A History of the World (77 page)

Many of its leaders had been Jewish. Hitler, who had been an elected military representative during the Red Republic, understood early on the advantage to an agitator of having a single easily definable enemy. In that milieu of small, angry meetings and small, angry parties, he made a name for himself for the extremism of his language and his one-culprit rhetoric. In the bars and cafés of Munich, German army ‘handlers’ used him to promote their campaign against the left and against the moderate republican government in far-off Berlin. Jews, Bolsheviks, swindling capitalists and the traitors who had allowed Germany to be beaten were all, for Hitler, essentially parts of the same nest of enemies.

Apart from his time in the army, it could be said that up to then Hitler had really done nothing with his life except talk. He had made bad paintings, loafed around, lived off small amounts of family money . . . and talked. His rants about art, music, Germany, history and politics had echoed around the cheap boarding houses, cafés and bars of Linz, Vienna and Munich. Now, talking became his job.

Young Hitler is so buried under the leprous grime of his reputation, the Holocaust and our image of his pallid white face with its ridiculous moustache, that it is hard to imagine back to a time when he seemed charismatic. He clearly was, though. The small right-wing party he joined and which eventually evolved into the Nazi party quickly came to depend on him as their most popular speaker. He could hold a room for two hours of sarcasm, shouting, joking, smearing and preaching, interrupted by cheers, boos and laughter. In between denouncing the German government and the victorious
Allies, he was calling for Jews to be sent to concentration camps to keep them away from good Germans, and for them to be expelled from Germany. He was soon being compared to Luther and even to Napoleon. His audience, which seems to have been made up of small-time businessmen, shopkeepers, clerks, demobilized soldiers and a surprisingly high proportion of women, found him the best entertainment, as well as the best teacher, to be had.

By the early 1920s Germany seemed to many to be on the edge of Communist revolution. Right-wing ‘folkish’ thinkers and military men were constantly debating about how to respond. They discussed the need to depose the government in Berlin, so keen to appease the French; to win back a larger German homeland; and to rebuild the German fighting forces. Paramilitary groups stockpiled guns. Funding was available from business tycoons terrified of socialist revolution. Parties formed, quarrelled, split and reformed. General Ludendorff, who had helped lead Germany in the war, re-emerged as a hero of the right. And Munich, after its brief experience of revolution, had become a centre of reactionary thinking. Hitler was in the right place. He had formed alliances with paramilitary organizers, notably Ernst Röhm. He had won powerful admirers in the army, including Ludendorff. He had the backing of extremist newspapers and gangs of organized thugs.

He had even personally designed the flag that would soon be known globally, the black swastika on a white circle against a red background. The swastika had long been a symbol of German anti-Semitic thinking. An ancient and common symbol of happiness, used by Hindus, Buddhists and animists, it had become popular after the German archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann uncovered examples from ancient Troy and proposed them as signs of Aryan identity. The swastika was used by German nationalists before Hitler: what he did was to refine a design and colour combination for the tense, rotated broken cross to make it, in the words of a recent art critic, ‘perhaps the most potent graphic emblem ever devised’.
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Hitler may have been a bad painter but he was a brilliant propagandist, obsessively careful about image. He had hundreds of photographs of himself taken in different poses and different clothes, hats and coats, rejecting almost all of them until he got the right image of the lonely, driven leader. He pored over the uniforms of his
storm-trooper guards and his party followers, as well as later architectural visions, with an attention he never gave to policy or bureaucracy. In an age of political brands, Hitler was an evil genius of a brand-manager.

How had he come, then, to find himself in prison in 1924? He had led a ludicrously bungled attempt at a coup, initially against the regional government in Bavaria but directed ultimately against Berlin. His party, the German Workers’ Party, which became the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, or NSDAP, ‘Nazi’ for short, was still relatively small. But the general movement of ‘patriotic organizations’ and similar parties was big. German army generals and even the local political rulers in Munich seemed broadly sympathetic. By the autumn of 1923 there had been long discussions about overthrowing the government, a putsch to be led either by the army or by the paramilitary groups, or perhaps following a Mussolini-style march on the capital. Hitler, by now described as ‘the German Mussolini’, believed that, given the right impetus, Ludendorff, with the army in Bavaria, would join in a general uprising against Berlin. It wasn’t an entirely unreasonable hope. All that was needed was the spark.

