“against the bourgeois world,” was a hero to many of these
Wandervogel
—just as he was to Adolf Hitler. Wagner’s operas, like
The Ring of the Nibelung
(
Der Ring des Nibelungen
), which contains such epic works as “The Twilight of the Gods” (
Götterdämmerung
), harked back to the great Norse and German saga myths. Hitler was so obsessed with the “heroic” nature of Wagner’s work that he saw the opera
Lohengrin
, featuring a Knight of the Holy Grail, “at least ten times” 7 in pre-war Vienna. He even tried—unsuccessfully—to write his own heroic opera called
Wieland the Blacksmith
.
Hitler’s favourite reading in Vienna was
The Sagas of German Heroes
(
Die Deutschen Heldensagen
) and, according to his flatmate, August Kubizek, Hitler “identified himself with the great men of this vanished epoch. Nothing appeared more worthy of the struggle than a life like theirs, full of brave acts of great consequence, the most heroic life possible …” 8
More recently, during the First World War, individual leaders had stamped their own names on their units in a demonstration of the importance of the individual “hero.” Hitler himself, for example, joined the 16th Bavarian Reserve Infantry Regiment, but his unit was actually known as the “List” regiment after Colonel Julius von List who commanded the regiment at the start of the war. This tendency to name units after individual commanders grew even stronger with the formation of the paramilitary
Freikorps
units in the immediate aftermath of the end of the First World War. One of the most powerful, for instance, was known as the “Rossbach
Freikorps
” after its commander Gerhard Rossbach, another was the “Ehrhardt Brigade” led by a former captain in the Imperial Navy called Hermann Ehrhardt. Units like these, says Fridolin von Spaun, himself a
Freikorps
member, “depended entirely on their leader’s personality and skills.” 9 Moreover, wrote Ludwig Gengler, “The individual commander [of the
Freikorps
] was often called the Führer. He is idolised as the concrete embodiment of all those qualities that the Volunteer wanted to possess in himself. And the Führer is also an abstraction. The Man who will come.” 10
As well as this historical predisposition towards a belief in the individual “hero,” there was for Hitler and the Nazi party in the early 1920sconcrete evidence of just how a heroic “Man who will come” could influence an entire country. In Italy, Benito Mussolini, who like Hitler had been wounded during the First World War and had then become active in violent extreme nationalistic politics, had formed a Fascist party in 1919 to fight the influence of Socialists and Communists. Here was proof of how a “heroic” leader could fight his way out of obscurity.
In those early years, it was a drunken writer called Dietrich Eckart who most helped Adolf Hitler develop into someone who could be Germany’s answer to Benito Mussolini. Hitler first met Eckart at the second meeting of the German Workers’ party he attended in the autumn of 1919. Irascible, bald and looking older than a man in his early fifties, Eckart was a virulent anti-Semite who, like Hitler, felt that Germany had been betrayed by the way the war ended and the peace treaty of Versailles. His hatred of the Jews was such that he remarked that he would like “to load all Jews into a railway train and drive into the Red Sea with it.” 11 But, unlike Hitler, Eckart was well connected in sophisticated Munich social circles and comparatively wealthy—his plays, particularly his version of Ibsen’s
Peer Gynt
, had made him a considerable amount of money. And Eckart had been waiting for a man like Hitler. In 1919 Eckart had said that Germany needed a leader who was a “fellow who can stand the rattle of a machine gun. The rabble has to be scared shitless. I can’t use an officer; the people no longer have any respect for them. Best of all would be a worker who’s
Wandervogel
—just as he was to Adolf Hitler. Wagner’s operas, like
The Ring of the Nibelung
(
Der Ring des Nibelungen
), which contains such epic works as “The Twilight of the Gods” (
Götterdämmerung
), harked back to the great Norse and German saga myths. Hitler was so obsessed with the “heroic” nature of Wagner’s work that he saw the opera
Lohengrin
, featuring a Knight of the Holy Grail, “at least ten times” 7 in pre-war Vienna. He even tried—unsuccessfully—to write his own heroic opera called
Wieland the Blacksmith
.
Hitler’s favourite reading in Vienna was
The Sagas of German Heroes
(
Die Deutschen Heldensagen
) and, according to his flatmate, August Kubizek, Hitler “identified himself with the great men of this vanished epoch. Nothing appeared more worthy of the struggle than a life like theirs, full of brave acts of great consequence, the most heroic life possible …” 8
More recently, during the First World War, individual leaders had stamped their own names on their units in a demonstration of the importance of the individual “hero.” Hitler himself, for example, joined the 16th Bavarian Reserve Infantry Regiment, but his unit was actually known as the “List” regiment after Colonel Julius von List who commanded the regiment at the start of the war. This tendency to name units after individual commanders grew even stronger with the formation of the paramilitary
Freikorps
units in the immediate aftermath of the end of the First World War. One of the most powerful, for instance, was known as the “Rossbach
Freikorps
” after its commander Gerhard Rossbach, another was the “Ehrhardt Brigade” led by a former captain in the Imperial Navy called Hermann Ehrhardt. Units like these, says Fridolin von Spaun, himself a
Freikorps
member, “depended entirely on their leader’s personality and skills.” 9 Moreover, wrote Ludwig Gengler, “The individual commander [of the
Freikorps
] was often called the Führer. He is idolised as the concrete embodiment of all those qualities that the Volunteer wanted to possess in himself. And the Führer is also an abstraction. The Man who will come.” 10
As well as this historical predisposition towards a belief in the individual “hero,” there was for Hitler and the Nazi party in the early 1920sconcrete evidence of just how a heroic “Man who will come” could influence an entire country. In Italy, Benito Mussolini, who like Hitler had been wounded during the First World War and had then become active in violent extreme nationalistic politics, had formed a Fascist party in 1919 to fight the influence of Socialists and Communists. Here was proof of how a “heroic” leader could fight his way out of obscurity.
In those early years, it was a drunken writer called Dietrich Eckart who most helped Adolf Hitler develop into someone who could be Germany’s answer to Benito Mussolini. Hitler first met Eckart at the second meeting of the German Workers’ party he attended in the autumn of 1919. Irascible, bald and looking older than a man in his early fifties, Eckart was a virulent anti-Semite who, like Hitler, felt that Germany had been betrayed by the way the war ended and the peace treaty of Versailles. His hatred of the Jews was such that he remarked that he would like “to load all Jews into a railway train and drive into the Red Sea with it.” 11 But, unlike Hitler, Eckart was well connected in sophisticated Munich social circles and comparatively wealthy—his plays, particularly his version of Ibsen’s
Peer Gynt
, had made him a considerable amount of money. And Eckart had been waiting for a man like Hitler. In 1919 Eckart had said that Germany needed a leader who was a “fellow who can stand the rattle of a machine gun. The rabble has to be scared shitless. I can’t use an officer; the people no longer have any respect for them. Best of all would be a worker who’s
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