# Mein Kampf (Stackpole Sons)/Volume 2/Chapter 7

7. The Struggle with the Red Front
In 1919–20 and in 1921 I personally visited some so-called bourgeois meetings. They always affected me as the prescribed spoonful of cod-liver oil used to in my childhood. One is supposed to take it, and it is supposed to be very good, but it tastes dreadful! If the German people were to be tied with ropes and dragged by force to these bourgeois “demonstrations,” and the doors were barred and no one let out until the close of each performance, it might bring success within a few centuries. Still, I must frankly confess that I would probably take no further pleasure in life, and that I would not want to be a German any more. But since this cannot be done, thank Heavens, we must not be surprised that the sound and unspoiled people avoids “burgeois mass meetings” as the Devil does holy water.
I have come to know them, these prophets of a bourgeois world-concept, and am truly not surprised, no, I understand why they attach no importance to the spoken word. I have attended meetings of the Democrats, the German Nationalists, the German People’s Party, and of the Bavarian People’s Party (the Bavarian Centrists). The thing that struck one immediately was the homogeneous unity of the audience. It was nearly always all party members that took part in such a demonstration. The whole affair, quite without discipline, was more like a yawning card-club than a meeting of the people that had just gone through its greatest revolution.
And to preserve this peaceful temper the speakers did everything that could possibly be done. They spoke, or rather they usually read speeches aloud, in the style of a highbrow newspaper article or a scientific dissertation, avoided all rough language, and ​occasionally sprinkled in a feeble professorial joke, at which the honorable Party Officers’ table would begin to laugh dutifully—if not loud, i.e., provocatively, at least with genteel quiet and restraint.
And the table itself:
I once saw a meeting in the Wagnersaal at Munich; it was a demonstration to commemorate the anniversary of the Battle of the Nations at Leipzig. The address was delivered, or read, by a dignified old gentleman, a professor at some university. On the platform sat the officers of the party. On the left a monocle, on the right a monocle, and in between one without a monocle. They were all three in Prince Alberts, so that one had the impression either of a court of law about to undertake an execution, or of a solemn baptism—at any rate, some religious act of consecration. The so-called speech, which might have looked quite well in print, was simply fearful in effect. Within three-quarters of an hour the whole meeting was dozing in a trance condition, interrupted only by the exit of occasional men and women, the rattle of the waitresses, and the yawning of ever more numerous listeners. Three workingmen who were attending, whether from curiosity or as a commissioned lookout, and behind whom I took up my stand, looked at one another from time to time with ill-concealed grins, and finally nudged one another, whereupon they very quietly left the hall. One could tell from looking at them that they would not have caused any disturbance for anything. And in that company it was really not necessary.
Finally the meeting seemed to be drawing to a close. After the professor, whose voice had grown fainter and fainter, had finished his speech, the chairman of the meeting got up from between the two monocle-wearers, and crashed out at the “German sisters” and “brothers” present how great was his feeling of gratitude, and how great theirs must also be, for the unique and splendid speech which Professor X had given so enjoyably and so profoundly, and which in the truest sense of the words had been an “experience,” nay an “achievement.” It would be a profanation ​of this consecrated moment to follow these lucid statements with a discussion, so on behalf of all those present he would omit that period, and instead would request all to rise and join in the cry, “We are a united nation of brothers,” etc. (Wir sind ein einig Volk von Brüdern). Finally, in conclusion, he asked everyone to sing Deutschland ueber Alles.
They sang; and it seemed to me that by the second stanza the voices grew a bit fewer, only swelling again tremendously in the refrain, and on the third stanza my feeling was strengthened, so that I believed not everyone was quite sure of the words.
But what difference does that make, when such a song resounds to heaven with all the fervor of a German-Nationalist heart?
Thereupon the meeting broke up, i.e., everyone rushed to get out quickly, some for a beer, some to a café, and still others to the fresh air.
Yes, out, out into the fresh air! That was my only feeling. And this was to glorify a heroic struggle by hundreds of thousands of Prussians and Germans? For shame, and again for shame!
The government, no doubt, may be fond of such things. Naturally it is a “peaceful assembly.” The Minister for Peace and Good Order need have no fear that the billows of enthusiasm will suddenly burst the legal limits of civil decency, that people intoxicated with enthusiasm may suddenly stream from the hall not to hasten to the café or the pub but to march in step by fours through the streets to the tune of Deutschland hoch in Ehren, causing unpleasantnesses for a peace-loving police.
No, those are citizens they can be satisfied with.
On the other hand the National-Socialist meetings; it must be admitted, were no “peaceful assemblies.” There the waves of two world-concepts collided; and they ended, not with the dull grinding-out of some patriotic song, but with a fanatical outburst of populist and national passion.
From the very beginning it was important to introduce blind discipline in our meetings, and to assure absolutely the authority ​of the meeting’s management. For what we said was not the lifeless slop of a bourgeois speaker; it was always fitted by substance and form to provoke the adversary to reply. And there were adversaries in our meetings. How often they came in great crowds, a few agitators among them, all their faces mirroring the conviction, Tonight we’ll take care of you!
