Dan Snow's History Hit - Hitler's Early Years

Episode Date: November 7, 2023

1/4 In this special 4-part series, we look back at the life of Adolf Hitler. With the help of Frank McDonough, a leading historian of the Third Reich, we follow Hitler from childhood to adulthood and learn how this awkward, aspiring artist became one of history's most infamous dictators.In this first episode, we trace Hitler's childhood and upbringing to learn what we can about his personality and desires. We hear how the First World War gave him a sense of purpose, and how the upheaval of Weimar Germany shaped his politics. Finally, we end with his disastrous first attempt to seize power - the Beer Hall Putsch.Produced by James Hickmann, Mariana des Forges and Freddy Chick. Edited by Dougal Patmore.Don’t miss out on the best offer in history! Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Get a subscription for £1 for 3 months with code BLACKFRIDAY sign up now for your 14-day free trial https://historyhit/subscription/.Discover the past on History Hit with ad-free original podcasts and documentaries released weekly presented by world-renowned historians like Dan Snow, Suzannah Lipscomb, Lucy Worsley, Matt Lewis, Tristan Hughes and more. Get 50% off your first 3 months with code DANSNOW. Download the app or sign up here.We'd love to hear from you! You can email the podcast at [e-mail] can take part in our listener survey here.

It's a cold afternoon on the 8th of November 1923. A group of men, stamping their feet and rubbing their hands, outside a beer cellar in Munich. It's the capital of the German state of Bavaria. They wear the field grey uniforms and distinctive steel helmets of the now defunct Imperial German Army. In their hands, they carry loaded rifles they have liberated from army stockpiles, and their backpacks are stuffed with ammunition and hand grenade.

Anyone passing by might be forgiven for thinking that they had stumbled across the ghosts of a frontline unit from the First World War. In fact, these are the foot soldiers of the recently minted Nazi paramilitary group, the Stürmerbataillon, or SA. They are the muscle of this party. Much of their time is spent fist-fighting with leftists and intimidating Jews. Many are the hardened veterans of the First World War. Others are just brawlers, recruited for their brute force and questionable morals. They've earned a reputation in Bavaria as one of the most violent paramilitary groups around, and there's sadly no shortage of competition. One of the men, in position of authority, calls them to attention, and then their commander paces

before them. He's a celebrated First World War fighter ace. His name is Hermann Goring. He wears an intimidating Nazi jacket. He's got a steel helmet with a Nazi swastika emblazoned on it. He spent months training these men for this day. He inspects their weapons, their kit, their uniforms, and he barks an order at them. Then, in a flurry of activity, they pile into a nearby flatbed trucks. A short drive away, thousands of Munich's business elite have gathered outside the Bergerbrückeller, an enormous beer hall near the banks of the Isar

River. It's a cavernous venue, rows of tables laden with beer steins, overflowing ashtrays, hefty pillars on either side support a very grand roof adorned with decorative plasterwork and ornate chandeliers. Everyone has come to hear the head of Bavaria's semi-authoritarian government, Gustav Ritter von Kahr,

who is due to give a speech on the horrors of Marxism. The crowd is so big it's spilled out onto the street. The jovial sound of umpah music emanates from inside the hall. Goering and his company of stormtroopers pull up opposite the beer hall's main entrance. Policemen stand guard outside the venue. Now this could be a problem for the Nazis, but they do have a trick up their sleeve. Disguised as they are in their army uniforms, they pretend to be a company on patrol and cautiously walk towards the beer hall.

The plan works. Filing through the entrance, they drop the pretense and spring into life. They take up positions around the hall, covering the windows and blocking the exits. The uneasy crowd rise to their feet. These are tumultuous times. Political assassinations are not uncommon. Nervous eyes flit around the room. Then an unassuming man in a long trench coat steps forward,

his collar turned up against the biting cold outside. He carries a hat in one hand, and he sports a bristly black toothbrush moustache. He is a 34-year-old, failed artist, high school dropout and leader of the Nazi party. His name is Adolf Hitler.

