Hitler’s impassioned speeches – delivered with such vitriol they often left him foaming at the mouth – were a core part of his persona
GETTY
In October 1922, Munich photographer Heinrich Hoffmann received an intriguing telegram. He was used to getting picture commissions, but the request – from an American photographic agency – was remarkable, because it offered the (then) huge fee of $100 for a picture of a little-known Munich politician. That politician’s name was Adolf Hitler.
Hitler was a relative newcomer to the Munich political scene. He had first emerged late in 1919, as an impassioned speaker for the nationalist German Workers’ Party (DAP), a small clique of disgruntled right-wing misfits. By the following spring, however, he had effectively engineered a takeover of the party, giving it the direction he felt it had lacked and renaming it the NSDAP – adding ‘National Socialist’ to the title. By 1922, though Hitler’s Nazi Party (as it was known) was making some political progress, it was still largely a Munich phenomenon. Hitler was barely known outside of Bavaria.