Yes, how often they were literally led in by columns, our Red friends, with the duty carefully drilled into them of smashing the whole affair that evening, and putting a stop to the thing! And how often everything hung in the balance, and only the ruthless energy of our meeting-committee and the brutal recklessness of our hall guard balked the opponents’ intention!
They had every reason to be provoked.
Even the red color of our posters by itself pulled them into our meeting-halls. The ordinary bourgeoisie was quite horrified that we too should resort to the red of the Bolsheviks, and regarded it as a very dubious matter. German-Nationalist spirits kept whispering to one another their suspicion that at bottom we were only a variety of Marxism, perhaps even mere Marxists or rather Socialists in disguise. For these brains have not grasped the difference between Socialism and Marxism even yet. Particularly when they discovered that at our meetings it was a principle not to greet the “ladies and gentlemen” but the “comrades,” and that among ourselves we talked only of Party comrades, the Marxist ghost seemed to many to be proved. How often we shook with laughter at these simple-minded, scared bourgeois rabbits with their ingenious guesswork about our origin, our intentions, and our aim.
We chose the red color of our posters after careful and thorough consideration, in order to provoke the Left wing, to arouse it to fury, and to lure in into our meetings even if only to break them up, so that in this fashion we could at least talk to the people.
It was delicious during those years to follow the puzzlement and helplessness of our adversaries by their perpetually shifting tactics. First they called on their adherents to take no notice of us, and to stay away from our meetings. This was in fact ​generally complied with. But in the course of time a few people did come; the number increased slowly but constantly, and the impression made by our doctrine was obvious; so the leaders gradually became nervous and uneasy, and made the mistake of becoming convinced that this development could not be watched forever in silence, but must be put an end to by terrorism.
Then came the appeals to “class-conscious proletarians” to attend our meetings in a body, in order to strike the representatives of “monarchist, reactionary agitation” with the fists of the proletariat.
All at once our meetings began to be filled with workmen three-quarters of an hour beforehand. They were like a powder-barrel that might blow up at any moment, and that had the burning fuse already laid to it. But it never turned out that way. People came in as our enemies, and went out, if not as our adherents, at least as thoughtful and in fact critical examiners of the soundness of their own doctrine. Gradually it came about that after my three-hour speech, followers and adversaries would be fused into one single enthusiastic mass. By then any signal to break up the meeting would be futile.
Now the leaders really did become frightened, and they began to turn back to those who had originally opposed these tactics, and who now, with some show of justice, recalled their opinion that the only sound thing to do was to forbid the worker to attend our meetings at all.
Then they came no longer, or at least fewer of them. But within a short time the whole game began over again.
The prohibition was not observed after all; more and more of the Comrades came, and finally the advocates of radical tactics gained the ascendancy again. We must be dispersed.
When it turned out after two, three, often after eight or ten meetings that the dispersing was more easily said than done, and the result of every single meeting was a crumbling away of the Red shock troops, the old watchword was suddenly heard again: “Proletarians! Comrades! Stay away from the meetings of the National-Socialist incendiaries!”
​The same perpetually wavering policy was also evident in the Red press. First they would try to freeze us with silence, and then, convinced of the futility of the attempt, they would go back to the opposite extreme. We were “mentioned” somehow every day, mostly to explain to the worker the absolute ridiculousness of our whole existence. But after a while these gentry could not help feeling that it not only did us no harm, but on the contrary helped us in so far as many individuals were naturally bound to ask themselves why so many words were devoted to anything, if it was so ridiculous. People grew curious. Thereupon there was a sudden shift, and for a time we were treated as veritable all-around criminals against humanity. Article after article explaining our criminality and proving it again and again, and scandalous stories, even though made up out of whole cloth from A to Z, were supposed to do the rest. But within a short time they seemed to be convinced of the ineffectiveness even of these attacks; at bottom it all simply helped to concentrate general attention upon us more than ever.
At that time I took this standpoint: it makes no difference whether they laugh at us or abuse us, whether they describe us as merry-andrews or criminals; the main thing is for them to mention us, to keep on concerning themselves with us, and for us gradually to appear in the eyes of the workers themselves as the only force with which a conflict is now actually going on. What we really are and what we really want we will show the pack of Jewish journalist hounds some fine day.
One reason why there were seldom direct dispersions of our meetings was, it is true, the unbelievable cowardice of our opponents’ leaders. In every crucial case they sent young cubs ahead, and themselves at best waited outside the hall for the result of the dispersion.
We were almost always well informed about the intentions of these gentry. Not only because for reasons of expediency we left many of our Party members within the Red formations, but because the Red wire-pullers themselves were seized with a garrulity that in this case was very useful to us, and that ​unfortunately is very common among our German people in general. They could never hold their tongues when they had hatched anything of this sort, and in fact they usually cackled before the egg was laid. Indeed we had often made extensive preparations before the Red dispersion-groups themselves had any idea how close their ejection was upon them.
That period compelled us to take the protection of our meetings into our own hands; there was no counting on official protection; on the contrary, experience shows that it never benefits anyone except the disturbers. For the sole actual result of official intervention by the police was the dissolution of the meeting, i.e., its being closed. And that, after all, was the sole aim and intention of the hostile intruders.
