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It's September 1919. It's just under a year since Adolf Hitler returned from World War I. He's an orphan and maintains only limited contact with his surviving siblings. He has no formal career to fall back on. The war may be over, but Hitler has been desperate to remain a soldier. Hitler's commanding officer is a man called Captain Karl Mayer. Captain Mayer heads up a unit conducting surveillance on radical political groups in Munich.
Hitler found himself footloose, adrift. The military wanted to keep tabs on radical groups of all kinds fomenting revolution in Munich. So they hired Hitler. Hitler stayed in the military and he became basically a spy. The army have their eyes on one group in particular, the German Workers' Party.
And the whole reason that he goes near what becomes the Nazi party, the German Workers' Party, is because he's told to go and spy on it by his local commander. Captain Mayer feels he's a loyal person, so he goes along to a meeting of this German Workers' Party. The introduction to this party will prove to be a turning point in history. This young man is about to become more than just a soldier, more than just an army spy.
The world will rue the day that Adolf Hitler discovered his voice. My name is Paul McGann and welcome to the series that explores the hidden lives of tyrants. In this episode we return to Germany in the early 20th century. This is the story of Hitler's early years and this is Real Dictators. A handful of men have gathered in a Munich restaurant. They're an eclectic bunch of disenchanted intellectuals, ex-soldiers, angry workers,
Glasses thud down on the tables. Bavarian beer slops onto the floor. Adolf Hitler stands in the throng. By now the elegant facial hair he sported as a soldier in Flanders has morphed into his trademark toothbrush moustache. Amidst the crowd, this spy is unremarkable, except that his hand clutches a small notebook rather than a frothy stein of beer. A succession of speakers clambers up to the makeshift stage to pontificate on Germany's ills.
The anti-communist and anti-Semitic rhetoric flows as freely as the booze. One man gets up. He declares that Germany is finished. Bavaria should break off from the country. It should unite with Austria to form a brand new South German nation. Something hits a chord with Hitler. He has no time for this separatism. He is all about bringing German-speaking peoples together under one roof, not splitting off into petty factions. So, Adolf Hitler...
Army spy crosses the Rubicon and begins to address the very crowd he's been sent here to observe. His tirade is so brutal, the previous speaker is forced from the room by the baying crowd. This workers party will never be the same again. Professor Thomas Weber. He jumps up during a meeting, he immediately connects with the members there. For the first time since the end of the war, he has found a new surrogate family, he has found people with whom he can connect.
Many in the military share Hitler's political views. Indeed, Hitler has to some extent been radicalized by the army. Hitler's bosses are impressed when they hear about his speech. They're more than happy for him to continue attending party meetings. If Hitler can sow anti-Semitism and anti-communism amongst the workers by ranting and raving at them, then that works for the army officers. At Captain Mayer's instruction, Hitler formally applies to join the Workers' Party.
Professor Claudia Kunz. As an undercover agent, of course, he began to make speeches himself. And he discovered he was quite good at it. Hitler became quite well known as a street corner speaker. Hitler is still employed by the army. He's a spy, but also a propagandist. That means his job is to plant ideas into people's heads, to spin stories that further the army's goals. They are delighted with his work.
But what the army don't quite realize is how serious Hitler is about his new political role. For him, it's more than propaganda. He's starting to think he might just have a future in politics. He might be a rookie, but Hitler's political antennae are finely attuned. He has an uncanny ability to read his audience. Once he's clocked what they want, he can subtly tweak his message to suit them.
And he had these qualities. First of all, he believed in himself. He spoke with a certainty of being a Messiah, as having the truth. He also had a biting sense of humor. He never wrote his speeches, ever, not even an outline.
The reason that we have a complete record of his speeches is because the Munich police also sent their observers to watch him, even when he was watching the other groups. And so the Munich police kept very good records about what Hitler said.
He tended, when possible, to speak at dusk, as the sun was setting, as people were particularly receptive. He would arrive late so that anticipation would build. Will Hitler be here? He would start quietly, then would pick up, and he sometimes could speak for an hour or two. Hearing Hitler was like going to a theatrical performance.
And Hitler once explained why he never wrote his speeches. He said, "I can't know in advance what themes I'm going to emphasize."
"When I speak, I speak, but I also listen." The great speaker, he once said in Mein Kampf, the great speaker not only finds the right words, he listens to his audiences. And so when his audiences cheered at a particular point, then he would say more and more about that point. And so Hitler responded to his audience's applauses.