He pushes through the crowds and marches down the aisle. Drowned out by the commotion around him, he stands on a chair and fires a shot into the ceiling with his pistol. Silence falls over the room. He speaks with a spellbinding voice that will one day bewitch people across Germany. The beer hall is surrounded, he says. The national revolution has begun. national revolution has begun. Over the next 24 hours, the Nazis will battle it out with the authorities in the streets of Munich in what's become known as the Beer Hall Putsch of 1923,

an attempted coup d'etat orchestrated by Hitler with the eventual aim of overthrowing the national government in Berlin. He wouldn't quite make it that far. Not yet, anyway. Hostages were taken and bands of armed thugs roamed the streets. The coup's momentum, however, wasn't short-lived. By the end of the 8th of November, the Bavarian authorities had rallied the city's defences and begun to close in on the Nazi conspirators. On the 9th of November, Hitler orchestrated a final desperate march to save his revolution, to reinvigorate it. This ended in a frenzied firefight with the police in which 16 Nazis were killed along with four policemen. Goring was shot in the groin. Hitler suffered a dislocated shoulder before

fleeing the scene to hide out in the Bavarian countryside. The Beer Hall Putsch was a resounding failure for the Nazis. They didn't spark the revolution they so badly wanted, but as we'll see later on, the Putsch became a defining moment for Hitler and his Nazi party. Putsch became a defining moment for Hitler and his Nazi party. You're listening to Dan Snow's History. This is our four-part series on the rise and fall of the 20th century's most infamous dictator, Adolf Hitler was born into a quiet corner of Austria-Hungary on the 20th of April 1889 in the modest town of Branau am Inn, just inside what is now the Austrian border with Germany. His parents, Alois and Clara Hitler, were not German, but Austrian. Alois was born with the

surname Schicklgruber, not Hitler, and was the son of an unmarried peasant woman. His father had taken off when Alois was only 10, leaving the boy with his uncle, a man named Johann Heidler. Alois grew up to become a customs official, and his uncle was so proud that he officially brought his illegitimate nephew into the family name. And so Alois adopted the name Heidler, which officials misspelt as Hitler, a silly administrative error that gave us the most notorious name of the last century. And it gives us something to think about. Adolf Hitler was very nearly Adolf Schicklgruber. Adolf's mother Clara was born in the Austrian village of Spital, and she worked as a domestic servant in her teenage years. At the age of 16, she was hired as a maid by her second cousin, teenage years. At the age of 16, she was hired as a maid by her second cousin, Alois Hitler. Yes,

that means Hitler's parents were second cousins. The bishop who married them was so disturbed they requested a special dispensation from the Vatican. Eventually, the marriage was approved, probably because Clara was pregnant by then. The couple would go on to have six children, but only Adolf and his younger sister Paula survived infancy. Alois was very proud to be a local customs official. He was known to strut around in his fancy Habsburg uniform and obsess about his reputation. His work meant that the family moved around a lot. They moved from Branau am Inn to the regional capital of Linz. Professor Frank McDonagh is a great friend of mine, great friend of the podcast, and he is a leading historian on the Third Reich. He's going to join me throughout this series. Frank says that Hitler rewrote parts of his childhood to push a certain

narrative about himself, a man born into poverty who rose to the top. But as we'll see, fabricating reality was something of a speciality for Hitler. Hitler says that his father was a lowly customs official. Makes out that he was kind of like a clerk, a pen pusher. But it turns out his dad was literally the customs official for the whole of a city, Linz, the tax collector. So he hadn't, you know, as as we know the tax collector has enormous powers and he wore a ceremonial uniform and you know he was well known in the area you couldn't cross the local customer official if you're a company or whatever he could investigate you couldn't be on

the spot they had posh curtains in the living room they had the the, you know, rugs, handmade rugs. They had three domestic servants with them. So this was definitely not an impoverished family. His family weren't poor, but it was a turbulent household. By all accounts, Hitler's father, Alois, was an authoritarian and unforgiving man. He demanded absolute obedience, apparently, from Adolf and would punish his behaviour with a whip. He had a bad temper. He was liable to fly into a rage at the slightest provocation. Adolf would later describe their relationship as a battle of competing wills. And he recalled, I never loved my father. I therefore feared him all the more. Things only got worse for Hitler as

he grew up and began to resist his father's attempt to push him into the civil service. Young Adolf had decided to take a more creative course in his life. He enjoyed painting and drawing. He set his sights on becoming an artist. To Adolf, nothing seemed worse than the monotony of an office job. To his father, the idea of raising an artist was unthinkable. In stark contrast, Clara was a doting mother. She pampered her son, encouraged him to pursue whatever he liked. Adolf's sister, Paula, would later describe her as a very soft and tender person who struggled to keep Hitler in check as he became more and more headstrong. What we know is that Hitler had a very good relationship with his mother