This came from the barrel of Hitler’s Browning revolver at around 8.40 p.m. on 8 November 1923, in a huge beer-hall, Munich’s Bürgerbräukeller. Beer-halls were, and are, where Munichers did their politics – large, cavernous spaces well suited for speeches and high emotion. That night, most of the leading men of the city had gathered for a long-advertised anti-Communist meeting – there were about three thousand people in the hall. Gustav Ritter von Kahr, a right-wing politician now installed as Bavaria’s leader, was in full flow when storm-troopers led by Hermann Goering, the former fighter ace, burst into the room.

Immediately, Hitler jumped onto a chair, fired his pistol at the ceiling and declared that the Bavarian government was deposed and a national revolution had begun. He shepherded the political leaders and a general into a neighbouring room, and told them they would join him in a new German government. If things went wrong, he had a bullet in his gun for all of them, including himself, and he later declared to the crowd: ‘Either the German revolution begins tonight or we will all be dead by dawn!’
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Ludendorff was fetched and, though taken aback, joined in. Hitler announced that in order to ‘save the
German people’, there would be a march ‘on that sinful Babel, Berlin’.
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He had assumed that the army and Bavaria’s political elite would be marching behind him. Faced by his storm-troopers and his threats, they had briefly agreed, but given neither proper preparation nor plan, they had no intention of starting a civil war. So as soon as they could they defected, and Hitler’s putsch began to sputter. While his restless mob was wondering what to do, the army and police were closing in. What the historian Alan Bullock called Hitler’s ‘revolution by sheer bluff’ had failed. The following morning, he and Ludendorff led about two thousand Nazis on a march through Munich towards the war ministry, though it was unclear just what they meant to do next. In face of a police cordon, shooting broke out, killing four policemen and sixteen Hitler supporters. Hitler either threw himself to the ground, or was pushed; the man standing next to him was killed. Ludendorff, the old soldier, had simply kept on marching towards the police. They stood aside. But nobody followed him.

Though some of the other putschists escaped, Ludendorff turned himself in and Hitler was arrested at a friend’s house. The trial of nine men accused of high treason began on 24 February 1924 in the former Munich infantry school. Hitler, perhaps embarrassed that he had ducked down so quickly at the first gunshots, then proved himself again a master propagandist. He took full responsibility, denied nothing, and spent much of the trial delivering long and defiant political speeches. The judges seem to have been largely sympathetic, and for the crime of treason, which had led to the deaths of police, hostage-taking and robbery, Hitler was given a sentence of only five years. He would in fact be let out much more quickly, serving just thirteen months. Had he been standing a foot to one side during the coup and been shot, or had he received a more serious sentence, or had he served the sentence he was given, then undoubtedly mankind would have been luckier. Hitler’s closing speech at his trial made him famous around Germany. One of the many adulatory letters sent to him in prison was from a young PhD student in Heidelberg called Josef Goebbels. Even his jailers saluted him with ‘Heil Hitler’ and, partly through
Mein Kampf
, he had ample time to further develop his personality cult – though he never developed his ideas. There was still a long way to go before Hitler would finally be installed as German
Chancellor, in 1933, able to dismantle the legal state and build his regime of expansionist terror. That journey depended upon a new world economic crisis that would snuff out Germany’s slow and steady postwar return to economic health; and upon bad leadership by other countries as well as a series of disastrous mistakes by rival German politicians.

For his part, Hitler had learned the hard way that, in order to seize power, he could not simply co-opt the German army, however bitter and resentful many of its officers might be. He would have to win politically.

In many ways this suited his talents better. By 1924 he had already assembled his armoury of uniformed intimidation, quiet business backing and extreme rhetorical provocation, which would take him nine years later to power in Berlin. The leader cult was growing. Inside the party, which had been banned but which he would refound in 1925, he had established the principle of personal leadership untrammelled by democracy or voting, which he would later impose on all of Germany. His chaotic working patterns, which forced those around him to second-guess what he might want, thereby allowing him to distance himself from any mistakes, were also becoming familiar. Above all, the ideology was clear: a single worldwide enemy, the Jewish people, were behind all the misfortunes Germany had suffered. They must be eradicated.

