Background
Hermann Esser was born on 29 July 1900 in Röhrmoss, near Munich. He was a son of a civil servant.
Hermann Esser was born on 29 July 1900 in Röhrmoss, near Munich. He was a son of a civil servant.
While still a teenager, he volunteered for military service, serving for one year during World War I. A radical socialist, who briefly worked on a left-wing provincial paper, he co-founded the German Workers’ Party (forerunner of the NSDAP) with Anton Drexler in October 1919.
Early in 1920 he met Hitler in the press department of the regional army headquarters and in the same year he was appointed the first editor of the Völkische Beobachter and Chief of Party Propaganda. From the outset Esser specialized in lurid descriptions of Jewish' scandals, appealing to the basest human instincts. Unsavoury, crude, of low moral character, Esser was nonetheless one of the most effective rabble-rousers in the early days of Nazism, his fiery speeches contributing to the Party’s initial successes in Bavaria. Esser did not take part in the unsuccessful Hitler putsch of November 1923, remaining in bed - Hitler subsequently accused him of personal cowardice - and afterwards fleeing to Austria. On his return to Germany in January 1924 he was sentenced to three months’ imprisonment by a Munich court.
He persuaded General Ritter von Epp to make him Bavarian Minister of Economics, a position he held until 1935 when his intrigue against the Bavarian Minister of the Interior, Adolf Wagner, failed and he was deposed. While in the post Esser had forced Bavarian industrialists to pay large sums to the State treasury, but it was above all his scandalous personal life - it was alleged that he had immorally assaulted the under-age daughter of a prominent Munich businessman - w hich prompted Hitler to act. Nonetheless the Führer did not dare to break completely with Esser, who knew too many compromising secrets and unsavoury details of Party life.
From 1926 until 1932 he held a position of the new Illustrierter Beobachter editor.
In 1935 he was put in charge of the Tourist Division in the Reich Propaganda Ministry and made President of the Reich Group Tourist Traffic {Fremdenverkehr).
On 12 December 1939 he was appointed Vice-President of the Reichstag, but this was a mere sinecure which did not carry any influence. During World War II Esser faded completely into the background, aside from publishing in 1939 a viciously anti-semitic book. Die Jüdische Weltpest {The Jewish World Pest), in the style of Julius Streicher. Apart from being the main speaker at the twenty-third anniversary of the founding of the NSDAP, celebrated by the “Old Fighters' in the Munich beer cellar on 24 February 1943, Esser remained out of the limelight.
At the end of the war, this led to his being regarded as of minor importance and he was released by the Americans in 1947, after having been held in detention for two years. Esser then went into hiding until he was taken into custody on 9 September 1949, this time by German police. A Munich de-Nazification court reclassified him as a ‘Major Offender’ for having been the oldest propagator of Nazi ideas and for his past Jew-baiting activities.
On 13 March 1950 an appeal court confirmed the verdict of five years’ forced labour against him, but with time deducted for several years spent in detention he was released in 1952. He would probably never have been re-arrested had he not furnished titillating details for a syndicated story on “Hitler, the Great Lover’ which appeared in 1949 in an illustrated Munich magazine. Henceforth, Esser maintained a low profile until his death at the age of eighty on 7 February 1981.
The scandals in Esser’s private life led other Nazis, especially the Strasser brothers and Goebbels, to call for his exclusion from the Party. Gregor Strasser called his behaviour egoistic and unvölkisch, while Otto Strasser compared him to Julius Streicher as two ‘sexual perverts’ and ‘demagogues of the worst kind'. Even Alfred Rosenberg, who did not share the Strassers’ “revolutionary’ ideas, held Esser in contempt and threatened to sue him for libel, dropping the suit at the last moment so as not to harm the Party. In 1926 Esser also quarrelled with Streicher, and this time Hitler (who had put up with Esser because he was useful) broke off personal relations with him, siding with the Gauleiter of Franconia. Nevertheless Hitler continued to use Esser as a speaker for certain kinds of public meetings and made him editor of the new, illustrated Party newspaper.