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Anton Drexler (13 June 1884 – 24 February 1942) was a German far-right political agitator for the Völkisch movement in the 1920s. He founded the German Workers' Party (DAP), the pan-German and anti-Semitic antecedent of the Nazi Party (NSDAP). Drexler mentored his successor in the NSDAP, Adolf Hitler, during his early years in politics.
In March 1918, Drexler founded a branch of the Free Workers' Committee for a Good Peace ( Der Freie Arbeiterausschuss für einen guten Frieden) league. Karl Harrer, a journalist and member of the Thule Society, convinced Drexler and several others to form the Political Workers' Circle ( Politischer Arbeiter-Zirkel) in 1918. The members met periodically for discussions about nationalism and antisemitism.
Once accepted, Hitler began to make the party more public by drawing people in with his speaking abilities, leading up to his organizing the party's biggest meeting yet, which attracted 2,000 people to the Hofbräuhaus in Munich on 24 February 1920. It was in this speech that Hitler, for the first time, enunciated the twenty-five points of the German Worker's Party's manifesto that he had authored with Drexler and Feder. Through these points, he gave the organisation a foreign policy, including the abrogation of the Treaty of Versailles, a German Question, Eastern expansion, and exclusion of Jews from citizenship. On the same day the party was renamed the National Socialist German Workers' Party ( Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, NSDAP).
Following an intraparty dispute, Hitler angrily tendered his resignation on 11 July 1921. However, Drexler and the party's governing committee members realised that the resignation of their leading public figure and speaker would mean the end of the party. So Dietrich Eckart was asked by the Party leadership to speak with Hitler and relay the conditions in which he would agree to return. Hitler announced he would rejoin the party on the condition that he would replace Drexler as party chairman, with dictatorial powers and the title of " Führer", and that the party headquarters would remain in Munich. The committee agreed and he rejoined the party as member 3,680. Drexler was thereafter moved to the purely symbolic position of honorary president.
Drexler was also a member of a völkisch political club for affluent members of Munich society known as the Thule Society. His membership in the Nazi Party ended when it was temporarily outlawed in 1923 following the Beer Hall Putsch, although Drexler had not taken part in the coup attempt. In 1924, he was elected to the Bavarian state parliament for the Völkisch-Social Bloc party (VSB), in which he served as vice president until 1928. He played no role in the Nazi Party's re-founding in February 1925 and rejoined only after Hitler ascended to national power in 1933. In May 1925, he founded a group with other VSB deputies, the Nationalsozialer Volksbund (National Social People's League), but it was dissolved in 1927–1928. Drexler received the Nazi Party's Blood Order in 1934, and was still occasionally used as a Nazi propaganda tool until about 1937, but was never allowed any power within the party.
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