The first political victim of Adolf Hitler went to the police in Munich on July 25, 1921.
The tool fitter Anton Drexler, 37, warned the officials about Hitler.
He wanted to "achieve the party goals in a revolutionary way, possibly using terror, violence and other means."
The police did not move: who was this Hitler?
Drexler was chairman and co-founder of the National Socialist German Workers 'Party (NSDAP), which had previously been called the German Workers' Party (DAP) for a good year and which Hitler had also joined.
Drexler feared in July 1921 that Hitler would usurp the leadership.
And he was not mistaken.
Hitler seized power in the small party using the same methods with which he submitted all of Germany around a decade later: a mixture of demagogy and vague promises, threats and intolerance.
Even within his own ranks, Hitler did not tolerate any contradiction.
Club Meier at the beer table
The hallmark of the DAP from the beginning was the willingness to cheat.
Even the original party name was misleading: the DAP was not an organization of the workers' movement, but that nationalist organization that was driven by hatred of the left after the revolution of 1918/19.
In January 1920, only 2.5 percent of the 190 DAP members were unskilled workers.
Craftsmen, university graduates, civil servants and officers dominated, together more than 40 percent of the members.
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Hitler joined the troops in 1919 at the age of 30 as a military scout, as an informant for the Bavarian Reichswehr.
The army unit for which Private Hitler worked observed political groups in the state capital.
The central motive was the concern about a strengthening of "Marxism", a few months after the suppression of the Munich Soviet Republic.
On September 12, 1919, Hitler attended his first DAP meeting.
Around 40 supporters had gathered in the Sterneckerbräu tavern near the Isartor.
Hitler vigorously spoke up, Drexler then urged him to join the party.
That happened a few days later in another restaurant, "in the twilight of a demolished gas lamp," as Hitler later wrote in "Mein Kampf".
In his book he also made clear his cynical relationship with the small party and sneered at the fact that there had been "the worst possible way of doing clubs."
But it was precisely this weakness that attracted Hitler: He realized that he could completely turn this leisurely beer table round upside down.
Drexler had been one of the two DAP chairmen since January 1919 and sole party leader from 1920.
During the First World War, the unfit for military service had joined the extremely nationalist "German Fatherland Party".
The anti-Semite Drexler provided Hitler with elements of his later party ideology - above all a mixture of nationalism and socialist-sounding promises to appeal to workers.
"Mei, hoat der a Goschn"
Drexler also influenced the 25-point program that the force, which has since been renamed the NSDAP, announced in February 1920. She called for the "amalgamation of all Germans" to form a "Greater Germany" including Austria. It promised the »abolition of labor and effortless income«, »confiscation of all war profits«, »profit sharing in large enterprises«. And it propagated the slogan "Common good comes before self-interest", which was later minted in the edge of coins under the Nazi regime.
The promising social slogans were accompanied by radical nationalism, xenophobia and anti-Semitism.
The NSDAP promised to "prevent any further immigration of non-Germans".
A citizen can only be someone who is a "national comrade".
But "Volksgenosse" can only be "someone who is of German blood."
Therefore "no Jew could be a national comrade".
Drexler was, as he himself admitted, rhetorically far inferior to Hitler.
"Mei, hoat der a Goschn," what kind of mouth has he, the party leader is said to have said about Hitler.
Drexler also had no talent for organization and propaganda.
Hitler described him in "Mein Kampf" as "weak and insecure".
Even under Drexler's chairmanship, Hitler set about turning the twilight bottle into a group of daredevils.
He smuggled more and more military comrades into the party and as an "advertising chairman" ensured an aggressive appearance in public.
Red flags are easier to see
Hitler had posters printed in red to attract attention and "irritate the left."
In the summer of 1920 he had red party flags made with a white circle and black swastika in the middle.
And he broke with civic conventions as a speaker at meetings.
Hitler addressed the audience not as "ladies and gentlemen" but as "national comrades".
In his speeches at the beginning of the twenties, the same motifs always reappeared in variations: Hitler railed against the "shameful peace" of Versailles and the "international Jewish stock market capital."
He accused the left-wing parties of "lying and deceit" and the right-wing parties of "unlimited incompetence".
As a speaker he relied more on feelings than arguments.
His appearances were highly emotional, in the events he "often intensified himself into a real excessive speech that lasted for hours," according to the historian and Hitler biographer Peter Longerich.
His henchman Max Amann, Hitler's superior for a time during World War I and an NSDAP functionary from 1921, remembered after 1945: "The man shouted, he behaved, I never saw anything like that." But many listeners did not see hysteria in Hitler's appearances but an emotional expression of sincere will.
Hitler's meetings were mostly attended by men, but the Munich police reported about 20 to 30 percent women in 1920.
Many of them raved about the "Führer" as if in love for decades.
Protected by thugs
The influx became stronger and stronger.
From March 1920 to January 1921 alone, the NSDAP held 46 major events with a total of more than 60,000 visitors and from then on also rented circus tents instead of just beer bars.
The first mass rally in the Krone Circus was organized by Hitler in front of 6,000 listeners on February 3, 1921 - on the subject of "Future or Fall".
Hardly any of his listeners at the time suspected that Hitler's future also included doom.
The number of members of the party rose rapidly, mainly thanks to the speaker Hitler.
At the end of 1919 the party had only 64 members, two years later there were already 6,000. This was unmistakably Hitler's work.
According to the British Hitler biographer Ian Kershaw, "the Munich public in 1921 saw Hitler as the epitome of the NSDAP."
Hitler provided, as he himself wrote in "Mein Kampf," a "tightly organized hall protection" that heckled hecklers outside - the nucleus of the later "Sturmabteilung" (SA) and the "Schutz-Staffel" (SS).
From November 1920, the bully troop operated as the party's "gymnastics and sports department".
"Dictatorial Authority"
But Hitler's role as a leading agitator and organizer was not enough.
He wanted unreserved control over the party and demanded "dictatorial power".
He achieved this at the end of July 1921 through blackmail - the threat to withdraw.
On July 29, 1921, the NSDAP elected him chairman of a meeting of 554 party members in Munich's Hofbräuhaus.
Soon afterwards, in November 1921, the NSDAP-Kampfblatt "Völkischer Beobachter" referred to him for the first time as "leader of the NSDAP".
The Führer cult around Hitler began.
Looking back on the party's beginnings in Munich in 1924, Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf that he was driven by the "longing for a new movement" in which "there could never be a turning back."
What he intends to do is "not a passing gimmick, but bloody seriousness."
It was more than 23 years from the election as party leader to the suicide in the "Führerbunker" on April 30, 1945.
But the course in madness, Hitler had already set it.
