The summer crisis of 1921 started with negotiations between the NSDAP and rival völkisch parties, especially the German Socialist Party. These negotiations, aiming at closer co-operation, had been going on for months. But Hitler’s intransigence blocked all efforts at alliance. He demanded nothing less than the total submission of the other parties and would not even concede them the right of corporate entry into the National Socialist Party. He insisted instead that the other groups must dissolve and their members enter his party on an individual basis. Drexler could not understand Hitler’s obstinacy; therein lay the whole difference between the instinct for unconditional power and the conciliatory temperament of a club founder. Hitler must have counted on his enemies in the party leadership using his absence for an ill-considered step when, in the early part of the summer, he went to Berlin for six weeks. Hermann Esser and Dietrich Eckart remained behind as his accomplices and kept him continually informed. Urged on by certain members of the party who wanted to cut the “fanatical would-be big shot” down to size, well-meaning Drexler used this period of Hitler’s absence to resume negotiations on the union, or at least the collaboration, of all the socialist rightist parties.
In Berlin, meanwhile, Hitler spoke at the Nationalist Club and established ties with conservative and radical rightists. He met Ludendorff and Count Reventlow, whose French wife, the former Baroness d’Allemont, introduced him to the former Free Corps leader Walter Stennes—describing Hitler as the “coming Messiah.” The hectic madness of Berlin, which was then entering its famous, or notorious, twenties, only heightened Hitler’s dislike for the city. He despised its greed and its frivolity, comparing conditions there with those of declining Rome in the Late Empire. There, too, he said, “racially alien Christianity” had taken advantage of the city’s weakness, as Bolshevism today was battening on the moral decay of Germany. The speeches of those early years are full of attacks upon metropolitan vice, corruption, and excess, as he had observed them on the glittering pavements of Friedrichstrasse or the Kurfürstendamm. “They amuse themselves and dance to make us forget our misery,” he cried on one occasion. “It is no accident that new amusements are constantly being invented. They want to artificially enervate us.” As if he were once again seventeen years old and arriving in Vienna, he stood baffled and alienated by the phenomenon of the big city, lost in so much noise, turbulence, and miscegenation. He really felt at home only in provincial circumstances and was, despite all his sense of being an outsider, permanently fixated upon provincial moral rectitude. Urban night life could only be an invention of the racial archfoe, a systematic attempt “to turn upside down the most natural hygienic rules of a race. The Jew makes night into day; he stages the notorious night life and knows quite well that it will slowly but surely… destroy one man physically, another mentally, and place hatred in the heart of a third because he must look on while others revel.” The theaters, he continued, “those halls which a Richard Wagner once wanted darkened in order to call forth the ultimate degree of sanctitude and solemnity” and “liberate the individual from grief and misery”—those theaters had become “hotbeds of vice and shamelessness.” He saw the city populated by white slavers, and love, “which for millions of others means supreme happiness or the greatest unhappiness,” perverted to a commodity, “nothing more than a deal.” In the city everything w.as being undermined and debased; he deplored the mockery of family life, the decay of religion. “One who has lost both these in this age of basest treachery and fraud has only two remaining possibilities: either he despairs and hangs himself, or he becomes a scoundrel.”22
As soon as word came of Drexler’s independent action, Hitler returned to Munich. And when the party executive committee, which had gained some self-assurance in the interval, called upon him to justify his behavior, Hitler responded with a sweeping gesture. On July 11 he declared his resignation from the party. In a lengthy statement three days later he heaped violent reproaches upon the other members of the committee, then stated as an ultimatum his conditions for returning to the party. Among other things he demanded the immediate resignation of the executive committee, the “post of First Chairman with dictatorial powers” for himself, and “the party to be purged of the alien elements that have lately intruded into it.” He also insisted that neither the name nor the program of the party could be changed; the absolute precedence of the Munich branch of the party must be preserved; there could be no union with other parties, only the annexation of other parties. And with that stubbornness which presaged the later Hitler he stated: “Concessions on our part are totally out of the question.”23
The degree of prestige and power that Hitler had already attained is evident from the immediate reply of the party executive committee, which was dated the following day. Instead of risking a showdown, it pleaded guilty to Hitler’s charges with timid reminders of its former services, bowed completely, and was even ready to sacrifice the incumbent First Chairman, Anton Drexler, to Hitler’s wrath. The key passage in the document, in which for the first time the Byzantine tones of subsequent homage sounded, read: “The committee is prepared, in acknowledgment of your tremendous knowledge, your singular dedication and selfless service to the Movement, and your rare oratorical gift, to concede to you dictatorial powers, and will be most delighted if after your re-entry you will take over the position of First Chairman, which Drexler long ago and repeatedly offered to you. Drexler will then remain as your coadjutor in the executive committee and, if you approve, in the same position in the action committee. If you should consider it desirable to have him completely excluded from the Movement, the next annual meeting would have to be consulted on that matter.”
The affair is a good illustration of Hitler’s skill at guiding and mastering crises. Its conclusion also shows his characteristic tendency to ruin a triumph by going a step too far. As soon as the party committee had submitted, he called an extraordinary membership meeting on his own initiative, in order to savor his victory to the full. At this point the good-natured Drexler would take no more. On July 25 he went to the Munich police and stated that the signers of the call for the meeting did not belong to the party and therefore had no right to convoke a membership meeting. He also pointed out that Hitler was aiming at revolution and violence, whereas he himself strove to carry out the party aims by legal, parliamentary procedures. The police, however, said they had no authority to intervene. Meanwhile, Hitler found himself under attack from other quarters. An anonymous leaflet appeared, accusing him of having brought “disunion and dissension into our ranks through power madness and personal ambition.” He was thus “doing the business of the Jews and their henchmen.” His aim was “to use the party as a springboard for dirty ends”; undoubtedly he was acting as the tool of obscure backers. There must be a reason why he was so anxious to keep his private life as well as his origins a mystery. “When asked by members what he lives on and what his former occupation was, he always became agitated and flew into a rage… so his conscience cannot be clear, especially since his excess in relations with women, to whom he has often referred to himself as ‘King of Munich,’ costs a great deal of money.” A poster that the police would not allow to be displayed repeated these accusations and ended with the battle cry: “The tyrant must be overthrown.”