Crises and Resistances

Hitler will run out of gas!

Karl Stützel, Bavarian Minister of the Interior, in 1925

 

It was in fact a depressingly changed scene to which Hitler returned from Landsberg. The turn of events could be traced to the stabilization of the currency. On the one hand, people could again feel that society had a reliable foundation. On the other hand, the end of the inflation worked hardship on the professional promoters of turmoil—for the Free Corps and the paramilitary associations had depended for support on foreign currency, trivial sums of which could go a long way under inflationary conditions. Gradually, the government acquired solidity and authority. By the end of February, 1924, it rescinded the state of emergency proclaimed on the night of November 9. In the course of the same year Foreign Minister Stresemann’s policy of reconciliation began to show results. These were not so much a matter of specifics as an improvement in the psychological climate within Germany. Gradually, the anachronistic hatreds and resentments of wartime began to dissolve. The Dawes Plan offered a prospect of solving the reparations problem. The French gave signs of willingness to evacuate the Ruhr. Security treaties were being discussed and even the question of Germany’s entry into the League of Nations. With the influx of American capital, the economy began to recover. Unemployment, which had created such scenes of misery on street corners and at bread lines and welfare offices, was tangibly receding. These changes for the better were reflected in the election results. In May, 1924, the radical forces still had one more success, but by the December elections of the same year they had been markedly thrown back. In Bavaria alone the racist-nationalist groups lost nearly 70 per cent of their following. Although this shift was not instantly reflected in a strengthening of the democratic centrist parties, it did appear as though Germany, after years of crisis, depressions, and threats of upheaval, was beginning to return to normality.

Like many others among the brand-new class of unemployed professional politicians, Hitler himself seemed to have reached the end of a ten-year phase of irregular living and to be faced once again with the law and order, the “domestic tranquillity,” that had horrified him as an adolescent. Viewed in sober terms his situation was hopeless. Though he had covered himself with glory during his trial, he had since been reduced to the sorry role of the failed and half-forgotten politician. The National Socialist Party and all its organizations had been banned, as had the Völkische Beobachter. The Reichswehr and most of the private patrons of the movement had withdrawn their support; after all the excitement and playing at civil war, they had turned back to the routine of everyday life. In retrospect, many people dismissed the year 1923 with an irritated shrug. It had been a crazy time, a bad time. Dietrich Eckart and Scheubner-Richter were dead, Göring living in exile, Kriebel on the way to exile. Most of Hitler’s closer followers were either in jail or had quarreled with one another and dispersed. Immediately before his arrest, Hitler had managed to send a scribbled note to Alfred Rosenberg: “Dear Rosenberg, from now on you will lead the movement.” Adopting the pseudonym Rolf Eidhalt (Ralph Oath-keeper), an anagram of Adolf Hitler, Rosenberg tried to hold the remnants of Hitler’s former following together under the guise of a Grossdeutsche Volksgemeinschaft (GVG) (Greater German People’s Community). The SA was continued under the guise of various sports clubs, glee clubs, and marksmen’s clubs. But Rosenberg had no talent as a leader; the movement soon broke up into feuding cliques. In Bamberg Streicher founded a Völkischer Block Bayern (Bavarian Racial-Nationalist Bloc), which claimed a measure of independence. Finally, Esser, Streicher, and a Dr. Artur Dinter from Thuringia, author of some wild racist maunderings in the form of novels, seized the leadership of the GVG, while Ludendorff, together with von Graefe and Gregor Strasser (soon joined by Ernst Röhm) organized the National Socialist Freedom Party as a kind of united front for the nationalist and racist groups. Thus various would-be leaders tried to make use of Hitler’s absence as a means of rising in the nationalist movement or even dislodging Hitler from the star position he had won during the trial and forcing him back into the role of “drummer.”

Hitler, however, was not discouraged by the situation. Rather, he saw it as rich in promise. Rosenberg later admitted that he had been greatly surprised at being appointed interim leader of the movement and suspected that Hitler had chosen him for some secret reason of his own. Perhaps Hitler was quite ready to let the movement fall apart, if that would reinforce his own claim to leadership. Nor was this reprehensible, in view of the sort of claim Hitler was by now making. For the summons he had received from fate could not be delegated. In religion, too, there is no such person as the vice-savior.

With curious dispassion, Hitler had watched the squabbles among Rosenberg, Streicher, Esser, Pöhner, Röhm, Amann, Strasser, and Ludendorff, and, as one of his followers commented, “did not even lift his little finger.” While still in prison, he had tried as far as possible to keep any decision from being taken, any power center formed or claim to leadership established. For similar reasons he opposed nationalist participation in the parliamentary elections, although such participation was in keeping with the new strategy of seeking the legal conquest of power. The point was that every party member who acquired parliamentary immunity and a legislator’s salary thereby gained some independence of his authority. He was not at all pleased to learn that the National Socialist Freedom Party had won 32 of 472 seats in the Reichstag elections of May, 1924. Shortly afterward, in an open letter, Hitler resigned the leadership of the NSDAP, withdrew the appointments he had made to various offices, and refused to receive politically motivated visits. With a touch of smugness Rudolf Hess, writing from Landsberg, commented on the “stupidity” of the party followers. As for Hitler’s gamble, it proved to be a clever one. When he came out of prison, he found nothing but the ruins of the party; but on the other hand he no longer had any serious rival. He appeared on the scene as the longed-for rescuer of a nationalist-racist movement that had been, with some assistance from him, sinking into the swamp. On this basis, Hitler was able to assert an authority that soon could no longer be challenged. He later frankly admitted: “Otherwise it would not have been possible. At that time [after his release from prison] I was able to say to everyone in the party: Now we are going to fight the way I want to and no differently.”