In fact the police had developed here a practice representing the most monstrous illegality one can imagine. If the authorities learn from some threat or other that there is danger of a meeting’s being broken up they do not arrest the threatener, but forbid the other and innocent parties to hold their meeting,—a piece of wisdom of which a normal police mind is monstrously proud. They call it a “preventive measure against infraction of the law.”
The resolute bandit, therefore, has it in his power at any moment to make the decent person’s political activities impossible. In the name of peace and good order the governmental authority bows to the bandit, and requests the other kindly not to provoke him. So if National-Socialists wanted to hold meetings at certain places, and the trade-unions declared this would lead to resistance by their members, the police never dreamed of putting these blackmailing scoundrels under lock and key, but forbade us our meeting. Indeed these organs of the law even had the incredible shamelessness to give us this information in writing on countless occasions.
If we were to protect ourselves from such eventualities, it was necessary to take care that any attempts at dispersion should be made impossible in embryo.
In this connection there was the following further consideration: Any meeting whose protection comes exclusively from ​the police discredits its organizers in the eyes of the broad masses. Meetings which can be guaranteed only by the assignment of a large police detail has no attraction for others, because conspicuous strength is indispensable in winning over the lower levels of a people.
Just as a courageous man can conquer women’s hearts more easily than a coward, a heroic movement will win the heart of a people sooner than a cowardly movement that is kept alive only by police protection.
For this last reason in particular the young Party had to take care of upholding its own existence, of protecting itself, and itself breaking the enemy terror.
Protection of meetings could thereby be built in two ways:
1. The energetic and psychologically sound management of the meetings;
When we National-Socialists held a meeting in those days, we and nobody else were masters there. And we kept sharply emphasizing our mastery without interruption every single minute. Our opponents knew very well that anyone who ventured on provocation would be ungently thrown out, even though we might be a dozen against half a thousand. In the meetings at that time, particularly outside of Munich, there would be fifteen or sixteen National-Socialists to five, six, seven or eight hundred opponents. But even so we would have tolerated no provocation, and the audience at our meetings was well aware that we would have been killed before we would capitulate. More than once a handful of Party members successfully maintained themselves in heroic fashion against a roaring and flailing superior force of Reds.
In such cases no doubt the fifteen or twenty men would have been overpowered in the end. But the others knew that the skulls of at least twice or three times that many of their own people would have been cracked first, and this they did not like to risk.
Here we tried to learn, and in fact did learn, by studying the technique of Marxist and bourgeois meetings.
​The Marxists always maintained blind discipline, so that there could be no thought whatever of the breaking up of a Marxist meeting, at least from a bourgeois quarter. All the more did the Reds concern themselves with such intentions. They not only attained a certain virtuosity in this direction, but finally went so far in large sections of the Reich as to describe a non-Marxist meeting as a provocation of the proletarian in itself—particularly when the wire-pullers had reason to suspect that their own sins might be recounted at the meeting in order to reveal the baseness of their activity in swindling and lying to the people. And whenever such a meeting was announced, the whole Red press raised a furious outcry, during which these despisers of all law not infrequently began by addressing to the authorities a request both urgent and menacing to prevent this “provocation of the proletariat,” “lest worse things happen.” They chose their language and accomplished their aims according to the particular official’s degree of asininity. But if such a post was occupied, for once, by a real German civil servant, instead of a mere creature in office, and he refused the insolent request, the result would be the familiar appeal not to tolerate such a “provocation of the proletariat,” but to attend the meeting in a body on the such-and-suchth to “put an end to the shameful machinations of these bourgeois creatures with the calloused hand of the proletariat.”
There is no substitute for having watched one of these bourgeois meetings, and having experienced the whole pitifulness and terror in which it is conducted. Often indeed a meeting was simply called off as a result of such threats. But in any case the fear was so great that the opening seldom took place before quarter of nine or nine, instead of at eight. By nine dozen compliments the chairman tried to make it clear to the “gentlemen of the opposition,” who were in attendance, how happy he and all the others present were (an outright lie!) at the presence of men who were not yet on their side of the fence, because it was only through mutual discussion (which from the outset he would solemnly promise them) that ideas could be brought closer together, mutual understanding created, and the gap bridged. At ​the same time he assured them that it was far from the meeting’s purpose to alienate people from their previous views. No indeed; everyone should find salvation in his own fashion, but he should also let his neighbor find his own, and he would therefore request that the speaker be allowed to finish his remarks, which in any case would not be very long, lest the world be offered once more, at this meeting, the shameful spectacle of bad blood between German brothers … brrr.
The brothers from the Left, it must be said, usually did not take kindly to this; before the speaker had even begun, he had to fold up his tent amid the grossest insults. Not infrequently one had the impression that he was even grateful to Fate for cutting short the agonizing process. Amid stupendous uproar these bourgeois toreadors would leave the arena, unless they whizzed downstairs with broken heads, which in fact often happened.
Thus it was a novelty to the Marxists when (and particularly how) we put on our first meetings. They walked in, convinced that of course they could repeat with us the little game they had so often played before. “Today we’ll clean up.” How many a one yelled those words in loud-mouthed fashion to another as he went into our meeting—to find himself in a flash, before he could interrupt again, sitting outside the entrance to the hall.
