Short History of World War II - James L. Stokesbury [15]
Next, as a result of vast amounts of paper being printed to pay off reparations, the mark collapsed. The French and Belgians occupied the Ruhr and seized German industry. The government responded with an unsuccessful policy of passive resistance. The Allies took over various German territories; assorted others were lost to breakaway movements among minority groups on the frontiers. Even some of the major states threatened to go their own way, negating the work of Bismarck in his unification of Germany a generation ago. The French supported a Rhenish republic. Bavaria was a hotbed of intrigue and separatism. Against this background an unknown but enterprising politician named Adolf Hitler made his own bid for power.
One of the myriad of mini-parties spawned by postwar Germany was a small group known as the National Socialist German Workers’ Party. Initially, it consisted of no more than half a dozen cronies. Hitler joined it in 1920, ironically as a paid informer for the army, to keep watch on potentially dangerous political groups.
Born an Austrian in 1889, Hitler had had a totally undistinguished career to this point. Destined to follow his father into the lower ranks of the civil service, Hitler saw himself instead as a great artist. He failed, however, to pass the exams to get into art school in Vienna. From 1904 to 1913 he lived, or existed, on part-time jobs in Vienna, selling not very good postcards, living in flophouses, engaging in passionate arguments about politics, and doing nothing very successfully. All he managed to do was develop a hatred of the Jews—anti-Semitism was a swelling current in central Europe in the years before the Great War—and an equal distaste for the system that was refusing to recognize his own genius. In 1913, he left Austria and went to Munich in Bavaria, and he has actually been identified in a photo of a cheering crowd listening to the declaration of war in 1914. Hitler enlisted in a Bavarian regiment, fought on the Western Front, and was promoted to corporal. At the collapse of Germany he was lying in a hospital, temporarily blinded by gas. He drifted through the period immediately after the armistice and ended up in low-level political intelligence work for the army, a nonentity.
He soon came to dominate the little party of which he had become a member, and it was he who gave it its name and what program it had, a mixture of radicalism, contempt for the politicians, provincialism, and resentment of Versailles. Slowly, profit-ting by the currents of dissatisfaction and despair throughout Bavaria, the party grew.
Its most illustrious recruit was General Eric Ludendorf, Germany’s second soldier and Marshal von Hindenburg’s alter ego. Ludendorff was becoming more and more radically anti-Semitic, anti-Jesuit, anti-Freemasons; he would eventually become totally immersed in the delights of Norse mythology. He was a natural for Hitler.
By 1923, the NSDAP, or Nazis, as they called themselves, were ready to act. In November, they tried to seize the government of Bavaria, in what came to be known as the Beer-Hall Putsch, named after the place where the idea was concocted. Supported by their Brownshirts—Mussolini had pre-empted black—they marched through the streets of Munich. They thought they had a deal with the police, but instead the police machine-gunned the column, and that was the end of the Putsch. Ludendorff