Nevertheless, upon his release he found himself confronting soaring hopes and the most contradictory expectations and demands from his disunited followers. His political future would be dependent upon whether he succeeded in freeing himself from all the splinter groups and, within the densely inhabited sphere of the Right, giving his party an unmistakable profile—which, however, had also to be vague enough to hold the divergent aspirations together. Many rightists were expecting him to join Ludendorff in organizing a racist-nationalist unity movement. But he realized that only a towering leader, a supreme personality standing alone upon a kind of supernatural pinnacle, could serve as the cohesive force his concept required. At the moment, therefore, he was not interested in concluding hasty alliances but in marking out dividing lines and in establishing his personal claim to absolutism. His behavior during the following weeks was determined by these considerations.

Only a few days after his release, Hitler, on Pöhner’s advice, asked Held, the new Bavarian Prime Minister, for an interview. Held, chairman of the Bavarian People’s Party, was strictly Catholic and resolutely federalistic; Hitler and his associates had been violently hostile to him. To play down the significance of the meeting, Hitler pretended that his sole purpose was to ask for the release of those of his comrades still imprisoned in Landsberg. Critics within the völkisch camp accused him of making his “peace with Rome.” In reality he was trying to make peace with the government. Unlike Ludendorff, he remarked, he could not afford to inform his opponents beforehand that he wanted to kill them.

His personal fate as well as the future of the movement depended on the success of this maneuver. His ambition was unchanged: to seize power. For this he must build up an autocratic, military party; but he must also regain the lost trust of powerful groups and institutions. That is, he had to appear simultaneously as revolutionary and as defender of existing conditions, radical and moderate at once. He must both threaten the system and play the part of its preserver; he must violate the law and establish credibility as its defender. It is not certain whether Hitler ever consciously spelled out this paradoxical strategy; but almost everything he did in practice aimed at the tactical realization of these paradoxes. In his talk with Held he assured the Prime Minister of his loyalty. In the future, he promised, he would work only by legal means; the putsch of November 9 had been a mistake. He had since recognized, he continued, that the authority of the state must be respected; he himself, as a bourgeois patriot, was ready to contribute to the best of his ability to that end. Above all, he was at the disposal of the government in the struggle against the seditious forces of Marxism. But, of course, if he were to be effective, he needed his party and the Völkische Beobachter. Asked how he intended to reconcile this order with the anti-Catholic bias of the nationalist-racist groups, Hitler replied that this hostility to the Catholics sprang from an idiosyncrasy of Ludendorff’s, that he himself took a skeptical attitude toward the general and would have nothing to do with it; he had always been against denominational bickerings; but, after all, the true-blue nationalist forces had to stick together.

Held listened to this tommyrot with a reserved air. He was glad to hear, he said, that Hitler was at last inclined to respect government authority, but it was a matter of indifference whether he did or did not respect it. As Prime Minister, he, Held, would maintain this authority against anyone. He would not stand for conditions such as had prevailed in Bavaria before November 9.

Nevertheless, at the suasion of his personal friend, Dr. Gürtner, who was one of Hitler’s patrons, Held finally agreed to lift the ban on the National Socialist Party and its newspaper. For, as he summed up his impression of the talk with Hitler, “the beast has been tamed.”

A few days later, Hitler turned up at a meeting of the nationalist faction in the Landtag, the Bavarian state legislature. And, as if the nationalist movement were not in bad enough shape, he opened a new breach in its ranks. Sporting the leather whip that was by now one of his regular props, he entered the Landtag building, where the deputies, in a solemn mood, had gathered to welcome him. But after only the briefest of preliminaries, he began assailing them for their lack of leadership and ideas. He was particularly angry at their having refused participation in the government, which Prime Minister Held had offered. Totally dismayed, the group protested that there were principles an honorable man could not abandon; one could not first come out against a rival party for betraying the German people and then go ahead and form a government in collaboration with it. As the wrangle went on, one of the faction members suggested that Hitler’s one reason for wanting the coalition had been to buy his release from prison on parole. Hitler answered witheringly that his release was a thousand times more important to the movement than all the principles of two dozen nationalist deputies.

