lp4guld

center of reactionary activities. It was, however, ablaze with agitation.Unemployment was widespread, food scarce, prices high. Littlegroups of all shades of opinion were meeting in beer halls andharanguing listeners on street corners. The Free Corps—volunteerroving bands of soldiers under adventurers of various sorts—werenumerous, combining military and political ambitions. At this pointHitler began. Stationed just outside Munich with his regiment, hewas assigned to collect information about several of these groups.He ended by joining one of them. It consisted of a handful of menwho met in a little beer hall and called themselves the GermanWorkers' party. The first seeds of this agitation, which was one dayto split the world, were planted, with a strange irony, by an organizationknown as the Association for the Promotion of Peace. Thussponsored, a branch was formed in Munich in 1918 by a locksmithnamed Anton Drexler. It did not go far, and on January 5, 1919,while communists in Berlin were rioting to overthrow the Ebertprovisional government, Drexler reorganized his group into theGerman Workers' party. The chief figures in this diminutive movementwere Drexler, an engineer named Gottfried Feder, a professornamed Dr. Johannes Dingfelder, a journalist named Karl Harrer,and a young reporter named Hermann Esser. Hitler was the sixthman to become a member. With the exception of young Esser therewas nothing vicious about these men. Oddly enough there was novery tight agreement among them on doctrine. Each seemed intenton his own brand of social medicine and willing to go along withthe others provided they did the same by him. Drexler was a moreor less futile, confused person, whose chief fixation was a hatred oflabor unions because they had inflicted some injustice on him. Feder,an engineer, had come to the conclusion that the woes of capitalismwere traceable to the institution of interest. He expounded thetheory that there were two kinds of capital—productive and speculative.To all who would listen he would preach the gospel of"breaking the bond slavery of interest which is the steel axle aroundwhich everything turns!" His grand remedy was to nationalize thebanks, institute state ownership of land, and substitute the Germanfor the Roman law, and he worked out a theory of money—whichwas inevitable—a kind of printing-press currency that came to be128