Dietrich Eckart

Dietrich Eckart is a dark, pivotal figure in the pre-history of the Nazi movement, more influential as a catalyst than as a leader. A middling poet and playwright with strong antisemitic and völkisch beliefs, he found his true calling in the political ferment of post-WWI Munich. He co-founded the obscure German Workers' Party, the tiny group that a disillusioned army veteran named Adolf Hitler was sent to monitor. Eckart, nearly two decades Hitler's senior, saw raw potential in the fiery orator. He became Hitler's intellectual tutor, introducing him to influential circles, refining his street-corner rhetoric, and imbuing him with a sense of divine mission. Eckart provided the movement with its first newspaper, the 'Völkischer Beobachter,' and its first anthem. His death in 1923, just after the failed Beer Hall Putsch, cemented his mythic status as the 'spiritual founder' of Nazism in party lore, a man who shaped the instrument of catastrophe but did not live to see it wielded.