Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler

Chapter IX: The 'German Workers' Party'
ONE DAY I received orders from my headquarters to find out what was behind an apparently
political organization which was planning to hold a meeting within th next few days under
the name of 'German Workers' Party'-with Gottfried Feder as one of the speakers. I was told
to go and take a look at the organization and then make a report.
The curiosity of the army toward political parties in those days was more than
understandable. The revolution had given the soldiers the right of political activity, and it
was just the most inexperienced among them who made the most ample use of it. Not until
the moment when the Center and the Social Democracy were forced to recognize, to their
own grief, that the sympathies of the soldiers were beginning to turn away from the
revolutionary parties toward the national movement and reawakening, did they see fit to
deprive the troops of suffrage again and prohibit their political activity.
It was illuminating that the Center and the Marxists should have taken this measure, for if
they had not undertaken this curtailment of ' civil rights '-as the political equality of the
soldiers after the revolution was called-within a few years there would have been no
revolution, and hence no more national dishonor and disgrace. The troops were then well on
their way toward ridding the nation of its leeches and the stooges of the Entente within our
walls. The fact that the so-called 'national' parties voted enthusiastically for the correction of
the previous views of the November criminals, and thus helped to blunt the instrument of a
national rising, again showed what the eternally doctrinaire ideas of these innocents among
innocents can lead to. This bourgeoisie was really suffering from mental senility; in all
seriousness they harbored the opinion that the army would again become what it had been,
to wit, a stronghold of German military power; while the Center and Marxism planned only to
tear out its dangerous national poison fang, without which, however, an army remains
forever a police force, but is not a troop capable of fighting an enemy-as has been amply
proved in the time that followed.
Or did our 'national politicians' believe that the development of the army could have been
other than national? That would have been confoundedly like the gentlemen and is what
comes of not being a soldier in war but a big-mouth; in other words, a parliamentarian with
no notion of what goes on in the hearts of men who are reminded by the most colossal past
that they were once the best soldiers in the world.
And so I decided to attend the above-mentioned meeting of this party which up till then had
been entirely unknown to me too.
In the evening when I entered the 'Leiber Room' of the former Sterneckerbrau in Munich, I
found some twenty to twenty-five people present, chiefly from the lower classes of the
population.
Feder's lecture was known to me from the courses, so I was able to devote myself to an
inspection of the organization itself.
My impression was neither good nor bad; a new organization like so many others. This was a
time in which anyone who was not satisfied with developments and no longer had any
confidence in the existing parties felt called upon to found a new party. Everywhere these
organizations sprang out of the ground, only to vanish silently after a time. The founders for
the most part had no idea what it means to make a party-let alone a movement out of a club.
And so these organizations nearly always stifle automatically in their absurd philistinism.
I judged the 'German Workers' Party' no differently. When Feder finally stopped talking, I was
happy. I had seen enough and wanted to leave when the free discussion period, which was
now announced, moved me to remain, after all. But here, too everything seemed to run along