In the first place even the conduct of our meetings was different. We did not beg that our speech should graciously be permitted, nor did we start by promising endless discussion to everyone; it was simply abruptly remarked that we were the masters of the meeting, that we were therefore masters in our own house, and that anyone who ventured so much as a single interruption would be pitilessly thrown out the way he had come. Further, that we must decline any further responsibility for the fellow; if there was time, and it happened to suit us, we would have a discussion, if not, then not, and the speaker, Party comrade so-and-so, now had the floor.
Even this astonished them.
In the second place we had a strictly organized hall guard. With the bourgeois parties the hall guard, or rather regulator ​service, consisted mostly of gentlemen who thought that the dignity appropriate to their age gave them a certain right to authority and respect. As the masses in their superinduced Marxist excitement cared less than nothing for age, authority and respect, the bourgeois hall guard, practically speaking, did not exist.
From the very beginning of our real activity in holding the meetings I introduced the organization of a hall guard as a regulator group, which on principle included nothing but young lads. Some of them were comrades whom I knew from the army, and others young recently recruited members of the Party who were instructed and trained from the outset to believe that terrorism can be broken only by terrorism, that the bold and determined man has always been the one to succeed in the world; that we are fighting for a tremendous idea, so great and so noble that it well deserves to be sheltered and protected with the last drop of blood. They were saturated with the doctrine that if reason is silent and violence has the last word, the best defensive weapon is attack; and that our regulator troops should be preceded by the reputation of being no debating club, but a desperately determined fighting fellowship.
And how these young people had been longing for such a battle-cry! How disappointed and outraged that trench generation has been, full of disgust and abhorrence of bourgeois mean-spiritedness!
Then one really began to understand how the Revolution had actually been possible only because of the devastating bourgeois leadership of our people. The fists to protect the German people would have been there even then, but the heads to be pledged were lacking. How my lads’ eyes used to shine at me when I explained to them the necessity of their mission, assuring them again and again that all the wisdom in the world will fail if it be not served by vigor, protected and defended; that the gentle Goddess of Peace can walk only by the side of the War-God, and that every great deed of peace requires the protection and help of power. In how much more vivid a light they now saw the idea of compulsory military duty! Not in the frozen sense of ​old, ossified official souls, serving the dead authority of a dead State, but in living realization of the duty to surrender the individual’s life in defending the existence of his people as a whole, always and everywhere.
And how those lads stood up to it!
Like a swarm of hornets they would fly at the disturbers of our meetings, reckless of no matter how great a superior force, reckless of wounds and bloody sacrifices, full of the great idea of clearing the road for our movement’s holy mission.
As early as midsummer of 1920 the organization of the regulator groups gradually began to take on definite form; in the spring of 1921 it began bit by bit to break up into divisions called Hundreds, which in turn were divided into groups.
This was urgently necessary, because in the meantime our activity in holding meetings had kept growing. We did, indeed, still frequently meet in the Munich Hofbräuhaus Banquet Hall, but even more often it was in the larger halls in the city. The Bürgerbräu Banquet Hall and the Münchner-Kindl Cellar in the fall and winter of 1920–21 were the scenes of ever greater mass meetings, and the picture was always the same: even that long ago, demonstrations of the National-Socialist German Workers’ Party usually had to be shut off by the police because of overcrowding even before the opening.
The organization of our regulator troops raised a very important question. Thus far the movement had no party symbols and no party flag. The absence of these symbols not only had immediate disadvantages but was intolerable for the future. The disadvantage consisted particularly in the fact that the party members had no distinguishing outer mark of belonging together, while for the future it was insupportable to be without a mark that had the character of a symbol of the movement, and as such could be opposed to the Internationale.
Even in my youth I had had more than one opportunity to realize and to understand emotionally how important such a symbol is psychologically. And then after the war in Berlin I observed a mass demonstration of Marxism in front of the Royal ​Chateau and Pleasure Garden. A sea of red flags, red armbands and red flowers gave a perfectly tremendous aspect, even outwardly, to this demonstration, in which a hundred and twenty thousand persons are estimated to have taken part. I myself could feel and understand how easily the man of the people may succumb to the hypnotic spell of such a grandiose spectacle. The bourgeoisie, which, as a political party, represents or maintains no world-concept of any kind, had for this reason also no flag of its own. It consisted of “patriots,” and accordingly ran around in the colors of the Reich. If these had themselves been the symbol of a definite world-concept, one could have understood that the proprietors of the State saw in its flag the sign of their world-concept, since the symbol of their world-concept had after all become the State and Reich flag through their own activity.
But this was not the true state of affairs. The Reich had been put together without the help of the bourgeoisie, and the flag itself was born of the war. Therefore it was actually only a State flag, having no meaning in the sense of a particular mission for some world-concept.
