Hitler’s rise began at a beer hall in Munich
It is exactly 100 years since Adolf Hitler made his first public address.
The future Fuhrer spoke at a meeting of the German Workers’ Party, a short-lived political group established in Weimar Germany after the First World War.
The Deutsche Arbeitpartie (DAP) was the direct precursor of the Nazi Party, becoming the National Socialist German Workers’ Party – or Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeitpartie (NSDAP) – at Hitler’s behest in February, 1920.
It was founded in Munich the previous year by a group that included Anton Drexler and one Karl Harrer, a member of the Thule Society, an occultist group that sponsored the DAP and whose membership list reads like a Who’s Who of early Nazi sympathisers.
The DAP had fewer than 40 members who met periodically to discuss nationalism and anti-semitism, but when Hitler returned to Munich after the war ended he was ordered by the German military authorities to infiltrate its ranks.
He instead became infatuated with Drexler’s anti-semitic, anti-marxist, nationalistic and anticapitalist ideas, and when he impressed the party with his oratory skills during a heated political argument, Hitler was invited to join.
He was still in the pay of the army – 20 gold marks a week – and after giving that first speech for the DAP at the Hofbraukeller, a Munich beer hall, in mid-september 1919 he became the party’s most active public speaker.
Hitler’s oratory and propaganda skills were appreciated by the party leadership and crowds began to flock to hear his speeches.
With the support of Drexler, he became the party’s chief of propaganda and saw himself as drumming up support for a national cause with propaganda the way to bring nationalism to the public.
The small number of party members were quickly won over by Hitler’s beliefs and he organised the DAP’S biggest meeting yet of 2,000 people in a historic Munich beer hall in February 1920.
In an attempt to make the party more appealing to larger swathes of the population, the DAP was renamed the NSDAP, “borrowing” the name from a different party active in Hitler’s native Austria at the time.
Hitler resigned following an inter-party dispute and only agreed to rejoin if he replaced Drexler as party chairman.
Drexler later resigned and though he later joined the Nazi Party, he was never given a position of real authority.
That was in stark contrast to several of the DAP’S early members who’d ride Hitler’s coat-tails to become powerful men in the Third Reich, and pay the price by being executed at Nuremberg for war crimes.