His idea seems to have been to make so bold a claim to leadership that those who were not willing to submit to him would be driven out of his camp. He had spoken ironically of the “inflationary gains” of the party in 1923, seeing its too rapid growth as the reason for its lack of fiber during the crisis. He was now separating the chaff from the wheat. The leaders of the other nationalist groups were soon complaining bitterly that Hitler would not co-operate with them. They kept referring to the blood that all had shed together at the Feldherrnhalle. But mystical sentimentalities of this sort had little effect on Hitler. Instead, he remembered how dependent he had been in 1923, how he had had to defer to all these fellow nationalists. He had learned a lesson from that: every partnership was a form of imprisonment. So now he would pretend to be pliable as far as the government and the power holders were concerned. But within the movement he imperiously enforced his will. He was quite willing to accept the consequences: that of the twenty-four conservative deputies, only six stood the test. The remainder went over to other parties.

Nor was this battle the last. Impatiently, he started fresh quarrels and blasted more pieces away from the margins of the shrinking movement. He made much of the differences between himself and the flock of other racist, nationalist, and radical rightist groups, and refused to collaborate with any of them. By now he had alienated all but four of the deputies in the Reichstag. Even those showed resistance and wanted him to break with such ambiguous and unsavory followers as Hermann Esser and Julius Streicher. The wrangles went on for months. But since Hitler realized far more clearly than his opponents that what was at stake was not the purity of the party, but control of it, he did not yield an inch.

Meanwhile, he was preparing for the break with Ludendorff. The general had become something of a burden, especially in South Germany, where he had involved himself in endless bickerings. He feuded with the Catholic Church; he provoked an unnecessary tiff with the Bavarian crown prince over questions of honor; he quarreled with the officers’ corps. Ludendorff was growing more and more unreasonable, under the influence of his second wife, Dr. Mathilde von Kemnitz. He was increasingly preoccupied with the pseudoreligious obscurities of a sectarian ideology, a mélange of psychotic fears, Germanic religion and anticivilizational pessimism. Such tendencies reminded Hitler of the teachings of Lanz von Liebenfels and the Thule Society that had dominated his early years. He had long since freed himself from such things, and in Mein Kampf had expressed biting scorn for the kind of völkisch romanticism that nevertheless lingered on in his imagination. His attitude toward Ludendorff was also colored by jealousy. He was all too aware of the disabilities suffered by a former private first class vis-à-vis a general—especially in so military-minded a country. Finally, Hitler took it as a personal affront that Ludendorff by a military order had detached his personal adjutant, Ulrich Graf, from him. In his first conversation with the general after his release Hitler made a big issue of this. At the same time, as if driven by a demon of quarrelsomeness, he took up arms against the leaders of the North German National Socialist Freedom Movement. These men, Albrecht von Graefe and Count Ernst von Reventlow, had publicly declared that Hitler must not be allowed to regain his former position of power, that he was a talented agitator but not a politician. Hitler now answered Graefe in a letter that not only threw down the gauntlet but was in itself a token of his new selfassurance. In the past, Hitler said, he had been the “drummer” and would be again, but only for Germany and never again for Graefe and his ilk, “so help me God!”

On February 26, 1925, the first issue of the Völkische Beobachter since the putsch appeared. It announced that next day at the Bürgerbräukeller, the site of the unsuccessful coup, the National Socialist German Workers’ Party would be founded anew. In his editorial “A New Beginning” and in an article, “Fundamental Directives” for the organization of the party, Hitler upheld his claim to leadership. He refused to make any concessions. With a side glance at the allegations against Esser and Streicher, he declared that the leadership of the party had nothing to do with the morality of its followers, any more than it did with doctrinaire squabbles. Its business was to practice politics. Those who were sniping at him he called “political children.” This strong line proved to be just what was wanted; declarations of loyalty poured in from all over the country.

Strategically, his appearance next day had been carefully thought out. In order to give greater force to his appeal, Hitler had not spoken in public for two months. This had raised to an extraordinary degree the expectations of his adherents and the nervousness of his rivals. He had received no visitors, even rebuffed foreign delegations, and had let it be known that he was throwing all political letters “into the wastebasket unread.” Although the meeting was not to begin until eight o’clock, the first of the audience—admission one mark—arrived by early afternoon. At six o’clock the police had to close the hall; some 4,000 followers had crowded into it.

Many of those present had been battling with each other. But when Hitler entered the hall, he was greeted with that wildly excessive homage that was later to become so common. People climbed on the tables, cheered, waved beer mugs, or joyfully embraced one another. Max Amann chaired the meeting, since Anton Drexler had refused to participate unless Esser and Streicher were expelled from the party. Gregor Strasser, Röhm, and Rosenberg were also among the missing. Hitler addressed all of them, the faltering, the skeptical or the obstinate partisans, in an extremely effective two-hour speech. He began with generalities, hailed the achievements of the Aryan as a creator of culture, discussed foreign policy, held forth on the theme that the peace treaty could be broken, the reparations agreement disavowed, but even so Germany would ultimately die of Jewish blood poisoning. Prey to his old obsession, he impressed his listeners with the fact that on Berlin’s Friedrichstrasse every Jew had a blonde German girl on his arm. Nevertheless Marxism could “be overthrown as soon as it is confronted by a doctrine of superior truthfulness but the same brutality in execution.” He went on to criticize Ludendorff for making enemies everywhere and not realizing that it is possible to speak of one enemy and mean another. Finally he came to the heart of his argument:

