The Firebrand
VERSAILLES AND AFTER
In a Germany rocked by revolutionary unrest, ravaged by influenza and malnutrition, and dismayed by the abdication of the Kaiser, a feeling of numb bewilderment greeted the signing of the armistice. Ordinary German civilians had been unaware of the dramatic course of events, both military and diplomatic, since July 1918. They could not comprehend why the armistice had been signed while the German Army still occupied parts of France and Belgium. A feeling grew that they had been ‘stabbed in the back’, a sentiment held by all political classes. In November 1918, returning troops were greeted by the citizens of Berlin with flowers and laurel leaves, and a speech from the new chancellor, Friedrich Ebert, in which he declared, ‘I salute you who return unvanquished from the field of battle.’ But many of these men had new battles to fight in postwar Germany. Disconnected from civilian life, they soon joined paramilitary groups, the Freikorps, which the postwar Social Democratic government led by Ebert was to use against Communist revolutionaries.
The feeling of betrayal felt by so many Germans grew when the victorious Allies met in Paris to redraw the map of Europe – and much of the world beyond – a task made all the more urgent by the collapse of the Russian, Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires. The principal treaty was signed by the Allies and Germany at the Palace of Versailles on 28 June 1919.
A famous painting by Sir William Orpen captures the moment of signature by the German delegates. In the centre of the frame are the Big Three – the US president, Woodrow Wilson, and prime ministers Lloyd George of the United Kingdom and Georges Clemenceau of France, all three of them serene and exquisitely suited, the victors of the Great War. Clemenceau later observed that Orpen had pictured him sitting between a would-be Napoleon (Lloyd George) and a would-be Christ (Woodrow Wilson).
On this occasion at least, Clemenceau got the better of Jesus Christ, although in the long run it did neither him nor France much good. Stalin had a famous saying, ‘How many divisions has the Pope?’ France, although grievously mauled by four years of war, still had the divisions. But if the war had continued into 1919 and beyond, which many believed it would until the sudden German collapse in the autumn of 1918, then the balance of power would have swung inexorably towards the Americans. However, just as many in the German military believed that they had been stabbed in the back by the armistice, so the French high command was convinced that the German collapse had denied them the crushing victory in the field that in 1918 was rightly theirs.
During the discussion of the peace terms, Lloyd George felt a premonition of the disaster which lay ahead. He observed then:‘If peace were made now, in twenty years’ time the Germans would say what Carthage had said about the First Punic War, namely that they had made this mistake and that mistake, and by better preparation and organisation they would be able to bring about victory next time.’
Nearly all the peace terms imposed at Versailles had been anticipated at the time of the armistice. This was no conference between victors and vanquished. The Germans were merely required to turn up and sign on the dotted line – it was a matter of dotting the ‘I’s and crossing the ‘T’s. Control of coal mines in the Saar was given to the French for fifteen years as compensation for the German wrecking of the mines in north-east France; the east bank of the Rhine was demilitarized to a depth of thirty miles to be occupied by the Allies, also for fifteen years, with Germany paying for the cost of the occupation; conscription in Germany was to be abolished and the size of the German Army limited to one hundred thousand; Germany was stripped of her colonies and denied membership of the League of Nations. The League had been the last of Wilson’s famous Fourteen Points which he outlined in January 1918, and was established to adjudicate international problems.
What really stuck in the craw of Germans of all political persuasions was the Allies’ demand, led by the French, for massive reparations to pay for war damage and the cost of occupation. Germany was to be ‘squeezed until the pips squeak’, according to popular sentiment at the time. In December 1918, the French Minister of Finance, Louis-Lucien Klotz (according to Clemenceau, ‘the only Jew who knows nothing about money’) had made it clear that he expected France’s budgetary deficits to be redeemed then, and in the future, by reparations. At Versailles, France claimed that its total war damages ran to 209,000 million gold francs, and the overall claims of the Allies amounted to approximately 400,000 million francs.
However, sceptical experts at the British Treasury thought that the most that could be squeezed from the Germans would be 75,000 million francs. Eventually the sum to be paid by Germany was left for future negotiations, and in 1932 it was written off. By then irreparable damage had been done. Reparations brought a lasting legacy of hatred in Germany, which was a crucial factor in the rise to power of Hitler and the Nazis – who repudiated Versailles, reparations and all.
After the armistice Hitler focused all his efforts on staying in the Army. In Germany anarchy reigned, and there seemed to be no future in civvy street. He returned to Munich in November 1918 and within a fortnight was one of some one hundred and fifty men assigned to guard duties at the Traunstein camp in Bavaria for Russian prisoners of war. At least there was some stability here as Bavaria drifted towards a civil war which the Social Democrat government in Berlin seemed powerless to prevent.
In Kiel, Berlin and Munich, Socialists assumed local authority, but in the chaotic conditions which prevailed in Germany they were unable to impose order. In Munich, an uneasy Socialist coalition, headed by Kurt Eisner, had been installed and the aged King Ludwig III had fled Bavaria. Over twenty years later Hitler would joke that at least he had the Social Democrats to thank for sparing him the trouble of removing these ‘courtly interests’.
In Munich there had at first been little revolutionary fervour, only a feeling of exhaustion and war-weariness. While Eisner and his colleagues fretted about coaxing the overwhelmingly rural and deeply conservative population of Bavaria into supporting their gradualist experiment in Socialism, the revolutionaries, the so-called Spartacists (Spartakusbund), were ready to move. They seized their opportunity after Eisner was assassinated on 21 February 1919 by Graf Anton von Arco-Valley, a former officer who was studying at Munich University.
At the end of April, a full-blooded revolution proclaimed a ‘Red Republic’, promising ‘a dictatorship of the proletariat’ to be guaranteed by a twenty-thousand-strong ‘Red Army’ led by Rudolf Eglhofer, a twenty-three-year-old veteran of the Kiel mutiny. The declaration was followed by an orgy of murderous reprisals against prisoners of the ‘Red Army’ and brutal counter-reprisals by the so-called ‘White Guards’ Freikorps formations massing outside Munich. Civil war exploded as revolutionaries and reactionaries clashed in street battles which saw both sides employing flame-throwers, heavy artillery and armoured vehicles. Prominent in the fighting was the Freikorps Epp, a formation commanded by Franz Ritter von Epp, a regular officer who would rise to a position of some power in the Nazi Party. Serving under von Epp was another veteran of World War I who would play an even more significant part in Hitler’s rise to power, Captain Ernst Röhm.
The battle for Munich, which lasted until 3 May, claimed some six hundred lives, over half of them civilian, and Eglhofer was murdered by the Freikorps. Sixty-five Spartacists were sentenced to hard labour and over two thousand were imprisoned. The Spartacist revolution had been put down but had left Chancellor Ebert’s hands caked with blood. In Berlin, the Spartacist leaders Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht were both murdered while being held by the Freikorps and their bodies dumped into a river.
Spartacists are escorted into captivity in 1919. Many former soldiers, veterans of World War I, were among the recruits to the extreme right- and left-wing groups which clashed in pitched battles in the streets of post-war Germany. In Munich in March 1920, right-wing monarchists and Freikorps units briefly seized power in the so-called Kapp putsch. Hitler drew many lessons from this period of turmoil.
In deeply conservative Bavaria the traumatic events between November 1918 and May 1919 provided a shot in the arm for the radical Right. They not only confirmed the Right’s deep fear of the Bolshevism which had so recently been installed in Russia and was still fighting a bitter civil war against ‘White’ enemies of its own, but it also legitimized the use of extreme counter-revolutionary violence against the Bolshevik threat. Later, this provided Adolf Hitler with one of the principal planks in his political platform.
KAPP PUTSCH
In 1919 there were an estimated two hundred and fifty thousand men in Germany’s Freikorps, bands of armed veterans of World War I. In March 1920, under the troop reductions required by the Treaty of Versailles, orders were issued for the disbandment of Freikorps units, one of which was the Marinebrigade Erhardt. The President of the Weimar Republic turned down an appeal from General von Luttwitz, commander of the Berlin Reichswehr, to resist the programme of troop reductions. Luttwitz then ordered the Marinebrigade to march on Berlin and occupy it under the nominal leadership of an East Prussian civil servant and extreme nationalist, Wolfgang Kapp. When the Reichswehr refused to intervene, the Weimar government was forced to flee to Dresden and then Stuttgart, where it issued a call to Germany’s workers to resist the putsch with a general strike. The strike paralysed Germany, the putsch collapsed when other Freikorps leaders declined to support it, and Kapp and Luttwitz fled to Sweden.
LEARNING THE ROPES
What was Hitler doing during these dramatic events? His duties at the prisoner-of-war camp, which had been cleared of its inmates by the beginning of February, had come to an end, and his military record shows that on 12 February he was assigned to a unit to await demobilization. Extremely keen to remain in the Army, he managed to do so until March 1920, by which time he had discovered the oratorical gifts which were to launch his political career. In Mein Kampf, however, he devotes only a few pages to the days of Munich’s Red Republic, which were soon to offer so many lessons for the nascent Nazi Party. It seems that Hitler had good reason to be reticent about his weeks in Munich during the Bavarian Soviet’s seizure of power and its brutal suppression.
On 20 February 1919, Hitler’s demobilization company was assigned to guard duty at Munich’s Hauptbahnhof. The soldiers also earned a little extra cash by testing gas masks. Hitler, however, avoided his imminent demobilization. A routine order issued at the beginning of April identifies him as his company’s representative (Vertrauensmann), and it is likely that he had held this post from February. The precise functions of the company representative were determined by the propaganda department of Bavaria’s Socialist government and included providing ‘educational material’ to the troops. It would seem that Adolf Hitler’s first hands-on involvement in politics was as a low-level stooge of the men he would later stigmatize as the ‘November criminals’. Small wonder that this was a career move over which he was subsequently eager to draw a veil.
On 14 April, the day after the declaration of the Red Republic, the Munich Soldiers’ Councils sanctioned a round of elections of barracks representatives to ensure that the Army toed the party line. Hitler was elected as the deputy battalion representative and soon afterwards became the battalion representative. During the turbulent days of the Red Republic, the Army stood squarely behind the Spartacists, and it is inconceivable that Hitler could have carried out his duties as a representative without falling into line. However, whether he was acting sincerely or merely ensuring that he retained his relatively cosy billet in the Army is a question which cannot be answered definitively. Although his subsequent career shows that Hitler was an opportunist par excellence, his opportunism in Munich in the spring of 1919 was not an episode to which he could easily apply a favourable gloss. He made no attempt to join the Freikorps, and in all probability marched in mass demonstrations wearing the red armband of the Marxists.
More significant was the fact that, only days after the fall of the Red Republic, Hitler was appointed to serve on a committee which was charged with investigating whether any of his battalion had been active Spartacist supporters. The appointment ensured the deferral of Hitler’s discharge and, crucially, brought him into contact for the first time with counter-revolutionary politics within the army.
The end of the Red Republic effectively brought Munich under military rule, and the units which had been involved in putting down the uprising were organized into Gruppenkommando No. Four (Gruko). The Gruko moved swiftly to control the Education and Propaganda Department (Nachrichtenabteilung, Abt. Ib/P) which had been set up after the suppression of the Red Republic to instil in the troops the appropriate nationalist and anti-Bolshevist attitudes. Surveillance and propaganda were the orders of the day, and reliable speakers were recruited from the ranks to get the message across. This task would keep them in the Army for some time; it was the answer to Adolf Hitler’s prayers.
A series of courses in anti-Bolshevism was initiated for the soldiers. The man in charge was Captain Karl Mayr, head of the Education and Propaganda Department and the first of Adolf Hitler’s political patrons. Mayr was a man of influence beyond that merited by his rank. He was allocated considerable funds to establish a team of agents (effectively informants), devise a programme of education whereby officers and men would receive suitable indoctrination, and provide finance for nationalist and anti-Bolshevik political parties, organizations and publications.
Mayr first encountered Hitler in May 1919, in the aftermath of the battle of Munich, when Hitler was serving on the committee investigating the Communist affiliations of his comrades. Perhaps Mayr already knew of Hitler’s previous incarnation as a small cog in the Red Republic’s propaganda machine, but he seemed an ideal candidate for Mayr’s purposes, a tabula rasa on which the messages of the Education and Propaganda Department could be transmitted. Years later Mayr wrote of Hitler, ‘He was like a tired stray dog looking for a master … ready to throw in his lot with anyone who would show him kindness … He was totally unconcerned about the German people and their destinies.’
Early in June 1919, Hitler was taken on as a Verbindungsmann (a V-man or police spy). Within days he was attending his first anti-Bolshevik instruction course at Munich University, listening to lectures on German history, the theory and practice of Socialism, economics and the impact of the Treaty of Versailles, and the linkage between domestic and foreign policy. He soaked it up like a sponge. One lecturer who made an immediate impression on him was Gottfried Feder, a Pan-German nationalist, self-styled economics expert and critic of ‘rapacious capital’, which he associated with the Jews and contrasted with ‘productive capital’. Hitler, who already had an ear for a striking turn of phrase, intuitively grasped that Feder’s lecture on breaking ‘interest slavery’ had enormous propaganda potential. Feder would become an important figure in the early days of the Nazi Party.
Mayr was impressed by Hitler and selected him as one of twenty-six instructors sent to attend a five-day course at Lechfeld, near Augsburg. The course was a response to complaints that many returned prisoners of war now awaiting discharge had been infected with Socialist ideas. It was the task of the instructors to wean them away from Bolshevism and re-introduce them to the ‘correct’ nationalist modes of thought. Hitler threw himself into the work. Faced with a crowd of cynical soldiers, he discovered that he could engage the attention of these listless men and sway them with his arguments. These were not the monologues to which he had subjected his friend Kubizek, the endlessly patient audience of one. Now his words had a bigger audience, and a measurable effect. He found a voice as he lectured his charges on the history of the Red Republic, the causes of World War I, and the political lessons to be learned from its aftermath. Later he was able to boast of his success: ‘In the course of my lectures I led many hundreds, indeed thousands of comrades back to their people and fatherland. I “nationalised” the troops …’
Reports on the impact of his lectures at Lechfeld were uniformly enthusiastic. They characterized Hitler as a man born to be a public speaker and praised his ‘fanaticism’ and populist style. They also indicate that, now clearly heavily influenced by Gottfried Feder, at Lechfeld Hitler had ridden the anti-Semitic tide which prevailed at the time. Indeed, the commanding officer at Lechfeld, Oberleutnant Bendt, sought to restrain him in order to prevent charges of anti-Semitic agitation being levelled against the work being undertaken at the camp. Bendt’s intervention had been prompted by Hitler’s first public reference to the Jews during a lecture on capitalism.
Mayr was not so squeamish and was happy to refer queries on the ‘Jewish Question’ to Hitler, whom he evidently considered an authority on the subject. A response to a query from one Adolf Gremlich, on the Social Democratic government’s position on the Jewish Question, provides us with the first written evidence of Hitler’s developing attitude towards the Jews. He wrote that anti-Semitism should be determined by facts and not emotion. He considered that the application of ‘reason’ would lead to the conclusion that the Jews should be subjected to a systematic removal of their rights before they were removed themselves.
THE GERMAN WORKERS’ PARTY
Adolf Hitler was about to enter the political arena. The setting was Munich’s Sterneckerbräu, a beer cellar which was later to become a Nazi shrine. On the evening of 12 September 1919, still working as a V-Man, Hitler attended a meeting of the German Workers’ Party (Deutsche Arbeiterpartei or DAP), one of over fifty small groupings flourishing in Munich’s murky political undergrowth and covering the political spectrum from the extreme Left to the extreme Right. The Army kept all of them under close surveillance.
The DAP had been founded in January 1919 by the economics theoretician Gottfried Feder, already familiar to Hitler from his anti-Bolshevik course at Munich University; Anton Drexler, member of a Munich brewing dynasty and a völkisch agitator; and the journalist Karl Harrer. Feder, Drexler and Harrer were members of the Thule Society, a German occult group whose pseudo-scientific beliefs coalesced around the notion of the Volk, the repository of mystical nationalism and romantic racism and, in their eyes, a bulwark against the capitalist and consumerist excesses of the modern world. Into this seedy den of racist crackpots and fantasists stepped Adolf Hitler.
Due to speak that night was Dietrich Eckart, another Thule Society man, founding member of the DAP, and an anti-Semitic ideologue. He had developed a theory of the ‘genius higher human’ based on the writings of Jorg Lanz von Liebenfels, the publisher of the racist magazine Ostara, which Hitler read during his days in Vienna. However, Eckart was ill and cried off, to be replaced by Feder who treated the audience to a now familiar theme: interest slavery.
Hitler had heard it all before and spent some time observing the assembled company. They were an unpromising bunch, all forty-one of them, but it was in the smallness and shabbiness of the DAP that Hitler saw his chance. According to his own account, he was already thinking of founding his own political party but here was one already formed, albeit with only a handful of disorganized and down-at-heel adherents, which might nevertheless serve his purposes as a ready-made vehicle which would enable him to flex his nascent powers of oratory.