and a very bad relationship with his father. Some people have called this the Oedipus complex. And it went a bit far. You know, they love their mothers. Their mother dotes over them, but they don't like their father. And in this case, his father was very violent. Hitler says that he administered beatings repeatedly against them. And he said, I loved my mother and I respected

my father, but I didn't love him. While at school in Linz, Hitler performed below average academically. He did gravitate towards history though. Aged 11, it was in his history lessons that Hitler was first introduced the idea of German nationalism. He idolised Germanic heroes like Frederick the Great and Otto von Bismarck. An avid reader, Adolf spent much of his childhood off in his own world. The hugely popular German writer Karl May was a favourite of his, and May's tales of the old American West appealed to Hitler, who admired underdog characters like Old Shatterhand. In these stories, the intrepid explorer befriends the brave Winnetou, an Apache chief. His writing romanticised indigenous American culture and portrayed

characters like Winnetou as honest and trustworthy in contrast to the pale-faced frontiersman. For its time, this was quite a radical departure from the more popular interpretation of the American West and one that Adolf imbibed enthusiastically. He also loved imaginary war games, in particular re-enacting the Boer struggle against the British Empire with himself playing, you guessed it, the underdog, rugged Boer commando. In 1903, Alois Hitler suddenly died of a lung hemorrhage. There was no resistance anymore to Hitler's artistic leanings, and he was able to throw himself into them completely. He was when he moved to Linz in about the late 19th century. He says he lived the life of a

dilettante. There's a kind of drawing of him. You know, he's got a moustache and he wears a hat. Apparently he had a cane and he would go to the opera quite regularly and hang out in local cafes. So if you met him, he was that kind of guy. When you were 18, you'd go to a cafe and you'd meet some guy and he'd say, what are you doing? I said, I'm in a band, you know, and I've got a few gigs going on. You know, he wasn't someone you'd say, oh, you know,

he's going to be a rabble-rousing dictator. More likely, he was going to be a poet. And that's how he saw himself at that stage. So he's in Linz. He's going to the opera. He sees himself as a poet. Is that why he goes to Vienna, this cultural capital? Well, he has a friend who he meets in Linz called August Kubisak. And he's a musician and he wants to get into the Vienna music school. And Hitler has this idea that he's going to get into the Vienna music school. And Hitler has this idea he's going to get into the Vienna School of Art, one of the greatest art schools in the whole of Europe,

based on a few drawings that he's done. So in a way, his idea of getting into the art school is a little bit far-fetched, whereas his friend Kubitsch is an accomplished pianist. So he's always backed himself? Yes, he thinks he's good at certain things. He certainly thinks he's good at art. But does he get in to the school of art? No, he gets turned down, not once, but twice he drops out there.

He's sharing a flat in Vienna at that time with August Kubisak. And he's so ashamed of the fact that he's failed twice to get into the school of art because Kubisak does get into the school of music, that he disappears from the flat, never sees Kubisak again. Between 1907 and 1913, we enter a bit of a blind spot in Hitler's story. Hundreds of historians have combed through these years for any clues as to when the young artist turned into something darker. Austria-Hungary, there are wars, there's wars in Southern Africa, the Russo-Japanese War. Do we know anything? Was he engaged with politics, with the politics of empire, of this era of European control over non-European peoples? Do we have any sense of what we made of all that?

The strange thing about Hitler is that we have so little evidence, real source evidence for what he was doing in Vienna from 1907 to 1913. We know that he went to musical evenings, ironically, with a Jewish family. So we can't really say that he was anti-Semitic in his Vienna period. Then he says that he went along to the local parliament and he watched some speakers like the mayor of Vienna was called Karl Luger. And he was very charismatic, fine speaker. And he was a populist, really, very anti-Semitic as well. So he said that he listened to that.

He said he bought pamphlets on anti-Semitism. So he said that he listened to that. He said he bought pamphlets on anti-Semitism. He says that when he looked around Vienna, he noticed that Jewish people were different. So for the first time, he sees them as others because most of them are Eastern European Jews. Anti-Semitism was pretty prevalent in Austria, pretty prevalent in France. In circles in Britain, it was pretty prevalent. And in Russia, of course, there were pogroms against Jews. So anti-Semitism was kind of, it was in the air.