 

If anyone comes and wants to set me conditions, I tell him: My friend, wait awhile until you hear the conditions I am setting you. I’m not wooing the masses, you know. After a year has passed, you be the judges, my party comrades. If I have not acted rightly, then I shall return my office to your hands. But until then this is the rule: I and I alone shall lead the movement, and no one sets me conditions as long as I personally bear the responsibility. And I on the other hand bear all the responsibility for everything that happens in the movement.²⁶

 

At the end, face flushed with excitement, he called upon the members of the audience to bury their enmities, forget the past, and put an end to the conflicts within the movement. He did not ask for obedience, did not offer any bargains; he simply demanded submission or withdrawal from the movement. The ecstatic cheering at the end confirmed his resolve to shape the NSDAP into a tightly organized party under his sole command. In the midst of this display of enthusiasm Max Amann stepped forward and called out to the crowd: “The quarreling must stop. Everyone for Hitler!” Suddenly all the old foes thronged to the platform: Streicher, Esser, Feder, Frick, the Thuringian gauleiter Dinter, the Bavarian faction leader Buttmann. In a spectacular scene, before thousands of people shouting and waving and climbing on tables and chairs, they ostentatiously shook hands with one another. Streicher stammered something about a “godsend,” and Buttmann—who only recently had taken sharp issue with Hitler at a meeting of the Landtag faction—testified that all the doubts he had felt when he arrived “melted away inside me when the Führer spoke.” What the dominant figure of Ludendorff had been unable to accomplish, what Graefe, Strasser, Rosenberg, and Röhm individually or in conjunction with one another had failed to do, Hitler accomplished with a few strokes. The experience strengthened his self-confidence as well as his authority. Buttmann’s phrase had been used occasionally before, though it had been applied also to Ludendorff and other competitors for leadership. From this day on, however, Hitler was the only one indisputably known as “the Führer.”

 

As soon as Hitler had asserted his control over the party, he set about accomplishing his second goal: organizing the Nazi party into a pliable and vigorous instrument for his tactical aims. While still in Landsberg he had, in a cynical mood, commented to one of his followers: “When I resume active work, it will be necessary to pursue a new policy. Instead of working to achieve power by an armed coup, we shall have to hold our noses and enter the Reichstag against the Catholic and Marxist deputies. If out-voting them takes longer than out-shooting them, at least the results will be guaranteed by their own Constitution! Any lawful process is slow.”²⁷

The business was far slower and more toilsome than Hitler had imagined, and was accompanied by repeated setbacks, obstacles, and conflicts. As luck would have it, he himself was to blame for the first severe setback. The Bavarian government had taken note of his remark that one could speak of one enemy and mean another and had interpreted it—just as it was meant—as proof of his inveterate hostility to the Constitution. It also resented his remark that either the enemy would pass over his dead body or he over the enemy’s. “It is my wish,” he had continued, “that the swastika flag shall be my shroud if next time the struggle lays me low.” This sort of talk cast such question on his pledge to be law-abiding that the authorities in Bavaria, and soon afterward in most of the other German states, simply forbade him to make public speeches. In conjunction with his parole, with the ever-present threat of deportation, and with the changes in the general situation, this ban seemed to put an end to all his prospects. It came as a surprise and a terrible reversal, for it seemed to scotch his idea of working with the government.

Nevertheless, Hitler seemed totally unperturbed. A year and a half before, in the summer of 1923, a setback would have thrown him off balance, would have thrust him back into the lethargy and weaknesses of his youth. Now he remained unaffected. He did not even seem to mind the personal consequences of the ban on public speaking: the loss of his chief source of income. He depended instead on fees for the editorials he was now writing for the party press. In addition, he frequently addressed groups of from forty to sixty guests at the home of his friends, the Bruckmanns, where the small audience and the absence of intoxicants produced a new atmosphere that called for another style of propaganda. Contemporary observers all report the changes Hitler seems to have undergone during his imprisonment, the sterner, more rigorous expression that gave a new stamp to his countenance. “The thin, pale, sickly, often seemingly empty face was more forcefully composed; the strong bony structure from brow to chin emerged more distinctly; what formerly might have given the effect of sentimentality had yielded to an unmistakable note of hardness.”

He had also acquired that arrogant tenacity which would serve him well through all misfortunes, enabling him to keep going throughout the period of stagnation and persist until the march to victory began at the outset of the thirties. In the summer of 1925, when his hopes were at their nadir, a meeting of party leaders discussed a motion to appoint a deputy for him; he would not hear of it, on the infuriating ground that the movement would stand or fall with him alone.

