German Workers' Party

Together with Harrer, Drexler founded the German Workers' Party (DAP) in Munich on 5 January 1919.^[2] At a DAP meeting in Munich on 12 September 1919, the main speaker was Gottfried Feder, who held a lecture on the subject of 'the breaking of interest slavery'. When Feder's lecture concluded, Adolf Hitler – who attended the meeting as part of his assignment from the German Army to watch political agitators – got involved in a heated political argument with a visitor, Professor Adalbert Baumann, who questioned the soundness of Feder's arguments and in turn spoke in favour of Bavarian separatism.^[7] In vehemently attacking the man's arguments, Hitler made an impression on the other party members with his oratorical abilities, and according to him, the professor left the hall defeated.^[7] Drexler approached Hitler and gave him a copy of his pamphlet My Political Awakening.^[7] Hitler later claimed the literature reflected the ideals he already held since his own "political awakening".^[7] Impressed with Hitler, Drexler encouraged him to join the DAP. On the orders of his army superiors, Hitler applied to join the party.^[8]

Once accepted, Hitler began to make 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 Hofbräuhaus in Munich on 24 February 1920. It was in this speech that Hitler, for the first time, enunciated the twenty-five points of the German Worker's Party's manifesto that he had authored with Drexler and Feder.^[9] 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.^[10] On the same day the party was renamed the National Socialist German Workers' Party (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, NSDAP).^[11]

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 mean the end of the party. So Dietrich Eckart was asked by the Party leadership to speak with Hitler and relay the conditions in which he would agree to return.^[12] Hitler announced he would rejoin the party on the condition that he would replace Drexler as party chairman, with dictatorial powers and the title of "Führer", and that the party headquarters would remain in Munich. The committee agreed and he rejoined the party as member 3,680.^[13] Drexler was thereafter moved to the purely symbolic position of honorary president and left the party in 1923.^[14]

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 not taken part 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 power in 1933.^[15] In May 1925 he founded a group with other VSB deputies, the Nationalsozialer Volksbund (National Social People's League), but it was dissolved in 1927–1928.^[16] 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 allowed any power within the party.