Hitler began his career in Munich, and in Munich were a lot of very interesting people. Now, we need to understand something very, very important about the evolution of Hitler's political career. There's, and again we need to just back up a little bit and correct a lot of myths from post-1945 history of historiography about Germany. There's an attempt again to, and as we discussed in the previous lecture, to portray Germany as on some sort of natural evolution since 1848, whatever, to becoming some peace-loving democracy, or so-called peace-loving democracy, etc. etc. Some sort of carbon copy of what America likes to think it is, and so on. As we've pointed out, that's absolute rubbish. Now, there's also an equally deluded point of view which is to try to portray Hitler as some sort of crackpot fringe character, who had nothing to do with German history. That, again, nothing could be further from the truth.
What is mind-boggling about Hitler is that even before the so-called putsch of 1923, Hitler had become a very major figure in German politics, particularly nationalist German politics. Hitler was backed by a Who's Who of the German political establishment on the right. The Becksteins, the Brookmans, prestigious German families such equivalent to our Rockefellers and Kennedys were behind Hitler. The Wagner family backed Hitler. Very important - Hitler managed to convince Gen. Ludendorff the war lord of Germany in World War I to support him. And even before the push of 1923, Hitler was traveling around Germany with Ludendorff on speaking tours, which is just mind-boggling to think that this is a corporal who was not even a German citizen until the late 1920s. He was a citizen of Austria. So, this is a mind-boggling achievement of somebody who came from such modest background. However, you really can't understand Hitler if you don't understand that that he was very much in alliance with key members of the German establishment.
Now, in terms of geopolitics this is very, very, very, important, because as Hitler sat in the beer halls, in the cafés of Munich, he got to know key people in German geopolitics. Now, when we first started studying this, we thought the main figure was general Haushofer. But as we study this thing further, we realize that Hitler was in touch with a good part of the German military leadership on Ludendorff's staff relating to the conquest of Russia in World War I. What evolved from Hitler and what is discussed in our General Plan Ost report and other reports that we have on the history of Germany. What was evolved in Hitler's mind was a really quite revolutionary strategy for German geopolitics. The traditional German Right in the 1920s had goals basically to regain where Germany was in 1914, regain Alsace-Lorraine from France, regain the colonies, basically just to sort of re-create Germany to where it was by 1914. That was the conventional point of view. Hitler's point of view was really totally revolutionary.
What Hitler wanted to do was to basically completely ignore that whole strategy. He proposed - he wanted a nonaggression pact with France and England. He wanted to make sure the French understood that Germany had no claims about getting Alsace-Lorraine back, and instead, he chose to implement a good part of the ideas of Ludendorff's staff in terms of the conquest of what was now the Soviet Union. This is absolutely critical to understand. If you don't understand this, then you don't this - you don't understand anything about Hitler's foreign policy.
Now, we also - just to further highlight Hitler's role in German politics we need to correct a number of myths about the so-called 1923 putsch. The conventional wisdom is this was a bunch of crazy people at three o'clock in the morning who tried to take over the Bavarian government. This is a nonsensical point of view. In 1923 the French had occupied the Ruhr. The German government was completely humiliated. All over Germany, there were calls for a putsch against the government. The government of Bavaria headed by the right-wing monarchist Commissioner Kahr, organized a plan for a putsch. They asked Hitler to be part of that plan. Hitler did not wake up in the morning one day and decide to overthrow the German government. That's an absolutely silly observation and another attempt to portray Hitler as some sort of marginal crackpot.
The idea of a putsch came from the very top in the Bavarian government. Now after the situation calmed down the Bavarian government was informed by General Von Seeckt, head of the German Army that, and the Army leadership, that they did not want a putsch. In fact, they were very specifically informed that if they organized a putsch, the German army would enter Bavaria and overthrow Kahr and replace him. So, at that point in time, Kahr decided maybe the putsch wasn't such a great idea. Hitler, however, had a big political problem because he had not only endorsed Kahr's plan - then he had gotten all of his supporters were very angry that the putsch had been canceled. And this is the root of the so-called "putsch" in 1923 which was to try to force Kahr to go through with his original plan.
Now, obviously the whole thing ended up in a big mess, and however, at the trial, the person was destroyed was not Hitler it was Kahr, because all these negotiations had been in secret, and Hitler came across as a kind of sincere, if a bit out of control, patriot, while Kahr came across as a complete fraud, because Kahr had tried to pretend that he had nothing to do with this, and then when the trial was - Kahr, in fact, tried to make sure Hitler got deported, he was absolutely horrified quite correctly at the possibility of a trial. So, Kahr ended up being completely destroyed by the trial that followed and Hitler became an even bigger celebrity around Germany. This is an important point to understand.
Now, in the 1920's that followed, Hitler very cleverly built a political machine all over Germany. He traveled all over Germany so that when the roof fell in on the world economy in 1930, there were National Socialist candidates running for office all over Germany and the National Socialist party went from being a marginal party to being one of the most powerful parties in Germany in the 1930 elections. Now, it's also very important to understand that Hitler's greatest opponents in Germany were not the left, they were the right. His greatest opponents in Bavaria were not the left, not communists, but people like Commissioner Kahr who represented the monarchist right wing. Once the National Socialist party became the largest political party in Germany, who stood in the way of Hitler getting in the power?
The democratic forces, the so-called "social Democrats" and so on had been had been completely discredited, and Hitler's power was blocked for a couple of years by right-wing, by Hindenburg. This is very, very important to understand. So, in the early 1930s, what you had in Germany was a Civil War on the right. Support for democracy, support for American-style democracy was basically dead as a door nail and the opponents of Hitler were not great lovers of democracy, they were forces on the political right. Now, through a series of intrigues and other things which we needn't to go into here Hitler became chancellor in 1933. Now, when Hitler became Chancellor he adopted a very, very cautious foreign policy. He, to the shock of everyone, negotiated a nonaggression pact with Poland in 1934 - and we will then in the next lecture begin to discuss what Hitler did when he came to power.