The trouble with leaving politicians to play, as was suggested the German people did, at the end of the last article, is that they never know when to stop. Any 'normal' politician has only one priority, his personal ambition. When the politician is a Hitler, then there will be no bounds to what he wants. And Hitler very quickly showed that he had the ability to realize his own particular ambitions.
Not that this was immediately obvious to all and sundry, but he knew it. When the First World War ended, he and millions of Germans felt that the Armistice was a betrayal - but they blamed the wrong people. It was in fact the Army officer class, the all powerful Junkers, who told the Kaiser and the Social Democrat government that had the nominal authority, that the actual fighting troops could not carry on for lack of logistics, and lack of the will to fight any longer. These facts were not passed on to the German people, and they also did not know that the senior generals maneuvred the government into signing the Armistice and in declaring the Weimar Republic. The whole matter was the usual sordid political shifting of blame but Hitler did not guess what actually happened. From what he could see and what he sensed he made a resolution; as he wrote in Mein Kampf; "My own fate became known to me. I decided to go into politics." (It is as well to repeat here that most of what we know about Hitler up until he joined the German Workers' Party in September 1919 is what he chose to write in Mein Kampf; where he decided to omit something or to gloss something, we have usually no way of knowing this, or of verifying what he does tell us.)
Having made his decision, Hitler did not know how he was going to get into politics. He returned to Munich in November 1918, still in the Army, who very soon assigned him to its Political Department to keep an eye on dissident political groups. While in Vienna before the war he had closely observed the Social Democrat party's activities and had formulated some ideas of his own. Now, the first time he went to a meeting of the German Workers' Party, he found himself haranguing those attending, about 25 people, on the evils of the Jews. In the course of time, Hitler was to meet several people who would be catalysts for some action or the other. The leader of this Party was the first such one. His name was Anton Drexler and, as Hitler was leaving the meeting, he gave him a booklet he had written. When Hitler read this the next day he found that many of the ideas were ones which he had put together in his own mind, notably the building of a strongly nationalist party and that the membership should based on the working classes. Whatever the attraction of this small group, and Hitler had no idea how it would develop, within a few days he became the seventh member of the committee.