Some historians have said, in a way, you can read Hitler speeches like an opinion poll.
If he said a lot about Jews in one situation, that meant his audience were probably responding. And his audiences in Munich responded to his anti-Semitism. Already you can see in Hitler a certain ability to read his surroundings. Outsiders have to have an ability to read their contexts. Outsiders know they don't know. An insider will take things for granted.
In person, Hitler was actually quite underwhelming. But when he gets up on stage, he becomes an entirely new proposition. Professor Frank McDonagh. Great performers are often empty people. They can often be not fantastically charismatic people off the stage. Hitler was one of them. That's what people said about Hitler at base. He was an actor. Hitler is welcomed into the Workers' Party fold by the leader, a man called Anton Drexler.
It's run by a guy called Anton Drexler. He's a locksmith. You know, it's only got less than 40 members. Drexler thinks he's a really charismatic figure. What a great little speech he gave there. Hitler hits the ground running, delivering a succession of powerful speeches at party meetings. He's soon offered the position of propaganda chief of the party. He's joined a movement that, to his mind, has worthy ideas. But it's small and poorly organized. It needs to be transformed.
and he is the man to do it. - Hitler is kind of paradoxical because he, in his own life, was indecisive, oddly enough. All his life, it took him a long time to arrive at a decision. But then once he did, he was ruthless. And one of the issues on which he had an uncanny sense
was on creating an absolutely loyal party. So he didn't join a huge party where he would have been a tiny fish in a very big pond. He found this little obscure party, this German workers party, which was small, and he could become its leader. Hitler's reputation as a charismatic speaker spreads throughout Munich. Attendance at party meetings gets larger and larger.
Night after night the applause grows louder, more enthusiastic, as propaganda chief Adolf Hitler is welcomed onto the stage. Soon he needs no introduction. His spitting, snarling performances become the talk of the town amongst Munich's right-wingers. Hitler might be the newbie, but the other party members can't argue with these tangible results. In hindsight, it might look like Hitler's rise is inevitable from this point, but this is still a small party. And in the grand scheme of things,
Hitler is still miles away from becoming a serious political figure. One man is watching Hitler very closely, taking note of his strengths and his flaws. This man's name is Dietrich Eckart. Eckart is the co-founder of the German Workers' Party. He's a 50-year-old Bavarian, born and bred. He's a square, moustachioed man, grown flabby in his middle age. It's well known that he's a morphine addict and alcoholic.
Eckart is also a newspaper editor. His publication is called "Auf gut Deutsch" or "In Plain German". The title captures the populist mood of the Munich far right. It's an anti-semitic rag. Before the war, Eckart was a successful poet and playwright. He made a small fortune in the theatre. He used some of that money to buy his newspaper. Now, he is a vocal member of Munich's right wing scene. Eckart will become the godfather to the Nazis.
And over the coming years, his ideas will explode into the popular imagination. Dietrich Eckhart was a member of that early Nazi party, the German Workers' Party. He was fervently anti-Semitic. And Hitler's fascinated by Eckhart. Eckhart is like the barroom philosopher. The barroom philosopher can thrive in a beer hall. You know, he's not going to thrive in the university department, but he'll thrive in a beer hall. Eckhart is profoundly impressed by this young speechmaker.
But he also has plenty of questions. Hitler can whip up a crowd, but can he lead? There's a lot of work to be done. Eckart takes Hitler under his wing. Hitler becomes his pet project. He requires careful management and patient training. Hitler is rude. He has no grasp of the codes of etiquette that prevail in polite society. At dinners and drink receptions, he's a bore. He chews people's ears off. He doesn't listen or ask questions.
Quite simply, he needs to learn how to behave like a well-mannered grown-up. Eckart feels he is the man to teach him. Under Eckart's tutelage, Hitler develops as a politician and as a person. Sometimes on weekends they travel south together to the Bavarian Alps. Here they discuss the state of the world and lament the decline of Germany.