After Feder’s address, comments were invited from the floor. A Professor Baumann, an advocate of Bavarian separatism, launched a fierce attack on Feder. This drew Hitler to his feet to deliver a stinging rebuke. Discomfited, the professor fled the tavern in disarray, prompting an impressed Anton Drexler to thrust a copy of his own pamphlet, My Political Awakening, into Hitler’s hands.
Drexler was reported to have said of Hitler, ‘Goodness, he’s got a gob on him. We could use a man like him,’ and invited him to another meeting.
Once again, Hitler’s account of the aftermath of this second meeting has to be treated with caution. The details were subsequently tweaked to fit the ‘Hitler myth’. He claimed that within a week of attending he had received a postcard which accepted him as a member and invited him to a committee meeting to further discuss the matter. In spite of his misgivings, he went along – he had at least been impressed by Drexler’s pamphlet. The new venue, a seedy beer cellar in the Herrenstrasse, was singularly unimpressive, as were the four members of the DAP who were present. After a few days of indecision – a trait which Hitler displayed until the end of his days – he decided to throw in his lot with the DAP, an organization which, with a combination of false modesty and shrewd insight, he estimated was small enough to offer an ‘opportunity for real personal activity’. In other words, he had decided to swap the Army for the DAP. Unlike the former, the DAP was small enough to provide the vehicle for Hitler’s ambitions.
An early example of the Hitler myth. This membership card was exhibited during the Nazi era, claiming that Hitler was the fifth member of the German Workers’ Party (DAP). In reality he was the fifty-fifth, and his membership number was later doctored to 555 so that the party would appear to have more members. Various versions of Hitler’s DAP card have surfaced since, featuring numbers as diverse as 5, 555, and 7.
Nevertheless, Hitler remained in the Army until 31 March 1920, when he was finally discharged, all the while drawing his army pay and with time available to devote to the DAP. Unlike other members of the DAP, who had regular jobs to go to, Hitler could now devote all his energies to his new-found career as a creator and disseminator of propaganda. Without the intervention of Captain Mayr, Hitler would in all probability have remained a face lost in the crowd, the archetypal ‘little man’ nursing unrealized fantasies of revenge on the world which ignored him. Hitler had not found politics; politics had found him, in the Munich barracks when he denounced his former comrades in the Red Republic and was talent-spotted by Mayr as a public speaker with a mesmerizing ability to connect with the gut instincts and basest prejudices of his audience. Karl Mayr had released Hitler’s demon, not yet fully formed but, in hindsight, now recognizable. Indeed, Mayr had ordered Hitler to join the DAP while the latter was still in the Army, an infringement of the ban on soldiers participating in political activity, and had provided him with supplementary funds. Mayr’s was an achievement of a baleful kind for which he, along with millions of others, would one day pay the ultimate price. His own political career followed a paradoxical trajectory from the far Right to the Left. He later became a Social Democrat, and when the Nazis came to power in 1933, he fled to France. However, after the outbreak of World War II, he fell into German hands and died in Buchenwald, the concentration camp near Weimar, in February 1945, two months before his protégé met his end amid the ruins of the Third Reich.
NATIONAL SOCIALISM
Initially, Hitler had nothing but contempt for the German Workers’ Party. The movement, if such it could be called, lacked headquarters, headed notepaper, finance, inspiring leaders and, above all, membership. Drexler and Harrer, its leading lights, were both dull platform speakers with little or no talent for organization. Then and later, this last ability was a very long way from being Hitler’s strongest suit but, in comparison with the DAP’s founders, he was at this stage in his career an organizational dynamo.
Drexler and Harrer seemed quite content for the DAP to remain little more than a political discussion club. Hitler thought differently. He harried the leadership into placing newspaper advertisements in the Münchener Beobachter for a meeting on 16 October 1919 at the Hofbräukeller, a large drinking establishment east of Munich’s city centre. Hitler was not the main speaker, but his speech, lasting some thirty minutes, brought the audience of one hundred and eleven people to its feet and raised three hundred marks for Party funds. Neither Drexler nor Harrer had served in the war, but Hitler, the Western Front veteran, had shrewdly enlivened the atmosphere by persuading some of his old army comrades to attend the meeting.
Buoyed by this initial success, Hitler insisted on bigger and more frequent meetings. Within a few weeks the audience was regularly reaching four hundred. At this point, according to Mein Kampf, Hitler insisted that the DAP stage a mass meeting, a demand which led to Karl Harrer’s resignation. Once again, Hitler got his own way, and the meeting was set for 24 February 1920. The venue was the Festsaal of the Hofbräuhaus in the centre of Munich, which was often used for large political meetings.
When it was not being used for political meetings, the big hall was packed with beefy male patrons, many of them wearing lederhosen, drinking their fill from long tables stacked with stone beer mugs. Dirndl-clad waitresses bustled back and forth bearing foaming tankards of ale to their bellowing customers. The Festsaal provided Hitler with an ideal arena in which to stage political theatre, the designs for which had been forming in the back of his mind since he watched the Socialist ‘human dragon’ winding through Vienna in the days before World War I. The atmosphere was not notably different during political meetings, and the beer flowed just as freely. There were frequent interruptions from the floor, and brawling regularly erupted between rival claques. This was politics in the raw, and meat and drink to Adolf Hitler. He was not in the least worried about disruption – he had been present at a mass meeting on 7 January 1920, attended by some seven thousand people, which had descended into a giant brawl. He was more concerned that on 24 February only a handful would turn up.
His concerns proved groundless. He had prepared the ground carefully. Dramatic red posters and leaflets advertising the meeting had been distributed. The party’s twenty-five-point programme, devised by Hitler and Drexler in the preceding weeks, was also printed and readied for distribution at the meeting. Significantly, however, there was no mention of Hitler in the advance publicity. On the night of 24 February, some two thousand people turned up, 20 per cent of them Socialist opponents spoiling for a scrap, to hear Dr Johannes Dingfelder, a well-known figure in Munich’s völkisch circles, deliver the main speech. It was, considering the occasion, unexceptionable. Dingfelder made no mention of the Jews and preferred to place the blame for Germany’s plight on the decline of religious faith and the rise of materialism. His answer? ‘Order, work and dutiful sacrifice for the salvation of the Fatherland.’
The mood changed when Hitler stepped forward to address the hall. He spoke in short, punchy sentences, robustly phrased, with which his audience readily identified – they spoke like this every day of their lives, although with infinitely less fluency. Hitler laid into the November criminals and men like Isidor Bach, one of Munich’s prominent Jewish capitalists, whom he attacked in tones both homely and deeply sinister: ‘When it is necessary to take a bowl of eggs away from a little hamster, the government shows an astonishing energy. But it will not use it if the hamster’s name is Isidor Bach.’
Explosions of frantic cheering greeted every slighting remark about Jews, and when Hitler turned his guns on war profiteers there were cries of ‘Flog them! Hang them!’ When he began to spell out the Party’s twenty-five-point programme, applause greeted every one of them. The first point demanded the union of all Germans into a Greater Germany. Many Germans were now citizens of Austria, Czechoslovakia and Poland. To bring them back into Germany could only be achieved by force, and this, in all probability, would mean war. Thirteen of the points were aimed against the Jews, including the assertion that ‘No Jew can be a citizen’. Jews were not to be allowed to hold public office or to publish newspapers. Those who had come to Germany after 1918 would be expelled.
There was spirited heckling from the Socialists in the audience, and the meeting constantly threatened to erupt into fisticuffs, but Hitler stuck to the last. At the climax of his speech he rebuked the government for providing food relief for Munich’s Jewish community, a sally which produced a storm of catcalls. Many of the audience were prompted to leap on to tables and chairs and hurl insults at each other as Hitler moved towards the end of his speech with words which would become familiar over the years: ‘Our motto is only struggle. We will go our way unshakeably to our goal.’
Hitler’s words closing the meeting were drowned out by the uproar in the hall. Socialists and Communists spilled out into the streets bawling the International, raising three cheers for the Red Republic and hurling insults at the German war leaders Hindenburg and Ludendorff and at German nationalists. Hitler later wrote, mendaciously, of a ‘hall full of people united by a new conviction, a new faith, a new will’. Nevertheless, the meeting had created controversy and had thus served its purpose very well. The fact that henceforth Nazi Party meetings were most decidedly not peaceful was a signal advantage which vividly set the DAP apart from its dull, bourgeois völkisch rivals. The opponents who packed DAP meetings before they began were themselves part of the spectacle. To deal with disruption, a ‘hall protection’ (Saalschutz) squad was formed – the seed from which the SA (Sturmabteilung) grew.
Dynamic design was also a vital ingredient in a mix which emphasized organisation, advance publicity, striking posters, and banners. The last was designed personally by Hitler and featured a black swastika (Hakenkreuz)6 on a white circle, framed by a red square. The makeover was completed by a new name: the DAP became the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP) – the Nazi Party.
In Munich at least, the Nazis were now on the map, and Adolf Hitler had put them there. Only Hitler, a man who seemingly had sprung from nowhere, appeared able to generate this excitement. Word raced around Munich that anyone attending a meeting addressed by Hitler was guaranteed a lively time.
One young man who saw Hitler speaking early in 1920, and was captivated by him, was Hans Frank, a World War I veteran and an early member of the NSDAP who, in World War II, became governor-general of the German-occupied territories in Poland. Awaiting execution for war crimes at Nuremberg in 1946, he recalled the first time he saw Hitler:
I was strongly impressed straight away. It was totally different from what was otherwise to be heard in meetings. His method was completely clear and simple. He took the overwhelmingly dominant topic of the day, the Versailles Diktat, and he posed all these questions: What now, German people? What’s the true situation? What alone is now possible? He spoke for over two and a half hours, often interrupted by frenetic torrents of applause – and one could have listened to him for much longer. Everything came from the heart, and he struck a chord with all of us …
How did Hitler do it? The building blocks of his speeches were, in the main, commonplaces peddled by all the parties of Munich’s nationalist Right: Germany laid low by the Allies, stabbed in the back, crippled by ruinous reparations and betrayed at home by corrupt politicians; the sinister figure of the Jew lurking behind all Germany’s ills, and the expulsion of all Jews from the country; the invocation of social harmony through national unity and the restoration of national greatness; the safeguarding of the archetypal ‘little man’ from the depredations of international financiers. Hitler’s list of enemies and his prescriptions for the future were, in themselves, unexceptional in the climate of the time. Where he differed was in the methods by which he ensured that his message got across, and the originality of his technique as an orator.
He spoke from rough notes, and at length, for two hours or more. In the Festsaal he cleverly addressed the audience from a beer table positioned on one of the side of the hall, thus placing himself in the middle of the crowd, the easier to gauge and orchestrate its mood. He quickly learned how to deal with shouted interruptions, foot-stamping, mocking laughter or even stony silence. He learned how to grab the attention of the audience, to read its collective mind – and individual minds – and to strike to the quick the listeners hanging on his every word.
Hitler’s formula was simple and cynical: ‘The receptive powers of the masses are very restricted and their understanding is feeble. On the other hand, they quickly forget. All effective propaganda must be confined to a few bare necessities and then expressed in a few simple phrases. Only by constantly repeating will you finally succeed in imprinting an idea on to the memory of the crowd … When you lie, tell big lies. This is what the Jews do. The big, cheeky lie always leaves traces behind it.’
An actor prepares. In the 1920s, Hitler honed his speaking platform histrionics with obsessive attention to detail. His personal photographer Heinrich Hoffmann would capture each gesture and posture before Hitler studied the results to select the precise choreography required to deliver the maximum impact.
Hitler’s choice of words matched his method. His oratorical vocabulary was simple, direct and violent. It featured heavily what would now be called buzz words – ‘smash’, ‘hatred’, ‘evil’, ‘power’ – which pressed all the right buttons with his audience. It is also as well to note the topics which, at this stage in his career, he did not mention or to which he referred only infrequently. In only one speech did he call for the establishment of a dictatorship in Germany, but he did not single himself out for this role. Nor did he introduce what was later to become a crucial element in his philosophy, the notion of Lebensraum (living space) in Eastern Europe, which would be colonized by German settlers after the expulsion and elimination of their Slavic populations. For the moment, Britain and France remained the principal targets of his ire and, in August 1920, he admitted that he was no expert on Russia. Nevertheless, he was fast catching up, influenced by Alfred Rosenberg. An early recruit to the Party, Rosenberg was of ethnic German descent but had been born in Russia, and he had seen the Russian Revolution at first hand.
Crowd control was also an essential element in Hitler’s method. The ‘hall protection squad’ was the first answer, burly ex-servicemen posted around the hall to silence troublesome hecklers. These roughnecks were later organized into strong-arm squads under the euphemistic name of the Gymnastic and Sports Division. In August 1921 the formation was strengthened by the addition of former members of the naval brigade led by Captain Hermann Ehrhardt, a seasoned campaigner in paramilitary activity and one of the leaders of the Kapp Putsch. In September 1921, the thugs from the Gymnastic and Sports Division played a prominent part in disrupting a meeting of the separatist Bayerbund, addressed by its leader Otto Ballerstedt. Ballerstedt brought charges against Hitler, and in January 1922 he was sentenced to three months’ imprisonment, with two months suspended against future good behaviour. Hitler served his month-long imprisonment in Munich’s Stadelheim prison between 24 June and 27 July 1922. After his release, he remained unrepentant. Savage clashes with opponents were the lifeblood of the Nazi Party and fed its hungry publicity machine.
By the summer of 1922, the ad hoc squads had been reorganized into the Sturmabteilung (stormtroops), a formation whose name was swiftly abbreviated to the SA. They were supplied with brown uniforms, jackboots and swastika armbands. The Brownshirts, as they became known, quickly acquired an ugly reputation. Not content with merely maintaining order at Party meetings, they moved on to breaking up those of their opponents. Nevertheless, they represented only one small element in the bear-pit of Munich politics, in which they were, for the moment, dwarfed by other private armies.
In August 1922, the SA numbered some eight hundred men. They made their first appearance as a paramilitary organization at a huge nationalist rally in Munich for the United Patriotic Associations of Bavaria, whose slogan proclaimed, with regionalist fervour, ‘For Germany – against Berlin’. But, however menacing they might have seemed, the SA was dwarfed by the thirty thousand armed men of the Bund Bayern und Reich, a coalition of a number of right-wing factions which combined strong monarchist and Christian principles with anti-Semitism and hatred of Bolshevism. The Bund’s watchword had a familiar ring: ‘First the Homeland, then the World!’
The United Patriotic Associations of Bavaria soon collapsed in a welter of factional fighting. Hitler and the SA endured.
The SA made its name in mid-October 1922 when it followed Hitler to Coburg, in Upper Franconia, to participate in the so-called German Day (Deutscher Tag). This was new territory for the Nazis, whose power base remained in Munich. Hitler had been asked to attend with a small delegation but, with his usual flair for a propaganda coup, arrived accompanied by his eight hundred stormtroopers. The police had issued orders banning a march, which Hitler pointedly ignored. The SA marched from the railway station into the town, banners unfurled and swastikas held high. Along the route, they clashed with workers and supporters of the Socialists, who lined the streets abusing them. The SA responded with clubs and rubber truncheons, and a pitched battle ensued. One of Hitler’s men was Kurt Ludecke, a playboy ‘man of the world’ and recent recruit to the Sturmabteilung, who was at Hitler’s side on the march into Coburg:
The gates were opened against the protests of the now thoroughly alarmed police, and we faced the menacing thousands. With no music but only drums beating, we marched in the direction of the Schuetzenhalle. We who were in the forefront with Hitler were exposed to the very real danger for cobblestones were fairly raining upon us. Sometimes, a man’s muscles do his thinking. I sprang from the ranks towards a fellow who was lunging at me with his club uplifted. From behind me, my good Ludwig followed. But at the same moment our entire column had turned on our assailants.
The police initially held back, but now they pitched into the fray on the side of the SA. Ludecke recalled, ‘But soon, probably because they shared our dislike of the street rabble, most of them took our side, and before long we were masters of the field.’After a vicious battle lasting some ten minutes, the SA claimed the streets of Coburg and won another propaganda victory for Hitler. The NSDAP had left its mark; Coburg became a Nazi ‘battle honour’, and a special medal was struck for those who had taken part in the affray.
Long before the SA began to crack heads in Coburg, Hitler was heading on a collision course with the leadership of the NSDAP. He was fast becoming central to the Party’s success but his increasing eminence was not universally popular. Several of the Party’s committee, including Gottfried Feder, were dismayed by what they considered to be his crude propaganda methods. The personal traits which were to characterize Hitler’s later political career were becoming evident to his colleagues. He was tetchily sensitive to any criticism, by turns impatient, irrational and hesitant, sometimes endlessly delaying decisions, at others charging into them precipitately. He was also violently opposed to plans hatched by Drexler to merge the NSDAP with another far-right party, the German Socialist Party (DSP).
Hitler’s truculent, unpredictable behaviour indicates that in 1921 he had not developed a rational, long-term plan to take control of the NSDAP. He had not anticipated a power struggle but nevertheless found himself in one, and prevailed by using all-or-nothing tactics – a desperate gamble which succeeded in unnerving his indecisive enemies, who failed to present a united front. It was a pattern he would repeat over the years and which, ultimately, proved the ruin of the Third Reich.
