The founding of the NSDAP

On the evening of Tuesday 24 February 1920 some two thousand people gathered in the festival hall of the Hofbräuhaus am Platzl beer hall in Munich. They had been invited by the small German Workers’ Party (Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, DAP), which only a few months earlier had been meeting in the back rooms of beer halls among a few dozen people. The main speaker was the physician and völkisch activist Johannes Dingfelder. After him the floor was taken by a thirty-year-old Reichswehr soldier, the party’s propaganda chief Adolf Hitler, who read out the party’s programme point by point: twenty-five demands, among them the union of all Germans in a single state, the abrogation of the peace treaties and the removal of Jews’ civil rights. That same evening it was announced that the party would henceforth be called the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, NSDAP). Thirteen years later its leader was Reich Chancellor, and the programme drawn up in Munich had, in its worst points, become the policy of the German state.

From DAP to NSDAP

The German Workers’ Party was founded on 5 January 1919 by Anton Drexler, a locksmith in the Munich railway workshops, and the sports journalist Karl Harrer, who was linked to the Thule Society. It was meant to win workers over to nationalism and antisemitism and take them away from the Social Democrats and the Communists. For its first months, however, it was more a discussion circle than a party. On 12 September 1919 Hitler came to one of its meetings, sent by the propaganda department of the Bavarian Reichswehr under Captain Karl Mayr, and soon joined it. He quickly proved to be the group’s best speaker. From 16 October 1919 he spoke at public meetings, which thanks to him drew ever larger audiences, and money from collections and from sympathisers, among them the writer Dietrich Eckart, paid for posters and advertisements.

The new member’s growing ambitions led to a dispute in the leadership. Harrer wanted the party to remain a small, closed circle; Hitler wanted to turn it into a mass movement that would take to the streets and fill great halls. At the beginning of 1920 Harrer lost and left, and Drexler became sole chairman. The party was still very small. According to the Historisches Lexikon Bayerns, at the turn of 1919 and 1920 it had 195 members. The first membership list, drawn up at the beginning of 1920, was numbered from 501 to make the group look bigger, and Hitler appeared on it as number 555.

Hitler pushed through the big meeting at the Hofbräuhaus against the misgivings of Drexler, who did not believe the party could fill so large a hall. The posters announced the evening under the slogan “Was uns not tut!” (“What we need”). The main lecture was given by Dingfelder, a physician who championed electro-homeopathy, a former activist in antisemitic organisations who published under the pseudonym Germanus Agricola. Then Hitler spoke. There were many opponents from the left in the hall, Independent Socialists and Communists, who interrupted the speakers with shouts, and according to accounts there was some scuffling. Hitler read out one point of the programme after another and, as he later wrote, the hall greeted them with ever louder applause.

In “Mein Kampf” he described this evening as the moment the movement was born. The first volume of the book ends with the scene in the Hofbräuhaus and with an image of a fire kindled in the hall, from whose glow a sword would be forged to restore Germany’s freedom. Dingfelder, who had after all been the main speaker, he mentioned only anonymously and dismissively. The story of how National Socialism was “born” in February 1920 later became one of the party’s founding myths, and every year on 24 February the Nazis celebrated the anniversary of the programme’s announcement at the Hofbräuhaus.

A new name

The change of name was proposed by a group around Hitler that included Eckart, the young propagandist Hermann Esser, Feder and the Reichswehr captain Ernst Röhm. The adjective “National Socialist” was not new. In the Habsburg monarchy a German Workers’ Party, a party of German workers from Bohemia and Moravia, had been active since the beginning of the twentieth century, and in May 1918 it adopted the name German National Socialist Workers’ Party (DNSAP). Its ideologue, the engineer Rudolf Jung, argued that socialism had to be taken away from the Marxists and fused with nationalism. The Munich party kept in touch with the Austrian and Sudeten “National Socialists” and met them in Salzburg in August 1920. The name was intended to attract nationalists and workers alike: the words “national” and “German” were aimed at the right, “socialist” and “workers’” at those who voted for the left.

Sources give slightly different dates for the change of name. According to the Historisches Lexikon Bayerns, the DAP was renamed the NSDAP at the meeting of 24 February. Some German studies add that the new name had already been registered a few days earlier, on 20 February, and that on 24 February it was merely announced publicly. Formally, as a registered association – the Nationalsozialistischer Deutscher Arbeiterverein (National Socialist German Workers’ Association) – the party appeared in the Munich register only from 12 October 1920. The Nazis themselves, and historians after them, regard the evening at the Hofbräuhaus as the birth of the NSDAP.

Twenty-five points

The Twenty-Five Point Programme was a short text written in slogans, with rallies and leaflets in mind. Historians disagree about its authorship. Drexler is usually regarded as the main author, with Hitler probably giving it its final form. The economic demands were related to the ideas of the engineer Gottfried Feder, whose slogan of “breaking interest slavery” found its way into point 11, but the extent of his contribution is disputed. Some researchers also point to the programme of the Austrian National Socialists as a model.

The first three points concerned foreign policy. The party demanded the union of all Germans in a “Greater Germany” on the basis of the right of peoples to self-determination, equal rights for the German nation and the abrogation of the Treaty of Versailles and the Treaty of Saint-Germain, which had forbidden the union of Austria with Germany. It also demanded “land and soil” – that is, colonies – “for the nourishment of our people and for settling our surplus population”.

Points four to eight were directed against the Jews. Only a “national comrade” (Volksgenosse) could be a citizen of the state, and only a person of “German blood”, regardless of religion, could be a national comrade. “No Jew, therefore, can be a national comrade,” the programme declared. Jews were to lose their citizenship, live in Germany as “guests” subject to the law on foreigners and be barred from public office. If food ran short, “members of foreign nations” were to be expelled. All non-Germans who had entered the country after 2 August 1914 were to leave it immediately. This point was aimed above all at Jews from Eastern Europe who had sought refuge in Germany during and after the war.

