Vienna at that time. In May 1913, in his twenty-
fourth year, he moved to Munich, Bavaria’s artistic
capital. He lived there by selling sketches and
watercolours, executed with care and photo-
graphic accuracy, pleasing pictures of no great
artistic merit. He could, then, be fairly described as
self-educated but without discipline, with sufficient
artistic skill to have earned his living as an engraver
or poster designer had he desired regular work. He
was essentially a loner, who had established no
deep relationships, and he was already filled with
resentments and hatreds which came to be centred
more and more on the Jews.
He later regarded the outbreak of the Great
War as the turning point in his life. He volun-
teered for the Bavarian army with enthusiasm. He
already saw himself as a pan-German, and not a
loyal subject of the multinational Habsburgs,
whom he detested. During the war he was
wounded and awarded the Iron Cross First Class;
he served as a dispatch messenger, though in
those days communications were passed mainly on
foot along the small distances from trench to
trench or from one command post to another. It
is notable that he was never promoted beyond the
rank of corporal, despite the desperate need for
NCOs, a reflection of his superior’s view that
Corporal Hitler was not a suitable leader of men.
When he returned to Munich after the war at the
age of twenty-nine, his lack of formal qualification
and education was typical of millions for whom
the future looked grim. But it is from this point on
that his hitherto insignificant and unsuccessful life
took a fantastic new turn.
For a start, his interest in politics and loyalty
commended him to the new Reichswehr. The
army retained him in a division for ‘military edu-
cation’. One of his tasks was to investigate and
infiltrate dubious, possibly left-wing, political
groups. In this way he came to join Drexler’s
small German Workers’ Party, more a beer hall
debating society than a genuine party. The trans-
formation of Hitler now began. As a political agi-
tator and an orator who could move his audiences
to emotion and hysteria with the violence of his
language, Hitler discovered a new vocation. He
did not of course see himself as the leader of
Germany at this stage, but rather as the propa-
gandist who would help to power the extreme
nationalists – men like Ludendorff who would
rescue Germany from ‘Bolshevism’ and the Jews
and who would break the shackles of Versailles.
Hitler fulminated against the world Jewish
conspiracy, Wall Street and ‘Bolshevism’, and
against the injustices of Versailles, until out of
Drexler’s debating club a real party emerged with
55,000 supporters by 1923. From 1921 Hitler
led that party, renamed the National Socialist
German Workers’ Party (or by its German initials
NSDAP). Hitler the rabid rabble-rousing politi-
cian had arrived, a fact made possible only by the
totally chaotic political condition of Bavaria where
a disparate right had bloodily defeated an equally
disparate left. In November 1923 Hitler mis-
judged the situation and sought to seize power for
the forces of the right in much the same way as
Lenin had seized control of Petrograd with a few
devoted revolutionaries. His attempted Munich
Putschended ignominiously, Hitler fleeing when
the police opened fire. Ludendorff alone, with
more courage than good sense, marched through
the cordon of police. Hitler had expected that
he would seize power without bloodshed and
that the police and army would rally to the
Ludendorff–Hitler alliance. Later he recognised
that failure had saved him. Had he succeeded in
gaining control and marched on ‘Red Berlin’ as he
intended, the government would not have capitu-
lated to a fanatic and extremist. Nor, as the army
high command knew, would the French, who had
entered the Ruhr, have tolerated for a moment a
coup led by a man who so stridently denounced
the Versailles Treaty; the French, moreover, still
possessed the strength and determination to pre-
vent such a coup. Hitler would then have been fin-
ished for good.
Hitler turned his trial for treason, conducted
in Bavaria by judges who sympathised with his
cause, into a personal propaganda triumph.
Sentenced to the minimum term of five years’
imprisonment, he actually only served a few
months. While in prison he started writing Mein
Kampfand after his release he began to rebuild
the party that was to carry him to power. The
Munich Putsch had convinced him that the
Nationalist right could not be trusted and was too
1
THE FAILURE OF DEMOCRACY AND RISE OF HITLER, 1920–34 187
