Hitler at a German Workers' Party meeting

On the evening of Friday 12 September 1919 a few dozen people gathered in a side room of the Sterneckerbräu beer hall in Munich, near the Isartor gate. The meeting had been called by the German Workers’ Party (Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, DAP), one of the many small nationalist groups that had sprung up in Bavaria after the revolution and the fall of the monarchy. The engineer Gottfried Feder was giving a talk on “how and by what means capitalism can be eliminated”. Among the audience sat a thirty-year-old soldier in civilian clothes, Gefreiter Adolf Hitler. He was there not on his own initiative but on the instructions of the propaganda department of the Reichswehr command in Bavaria, headed by Captain Karl Mayr, who had his men keep an eye on the new parties in Munich. In the discussion Hitler sharply attacked one of the speakers, and the party’s chairman, Anton Drexler, was so impressed by his eloquence that he pressed his own pamphlet into his hand and invited him to join in the work. A few days later Hitler was a member of the DAP. Within fourteen years the party, which then had a few dozen active members, had carried him to power in Germany.

July or September

Some chronologies place this event in July 1919 and describe it as the “infiltration” of the party by an unknown corporal on behalf of the Reichswehr. Both parts of that statement need explaining. In July 1919 Hitler attended propaganda courses organised by Mayr’s department at the University of Munich, and on 22 July he was assigned to a team of agitators that worked at the Lechfeld military camp near Augsburg in the second half of August. It was then that his superiors discovered his talent as a speaker. He first came into contact with the German Workers’ Party, however, only on 12 September, and became a member in the second half of the month, probably about a week later. The key date is therefore the meeting at the Sterneckerbräu.

The word “infiltration” is also an exaggeration. The Reichswehr propaganda department did indeed send trusted soldiers to meetings of parties and political organisations, and Hitler went to the Sterneckerbräu in that capacity. Yet no report of his on DAP meetings has survived, and more recent research suggests that intelligence work and the network of informers in the strict sense were handled by a different section of the command. Nor was the party an enemy the army wanted to penetrate. The nationalist, anti-Marxist and antisemitic DAP was exactly the kind of group officers such as Mayr wished to encourage. Hitler did not slip into it like a spy; with the knowledge and consent of his superiors, he began to work in it. Nor was he, strictly speaking, a corporal. From November 1914 he held the rank of Gefreiter, roughly a senior private, which Polish and English texts often render as “corporal”.

Munich after the revolution

In the first half of 1919 Bavaria went through more upheavals than any other part of Germany. The revolution that swept away the German monarchies in November 1918 began in Munich on 7 November, two days before Berlin. The Independent Socialist Kurt Eisner became prime minister of republican Bavaria. On 21 February 1919 he was shot dead in the street by a young nationalist officer, Count Anton von Arco auf Valley. After the murder the state sank into chaos, and at the beginning of April the radical left proclaimed the Bavarian Soviet Republic in Munich, which the Communists soon took over. The legal Social Democratic government of Johannes Hoffmann fled to Bamberg and asked Berlin for help. At the turn of April and May government troops and volunteer Freikorps (PL) units sent by the minister Gustav Noske took the city. Several hundred people were killed, many of them shot without trial. A few months earlier the Freikorps had dealt in a similar way, though on a smaller scale, with the Spartacist uprising in Berlin.

The brief rule of the councils and its suppression shaped Munich for years. The middle classes, officers and officials had lived through the “Red Terror” as a nightmare, and the fact that several of the leaders of the Soviet Republic were intellectuals of Jewish origin was exploited by propaganda that equated Bolshevism with the Jews. The city was full of demobilised soldiers, the unemployed, refugees from lost territories and Russian émigrés. Dozens of “völkisch” – ethnic-nationalist – groups, circles and associations were active there, preaching the unity of a nation of blood, hatred of Marxism and the Jews, and revenge for defeat. Many were connected with the Thule Society, a secret nationalist association that had recruited volunteers to fight the Soviet Republic. In the summer of 1919 this mood was compounded by anger at the Treaty of Versailles, signed on 28 June, which the nationalists at once called a “Diktat” and a “disgrace”.

In this situation the army became a political force. On 10 May 1919 a provisional Reichswehr was set up in Bavaria. Its command, Gruppenkommando 4 under Generalmajor Arnold von Möhl (PL), decided that soldiers who until recently had been electing soldiers’ councils had to be “immunised” against Bolshevism. From 30 May propaganda in the army was the business of department Ib/P under Captain Karl Mayr, a General Staff officer who had worked with the Thule Society during the Soviet Republic.