At only one spot in the German language territory was there anything like a bourgeois party flag—German Austria. Some of the nationalist bourgeoisie there had chosen for their party flag the colors of 1848, black, red and gold, thus creating a symbol which, while it had no importance whatever for a world-concept, nevertheless had a revolutionary character from the stand-point of State policy. The bitterest enemies of this black-red-gold flag at that time were—as we today should never forget—Social Democrats and Christian Socialists or Clericals. In those days they were the very ones who insulted, besmirched and befouled those colors, just as later, in 1918, they dragged the black-white-red in the gutter. True, the black, red and gold of the German parties of old Austria was the color of 1848, that is of a period which, while it may have been fantastic, was represented individually by the most honorable of German souls, even though the Jew stood invisibly in the background as a wire-puller. It was, therefore, only treason to the Fatherland and shameless selling of the German people and German substance which made these ​flags so congenial to Marxism and the Center that they revere them today as sacred, and set up militias to protect the flag they once spat upon.
Up until 1920, then, there was actually no flag opposed to Marxism which would have represented its diametrical opposite as a world-concept. Even if the better parties of the German bourgeoisie after 1918 would no longer condescend to take over the now suddenly discovered black-red-gold national flag as their own symbol, they still had no program of their own for the future to oppose the new development; at best their idea was to reconstruct the vanished Empire.
To this idea the black-white-red flag of the old Empire owes its resurrection as the standard of our so-called national bourgeois parties.
Now it is perfectly obvious that the symbol of the state of affairs which Marxism succeeded in overcoming, under rather inglorious circumstances, is ill-suited to be the sign under which this same Marxism is to be destroyed again. Sacred and dear as the old and beautiful colors must be in their fresh, youthful combination to every decent German who has fought beneath them and seen the sacrifice of so many, that flag is no symbol for a battle of the future.
In contrast to the bourgeois politicians, I have always maintained in our movement the standpoint that it is a real blessing for the German nation to have lost the old flag. What the Republic may do under its flag is nothing to us. But we should thank Fate from the bottom of our hearts that it was merciful enough to protect the most glorious battle-flag of all times from being used as a sheet for the most shameful prostitution. The present Reich, which sells itself and its citizens, must never fly the heroic black-white-red flag of honor.
As long as the November disgrace lasts, let it wear its own outer garment, and not steal even this from a more honest past. Our bourgeois politicians’ consciences should tell them that anyone who desires the black-white-red flag for this State is committing theft from our past. The old flag really was beautiful only for the old Empire, just as the Republic, thank Heaven, has chosen ​the one suitable to itself.
This was the reason why we National-Socialists could not regard the raising of the old flag as an expressive symbol of our own activity. After all, we did not want to awaken the old Empire, destroyed by its own faults, from the dead, but to build a new State.
The movement which today is fighting against Marxism on that principle must show the symbol of the new State even in its flag.
The question of the new flag, i.e. of its appearance, occupied our minds a great deal at that time. Proposals came from all sides, though they were mostly more well-intended than acceptable. For the new flag had both to be a symbol of our own battle and to have a striking poster-like effect. Anyone who has had to concern himself much with the masses will realize that these apparent trifles are actually very important matters. An effective badge may give the first impulse toward an interest in a movement in hundreds of thousands of cases.
For this reason we had to decline the suggestion of a white flag, made in many quarters, which would have identified our movement with the old State, or rather with those feeble parties whose sole political aim is the restoration of vanished conditions. Besides, white is not a compelling color. It is suitable for chaste societies of maidens, but not for insurgent movements in a revolutionary age.
Black was also proposed. In itself it was fitting for the present day, but there was almost no way of deducing from it any suggestion of our movement’s intent. And finally this color is not compelling enough either.
Blue and white was out of the question, despite its wonderful aesthetic effect, as the color of one German State [Bavaria] and of a political attitude of narrow particularism whose reputation unfortunately was not of the best. Here too, furthermore, it would have been hard to find any indication of our movement. The same was true of black and white.
Black, red and gold was out of the question in itself.
​So was black-white-red, for reasons which have been mentioned—at least in the accustomed form. In effectiveness, however, this color combination stands far above all others. It is the most radiant harmony there is.
I myself always retaining the old colors, not only because they are the most sacred thing to me as a soldier, but because their artistic effect appeals far more than any other to my aesthetic sense. Nevertheless I had to decline without exception all the countless sketches that came in from the members of the young movement, most of them incorporating the swastika into the old flag. I myself, as Leader, did not want to appear immediately before the public with my own design, since it was quite possible that someone else might produce one equally good, perhaps even better. And in fact a dentist from Starnberg brought in a design that was not at all bad; it was a good deal like mine, but had the one fault that the swastika was fitted into a white circle by means of curved ends.
Meanwhile I myself, after endless attempts, had laid down a final form: a flag with a red ground, bearing a white disk with a black swastika in its center. After many experiments I also established a definite relation between the size of the flag and the size of the white disk, as well as the shape and weight of the swastika.
And so it remained.
Similarly, arm bands for the regulator companies were ordered at once, red bands likewise bearing the white disk with the white swastika.
The party badge was designed along the same lines: a white disk on a red field, with the swastika in the middle. A Munich goldsmith, Füss, produced the first usable design, which has since been retained.
