But Hitler's true hero in those days was the burgomaster of Vienna himself, Dr. Karl Lueger. The head of the Christian Social Party, Lueger was a master politician-demagogue, a Viennese Huey Long of sorts, who championed — usually in explosive, sweaty tirades — a mixture of "municipal socialism," populism, and anti-Semitism. His infamous calls for anti-Jewish boycotts and his warnings to Vienna's Jews to behave themselves or end up like their co-religionists in Russia were reported in newspapers around the world. Indeed, the emperor had overruled Lueger's election twice, recognizing that he could only mean headaches for those who favored the status quo.
In 1913 Hitler inherited the remainder of his father's estate and moved to Munich, fulfilling his dream of living in a "real" German city and avoiding military service for the Hapsburgs. These were among his happiest days. He spent much of his time studying architecture and delving deeper into pseudo-historical Aryan theories and anti-Semitism (particularly the writings of Houston Stewart Chamberlain). He also renewed his study of Marxism, which both fascinated and repulsed him, appreciating its ideas but becoming utterly convinced that Marx was the architect of a Jewish plot. At the outbreak of World War I, Hitler immediately petitioned King Ludwig III of Bavaria for permission to serve in the Bavarian army, which, after some entanglement with Austrian authorities, was granted. Hitler served honorably during the war. He was promoted to corporal and received the Iron Cross.
As countless others have observed, World War I gave birth to all the horrors of the twentieth century. A host of banshees were let loose upon the Western world, shattering old dogmas of religion, democracy, capitalism, monarchy, and mankind's role in the world. The war fueled widespread hatred, suspicion, and paranoia toward elites and established institutions. For belligerents on both sides, economic planning lent political and intellectual credibility to state-directed war socialism. And, of course, it led to the enthronement of revolutionaries throughout Europe: Lenin in Russia, Mussolini in Italy, and Hitler in Germany.
Not surprisingly, Hitler's experience during the war was very similar to Mussolini's. Hitler witnessed men of high and low station fighting side by side in the trenches. These men experienced the corruption and duplicity — real and perceived — of their own government.
Hitler's hatred of communists was also given new heat and strength during the war, thanks largely to antiwar agitation on the home front. German civilians starved along with the troops. They made bread with sawdust and turned pets into meals. Cats were called "roof rabbits." German Reds fed off this suffering, organizing strikes against the government and demanding peace with the Soviets and the establishment of German socialism. Hitler, who as it would turn out had no problem with German socialism, saw communist antiwar mobilization as treason twice over: it not only betrayed the troops at the front but was done at the behest of a foreign power. Infuriated by the fifth columnists, he railed, "What was the army fighting for if the homeland itself no longer wanted victory? For whom the immense sacrifices and privations? The soldier is expected to fight for victory and the homeland goes on strike against it!"12
When the Germans surrendered, Hitler and countless other soldiers famously protested that they had been "stabbed in the back" by a corrupt democratic government — the "November criminals" — that no longer represented the authentic needs or aspirations of the German nation. Hitler was recovering in a hospital, stricken with temporary blindness, when news of the armistice was announced. For him it was a transformative event, a moment of religious vision and divine calling. "During those nights my hatred increased, hatred for those responsible for this dastardly crime," he wrote. The perpetrators in his mind were a diverse coalition of capitalists, communists, and cowards, all of whom were fronts for a Jewish menace. Hitler's hatred for communism was not — as communists themselves have claimed — grounded in a rejection of socialist policies or notions of egalitarianism, progress, or social solidarity. It was bound up inextricably with a sense of betrayal of German honor and pathological anti-Semitism. This is what launched Hitler's political career.
After recovering from his wounds, Corporal Hitler found a post in Munich. His job was to monitor organizations promoting what the army considered to be "dangerous ideas" — pacifism, socialism, communism, and so on. In September 1919 he was ordered to attend a meeting of one of the countless new "workers' parties," which at the time was generally code for some flavor of socialism or communism.
Young Hitler showed up at a meeting of the German Workers' Party ready to dismiss it as just another left-wing fringe group. But one of the speakers was Gottfried Feder, who had impressed Hitler when he'd heard him speak previously. The title of Feder's talk that night: "How and by What Means Is Capitalism to Be Eliminated?" Feder was a populist ideologue who had tried to ingratiate himself with the socialist revolutionaries who briefly turned Munich into a Soviet-style commune in 1919. Like all populists, Feder was obsessed with the distinction between "exploitative" and "productive" finance. Hitler instantly recognized the potential of Feder's ideas, which would appeal to the "little guy" in both cities and small towns. Hitler understood that, just as in America, the increasing power of big banks, corporations, and department stores fostered a sense of powerlessness among blue-collar workers, small farmers, and small-business owners. While Feder's economic proposals were little better than gibberish (as is almost always the case with populist economics), they were perfect for a party seeking to exploit resentment of national elites and, particularly, Jews. Rarely did a day go by that Feder didn't call Jews "parasites."
Although Hitler was impressed by Feder's speech, he recounts in Mein Kampf that he remained underwhelmed by the German Workers' Party, considering it just another of those groups that "sprang out of the ground, only to vanish silently after a time." He did take a moment to dress down an attendee who dared to suggest that Bavaria should break from Germany and join Austria — a comment that was bound to horrify a Pan-German like Hitler. Hitler's tirade so impressed some of the officials at the meeting that one of them — a meek-looking fellow named Anton Drexler — stopped him as he was leaving and gave him a copy of a party pamphlet.
At 5:00 a.m. the next morning, Hitler was lying on his cot at the barracks watching the mice eat the bread crumbs he usually left for them. Unable to sleep, he took out the pamphlet and read it straight through. Written by Drexler himself and titled "My Political Awakening," the autobiographical booklet revealed to Hitler that there were others who thought as he did, that his story was not unique, and that there was a ready-made ideology available for him to adopt and exploit.
Even if Hitler's nationalism, populism, anti-Semitism, and non-Marxist socialism took more time to germinate, the relevant point is that what came to be known as Hitlerism or Nazism was already a significant current in Germany and elsewhere in Central Europe (particularly Czechoslovakia). Hitler would give these inchoate passions a name and a focus, but the raw materials were already there. Unlike Mussolini's Fascism, which was mostly a creation of his own intellect, Hitler's ideology came to him largely preassembled. Mussolini's Fascism, moreover, played no discernible role in the formation of early Nazi ideology or Hitler's embryonic political vision. What Hitler would later confess to admiring about Mussolini was Il Duce's success, his tactics, his Sorelian exploitation of political myth, his salesmanship. These ideas and movements were swirling all around Europe and Germany. What the masses didn't need was some new doctrine. What they needed was someone who could pull them into action. "Action" was the watchword across the Western world. Action got things done. That's what Hitler realized when he read that pamphlet on his cot in the predawn hours: his time had come. He would become National Socialism's greatest salesman, not its creator.