Undoubtedly, anyone observing his immediate entourage would have had to concede that he was right. After the deliberate clashes and schisms of the preceding months, it was in the nature of things that most of the followers who remained with him were the mediocrities. His retinue had shrunk again to that cohort of cattle dealers, chauffeurs, bouncers, and onetime professional soldiers with whom he had formed, ever since the murky beginnings of the party, a curiously sentimental and almost human relationship. The unsavory reputation of most of these satellites bothered him no more than did their rowdy manners. His keeping such company above all showed how far he had come from the bourgeois aesthete he had once been. In answer to occasional reprimands, he would say, with a trace of embarrassment, that he too could make a wrong choice; it was human nature to be “not infallible.” And yet, right on into his years as Chancellor such types remained his preferred associates; they were always on hand in these long, empty evenings when Hitler, watching movies or engaging in trivial chitchat in the rooms that had once been Bismarck’s, unbuttoned his jacket and slumped in the big armchair with his legs stretched out before him. These men without background, without families or professions, all of them with some crack in their characters or their careers, aroused familiar associations in the former inmate of the home for men. Admiration and sincere devotion were all they could offer him, and these they gave without reserve. They listened raptly when he sat with them in the Italian restaurant Osteria Bavaria or the Café Neumaier and embarked on one of his tirades. Perhaps their uncritical devotion served him as a substitute for that mass enthusiasm he needed like a drug and which for the time being he had to do without.

Among the few successes Hitler could tote up during this period of paralysis was the winning over of Gregor Strasser. Until the failure of the November putsch Strasser, a pharmacist from Landshut and the gauleiter of Lower Bavaria, whom “experience at the front” had brought to politics, could hardly have been considered prominent. But he had profited by the absence of Hitler to push forward and had won a considerable following for Nazism in North Germany and the Ruhr. The National Socialist Freedom Movement was his personal vehicle. This hulking but sensitive man who brawled in taverns and read Homer in Greek was of impressive appearance. He was an excellent speaker and had an important ally in his brother Otto, a skillful journalist. It was hard for him to work with the cold, slippery, neurasthenic Hitler; for a man like Gregor Strasser there was something repellent about Hitler’s personality. Nor could he stomach Hitler’s entourage. All that the two men had in common was allegiance to an as yet shifting, ill-defined concept of “National Socialism.” Nevertheless, Strasser admired Hitler’s magnetism and his grip over his followers.

Strasser had not taken part in the meeting aimed at refounding the party. In March, 1925, to compensate Strasser for his resignation from the National Socialist Freedom Movement, Hitler offered him the largely independent post of leader of the Nazi party in the entire North German area. Strasser accepted with the proud proviso that he was joining Hitler not as a follower but as a fellow warrior. He still had his moral scruples and his doubts, but felt that the essential cause, the idea promising the birth of the future, must stand above all else. “That is why I have offered Herr Hitler my co-operation.”

But this addition to the ranks was balanced out by a major loss. While Strasser applied his vast energy to building up a party organization in North Germany, within a short time establishing seven new gaus between Schleswig-Holstein, Pomerania, and Lower Saxony, Hitler showed how bent he was on imposing his own authority, no matter what the cost. For now he broke with Ernst Röhm. After Röhm’s brush with the Munich People’s Court (he was pronounced guilty but given no sentence), the former army captain had promptly begun to unite his old comrades of the Free Corps and Kampfbund days in a new association, the Frontbann (“the Front-liners”). These “liners,” who knew only soldiering and were totally unable to adjust to the increasingly normal conditions, almost to a man were recruited into the new movement.

Even while he was still in Landsberg, Hitler had looked askance at Röhm’s activities, since everything Röhm was doing was a threat to his parole, his power within the nationalist movement, and his new tactics. One of the lessons of November had been to have done, once and for all, with the swaggering ways and conspiratorial games of the military leagues. What the NSDAP needed, Hitler had decided, was a party force organized on paramilitary lines and totally subordinate to the political leadership, hence to himself personally. Röhm, on the other hand, was still clinging to the idea of an underground auxiliary army that would enable the Reichswehr to evade the provisions of the Versailles Treaty. He even thought of making the SA completely independent of the party and turning it into a subordinate unit of his Frontbann.

Fundamentally, this was a renewal of the old dispute over the SA’s function and command status. In contrast to the slower-minded Röhm, Hitler had in the interval acquired new insights and resentments. He had not forgiven Lossow and the officers of his staff for their betrayal on November 8 and 9. But at the same time he had learned from the events of that night that the majority of army officers were morally fettered by their oath and their respect for legality.

During the first half of April the quarrel erupted into the open. Röhm had a strong sentimental attachment to Hitler; he was forthright, easygoing, and as doggedly faithful to his friends as he was to his views. Presumably Hitler had not forgotten all he had owed to Röhm since the beginnings of his political career. But he also realized that times had changed. This once-influential person who in the past could be counted on to round up money, machine guns or members at the drop of a hat, had by now turned into a stubborn, difficult friend awkward to fit into the more solid establishment Hitler was trying to create.