When the crisis broke, Hitler was in Berlin, raising funds. The malcontents in the NSDAP had been casting around for a counterbalance to their troublesome pre-eminence, someone to clip his wings, and lit upon Dr Otto Dickel. Dickel headed another recently formed völkisch organization, the Deutsche Werkgemeinschaft, who had recently scored a publishing success with The Resurrection of the Western World. Dickel’s windy völkisch philosophizing was not to Hitler’s taste, but his violent anti-Semitism and plans to build a classless community through national renewal dovetailed with Hitler’s ideas. And, like Hitler, Dickel was a fiery orator. While Hitler was in Berlin, Dickel gave a well-received speech in one of Hitler’s stamping grounds, the Festsaal of the Hofbräuhaus. More speeches were planned. Dickel seemed to be the answer to the prayers of those who were unhappy with the prima donna Hitler. Above all, he was controllable.
Hitler returned from Berlin to discover that talks about a new merger, this time with Dickel’s party, were imminent. Like a spoilt child, he responded with a tantrum followed by moody sulking. And, like a child, he had failed to get his own way. On 11 July, he resigned from the Party. Now, it seemed, Hitler was back where he began. He would have to establish his own party. Then Drexler blinked. He realized, belatedly, that the loss of Hitler might prove catastrophic. Perhaps, after all, Dickel was not the man to replace him. Within days Hitler was asked to rejoin the Party. Hitler seized his chance. He would rejoin, but only on his own terms: he would assume the post of party chairman with dictatorial power;7 the party headquarters must be in Munich; the twenty-five-point programme was inviolate; and there would be no more attempts to merge with other parties. Within twenty-four hours the Party committee had caved in and acceded to Hitler’s demands. On 26 July, six days after a triumphant rabble-rousing appearance before a packed house at the Circus Krone, he was welcomed back as Party member number 3680. Game set and match to Adolf Hitler.
There was another outburst of snapping and snarling before the dust settled, the last death twitch of Hitler’s opponents in the NSDAP. Placards denouncing him were prepared and an anonymous pamphlet appeared attacking him as the agent of sinister forces. He brushed his opponents aside and, in an extraordinary meeting at the Festsaal, so recently the scene of Dickel’s transient triumph, members voted five hundred and fifty-three to one to accept the new dictatorial powers sought by their leader. A constitution, hurriedly drafted by Hitler, confirmed his supremacy not once but three times. The Nazi Party was about to undergo a transformation. It was to become a ‘Führer party’, in which the Führer’s word was law, subject to rubber stamp approval by the membership.
THE COURTIERS
In less than two years Adolf Hitler had travelled from being an anonymous police spy to assuming the leadership of the NSDAP. During these early years, he began to gather round him a circle of intimates, many of whom would, from 1933, occupy positions of untrammelled power in Germany, and later in Occupied Europe.
An important figure in these years was Captain Ernst Röhm, a scarred veteran of the ‘front generation’, who rapidly replaced Karl Mayr as Hitler’s link with the German Army, the Reichswehr. Early in 1920, at a time when Hitler himself was still in the Army, Mayr had taken him to meetings of the Iron Fist club, an association of radical nationalist serving officers which had been formed by Röhm in defiance of the rule that the Reichswehr should remain apolitical. In all probability, Hitler had already been introduced to Röhm by Mayr in the autumn of 1919. Röhm had joined the DAP in October 1919, shortly after the meeting at which Hitler had first found his political voice.
In the winter of 1919, however, Röhm was more interested in the Citizens’ Defence Force (Einwohnerwehr) than in the tiny DAP. This heavily armed paramilitary organization, numbering some four hundred thousand men, had been formed after the crushing of the Red Republic and presented the traditional face of Bavarian reaction. Röhm, nevertheless, kept a finger in the pie of any number of völkisch movements in Bavaria and, from 1921, became a significant figure in the NSDAP and the development of the Sturmabteilung. By 1923, the SA was some fifteen thousand strong and, thanks to the ‘machine-gun king’ Röhm, was armed to the teeth. Röhm was a man with sensitive political antennae but, like his associate Hermann Ehrhardt, was nevertheless wedded to the application of exclusively paramilitary answers to political questions. For Hitler, however, the wholesale integration of the SA into the political framework of the NSDAP was a problem which was to become increasingly troublesome as the years went by. The resolution, when it came, was bloody. Ernst Röhm, who had always lived by the sword, was to die by the sword in 1934 in the Night of the Long Knives.
Another significant early figure in Hitler’s rise to prominence in the politics of Bavaria was Dietrich Eckart, an alcoholic who was to die in 1923. If the brutal, homosexual Röhm provided the brawn of the NSDAP, then Eckart was the brain. Twenty years older than Hitler, he was an unsuccessful poet and critic who had entered politics in December 1918 with the publication of a violently anti-semitic weekly magazine, In Plain German (Auf gut deutsch), whose regular contributors included Gottfried Feder and Alfred Rosenberg. Eckart had spoken at DAP meetings before Hitler had joined and later took the new recruit under his wing. He helped Hitler to widen his reading, gave him a little social polish and introduced him to significant financial backers. One of them was the Augsburg industrialist Dr Gottfried Grandel, who had funded In Plain German and also acted as guarantor for the funds that the NSDAP used to purchase the bankrupt newspaper the Völkischer Beobachter (People’s Observer) in December 1920. Its first publisher was Dietrich Eckart.
One of Hitler’s earliest and most slavish disciples was Rudolf Hess. Born in Egypt, the son of a successful wholesaler and exporter, Hess did not live in Germany until he was fourteen. He served in the List Regiment during World War I but had not met Hitler. After the war he joined the Freikorps, and while studying at Munich University came under the influence of the Thule Society and Professor Karl Haushofer, a former soldier. Haushofer’s geopolitical theories of race and expansionism would play a part in the concept of Lebensraum, one of the last major elements in Hitler’s Weltanschauung (world view). Hess joined the NSDAP on 1 July 1920, and after meeting Hitler, felt that he had been ‘overcome by a vision’.
Among the earliest members of the NSDAP, Hermann Göring had the highest public profile. A World War I air ace with twenty-two victories under his belt, the fleshily handsome, flamboyant Göring had commanded JG1, the legendary Richthofen squadron, during the closing months of the conflict. In 1920 he married a wealthy Swedish countess, settled in Munich, and in 1921 had joined the NSDAP, making his aristocratic connections and wife’s fortune available to the Party. In 1923 Göring was appointed head of the Sturmabteilung.
Undoubtedly one of the most unpleasant members of this unappealing bunch was Julius Streicher, a bald, burly bully and lecher, who thrashed his enemies with a rhino-hide whip. Another war hero – he was also awarded the Iron Cross (First Class) – Streicher was a virulent anti-Semite who, after the war, was one of the founding members of the German Socialist Party, or DSP (Deutschsozialistische Partei), whose basic philosophy differed little from Nazism. In 1923 Streicher established his own newspaper, Der Stürmer (The Attacker), which dripped with obscene caricatures of hook-nosed, bearded Jews ravishing innocent Aryan maidens and achieved the rare distinction of being banned in the Hitler Youth, and in all the departments of the Third Reich run by Hermann Göring. Vile though he was, Streicher proved an invaluable ally to Hitler in the development of the NSDAP in Protestant Franconia, in northern Bavaria, which was to provide the Nazi Party with a symbolic capital in the city of Nuremberg.
(Left to right) Alfred Rosenberg, Hitler and Friedrich Weber, head of the Bund Oberland, during a parade of the SA and other paramilitaries marking the laying of the war memorial foundation stone in Munich, 4 November 1923.
Although Hitler had now become a familiar player on Munich’s political scene, his personal habits had in many ways changed little since his time in pre-war Vienna. The most significant difference was that he now had an audience hanging on his every word as he lounged around in his favourite haunts, among which was the Café Heck in Galerienstrasse, a popular watering hole of Munich’s bourgeoisie, where Hitler would hold court for long hours. Among his inner circle were Max Erwin von Scheubner Richter, an engineer who had excellent contacts among Russian émigrés, Alfred Rosenberg and, from late 1922, Ernst ‘Putzi’ Hanfstaengl,8 a tall, cultured half-American and a graduate of Harvard, who became Hitler’s foreign press chief.
Hanfstaengl, who came from a family of art dealers, was fascinated by Hitler, this awkward little man in a shabby blue suit, who was a mixture of NCO and railway clerk but nevertheless possessed the gift of swaying the masses. Hanfstaengl’s fascination, however, was tempered by a snobbish attitude towards Hitler’s clumsiness in clever and sophisticated company – he was awkward with a knife and fork, sprinkled sugar into vintage wines, knew little about art, about which Putzi knew a great deal, and frequently resorted to blustering monologues or long periods of brooding silence to cover his ignorance. In a small group, or one-to-one, Hitler often appeared an unimpressive, even sometimes ludicrous, figure. The fastidious Hanfstaengl could nevertheless overlook these social shortcomings because he considered Hitler ‘a virtuoso on the keyboard of the human psyche’. Riding the irresistible emotional surge of a mass meeting, Hitler had no equal.
Just as Röhm ensured that Hitler enjoyed contacts at the highest level with representatives of the Reichswehr in Munich, so Hanfstaengl introduced him to the upper echelons of Munich society, whose dominant females vied with each other to present their newly found acquaintance with gifts of bulky dog whips and hefty donations to NSDAP funds. In this milieu Hitler cut a curious figure, prompting one Freikorps leader of the time, General Rossbach, to observe, with some accuracy, that he was ‘a man mistrustful towards himself and what he was capable of, and so full of inferiority complex towards all who were anything or were on their way to outflank him …. He was never a gentleman, even later in evening dress.’
There were many in Hitler’s inner circle who were also not gentlemen and who were happy to sit at his feet every Monday evening at the Café Neumaier. The company here was a world away from the decorous salons of upper-class Munich. Nazi philosophers like the anti-Semite Dietrich Eckart were joined by other more rough-hewn Party members: Christian Weber, a former bouncer and horse-dealer who, like Hitler, habitually affected a dog whip; Max Amann, Hitler’s sergeant in the List Regiment; and Ulrich Graef, a butcher and amateur wrestler who was Hitler’s personal bodyguard. At the end of the evening this band of cronies – the so-called ‘chauffeureska’ – would act as bodyguard to their leader, theatrically dressed in a black trilby and long black overcoat, and escort him back to his modest lodgings in Munich’s Thierschstrasse.
A NEW CRISIS
Between 1919 and 1923 Hitler’s audiences grew steadily in size. In 1932 he recalled, ‘I cast my eyes back to the time when with six other unknown men I founded [the Nazi Party], when I spoke before eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, twenty, thirty, fifty persons. When I recall how after a year I had won sixty-four members of the movement, I must confess that that which has today been created, when a stream of millions is flowing into our movement, represents something unique in German history’.
By 1923, the stream of millions had not yet begun to flow. Hitler’s followers were still numbered in thousands, but the events of that year provided a pretext for him to launch a military putsch in Munich. It ended in disaster, but its dramatic failure thrust Hitler for the first time on to the national stage.
The French had precipitated a crisis at the beginning of the year. In January 1923, in order to force the German government to sustain reparations payments which it had insisted it could not meet, the French government sent troops to occupy the Ruhr, Germany’s industrial heartland, and extract payment at source. The French needed the income from reparations to balance their own budget and pay their debts to the United States, and imagined that the seizure of the factories and mines of the Ruhr would both solve the problem and exact the revenge denied by the German surrender in 1918.
The Ruhr was paralyzed, and the effect on the entire German economy was disastrous. The German mark collapsed and hyperinflation set in. In December 1922 the exchange rate stood at eight thousand marks to the US dollar. Ten months later it had soared to four million, two hundred thousand marks to the dollar. Money became worthless and barter took over as the normal method of trading. Workers were paid daily and spent the money as soon as they received it, lest its value plummet further. The government needed to print more and more money; eventually it had three hundred paper mills and two thousand printing plants working twenty-four-hour shifts to meet the demand.
Gustav Stresemann, who had become Germany’s chancellor in August 1923, initially called for a campaign of passive resistance in the Ruhr. This did nothing to deter the French, but set an example of illegality which encouraged Communists in Saxony and Hamburg, separatists in the Rhineland, and former Freikorps men in Pomerania and Prussia, to threaten civil disobedience. In this situation most people were losers. In a matter of days a lifetime’s savings could become valueless.
‘Our misery will increase. The scoundrel will get by. The reason: because the state itself has become the biggest swindler and crook. A robber’s state!’
Thus declared Adolf Hitler, to whom those hit hardest by the crisis – the German workers and middle classes – offered a fertile recruiting ground. A plan began to form in his mind, based not on a German but on an Italian example. The Freikorps phenomenon had not been confined to Germany. After 1918 the world was awash with weapons and with rootless men inured to violence. There was no shortage of freebooting officers eager to lead them on death or glory missions. Italy, with little to show for its six hundred thousand war dead, was an arena in which such desperate men flourished.
After the war there was an economic crisis which the traditional Italian parties, religious and political, were wholly incapable of solving. The only leader to promise salvation was Benito Mussolini, a former Socialist and founder, in 1919, of the Fascist Party (Fascio di Combattimento), the so-called Blackshirts (Squadristi). Like the Freikorps, the Squadristi were used by the government as strike breakers and as a stick with which to beat Socialists. Mussolini was the archetypal Freikorps type, a man of action who advocated military-style solutions to the country’s difficulties. As with the Freikorps, the Fascist Party’s activists were drawn from ex-servicemen, among whom the most effective were former arditi (stormtroops). Mussolini promised to establish strong government and restore national pride. Communism was identified as the principal threat, while Fascism offered the prospect of dynamic action and leadership in contrast to the inertia of the established parliamentary parties.
Mussolini’s ‘March on Rome’ began on 27 October 1922. The Fascist leader was careful to be photographed striding out with his Blackshirts but did not walk all the way. He had made his aim clear in a speech delivered in Naples on 24 October: ‘Our programme is simple. We want to rule Italy.’ The Italian prime minister, Luigi Facta, fondly believed that Mussolini could be accommodated and, having been muzzled, given a role in government. But Mussolini now enjoyed the support not only of the Italian military, but also the business class, the political Right and King Victor Emmanuel III. Victor Emmanuel, assured by Mussolini that he would keep his throne, refused to sign an order declaring Rome to be in state of siege and, on 29 October, power was transferred to Mussolini, who became prime minister, within the framework of the Italian constitution.
The next day the new prime minister arrived in Rome, resplendent in a black shirt, black trousers and a black bowler hat. The March on Rome was never the heroic seizure of power later celebrated by Fascists. The Italian Army could have easily crushed the twenty thousand sodden, bedraggled marchers had it chosen to do so: the transition had been made possible by the surrender of public authorities in the face of Fascist intimidation. By the summer of 1924, Mussolini had become the dictator of Italy.
The March on Rome made a deep impression on the NSDAP. Mussolini was the kind of hero needed in Germany, striding to the rescue of the nation at the head of his own private army. At the beginning of November 1922, at a packed meeting at the Festsaal in the Hofbräuhaus, Hermann Esser, editor of the Völkischer Beobachter, declared, ‘Germany’s Mussolini is Adolf Hitler!’ Just as the March on Rome launched Mussolini as Il Duce, the leader of Italy, so Hitler’s followers were now to subscribe to the Führer cult which sprang up around their own leader.
In the Weimar Republic, tottering from one crisis to the next in a bullies’ playground of warring private armies, the cult of a strong leader guiding his followers and the nation to salvation – a long German tradition – exercised an inexorable grip on the imagination of parties of the nationalist Right. After Mussolini’s triumph, however bathetic, Hitler’s role in the NSDAP was cast in a different light. In December 1922 the Völkischer Beobachter suggested that he was a special kind of leader, that indeed, like Mussolini, he was the leader for whom Germany was waiting. Rank and file Nazis had long thought this, and Hitler had done little to discourage them. But he had also done little actively to foster a personality cult around himself. In 1922 he disingenuously told the Hamburg neo-conservative intellectual Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, ‘I am nothing but a drummer and a rallier.’
Now a gradual process of change began. By the beginning of May 1923, in a speech lambasting the parliamentary system, Hitler invoked the image of two of Germany’s greatest titans of the past, Frederick the Great and Bismarck. He affirmed that Germany could be saved only by a ‘dictatorship of the national will and national determination’. But the task of the nation was to ‘create the sword that this person will need when he is here. Our task is to give the dictator, when he comes, a people ready for him!’
MILITARY MANOEUVRES
The May meeting at which Hitler urged his audience to forge a sword for the future dictator of Germany came after six months of frantic political activity in Munich where, from December 1922, rumours were rife that a putsch was being planned by the NSDAP. When the French marched into the Ruhr in January 1923, Hitler turned his guns on the November criminals in a mass meeting at the Circus Krone. For him, the real enemy was within. It was a familiar roll call. Parliamentary democracy, Marxism, internationalism and the Jews had caused Germany to be held to ransom by the French. He expressly ordered Party members not to offer active resistance to the occupation.
