Background
Anton Drexler was born on 13 June 1884 in Munich.
Anton Drexler was born on 13 June 1884 in Munich.
He was a machine-fitter who had lost his job in Berlin for refusing to accept the Social Democrats as the voice of the German working class, he became a locksmith in a locomotive works in Berlin after 1902.
Physically unfit for the army, the idealistic Drexler found an outlet for his patriotism by joining the Vaterlandspartei (Fatherland Party) during World War I. Drexler urged the workers to fight for a German victory and demanded action against profiteers and speculators, while at the same time denouncing the Marxism of the Social Democrats.
In March 1918 he set up a Committee of Independent Workmen, which combined German national racism - directed at excluding Jews and foreigners from State and society - and the liberation of the working man on the basis of a supra-class platform.
On 5 January 1919 Drexler joined forces with the journalist, Karl Harrer, head of the Politischer Arbeiterzirkel (Political Workers’ Circle) in Munich, to form the first cell of the future NSDAP. the German Workers’ Party. A mixture of secret society and drinking club with about forty regular members when Adolf Hitler joined the group in 1919, it advocated the union of all ‘producers' against loan capital and interest slavery, called for profit sharing and bridging the gap between intellectual and physical labour. Superimposed on this quasi-socialist programme was an intense nationalism and anti-semitic racism fed by the trauma of the lost war. The German labouring classes were seen as the victims of a diabolical conspiracy of international ‘Jewish’ capital, ideas which found a fertile soil in postrevolutionary Munich and impressed the young Hitler. The latter had read Drexler's pamphlet Mein Politisches Erwachen {My Political Awakening) and derived the core of his Nazism from these first attempts to create a classless, popular Party, which was anti-capitalist, anti-liberal, anti-Marxist and anti-semitic, while espousing the cause of German national resurgence. The ingenuous, unworldly Drexler, who co-authored the twenty-five theses which constituted the National Socialist programme announced on 24 February 1920, proved however to be no match for Adolf Hitler who had wrested the leadership from him by the summer of 1921. Two years later, Drexler had left the Party and in 1924 he was elected to the Bavarian legislature on another list.
He never again participated in the Nazi movement and died a forgotten figure in Munich on 24 February 1942.
