Lies being taught;
Mein Kampf is unintelligible ravings of a
maniac.
Now the Truth; Read and know. CHAPTER XIId- Beginnings of
our movement.
“During the initial phase of our movement,
our greatest handicap was the fact that none of us were known and our names
meant nothing, a fact which then seemed to some of us to make the chances of
final success problematical.
Consider that only six or seven poor devils
who were entirely unknown came together to found a movement which should
succeed in doing what the great mass-parties had failed to do: namely, to
reconstruct the German REICH, even in greater power and glory than before. We
should have been very pleased if we were attacked or even ridiculed. But the
most depressing fact was that nobody paid any attention to us whatever. This
utter lack of interest in us caused me great mental pain at that time. In
Munich nobody knew of the existence of such a party, not even by name, except
our few members and their small circle of acquaintances.
Every Wednesday what was called a committee
meeting was held in one of the cafés, and a debate was arranged for one evening
each week. In the beginning all the members of the movement were also members
of the committee, therefore the same persons always turned up at both meetings.
The first step that had to be taken was to extend the narrow limits of this
small circle and get new members, but the principal necessity was to utilize
all the means at our command for the purpose of making the movement known. We chose the following methods: We decided to
hold a monthly meeting to which the public would be invited. Some of the
invitations were typewritten, and some were written by hand. For the first few
meetings we distributed them in the streets and delivered them personally at
certain houses. Each one canvassed among his own acquaintances and tried to
persuade some of them to attend our meetings. The result was lamentable.
We then changed our methods. We had the
invitations written with a typewriter in a Munich stationer's shop and then
multigraphed them.
The result was that a few more people
attended our next meeting. The number increased gradually from eleven to
thirteen to seventeen, to twenty-three and finally to thirty-four. We collected
some money within our own circle, each poor devil giving a small contribution,
and in that way we raised sufficient funds to be able to advertise one of our
meetings in the MUNICH OBSERVER, which was still an independent paper.
This time we had an astonishing success. We
had chosen the Munich HOFBRÄU HAUS KELLER (which must not be confounded with
the Munich HOFBRÄU HAUS FESTSAAL) as our meeting-place. It was a small hall and
would accommodate scarcely more than 130 people. To me, however, the hall
seemed enormous, and we were all trembling lest this tremendous edifice would
remain partly empty on the night of the meeting.
At seven o'clock 111 persons were present,
and the meeting was opened. A Munich professor delivered the principal address,
and I spoke after him. That was my first appearance in the role of public
orator. The whole thing seemed a very daring adventure to Herr Harrer, who was
then chairman of the party. He was a very decent fellow; but he had an A PRIORI
conviction that, although I might have quite a number of good qualities, I
certainly did not have a talent for public speaking. Even later he could not be
persuaded to change his opinion. But he was mistaken. Twenty minutes had been
allotted to me for my speech on this occasion, which might be looked upon as
our first public meeting.
I talked for thirty minutes, and what I
always had felt deep down in my heart, without being able to put it to the
test, was here proved to be true: I could make a good speech. At the end of the
thirty minutes it was quite clear that all the people in the little hall had
been profoundly impressed. The enthusiasm aroused among them found its first
expression in the fact that my appeal to those present brought us donations
which amounted to three hundred marks. That was a great relief for us. Our
finances were at that time so meager that we could not afford to have our party
prospectus printed, or even leaflets. Now we possessed at least the nucleus of
a fund from which we could pay the most urgent and necessary expenses.
The need for this fresh blood supply became
evident to me after a few weeks of collaboration with the new members. Herr
Harrer, who was then chairman of the party, was a journalist by profession, and
as such he was a man of general knowledge. But as leader of the party he had
one very serious handicap: he could not speak to the crowd. Though he did his
work conscientiously, it lacked the necessary driving force, probably for the
reason that he had no oratorical gifts whatsoever. Herr Drexler, at that time
chairman of the Munich local group, was a simple working man. He, too, was not
of any great importance as a speaker. Moreover, he was not a soldier. He had
never done military service, even during the War. So that this man who was
feeble and diffident by nature had missed the only school which knows how to
transform diffident and weakly natures into real men. Therefore neither of
those two men were of the stuff that would have enabled them to stir up an
ardent and indomitable faith in the ultimate triumph of the movement and to
brush aside, with obstinate force and if necessary with brutal ruthlessness,
all obstacles that stood in the path of the new idea. Such a task could be
carried out only by men who had been trained, body and soul, in those military
virtues which make a man, so to speak, agile as a greyhound, tough as leather,
and hard as Krupp steel.
At that time I was still a soldier.
Physically and mentally I had the polish of six years of service, so that in
the beginning this circle must have looked on me as quite a stranger. In common
with my army comrades, I had forgotten such phrases as: "That will not
go", or "That is not possible", or "We ought not to take
such a risk; it is too dangerous".