Most people were anti-Semitic, but not in the sense of saying, oh, let's kill the Jews, but just in the sense of saying, oh, Jews, you know, they run the banks, don't they? And things like that. All Jewish people were mean. The classic sort of Ebenezer Scrooge type or Fagin in Charles Dickens' novels. So I think it was pretty uniform. So he couldn't go through Vienna,

a cosmopolitan city like that, with the highest Jewish population of any city in Europe and not be inculcated in anti-Semitism. So Hitler is 25 years old at this point. He's in Vienna. It's a multicultural capital with all the energy and opportunities and prejudices that you find in a diverse city. He's exploring the potent anti-Semitism that's definitely sweeping across Europe. He's reading about German nationalism. He's also dealing with his own insecurities. He's been rejected by

prestigious artistic institutions. He's struggling to sell his work. He's broken off his only real friendship. He's relying on payouts from his father's inheritance to make ends meet. It does seem like a very dangerous combination. All of those insecurities, those external factors, mixed with his strong sense of self-importance. And young Hitler doesn't have long to wait, for he finds himself drawn into one of history's greatest dramas. It's 1914, and Adolf Hitler is about to go to war. Before the First World War, the Austro-Hungarian Empire was made up of many different ethnic groups, people with different identities, religions, sometimes several of them overlapping. Its leadership had become divided between those

who wanted to embrace this multiculturalism and those who saw it as a danger. The heir to the throne, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, advocated for greater autonomy for the various groups within the empire. On the 28th of June 1914, the Archduke and his wife were assassinated in Sarajevo. The man who killed them was a member of the so-called Black Hand, a secret society that wanted to unite ethnic Serbs under one banner. This nationalist assassination would lead to the death of millions. It precipitated an international crisis leading to the declaration of war at the end of July, beginning of August 1914. It would be a war of appalling destruction that would topple empires and change the world's political order forever. To the directionless, frustrated, yet strangely confident young Hitler,

a good old war like the ones he used to recreate in his childhood was exactly what he wanted. The only problem on Hitler's mind was what country did he want to fight for? Was he a patriot? Did he believe in the Austrian Empire, which was struggling at this point? No, he didn't. He hated the Habsburg Empire. He said it was a kind of melting pot of different races. Oh, too cosmopolitan.

Too cosmopolitan for him. So he admired Germany more. Because was he ethnic German living in the Austrian Empire? He was, well. He classified himself as that. Yeah, he classified himself as that, yeah. So he moves then to Germany, doesn't he, just for the First World War?

And does he do that because he sort of thinks actually I'd rather be German in Germany than a German in this big multicultural empire? Well, in Mein Kampf he says that he arrives in Munich and he says, at last, a German city. What a wonderful thing. And then the First World War happens. Yeah, well, that really transforms his life, really,

because he signs up for the List Regiment. The interesting thing about his signing up for the List Regiment, the Bavarian Regiment, is that he wasn't eligible due to his background, but clearly nobody checked his application form. And he gets into the Bavarian List Regiment, spends his time on the Western Front. And he's a messenger, first on a bike, then on a motorcycle. He takes messages from the front. Hitler made a competent soldier. While his job as a messenger meant that he wasn't always right up in the frontline trenches,

he wasn't the tip of the spear. He was still extremely dangerous. Artillery barrages would have been constantly landing around him. And there was always the possibility that he would get caught up in an enemy attack or raid, killed by a sniper, or choke on poison gas. He was wounded several times by flying shrapnel and mustard gas.

And he did win prestigious awards, like the Iron Cross First Class. Yeah, it doesn't sound as gallant as doing the fighting on the front line, but it's incredibly dangerous, right? You're showing yourself. Oh, absolutely. Yeah, you know, there's bombs exploding,

you know, left, right and centre. So it's, he's pretty brave, you know, he's not a coward. And is he social? Does he make friends? Well, not really because he's kind of a bit older. He's like 25. He's a bit older than the raw recruits who are in about 18.

And they see him as rather strange. They call him Uncle Dolph. And he has a little dog called Foxel. Someone kills his dog. And he said, if only that person knew how much I love that dog, they never would have killed it. So he's obviously a loner. Oh, he was a loner, yeah.