A soldier without a future

Hitler returned to Munich on 21 November 1918 after treatment in the hospital at Pasewalk, where he had learned of the revolution and the armistice. He had no profession, no family and no home, and the army gave him a roof over his head, food and pay. He therefore did everything he could to put off demobilisation for as long as possible. From December to January he guarded prisoners of war at a camp in Traunstein. In February 1919 the soldiers of his unit elected him their spokesman (Vertrauensmann), and on 15 April, during the Soviet Republic, a member of the soldiers’ council of the reserve battalion. He thus worked with the revolutionary authorities, something he never mentioned afterwards. After the fall of the Soviet Republic he testified before a military commission of inquiry against other members of the council and, according to researchers, contributed to their conviction. In this way he won the trust of the new authorities.

Historians disagree about the views Hitler held at this time. He himself claimed in “Mein Kampf” that he had become an antisemite in Vienna and that in November 1918 he had decided to become a politician. The surviving sources from 1918–1919, however, show rather a soldier drifting with events. Only the summer of 1919 brought clear changes: in the Reichswehr courses Hitler found the language and ideas he would use for the rest of his life, and he spoke in public for the first time.

Captain Mayr’s courses

Department Ib/P organised so-called anti-Bolshevik courses in Munich for officers and selected soldiers, who were then to conduct “educational work” in their units. The first course began on 5 June 1919 in the buildings of the Ludwig Maximilian University. The lecturers were nationalist professors and writers, among them the historian Karl Alexander von Müller and Gottfried Feder, who argued that the root of Germany’s misfortunes was “interest slavery” and international finance capital, which he identified with the Jews. According to more recent research based on the command’s files, Hitler attended the third course, from 10 to 19 July 1919. Older literature assumed that he was on the first, in June, and some biographers write of two courses. Karl Alexander von Müller recalled that during a break he noticed a soldier passionately haranguing a group of listeners and drew Mayr, his old schoolfellow, to his attention.

On 22 July Mayr assigned Hitler to a 26-man “enlightenment detachment” commanded by Rudolf Beyschlag. Its task was to “immunise” against Bolshevism the soldiers at the Lechfeld camp near Augsburg, where many returning prisoners of war were held. The Lechfeld course took place on 20–24 August. Hitler proved the most persuasive speaker in the team. Participants praised his temperament and the clarity of his arguments in their reports, while a company commander asked that the lectures avoid overly blatant antisemitism, which might put listeners off. Mayr began to treat Hitler as a trusted collaborator. On 16 September, a few days after the Sterneckerbräu meeting, Hitler, on Mayr’s instructions, replied to a letter from one of the course participants, Adolf Gemlich, who had asked about the “Jewish question”. In this, his first surviving political text, Hitler called for an “antisemitism of reason” whose “final aim” must be “the removal of the Jews altogether”.

An evening at the Sterneckerbräu

The German Workers’ Party had been founded on 5 January 1919 by Anton Drexler, a locksmith in the railway workshops, and the sports journalist Karl Harrer, who was linked to the Thule Society. They wanted to win workers over to nationalism and draw them away from the Social Democrats and the Communists. The party, however, functioned more as a discussion club than a political organisation. It met in the back rooms of beer halls, and its members were mainly Drexler’s workmates. Meetings drew anything from a dozen to a few dozen people.

According to the surviving attendance list, 41 people came to the meeting on 12 September. Hitler later wrote of twenty or twenty-five listeners, which suited his story of a party he had supposedly built from nothing. The meeting was held in the so-called Leiberzimmer, the room where former officers of the Bavarian Leib Infantry Regiment used to gather. Feder spoke about “interest slavery”. Hitler had already heard this lecture on his course and, so he claimed, was about to leave. The discussion kept him there. One of those present, whom Hitler calls a professor in “Mein Kampf”, argued for separating Bavaria from Prussia and uniting it with Austria. Hitler, an advocate of a strong, united Germany, answered him so vehemently that the professor, he writes, left the room before he had finished speaking. Later literature identified this speaker as Professor Adalbert Baumann, but some researchers doubt it, since his presence is recorded in the party’s files only at one of the November meetings. The scene itself is known solely from Hitler’s account, and he had every reason to embellish it. The irony is that in those same weeks it was Austria that was demanding union with Germany, and two days before the meeting the Treaty of Saint-Germain had forbidden any such union.

Hitler’s intervention impressed Drexler. According to a version that comes from Drexler himself, he remarked in Bavarian dialect that the man “had a gob on him” and could be made use of. As Hitler was leaving, Drexler caught up with him, handed him his pamphlet “Mein politisches Erwachen” (“My Political Awakening”), which described a worker’s path from socialism to nationalism and antisemitism, and invited him to the next meeting. In “Mein Kampf” Hitler described how he read it in the barracks the following morning and recognised his own experiences in it.