Although Hitler wasn't a drinker, Eckhart made up for that by drinking twice as much. He's such a, I was going to say, such a terrible drinker. He's a great drinker, but he drinks too much. And Hitler loved him. And he really was convinced of the Jewish worldwide conspiracy. And he told Hitler about the Protocols of Zion. This was this forged document that said that the Jews planned an international conspiracy to take over the world.
and he introduced him to that pamphlet and he said, Eckhart told him it's true and Hitler believed it was true as well. So he's actually very important in influencing Hitler. He was much older than Hitler. He became a kind of paternal mentor to Hitler. He was very jovial. He was an extremely gifted writer. After the war, he became one of the organizers of right-wing ideology and of ideas in Munich. He was kind of looking for someone
who had more of a talent for public speaking and to connect to the people than he did. And he found that in Adolf Hitler. He saw in Adolf Hitler his kind of disciple, while Hitler seems to have seen in him a kind of paternal mentor. Hitler was very much searching for new ideas, for better answers, and Dietrich Eckart was very much helping with that. Eckart and Hitler will prove to be a formidable team.
Eckhart has the social introductions and the conspiracy theories. Hitler is the communicator, the preacher. One year ago, in 1918, Eckhart wrote a poem. It was called "The Nameless One." It called out for a messiah to rise and rescue Germany from its post-war humiliation. Well, now Eckhart looks to have found his man. And it is perhaps now, under Eckhart's influence,
that Adolf Hitler begins to think that he could be that figure. And Hitler aimed to fulfill that longing for a single powerful leader. He said democracy can never provide that leadership. Democracy in a crisis will stagnate. They won't know what to do. But a leader will pull people together, like in wartime, which he had experienced in the First World War,
a leader will pull people together out of their petty differences and form a mighty bloc. In February of 1920, the senior figures of the Workers' Party meet to hammer out a new manifesto. The document they produce is pure, unfiltered populism. It's a set of clear demands conveyed in simple language. There are two main takeaways. Firstly, the manifesto demands an end to the reparations for World War I.
No longer should Germany line the Allies' pockets. And second, Germany is to reclaim all lands confiscated at the Treaty of Versailles. Later Nazi propaganda will depict the Manifesto as all Hitler's work, and the party as being at his beck and call. But in truth, at this point, Anton Drexler is still the intellectual heart of the movement. The 25 points come primarily from him.
Hitler, however, gets lucky when it transpires Drexler is unavailable to attend the launch of the party program. It falls to the propaganda chief to announce the manifesto to the expectant crowd.
And it was there that Hitler read out the 25 points of the program. The program was a kind of strange mixture of different points. They offered something for everyone, including points that would not seem out of place in the party program of any party. There were only two explicitly anti-Semitic points, which also would suggest that Hitler was not the primary author. On March 31st, 1920,
Hitler leaves the Bavarian army for good and becomes a full-time party worker. He's outgrown the roles of army spy and propagandist, but this is a big decision for him to make. He's leaving the shadow world of espionage and stepping decisively into public life. He is 100% committed to the cause. Hitler has built his life around the army since 1914. The fact that he's willing to give up stable employment as a soldier shows his dedication to the far right.
Liberated from his military duties, Hitler throws himself into the movement. As he takes to the stage night after night, he continues to fine tune his barnstorming speeches.
In every speech, almost, he blamed the defeat. He talked about the utter terrible humiliation, his hatred of the democracy, because what was democracy? Democracy was against nature. Nature said the strongest survive. Democracy said the cowardly survive. They run for elections. Whereas Germany needs leadership. It needs hierarchy. Democracy is for weak people.
The Workers' Party get a brand new slogan to go with their new manifesto. It rings around Munich, reverberating in the ears of drunken workers as they stumble home from beer halls in the small hours. Deutschland erwache. Germany awake. I think it all grows out of his wartime experience. It was that experience that we didn't get beaten. You know, we were getting well fed. We didn't feel as though we were losing the war. I think it all goes back to there.
Hitler paints himself as a man with a singular vision. Certainly, he knows broadly what he's for and what he's against. But even he appreciates the need to be flexible. There are lots of ideas that Hitler toys with that never see the light of day. Looking back, it's remarkable some of the things he's happy to go along with. Something that is very little known but really fascinating and important is that until late
Late 1923 or 1924, Hitler thought that Germany should enter into a permanent and an all-encompassing alliance with Russia, with a restored Tsarist Russia. He thought that at that point, after the First World War, he thought that Germany on its own was just too weak to have insufficient territory resources and manpower.
So his answer is, why don't we team up with Tsarist exiles who want to restore an anti-Semitic and nationalist Russia, and we'll try to restore nationalism and anti-Semitism in our two countries, and then we'll team up permanently.
