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After the war, Hitler joined a new and violently anti-Semitic group, the $ forerunner of the National Socialist German Workers' Party -- Nazi for short. There, for the first time since adolescence, he found a home and friends. Within a year, he became the chief Nazi propagandist. Judaism, he told his audiences, had produced the profiteers and Bolsheviks responsible for the defeat of the fatherland and the strangulation of the economy. Jews were bacilli infecting the arts, the press, the government. Pogroms would be insufficient. "The final aim must unquestionably be the irrevocable Entfernung ((removal)) of the Jews."
Early on, Hitler had a central insight: "All epoch-making revolutionary events have been produced not by the written but by the spoken word." He concentrated on an inflammatory speaking style flashing with dramatic gestures and catch phrases: "Germany, awake!" He ingeniously added a series of symbols that caught the national imagination. The most powerful was the Hakenkreuz (hooked cross), set in a circle and inscribed on a banner. "In red," he proclaimed, "we see the social idea of the movement, in white the nationalist idea, in the swastika the mission of the struggle for the victory of the Aryan man."
The Hitlerian pathology became more pronounced. He now regarded his audience as feminine: "The mass, the people, is for me a woman," ready to be seduced. But the seduction was figurative; the woman who seemed to beguile him most was Carola Hoffmann, an elderly widow. He frequently visited his admirer's home in a suburb of Munich, where she did his laundry and indulged his sweet tooth; acquaintances were once astonished to see Adolf put seven spoonfuls of sugar in his tea. When Frau Hoffmann offered to buy him a gift, he suggested a rhinoceros-hide dog whip like the one Alois had used long ago. There was every reason to agree with the appraisal of Hitler offered by the wife of an early follower: "I tell you, he is a neuter."
Initially, Hitler attracted those like himself, unappeased outsiders, misfits, losers. Joseph Goebbels was an unsuccessful novelist and playwright. Julius Streicher was a blackmailer. Ernst Rohm was a sadistic homosexual who advocated violence and murder. Hermann Goring was an air-force veteran without a scruple to his name. "I have no conscience," he liked to declare. "My conscience is Adolf Hitler." But then, Hitler was the conscience of all his cadre. Pan-Germanism was their creed, Adolf their Messiah. When criticized, Hitler would say, "Two thousand years ago, a man was similarly denounced . . . That man was dragged before a court, and they said, 'He is arousing the people!' So he too was an agitator!"
Before long Hitler was dragged before a court. He and his fellow Nazis had attempted an armed coup in Munich; when it failed, the instigators were imprisoned. Here at last was the longed-for martyrdom, and Hitler seized it. Up to now, events had formed the leader: Germany's humiliating loss of the Great War, the Allies' insistence on reparations, the monstrous inflation, the centuries-old distrust of Jewish professionals and merchants. From here on, the leader would create the events.