When our political meetings first started I made it a special point to organize a suitable defensive squad--a squad composed chiefly of young men. Some of them were comrades who had seen active service with me; others were young party members who, right from the start, had been trained and brought up to realize that only terror is capable of smashing terror--that only courageous and determined people had made a success of things in this world and that, finally, we were fighting for an idea so lofty that it was worth the last drop of our blood. These young men had been brought up to realize that where force replaced common sense in the solution of a problem, the best means of defence was attack and that the reputation of our hall-guard squads should stamp us as a political fighting force and not as a debating society.

The urgency for this was apparent, as meanwhile the number of our meetings had steadily increased. We still frequently met in the Munich Hofbräuhaus but more frequently in the large meeting halls throughout the city itself. In the autumn and winter of 1920-1921 our meetings in the Bürgerbräu and Munich Kindlbräu had assumed vast proportions and it was always the same picture that presented itself; namely, meetings of the NSDAP (The German National Socialist Labour Party) were always crowded out so that the police were compelled to close and bar the doors long before proceedings commenced.

The organization of defence guards for keeping order at our meetings cleared up a very difficult question. Up till then the movement had possessed no party badge and no party flag. The lack of these tokens was not only a disadvantage at that time but would prove intolerable in the future. The disadvantages were chiefly that members of the party possessed no outward broken of membership which linked them together, and it was absolutely unthinkable that for the future they should remain without some token which would be a symbol of the movement and could be set against that of the International.

More than once in my youth the psychological importance of such a symbol had become clearly evident to me and from a sentimental point of view also it was advisable. In Berlin, after the War, I was present at a mass-demonstration of Marxists in front of the Royal Palace and in the Lustgarten. A sea of red flags, red armlets and red flowers was in itself sufficient to give that huge assembly of about 120,000 persons an outward appearance of strength. I was now able to feel and understand how easily the man in the street succumbs to the hypnotic magic of such a grandiose piece of theatrical presentation.

The bourgeoisie, which as a party neither possesses or stands for any WELTANSCHAUUNG, had therefore not a single banner. Their party was composed of 'patriots' who went about in the colours of the REICH. If these colours were the symbol of a definite WELTANSCHAUUNG then one could understand the rulers of the State regarding this flag as expressive of their own WELTANSCHAUUNG, seeing that through their efforts the official REICH flag was expressive of their own WELTANSCHAUUNG.

But in reality the position was otherwise.

The REICH was morticed together without the aid of the German bourgeoisie and the flag itself was born of the War and therefore merely a State flag possessing no importance in the sense of any particular ideological mission.