Hitler Adolf - A Brief History of the Third Reich: The Rise and Fall of the Nazis

Anton Drexler was born in Germany in 1884 and first worked as a machine-fitter, before becoming a locksmith in Berlin in 1902. Despite his extreme nationalism he was judged physically unsuitable for military service and so, to his great disappointment, did not fight in the First World War. In 1919 bitter at the defeat of Germany and alarmed at the social and political turmoil of post-war Bavaria he co-founded the German Workers Party (the DAP) in Munich. Drexler was typical of a vulnerable section of the German population, the lower middle class. Possessing sufficient skills and independence to raise them above the mass of workers, such people were desperate to avoid any downwardly mobile pressures that might force them into the ranks of the working class. Made insecure by the economic and political upheaval in post-war Germany, such people were quick to blame Jews, socialists and communists for Germanys plight.

The DAP was only one of many tiny vlkisch (ethnic/racist) parties in Bavaria. Their common feature was their racist belief in the purity of German blood and German culture. Beyond that, their beliefs were a strange mixture of extreme nationalism, anti-Semitism and right-wing militarism, blended with a radical and semi-socialist resentment of capitalism, large department stores and unearned profits. As such, they were difficult to place on any political spectrum as they represented the anxieties, fears and resentments of those who felt themselves squeezed from above and below. Below them were the unionized workers with their internationalist allegiances to class rather than race; above them were the more comfortably off and the rich, whose nationalism was basically conservative.

In 1919, one of the DAPs meetings was attended by an obscure army corporal of Austrian origin Adolf Hitler. Drexler gave Hitler a pamphlet entitled My Political Awakening and, according to Hitlers later thoughts expressed in his own political biography, Mein Kampf (My Struggle), Drexlers pamphlet reflected many of Hitlers own emerging beliefs. As a result, Hitler decided to join Drexlers tiny party and, by 1920, his rhetorical skills were both drawing in the crowds and overshadowing Drexler. That same year, he persuaded Drexler to change the partys name to the National Socialist German Workers Party (the NSDAP, or Nazis). In 1921, Drexlers leadership was challenged by Hitler and, after a brief resistance, Drexler resigned. Without the skills or organization to resist Hitler, Drexler left the NSDAP in 1923 and was a largely forgotten figure by the time he died in Munich in February 1942. By that time the party that Hitler had hijacked had been in power for almost ten years and had unleashed a world war of unbelievable savagery. German troops occupied Europe from the Atlantic to southern Russia and the mass killing of Jews in Eastern Europe had been taking place since the previous summer. That would have been impossible to imagine in the years immediately following Germanys defeat in 1918, but the roots of what Hitler would come to call the Third Reich went back deep into that

As Germany faced defeat in November 1918 it was disintegrating. Sailors mutinied in the ports of Wilhelmshaven, Kiel and Hamburg; workers and ex-soldiers set up revolutionary