Hitler and the Deutsche Arbeiterpartei

Abstract

his earliest contact with it in September igig until its first public triumph, his proclamation of its program in the Hofbrduhaus on February 24, 1920. To summarize his narrative :1 Coming from the hospital in Pasewalk, where his temporary blinding by gas had confined him, he reached Munich late in November I9I8, joined a replacement battalion at Traunstein, and returned to Munich in March. He remained there under the short-lived Soviet republics set up in April and was assigned to an army investigating commission shortly after the occupation of Munich by government troops early in May. He talked with comrades about founding a social revolutionary party. A lecture in an army citizenship course by Gottfried Feder on the dangers of international capitalism impressed him deeply. His energetic response to a participant who defended the Jews, in a discussion in one of these courses, led to his appointment as a training officer (Bildungsoffizier), and he found that he could speak to a crowd.2 One day Hitler was ordered to report on a meeting of the obscure Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, which, like any possibly subversive organization, in-