WHAT’S THE STORY?

TODAY is the centenary of the founding of the German Workers Party (the Deutsche Arbeiterpartei or DAP), the political party which would later become the National Socialist Party, the Nazis.

No sane person will be celebrating this 100th birthday of organised Nazism, but there is perhaps an important lesson to be learned about how a populist nationalist with a perverse philosophy can hijack a small group and turn it into a mass movement – for one of the DAP’s most infamous members was Adolf Hitler.

HOW DID IT START?

FROM the outset, the German Workers Party was highly nationalistic and anti-Semitic in nature. It was co-founded by Anton Drexler, a locksmith from Berlin who had been a member of the nationalist German Fatherland Party before going on to found the anti-Marxist group known as the Committee of Independent Workmen or the Free Workers Committee for a Good Peace.

That movement was going nowhere in the ferment of the post-war German state where the Weimar Republic was coming into being but had not been officially declared – that would not formally happen until August, 1919.

In mid-1918, however, Drexler met with fellow right-winger Karl Harrer, a journalist and founder of the Political Workers Circle (Politischer Arbeiter-Zirkel) who encouraged Drexler to develop the idea of a nationalist party that would have pronounced anti-Marxist and anti-Semitic views.

WHERE DID IT HAPPEN?

IN Bavaria, mostly. The Nuremberg industrialist Dr Paul Tafel persuaded Drexler to go further and found a political party. Tafel was a leader of the nationalist Pan-German Union, and he could see the potential for a new movement that would appeal to the nationalism of the German working class at the same time as persuading them to reject Marxism.

On January 5, 1919, Drexler and Harrer joined with Hermann Esser, Gottfried Feder and Dietrich Eckart – the latter a poet and satirist who would mentor Hitler – to found the German Workers Party in a hotel in Munich.

At first the new party struggled to grow. Alan Bullock in his biography of Hitler’s early years wrote: “Its total membership was little more than Drexler’s original forty (Committee of Independent Workmen), activity was limited to discussions in Munich beer-halls, and the committee of six had no clear idea of anything more ambitious.”

SO WHAT HAPPENED NEXT?

NOT what but who – Hitler. At this point it should be noted that Hitler did not join the party of his own volition. He was still in the German Army and working in intelligence as a political educator, and by his own admission in Mein Kampf, Hitler was developing his oratorical skills in convincing soldiers to reject Marxism and embrace nationalism.

His commanding officer ordered Hitler to check out the German Workers Party and he duly attended its meeting in a Munich beer hall on September 12, 1919. It was an encounter, effectively a piece of espionage, that would change history.

Hitler recalled: “When I arrived that evening in the guest room of the former Sternecker Brau, I found approximately 20–25 persons present, most of them belonging to the lower classes. The impression it made upon me was neither good nor bad. I felt that here was just another one of these many new societies which were being formed at that time.

“In those days everybody felt called upon to found a new party whenever he felt displeased with the course of events and had lost confidence in all the parties already existing. Thus it was that new associations sprouted up all round, to disappear just as quickly, without exercising any effect or making any noise whatsoever.”

EXCEPT THIS PARTY DID MAKE A NOISE.

HITLER was told by his army bosses to join, and he was happy to do so because its philosophy reflected his own views. It was in the party that Hitler found his voice and within months thousands would attend to hear him speak out his extreme nationalist and anti-Semitic views.

He formed the view that Drexler and Harrer were not up to the job of leading the party and later wrote “what was needed was one fleet as a greyhound, smooth as leather, as hard as Krupp steel”. Guess who?

The following year Hitler turned the German Workers Party into the National Socialist German Workers Party, the Nazis, and the rest as they say, is history.