Born in Munich, Drexler was a machine-fitter before becoming a railway toolmaker and locksmith in Berlin. He is believed to have been disappointed with his income, and to have played the zither in restaurants to supplement his earnings. Drexler did not serve in the armed forces during World War I because he was deemed unfit.
Together with Harrer, Gottfried Feder and Dietrich Eckart, Drexler founded the German Workers' Party in Munich on 5 January 1919. At a DAP meeting in Munich in September 1919, the main speaker was Gottfried Feder. When Feder's lecture concluded, Adolf Hitler got involved in a heated political argument with a visitor, Professor Adalbert Baumann, who questioned the soundness of Feder's arguments in support of Bavaria separatism and against capitalism. In vehemently attacking the man's arguments, Hitler made an impression on the other party members with his oratory skills, and according to him, the professor left the hall acknowledging defeat. Drexler approached Hitler and gave him a copy of his pamphlet My Political Awakening, which contained anti-Semitic, nationalist, anti-capitalist, and anti-Marxist ideas. Hitler claims the literature reflected the ideals he already believed in. Impressed with Hitler, Drexler encouraged him to join the DAP. On the orders of his army superiors, Hitler applied to join the party. Once accepted, Hitler began to make the party more public, and he organized their biggest meeting yet of 2,000 people, for 24 February 1920 in the Hofbräuhaus in Munich. 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 Greater Germany, Eastern expansion, and exclusion of Jews from citizenship. On the same day the party was renamed the National Socialist German Workers' Party. Following an intraparty dispute, Hitler angrily tendered his resignation on 11 July 1921. The committee members realised that the resignation of their leading public figure and speaker would mean the end of the party. Hitler announced he would rejoin on the condition that he would replace Drexler as party chairman, and that the party headquarters would remain in Munich. The committee agreed; he rejoined the party as member 3,680. Drexler was thereafter moved to the purely symbolic position of honorary president and left the party in 1923. 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 despite Drexler not actually having taken part in the coup attempt. In 1924 he was elected to the Bavarian state parliament for another party, in which he served as vice president until 1928. He played no role in the Nazi Party's re-founding in 1925 and rejoined only after Hitler ascended to national power in 1933. He founded a splinter group, the Nationalsozialer Volksbund, but this dissolved in 1928. He received the party's Blood Order in 1934, and was still occasionally used as a propaganda tool until about 1937, but was never allowed any legitimate power within the party.
Death
Drexler died after a lengthy illness due to alcoholism in Munich in February 1942.