He was a loner. But in the sense that he was a loner, but, you know, it's like that thing about, you know, when they have a murder and he kills, you know, many people, and then people go on about him being a loner, and then you find out that he's got all these friends and he went to the pub every week and so on. I think with Hitler, he was always in social situations,

but he was a bit awkward. He couldn't have a conversation because he couldn't listen to the other person. He didn't have much empathy with other people. He loved the sound of his own voice. He decorated for bravery, though. Conspicuous gallantry. Yeah.

He gets two Iron Crosses for bravery, awarded, ironically, by a Jewish officer. There's a view that he was a corporal, but he actually wasn't ever. I mean, a guy called Thomas Weber looked at his wartime record in detail and found that he was never promoted to a corporal. He was just promoted to a kind of assistant corporal, something like that. He had no power over any other officers. And this thing about him being a corporal,

Weber shows that he never was a corporal. He was like a kind of special private. He didn't climb the rungs. He only climbed one little half rung. He climbed one little rung, yeah. And what about his politics? Because I've read in your books, he does start haranguing his mates at this point, doesn't he? develops quite a powerful sort of world he doesn't listen he's happy to broadcast

nationalism is his credo it's he's a patriot a super patriot his colleagues in the trenches say that whenever someone talks about defeat he stands up then and he gives a big harangue you know and he's very patriotic his officers even say they'd never seen anyone as loyal and patriotic. He never seems to have another side to him to question authority. Interestingly enough, he just accepts authority. Authority to him is good. And I suppose that kind of army discipline inculcates into his eventual Nazism. It's the same thing.

It's like he's running the country like it's an army. And he's wounded a couple of times. Yeah, he gets wounded. He gets wounded in his thigh. Then he gets a mustard gas attack later on in the war as well. This is Dan Snow's History Hit. More after this. groundbreaking research from the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings, Normans,

kings and popes, who were rarely the best of friends, murder, rebellions, and crusades. Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit wherever you get your podcasts. now i think it's impossible to understand hitler or how the nazis came to power without

acknowledging that the great war instilled in thousands of men a deep-rooted and unbending sense of purpose, but also afflicted many of those same men with terrible trauma. The fighting in the trenches, the spirit of wartime, seemed to offer a very simple model to impressionable, nationalistic-minded young men. There's the enemy. He's a threat to us and our people. You must kill him for us to survive and flourish. This is the context, I think, to so many of the choices made by men in particular in this period. Even after being badly wounded by an exploding shell during the Battle of Somme in 1916, Hitler begged to stay on the front lines rather than be sent to the rear to do other jobs. Like one of Carl May's Wild West

adventurers that he loved so much as a child, Hitler saw himself as a lone wolf fighting the good fight on the Western front. Do you think he was one of these men that enjoyed the war? He loved the war. He was happiest at war. And that came about in the Second World War. He loved war. He thought war was a good thing, that it was one of the great things, that it was a purifier, that nations came to war. They had wars and then they went up the Peckinorder and down the Peckinorder. So he loved war. He saw war as an instrument of policy. Chop the dead wood out of the body politic. Yeah. And then move on. And then he thought then that the next generation would be better for whoever won and

establish a new civilization so that's the way he sees war but he sees it as a war of races that these races become militaristic because they want to be superior so he sees it as biological as well as a biological instinct for war but in the higher. He's got a bit of sort of corrupt Darwinian thinking. Yeah, he's a social Darwinist through and through. He believes in that. He thinks war can purify the world. He's injured, isn't he, when he hears news of the armistice? So he doesn't witness those final catastrophic weeks of the German army on the Western Front.

He goes to a hospital in Passau. He's had a mustard gas attack and he's gone blind, briefly gone blind, and he's in this hospital. And then the chaplain comes in and says to him, Germany's lost the war. He says that he threw himself into his pillow and started to cry. And he said, it's all been for nothing. And he says at that moment, he decided to enter politics. We should always take Hitler's account of his own life with a pinch of salt. His infamous autobiographical work Mein Kampf plays very fast and loose with the truth. It's really more of a mythical origin story for the cult of Hitler than a factual account of his life. But it does seem certain that at the end of the war, he was dejected. And like so many other Germans, he grew to resent those who had ended it as he

saw it dishonorably, ended it in a sort of surrender. And from this resentment grew a conspiracy that took hold in Germany, that it had been Jews and communists at home in Germany who had conspired to end the war disastrously early, yet for their own gain. They'd betrayed good patriotic Germans who'd gone away to fight. It's often referred to as the stab in the back myth, and it's a recurring motif in Hitler's ideas, speeches, writing. For many Germans in the interwar period, the First World War was not something to be avoided at all costs, consigned to the past, to be moved beyond, but something that remained unfinished. I'm sort of fascinated by these hardened, brutalized veterans who decide to enter politics, whether it's in Italy or in