Party member

A few days later Hitler received a postcard informing him that he had been admitted to the party and inviting him to a committee meeting. It was held in a shabby tavern, the Altes Rosenbad. According to Hitler, the party treasury contained seven marks and fifty pfennigs, and its entire activity consisted of reading out minutes and answering letters. After two days’ reflection, he writes, he decided to become a member. How far this was his own decision and how far an order from his superiors can no longer be established. Mayr later claimed that he had told Hitler to join the DAP and help build it up, and even that the order had come from General Erich Ludendorff, which no documents confirm. What is certain is that Hitler stayed in the army, drew his pay and worked in the party with the knowledge of the command, even though soldiers were not allowed to belong to political parties.

Contrary to what he later wrote, he was neither the party’s founder nor its seventh member. He was the seventh member of its committee, responsible for propaganda and recruitment. On the membership list drawn up at the beginning of 1920 he was given number 555, but the numbering began at 501 to make the party look bigger, and the first members were entered alphabetically. In reality he was one of the first fifty-odd members. Drexler reminded him of this as late as 1940, in a draft letter that he probably never sent.

On 16 October 1919 Hitler spoke for the first time at a public party meeting, in the Hofbräukeller beer hall. 111 people attended. Hitler spoke after the main speaker, but it was his speech that was remembered, and the collection raised, by his account, 300 marks. From then on DAP meetings at which he spoke drew ever larger audiences. Money for posters and advertisements came from sympathisers, among them the writer Dietrich Eckart, and from the army: Mayr’s department and Franz von Epp, commander of a Bavarian Freikorps and later of a Reichswehr brigade. Captain Ernst Röhm, who brought soldiers and officers into the party, also joined.

From DAP to NSDAP

Harrer wanted the party to remain a small, discreet circle, and early in 1920, having lost his dispute with Hitler, he left. On 24 February 1920, at a meeting in the festival hall of the Hofbräuhaus attended by some two thousand people, Hitler read out the party’s 25-point programme, drawn up together with Drexler and influenced by Feder’s ideas. The programme demanded the union of all Germans in a “Greater Germany”, the abrogation of the Treaties of Versailles and Saint-Germain, land and colonies to feed the nation, the removal of Jews’ civil rights and the “breaking of interest slavery”. That day it was announced that the party would henceforth be called the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP). In the summer of 1920 the swastika became its emblem. On 31 March 1920 Hitler left the army and devoted himself entirely to politics.

In July 1921, when Drexler and part of the leadership were discussing a merger with another nationalist group, Hitler announced that he was leaving the party 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 by 553 votes to one, and Drexler was shunted into an honorary post. The party acquired a strong-arm force, the Sturmabteilung (SA), largely made up of former Freikorps men, and the leader principle.

The long shadow of the Sterneckerbräu meeting

The meeting of 12 September 1919 was a turning point for no one but Hitler himself. Outside the narrow circle of those present nobody noticed it at the time, and the DAP remained one of dozens of similar little groups. For him, however, it was the start of a path on which an army agitator without a profession became the leader of a mass movement. Without the support of the Reichswehr, which trained him, kept him and allowed him to work in the party, and without the atmosphere of Munich after the Soviet Republic, that career would probably never have begun. Hitler himself stressed throughout his life that he had entered politics as an unknown front-line soldier, and made this part of his legend. In 1933 the Nazis set up a party museum in the Sterneckerbräu, and the September 1919 meeting was presented as one of the movement’s founding moments.

The road ahead led through the Munich Putsch of 8–9 November 1923, in which Hitler and Ludendorff tried to overthrow the governments of Bavaria and the Reich, the trial and imprisonment in Landsberg, where he dictated “Mein Kampf”, the refounding of the party in 1925 and years on the margins. The Great Depression made the NSDAP the largest party in Germany, and a deal with the conservative elite led Paul von Hindenburg to appoint Hitler Reich Chancellor on 30 January 1933. All the strands that had appeared in Munich in the summer of 1919 later found their way into the policy of the Third Reich: hatred of the “November criminals”, the revision of Versailles, the union of Austria with Germany, which Hitler carried out in 1938, and antisemitism, which in the letter to Gemlich was still a call for the “removal” of the Jews and during the war became a programme for their annihilation.

Many of the people present at the party’s birth were later sidelined or destroyed by Hitler. Harrer died forgotten in 1926. After 1933 Drexler received the decoration for old fighters but no power. Feder served for a year and a half as a state secretary and then ended up in an academic backwater. Röhm was murdered on Hitler’s orders during the Night of the Long Knives in 1934. Karl Mayr, the officer who had sent Gefreiter Hitler to the Sterneckerbräu meeting, went over to the Social Democrats in the mid-1920s, fought the Nazis in the republican Reichsbanner organisation and died in Buchenwald concentration camp in February 1945.