By the time of the Munich putsch, Hitler had also decided that Germany could not be content with regaining her old imperial borders and uniting herself with Austria, nor simply with wreaking revenge on France. Germany needed more land. It could be found only in the east, including Russia, which was now under Jewish control and therefore a lesser civilization. In
Mein Kampf
we read that ‘the new Reich must again set itself on the march of the Teutonic knights of old, to obtain by the German sword sod for the German plough’.
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Later, Hitler says, ‘State boundaries are made by man and changed by man.’ The German nation is ‘penned into an impossible area’, and a reckoning with France is only useful ‘if it offers the rear cover for an enlargement of our people’s living space in Europe’.
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No clearer warning of the attacks to be launched on Poland, the Ukraine and Russia herself could have been given. It was all there, in black and white, from the day
Mein Kampf
was first published.

For Germans of the 1920s, the trauma of near-starvation in the latter part of the Great War was a recent memory. Britain’s Royal Navy had imposed a blockade on Germany that had reduced middle-class Germans to chewing unripe potatoes – Germany’s attempt in turn to starve Britain through her U-boat campaign was, as we have seen, a close-run failure. But though Germany had been defeated on the Western Front, she had triumphed in the east against the Russian empire. During the Great War, Germans had ruled their own mini-empire in Poland, the Ukraine and Belarus. In Hitler’s view, to stop Germany being starved again, she had once more to seize the rich agricultural lands to her east. One recent historian of the mass killings in the ‘bloodlands’ of central Europe puts it like this: ‘The true Nazi agricultural policy was the creation of an eastern frontier empire . . . by taking fertile land from Polish and Soviet peasants – who would be starved, assimilated, deported or enslaved. Rather than importing grain from the east, Germany would export its farmers to the east.’
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Naive credulity, too, is part of the recurring pattern of human history. Had so many people who thought themselves worldly-wise, from Stalin to the British government, American ambassadors to French statesmen, not preferred to believe that Hitler didn’t really mean it, some of the greatest disasters of the twentieth century could have been avoided. There seems to be a deep desire to look at our enemies and believe we are looking in a mirror – that, deep down, we are all the same – so that we flinch from the rare reality of outspoken, frank evil. In this case it was all there, in cold print, unequivocal, from the beginning. Whatever one might say of Hitler, nobody could accuse him of not giving fair warning.

Hitler and the Rest of Us

Now all the cards fell badly. Whole library shelves have been filled with meticulous accounts of German politics in the years after Hitler’s brief imprisonment, when he was able to rapidly rebuild the Nazi party and take it via elections to power in 1933. Had Germany had a stronger political hub, able to withstand the buffeting of the Communist left and the Fascist right, things could have been different. Had the German constitution not already put effective power into the hands of a
Chancellor legitimately able to bypass the German parliament, the Reichstag, Hitler’s ascent would have been far harder. Had the other European powers acted to punish his early aggressive acts, in the Rhineland, over the Austrian
Anschluss
and the taking of the German-speaking Czech lands, the putscher himself might have been putsched well before the fatal year, 1939. There were generals waiting and willing; but the politicians of democratic Britain and France failed them.

For it is wrong to see the rise of the Nazis as a purely German phenomenon, or even as a purely European failure. There is an American view that in 1941/2 the US had to come to rescue Europe, for a second time, from a great evil that had really nothing to do with the New World. This is hardly the full tale. The Hitler story could not have happened without a worldwide failure of leadership, including by the United States. In the 1920s and 1930s the world was already inextricably interconnected. The First World War had left a badly divided-up Europe and Middle East. This was the fault of the US President Woodrow Wilson, as well as of the British and French leaders Lloyd George and Clemenceau. But the ineffectual League of Nations, partly designed by Americans, was then abandoned by the US, to dither and witter during America’s age of isolationism. Europe was left to deal by herself with the consequences of American state-making – a patchwork Yugoslavia, a swollen Poland, the German minorities in Czechoslovakia and Danzig. The sense of grievance in Germany and Austria was not conjured up by the Nazis. They were immersed in grievance. It was what they swam in.