Anton Drexler - the first leader of the Nazi Party.

Anton Drexler was born in Munich on 13 June 1884, his father worked on the railway. He followed in his father’s footsteps. After an apprenticeship as a locksmith, he first worked as a tool fitter in a Berlin locomotive factory and as from 1902 in a Munich railway workshop. Despite being of military age – he was thirty when the war broke out – he did not volunteer and he was not called up allegedly for being unfit. In 1917 he joined the newly founded and as it happened, short lived, German Fatherland Party. This party had been founded by conservative land owners including Admiral Tirpitz in Koenigsburg town hall but sought to reach out to working class people. On 7 March 1918, together with 27 colleagues from his workplace in what was then the Royal Bavarian State Railroad Central Workshop in Munich , he founded a branch of the Free Workers Committee for a Good Peace . Using contacts such as the rather wealthy playwrite Dietrich Eckart, Drexler was able to have such dignitaries as General Felix