They even established this secret society, which includes people close to one of the pretenders to the Russian throne. And one of the pretenders, in fact, is living in Bavaria at that time. They think that if just Germany and Russia comes together, both countries will be safe for all times. It's extraordinary that a man who will go on to invade Russia advocates merging with them at this time. Ultimately, Hitler's anti-Russian racism will out. But in the early 20s,
Hitler is playing with lots of different ideas. He has not emerged fully formed as Germany's so-called messiah, whatever Mein Kampf would have you believe.
And then in 1924, probably because he realizes that the Soviet Union is there to stay, he realizes that this restoration will never happen. He turns Russians and Slavs into subhumans almost overnight. This ideological flexibility on Hitler's part here shows how much Hitler always thought about translating his ideas into reality and also what is important in Hitler's ideology and what is only kind of secondary importance or what is a means to an end.
It's at this time that the German Workers' Party changes its name. It becomes, for the first time, the National Socialist German Workers' Party, the Nazis for short. The party initials could be written as follows: NSDAP.
National, when he's speaking to soldiers and nationalists. N would be written big. Socialist would be written lowercase. Other way around, he's speaking to workers who are socialists. Small n, big S for socialist, and so on. So NSDAP would be changed to fit the circumstances because once again, here is Hitler, the outsider, always reading his audience.
What do they want from me? How can I sell them my ideas within their framework? How can I start where they are now and pull them to me? Like a brilliant salesman, he understood as an outsider in a way that an insider never would have. Hang on a minute. Doesn't Hitler hate socialism? He spent years raging against communism.
Yet now he's a paid-up member of a party with socialism in the title. How does that work?
What does it mean? Why did he change the name from Workers' Party to National Socialist German Workers' Party? Why is socialism part of the Nazi creed? The answer is Hitler believed in socialism, but not Bolshevik socialism. Hitler meant everybody in one ethnic community sacrificed for the good of the whole. That's what it meant, national socialism. We would even maybe say nationalist socialism.
Dr. Chris Dillon. In the 19th century, a lot of German conservatives and nationalists have been horrified by the specter of socialism. So Marx's idea is workers of the world unite. This is a horrendous prospect for conservatives and nationalists. And this is where the idea of national socialism emerges, that you could be patriotic and
support and exalt one's own nation, but also attend to the social problems which are then mobilized so effectively by socialists and communists. So national socialism held that it was perfectly possible to be at once fiercely patriotic and racist, but also to be concerned about the plight and the conditions and the outlook for ordinary German workers.
But likewise, Hitler equally thought that particularly finance capitalism, stock exchange, charging interest, he thought that this was all equally wrong. So his nationalist version of socialism was supposed to be one in which there is still private property, but in which finance capitalism is being rejected, in which a community of the German people is being created.
Germany has been riven by political divisions between far left and far right. The Nazis are incorporating ideas from both sides. It's an attempt to give extremist politics a single home. Hitler is a rising star of the Nazi party, but his ascent to the leadership is still far from a foregone conclusion. He's a highly divisive figure within the party. He's no unifier. Many love Hitler, others loathe him.
So Hitler is now becoming more and more kind of the leading figure of the National Socialist German Workers' Party or Nazi Party, but he's still not the leader. And it was far from inevitable that he would become the leader. A lot of people just found him irritating. Others also thought that he represented ideas they didn't agree with. Many kinds of reasons why people rejected Adolf Hitler. And some of them were actually actively trying to push him out.
Despite these rivalries, Hitler is about to maneuver his way to the top. Tension has been building between Hitler and Drexler, the Nazi's leader. It's clear this party isn't big enough for the two of them.
Others in the Nazi party thought that the Nazi party couldn't really go it on their own, that they should merge with other right-wing parties. But Hitler, from their perspective, irritatingly rejected all kinds of attempts for merger, particularly if the Nazi party was the junior partner. This all came to a head when eventually meetings took place behind Hitler's back to have mergers anyway. Hitler then left the party in protest.
Hitler judges the time is right for a power play. To the surprise of many, he promptly quits his job as propaganda chief and resigns from the party. His party enemies might be relieved, but with Hitler gone, the Nazis have lost their biggest asset. Bavaria has a very busy marketplace of right-wing groups. It's dog-eat-dog. Hitler makes the National Socialists stand out from the crowd. It's clear even now that the party is far weaker without him.
Eckhart and a few others arrange for him to be invited back. Hitler spots an opportunity. He agrees to return, but on one condition: he will return as leader. And not only that, he demands to be a leader with dictatorial powers. The party committee give their stamp of approval. Anton Drexler is out. Adolf Hitler is in.