Points eleven to eighteen were meant to attract workers and small businessmen. They demanded the abolition of income “not earned by work”, the confiscation of war profits, the nationalisation of trusts, profit-sharing in large enterprises, an expansion of old-age pensions, the communalisation of the great department stores and their leasing to small traders, a land reform allowing expropriation without compensation, and the death penalty for “usurers and profiteers”. Further points called for Roman law to be replaced by a “German common law”, for state physical education of the young and for a “people’s army” in place of the professional army to which the Treaty of Versailles had condemned Germany. Point 23 announced control of the press: German-language newspapers could be published and financed only by Germans, and publications harmful to the “common good” faced a ban. Point 24 promised freedom of religion only to denominations that did not endanger the state or offend “the moral sense of the Germanic race”, professed “positive Christianity” and declared war on the “Jewish-materialist spirit”. The whole was summed up in the slogan highlighted in the text, “Gemeinnutz vor Eigennutz” (“the common good before individual good”). The last point demanded a strong central authority for the Reich, and the party’s leaders pledged to fight for the programme “if necessary at the risk of their lives”.

Nothing in the programme was original. Similar slogans had been proclaimed before the war by Pan-German and antisemitic organisations, and after the revolution by dozens of völkisch groups. The German historian Karl Dietrich Bracher called it a muddled, eclectic mixture of nationalism, racism and anti-capitalist wishful thinking. More important than its content was who proclaimed it and how.

The first months

When the programme was announced, Hitler was still a soldier. He left the army on 31 March 1920 and from then on devoted himself entirely to politics, living on fees for his speeches and help from wealthy sympathisers. Two weeks before that, during the coup in Berlin organised by Wolfgang Kapp and General Walther von Lüttwitz, he flew to the capital with Eckart to make contact with the putschists. The aircraft was piloted by the future Field Marshal Robert von Greim. By the time they reached the Reich Chancellery, the coup was already collapsing.

Paradoxically, the failure of the putsch in Berlin strengthened the extreme right in Bavaria. The Social Democratic government of Bavaria resigned, and the conservative Gustav von Kahr became prime minister. He turned Bavaria into a “cell of order” (Ordnungszelle), a refuge for nationalists and participants in the coup from all over Germany. In this climate the NSDAP could grow unhindered. According to the Historisches Lexikon Bayerns, between the announcement of the programme and January 1921 it held 46 public meetings in Munich. By the summer of 1920 it had about 1,700 members, and in 1921 about 3,000. On 20 May 1920, at a meeting of the party’s new branch in Starnberg, the red flag with a black swastika in a white circle appeared for the first time; it was soon adopted as the party’s emblem. In December 1920, with money raised by Eckart and General Franz von Epp, among others, the party bought the daily “Völkischer Beobachter”.

Drexler remained chairman, but the party’s real strength was Hitler. In July 1921, when the leadership, in his absence, discussed a merger with another National Socialist group, he announced that he was leaving and set a condition for his return: the chairmanship with dictatorial powers. The leadership gave way. On 29 July 1921 a members’ meeting elected him chairman, and Drexler was shunted into an honorary post. The party acquired a strong-arm force, the Sturmabteilung (SA), and the leader principle, which was later extended to the whole state.

The “unalterable” programme

The 1920 programme survived unchanged until the end of the Third Reich, even though many of its points remained on paper. When in the mid-1920s the party’s left wing, grouped around the brothers Gregor and Otto Strasser, wanted to revise it and give it a more anti-capitalist character, Hitler cut the dispute short at the Bamberg conference in February 1926 and declared the programme “unalterable”. In this way he closed the debate on ideas, since it was he who decided what the programme meant. In April 1928, courting peasant votes and industrialists’ money, he explained in a statement that the party stood on the basis of private property and that expropriation without compensation applied only to “Jewish land-speculation companies”. The demands for the nationalisation of trusts and profit-sharing were never carried out. In the second volume of “Mein Kampf” the demand for colonies was replaced by a programme of conquering living space (Lebensraum) in the east, at the expense of Russia and its neighbours.

The long shadow of the evening at the Hofbräuhaus

For its first years the NSDAP was one of many far-right parties, and a regional, Bavarian one at that. After the failed Munich Putsch of 8–9 November 1923, by which time it had about 55,000 members, it was banned. Hitler refounded it on 27 February 1925, again in Munich, but in the elections of May 1928 it won only 2.6 per cent of the vote across the Reich. Only the Great Depression and unemployment brought it mass support: 18.3 per cent and 107 seats in September 1930, and 37.3 per cent and the position of the largest party in the Reichstag in July 1932. On 30 January 1933 Hitler became chancellor, and a few months later the NSDAP was the only legal party in Germany.

The most important points of the 1920 programme were then carried out with ruthless consistency. The Nuremberg Laws of 1935 stripped Jews of German citizenship in the spirit of point four. In the same year, in line with point 22, Germany introduced conscription and built the Wehrmacht. The press, as point 23 had announced, came under state control. In March 1938 Hitler fulfilled point one by annexing Austria to the Reich, and in the autumn of that year the Sudetenland, inhabited by the very Germans among whom Austrian National Socialism had been born. The revision of Versailles, which he had made the party’s banner, led straight to the demands on Poland and to war in September 1939. Antisemitism, which in 1920 had meant “only” stripping Jews of their rights, became during the war a programme for their extermination.

In 1945 the NSDAP had about eight and a half million members. On 10 October that year the Allies formally dissolved it and banned its activities, and its leaders were tried at Nuremberg. The party christened in a beer hall on the Platzl in February 1920 left behind a Europe in ruins and millions murdered.