Nevertheless, for some time Hitler said neither yes nor no to Röhm’s urging. But at last he decided to take a stand. During a conversation in mid-April Röhm once more demanded strict separation between the National Socialist Party and the SA. Moreover, he wanted to lead his units as a nonpolitical private army that would be above all partisan strife and the issues of the day. A heated quarrel ensued. Hitler was particularly incensed, because Röhm’s idea would once again degrade him to the “drummer” of the movement. What is more, it would return him to the subordinate role forced on him in the summer of 1923, that of adjunct to aims set by others. Full of hurt feelings, he charged Röhm with betraying their friendship. Röhm thereupon cut the conversation short. The following day he formally resigned in writing his leadership of the SA. Hitler did not answer. At the end of April, after Röhm had also resigned the leadership of the Frontbann, he wrote Hitler once again, closing his letter on the significant note: “I take this opportunity, in memory of the great and the trying times we have been through together, to thank you warmly for your comradeship and to ask you not to deprive me of your personal friendship.” But that, too, was not answered. The following day, when he sent a note on his resignation to the nationalist newspapers, the Völkische Beobachter printed it without comment.

During this same period an event occurred that showed Hitler how bleak his prospects had become and how wise he had been to separate his political fortunes from those of Ludendorff, though his reasons for the break had been largely personal. At the end of February, 1925, Friedrich Ebert, the Social Democratic President of Germany, died. The nationalist-racist groups put up Ludendorff, while the candidate of the bourgeois rightist parties was a competent but totally unknown person named Dr. Jarres. Despite his fame, the general suffered an annihilating defeat, receiving little more than 1 per cent of the national vote. Hitler noted the result with a measure of grim satisfaction.

A few days after the election, Dr. Pöhner, the only trustworthy and important associate Hitler had left, was killed in an accident. Hitler truly seemed to have reached the end of his political career. In Munich the party had no more than 700 members left. Anton Drexler seceded and despondently founded a party more congenial to his quieter tendencies. But Hitler’s bullies made a point of tracking down their erstwhile comrades and beating them up. In this way they smashed the rival enterprise. Other kindred groups suffered a similar fate. Quite often Hitler himself, leather whip in hand, stormed the meetings. Since he was not allowed to speak, he showed himself to the crowds from the platform, merely smiling and waving. Before the second round in the elections for the presidency, he called upon his followers to vote for Field Marshal von Hindenburg, who had meanwhile been nominated. Some writers have seen this choice as a farsighted political speculation. But he really had no ground for such speculation, as things stood; moreover, the few votes he controlled could not change anything. It was important, however, that he was ostentatiously aligning himself with the parties of order and that he was moving closer to the man of legend, the secret “ersatz kaiser” who had or some day would have a key to virtually all the powerful institutions in the country.

The continuing setbacks inevitably sapped Hitler’s position within the party. In Thuringia, Saxony, and Württemberg he had to fight for his challenged leadership; in North Germany Gregor Strasser went on building up the party. Strasser was forever on the move. He spent most of his nights on trains or in waiting rooms; by day he visited followers, founded branches, saw functionaries, conferred, or appeared at meetings. During 1925 and 1926 he appeared as principal speaker at nearly one hundred meetings, while Hitler was condemned to silence. This fact, less than any ambitions on Strasser’s part to rival Hitler, for a while made it seem as though the party’s center of gravity were shifting to the north. Thanks to Strasser’s loyalty, Hitler’s position as leader was on the whole acknowledged. But the sober Protestant North Germans’ suspicions of the flamboyant petty bourgeois bohemian with his alleged “pro-Rome” course came repeatedly to the fore, and many people would join the party only if they were assured considerable independence of Munich headquarters. For; quite a while Hitler had to waive his requirement that leaders of local groups in the north be appointed by party headquarters. Until the late autumn of 1925, moreover, the North Rhineland gau had membership cards of its own and would not use the membership booklets provided by Munich headquarters.

The business manager of this North Rhineland gau, with headquarters in Elberfeld, was a young academic who had made a stab at being a journalist, writer, and crier at the stock exchange, before he found a post as secretary to a nationalist-racist politician, made contact with the National Socialists, and met Gregor Strasser. His name was Paul Joseph Goebbels, and what had brought him to Strasser’s side was chiefly his intellectual radicalism, which he expounded in various literary works and diary notes, wherein he often marveled at his own personality. “I am the most radical. Of the new type. Man as revolutionary.” His style ranged from such incisiveness to rhapsody, which, however, at the time was found quite acceptable. His radicalism was a compound of nationalistic and social-revolutionary ideologies; it seemed a thinner, shriller version of the doctrine of his mentor. For, in contrast to the cold Hitler, who moved in a curiously abstract world of feeling, the more emotional Gregor Strasser had been affected by the misery of the postwar era. His heart went out to the common people. Sooner or later, he believed, the proletariat would embrace National Socialism. For a time Gregor Strasser found in Joseph Goebbels and in his brother Otto Strasser the advocates for an ideological course that no one ever followed. Gregor Strasser’s “program” won merely temporary importance as the fleeting expression of a socialist alternative to Hitler’s “Fascist” South German National Socialism.