At the end of the month the jittery Bavarian government declared a state of emergency in an attempt to prevent the NSDAP from holding its first ‘Reich Rally’. Röhm saved the day, persuading the German Army to come out in support of Hitler, who assured the local commander, General Otto Hermann von Lossow, that the rally would be peaceful. The police and the government president of Upper Bavaria, Gustav Ritter von Kahr, were also brought on board, and Hitler was allowed to address twelve mass meetings on the same evening. In addition, he attended the dedication of SA standards at Munich’s Marsfeld in the company of six thousand uniformed stormtroopers. It was a great propaganda triumph, which saw Hitler’s first use of the Fascist outstretched-arm salute, borrowed from the Italian Fascists who had themselves filched it from the Romans.
A month later Ernst Röhm, the man who in January had enabled Hitler to defy the Bavarian government, cut across his leader’s bows by establishing the Working Union of Patriotic Fighting Associations (Arbeitsgemeinschaft der Vaterländischen Kampfverbände). The Union combined the SA with a number of private armies of the nationalist Right as a force potentially to be used not against the French but against the government in Berlin. Hitler was furious at losing direct control of the SA, but Röhm had seen to it that he was now in the political fast lane, charged with drafting a statement of the Working Union’s political aims and meeting, thanks again to Röhm’s string-pulling, the commander-in-chief of the Reichswehr, Colonel-General Hans von Seeckt. Hitler, however, failed to impress the Colonel-General. The disdainful Seeckt nevertheless did his job well; by the time he was dismissed for harbouring monarchist sympathies in 1926, he had laid the foundations for the rapid expansion of the Reichswehr in the 1930s.
At the end of February, Hitler was brought into contact with his wartime commander-in-chief, General Ludendorff, who had returned to Munich from exile in Sweden early in 1919 and thrown his hat into the seething ring of Munich’s politics. Ludendorff urged the use of paramilitary formations in a strike against the French. Hitler had already agreed to the military training of the SA by the Reichswehr in January, and the stormtroops handed over their weapons to the army in anticipation of a scrap with the French. Much of this manoeuvring was not to Hitler’s liking, but thanks to Röhm he had now been admitted to the political top table in Munich.
The price Hitler paid for these developments threatened to be a heavy one. He was losing control of the very elements he needed to force the pace of political developments in Bavaria. He was being elbowed out of the action by more powerful figures whose agendas differed from his own. At the beginning of May, he was forced into another confrontation with the government of Bavaria. On May Day, the Socialists were to march through Munich, a demonstration for which they had obtained police permission. In the feverish atmosphere of the time the nationalist Right, for whom 1 May marked the anniversary of the downfall of the hated Red Republic, saw this as an outright provocation. Violence was in the air; already, on 26 April, shots had been exchanged between armed Communists and members of the NSDAP in which several of the combatants had been wounded. The armies of both Right and Left were spoiling for a fight.
They were to be denied. First, the police withdrew permission for the Communists’ march, restricting them to a limited demonstration in the centre of Munich. Then the right-wing paramilitary groups’ demand that the Reichswehr return their weapons was denied. This time the jellied nerve of the state authorities had remained firm. The paramilitary groups were given a sop – permission to gather in a northern suburb of Munich near the barracks, but well away from the Communist demonstration. It was a low-key affair, attended by some two thousand men, about half of them from the NSDAP, and ringed by a cordon of police. There was some half-hearted drilling, with weapons supplied by the ‘machine-gun king’, but this was no substitute for the anticipated pitched battle with the forces of the Left.
At a meeting that night in the Circus Krone, Hitler tried to make the best of a bad job, railing against the Jews, whom he called a ‘racial tuberculosis’. The police observer reporting the meeting wrote of a ‘pogrom mood’. As the summer wore on, however, Hitler became acutely aware that the NSDAP, and more importantly the SA, could not be kept on the leash indefinitely. Moreover, he was being outflanked by the war hero Ludendorff, who since his return to Munich was rapidly becoming the focal figure in Germany’s ‘national struggle’. It was Ludendorff who, at the beginning of September, was the star attraction of the German Day held at Nuremberg and attended by a crowd of over a hundred thousand. Scheduled to coincide with the anniversary of the humbling of the French at Sedan in the Franco-Prussian War (1870–71), it was a gathering of the nationalist Right which enabled Hitler to recover much of the prestige he had lost after the May Day fiasco. He had a seat on the saluting base for the climactic paramilitary march past, alongside Ludendorff and Prince Ludwig Ferdinand of Bavaria, and was judged to have given by far the best speech.
Reward of a kind came three weeks later when Hitler was given the ‘political leadership’ of the German Combat League (Deutscher Kampfbund) which amalgamated the paramilitary groupings, including the NSDAP, under the military leadership of Lieutenant-Colonel Hermann Kriebel, who had formerly headed the Union of Patriotic Fighting Associations. Once again, this realignment of the forces of the Right in another umbrella organization had been engineered by Röhm, who also ensured that the Bund’s business manager was one of Hitler’s cronies, Max Erwin von Scheubner-Richter. Again, this left Hitler in a no-man’s-land, stranded between the military professionals – Röhm and Ludendorff – and the political activists. Röhm considered Hitler one of the latter, a born rabble-rouser but not the man to plan and lead a coup. Hitler, on the other hand, was determined to subordinate the role of the paramilitaries to the building of a revolutionary mass movement through the NSDAP. There was no effective meeting of minds on this thorny problem, but one thing on which Hitler, Röhm and Scheubner-Richter did agree was that any attempt to mount a coup in Bavaria in the teeth of opposition from the police and the military was doomed to failure.
Stosstruppe Adolf Hitler (Adolf Hitler Assault Squad), which was Hitler’s original personal bodyguard. Formed in May 1923, the Stosstruppe was a group of roughnecks led by Julius Schreck. They wore distinctive death’s head badges, a link with the Imperial past which was later to be adopted by the SS. Schreck subsequently became the first Reichsführer SS (a post he never acknowledged) before becoming Hitler’s driver. He died of meningitis in May 1936 and was given a state funeral at which Hitler delivered the eulogy.
THE BEER-HALL PUTSCH
On 26 September 1923 the government in Berlin called off the strike in the Ruhr and pledged to resume reparations payments. This threatened to take the wind out of the sails of the Communists and the nationalist Right. The longer the crisis lasted, the greater became the possibility of civil war from which those on each side of the political divide anticipated they would emerge victorious.
The Communist threat in Hamburg, Saxony and the Ruhr was swiftly snuffed out by the Army. It was all over by the end of October. The threat from the Left had been eliminated at the first whiff of grapeshot. The menace from the Right sprang from Bavaria, where extreme nationalists were using the ‘Red threat’ as an excuse to march on Berlin. Bavaria’s immediate response to the ending of passive resistance was to proclaim a state of emergency which granted Gustav Ritter von Kahr, a monarchist of the old school, dictatorial powers as General State Commissar. One of his first acts was to ban a series of meetings to be held by the NSDAP. Kahr was to rule Bavaria at the head of a triumvirate whose other members were the state police chief, Colonel Hans Ritter von Seisser, and the local Reichswehr commander, General Otto Hermann von Lossow.
The triumvirate had its own agenda: envisaging a German version of Mussolini’s March on Rome, they were aiming at the installation of a nationalist dictatorship in Berlin with the support of the Reichswehr. Hitler, Ludendorff, and the Kampfbund were excluded from the plan. In the fevered atmosphere of the time, the triumvirate was queasily aware that it could be outmanoeuvred by Hitler – if he made his move first. Seisser travelled to Berlin to square Seeckt but was sent away with a flea in his ear. The commander of the Reichswehr flatly refused to move against the legally constituted government. Seeckt followed up by sacking Lossow, a move which was simply ignored by the triumvirate, who made the troops in the state swear an oath of loyalty to the Bavarian government. Seeckt issued a stern warning that any move by the triumvirate would be crushed by force.
Hitler was now coming under intense pressure to act. Scheubner-Richter warned him, ‘In order to keep the men together, one must finally undertake something. Otherwise the people will become Left radicals.’ By 7 November, when the Combat League leaders met, a plan had emerged. In the principal cities and towns of Bavaria, communications hubs and police stations were to be seized. Communists, Socialists and trades union leaders were to be arrested. The Combat League leaders agreed to Hitler’s demand that the strike should be launched the next day, 8 November, when all the prominent political figures in Munich would be gathered in the Burgerbräukeller to listen to a speech by Kahr denouncing Communism. Hitler had been forced to make a pre-emptive strike to launch his own Bavarian revolution before the triumvirate set its own plan in motion.
On the night of 8 November, three thousand people were packed into the Burgerbräukeller, one of the largest halls in Munich. It was a cavernous space with a high ceiling from which were suspended ornate chandeliers; a balcony ran down one side. The doors had been closed at 7.15 p.m. and a large crowd milled about outside in a light drizzle. Kahr had been speaking for about half an hour when Hitler began to push his way through the crowd accompanied by two stormtroopers brandishing pistols. He clambered on to a chair, drew a Browning pistol and fired a shot into the ceiling. When the tumult died down, he announced that the national revolution had begun and that the Burgerbräukeller was surrounded by six hundred armed men. He warned that if there was any trouble he would bring a machine gun into the gallery.
Hitler then invited the triumvirate to retire with him to an adjoining room. They had little choice in the matter. There, brandishing his pistol in a state of wild excitement, Hitler announced the formation of a new government with himself at its head, and promised ministerial posts to his captive audience if they agreed to cooperate. He warned them, in the tones of a ham actor, ‘I have four shots in my pistol. Three for my collaborators if they abandon me. The last is for myself.’Then, putting the Browning to his temple, he declared, ‘If I am not victorious, by tomorrow afternoon I shall be a dead man’.
Having laid his cards on the table, Hitler returned to the hall to reassure the restive crowd that his actions were not directed at the police or the Army, but ‘solely at the Berlin Jew government and the November criminals of 1918’. He outlined his proposals for the new governments in Berlin and Munich and added that Ludendorff was to be made army commander-in-chief, with dictatorial powers. The crowd roared its approval when he declared that he would inform the triumvirate that it had the full support of the audience.
Shortly afterwards, Hitler, accompanied by the triumvirate and Ludendorff, who had arrived wearing the full uniform of the Imperial Army, returned to the podium. After shaking hands with Hitler, they all made short speeches announcing their new roles and their willingness to co-operate. Spontaneously, the crowd burst into ‘Deutschland über Alles’. Ominously, Rudolf Hess then began to call names from a list of those present who were to be detained for interrogation and trial. The remainder of the crowd was asked to leave as sympathizers from across Munich began to arrive. Hitler, it seemed, had carried the day.
Outside the hall, however, as well as taking over three large beer halls in the centre of Munich, Röhm and the SA had occupied the War Ministry, but had failed to commandeer its switchboard. This oversight allowed Lossow to order loyalist troops into the city. The cadets at the infantry school came out in support of the putschists, and paramilitaries loyal to Hitler had occupied the offices of the influential Münchener Post newspaper. But that was the extent of their success. Moreover, Ludendorff had made a fatal blunder. Left in charge of the Burgerbräukeller while Hitler went off on a vain mission to secure the engineers’ barracks, he had allowed the triumvirate to leave, accepting their word as officers and gentlemen. They were now free to renege on the agreement they had made with Hitler at gunpoint.
In the centre of Munich high-spirited paramilitaries were parading with posters proclaiming Hitler as chancellor. But inside the Burgerbräukeller, amid the fug of cigarette smoke and piles of stale bread rolls, the moment of glory had passed.
Early the following morning a correspondent from The Times newspaper made his way to the Burgerbräukeller, where he found Hitler and Ludendorff in a small upstairs room. The quartermaster general and the corporal – the walrus and the carpenter – staring down the barrel of a gun. Hitler, the journalist wrote, was exhausted: ‘… this little man in an old waterproof coat with a revolver at his hip, unshaven and with disordered hair, and so hoarse he could barely speak’. Ludendorff, as well he might have, looked ‘anxious and preoccupied’.
The putschists were glumly considering a rapidly dwindling list of options. Hitler suggested driving to Berchtesgaden to enlist the support of Crown Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria. Lieutenant-Colonel Kriebel urged a tactical withdrawal to Rosenheim, near the Austrian border, where an armed resistance could be mounted against the inevitable Reichswehr riposte. While they talked, the paramilitaries began to trickle away. Finally, Ludendorff came up with the idea of a demonstration march through the streets of Munich, a desperate gesture which just might pick up speed, like a snowball rolling downhill, to become an avalanche. Surely the presence of Ludendorff, the totemic nationalist hero, would prevent the police and troops waiting in the streets of Munich from opening fire.
Shortly after noon, a column of some two thousand men, many of them still armed, set off from the Burgerbräukeller into the centre of Munich. Their destination was the War Ministry. In the front rank, marching beneath the swastika and the flag of Imperial Germany, was Hitler, with Ludendorff and Scheubner-Richter on either side. Close by were the bull-necked Ulrich Graef, Gottfried Feder and Hermann Göring, resplendent in a full-length leather overcoat, his Pour le Mérite medal, the ‘Blue Max’,9 at his neck. They were followed by SA men from the paramilitary Bund Oberland, marching four abreast in front of a car bristling with weapons. Bringing up the rear was a raggle-taggle army of students and fellow-travellers, some marching smartly in step and wearing their uniforms and medals from World War I. Many of them could not fail to notice that the posters proclaiming the revolution had already been torn down. To curious members of the public the march seemed like a funeral procession. And so it was.
The column broke through the first police cordon but encountered a second and more formidable barrier as it approached Odeonsplatz. Someone, possibly a bystander, cried out ‘Heil Hitler’ and then shots rang out, the preliminary to a fierce fire-fight which lasted only some thirty seconds but left fourteen putschists and four policemen dead. One of the dead was Scheubner-Richter, who pulled Hitler down with him as he fell, dislocating his leader’s left shoulder. Hitler struggled to his feet and escaped in a car. Göring was shot in the leg and badly wounded. The lone figure of Ludendorff marched on through the carnage and the police cordon but no one followed. Behind him, the column broke and fled.
Two days later Hitler was arrested at Putzi Hanfstaengl’s house in Uffing (Putzi had fled to Austria). While at Uffing Hitler had drafted a statement – the first of his co-called ‘testaments’ – placing the leadership of the Party in the hands of Alfred Rosenberg with Max Amann as his deputy. He was cast down but calm. When the police arrived to arrest him, he was incongruously dressed in a white nightgown, with his injured arm in a sling. He was taken to Landsberg prison and incarcerated in Cell No. Seven, whose previous occupant, Graf Anton von Arco-Valley, the assassin of Kurt Eisner, the Bavarian premier who had been murdered in February 1919, had been moved to make way for the new prisoner.
The putsch had collapsed like a pricked balloon and so, it seemed, had the political ambitions of Adolf Hitler. The writer Stefan Zweig later observed: ‘In the year 1923 the swastikas and stormtroopers disappeared, and the name of Adolf Hitler fell back almost into oblivion. Nobody thought of him any longer as a possible threat in terms of power.’
LANDSBERG
The fever which had gripped Germany in the autumn of 1923, and had reached crisis point during the Munich putsch, then subsided. The road to economic recovery, a salve for many of the most savage wounds the nation had suffered, opened up. Gustav Stresemann, who had been German chancellor since August 1923, stabilized the currency with the introduction of the Rentenmark10 and, with the aid of the Dawes Plan (named after its progenitor, the American banker Charles Dawes), adopted the phased repayment of reparations. Foreign loans were now made available to Germany, and the country entered a period of rehabilitation lasting until the arrival in the later 1920s of another economic tsunami.
After the Munich putsch, the NSDAP was banned. The völkisch vote, while initially holding up in local and national elections in the spring of 1924, swiftly fell away. The paramilitaries’ bluff had been called. Without the support of the Army they had no chance of seizing power, a lesson that was not lost on Adolf Hitler as he awaited trial in Munich. In the aftermath of the putsch, the Combat League was dissolved, the paramilitaries had their weapons confiscated and restrictions were placed on their activities. The triumvirate of Kahr, Lossow and Seisser were relieved of their responsibilities. In Bavaria, power passed to a cabinet under a new prime minister, Dr Heinrich Held, a leading figure of the Catholic establishment.
Nevertheless, it was the Bavarian Right which ensured the survival of Hitler’s career at the very time when he should have been shown the political door and firmly thrust into the outer darkness. His fingerprints were all over the failed putsch – from the its slapdash planning and all-or-nothing execution to the lack of any fall-back position if, as duly occurred, the enterprise fell apart in his hands. However, Hitler had not acted alone. There were many who had colluded in the crisis, from the triumvirate, with its own plans for a ‘March on Berlin’, to the Reichswehr which, in the months leading up to the beer-hall putsch, had trained and armed the paramilitaries who carried it out. Ludendorff, no less, had lent his name to the ill-starred enterprise. Embarrassing revelations threatened to reveal the complicity of many in the Munich putsch unless, of course, Adolf Hitler could be shown as solely responsible. And this was a responsibility he was only too happy to shoulder.
The accused at the trial of the Munich putschists strike a defiantly unrepentant pose for the camera. Seventh from the left is Friedrich Weber, and next to him are Wihelm Frick and Hermann Kriebel. Erich Ludendorff, staring straight ahead, clutching his gloves, is on the right of Hitler, who is gripping his soft hat as if for dear life. On Hitler’s left, scarred and noticeably jaunty, is the ‘Machine Gun King’ Ernst Röhm.