In mid-summer of 1920 the new flag appeared in public for the first time. It suited our young movement admirably. One, like the other, was young and new. No one had ever seen it before; its effect was like a firebrand. We were all almost childishly delighted when a faithful woman Party member executed the ​design for the first time, and finished the flag. Within a few months we had half a dozen of them in Munich, and the constantly expanding regulator troops in particular helped to spread about the new symbol of the movement.
And this is truly a symbol. Not only because our respect for the past is attested by each color, passionately loved by us all, which called forth so much honor from the German people, but it was also the best embodiment of the desires of the people of the movement. As National-Socialists we see our program in our flag. In the red we see the social ideas of the movement; in the white, the nationalistic; in the swastika the mission of the fight for the victory of the Aryan man, and with it, simultaneously the victory of creating work, which in itself was anti-semitic, and will be anti-semitic eternally. Two years later, when out of regulator troops a great many thousand men had become an elaborate Storm Detachment, it seemed necessary to give this defense organization of the young world-concept a special symbol of victory: the Standard. I sketched it myself, and gave it to the master goldsmith, Gahr, to execute.
Since then the Standard has been the token and field-badge of the National-Socialist battle.
The meeting activity, which kept growing in the year 1920, lead finally in many weeks to our holding two meetings.
Crowds gathered in front of our posters, the largest halls in the city were always filled, and tens of thousands of misled Marxists found their way back to their national community, to become warriors for a coming free German Reich. The public in Munich had come to know us. We were talked about; the word “National-Socialist” became familiar in many people’s mouths, and stood for a program. The crowd of followers, even of members, began to grow without interruption, so that by the winter of 1920–21 we were a strong party in Munich.
Except for the Marxist parties there was at that time no party, above all none of the nationalist parties, that could point to such mass demonstrations as we. The Münchener-Kindl Cellar, ​holding five thousand, was full to bursting more than once, and there was but one hall we had not yet dared to try, the Zirkus Krone.
At the end of January, 1921, grave worries arose once more for Germany. The Paris Agreement, on the basis of which Germany agreed to pay the insane sum of a hundred billion gold marks, was to be translated into reality in the form of the dictated agreement of London.
A working group of so-called populist societies that had existed for a long time in Munich proposed to send out invitations for a large general protest on this occasion. Time was very urgent, and in view of the perpetual hesitation and delay in carrying out resolutions once taken, I myself was nervous. First they talked of a demonstration in the Königsplatz; but they let it drop because they were afraid of being violently scattered by the Reds, and projected a protest demonstration in front of the Feldherrnhalle. But this too they discarded, and finally proposed a joint meeting in the Münchener-Kindl Cellar. Meanwhile day after day had passed, the big parties had taken no notice whatever of the great event, and the working group itself could not make up its mind to set a definite date for the proposed demonstration.
On Tuesday, the first of February, 1921, I urgently demanded a final decision. I was put off until Wednesday. On Wednesday I absolutely insisted on a clear statement whether and when the meeting was to take place. Again the answer was indefinite and evasive; the story was that they “intended” to turn out the working group for a demonstration a week from Wednesday.
At that my patience gave way, and I decided to carry out the protest demonstration by myself. On Wednesday afternoon I dictated the poster on to the typewriter in ten minutes’ time, and had the Zirkus Krone hired for the next day, Thursday, February 3d.
This was then a piece of infinite daring. Not only did it seem questionable whether the gigantic room could be filled, but there was the further danger of being dispersed.
Our regulator troop was far from adequate for this colossal room. Nor did I have any real notion of the possible method of ​procedure in case of a dispersion. I then supposed this would be much harder in the Zirkus building than in an ordinary hall. But as it turned out, the reverse was true. In the giant room it was actually easier to master a dispersion troop than in closely-packed halls.
Only one thing was sure! any failure might put us back for a long time. For a single successful dispersion would have destroyed our aura at a blow, and encouraged our adversaries to keep on trying what had once succeeded. It might have led to the sabotaging of our entire activity in holding meetings—something that could have been overcome only after many months and desperate battles.
We had only one day for our posters to work, namely Thursday itself. Unfortunately it rained all morning, and the fear seemed reasonable that under such circumstances many people would prefer to staying at home to hurrying through rain and snow to a meeting where there might possibly be violence and killings.
Thursday morning I suddenly began to be afraid the hall would not be filled (of course then I would have been the one disgraced in the eyes of the working group), so I hastily dictated a few leaflets, and got them printed for distribution in the afternoon. Of course they were an appeal to attend the meeting.
Two trucks that I hired were swathed in as much red as possible; a few of our flags were stuck up on them, and each one was manned with fifteen or twenty party members; they were ordered to keep on driving around the streets of the city, throwing out leaflets, and in short carrying on propaganda for the mass demonstration of that evening. It was the first time that trucks with flags had ever gone through the city with no Marxists on board. Hence the bourgeoisie gaped after the cars, decorated in red and adorned with fluttering swastika flags; while in the outer districts countless clenched fists were raised whose possessors seemed obviously afire with rage at the latest “provocation of the proletariat.” For Marxism alone had the right to hold meetings, just as it did to ride around on trucks.
​If these things were done by others, then it was the Marxists’ holy right to consider it a provocation to those, who until now were sole owners of this monopoly.