The whole undertaking was of its very nature
dangerous. At that time there were many parts of Germany where it would have been
absolutely impossible openly to invite people to a national meeting that dared
to make a direct appeal to the masses. Those who attended such meetings were
usually dispersed and driven away with broken heads. The largest so-called
bourgeois mass meetings were accustomed to dissolve, and those in attendance
would run away like rabbits when frightened by a dog as soon as a dozen
communists appeared on the scene.
The Marxist leaders, whose business consisted
in deceiving and misleading the public, naturally hated most of all a movement
whose declared aim was to win over those masses which hitherto had been
exclusively at the service of international Marxism in the Jewish and Stock
Exchange parties. The title alone, 'German Labour party', irritated them. It
could easily be foreseen that at the first opportune moment we should have to
face the opposition of the Marxist despots, who were still intoxicated with
their triumph in 1918.
People in the small circles of our own
movement at that time showed a certain amount of anxiety at the prospect of
such a conflict. They wanted to refrain as much as possible from coming out
into the open, because they feared that they might be attacked and beaten. I
found it difficult to defend my own position, which was that the conflict
should not be evaded but that it should be faced openly and that we should be
armed with those weapons which are the only protection against brute force.
Terror cannot be overcome by the weapons of the mind but only by
counter-terror.
Some time in October 1919 the second larger
meeting took place in the EBERLBRÄU KELLER. The theme of our speeches was
'Brest-Litowsk and Versailles'. There were four speakers. I talked for almost
an hour, and the success was even more striking than at our first meeting. The
number of people who attended had grown to more than 130. An attempt to disturb
the proceedings was immediately frustrated by my comrades. The would-be
disturbers were thrown down the stairs, bearing imprints of violence on their
heads.
A fortnight later another meeting took place
in the same hall. The number in attendance had now increased to more than 170,
which meant that the room was fairly well filled. I spoke again, and once more
the success obtained was greater than at the previous meeting.
Then I proposed that a larger hall should be
found. After looking around for some time we discovered one at the other end of
the town, in the 'Deutschen REICH' in the Dachauer Strasse. The first meeting
at this new rendezvous had a smaller attendance than the previous meeting.
There were just less than 140 present. The members of the committee began to be
discouraged, and those who had always been skeptical were now convinced that
this falling-off in the attendance was due to the fact that we were holding the
meetings at too short intervals. There were lively discussions, in which I
upheld my own opinion that a city with 700,000 inhabitants ought to be able not
only to stand one meeting every fortnight but ten meetings every week. I held
that we should not be discouraged by one comparative setback, that the tactics
we had chosen were correct, and that sooner or later success would be ours if
we only continued with determined perseverance to push forward on our road.
This whole winter of 1919-20 was one continual struggle to strengthen
confidence in our ability to carry the movement through to success and to
intensify this confidence until it became a burning faith that could move
mountains.
Our next meeting in the small hall proved the
truth of my contention. Our audience had increased to more than 200. The
publicity effect and the financial success were splendid. I immediately urged
that a further meeting should be held. It took place in less than a fortnight,
and there were more than 270 people present. Two weeks later we invited our
followers and their friends, for the seventh time, to attend our meeting. The
same hall was scarcely large enough for the number that came. They amounted to
more than four hundred.
During this phase the young movement developed
its inner form. From various sides objections were made against the idea of
calling the young movement a party. At that time it was very difficult to make
the people understand that every movement is a party as long as it has not
brought its ideals to final triumph and thus achieved its purpose. It is a
party even if it give itself a thousand different names.
Any person who tries to carry into practice
an original idea whose realization would be for the benefit of his fellow men
will first have to look for disciples who are ready to fight for the ends he
has in view. It is only hair-splitting and playing with words when these
antiquated theorists, whose practical success is in reverse ratio to their
wisdom, presume to think they can change the character of a movement by merely
changing its name.
If somebody has fought for forty years to
carry into effect what he calls an idea, and if these alleged efforts not only
show no positive results but have not even been able to hinder the success of
the opposing party, then the story of those forty years of futile effort
furnishes sufficient proof for the incompetence of such a protagonist. Nobody
of common sense would appoint to a leading post in such a movement some
Teutonic Methuselah who had been ineffectively preaching some idea for a period
of forty years, until himself and his idea had entered the stage of senile
decay.
Furthermore, only a very small percentage of
such people join a new movement with the intention of serving its end
unselfishly and helping in the spread of its principles. In most cases they
come because they think that, under the aegis of the new movement, it will be
possible for them to promulgate their old ideas to the misfortune of their new
listeners.
We had declared one of our principles thus:
"We shall meet violence with violence in our own defence". Naturally
that principle disturbed the equanimity of the knights of the pen. They
reproached us bitterly not only for what they called our crude worship of the
cudgel but also because, according to them, we had no intellectual forces on
our side. These charlatans did not think for a moment that a Demosthenes could
be reduced to silence at a mass-meeting by fifty idiots who had come there to
shout him down and use their fists against his supporters. The innate cowardice
of the pen-and-ink charlatan prevents him from exposing himself to such a
danger, for he always works in safe retirement and never dares to make a noise
or come forward in public.