The trial of the putsch leaders was held at the People’s Court in Munich between 26 February and 27 March 1924. Hitler was reportedly depressed and suicidal after his arrest, but by the time the trial opened he had regained his composure. He was well aware of the hand he held and also of the fact that the judge was far from impartial. Sitting on the bench was the nationalist George Neithardt, the very man who had passed the sentence for breach of the peace on Hitler in January 1922. Hitler was technically still within his probation period for good behaviour, but Judge Neithardt conveniently forgot this, and much else. He tampered with Ludendorff’s initial statement to make it appear as if the quartermaster general was ignorant of Hitler’s plans; and before the trial he predicted that the veteran soldier would be acquitted. Ludendorff arrived every day in a luxury limousine; Hitler wore a smart blue suit and his Iron Cross, and was permitted by Neithardt to talk at length. Afterwards, the judge lamely explained that he could find no way of interrupting the torrent of words. Hitler was also allowed to interrogate witnesses – he subjected the triumvirate to a particularly gruelling session from which only Lossow emerged still clutching some shreds of credibility – all the while giving a relentless political ‘spin’ to his questions.
In his closing speech to the court, a speech which was reported throughout Germany and which made him, for the first time in his career as a demagogue, a national figure, Hitler expressed his relief that it was the police and not the army which had fired on him and the Combat League. He declared:
The Reichswehr stands as untarnished as before. One day the hour will come when the Reichswehr will stand at our side, officers and men … The army we have formed is growing from day to day … I nourish the proud hope that one day the hour will come when these rough companies will grow to battalions, the battalions to regiments, the regiments to divisions, that the old cockade will be taken from the mud, that the old flags will wave again, that there will be a reconciliation at the last great divine judgement which we are prepared to face.
The verdicts were read out on April Fool’s Day, 1924. Ludendorff was acquitted, a verdict which the old soldier took as a personal insult. Dr Friedrich Weber, head of the Bund Oberland, Kriebel, and Ernst Pöhner, a former Munich chief of police and NSDAP sympathizer, received five years for high treason. Others indicted received a range of lighter sentences, among them Röhm, who got fifteen months. Adolf Hitler received a sentence of five years, also for high treason, less the four months and two weeks he had been in custody. The court also decided not to deport him under the terms of the Protection of the Republic Act, because he ‘considers himself a German’ and because of his admirable war record in the German Army.
Even in Munich’s right-wing circles, the leniency of the sentences caused a stir. The shooting of policemen, the taking of hostages, the wanton destruction of the offices of an SPD newspaper, the looting of large sums of money during the putsch, were all brushed under the carpet. Hitler, who had been allowed to dominate the courtroom throughout the trial, returned to Landsberg prison, fifty miles west of Munich, in triumph.
The relatively short time Hitler spent in Landsberg enabled him to complete the journey from ‘drummer’ for the völkisch movement to fully fledged national leader of the NSDAP, the man who would be Germany’s Führer. In this, his incarceration proved singularly fortuitous. Before he returned to prison, he had placed the Party in the hands of Alfred Rosenberg, a man whose incompetence and lack of the slightest vestige of leadership strongly recommended themselves to Hitler. In the wake of the putsch, the NSDAP had been banned, so Rosenberg reconstituted it as the Grossdeutsche Volksgemeinschaft (GVG, the Greater German National Community). As things fell apart, and the squabbling völkisch movement drifted into factional feuding, the attractions of the ‘lost leader’, in studiedly romantic exile in Landsberg, would appeal ever more strongly to his former followers. Rosenberg was highly unpopular in the Party, and other leading members of the GVG hierarchy, notably Julius Streicher and Hermann Esser, who combined to oust Rosenberg in the summer of 1924, could be relied on to excite even more loathing.
There was, though, a downside to this tactic, and it came in the burly form of Ernst Röhm. While he remained in Landsberg, Hitler could exercise only very limited control of day-to-day events, and the battle-scarred front fighter was up to his old tricks. Röhm remained determined to establish a nationwide paramilitary organization, the Frontbann, and there was little that Hitler could do to deter him. Röhm had been released on probation after serving a short term in prison and was now seeking the patronage of Ludendorff.
MEIN KAMPF
Hitler had a comfortable time in Landsberg and celebrated his thirty-fifth birthday there. He received parcels and gifts of flowers which filled several rooms. He had a constant stream of visitors and was allowed to receive as many books, newspapers and letters as he wished. Most of the warders were sympathetic. On 15 September the prison governor, Otto Leybold, wrote a glowing report on his model prisoner:
Hitler shows himself to be a man of order, of discipline, not only with regard to his own person, but also towards his fellow internees. He is contented, modest, and accommodating. He makes no demands, is quiet and reasonable, serious and without any abusiveness, scrupulously concerned to obey the confinements of the sentence … He occupies himself every day for many hours with the draft of his book, which should appear in the next weeks and will contain his autobiography, thoughts on the bourgeoisie, Jewry and Marxism, German revolution and Bolshevism, on the National Socialist Movement and the prehistory of the 8th of November 1923 … During the ten months of his remand and sentence he has without doubt become more mature and quiet than he had been …. He will be no agitator against the government …
Doubtless, Hitler’s spotless record was inspired as much by his keen desire to win parole as by any fundamental change in his moral make-up. It failed, however, to impress the Munich police, who warned against granting him the parole he craved and who commented acutely that, in their opinion, he would reconstitute the NSDAP immediately on his release and renew his campaign of ‘meetings, demonstrations, and public outrages’. The outcome would be a ‘ruthless struggle with the government’.
The book to which Leybold referred in his glowing tribute to Hitler was, of course, Mein Kampf (My Struggle), on which Hitler had been working during his last five months in prison. Hitler had much time for reading in Landsberg, and he later told Hans Frank that the prison was his ‘university paid for by the state’. He claimed that during his time at Landsberg he had devoured everything he could get hold of, from Nietzsche to Marx, stacks of military memoirs, and the writings of the Englishman Houston Stewart Chamberlain.11 As we have seen, however, Hitler’s reading habits were not those of the earnest seeker after truth. He read merely to confirm his own prejudices. The result was Mein Kampf, which was dictated to his chauffeur Emil Maurice and the faithful Rudolf Hess, both of whom were also serving sentences for their part in the Munich putsch.
Hitler in brooding mood at Landsberg, contemplating his future. He later confessed that the prison provided him with the nearest thing he ever knew to a university, ‘paid for by the state’, as he ironically observed. By his own account he read an impressively wide range of literature during his relatively comfortable incarceration, although his reading regime was designed solely to confirm and reinforce his own prejudices.
Originally, Hitler wanted to give the book the leaden title ‘Four and a Half Years of Struggle against Lies, Stupidity, and Cowardice’, but had been persuaded to go for the snappier My Struggle by his publisher Max Amann, whose idea it had probably been in the first place that Hitler might fill his hours, and make some money, from an account of the putsch. Perhaps Amann, and others in Hitler’s inner circle, imagined that their roles in the putsch would be immortalized in Hitler’s book. They were to be sorely disappointed. The author was a mesmerizing speaker but as a writer he was a clumsy amateur.
The original version was a rehash of what Hitler had said in countless speeches, interspersed with vainglorious accounts of episodes in his life. Otto Strasser, who worked on the draft, described it as ‘a veritable chaos of banalities, schoolboy reminiscences, subjective judgements and personal hatred’. Putzi Hanfstaengl, Max Amann, Rudolf Hess, the music critic Stolzing-Cerny, and a former monk, Father Bernard Stempfle, were among the editors who undertook the thankless task of massaging Mein Kampf from an unreadable shambles into a state in which it was readable, if only barely so. Hitler himself had the good grace to concede that his draft was badly written.
The first volume, which appeared in the summer of 1925, was largely autobiographical and concluded with Hitler’s announcement of the NSDAP programme at the Hofbräuhaus in July 1920. The second volume, written after his release from Landsberg and published in the winter of 1926, dealt principally with the philosophy of Nazism, propaganda and foreign policy. At first Mein Kampf was no bestseller, but sales picked up in the late 1920s. By 1934 it had sold nearly a quarter of a million copies. By the end of the war, about ten million copies had been sold or distributed free, largely to newly-weds and soldiers. Hitler never paid taxes on his royalties, and when he became chancellor in January 1933 the debt was waived.
For all its literary shortcomings, Mein Kampf is very revealing of Hitler’s thinking at this stage in his career. Thereafter, he did not significantly change his world view, which was startling in its simplicity. The one new element he introduced was that of Lebensraum (living space), the concept he borrowed from the geopolitician Professor Karl Haushofer. Lebensraum posited that the German people were to find in Eastern Europe that living space which the Anglo-Saxon peoples had found in the New World. A German equivalent of the United States would appear in the Ukraine, enabling Germany to withstand blockade in a future war with Britain and France, although Hitler cynically professed that such a conflict was unthinkable. In effect, the notion of Lebensraum reflected Hitler’s desire to rewrite the history of World War I. Germany had pursued a similar policy in European Russia in 1917, but without the geopolitical trimmings. Hitler wanted to restore those territorial gains.
The acquisition of living space was inextricably linked with the destruction of ‘Jewish-Bolshevism’. Jews and Marxism were synonymous in Hitler’s mind as, paradoxically, were Jews and capitalism. Of course, Hitler did not invent anti-Semitism – every fantasy in his philosophy had its forerunners and parallels. The only difference was that Hitler took his ideas literally, and anti-Semitism most literally of all. While other right-wing politicians talked of eliminating Jewish influence from political or cultural life, without any clear idea of what they meant, Hitler saw the answer in precise terms of physical destruction. Thus the acquisition of living space and the destruction of the Jews could be seen as two sides of the same coin:
If we speak of soil in Europe today, we can primarily have in mind only Russia and her vassal border states … For centuries Russia has drawn nourishment from [the] Germanic nucleus of its upper leading strata. Today it can be regarded as almost totally exterminated and extinguished. It has been replaced by the Jew … He himself is no element of organisation, but a ferment of decomposition. The giant empire in the east is ripe for collapse. And the end of Jewish rule in Russia will also be the end of Russia as a state …
WEIMAR
The warnings of the Munich police were ignored when in December 1924 Adolf Hitler emerged from Landsberg, released as part of a general amnesty for political prisoners. Including time on remand, he had served little more than one year of his sentence.
When he left Landsberg, the political situation in Germany had calmed and the economy had improved. Progress was also being made on the diplomatic front. Chancellor Gustav Stresemann had established a close working relationship with the French foreign minister, Aristide Briand, the fruit of which was the Dawes Plan and the Locarno Pact, signed in December 1925 and confirming the inviolability of the Franco-German and Franco-Belgian borders, the demilitarizing of the Rhineland, and repudiating the use of force to revise Germany’s western border. The measures – the so-called ‘Spirit of Locarno’ – did much to ease international tension and cleared the way for Germany’s entry into the League of Nations in 1926. Two years later, in 1928, sixty-five nations signed the Kellogg-Briand Pact renouncing war, and in 1929 the Young Plan further reduced German reparations. Europe had set a course for a peaceful future. Or so it seemed.
The middle years of the Weimar Republic, from 1924 to 1929, saw a steady improvement in Germany. American loans enabled industry to modernize, and coal and steel production figures for 1928 showed an increase of 120 per cent on those for 1913. The building industry was revived and by the late 1920s some three hundred thousand houses and apartments were being built each year. Health insurance was extended to cover over twenty million people. Two new universities were built, at Hamburg and Cologne, and distinguished figures in Germany’s cultural and intellectual life included Albert Einstein, Paul Klee, George Grosz, Arnold Schoenberg, Paul Hindemith, Bertolt Brecht, Thomas Mann and Fritz Lang. An American journalist, William L. Shirer, arrived in Berlin in 1925. In his monumental book, Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, Shirer recalled the atmosphere of the mid-1920s:
I was stationed in Paris and occasionally London at that time, and fascinating as they were to a young American, they paled a little when one came to Berlin and Munich. A wonderful ferment was working in Germany. Life seemed more free, more modern, more exciting than any other place I had seen. Nowhere did the arts or intellectual life seem so lively. In contemporary writing, painting, architecture, in music and drama, there were new currents and new talents. And everywhere the accent was on youth. One sat up with young people all night in the pavement cafes, the plush bars, the summer camps, on a Rhineland steamer or in a smoke-filled artist’s studio and talked endlessly about life. They were a healthy, carefree, sun-worshipping lot, and they were filled with an enormous zest for living to the full and in complete freedom. The old, oppressive Prussian spirit seemed dead and buried.
POLITICAL GAMES
On his release from prison, Hitler moved swiftly to re-establish his primacy on Bavaria’s nationalist Right. At the end of February 1925, the Völkischer Beobachter appeared for the first time since the Munich putsch. In a leading article, Hitler outlined his plans for the future. Religious disputes were to be avoided, a necessary precaution in Catholic Bavaria and an implied criticism of the völkisch movement, which had accused him of making concessions to Catholicism. The Party’s power base was to remain in Munich.
Hitler appealed to ‘former members’ of the NSDAP to rejoin the Party, which was waiting for the lifting of the ban imposed after the 1923 putsch. There would be no post-mortems over past behaviour. The simple requirements would be unity, loyalty and obedience, in effect a ‘pax Hitleriana’. Unity was essential in the fight against Marxism and Jewry, and the SA was to be withdrawn from the Bavarian paramilitary scene, a measure which within weeks provoked the resignation of Ernst Röhm, who departed to Bolivia to act as a military adviser.
On the evening of 27 February 1925, Hitler made a dramatic return to the political arena at the Burgerbräukeller. Three thousand were crammed inside to hear him speak and another two thousand had been turned away. He spoke for two hours, telling his audience that the art of all great popular leaders consisted ‘at all times in concentrating the attention of the masses on a single enemy’ – a coded reference to the Jews. Moving towards the climax of his speech, he urged all members of the völkisch movement to bury their differences. In a pointed reference to Rosenberg, Streicher and Esser, Hitler reminded the audience that while he had been in Landsberg the Party had been ‘looked after by others’. Amid tumultuous applause he said, ‘Gentlemen, let the representation of the interest of the movement from now on be my concern!’ Acceptance of his leadership must be unconditional, enabling him to assume total responsibility in the movement. In a year he would be held to account.
There was one more coup de théâtre. Hitler’s opponents within the movement – men such as Hermann Esser, Julius Streicher, Gottfried Feder and Wilhelm Frick – mounted the stage to shake hands with Hitler and pledge their undying loyalty. No matter that for some such loyalty was little more than skin deep. Hitler was the only man who could engineer such a public demonstration. However, one figure retained, for the moment, sufficient popularity to destabilize Hitler’s position – Quartermaster General Erich Ludendorff.
Events now came to Hitler’s aid. On 28 February 1925, Friedrich Ebert, the first president of the Weimar Republic, died after an operation for appendicitis. Hitler insisted on adopting Ludendorff as the National Socialist candidate in the elections for Ebert’s successor. Ludendorff accepted, and duly went like a lamb to the electoral slaughter in a contest in which Hitler correctly estimated that he had no chance of making the slightest impression. The new president was another World War I hero, Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg, Ludendorff’s fellow warlord in 1914–18. In the war, Ludendorff had been the dominant partner; now their roles were reversed. Ludendorff’s fate was that of the old soldier – he slowly faded away on the lunatic fringes of the völkisch movement. The movement in Bavaria now had one leader: Adolf Hitler.
ENTER GOEBBELS
Shortly after his comeback address in the Burgerbräukeller, Hitler was banned from making public speeches in Bavaria, and in other German states including Prussia. This enabled him to step up his appearances at closed Party meetings, where he could reinforce in the most effective way the bonds which ensured the loyalty of individual members of the NSDAP. It was what today’s politicians call ‘face time’, the establishment of eye contact with your supporters, a manly handshake and a pat on the shoulder – loyalty guaranteed.
This worked well in Bavaria, but the ban proved problematic further afield. Hitler sought the help in northern Germany of Gregor Strasser, a Bavarian apothecary from Landshut who had been elected to the Reichstag in 1924. A bluff, open-faced character who was equally at home in a beer hall mêlée or reading Homer in the original Greek, Strasser was perhaps the most attractive of the early Nazis. Naturally, he was an anti-Semite but not an obsessive like Hitler and his Munich rat-pack. Strasser was also one of the few Nazis for whom the concept of Socialism meant something, and he nuanced his presentation of the Party’s programme to appeal to the northern industrial working class.
In this he was joined by Joseph Goebbels, who in 1926 had been appointed Gauleiter12 – regional party leader – of Berlin. A graduate of Heidelberg University, Goebbels had subsequently worked as a journalist, bank clerk and caller on the stock exchange. His deformed right foot and unfulfilled literary ambitions left him with chips on both shoulders and a strong streak of self-pity. He offset these traits with an exceptionally sharp mind and a biting tongue. His desire to succeed in a political movement in which physical infirmity was frequently derided fostered a driving ideological fanaticism. Moreover, he had an unbounded admiration for Hitler which, at times, resembled a schoolboy’s crush. He wrote in his diary in October 1925: ‘Who is this man? Half plebeian, half God! Actually Christ or only John [the Baptist] … This man has everything to be a king. The born tribune of the people. The coming dictator.’