Britain or in Germany. What are they hoping to achieve? I think, first of all, it grows out of their own dissatisfaction. So you've got their dissatisfaction. The world hasn't turned out the way they wanted it. You know, Germany didn't win the war. The Treaty of Versailles has come along. There's a democratic government. And they just feel as though this is the worst hell imaginable.

And they've suffered so much for a vision of the future that they were fighting for. Yeah. And because, of course, Germany wasn't invaded, they could believe in this myth, this stab in the back myth that Germany wasn't defeated. It was stabbed in the back by Jews and socialists at home. And Hitler came to believe that when he goes back to Munich at the end of the war. But he's got no clear idea of what he's going to be. He sort of falls into it and he meets, obviously, he meets people, like all great people meet people, don't they, along the way. They always have a mentor. There's always someone, there's always a Brian Epstein for every Beatles. And in a way, politicians are like that. They meet people. And Hitler, it's who he meets that makes a difference, I think.

Tell me about the Germany. He goes back to so-called Weimar Germany. I mean, it's amazing Germany continued to exist. It seemed there were rebellions all over the place. There was a Bavarian independent republic had been established. It's extraordinary. It wasn't particularly old country Germany, was it? It had only been around for a couple of generations.

It was chaotic. I mean, at the end of the First World War, it was completely chaotic. You know, they established the Weimar Republic in Berlin, proclaimed it, you know, Herbert, he was the first president of the Weimar Republic, social democrat, patriot. It's called Weimar because it was... It's called Weimar because that's the place where the constitution was ratified because Berlin was in such chaos at that time. But there were all kinds of, you know, political upheavals. It's amazing that it survived, you know, because first of all, you had the Spartacus revolt

led by Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, and that ended. Saved by the Freikorps, saved by these soldiers like the Wagner Group, they were of their day. They were sort of brought in by the government to defend the republic. And so they put that down, killed Luxembourg and Liebknecht through Rosa Luxemburg and a local canal. Then there was a revolt in Munich.

That was chaotic. Ended up with a kind of what was called the regime of the poets. And that was just completely chaotic. Anyone who knows any poets would not be surprised. Yeah, that's right. They couldn't even agree on a poem. And that got put down by the Fry Corps as well. Then there was the Capuch in 1920.

That was led by a renegade army officer, and he actually became chancellor for five days, and the government fled to Dresden in exile. And then that was put down, not by the army, which sat on the sidelines, but by a general strike by the workers. Life was grindingly hard in Germany after the war. There had been revolution, dislocation, blockade. Germany's economy was shattered. Inflation ran rampant through the early 1920s.

It was easy to believe all these things on the cruel peace settlement enforced at the Treaty of Versailles. We've all heard the stories about the man who goes to buy a loaf of bread with a wheelbarrow full of cash. The once mighty German empire was now a shambles. The German military, regarded as the world's finest before 1914, had been rendered a shadow of its former self. On top of all that, the people living in or near major cities risked being caught up in the pell-mell of politics and paramilitary fights on a near daily basis, to people like Hitler, who valued order, authority, the military, a military ethos. This was just humiliating, unstable, an unacceptable state of affairs. By 1919, Hitler had been desperate to stay in the army, desperate to avoid unemployment,

and he'd ended up working seemingly as a spy in the German army intelligence. His job was to infiltrate subversive political parties and report back on them. And it was this job that would fatefully connect him with the nascent far-right political group called the German Workers Party, or the DAP. The founder and chairman of the DAP was a man named Anton Drexler. In September 1919, Hitler attended one of Drexler's party meetings and speeches. He had a back and forth with the main speaker, and Drexler was impressed with Hitler's oratory skills, inviting him to join the party. Hitler embraced the ideology of the party.