Even to-day I must warn the members of our young
movement in the strongest possible terms to guard against the danger of falling
into the snare of those who call themselves 'silent workers'. These 'silent
workers' are not only a white livered lot but are also, and always will be,
ignorant do-nothings. A man who is aware of certain happenings and knows that a
certain danger threatens, and at the same time sees a certain remedy which can
be employed against it, is in duty bound not to work in silence but to come
into the open and publicly fight for the destruction of the evil and the
acceptance of his own remedy. If he does not do so, then he is neglecting his
duty and shows that he is weak in character and that he fails to act either
because of his timidity, or indolence or incompetence. To put it briefly, they
are sheer swindlers, political jobbers who feel chagrined by the honest work
which others are doing. In addition to all this one ought to note the arrogance
and conceited impudence with which these obscurantist idlers try to tear to
pieces the work of other people, criticizing it with an air of superiority, and
thus playing into the hands of the mortal enemy of our people.
In the beginning of 1920 I put forward the
idea of holding our first mass meeting. On this proposal there were differences
of opinion amongst us. Some leading members of our party thought that the time
was not ripe for such a meeting and that the result might be detrimental. The
Press of the Left had begun to take notice of us and we were lucky enough in
being able gradually to arouse their wrath. We had begun to appear at other
meetings and to ask questions or contradict the speakers, with the natural
result that we were shouted down forthwith. But still we thereby gained some of
our ends. People began to know of our existence and the better they understood
us, the stronger became their aversion and their enmity. Therefore we might
expect that a large contingent of our friends from the Red Camp would attend
our first mass meeting.
Herr Harrer was then chairman of our party.
He did not see eye to eye with me as to the opportune time for our first mass
meeting. Accordingly he felt himself obliged to resign from the leadership of
the movement, as an upright and honest man. Herr Anton Drexler took his place.
I kept the work of organizing the propaganda in my own hands and I listened to
no compromise in carrying it out. We decided on February 24th 1920 as the date
for the first great popular meeting to be held under the aegis of this movement
which was hitherto unknown.
I made all the preparatory arrangements
personally. The posters and leaflets concentrated on a few points which were
repeated again and again. The text was concise and definite, an absolutely
dogmatic form of expression being used. For our principal colour we chose red,
as it has an exciting effect on the eye and was therefore calculated to arouse
the attention of our opponents and irritate them. Thus they would have to take
notice of us--whether they liked it or not--and would not forget us.
In the second volume of this book I shall
give a detailed account of the guiding principles which we then followed in
drawing up our programme. Here I will only say that the programme was arranged
not merely to set forth the form and content of the young movement but also
with an eye to making it understood among the broad masses. The so-called
intellectual circles made jokes and sneered at it and then
tried to criticize it. But the effect of our programme proved that the ideas
which we then held were right.
I shall bring the first part of this book to
a close by referring to our first great mass meeting, because that meeting
marked the occasion on which our framework as a small party had to be broken up
and we started to become the most powerful factor of this epoch in the influence
we exercised on public opinion. At that time my chief anxiety was that we might
not fill the hall and that we might have to face empty benches. I myself was
firmly convinced that if only the people would come this day would turn out a
great success for the young movement. That was my feeling as I waited
impatiently for the hour to come.
It had been announced that the meeting would
begin at 7.30. A quarter-of-an-hour before the opening time I
walked through the chief hall of the Hofbräuhaus on the PLATZ in
Munich and my heart was nearly bursting with joy. The great hall--for at that
time it seemed very big to me--was filled to overflowing. Nearly 2,000 people
were present. And, above all, those people had come whom we had always wished
to reach. More than half the audience consisted of persons who seemed to be
communists or independents. Our first great demonstration was destined, in
their view, to come to an abrupt end.
But things happened otherwise. When the first
speaker had finished I got up to speak. After a few minutes I was met with a
hailstorm of interruptions and violent encounters broke out in the body of the
hall. A handful of my loyal war comrades and some other followers grappled with
the disturbers and restored order in a little while. I was able to continue my
speech. After half an hour the applause began to drown the interruptions and
the hootings. Then interruptions gradually ceased and applause took their
place. When I finally came to explain the twenty-five points and laid them,
point after point, before the masses gathered there and asked them to pass
their own judgment on each point, one point after another was accepted with
increasing enthusiasm. When the last point was reached I had before me a hall
full of people united by a new conviction, a new faith and a new will.
Nearly four hours had passed when the hall
began to clear. As the masses streamed towards the exits, crammed shoulder to
shoulder, shoving and pushing, I knew that a movement was now set
afoot among the German people which would never pass into oblivion.
A fire was enkindled from whose glowing heat
the sword would be fashioned which would restore freedom to the German
Siegfried and bring back life to the German nation.
Beside the revival which I then foresaw, I
also felt that the Goddess of Vengeance was now getting ready to redress the
treason of the 9th of November, 1918. The hall was emptied. The movement was on
the march.”
Adolf Hitler
Kaps
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