Strasser and Goebbels were behind the creation of a loose organization of Party districts in northern Germany, the so-called Working Community (Arbeitsgemeinschafte, AG) of the North and West, which principally concerned itself with the exchange of speakers. The AG was loyal to Hitler but highly critical of his Munich entourage. Strasser also hoped to replace Hitler’s ‘immutable’ programme of 1920 with a manifesto of his own which envisaged a racially integrated German nation sitting at the heart of a Central European customs union, a primitive early version of the European Community.
These stirrings posed a threat to Hitler. Pressed into action by Gottfried Feder, the original Party philosopher, he travelled to Bamberg, in Upper Franconia, on 14 February 1926 to address a meeting of Party leaders and bring the Working Community to heel. Clearly, the AG presented a threat to his authority. It was a bitter blow for Goebbels, who confided in his diary his estrangement from Hitler: ‘Probably one of the greatest disappointments of my life. I no longer fully believe in Hitler. That’s the terrible thing: my inner support had been taken away.’
After the crushing of the Working Community, the lovelorn Goebbels was nevertheless swiftly welcomed back into the fold. In April, he was invited by Hitler to speak in Munich, where he was given red-carpet treatment. During his stay, Hitler’s powerful Mercedes-Benz limousine was placed at his disposal for sightseeing trips into the country. After Goebbels’s speech in the Burgerbräukeller, in which he nimbly retreated from his Socialism, Hitler embraced him with tears in his eyes. The next day the Führer jerked the leash, inviting Goebbels and his north German colleagues to Party headquarters, where they were given a stern dressing down over the Working Community before Hitler, all magnanimity, suddenly offered to wipe the slate clean. It was a classic example of a Mafia boss dealing with his moll, keeping her guessing over whether the next move will end with her swathed in mink or with a bruised and battered face. It was all too much for Goebbels, who wrote in the diary: ‘Adolf Hitler, I love you because you are both great and simple at the same time. What one calls a genius.’ The threat to Hitler’s twenty-five-point programme of 1920 had been nipped in the bud. It would remain immutable. Hitler observed, with cynical relish, ‘It stays as it is, the New Testament is also full of contradictions, but that hasn’t stopped the spread of Christianity.’
The process which transformed the NSDAP into a ‘Leader’ party rolled on smoothly. Weimar was a town in which Hitler was permitted to speak in public, and in a rally held there on 3–4 July 1926 it provided the setting for a demonstration of the strength and unity of the movement. Discussion and debate were kept to a minimum, and all decisions on matters of substance were subject to Hitler’s veto. Some eight thousand Party members participated in an orgy of speeches, ritual and marching. On display for the first time was the Blutfahne, or Blood Flag, of 1923, which had fluttered at the head of the march into Munich and had reputedly been soaked in the blood of three Nazi martyrs whose names were engraved on silver finials on the shaft. Every SA man at the rally – some three thousand six hundred of them – swore an oath of personal loyalty to Hitler. Also present for the first time were a hundred and sixteen men of the Schutzstaffel (Protection Squad or SS) which had been established in April 1925 and acted as Hitler’s personal bodyguard.
SCHUTZSTAFFEL: THE SS
From the earliest days of the Nazi Party, there had been SS (Schutzstaffel), or protection squads, formed as personal bodyguards of Adolf Hitler. From these unsavoury origins, the SS evolved into the most powerful arm of the Nazi state, and from 1928 was placed by Hitler under the personal control of Heinrich Himmler, the son of a Bavarian schoolmaster and himself a poultry farmer, who had taken part in the Munich putsch. Himmler immediately expanded the size and role of the SS, which came into its own after the emasculation of the SA in the Night of the Long Knives in June 1934. The SS consisted of two principal branches. The General Staff SS (Allgemein) staffed the concentration camps, supervised deportations, formed the Einsatzgruppen (task groups) which followed the Wehrmacht into Poland and Russia and were tasked with the execution of Jews, Communists and non-Aryan elements, and imposed the Nazi diktat throughout occupied Europe. The Waffen (armed) SS provided military formations dedicated to the Führer and the Party which fought alongside the German Army. From the winter of 1941–42, the Waffen SS benefited greatly from Hitler’s growing disillusionment with the Army. In June 1941, at the start of Barbarossa, it numbered some hundred and sixty-five thousand men. By the end of the war, forty SS divisions had been raised, on paper at least, twenty-seven of which were composed of foreigners, and the number of men under the SS oath had risen to some seven hundred thousand, more than 10 per cent of the entire German Field Army. From October 1939, SS formations were subject to the provisions of the legal military code but could only be tried by special SS courts staffed by Himmler’s nominees.
THE ACTOR
By now, Hitler had established a routine which he would maintain for the rest of his life. He was a hard man to see; those who met him regularly – the chauffeureska cronies, his secretary Rudolf Hess and his factotum Julius Schaub – were members of a surrogate family who had been with him during the putsch and, in some cases, had served time at Landsberg. The few shielded Hitler from the many who came seeking decisions on Party matters. Hitler was content to conspire in this isolation; it suited the image of the remote, brooding leader and also enabled him to disguise the fact that he was quite incapable of applying himself to long hours of systematic work. When lieutenants and supplicants were finally granted an audience, it heightened the sense of awe which they felt in his presence.
Hitler was also a superb actor and manipulator. The ‘tough love’ methods he used to overawe the impressionable Goebbels provide a graphic example of the skill with which he played on the emotions of those around him. From time to time, though, he struck a false note. The sanguine Putzi Hanfstaengl noted that, while staying with him after his release from Landsberg, Hitler would frequently freeze in mid-conversation and cast a long, melodramatic look over his shoulder, explaining, unconvincingly, that this unfortunate tic was a relic of his imprisonment. When confronted with an audience, however, Hitler was pitch perfect, deploying all the staples of oratory – a slow, quiet beginning, the dramatic use of the hands, savage wit directed at enemies, the inexorable build-up to a spine-tingling climax – to enormous effect. Nothing was left to chance, as is evidenced by the large number of photographs taken by Hitler’s personal photographer, Heinrich Hoffmann, which reveal Hitler rehearsing the poses he intended to strike during a speech. Only after careful scrutiny were the most appropriate selected.
When it came to clothes, Hitler paid the same attention to detail. Different occasions demanded different outfits. For the Party faithful, it was the light-brown uniform of an SA man with Sam Browne-type strap over his right shoulder, knee-length boots and swastika armband. When addressing an audience of prosperous businessmen, as he did in Hamburg on 26 July 1926, both Hitler’s sartorial and oratorical styles were radically different: sober dark suit, white shirt and tie, and no railing against the Jews. His method brings to mind Stanislavsky’s great book on dramaturgy, An Actor Prepares. Hitler prepared, obsessively, leaving nothing to chance. Unlike Mussolini, who liked nothing better than to pose for photographers bare-chested while supposedly lending a hand with the harvest (not unlike a modern equivalent, Vladimir Putin), Hitler recoiled from such fraudulent spontaneity. He always appeared fully clothed and was paranoid about eliminating any possibility for embarrassment.
The central themes on which he relied when addressing the Party faithful remained the same. A Social-Darwinist interpretation of history in which ‘politics is nothing more than the struggle of a people for its existence’. For Hitler, it was an ‘iron principle’ that in the struggle the weak would always go to the wall so that ‘the strong gain life’. Three constants determined the fate of a race – blood, personality and self-preservation. These elements, possessed by the Aryan race, were threatened by three opposing vices – democracy, pacifism, and internationalism – the last the child of ‘Jewish-Marxism’. The only way forward was under a strong leader, to whom his followers must be blindly loyal.
By the mid-1920s, Hitler did not have to labour this point. Propaganda, which did it for him, regulated every aspect of the Nazi Party’s machinery and remained his abiding preoccupation. The nuts and bolts of Party administration held no appeal for Hitler. Then and later he remained a broad brushstroke man, leaving the detailed work to others. Max Amann handled the Party’s finances along with its treasurer Franz Xaver Schwarz; there was also an efficient secretariat in Munich, and propaganda during the latter half of the 1920s was in the hands of Gregor Strasser, who streamlined procedures on a nationwide scale. For the moment at least, Strasser was one of Hitler’s most canny appointments.
Nevertheless, in the mid-1920s the NSDAP was yet to make a significant impact on national politics across Germany. Indeed, at the very moment that the Party’s overall prospects began to improve, it suffered a series of potentially disabling setbacks. At the end of January 1927, Saxony became the first large German state to lift its speaking ban on Hitler. Five weeks later Bavaria followed suit, on the condition that his first public meeting should not be in Munich. He chose to hold a meeting on 5 March at Vilsbiburg in Lower Bavaria, but the hall was only two-thirds full. However, on 8 March it seemed as if it was business as usual at the Circus Krone in Munich, where a capacity crowd of seven thousand cheered Hitler to the echo. However, the police spy who filed a report on his speech observed that it was remarkably dull – Hitler was still careful not to court any trouble with the authorities – and wondered how he could have come this far if his speeches had been as feeble in 1923.
At subsequent meetings, attendance fell away sharply. In Munich, his power base, Hitler seemed to be losing his touch. The waning appeal of the NSDAP was duly noted by the police. The Party rally in August 1927, held for the first time at Nuremberg, was a damp squib in spite of determined efforts to orchestrate it for maximum propaganda effect. The authorities concluded that the threat posed by the Nazi Party was a passing phenomenon, and Prussia rescinded the ban on Hitler in the autumn of 1928. In the Reichstag elections in May of that year, NSDAP candidates secured just twelve seats. Party membership was becalmed on one hundred and seventy-eight thousand in a nation of some twenty million registered voters.
(From left) Rudolf Hess, Hitler, Julius Streicher and Alfred Rosenberg in Nuremberg in August 1927. Hitler dedicated Mein Kampf to Hess, who had been a fellow-prisoner at Landsberg and was Deputy Führer until early September 1939. In 1935 Streicher was appointed Gauleiter of Franconia but was removed from public life, for gross corruption, in 1940.
Another economic downturn, of the most savage kind, came to the rescue of the NSDAP. In 1929 the world’s economic bubble burst. In Europe and the United States the Great Depression was the central event of the interwar years. Within three years it had propelled Hitler and the Nazis into power. Inasmuch as we are still living with many of the consequences of World War II, for which Hitler was wholly responsible, we are still feeling the backwash of the Great Depression today.
The onset of the Depression can be dated precisely. Since 1921 the American stock market had prospered as never before, and in the eighteen months before the crash in the autumn of 1929 had enjoyed a runaway boom. On 29 October 1929, the boom burst; share prices fell even faster than they had risen, and thousands of speculators faced ruin. The US financial collapse soon overwhelmed Europe. America’s loans to Europe had already stopped; now American purchases from Europe ground to a halt. The European economy was teetering on a cliff-edge. Postwar recovery had boosted industry but had not brought a corresponding expansion of markets, and it was the flood of US dollars that had maintained prosperity. European factories were now forced to close their gates. World trade was more than halved within two years and unemployment soared, particularly in the most industrialized countries. In Germany it would reach six million. The hopes of the NSDAP rose with the rising tide of unemployment.
In the months preceding the Wall Street Crash, there were some significant indications that the fortunes of the NSDAP were describing an upward curve.
There were encouraging local and state election results, and in June, Coburg in northern Bavaria became the first town in Germany to elect a Nazi-run town council.
The vexed issue of reparations also gave the Party a shot in the arm. On 7 June agreement had been reached on the terms of the American-devised Young Plan to regulate the payment of reparations. The terms were lower than those prescribed by the Dawes Plan but the reparations would not be paid off until 1987. As a sweetener, the Allies offered to withdraw from the Rhineland by the end of June, five years earlier than had been stipulated in the Treaty of Versailles. The nationalist Right reacted with fury. A Reich Committee for the German People’s Petition was formed to organize a plebiscite demanding that the government reject the Young Plan. The leading light in the Reich Committee, Alfred Hugenberg, a director of the industrial giant Krupp, press baron, movie magnate and leader of the German National People’s Party (DNVP), persuaded Hitler to join. Hitler’s association with captains of industry was not to the liking of the NSDAP left, represented by Gregor Strasser and his brother Otto, but Hitler could see the opportunities it presented. The plebiscite was a failure, but Hitler and the NSDAP benefited hugely from the exposure they were given by the Hugenberg press.
Association with the Reich Committee brought Hitler into contact with other industrial magnates, including Fritz Thyssen, president of the largest steel combine in Europe. Thus far, the Party’s chief industrialist benefactor had been been the Ruhr magnate Emil Kirdorf, who had been introduced to Hitler by Winifred Wagner, the widow of the composer’s son Siegfried, and doyenne of the Bayreuth Festival.13 Kirdorf and Wagner were both guests at the Party Rally held at Nuremberg at the beginning of August 1929, which was attended by some forty thousand people. At the rally, Hitler’s mastery over the movement he had created was total. The crisis which would bring him to power was about to unfold.
The Völkischer Beobachter did not run a story on the economic meltdown on the day after the Wall Street Crash, but the massive shock it administered to the fragile democracy established by the Weimar Republic acted as a recruiting sergeant for the NSDAP. Bitterness and betrayal did their work, as did the idealistic ‘national community’ offered by Hitler as the solution to the catastrophe. The dynamic alchemy of Nazi propaganda turned the base metal of prejudice into the gold of patriotism. Those who did not belong to the national community, notably the Jews, would be dealt with harshly. Within the community, the right of the individual would be subordinated to the common good. This was the only way to ensure that Germany was released from the straitjacket of Versailles. The essential preliminary to this process of national renewal was the liquidation of the democratic system itself.
The democracies in the United States, Britain and France were severely shaken by the Depression but were nevertheless able to survive it. But in Germany the democracy established after World War I was a sickly growth, in spite of the improvements wrought by Weimar from 1924 to 1929. The yearning for an authoritarian alternative ran deeper than the shallow roots of Weimar democracy. Significant sectors of society – landowners, civil servants, many intellectuals – had been prepared only to tolerate the Republic rather than actively throw their support behind it. Now Germany’s political class conspired to ensure its destruction.
ELECTIONEERING
The drama was characterized by a series of critical miscalculations by Germany’s politicians. On 27 March 1930 the chancellor, Hermann Müller, who headed an uneasy coalition government, resigned over the question of unemployment insurance. Müller’s administration was replaced by a minority cabinet. The new chancellor, Heinrich Brüning of the Roman Catholic Centre Party (Zentrum), lacked a majority in parliament and proposed to implement measures through presidential decree, which was permitted by Article 48 of the Weimar constitution. However, Brüning rapidly found that he could not entirely dispense with the support of the Reichstag. When a bill which aimed drastically to reduce public spending was rejected by the German parliament, Brüning decided to dissolve the Reichstag rather than negotiate his way painfully towards a majority.
New elections were set for 14 September. The NSDAP’s recently appointed propaganda chief, Josef Goebbels, threw himself into a summer of frantic agitation. In the climate of the time, the NSDAP benefited hugely from the combination in its name of the words ‘National’ and ‘Socialist’. Nationalists could be counted among former officers, businessmen, landowners and members of the bourgeois professional classes. The Socialist appeal reached the working class alienated by the internationalist approach of the German Communist Party (KPD) and its adherence to orders from Moscow. The KPD’s leaders were in no position to exploit Germany’s bruised pride to their advantage.
This enabled Hitler to claim an interest in, and the attention of, a cross-section of classes within German society. To the military he promised expansion and rearmament; to businessmen he promised full order books and the crushing of the Communists who wanted the nationalization of industry; to the unemployed he promised work; to the middle classes, ruined by inflation and the effects of the Depression, he promised to extirpate the root cause of their misery – the Jews and the money barons; to nationalists he promised the revival of German greatness and an end to the Treaty of Versailles. Rather than being the representative of special interest groups, Hitler could claim to speak for the nation as a whole.
The drive and dynamism of the NSDAP campaign earned grudging praise from normally hostile papers like the Dortmunder General-Anzeiger which observed of the Party’s campaign in the Ruhr during the summer of 1930: ‘Here one can only accord the strongest recognition of the organization, activity and will to power which inspires the National Socialists … For years the flag-bearers of the party have not avoided going into the most outlying villages and casting their slogans to the masses in at least a hundred meetings a day in Germany.’
In the run-up to polling day, Hitler gave twenty major speeches. On 12 September he addressed a crowd of twenty-five thousand in Breslau’s Jahrhunderthalle while the six thousand who could not get in listened to him over loudspeakers. In his speeches he toned down his attacks on Jews and the demands for living space, instead emphazising the abject failures of the Weimar system and promising a new Germany which would transcend class divisions. Only the ‘high ideal’ of National Socialism could provide the answer to Germany’s ills and the liberation of its entire people. Hitler was not selling a political programme; he was promising national redemption. It was like the Salvation Army all over again, this time promising Heaven on Earth.
In reality, the National Socialist programme was a tired replay of Pan-Germanism’s greatest hits, to which Hitler nevertheless imparted a furious energy which none of his opponents could begin to match. To many voters who were disillusioned with the predictable posturing of conventional politicians, the NSDAP seemed to be singing a fresh tune.