By seven in the evening the Zirkus was not yet well filled. I got telephone reports every ten minutes, and was fairly uneasy myself; for by seven or quarter past seven the other halls had usually been half and often nearly filled. But this was soon explained. I had not counted on the new hall’s vast dimensions. A thousand people made the Hofbräuhaus Hall look very nicely filled, while the Zirkus Krone simply swallowed them up. One hardly saw them. But more encouraging reports came a little while later, and by quarter of eight they said that the hall was three-quarters full, with great crowds standing in front of the ticket booths. There-upon I drove off.
At two minutes past eight I arrived in front of the Zirkus. There was still a crowd of people in front, part of them merely curious, and many of them opponents who meant to await events outside.
When I went into the mighty hall, I was filled with the same joy as a year before, at the first meeting in the Munich Hofbräuhaus Banquet Hall. But only when I had squeezed my way through the human walls, and had reached the high platform, did I see the full extent of the triumph. Like a giant shell the hall lay before me, filled with thousands and thousands of people. Even the manège was black with spectators. More than 5600 tickets had been sold, and if the total number of unemployed, poor students, and our regulator troops, were counted, about 6500 people must have been there.
“Future or downfall” was the theme; and my heart leaped with the conviction that the future was lying before me down there.
I began to talk, and spoke for about two and a half hours; after the first half-hour my feeling told me the meeting would be a great success. The contact with all the thousands of individuals was established. By the end of the first hour the applause began to interrupt me with ever-greater spontaneous outbursts, ​to ebb again after two hours, going over into that solemn stillness which I had experienced so often since in that hall, and which will scarcely be forgotten by a single person who was there. The breathing of the vast crowd was almost the only thing to be heard; not until I had spoken my last word was there a sudden surge that found its outlet and its conclusion in Deutschland über Alles, sung with supreme fervor.
I waited to watch the gigantic hall slowly begin to empty itself, and the tremendous human sea crowd its way out for almost twenty minutes through the great central exit. Then at last I left my post, supremely happy, to go home.
Photographs were taken of this first meeting in the Zirkus Krone at Munich. They show the magnitude of the demonstration better than any words. Bourgeois papers printed illustrations and reports, but mentioned merely that it had been a “nationalist” demonstration, and omitted the names of those responsible, in the usual modest fashion.
Thus for the first time we advanced far beyond the confines of an ordinary party of the day. We could no longer be ignored. To prevent the impression from gaining any currency that the meeting’s success was an ephemeral one, I immediately scheduled a second demonstration at the Zirkus for the following week, and the success was the same as before. Once more the gigantic hall was filled to bursting with masses of people, so that I decided to hold a third meeting on the same scale the following week. And for the third time the giant circus was jammed with people from top to bottom.
After this beginning of the year 1921, our activity in holding meetings at Munich increased still further. I now began to hold not merely one a week, but in many weeks two mass meetings; in mid-summer and late fall there were even sometimes three. From now on we always held our meetings in the Zirkus, and found to our satisfaction that each evening was a similar success.
The result was a constantly growing number of followers of the movement and a great increase in members.
​Such successes naturally gave our opponents no rest. Their tactics having wavered between terrorism, and a conspiracy of silence, they themselves were forced to realize that they could hinder the movement’s development neither with the one nor with the other. So, as a last supreme effort, they decided on an act of terrorism to put a definite stop to further meetings on our part.
As the outward occasion for the action, they made use of a highly mysterious assault on a Landtag deputy by the name of Erhard Auer. The said Erhard Auer was alleged to have been shot at by somebody one evening. That is, he was not actually shot at, but an attempt had been made to shoot at him. Superb presence of mind, however, and the proverbial courage of a Social Democratic party leader, had not only foiled the dastardly attack, but had put its nefarious perpetrators to ignominious flight. They fled so fast and so far that the police were never able to find the slightest trace of them.
This mysterious occurrence was now made use of by the Social Democratic party organ in Munich to carry on the most unmeasured agitation against our movement; in the course of this, with their accustomed garrulity, they hinted what was to happen next. Measures had been taken to be sure we did not get out of hand, and proletarian fists would intervene in good time.
Within a few days the time for the intervention arrived.
A meeting in the Munich Hofbräuhaus Banquet Hall, at which I was to speak, had been chosen for the final settlement.
On the 4th of November, 1921, between six and seven in the evening, I received my first positive information that the meeting would definitely be broken up, and that for this purpose it was intended to send to the meeting great masses of workers from some of the Red shops.
It was due to an unlucky chance that we did not get this information earlier. That day we had given up our venerable business office in the Sterneckergasse in Munich, and had moved to a new one—that is, we were out of the old one, but could not get into the new one because work on it was still in progress. And ​as the telephone had been pulled out of the one, and not yet installed in the other, a number of telephonic attempts to inform us that day of the intended dispersion were vain.
The consequence of this was that the meeting itself was protected only by very weak troops of regulators. Only an incomplete Hundred quite small in number—about forty-six men—was on hand; and the alarm system was not yet well enough developed to fetch in any considerable reinforcements in the course of an hour at night. Besides, that sort of alarming rumors had reached our ears countless times without anything’s happening out of the ordinary. The old saying that announced revolutions seldom take place had thus far always proved true in our case as well.