We know he's a bit of a sucker for nationalistic rhetoric, and the DAP provided that in droves. But they were just a small fish in a very big pond. But it was enough of a start that it fired Hitler's ambition. He set his sights on stardom within the grimy world of the far right. They're sort of socialist or they're nationalists? They're nationalists, aren't they? When we talk about socialism, they want to be a workers' party because they think that's where it's at, appealing to the workers, but they're not socialists. They're patriotic. They say a few slogans that are anti-capitalist, you could say,

to try and attract workers. And who's this Anton Drexler? He's a railway worker. He wrote a little pamphlet. He gives that pamphlet to Hitler. It's more or less like Mein Kampf, where he says that he was just a lowly railway worker. And one day he thought that the workers need to be won over towards nationalism, that what socialism lacked, he says, it's got many good qualities, he said, you know, the idea of a collective and all of that and a movement, which Hitler liked good qualities, he said, the idea of a collective and all of that, and a movement, which Hitler liked. Hitler liked the idea of a movement, but they lack any kind

of systemized way of looking at the world. From the start, Hitler wanted to become the party's leader. Throughout 1919, he encouraged the DAP to become more proactive. Target working class Germans. The party ramped up its nationalistic language, its anti-Semitism, its anti-Marxism. Hitler began making public speeches. He won a reputation within the party as a skilful orator. Seeing Hitler's growing popularity, well, Drexler promoted him. He made him head of the party's propaganda machine in 1920. And what do you do when you're a new head of propaganda or spin? You change the name. You do a rebrand. From that point forth, they were the National Socialist German Workers Party, the NSDAP, or what we now know as the Nazi

Party. And Hitler was fast becoming their main attraction. In 1921, a mutiny broke out. Some members wanted to merge with the confusingly named German Socialist Party, which was a competing far-right movement. Hitler was having none of it. He tendered his resignation. Realising that losing Hitler would be a great loss, the party's committee members managed to coax him back on board. And they did so by offering him the job of replacing Anton Drexler as party chairman. He basically takes over that party because he's a fantastic speaker. He's just one of those people who starts to speak and people listen. And he went round the beer halls. If you like, it was like Hitler mania, like Beatle mania, really.

And he went around these beer halls and people would say, Hitler's appearing tonight. And people said, oh, wow, go and see him. He was a great speaker. I mean, he started out when he gave his speeches, he'd come in with some papers and then he'd shuffle them. He'd be nervous. He did it all deliberately. And then gradually he'd go back to his own. No, he'd try and make it a personal story. I'm just like you. He starts off trying to get empathy for himself. I'm just like you. I'm the same as you. I come from nothing. But in the end, he sort of ends with some kind of flourish of patriotism, if you like. Before me comes Germany, in me marches Germany, and after

me will come Germany. These are little phrases, but they are wonderfully evocative and passionate. Hitler was very passionate. He spoke very passionately. And I think it's that passion that people started to buy into. We need to get up, face this dreary democracy that we've got that doesn't go anywhere and has got faceless politicians, because no real charismatic politician really emerges under the democratic system. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Alan Orjanaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries. The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research from the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings, Normans, Kings and Popes,

who were rarely the best of friends, murder, rebellions, and crusades. Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. podcasts. And Hitler's got charisma. I guess you can speak to that kind of veteran community as well, talking about their sacrifice. Yeah, well, somebody said that the early Nazi party was a matter of show me your medals. Most of them have been in the army. Hell of a lot of the people around Hitler is elite. You were nothing unless you had an iron cross. By the end of July 1921, Hitler was at the helm

with near total control within the party. Over the next two years, he would build membership using the tropes of what we now know as fascist politics, the promise of stability achieved through nationalism, racial purity, revenge, and of course, the creation of a singular, all-powerful dictatorship. a dictator. So he's got an idea that's the opposite of what's going on. He doesn't think democracy works. And he's looking at democracy and saying, well, it doesn't really work, does it? And democracy in Germany under the Weimar period, it doesn't work. People don't realize that there were 20 different coalition governments in that period, eight national elections, 12 different chancellors. So when Hitler gives speeches, he says, look, this system doesn't work. It's useless. And he had a point and the public don't really start to love the Reichstag and the politicians. We've got it now, haven't we? We've got a very low opinion, haven't we, of politicians right now. And that was the same in the Weimar period.