When the votes had been counted, the NSDAP had increased the number of seats they held from twelve to one hundred and seven. It was now the second largest party in Germany. New recruits rushed to join, and membership of the SA rose to half a million. Hitler was now a politician of national, even international significance. He was only too happy to give an interview to the British Daily Mail, whose right-wing proprietor, Lord Rothermere, had greeted the results of the election as ‘the rebirth of Germany as a nation’ and welcomed the National Socialists as a ‘bulwark against Communism’. The journalist who conducted the interview, Rothay Reynolds, was utterly disarmed: ‘Hitler spoke with great simplicity and with great earnestness. There was not a trace in his manner of those arts which political leaders are apt to employ when they wish to impress. I was conscious that I was talking to a man whose power lies not, as many will still think, in his eloquence and in his ability to hold the attention of the mob, but in his conviction.’
Hitler was triumphant but tired. The day before he gave that interview he had appeared as a major defence witness at the trial in Leipzig of three young army officers, whose enthusiasm for the Nazi Party had resulted in charges of high treason for involvement in a purported putsch by the National Socialists. (Reichswehr officers were banned from participating in activities which were aimed at changing the constitution.) Defence counsel for one of the officers was Hans Frank, who called Hitler as a witness.
Predictably, Hitler was allowed, once again, to use the courtroom as a bully pulpit, praising the Reichswehr as ‘the basis for the German future’. He denied that the Party had any plans to launch a putsch. Indeed, he continued, the NSDAP intended to achieve power by constitutional means. Goebbels was later to assure one of the defendants, ‘Now we are strictly legal’, and Putzi Hanfstaengl ensured that there was wide coverage of the trial in the overseas press. Two of the officers were cashiered, but their fate was not the big story. Rather, it was Hitler’s pledge not to stray from the constitutional path, and the widespread coverage it received – another skilfully handled publicity coup, which encouraged sceptical conservatives to reconsider their initial reluctance to work with the leader of the Nazi Party.
A notable exception was Chancellor Brüning, who met Hitler at the latter’s request early in October. Brüning was hoping to brief Hitler on the current negotiations to obtain a substantial foreign loan and, by taking him into his confidence, coax him into leading a loyal opposition. The chancellor was trying to take the heat out of an already tricky situation, which had only been exacerbated by Hitler’s intemperate attacks on the Young Plan. There was no meeting of minds. To Brüning’s distaste, he was subjected to an hour-long monologue during which he fastidiously noted the frequency with which Hitler spat out the word ‘annihilate’, a fate to be meted out to a long list of enemies from the French to the KPD. Brüning intended the meeting to be kept secret but Hitler, who had started hesitantly, soon hit his stride as squads of SA men drilled noisily outside, a manoeuvre which Brüning realized had been pre-arranged. By the time Hitler finished his tirade, it was as if he were addressing a mass rally at the Circus Krone rather than an audience of four – Brüning, Reich Minister Treviranus, and Hitler’s own colleagues Gregor Strasser and Wilhelm Frick.
Before the meeting, Hitler had given his word to Brüning that the discussion would remain confidential. But immediately afterwards he briefed Putzi Hanfstaengl, who leaked the information to the American ambassador. Although the two men parted on civil terms, Brüning developed a heartfelt antipathy towards Hitler, whom he characterized as an unsophisticated but highly dangerous demagogue. The feeling was mutual. On Hitler’s part, however, it was prompted by a paranoid conviction that he had been patronized by the chancellor. And hate was the fuel which fired Hitler. Brüning was added to the long list of enemies to be annihilated.
Although Hitler appeared unsophisticated to the fastidious Brüning, his lifestyle had changed dramatically since the days when he lived in modest lodgings in the Thierchstrasse. He had now moved to a luxury apartment in Munich’s fashionable Bogenhausen district. Here he was looked after by his half-sister Angela and his niece Geli Raubal. Hitler rarely entertained there, preferring the company of his shifting cast of cronies at the Café Heck, where he held interminable court. The remoteness he cultivated, and his personal dominance over those around him, enabled him to extend indefinitely the undisciplined, dilettante life he had lived during his early days in Vienna. Now, however, the settings in which he wove his spells were on a grander scale.
Hitler adored the cinema, and the environments he chose for himself had all the impact of a Hollywood or UFA epic but lacked the slightest trace of intimacy. Nowhere was this more evident than in his so-called Arbeitzimmer, or work room in Munich’s Brown House, the headquarters of the NSDAP. The vast room was dominated by a colossal portrait of Frederick the Great and an outsize bust of Mussolini. The furniture was on a similar scale. The room was a cinema art director’s dream, but not a space in which one can imagine anyone having a single original thought. Hitler was childishly proud of it but seldom there. Indeed, his lieutenants were hard put to it to know exactly where he was at any given moment. Meetings were there to be broken when Hitler was seized by a sudden whim. Pinned down, he often refused to address the matter in hand but embarked on another flight of fancy. The one place where he could be located with any degree of certainty by ruffled subordinates was in the Café Heck, surrounded by the chauffeureska.
Hitler’s dominating personality ensured that those who worked for him had to adapt their own rhythms and routines to accommodate his singularities of behaviour. They learned to ‘work towards the Führer’, to anticipate when they could translate his often cloudy generalizations into detailed plans of action. This was effective enough in the early 1930s when the Party had a single, well-defined aim, that of gaining power. But it was a method ill-suited to the governance of a modern state, a peculiar style of working that poses problems for historians when they consider numerous aspects of the Third Reich, not least the Holocaust.
RALLIES
The first NSDAP rallies were held in 1923 in Munich and in 1926 in Weimar. From 1927 they were held at Nuremberg in Franconia, a German state whose Gauleiter was a Hitler favourite, Julius Streicher. From 1933 the rallies were held in the first half of September on a parade ground – the Zeppelin Field – the size of twelve football pitches which could accommodate some two hundred and fifty thousand spectators housed in stands designed by Albert Speer. By 1937, the original wooden stands had been replaced by stone structures dominated by a monumental grandstand, modelled on the ancient altar of Pergamon, the central feature of which was the Führer rostrum. From 1933 the rallies were themed. In 1937 the theme was ‘The Rally of Labour’, which celebrated the reduction in unemployment since 1933. This rally was also marked by Speer’s ‘cathedral of light’, one hundred and fifty-two searchlights casting vertical beams into the night sky to symbolize the walls of a building. Much of the ceremonial at and around these rallies partook of a quasi-religious symbolism, an essential element of the Führer cult. This was evoked in the 1934 Leni Riefenstahl documentary Triumph of the Will, which opens with shots of steeply banked cloud formations underscored by the drone of Hitler’s invisible aircraft. Here, the pagan myth of the universal father Odin and his host raging in the skies was fused with the mountain cult of Weimar cinema.
THE GADARENE SWINE
After the Reichstag election of September 1930, the Weimar Republic raced to destruction like a runaway train. Rational debate was replaced by street violence. All the leading parties had their own private armies. In addition to the SA, there were, most prominently, the Steel Helmets (Stahlhelm), a nationalist paramilitary grouping consisting of veterans which, in 1930, boasted half a million members. The Schufo was the paramilitary arm of the conservative Reichsbanner, a smaller party that supported the Republic. The aim of the Schufo was to prevent a putsch by the NSDAP or the Communists, but it was disabled by simply standing for the status quo. The Red Front Fighters’ Association (Rotfrontkampferbund) was the paramilitary arm of the KPD, and its principal enemy was the SA, to which it often came a poor second in street battles.
At the time there was also fierce conflict within the Nazi Party over the autonomy of the SA, now some eighty thousand strong. Many of the stormtroopers baulked at control by a civilian Party leader and still hankered after the permanent revolution promised by Ernst Röhm before his departure to Bolivia. Men like Walter Stennes, the SA chief in eastern Germany, were determined to go their own way. At the end of August 1930, disaffected SA men ransacked the Party headquarters in Berlin; a panicking Goebbels urged Hitler to assume overall control of the SA and SS.A combination of Hitler’s impassioned oratory and a number of financial inducements defused the situation, but the respite was not to last long.
At the end of November 1930, Ernst Röhm, now returned from Bolivia, was appointed the SA’s chief of staff. His lack of involvement in the recent dispute encouraged the case for his appointment, although he had many opponents in the SA who were less than happy with his flamboyant homosexuality. In any event, the crisis which had marked the summer was boiling up again. Stennes was calling for a putsch, forcing Hitler to block any such action. In speeches, and in the Völkischer Beobachter, he declared that this flew in the face of Nazi policy. He told SA men in Munich, ‘We need the SA for more important things, namely for the construction of the Third Reich.’
On 28 March 1931 an emergency decree gave the Brüning government sweeping powers to combat ‘political excesses’. Hitler, fearing a new ban on the NSDAP, ordered the SA to comply, but the SA’s leadership in Berlin responded with a stinging personal attack on Hitler, accusing him of despotism and demagogy. However, Stennes had shot his bolt; when the SA membership was asked to choose between Hitler and the rebels, they quickly fell back into line.
Hermann Göring was parachuted in to deal with the aftermath – although Goebbels cannily remained in charge in Berlin – and about five hundred SA men in north and east Germany were purged. The SA was back on the leash, still snapping and snarling but for the moment held in check. Röhm was given the task of heading a new recruitment drive, trebling SA membership by the early winter of 1931, and charged with the formation’s reorganization. In rural areas, far from the savage street fighting which scarred Germany’s cities and towns, the SA now took on a more respectable image. Nevertheless, the old soldier Röhm was storing up trouble for the future. The SA remained first and last a popular militia. Many stormtroopers hoped that it would form the core of a renewed German Army. The Party and the SA were on a collision course.
GELI RAUBAL
In the autumn of 1931, Hitler faced another problem, which was personally traumatic and had the potential to damage him politically – the suicide of his niece Geli Raubal.
The precise nature of Hitler’s relationships with women will always remain problematic. Gregor Strasser highlighted the essential coldness of Hitler’s nature when he observed, ‘He doesn’t smoke, he doesn’t drink, he eats almost nothing but green stuff, he doesn’t touch any woman! How are we supposed to understand him to put him across to other people?’
Strasser was not quite right on the women. Hitler did, from time to time, enjoy the company of women, and would invariably make courtly, if laboured, attempts to put them at their ease. During World War II he was always very attentive to secretaries like Traudl Junge. Sometimes the actor took over and he would briefly abandon his formal manners. On one occasion, when he was alone with Putzi von Hanfstaengl’s wife Helena, he fell to his knees and confessed his love for her. However, the worldly Putzi later dismissed this as mere role-playing, on a par with Hitler’s deeply unconvincing traumatized prisoner routine.
Certainly Hitler never treated women as equals, and although they were not banned from the sessions at the Café Heck, they were never encouraged to join the conversation in the rare intervals between Hitler’s monologues. For Hitler, whom Helena Hanfstaengl considered a sexual neuter, the nearest thing to emotional fulfilment came at the climax of his big speeches, delivered to what he always considered was the ‘feminine mass’ of his followers. His own stated preference was for women who were pretty, domestic airheads, a description which, until she bravely decided to spend her final days in the Berlin bunker, fitted Eva Braun for most of her life.
Geli Raubal fell into this category but she nevertheless struck a deep chord in Hitler’s perverse psyche. Briefly, Uncle ‘Alf’ became the centre of Geli’s world. He paid for her to have singing lessons, although she was never likely to become an operatic diva. She accompanied Hitler around Munich; wherever they went, he sang her praises. Then it all went sour. Geli developed a crush on Emil Maurice, Hitler’s chauffeur. Hitler threw a tantrum spectacular even by his standards and packed Geli off to stay with one of the Party’s benefactors. When she returned, Hitler became pathologically possessive. Raubal was now a virtual prisoner in his apartment, and she took to describing Uncle Alf as a ‘monster’. She planned to return to Vienna.
On Friday 18 September, after a bitter argument, Hitler denied Geli permission to go to Vienna before himself leaving on a trip to Nuremberg. Early the next morning he was brought rushing back by the news that Geli had shot herself with his revolver. Hitler’s enemies could hardly believe their luck. Stories of increasing improbability, laced with feverish sexual innuendo, raced around Munich.
The facts, however, were tragically simple – Geli had shot herself in the head. The NSDAP shot itself in the foot by issuing a lame explanation of her death – it had apparently happened entirely by accident when she was playing with Hitler’s gun. Was Geli’s death a tragic accident? Or was it a cry for help which somehow went wrong? The truth will never be known. Hitler turned her room in the Prinzregentenplatz apartment into a shrine. What is clear is that the death of Geli Raubal plunged Hitler into a deep depression, and for a few days he spoke about dropping out of politics altogether. Then the actor regained control. Hitler was due to speak in Hamburg and, although he looked pale and strained when he appeared on the platform, his speech was rapturously received. Politics had reclaimed him.
From 1933, the dynamic of the Nazi state was geared to ‘working towards the Führer’, meaning, essentially, tailoring policies to conform with the Führer’s often cloudily expressed world view. Moreover, from 1938, Hitler curtailed all cabinet meetings. Thus, to the many cogs in the Nazi machine, power depended on access to Hitler, which few obtained on a regular basis. By the same token, the successful ability to interpret the will of the Führer and put it into effect was the path to gaining and retaining Hitler’s favour. This involved competing arms of the Nazi state attempting to realize Hitler’s vision. They vied with each other over action against the Jews, from the 1935 Nuremberg Laws to the rampage on Kristallnacht, and sometimes found themselves at odds with Hitler, invariably on tactical rather than substantive grounds. In contrast, initiatives such as the euthanasia programme of 1939, prosecuted by the Aktion T4 organization to kill mentally and physically handicapped children, was launched outside the framework of government but with the vital support of Hitler, in effect a few lines typed on Hitler’s private headed notepaper. As a result, nearly a hundred thousand children were murdered by doctors using injections of luminal or carbon monoxide poisoning. Doctors then lied about the cause of death. Ambitious officials had attempted to secure the Führer’s blessing by designing a policy which chimed with his world view. Hitler can thus be seen as the demonic but often distant enabler for the vilest excesses of the Third Reich.
Sensing that the Weimar Republic was mortally wounded, the forces of the extreme Right gathered for the kill. The autumn of 1931 saw the formation of the Harzburg Front, a grouping of parties of the Right with the aim of presenting a unified opposition to the Brüning government. Fritz Thyssen was involved, but representatives of big business and heavy industry were notably absent when the Front was established at the spa town of Bad Harzburg, in Brunswick, on 21 October. However, the usual suspects were there – Hugenberg’s DNVP, the leadership of the Steel Helmets, and the NSDAP. Lurking on the fringes, there was an interesting supporting cast of characters: the Hohenzollern princes Eitel Friedrich and August Wilhelm (sons of the exiled Kaiser Wilhelm II), the former army chief of staff, General von Seeckt and, significantly, the former president of the Reichsbank, Hjalmar Schacht, who had resigned over the implementation of the Young Plan in December 1930 and was now leading an ostensibly pro-Republican party, the DDP.
On the face of it, Schacht was an unlikely fellow-traveller with the NSDAP, but he had been introduced to Hitler after a dinner with Göring in January 1931. Schacht, an immensely wily operator, was impressed by Hitler’s ‘absolute conviction of the rightness of his outlook and his determination to translate this outlook into action. Even at this first meeting it was obvious to me that Hitler’s powers of propaganda would have a tremendous pull with the German population if we did not succeed in overcoming the economic crisis and weaning the masses from radicalism. Hitler was obsessed by his own words, a thorough fanatic with the most powerful effect on his audience, a born agitator in spite of a hoarse, sometimes broken and not infrequently croaking voice.’
Alfred Hugenberg had intended to use the Harzburg meeting to forge, under his leadership, a united opposition of the Right and to urge the choice of a single candidate to represent it in the forthcoming presidential election. However, his efforts foundered on the failure of those at Harzburg to agree on anything beyond their detestation of the Weimar Republic. Mutual suspicion was the order of the day. The NSDAP, in particular, viewed Hugenberg with the deepest distrust. Hitler thought the Front’s manifesto, demanding new Reichstag elections and the suspension of emergency legislation, hardly worth the paper on which it was written. He had also delivered a very public snub to the Steel Helmets at the Harzburg Front’s concluding rally, taking the salute from the SA before abruptly leaving the podium, having kept the Steel Helmets waiting for half an hour. Hitler now felt sufficiently confident that the NSDAP could go it alone. A week later he attended a rally in Braunschweig and took the salute at a march past of over a hundred thousand SA and SS men.
Hitler with the so-called ‘Blood Banner’, a swastika flag carried during the Munich putsch and a key element in Nazi iconography. It had reputedly been soaked in the blood of Nazi martyrs who had fallen in the November 1923 putsch, primarily Andreas Bauriendl, who had died underneath it. At Nuremberg rallies, in a pseudo-religious gesture, Hitler touched other Nazi banners with the ‘Blood Flag’. It was last seen in public at a Volkssturm initiation ceremony on 18 October 1944, which was conducted by Heinrich Himmler and attended by many of the Nazi paladins.