And so, for this reason as well, perhaps not everything was done that might have been done that day to prepare with brutal determination against a dispersion.
Lastly, we thought the Munich Hofbräuhaus Banquet Hall completely unsuited to a dispersion. This we had been more afraid of in the largest halls, particularly the Zirkus. In that respect the day taught us a valuable lesson. Afterward we studied the entire question with, I can truthfully say, scientific method, and arrived at results some of which were as surprising as they were interesting, and subsequently of fundamental importance in the organization and tactical management of our Storm Troops.
When I came into the vestibule of the Hofbräuhaus at quarter of eight, however, there could no longer be any doubt of the existing intention. The hall was overcrowded, and had been shut off by the police. The opponents, who had come very early, were inside the hall, and our followers largely outside. The little Storm Troop awaited me in the vestibule. I had the doors to the big hall closed, and then I lined up the forty-five or forty-six men. I told the lads that today for the first time they would probably have to be true to the movement, bend or break; and that none of us must leave the hall unless we were carried out dead. I would stay in the hall, and did not believe that a single one of them ​would desert me; but if I saw anyone acting the coward, I personally would tear off his colors and take his badge. Then I instructed them to rush in at once on the slightest attempt to break up the meeting, and to remember that the best defense is in attack.
A triple Heil, which sounded rougher and hoarser than usual, was the answer.
Then I went into the hall, and looked over the situation with my own eyes. They were sitting thick inside, trying to drill me with their very eyes. Countless faces were turned toward me with grim hatred, while others, with mocking grimaces, emitted shouts that were anything but ambiguous. They would “take care of us” today, we should look out for our guts, they would stop our mouths for good, and various other pretty phrases. They were conscious of their superior force, and felt accordingly.
Nevertheless it was possibe to open the meeting, and I began to speak. In the Hofbräuhaus Banquet Hall I always stood against one of the long walls of the hall, and my platform was a beer table. Thus I was really in the very midst of the crowd. Perhaps that was one reason why there was always in this particular hall a temper such as I have never found anywhere else.
In front of me, and particularly to my left, there were nothing but opponents, sitting and standing. They were extremely robust men and youths, largely from the Maffei locomotive works, from Kustermann, the Isaria works, etc. Along the left wall of the hall they had pushed up close to my table, and they now began to collect beer-mugs—that is, they kept ordering beer, and putting the empty mugs under the table. They gathered whole batteries, and I would have been surprised if the affair had gone off smoothly.
After about an hour and a half—I was able to speak that long despite all the heckling—it almost seemed as if I would become master of the situation. The leaders of the dispersion troops seemed to feel this themselves, for they grew more and more uneasy, kept going out and coming back in, and talked very nervously to their people.
A small psychological error which I committed in warding off ​an interruption, and which I myself realized the moment it was out of my mouth, was the signal for them to cut loose.
There were a few angry interruptions, and a man suddenly jumped on a table and bellowed into the hall, “Freedom!” [The battle-cry of the Social Democrats.] Upon this signal the fighters for freedom began their work.
Within a few seconds the whole hall was filled with a roaring and yelling mass of men, above which countless beer-mugs flew like howitzer shots; through it all came the cracking of chair-legs, the smashing of the mugs, whooping and yowling and screeching.
It was an insane uproar.
I stood still where I was, and was able to see my lads doing their duty to the limit.
I would have liked to see a bourgeois meeting under such circumstances!
The game had not yet begun when my Storm Troopers (for so they were called from that day forward) attacked. In packs of eight or ten they fell like wolves upon their adversaries, and gradually began actually to hammer them out of the hall. Within five minutes I saw scarcely one who was not streaming with blood. Many of them I thus came really to know for the first time—at their head my faithful Maurice, my present private secretary, Hess, and many others, who, although severely wounded, kept on attacking as long as they could stay on their feet. The hellish turmoil lasted twenty minutes; then my less than fifty men had largely finished with pounding our adversaries, who may have been seven or eight hundred strong, out of the hall and down the stairs. Only in the left rear corner of the hall a large knot held out, resisting desperately. Suddenly there were two pistol shots from the entrance toward the platform, and then a wild fusillade began. Such a refreshing of one’s old war memories almost made one’s heart leap up.
From then on there was no saying who was doing the shooting; only one thing was to be remarked—that from that moment the fury of my bleeding lads increased mightily; and finally the ​last disturbers, overpowered, were driven from the hall.
About twenty-five minutes had passed; the hall itself looked as if a shell had burst. Many of my followers were being bandaged; others had to be taken away in cars; but we had remained masters of the situation. Hermann Esser, who had taken over the chairmanship of the meeting that night, said, “The meeting will continue. The speaker has the floor,” and I resumed speaking.
After we had terminated the meeting, an excited police lieutenant suddenly rushed in, madly waving his arms, and crowed into the hall, “The meeting is dissolved.”
In spite of myself I could not help laughing at this straggler after events—true police self-importance. The smaller they are, the larger at least they must appear.
We really learned much that evening, and our adversaries, too, did not forget the lesson they had had.
Until the fall of 1923 the Muenchener Post did not warn us of any more proletarian fists.