I have been reading an engrossing book called "Germany's Hitler" by an author called Heinz A. Heinz, which I assume is a pen name. This work is not particularly well-written, but it is interesting in that it permits us a glimpse at a young, engaging activist called Adolf Hitler not yet maligned and made grotesque and one-dimensional by decades' worth of non-stop horror tales.
The author of this title comes across as a Brit of the Old School in some of his rather quaint and often stilted expressions. I have left his words and sentences intact, even though the effect can be odd. He wrote this book based on interviews with people who knew Hitler in his young, impoverished days, and the first edition was published by Hurst & Blankett, London, 1934. That puts this title in perspective.
I thought I would run a series of fascinating excerpts - taken like some snapshots at the very cusp of Hitler's taking power. These excerpts start right after Hitler was released from prison to where he had been sentenced for his part in a failed attempt at toppling the Weimar government by a military/political putsch and where he had dictated Mein Kampf in his prison cell in Landsberg.
Once released, he was still persona non grata and carefully watched and contained by the powers-that-be. In 1926, he was 37 years of age. He had quite a following and a somewhat regional Movement in Bavaria, but it was powerless and politically in the wilderness.
I'll take you through the early Hitler years from there. You will find many parallels to times we experience today:
Little by little, the newly risen Party began to gain ground, although Hitler still continued to be forbidden to speak at meetings. In the summer of 1926, however, he was able to address his followers on the occasion of an anniversary celebrated in Brunswick. An audience of twelve thousand followers served to show what progress had been made up to date.
Through the pressure of public opinion in Bavaria, this interdict was lifted from Hitler in the March of 1927, and once more his voice was welcomed with immense acclaim in Munich. The Party there made a great leap forwards, but it was immediately suppressed in Berlin by the half-Jewish, half-Polish Chief of Police Grzesinski, who was to earn such a sinister name for himself later through his enmity to the National Socialist Movement. It was this man who wished to "drive Hitler out of the country with a dog whip." Dr. Goebbels, however, stuck to his post, all this notwithstanding, and carried on with his work in the capital.
In August 1927 Hitler reviewed a march of his adherents numbering thirty thousand men, and over 100,000 heard the speech he made on that occasion. They had assembled in Nuremberg from every corner of Germany for this purpose, and dispersed again filled with fresh ardour to promote the Movement and win for it ever more and more support.
After the elections of May, 1928, twelve representatives of the Party appeared in the Reichstag. In August the ban on Hitler speaking in Berlin was removed and he gave a great address there in the Sportspalast.
The following year, 1929, saw an enormous augmentation in the members of the Party. In Berlin it had come to open fighting between the Communists, who erected barricades in the streets, and the police. At the end of the twelve months fully 175,000 people belonged to the National Socialists.
Early in the year 1930 a young National Socialist fell, whose death has come to have a special significance for the Party and the Movement. The shooting of Horst Wessel is one of the landmarks in this story.
This young man, the son of a clergyman, and who wrote a marching song for the Party, which has since gone by his name, was a law student. He embodied in himself the ideal of manly uprightness and modesty, high endeavor, dutifulness and simple living which Hitler desires to impress upon the whole of his following. He had drawn upon himself the enmity of the Communists by having converted a large number of them to his own political creed. One day young Wessel was at work in his room in a lodging house in Berlin when four Communists invaded it and shot him. So bitter indeed was their feeling against him that at the funeral his coffin had to be protected by the police. Even his grave called for protection, and young members of his own Troop still mount special guard, in honour, over it.
The next landmark was the opening of the Brown House in Munich on January 1st, 1931. Hitherto the direction of the Movement had been carried on from a retired house in the Schellingstrasse, but these premises had long been outgrown. They were by now wholly inadequate. Therefore, the Party made a purchase in the summer of 1930 of the unoccupied Barlow-Palais in the Briennerstrasse. This mansion was adapted in record time to its new requirements and uses after plans of Hitler's own, by National Socialist volunteer workmen. For the first time the Party beheld an outward sign of the power and strength to which it had attained in the creation of this fine Headquarters, which is now a part and parcel of the very self of Munich. The Brown House stands for everything dear to the heart and purpose of a National Socialist.
Notwithstanding all this progress, opposition was still fierce and obstinate. In the spring of 1931 the wearing of the Brown Shirt was proscribed. The "Brown Shirts" marched, all the same. They got their clothes torn off their backs in the streets, so they marched bare to their waist. They were flung into prison. Thousands of new members took their places. Bolshevism waged open war on the middle classes, and the Government merely looked on. During this period three hundred National Socialists were brutally murdered, one way or another, and over twenty five thousand sustained serious wounds and injuries.
A crisis was at hand.
The financial condition of the country was almost as bad as it had been ten years ago. Since the elections of March 1930 had resulted in triplicating the number of National Socialist deputies to the Reichstag, the President required Chancellor Brüning to dismiss the Reichstag and call for a new election. Brüning had always been a determined opponent of National Socialism: his cabinet was now dissolved. Although the standing of the Party had long been legalised (how could it be otherwise with so strong a representation in the Reichstag?), shortly before this election it was forbidden for officials in Prussia to give it their adherence and support.
These elections of September, 1930, were preceded by a propaganda campaign such as Germany had not yet witnessed. Hitler flooded the land with speakers, and organized meetings to be held high and low, near and far, in the most negligible little village as well as in the most important places. At least thirty thousand meetings were held every day for more than two months. The result was the capture of one hundred and seven seats in the Reichstag, and the Party rose in order of Party precedence from the ninth to the second in Germany.
"The National Socialist March on Berlin has started," announced the N.S. papers. Seven years after the so-called Putsch in Munich, Hitler had largely obtained his objective. Out of a voting population of 43,000,000 (36,000,000 went to the polls) the Party, extinguished a few years before, had obtained 107 mandates from 6,500,000 voters.
This was progress. But in the autumn of the same year the trial at Leipzig of three Reichswehr officers, who had shown interest in the National Socialist Party and were therefore accused of aiding and participating in an "outlaw" Movement, enabled Hitler to state his legal claims more prominently perhaps than he had ever done before. It was intolerable that these officers should be sentenced for desiring to belong to the second largest yet most significant political party in the Reich.
The Reich was in a tragic state by the end of 1931. Sixteen million people were earning less than the equivalent of an English pound a week. Emergency measure after emergency measure was passed without any appreciable effect, except that of growing despair, on the outlook for the nation. It was only the National Socialist Party who hammered away with their demand for power, and their confident assertion that they could weld and use it to every sort of public betterment.
(To be continued tomorrow)
Thought for the Day:
"The Congress doesn't run - it waltzes."
(Charles Joseph, Prince de Ligne)
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