Reich President Hindenburg’s seven-year term of office was due to end on 5 May 1932. In the prevailing climate of crisis, a move was made to confirm the aged war hero for a further term without the need to hold a divisive election. Approval required a two-thirds majority in the Reichstag, but this could not be secured without the support of the NSDAP and the DNVP.
Hitler withheld the support of the NSDAP on ‘constitutional, foreign-political, domestic and moral grounds’. After the customary delay, which drove Goebbels into a frenzy of impatience, Hitler agreed to his name being put forward as a candidate for the presidency. The corporal would stand against the field marshal; the fire-breathing political adventurer against the hero of Tannenberg and symbol of national values above party politics. When Goebbels announced Hitler’s candidacy at a rally in the Sportpalast on 22 February, the crowd cheered itself hoarse for ten minutes.
A minor but nevertheless crucial technicality still stood in Hitler’s way. He was not a German citizen and therefore could not run for public office. However, swift steps were taken to appoint him a government councillor in the Office of State Culture and Measurements in Braunschweig and as state representative in Berlin. Thus it was as a civil servant that Hitler acquired citizenship of a state he was shortly to destroy.
There were other candidates,14 but the election boiled down to a straight contest between Hitler and Hindenburg. The Nazi programme presented Hitler as the candidate for change. At a massive rally in Berlin’s Sportpalast on 27 February, he urged the old man to step aside. Germany was then engulfed in a delirium of electioneering – this was the first of five elections in 1932. Hitler polled 30 per cent of the thirty-eight million votes cast, while Hindenburg with over 49 per cent nonetheless failed to achieve an absolute majority. There had to be a second round.
This saw the adoption by the NSDAP of a new propaganda weapon. Hitler hired an aircraft for the short campaign, which was truncated by Easter, enabling him to make twenty speeches before a combined audience of nearly a million. While Hitler increased his share of the vote, at over thirteen million, to 37 per cent – over one-third of the German population – it was Hindenburg, with 53 per cent, who was re-elected.
April saw more state elections and more ‘Germany Flights’ by Hitler, crisscrossing the country from the biggest cities to the deepest countryside. It was a sensational progress. Crowds waited for hours in drenching rain to see him and hear him speak. When the sun shone the listeners dubbed it ‘Führer weather’. One of them was a schoolteacher, Luise Solmitz,15 who saw him near Hamburg on 23 April after waiting nearly three hours:
The hours passed, the sun shone, the expectation mounted … It got to three o’clock. ‘The Führer’s coming!’ A thrill goes through the masses. Around the platform, hands could be seen raised in the Hitler greeting … There stood Hitler in a simple black coat, looking expectantly over the crowd. A forest of swastika banners rustled upwards. The jubilation of the moment gave vent to a rousing cry of ‘Heil’. Then Hitler spoke. Main idea: out of the parties a people will emerge, the German people. He castigated the system … For the rest, he refrained from personal attacks and also unspecific and specific promises. His voice was hoarse from speaking so much in previous days. When the speech was over, there were more roars of jubilation and applause. Hitler saluted, gave his thanks, the German Anthem sounded … Hitler was helped into his coat. Then he went. How many look to him in touching faith as the helper, a saviour, the redeemer from over-great distress. To him, who rescues the Prussian prince, the scholar, the clergyman, the peasant, the worker, the unemployed out of the party into the people.
The elections confirmed that the NSDAP was Germany’s largest political party, overhauling the SPD (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschland) which had been the dominant political player since 1919. In Anhalt, where the Nazis recorded just under 41 per cent, they were able to nominate the first Nazi Minister President of a German state. Goebbels noted jubilantly, ‘It’s a fantastic victory that we’ve attained. We must come to power in the foreseeable future. Otherwise we’ll win ourselves to death in elections.’
The creaking wheels of German democracy were working loose as successive coalition governments went through a routine which was becoming ominously familiar: the formation of a coalition, an attempt to get to grips with Germany’s difficulties, government by decree, the setting aside of the parliamentary system, collapse. By 1932, it was the Army which effectively kept governments afloat, or sank them, by granting or withholding its willingness to back any given combination of parties, all the while steadfastly denying that it was in the least interested in politics. The convention established by Seeckt, in which the Army was above politics, had completely broken down. However, once the Army had got its hands on the political tar baby it defiled everything else it touched.
On 30 May 1932, Chancellor Brüning resigned, brought down by the disastrous effects caused by his deflationary policies. Casting around for a new chancellor acceptable to them, the Army chose Franz von Papen,16 an urbane and well-connected Catholic aristocrat. Papen’s path to the chancellorship had been cleared by General Kurt von Schleicher, head of the ministerial office, the political office in the Reichswehr. Papen envisaged a form of government independent of party, and thus forced to depend wholly on emergency decrees. He was not overly impressed when he met Hitler a week after taking office, and his postwar recollection of their initial meeting drips with well-bred disdain:
He was wearing a dark-blue suit and seemed the complete petit bourgeois. He had an unhealthy complexion, and with his little moustache and curious hairstyle had an indefinable bohemian quality … As he talked about his party’s aims I was struck by the fanatical insistence with which he presented his arguments. I realised that the fate of my government would depend to a large extent on the willingness of this man and his followers to back me up, and that this would be the most difficult problem with which I should have to deal.
The Reichstag voted down the proposal to adopt Papen’s non-party government, and another election was set for 31 July. Thanks to the intervention of Schleicher the SA, which had been banned before the state election campaign, was allowed to re-form. As a result, the summer saw a savage escalation of political violence which brought Germany to the edge of civil war. In the last two weeks of June, after the lifting of the ban on the SA, there were seventeen politically motivated murders. In July there were eighty-six as the Nazis and the Communists fought it out on the streets. In the worst incident, at Altona on 17 July, four were killed and forty-six wounded as shooting broke out during an SA parade which was seen as a direct provocation to the Communists. The campaign also featured another Nazi propaganda innovation: a combination of films about Hitler and the distribution of fifty-thousand gramophone records of him making an Appeal to the Nation.
When the votes were counted at the end of July, the Nazis had secured just under fourteen million votes, giving them two hundred and thirty of the six hundred and eight Reichstag seats. The Social Democrats trailed far behind, with eight million votes and one hundred and thirty-three seats, and the Communists made small gains but still came a poor third.
Nevertheless, anxiety was setting in among the Nazi Party leadership. Goebbels recognized that the Party had reached a dangerous crossroads: ‘We have won a tiny bit … Result: now we must come to power and exterminate Marxism. One way or another! Something must happen. The time for opposition is over. Now deeds! Hitler is of the same opinion. Now events have to sort themselves out and then decisions have to be taken. We won’t get to an absolute majority this way’.
Hitler then opened secret negotiations with Reichswehr Minister Schleicher. His demands were straightforward: the chancellorship for himself; the Air Ministry for Göring; the Ministry for the People’s Education for Goebbels; the Interior Ministry for Wilhelm Frick; and the Labour Ministry for Gregor Strasser. Schleicher agreed to present Hitler’s terms to Hindenburg. He was confident that, as Germany’s political éminence grise, and with the Army in his pocket, he could control Hitler. But he could not control Hindenburg, who summarily rejected the proposal. The old warlord was adamant that he was not going to treat with the Bohemian corporal.
On 13 August Hitler met Schleicher and Papen and was informed that Hindenburg was not prepared to appoint him chancellor. Later that day he was summoned to a meeting with Hindenburg himself, who extended an invitation to him to serve in Papen’s government. Hitler told him that it was the chancellorship or nothing. The president refused to budge, and told Hitler that he had no intention of placing the reins of power in the hands of a party which was so intolerant of others. Nor could he predict the effect of such a decision at home and abroad. He urged Hitler to conduct the opposition in a ‘gentlemanly fashion’ and shook his hand as though they were ‘old comrades’.
But Hitler was no gentleman. He had kept himself under control during the twenty-minute audience with Hindenburg but emerged from the meeting incandescent with rage, only too well aware that he had suffered a major setback, the most serious since the failure of the Munich putsch. He had succeeded in what he had always done best, mobilizing and manipulating the masses, but had driven the NSDAP up a political cul-de-sac. In spite of its huge electoral success, with over thirteen million members of the electorate voting for the NSDAP, he had been rejected in his bid for the chancellorship by the one man whose assent, under the Weimar constitution, was indispensable.
The irony was that Hitler was nobody’s first choice, but most people’s second or third. The men who called the shots in Germany – the big businessmen, the established politicians, and the soldiers – devoted much of their time to making deals to shut him out. His followers urged him to launch a coup d’état, but he insisted on waiting.
THE DEATH OF WEIMAR
In the autumn of 1932, the Weimar Republic entered its death throes. Political power was now concentrated in very few hands, but the elite groups who exercised it did not form a united front. Politically and economically they were divided. It was the Harzburg Front all over again. They all wanted an end to democracy, the destruction of Marxism, which included the destruction of the SDP, and the introduction of an authoritarian government. There agreement ended.
From this process, the great mass of the German electorate was utterly excluded. However, the power elites had no control over the masses. Those whose sympathies lay on the Right were controlled by Hitler, whom the elites were determined to exclude, hence the political impasse of the autumn of 1932. Hitler could block any move designed to keep him out of power but, acting alone, was not sufficiently well-placed to gain that power. Once again, it was the lack of unity among his enemies that enabled Hitler finally to become chancellor. Effectively, his enemies conspired to hand him the prize.
After a vote of no confidence in the Papen government, supported by over 80 per cent of the deputies, the Reichstag was dissolved and new elections were called for November. Hitler was exhausted but the electioneering, in the fifth campaign of 1932, galvanized him. Beginning on 11 October, he launched another series of Germany Flights, giving fifty speeches in just over three weeks (on one occasion four in one day), all of them lambasting Papen and the ‘Reaction’, who lacked the smallest shred of popular support. He emphasized his own lack of ambition for office, instead claiming his preference as being the leader of the NSDAP. Papen, he said, was a rich aristocrat who still drew his chancellor’s salary; he, on the other hand, was working for the people and would make no compromises on the way to power. ‘My opponents deceive themselves above all about my enormous determination. I’ve chosen my path and will follow it to its end’.
By now, the German people were as exhausted with elections as Hitler was energized by them, and turnout was at its lowest since before the onset of the Depression. When the results were announced, the Nazis had lost thirty-four seats and the Communists had gained eleven. A crisis of confidence ensued within the NSDAP, in part caused by Hitler’s refusal to enter the cabinet in August. The scathing attacks on Papen had driven off many middle-class and rural voters. The Hamburg schoolteacher Luise Solmitz reluctantly cast her vote for the DNVP.
The NSDAP, however, remained the largest party in the Reichstag and Papen proposed to dissolve parliament again, along with an indefinite postponement of elections. At first Hindenburg backed this move, but Schleicher and the Army withdrew their support. They argued a worst-case scenario, a military move against Germany by Poland, and a simultaneous uprising by the Communists and the NSDAP. If this happened, the Army could not maintain order. Faced with this alarming but highly unlikely prospect, Hindenburg changed his mind. On 2 December 1932, General Kurt von Schleicher became chancellor of Germany. His term of office was destined to last a mere fifty-nine days.
Schleicher was faced with a naggingly familiar problem. He had to put together a government which would have the support of all the right-wing and centre parties, and of the Nazis. The Nazi Party had been virtually bankrupted by a year of constant campaigning, but Hitler had no intention of getting into bed with Schleicher who was now putting out feelers to Gregor Strasser.
Unlike Goebbels, Strasser had never been an unreserved convert to the Hitler myth, although in many ways he took the same line as Hitler. He was an out-andout racist and a vigorous apostle of political violence, but he had reached the conclusion that Hitler’s absolute inflexibility would permanently exclude the Party from power. Strasser was not an all-or-nothing man, and was prepared to contemplate joining coalitions as a way of gaining political purchase in Weimar’s convoluted jostling for power. Moreover, he had never wholly abandoned his Socialist leanings – a philosophical underpinning which was anathema to Hitler – and had strong links with the German trade unions. After the November elections, Strasser became increasingly semi-detached from Hitler’s inner circle, a lonely voice urging Hitler to abandon his strategy of holding out for the chancellorship.
The qualities which estranged Strasser from Hitler were precisely those which recommended him to the embattled Schleicher. At the beginning of December, Schleicher offered Strasser the posts of Vice-Chancellor and Minister-President in Prussia. Inevitably this brought Strasser into direct conflict with Hitler, and at a meeting two days later there were heated exchanges between the two men. Strasser then backed down. He knew that he was outgunned by Hitler, resigned all his Party offices and retired from politics. His departure produced an immediate and all too familiar result.
The organizational framework of the Party, which Strasser had in large part created, was dismantled, and Hitler himself assumed political control with Robert Ley as his deputy. Declarations of loyalty to Hitler were elicited from all sections of the Party across Germany. There was much shaking of hands with the Führer, and the backs of wavering loyalists were stiffened by the gaze of his deep blue eyes. Goebbels wrote triumphantly, ‘Strasser is isolated. Dead man!’
Schleicher’s failure to enlist Strasser and the Nazis in his struggle to stay in power fatally wounded his faltering chancellorship. Then Hitler received help from an unexpected quarter. A Cologne banker, Baron Kurt von Schroeder, engineered a meeting on 4 January between Papen and Hitler. At this and several subsequent meetings, the two men agreed to shelve their differences and work together for the overthrow of Schleicher. Papen harboured hopes of once again becoming chancellor and, foolishly, believed that Hitler could be kept in check. For his part, Hitler was well aware that the man to unlock the door to Hindenburg’s approval was the president’s favourite, Papen.
On 28 January Schleicher and his cabinet tendered their resignations. By now, Papen recognized that, inevitably, Hitler would be the next chancellor. He saw his main task as ensuring that Hitler was ring-fenced by conservatives who were held in high esteem by Hindenburg but were nevertheless willing to work with the new man. On the night of 28 January, his work done, Papen met Hindenburg, who withdrew his objections to a Hitler chancellorship. The door had been unlocked.
In discussions with Hitler and Göring on 29 January, Papen divided the spoils. All the cabinet posts bar two (and the chancellorship) were to be held by conservatives. Frick was to be nominated as Reich Minister of the Interior; Göring would be Papen’s deputy at the Prussian Ministry of the Interior, a key appointment giving the Nazis control over the police in Germany’s biggest state. There was no place for Goebbels, who was needed to mastermind the election campaign which Hitler was insisting must follow his appointment as chancellor. Hugenberg, who in November had warned Hindenburg that Hitler was wholly untrustworthy, was bought off with the Economics Ministry. Given a sniff of power, Hugenberg had put aside his misgivings, concluding, ‘We have boxed him in.’When Papen was warned that he was placing himself in Hitler’s hands, he replied, ‘You are mistaken. We’ve hired him!’
Shortly after midday on 30 January 1933, the Hitler cabinet filed into the rooms of the Reich President. They had kept Hindenburg waiting while they bickered outside the door over the final composition of the cabinet. Even at this stage, the cracks were showing. A visibly annoyed Hindenburg congratulated the nationalist Right on having at last come together. After swearing to carry out his obligations for the good of the entire nation, Hitler gave a short and unexpected speech, vowing to uphold the constitution, respect the rights of the president and, following the next election, to restore Germany to parliamentary government. There was a long pause before Hindenburg replied, ‘And now, gentlemen, forwards with God.’
The Hitler Youth emerged as an arm of the Nazi Party in the summer of 1926. Its membership comprised youths aged between fourteen and eighteen, and by 1930 some twenty-five thousand members had enlisted. Boys aged between ten and fourteen could join a junior organization, the Deutsches Jungvolk; young women between the ages often and eighteen were given their own organization, the League of German Girls (Bund Deutscher Mädchen, or BDM).
In 1932 the Hitler Youth was banned by Chancellor Heinrich Brüning, but a significant expansion began after Hitler became Chancellor in 1933 and Baldur von Schirach was appointed the first Reich Youth Leader (Reichsjugendführer). The Hitler Youth were seen as the ‘Aryan Supermen’ of the future, and their training emphasized physical toughness, military schooling and anti-Semitic indoctrination. Their uniforms aped those of the SA, with similar ranks and insignia. Membership was organized into corps under adult leaders, and from 1936 it was compulsory for all young German men. It was seen as an important stepping stone to membership of the SS and, for a significant minority, a forcing ground for future officers of the Wehrmacht. Outstanding Hitler Youth members also attended special Adolf Hitler schools for grooming as the Party leaders of the future.
By 1938 there were eight million young men and women in the Third Reich’s youth organizations, although some three million remained outside in spite of severe penalties for parents who refused to co-operate. During World War II, under the leadership of Artur Axmann, the Hitler Youth manned the air defences in Germany’s cities and played a significant role in the air raid precautions programme and other auxiliary services. From 1943, the Hitler Youth provided a manpower reserve for the Third Reich’s depleted armed forces. The Twelfth SS Panzer Division Hitlerjugend, composed principally of boys between the ages of sixteen and eighteen, earned a fearsome reputation during the Normandy campaign of 1944. By early 1945, as the Red Army advanced on Berlin, Hitler Youth members were swelling the ranks of the Volkssturm, the last-ditch defenders of the Third Reich.
Hitlerjugend drummers at a Party rally. The movement stressed the importance of ultra-patriotism in German national life and used camps and rallies to inculcate the Nazi creed.
