Anton Drexler

A Thule member and sports journalist named Karl Harrer got the job of putting together a political discussion circle for workers.

Harrer recruited a toolmaker from the Munich railway yards named Anton Drexler, a nationalist and an antisemite who could talk to other working men.

On January 5th, 1919, Harrer and Drexler turned their discussion circle into a party, the German Workers Party, or DAP.

It was tiny.

Hitler was supposed to be watching the German Workers' Party, not joining it.

But during the discussion that night, a professor argued that Bavaria should break away from Germany and join Austria, and Hitler tore into him.

The tirade impressed Anton Drexler, one of the chairmen, who pressed a pamphlet into his hands and told him to come back.

Within weeks, the informant had become a member, and soon he was a lot more than that.

Nobody thought that way anymore.

And the people who did, you know, famously, I'm talking in the 1920s, like right after Anton Drexler, pretty amicably, when Hitler replaced Drexler, Drexler was happy.

Drexler was the original... chairman of the National Socialist Workers' Party back when it was just the DAP.

And Drexler, he was happy to hand over the reins to Hitler.

And Drexler actually was well treated later.

He was honored and things like that.

Hitler and Drexler made the point that these These kind of provincial Bavarians who are demanding some sort of Bavarian national state.

Or these people who refuse to think in terms of a European civilization against the Bolsheviks and America.

The National Socialist German Workers' Party grew out of several right-wing parties that came and went quickly in Bavaria in the two years following the end of the First World War.

Initially led by Anton Drexler, by the summer of 1921 Hitler would be their leader, though long before that he had established himself as the Nazis' pre-eminent speaker.

Hoffmann was clearly an early witness to the meetings which led to the establishment of the party in Munich in 1920 and its early gatherings.

In fact, he joined the party almost immediately and was recorded as member number 57.

sent by the army, to which he still belonged, to observe a far-right group called the German Workers' Party.

The German Workers' Party was a group founded in Munich in January 1919 by Anton Drexler, a leading member of the occultist Thule Society.

The party would meet regularly and discuss ideas of nationalism.

The binding ideas of the German Workers' Party were entrenched in racism and the hatred of Jews.

Having shown his strength as a public speaker, Hitler began to take a bigger role in the German Workers' Party.

He took on more responsibility, soon becoming the head of propaganda.

He starts not as leader, that remains Anton Drexler, but as their PR man.

And what he does is produce these amazing, inflammatory, exciting posters and have these mass meetings, which increasingly large numbers of people come to him.