Politics at that time was, well, it's definitely more hands-on than we used to. So any respecting fringe party had its own paramilitary wing. Essentially, they were a group of street fighters who policed rallies and they violently broke up those of their rivals. Having just fought a gigantic world war, Germany had no shortage of disgruntled young men with too much time on their hands and an affinity for violence. So it didn't take long for the Nazis to tool up. It becomes a political party with a bit of muscle as well. What's this paramilitary wing? Well, this paramilitary wing are called the Storm Troopers, the SA, and they wear khaki.

They're called the brown shirts. The reason why they're the brown shirts is because the guy who manufactured the Nazi uniforms, Hugo Boss, Hitler wanted the party to wear black. But Hugo Boss told them it's too expensive, but I've got a shed load full of brown shirts. So they made them up like that way. So in a sense, they became brown shirts by accident. So by 1923, Hitler has become the new leader of a small but fast-growing fascist party. He had a manifesto in his USP. He had a band of paramilitary thugs to back it up.

Feeling confident, his eyes turned on the greatest prize of all, taking over the national government in Berlin. And that's how, in 1923, Hitler came to launch his first attempt to wrestle control from the Weimar Republic. The coup came to be known as the Beer Hall Putsch. It was inspired by Benito Mussolini's March on Rome in October of 1922, which had installed him and his National Fascist Party in government in Italy. Hitler's plan was a coup d'etat, plain and simple. He was going to overthrow the local government in Munich,

which was the capital of the Bavarian state. He would then ultimately march on the national seat of government in Berlin. But Bavaria was governed by Gustav Ritter von Kahr, the head of a reasonably unpleasant authoritarian government trying to stop the rampant political violence and rioting that was raging through his state. On the night of the 8th of November 1923, at the height of Bavaria's political unrest, Hitler seized his opportunity. At the head of a gang of paramilitary soldiers, he burst into the Berger-Breukeller beer hall where von Kahr was making a speech. The list of putschists is a who's who of the men who had become Third Reich's most villainous figures. Alongside Hitler is the charismatic World War I flying ace Hermann

Goering, the sycophantic Rudolf Hess, the unscrupulous Nazi propagandist Julius Streicher, the unscrupulous Nazi propagandist Julius Streicher and the riotous Ernst Röhm. The famous First World War general Erich Ludendorff who'd helped come up with the stab in the back myth which rather usefully helped distract people from the various catastrophic decisions he'd made during his time at the very pinnacle of command in the German army. So he was another key player. Over the course of the putsch they were backed by thousands of determined supporters ready to fight to achieve their aim. The putsch culminated on the 9th of November with Hitler ordering a defiant and poorly conceived march on the Feldherrnall, a monument to the Bavarian army in central Munich. In the vanguard, Hitler marched arm in arm with Ludendorff and other

senior Nazis. We don't know who pulled the trigger first, but in the confusion that followed, Hermann Göring was hit in the groin. The man to Hitler's left was shot dead, with his arm still intertwined in Hitler's. He dragged Hitler to the ground and dislocated his shoulder. Hitler's bodyguard leapt onto him and was shot several times. Ludendorff obstinately continued to march towards the police barricades, knowing that no one had the guts to shoot at the great war hero. He was arrested instead. The next day, Hitler realises it's a complete bungled failure

and he marches on the Feldenhalle the next day with the remains of his troops, which are about 2000 of them. And they get shot at. 16 of them are killed. The martyrs, the Munich Beer Hall martyrs. And so it ends ignominiously. From what we can tell, Hitler conducted himself pretty abysmally during this fight. He turned and ran, making no effort at all to help his dead and dying comrades. He fled the scene in a waiting car and was whisked away to hide in the countryside home of his German-American friend, Ernst Putzi Hansteengel. Here he would obsess over the events of the putsch, flitting from moments of suicidal despair to explosive rage. Hitler was discovered

and arrested a few days later, escorted from the house dressed in pyjamas and a bathrobe. The putsch had been an embarrassing failure, but there was a silver lining. For the first time, the eyes of the entire nation were on Adolf Hitler. In the next episode, we'll look at the trial of the Nazi conspirators and see how Hitler used it as a platform to begin building his own cult of personality. He'd set his sights on the Reichstag, the German parliament, and nothing was going to stop him. You've been listening to our series on the rise and fall of Adolf Hitler.

If you've enjoyed the series so far, do leave us a review and a rating wherever you get your podcasts. Goodbye. you