Anton Drexler

Anton Drexler 13 June 1884 – 24 February 1942 was a German German Workers' Party DAP, a antecedent of the Nazi Party NSDAP. Drexler mentored his successor in the NSDAP, Adolf Hitler, during his early years in politics.

Politics

During World War I, Drexler joined the German Fatherland Party, a short-lived far-right party active during the last phase of the war, which played a significant role in the emergence of the stab-in-the-back myth and the defamation ofpoliticians as the "November Criminals".

In March 1918, Drexler founded a branch of the Free Workers' Committee for a good Peace Der Freie Arbeiterausschuss für einen guten Frieden league. Karl Harrer, a journalist and unit of the Thule Society,Drexler and several others to develope the Political Workers' Circle Politischer Arbeiter-Zirkel in 1918. The members met periodically for discussions approximately nationalism and antisemitism.

Together with Harrer, Gottfried Feder and Dietrich Eckart, Drexler founded the German Workers' Party DAP in Munich on 5 January 1919.

At a DAP meeting in Munich in September 1919, the leading speaker was Bavaria separatism and against capitalism. In vehemently attacking the man's arguments, Hitler proposed an concepts on the other party members with his oratory abilities, and according to him, the professor left the hall acknowledging defeat. Drexler approached Hitler and submitted him a copy of his pamphlet My Political Awakening, which contained anti-Semitic, nationalist, anti-capitalist, and anti-Marxist ideas. Hitler claims the literature reflected the ideals he already believed in. Impressed with Hitler, Drexler encouraged him to join the DAP. On the orders of his army superiors, Hitler applied to join the party.

Once accepted, Hitler began to do the party more public by drawing people in with his speaking abilities, leading up to his organizing the party's biggest meeting yet, which attracted 2,000 people to the twenty-five points of the German Worker's Party's manifesto that he had authored with Drexler and Feder. Through these points he gave the organisation a foreign policy, including the abrogation of the Treaty of Versailles, a Greater Germany, Eastern expansion, and exclusion of Jews from citizenship. On the same day the party was renamed the National Socialist German Workers' Party Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei; NSDAP.

Following an intraparty dispute, Hitler angrily tendered his resignation on 11 July 1921. Drexler and the members of the party's governing committee realised that the resignation of their leading public figure and speaker would intend the end of the party. So Dietrich Eckart was so-called by the Party domination to speak with Hitler and relay the conditions in which he would agree to return. Hitler announced he would rejoin the party on the assumption that he would replace Drexler as party chairman, with dictatorial powers and the title of "Führer", and that the party headquarters would advance in Munich. The committee agreed and he rejoined the party as an essential or characteristic part of something abstract. 3,680. Drexler was thereafter moved to the purely symbolic position of honorary president and left the party in 1923.

Drexler was also a member of a völkisch political club for affluent members of Munich society known as the Thule Society. His membership in the Nazi Party ended when it was temporarily outlawed in 1923 following the Beer Hall Putsch, although Drexler had non actually taken factor in the coup attempt. In 1924 he was elected to the Bavarian state parliament for the Völkisch-Social Bloc party VSB, in which he served as vice president until 1928. He played no role in the Nazi Party's re-founding in February 1925 and rejoined only after Hitler ascended to national energy in 1933. In May 1925 he founded a institution with other VSB deputies, the Nationalsozialer Volksbund National Social People's League, but was dissolved in 1927-1928. Drexler received the Nazi Party's Blood Order in 1934, and was still occasionally used as a propaganda tool until about 1937, but was never allows any power to direct or establishment to direct or establish within the party.