Young Hitler by Paul Ham

Author:Paul Ham [Ham, Paul]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Random House Australia
Published: 2017-02-15T05:00:00+00:00

Hitler’s oratorical skills were soon noticed. Feder’s brother-in-law and fellow speaker Karl Alexander von Müller mentioned to Mayr after that session, ‘Do you know that one of your trainees is a natural born public speaker?’5 Captain Mayr cast a fresh eye on his furious young protégé, duly rewarding Hitler’s ‘good work’ in ratting on his fellow soldiers and his growing reputation as an impassioned defender of Germany by promoting him to a new ‘political’ role in the regimental Demobilization Office where his oratorical skills could be used to advantage. This was a job in an ‘Enlightenment Squad’6 at the army base in Lechfeld. In this role, Hitler would serve as one of twenty-six instructors, lecturing returning servicemen in the economic and political conditions at home.

In substance like Feder’s, in style far more vitriolic, his presentations were soon the talk of Lechfeld. It was the speaker, not the content of his speeches, that amazed those who heard them: it was the way he spoke, on familiar and well-trodden themes, that enraptured his listeners. He appealed to their most basic emotions – fear, envy, blame, hatred – and exhorted them to target the Jews and communists, who, he claimed ad nauseam, were responsible for Germany’s humiliation. His audiences rapidly grew. Hitler quickly realized that a message of aggressive anti-Semitism struck a chord with many German people, especially the lower-middle classes who had lost most in the post-war economic crisis. By focusing their resentment, like a beam through a magnifying glass, on a single, detested target, Hitler saw that he could unleash the pent-up rage of a people who yearned for someone to blame for Germany’s post-war misery.

As such, ‘the Jews’ served as the perfect scapegoat for this would-be populist and soap-box orator. They were widely unpopular, electorally insignificant and anathema to right-thinking Lutherans. And by stoking Bavaria’s latent anti-Semitism into full-blown hatred, Hitler found that he could draw accolades to himself and carve out a new life as a propagandist, an organizer, perhaps a politician. This was not pure opportunism: rather, a potent mixture of the viscerally personal and the brazenly populist, a process by which Hitler’s own political ambitions and society’s hatred of the Jews became mutually reinforcing.

‘Like a sponge, Hitler sucked up popular anti-Jewish sentiment,’ writes his biographer Volker Ullrich. ‘His turn towards fanatical anti-Semitism, which he would later claim had originated in Vienna, actually took place amidst the revolution and counter-revolution in Munich.’7

In fact, Hitler’s ‘conversion’ to extreme anti-Semitism drew on deeper impulses than his exposure to these post-war upheavals. The anti-Semitic mood in Bavaria, which by now had become an autonomous state within the Weimar Republic, ignited his memories of his ‘exposure’ to Jewish people in Vienna and Munich before and during the war. And these memories acquired a twisted, toxic quality in a mind that would soon identify the Jews as a ‘race’ of parasites that posed an existential threat to Germany.

Blaming a defenceless minority for Germany’s ills distracted attention from the real cause – a world

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