Group items tagged

Hitler rushed back to Munich and countered them by announcing his resignation from the Party on July 11, 1921.

They realized the loss of Hitler would effectively mean the end of the Nazi Party. Hitler seized the moment and announced he would return on the condition that he was made chairman and given dictatorial powers.

At the next gathering, July 29, 1921, Adolf Hitler was introduced as Führer of the Nazi Party, marking the first time that title was publicly used to address him.

He described the scene in Mein Kampf: "I spoke for thirty minutes, and what before I had simply felt within me, without in any way knowing it, was now proved by reality: I could speak! After thirty minutes the people in the small room were electrified and the enthusiasm was first expressed by the fact that my appeal to the self-sacrifice of those present led to the donation of three hundred marks."

The money was used to buy more advertising and print leaflets.

The German Workers' Party now featured Hitler as the main attraction at its meetings.

In his speeches Hitler railed against the Treaty of Versailles and delivered anti-Semitic tirades, blaming the Jews for Germany's problems. Attendance slowly increased, numbering in the hundreds.

In Munich, there were many alienated, maladjusted soldiers and ex-soldiers with a thirst for adventure and a distaste for the peace brought on by the Treaty of Versailles and the resulting democratic republic. They joined the German Workers' Party in growing numbers.

He proceeded to outline the Twenty Five Points of the German Workers' Party, its political platform, which included: the union of all Germans in a greater German Reich; rejection of the Treaty of Versailles; the demand for additional territories for the German people (Lebensraum); citizenship determined by race with no Jew to be considered a German; all income not earned by work to be confiscated; a thorough reconstruction of the national education system; religious freedom except for religions which endanger the German race; and a strong central government for the execution of effective legislation.

In the summer of 1920, Hitler chose the symbol which to this day remains perhaps the most infamous in history, the swastika.

Hitler described the symbolism involved: "In the red we see the social idea of the movement, in the white the national idea, in the swastika the mission to struggle for the victory of Aryan man and at the same time the victory of the idea of creative work, which is eternally anti-Semitic and will always be anti-Semitic."

The German Workers' Party name was changed by Hitler to include the term National Socialist. Thus the full name was the National Socialist German Workers' Party (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei or NSDAP) called for short, Nazi.

By the end of 1920 it had about three thousand members.

In Mein Kampf, Hitler describes the condition of the party: "aside from a few directives, there was nothing, no program, no leaflet, no printed matter at all, no membership cards, not even a miserable rubber stamp..."

Although unimpressed by the present condition of the German Workers' Party, Hitler was drawn to the sentiment expressed by Drexler that this would somehow become a movement not just a political party.

"This absurd little organization with its few members seemed to me to possess the one advantage that it had not frozen into an 'organization,' but left the individual opportunity for real personal activity. Here it was still possible to work, and the smaller the movement, the more readily it could be put into the proper form. Here, the content, the goal, and the road could still be determined..."

Adolf Hitler joined the committee of the German Workers' Party (Deutsche Arbeiterpartei or DAP) and thus entered politics.

"[T]he theory of output as a whole, which is what the following book purports to provide, is much more easily adapted to the conditions of a totalitarian state, than is the theory of production and distribution of a given output produced under the conditions of free competition and a large measure of laissez-faire."

Unemployment stayed low because Hitler, though he intervened in labor markets, never attempted to boost wages beyond their market level.