Synopsis and Historical Notes

We are in Berlin on the evening of July 3rd in 1921 – at a reception in the home of Helene and Edwin Bechstein, heads of one of Germany’s wealthiest and most prominent families. Among the guests is 32-year-old Adolf Hitler. Although virtually unknown – except among right-wing extremists in Munich – Hitler has already formed many of the views that three years later will become Mein Kampf and is unleashing and shaping his genius for mesmerizing and seducing. In little more than a decade, he will be Chancellor of Germany and soon after be anointed “Der Fuehrer” – and have dictatorial powers.

The historical record shows that such a soiree did, in fact, occur several days before Hitler seized control of the German National Socialist Workers Party, later nicknamed the Nazi Party. History does not, however, tell us what happened that night.

The stage is set for MARCH.
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The Bechstein soiree marked Hitler’s introduction to Berlin’s economic elite, who went on to play a pivotal role in helping him to gain and keep power a decade later. A front page article in The New York Times (October 16, 2010), quoted from a new, much talked-about exhibit at Berlin’s German Historical Museum: “Hitler was embraced early on by the elite…. The wives of entrepreneurs vied to be the first to drag Hitler to a social event. As it turned out, Hitler was able to implement his military and extermination objectives because the…economic elites were willing to carry out his war.”

Indeed, the Bechsteins, makers of what at the time was Europe’s most acclaimed piano, subsequently became benefactors of Hitler, donating money to the Nazis and introducing Hitler to other influential people, including the Wagner family at Bayreuth. They invited Hitler to their country residence near Berchtesgaden, where he eventually built his mountaintop retreat. Helene Bechstein was especially enamored of Hitler and for years sought to have her daughter, Lotte, marry him.

Outside the Bechstein home on that evening in 1921, extremist groups – communists, anarchists and ultra right-wing nationalists among them – battled in the streets. Much of Germany was in political and economic chaos. The Treaty of Versailles – called by Hitler the “shameful armistice” – had ended World War I three years before. In the treaty, the Allies – principally France, Germany and the U.S., reeling from terrible human and material loss – had exacted stiff financial reparations payments on Germany. They had also restricted certain heavy industries, taken over colonial territories that were sources of raw materials, and had fostered the replacement of Kaiser Wilhelm’s monarchy with Germany’s first democratically elected republic, which included the Reichstag (Parliament). These actions had roused a furor, particularly among Germany’s military and industrial elite who felt the Armistice was an act of revenge as opposed to the establishment of a just peace. Political fringe groups, feeding on the general discontent, gained in power as their ranks swelled with military veterans who had returned from the front bearing the stigma of defeat and could not find work.

Adolf Hitler was among the veterans who settled in Munich after the war. He had been born in a rural Austrian village bordering Bavaria in 1889 and had lived in bohemian poverty in Vienna and then Munich before World War I, drawing ads and posters and sketching city and pastoral scenes that he sold in cafes and on the streets. During the war, he had been a courier in the German Army and was twice wounded and decorated. Back in Munich, he took up with subterranean right-wing, anti-communist, anti-Semitic nationalists, gaining attention for his polemical skills. He became chairman of the Nazi Party in 1921. After the “beer hall putsch” of 1923, a failed attempt to take over the Bavarian and German governments, Hitler was imprisoned for treasonous activities by the Weimar Republic. During his eight months in prison, he wrote the autobiographical polemic, Mein Kampf (My Struggle) and became a martyr among his followers. He was a national figure by the time of his release.

Hitler was introduced to the Bechsteins and other wealthy German families by Dietrich Eckart. Heavy drinking and psychologically unstable, Eckart was the driving force behind and served as the editor-in-chief of the Völkischer Beobachter, an ultra-nationalist, virulently anti-Semitic newspaper that became the official Nazi organ. He also presented himself as a poet and playwright. Eckart became a mentor to the young Hitler, influencing his views on Aryan supremacy, racial ideology and Pan-German nationalism, broadening his knowledge of German politics and society, coaching him on social etiquette and his Austrian-accented German and introducing him to influential friends. Hitler credited Eckart as the “spiritual founder” of National Socialism, saying of him in the final sentence of Mein Kampf, he was “one of the best, who devoted his life to the awakening of our people, in his writings and his thoughts and finally in his deeds.” He died of a heart attack in 1923.

Centerpieces of the Nazi platform, defined by Hitler in Mein Kampf, were antipathy toward the Treaty of Versailles and the Jews – historically scapegoats for all manner of troubles in Europe. The Nazis believed that the Jews were an “alien race” among the Aryan or “Nordic master race” of Germany, had been sympathetic to the Allies and Soviet Russia during the war, and had played a central role in Germany’s surrender.

The anti-Semitism espoused by Hitler and his compatriots was not widely held by Germans in the early 20th Century. In actuality, Jews were more assimilated and less subjected to prejudice in Germany than in most other major European countries. Many Jews, especially the more highly educated and well-off, saw themselves as Germans first and Jews second and had great pride in their adopted country. They were distinguished in medicine, academia, business, government and the arts. Anti-Semitism, such as it was, tended to be more pronounced in southern Germany, including Munich, which had a large Catholic population and was influenced by anti-Semitism in Austria, where some of the early racial theories embraced by Eckart, Hitler and their cohorts had taken root.

Hitler’s polemics were couched in populist themes of restoring Germany’s economic, military and cultural grandeur. They spoke of delivering the “Fatherland” from the burdens of reparations and other punishments imposed by the Treaty of Versailles, eliminating the perceived internal threats from Jews, communists, intellectuals, liberal politicians and other “perfidious elements,” and restoring the purity of the Aryan race. These views found increasing acceptance in a time of extreme political, economic and social turmoil and fear.