In September 1919, in response to a letter from one of his soldier students, Hitler defined his attitude toward the Jewish question. Everything that might seem to be a higher goal (“religion, socialism, democracy”) was for Jews a way to make money. Jews were not to be treated as fellow people, but to be understood as an objective problem, like a disease (“racial tuberculosis”) that needed to be resolved.

In “Mein Kampf,” Hitler would take these points a step further. All ideas of universal goodness were simply mental traps set by Jews to catch weak German brains. The only way to restore German faith in German virtue was the physical elimination of the Jews. The same held for ideas of universally accessible truth. As Benjamin Carter Hett put it in an excellent recent study of Hitler’s rise to power, “The key to understanding why many Germans supported him lies in the Nazis’ rejection of a rational, factual world.”

In his speeches of late 1919, Hitler was pioneering a style of propaganda that has defined much of the century since (and which the philosopher Jason Stanley has described in sophisticated fashion). It begins with a total devotion to persuasive technique, passes through the creation of a pure myth, and ends with the speaker leading his country on a chase for fake phantoms that ends over real graves. In “Mein Kampf,” Hitler wrote that propaganda “must confine itself to a few points and repeat them over and over.”

In his first speech to the DAP as one of its members, at a beer hall in Munich on Oct. 16, he seems to have already grasped this technique. In “strong words,” as a listener recalled, he demanded decisive action against the Jewish “enemy of the people.” He reserved particular fury for newspapers, demanding that they be replaced by propaganda organs that spoke to German emotions. Not long afterward, the army helped Hitler and his party (by then known as the NSDAP, short for the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, or the “Nazis”) acquire a newspaper to spread their message.

What Hitler offered in 1919 was a response to globalization. In a powerful new biography, Brendan Simms contends that Hitler was impressed on the Western Front by the global might of Britain and the United States. Hitler was right, of course, that the fate of Germany was sealed by the power of capitalist empires, especially once the Americans had entered the war. But rather than draw the conclusion that a war was not in Germany’s interests, Hitler in 1919 preferred an emotional portrait of Germans as innocent victims of global evil.