Hermann Esser

Hermann Esser (29 July 1900 – 7 February 1981) was a very early member of the Nazi Party (NSDAP). A journalist, Esser was the editor of the Nazi paper, Völkischer Beobachter, and a Nazi member of the Reichstag. In the early history of the party, he was a de facto deputy of Adolf Hitler.

Esser was born in Röhrmoos, Kingdom of Bavaria. The son of a civil servant, he was educated in the high school at Kempten. As a teenager, he volunteered and did service in World War I in the Kgl. Bayerischen 19, Fussartillerie-Regiment.

A radical socialist, after he joined a left-wing provincial newspaper to train as a journalist. Having previously formed his own Social Democrat party, but as it was small and one of numerous post-Armistice parties in Germany and Austria, it quickly failed.

Having met Anton Drexler through his work, he joined with the group of men that formed the Nazi Party: Drexler, Gottfried Feder and Dietrich Eckart. Esser joined the party, holding membership card No. 2. In 1920 he met Hitler in the regional press office of the Reichswehr (Army of the Weimar Republic), and was made editor of Völkischer Beobachter that same year.

In the fall of 1920, he began his public appearances in Passau.

A good public speaker, Esser was as a result able to rouse and direct rebels, enabling them to attack the political meetings of groups and parties that the NSDAP frowned upon. Esser's speeches were described by Louis Snyder as "Crude, uncultured, of low moral character", featuring the kernel of future Nazi policies: extreme nationalism and anti-Semitism. From 1923 to 1925, he became the party's first head of propaganda, turning out a series of posters and a book attacking the Jews.

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