The special temper of the North German Nazis manifested itself in a committee organized in Hagen on September 10, 1925. Goebbels immediately took command of it, along with Gregor Strasser. And although the participants kept saying that they were not opposed to Munich headquarters, they nevertheless spoke of themselves as a “west bloc,” and of a “counterattack” against “the calcified big-shots in Munich.” They also criticized the party leadership for its meager interest in questions of program. Gregor Strasser deplored the “atrociously low level” of the Völkische Beobachter, Significantly, however, none of the reproaches were directed at Hitler in person or at his conduct of his office. In fact, what the critics wanted was to strengthen rather than to diminish his position. They were objecting to the “slovenly, lousy way they run things at headquarters,” and once again to the brashness of Esser and Streicher. Totally misconstruing the situation, this circle hoped to free Hitler from the clutches of the “corrupt Munich clique,” the “Esser dictatorship,” and win him over to their own cause. Here, in these early years, and not for the first time, we find that notion so widespread later on: that the “Führer” was frail and human, surrounded by bad advisers who prevented him from carrying out his honest intentions.

The program of the Strasser group was set forth in a fortnightly review, Nationalsozialistische Briefe (“National Socialist Letters”). Unpretentious in format, the magazine was edited by Goebbels and was chiefly concerned with escaping the narrowness of a nostalgic, backward-looking middle-class ideology and turning the movement’s face toward the present. Almost everything that “was held sacred in Munich was at some time or other thrown into question or frankly run down” in the magazine. There was constant stress on the difference in social conditions in Bavaria and the north. The magazine’s pronouncedly anticapitalist thrust was a response to the urban, proletarian social structure of North Germany. As a letter from a Berlin reader put it, the National Socialist Party should not consist “of radicalized bourgeois” and “be afraid of the words worker and socialist.” Thus the magazine announced: “We are socialists; we are enemies, mortal enemies, of the present-day capitalist economic system with its exploitation of the economically weak, with its injustice in wages. . . . We are resolved to annihilate this system despite everything.” Looking for formulas which could unite the nationalistic socialists and Communists, Goebbels found a whole catalogue of identical attitudes and convictions. He by no means rejected the theory of class struggle. He contended that the collapse of Russia would “bury forever our dreams of a National Socialist Germany.” Moreover, he questioned Hitler’s theory of the Jews as the universal enemy, remarking: “It is by no means settled that the capitalist and the Bolshevik Jew are one and the same” and going so far as to say that the Jewish question in general was “more complicated than one imagines.”

The Strasser people also held quite different ideas on foreign policy from the Munich leadership. Strasser and his associates had responded to the socialist appeal of the times, but “not as to the call of the proletarian class but of proletarian nations,” in the forefront of which stood humiliated, betrayed, and plundered Germany. They saw the world as divided into oppressing and oppressed peoples and supported those very revisionist demands that Hitler in Mein Kampf had branded “political nonsense.” Where Hitler saw Soviet Russia as a target for conquest, and Rosenberg described her as a “Jewish colony of hangmen,” Goebbels spoke with deep respect of the Russian utopian impulse, while Strasser even called for an alliance with Moscow “against the militarism of France, against the imperialism of England, against the capitalism of Wall Street.” Even more socialistic was the group’s economic program: large landholdings were to be abolished, and all peasants were to be organized into agricultural cooperatives; small businesses were to be grouped in guilds; corporations with more than twenty employees were to be partially socialized. Where enterprises continued in private hands, the personnel were to be entitled to a share of 10 per cent of the profits, the national government to 30 per cent, the county to 6 and the local community to 5 per cent. The group also advocated simplification of legislation, creation of a school system open to all classes, and payment of wages partly in goods. This last was a romantic expression of the popular distrust of money resulting from the inflation.

All this was outlined by Gregor Strasser at a meeting in Hanover on November 22, 1926. Here the rebellious mood of the North and West German party organizations, their antipathy to headquarters and the “pope in Munich”—as Gauleiter Rust put it, to general applause—emerged in public to a startling degree. At another such meeting in the same city at the end of January, this time held in Gauleiter Rust’s apartment, Goebbels demanded that the group bluntly show the door to Gottfried Feder, whom Hitler had recently sent as an observer. Nor was this all. If the sources are to be believed, Goebbels followed this up with a motion “that the petty bourgeois Adolf Hitler be expelled from the National Socialist Party.”²⁸

The challenge to Hitler’s authority was to increase. In December, without knowledge of headquarters, Strasser distributed his draft program among the party members. It was meant to replace the twenty-five points so arbitrarily thrown together long ago, and to overturn the image of the party’s representing only petty bourgeois interests. Although Hitler was reported to be “furious” over this show of autonomy, no one paid attention to Feder’s objections. In fact, the Strasser group refused to allow Feder to vote on any motions. Only one of the twenty-five who took part in the discussion, the gauleiter of Cologne, Robert Ley, “a moron and possibly an intriguer,” came out openly for Hitler.