Hitler then becomes the party leader and crucially he's not accepting to become the leader on the pre-existing terms but he's saying I will only accept to become your leader if you change the constitution of the party. In other words, if I become the leader with dictatorial powers which I think is also revealing what Hitler's goals were by that time. Hitler likes to describe himself as merely a drummer.
By this he means that he's not the headline. If he has a talent as a politician, he only wants to use it to support other more capable leaders. His role is a modest one, he says, to drum up support for the party and keep them marching in time. Already, this self-characterization is clearly a fiction.
We often still hear that Hitler didn't really know what his goal was and that he was just seeing himself as a drummer, as a drummer of someone bigger to come. But I think this was, again, this was just clever political posturing for Hitler. His party is a small party, so he needs to make friends with more powerful people. And he's telling them,
well, look, I don't want to replace you. I just want to be your drummer. All the while hoping that they would then piggyback him for a while towards more power until he has reached more power and would then be able to push them to the side. And that is, of course, what kind of Hitler in a scarily brilliant way is doing time and time again in
the years and decades to come. So Hitler, even at that point, cannot possibly have seen himself as just a drummer because drummers don't tend to demand to become dictators. The time for consensus decision-making is over. The time for single-minded leadership is here. Hitler now has full control over the Nazi party. It is his to do with as he wishes. Not for the last time.
he's convinced a group of free-thinking people to vote him in as their dictator. It's a tantalizing illustration of how democracy can be subverted to its own distorted ends. With Hitler installed as party autocrat, committee meetings become less about debate and more about the leader delivering his vision for a Germany transformed.
From this point on, if anyone steps out of line, they'll be dealt with ruthlessly. Whenever there was a question about party doctrine, Hitler insisted on absolute loyalty. And when it had to do with leadership, that was even more important.
Somebody joining the party had to pledge to defend that program with his life. So to be willing to sacrifice your life for a political party, that seems unusual. But Hitler demanded that kind of absolute loyalty to his person. To build a party from around 6,000 members in 1919 to 20,000 members three years later is quite a feat.
And Hitler was brilliant at delegating authority, knowing who to trust. He managed his party very well, which is strange because he had this personality that seemed so lackluster, except when he was on stage.
People described him sitting around in Munich coffee houses flirting with potential female fundraisers and gorging himself on famous Munich pastries. He slept late every day. He was so lazy. But as a leader, as a speaker, he was incredibly dynamic. As party dictator, Hitler's word is final. But he can't do it all on his own. He's still on the lookout for deputies able and willing to help him transform Germany.
It is now also the early 1920s that other future senior Nazis joined the party. They are interestingly not the people who were the most likely candidate at this point to compete with Hitler. The ones who were kind of competing with Hitler were all kind of pushed out either the moment Hitler had won the leadership or they were later pushed out by Hitler because, again, he never forgave anyone who crossed his path.
So the future leaders were by and large those who were precisely the people who were willing to support Hitler, even if in some cases this ultimately, of course, did turn into a competition. As Hitler delivers yet another rabble-rousing speech, a man watches on, transfixed from the back of the beer hall, his piercing blue eyes alight with ambition, with his pale pink complexion and light brown hair seamlessly slicked back.
he'd be right at home in any hotbed of Aryan supremacists. His name is Hermann Göring. He will rise almost as far as Hitler himself, becoming in due course the Fuhrer's second in command. But Hermann Göring's own journey to the top will be far from smooth. In the next episode of Real Dictators…
Hitler begins to assemble his executive team of allies and deputies. Among them, a celebrity fighter pilot and a rogue army officer who's been stockpiling weapons. As the Reitming Uprising takes shape in the German capital, Berlin, Hitler flies north, eager to play his part. Back home in Munich, the Nazis create a paramilitary unit. These stormtroopers will turn the city upside down.
as they take National Socialism onto the streets. That's next time on Real Dictators. Real Dictators is presented by me, Paul McGann. The show was created by Pascal Hughes. Produced by Joel Dodel. Editing and music by Oliver Baines, with strings recorded by Dori McCauley. Sound design and mix by Tom Pink, with edit assembly by George Tapp. Follow Noisa Podcasts on Twitter for news about upcoming series.
If you haven't already, follow us wherever you listen to your favorite shows or check us out at realdictators.com. Tune in on Wednesdays for new episodes.
