 Without a high school diploma, he dared not follow the examiners’ suggestion that he might apply to architecture school instead.
Devastated, Hitler was soon homeless. After several months of uncertain living arrangements, including at least a few nights on park benches, the vagrant young man fetched up in a men’s shelter, where he earned a meager living by drawing postcard-style paintings of Viennese landmarks for the tourist trade. In his spare time, he became a voracious reader of history, architecture, and politics, often picking up free pamphlets in all-night cafés or spending long hours in a small bookstore. He began lecturing his hapless housemates on the evils of international political movements such as socialism.
By the age of twenty-four, Hitler was on the lam from his draft board. He was due for service in the army of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, an enlistment that could last for years. Hopping a train to Germany, he stepped down in the first big city he came to: Munich. The capital of Germany’s southernmost state, Bavaria, Munich gleamed with monuments, museums, and stately architecture; Hitler fell in love. Yet he was penurious, aimless, and stuck in a rut, still peddling watercolors and sketches of city sights. After little more than a year, however, the draft dodger was rescued by the unlikeliest of events: war.
The First World War broke out in the summer of 1914. Like many Austrians and Germans, Hitler was caught up in war fever. Bitterly rejecting the multicultural Austro-Hungarian Empire of his birth as a misbegotten political construct, he eagerly embraced a sense of German ethnicity. He joined excited mobs on a Munich square, loudly welcoming the coming war. He eagerly enlisted in a Bavarian regiment that did not reject him because of his Austrian origins. He shared what Ernst Simon, a German Jew, referred to as the “intoxicating joy” of going to fight for his homeland.2 The young Hitler, who had constantly played war games on the meadows near his boyhood home, was soon on his way to fight the real thing on the fields of Flanders and in northern France. Soldiering was Hitler’s first actual job. War became the primal transformative experience of his life, giving shape, purpose, and discipline to a chaotic existence.
Hitler began to grow up. The foot soldier showed skill in improvisation and self-preservation. Following several harrowing months on the front lines, he cadged a relatively safe and cushy job as staff courier at regimental headquarters far behind the trenches. While his messenger’s job gave him a “warm, lice-free stretcher” to sleep on, his forays to the front put him often, though briefly, in mortal danger. He was wounded twice. Promoted from buck private to private first class, Hitler was awarded an Iron Cross Second Class and an Iron Cross First Class. The value of his medals is uncertain: sixty other men from his regiment received the First Class award on the same day.
Hit by a gas attack in 1918, Hitler lay recovering in a hospital north of Berlin when news arrived that Germany had surrendered to the Allied powers. After five years of slaughter, with almost two million German soldiers killed, the fatherland was defeated. Adding to the tragedy — at least in Hitler’s eyes — was the fact that the long-reigning monarchy of Wilhelm II had been deposed. A Social Democratic–led revolution had turned Germany into a democratic republic.
Germans were shocked by their generals’ capitulation, a prospect about which they had not been warned. Like many Germans, Hitler was stunned and angered by the news of the country’s defeat. He later claimed that Germany’s loss and its conversion into a democracy had persuaded him on that very day to enter politics. Yet he showed no immediate signs of seeking a profession in public life. Half a year after hostilities ended, the rifle-toting soldier was still in the army while six million other German servicemen demobilized. With no training, no skills, and no prospects, the uneducated Hitler’s only hope for a roof, a cot, and three meals a day was the military.
Luck was on Hitler’s side. After he returned to Munich, the thirty-year-old was eventually attached to a new training and propaganda unit. Its job was to combat the rampant Marxist ideas circulating among recruits in the new, slimmed-down army — the Reichswehr. The unit’s commander, Captain Karl Mayr, regarded Hitler as a “tired stray dog looking for a master.”3 But Mayr needed lecturers for his propaganda program, so he sent Hitler to a one-week course in political history at the University of Munich. This serendipitous assignment unlocked Hitler’s talents as a declaimer and debater. His fierce argumentative skills surfaced in after-class discussions in the hallways, which were noted by his professor. Captain Mayr dispatched Hitler to harangue new troops about German nationalism and the perfidy of Marxists (including Communists and Social Democrats) at a military camp outside Munich. Strident and full of examples drawn from his own casual but wide reading of history, Hitler enthralled his young students with patriotic and unabashedly anti-Semitic arguments. “Herr Hitler is, if I may say so, a born popular speaker,” wrote one soldier in a postcourse evaluation.”4
Hitler was again transformed. Through a week of talking, he had discovered his singular gift. “I could ‘speak,’ ” he noted with astonishment.5 The unpromoted private with the big mouth and bigger ego had stumbled into his life’s work.
In another fortuitous turn, a month later, Hitler’s path into politics opened. Curious about the burgeoning right-wing political scene, which was dominated by rejection of the parliamentary republic, he attended a meeting of the fledgling German Workers’ Party. He claimed that, at a gathering of several dozen attendees in a dim Munich pub, he stood up and demolished the argument of a speaker who favored Bavarian separation from Germany. Hitler, on the other hand, fiercely embraced pan-German unification, including Austria. The other man was haplessly driven from the room “like a wet poodle,” insisted Hitler — a possibly invented or embellished story.6 Whether the account is true or not, there is no question that Hitler was drawn to the little political group. A watershed was reached when Hitler decided to join the party. It was autumn of 1919.
The freshly minted new member of the German Workers’ Party wasted no time in asserting his rhetorical skill and authoritarian muscle. Though a neophyte, Hitler became the party’s chief stump speaker within five months. His maiden outing, in the capacious Hofbräuhaus, in February of 1920, turned into an uproarious melee. With his fiery orations, he was the attraction who could draw listeners and money to the party (in those days, people paid to hear a speech). As its rising star, Hitler gained control and elbowed aside the group’s cofounders. He added two words to the party’s name, restyling it the National Socialist German Workers’ Party. It was quickly nicknamed the Nazi Party (Nazi derives from Nationalsozialistisch, the German word for “national socialist”).
On a Munich political stage filled with right-wing groups vying for attention, Hitler’s high-flown rants attracted notice. Quickly regarded as the most dynamic speaker on the local beer-hall circuit, he became an act that people wanted to see. His rabid confidence, edgy ideas about race, politics, and foreign conquest, and theatrical speaking style often left him drenched in sweat. Women, in particular, were fascinated by the unmarried ex-soldier with the apocalyptic pronouncements (“Marxism . . . will overrun the rotten edifice of our national life”)7 and undiluted sense of messianic mission (“A new German Reich will rise again!”).8 Hitler rejected accommodation of the humiliations and burdens imposed by the 1919 Treaty of Versailles — including its “sole war guilt” clause and heavy reparations requirements. To listeners who despaired over Germany’s economic and political plight, his message was both sizzling and inspirational. His was a combative voice for frustrated and angry people.
Speaking in beer halls and even in private drawing rooms, the sharp-voiced Nazi leader turned his party into a fast-growing upstart “movement,” as he liked to call it. By early 1923, the Nazi Party could count twenty thousand members. After a busy s...