At the moment, the German public was passionately discussing the question of whether the royal and ducal houses should be expropriated or whether their property, confiscated in 1918, should be returned. Hitler found himself impelled by his tactical reasoning to side with the German princes, and in general with the propertied classes. The Strasser group decided, as did the parties of the Left, for expropriation of the former rulers without compensation. They also undertook, without authorization from Munich, to publish a newspaper entitled Der Nationale Sozialist (“The Nationalist Socialist”) and, with funds Gregor Strasser obtained by mortgaging his drugstore in Landshut, to set up a publishing house called the Kampfverlag. This soon developed into a sizable concern; with its six weekly newspapers it for a while outdid the Eher Verlag, run by Munich headquarters. Moreover, in the judgment of Konrad Heiden, its publications were far superior to those of the Munich firm “in intellectual variety and honesty.”

But the most naked challenge to Hitler on the part of the Hanover circle came when Gregor Strasser called upon the party to abandon its timorous pledge of legality and follow a “politics of catastrophe,” prepared for the worst contingencies. He declared his resolve to seize power by frontal attack and sanctioned any means that damaged the government and shattered public order: putsch, bombs, strikes, street battles, or brawls. As Goebbels was to express it shortly after: “We will attain everything if we set hunger, despair and sacrifice marching for our aims.” The party was “to light the beacon in our people so that nationalist and socialist despair flame in a single great fire.”

Hitler had so far remained silent about the group’s activities, although it was setting up a power center that threatened to become a secondary governing committee within the party and although in North Germany the name of Gregor Strasser meant “almost more” than his own. “Nobody has faith in Munich any more,” Goebbels noted jubilantly in his diary. “Elberfeld is going to become the mecca of German socialism.” But Hitler haughtily ignored the plans to kick him upstairs by making him honorary chairman and then unite the disorganized nationalist camp in one great movement. A few scornful pages in Mein Kampf were the only notice Hitler ever took of such projects.

Hitler’s restraint was partly due to his personal affairs. For in the interval he had rented a country house belonging to a Hamburg businessman on the Obersalzberg, near Berchtesgaden. The situation of the house was extraordinarily beautiful, although the place was otherwise quite modest, consisting of a large living room and a veranda on the ground floor, and three attic rooms. In talking to visitors, Hitler made a point of saying that the house did not belong to him, “so that there could be no question of any corrupt practices, in line with the bad example of other ‘party bigwigs.’ ” He had asked his widowed half-sister, Angela Raubal, to be his housekeeper. She was accompanied by her seventeen-year-old daughter Geli. The affection Hitler felt for this pretty, superficial niece soon developed into a passionate relationship hopelessly burdened by his intolerance, his romantic ideal of womanhood, and avuncular scruples, so that it was finally to end in an act of desperation. Hitler rarely left his rural retreat; when he did, it would be to attend the Munich opera with his niece or to visit friends in the city. These were still the Hanfstaengls, the Bruckmanns, the Essers. He scarcely bothered about the party; even in South Germany criticisms of his indifferent leadership were voiced; but Hitler paid these little attention. The summer of 1925 saw the publication of the first volume of Mein Kampf, and although the book was not a success—it sold fewer than 10,000 copies the first year—Hitler promptly set about dictating the second volume. His need to justify himself was as much a motive force as his urge to communicate.

From his mountain hideout he had followed with apparent apathy the program discussions in the North German wing of the party. His silence did not stem entirely from his characteristic reluctance to take steps. It also sprang from the politician’s indifference to theory, his contempt for ideas in themselves. Moreover, he might have been secretly hoping to repeat the game he had played so successfully while in Landsberg, when he encouraged rivals, promoted antagonisms, and actually increased his own authority by slackening the reins.

Strasser’s “catastrophe politics” abruptly changed the situation. Rather justifiably Hitler saw this as a direct challenge to himself, since, as with Röhm’s activities, it threatened his parole and hence his entire political future. Immediately, he went on the offensive and could barely wait for the chance to strike out against the rebels and restore his authority.

 

In retrospect it would seem as if Hitler’s imperious and impatient nature wrecked the party just when it was making such great strides. He was striking out at all his former associates, including Anton Drexler, with whom he was waging a libel suit. In the course of the proceedings, one of Hitler’s former followers appeared as witness against him. Calling out in court to Hitler that the National Socialist Party would in the long run fail if it used his methods, the man struck a prophetic chord, “You will come to a very sad end.”

Only Hitler himself seemed unmoved by the continuing chain of failures. The certitude that had come to him as he formulated his philosophy in Mein Kampf, together with his obstinacy, enabled him to withstand all the crises without a hint of discouragement or resignation. It seemed as if he were once again, and with a measure of satisfaction, letting events take their course toward the highest dramatic pitch. As if untouched by all the bothersome events around him, he busied himself drawing, on postcards or in a sketchbook, baroque public buildings, arches of triumph, ornate domed halls—in short, a backdrop that expressed his unrelinquished plans for world domination and his extravagant millennial expectations.²⁹