Out of this festering morass of apathy and despair, some strange figures emerged, similar to those observed by Raimund Pretzel in the surreal climate of hyperinflation.
Indeed, the mood had gradually become apocalyptic. Saviours appeared everywhere, people with flowing locks and hair shirts, declaring that they had been sent by God to save the world.
When British correspondent Sefton Delmer stepped out of his office onto the streets of Berlin, he saw miracle men proselytising in an atmosphere of unreality—revivalists, charlatans, faith healers and prophets of every kind. Each one of these German shamans had his own style. Every call to action, however eccentric, resonated with somebody, even in the middle classes, in industry and in the military. Saviours had never had it better. People had never longed so much for someone to come and heal the wound that was Germany.
What impressed me as symptomatic and significant about the miracle men was that, whether they were healers or alchemists, clairvoyants or bucket-shop swindlers, all of them claimed to have a patriotic mission, the restoration of Germany to greater strength than ever before.
The Rasputin-like Ludwig Haeusser from Württemberg, an itinerant preacher with a beard and a monk’s cowl, found disciples all over the Reich. He styled himself Germany’s saviour and the ‘Dictator of the United States of Europe’, and ran for the Reichstag, hoping to become president. In Berlin, Joseph Weissenberg, mesmerist and religious reformer, rallied more than a hundred thousand followers to join his ‘Union of Serious Researchers from this World to the Next’. In Bavaria, the alchemist Franz Tausend formed a nationwide network of political esoterics, all delirious at his promise of producing gold by chemical means. Tausend was looked to as a source of hope, especially in the circles of war hero and prominent nationalist leader Erich Ludendorff—here was a way of paying off all reparations at one blow and casting off foreign rule. In Thuringia, Saxony and Anhalt, Friedrich Lamberty, known as ‘the inflation saint’, tried to breathe new life into Germany. Lamberty was a kind of Pied Piper, singing and dancing and preaching his way across the country, followed by a growing flock; in the early 1930s he would forge alliances with right-wing groups. And in Munich, Adolf Hitler caused a stir by working his way up from local beer-hall revolutionary to widely respected extreme-right leader. Despite the strident posturing of such nationalist prophets, the Great Depression drove more and more people into their arms.
It was financial expert Heinrich Brüning, though, who became chancellor in March 1930. Brüning was no charismatic saviour; his gaunt face, narrow-lipped mouth and cold eyes behind rimless glasses were those of a man of reason. His task was to bring an end to the economic chaos, and his method was to starve the country until its debts were discharged. One emergency decree followed another, until even salaries and pensions were whittled away. Brüning stuck to this course with iron resolve, longer than any other Weimar chancellor, and ended his stint in office believing himself only a few feet from his goal.
He had, however, failed to convince the Germans of the necessity of this tremendous feat of discipline. He had none of the qualities that impress people—neither rhetorical prowess nor personal charm, let alone the talent to seduce. Rather than inspire hope, he was stern, severe, exacerbating people’s bitterness and demoralising Weimar’s supporters. Brüning was not the longed-for saviour.
• • •
The Hamms, from the small university town of Giessen, led a politically uneventful life. In the whirl of his parents’ conviviality, ten-year-old Reiner barely noticed the political goings-on in Germany. That changed in the early 1930s, when the local and general election campaigns grabbed his attention. Party symbols leapt off the hoardings at Reiner: the Communists’ hammer and sickle, the Social Democrats’ slanting arrows and, increasingly, the Nazi swastika. Against a backdrop of stucco-faced houses, the electioneers shouted till they were hoarse.
Brüning’s emergency decrees pushed politics into family life. Reiner’s parents talked at the dinner table of the ‘hunger chancellor’ and his excessive demands, and Reiner’s father, a hardworking municipal employee, often raised his voice. Before long, the family were having to economise. There were no new clothes to replace the old, worn ones. The larder was empty. At home, Reiner heard the injured pride in his parents’ voices when they talked politics; on the school playground, the name Brüning had become a byword for austerity, bitterness and fear of the future. This fear became palpable when hard-faced strangers tried to push their way in at the Hamms’ front door. Reiner remembers being seized by terror.
Would-be intruders frightened me by putting their feet in at the front door so that I couldn’t close it. I was told to put the chain across on the inside before opening up to anyone.
The Great Depression surpassed anything suffered in Germany since 1918. In small and middle-sized towns like Giessen, all hell broke loose. Reiner’s father came home in the evening with stories of unemployed people hammering at the doors and windows of the town hall, where he had his office. Reiner imagined them with twisted mouths and wide eyes. In the summer of 1932, after months of scrimping, the young boy was looking forward to a holiday on the North Sea. But there are no sandcastles in his memoirs—nothing that suggests a typical twelve-year-old’s summer holiday. There is only the description of a motorboat journey around the port of Bremerhaven.
It was depressing. Usually there were ships coming and going, and cranes on the quays loading and unloading cargo, but everything seemed dead. The freighters were lined up in a long row, and nothing moved.
Germany was at a standstill. But the election campaign of summer 1932 brought movement to Giessen. In June, Adolf Hitler paid the town a visit. Reiner Hamm’s parents were in the audience that evening when he addressed a crowd of fifteen thousand. The next day, Reiner could tell how impressed they’d been by his speech. Until 1929, the Nazi Party had little clout in Giessen. That had changed when the Great Depression hit, and in the 1930 elections the Nazis had won almost twenty per cent of the vote. Now, just two years later, on the eve of another election, Reiner saw brown SA uniforms everywhere. The ‘movement’ appealed not only to the desperate of Giessen, but also to the town’s conservatives. It was these conservatives who’d recently organised Hessian Grenadier Day, when, for the first time since the defeat, the traditional regimental flags were carried through the streets. Reiner’s father had taken him to see the parade, and they stood in the crowd, watching the heavy old flags pass by in solemn silence. ‘My father was moved to tears,’ Reiner later recalled.
Those wistful tears betrayed a longing for a leader who could cross the gulf between the camps and steer the drifting country on a new course. The more mainstream this vision became, the more Adolf Hitler stood out from the mass of cheap prophets and political one-day wonders. Throwing off the mantle of professional revolutionary, he came out into the open, leaving the reek of the beer hall behind him.
• • •
Gerhard Starcke was a penniless student and sick of his lack of prospects. He threw himself into the political fray and began to write about a free fatherland and national unity for his fraternity newspaper. Democracy and dry reason were not enough; he was seeking direction, inspiration—an animating spark. He wanted to feel alive. ‘We Germans prefer professions of faith to cool consideration and patient watching and waiting,’ he said.
Starcke’s own moment of faith came in 1930, at the Sportpalast arena in Berlin. As he pushed his way through the mass of bodies at the entrance doors, he felt a thrill of excitement. It took him a long time to find a seat. Surrounded by thousands of people brought together by a common hope, he had the feeling he was a minute part of a greater whole, a single atom in a buzzing body made up of thousands of heads and arms and legs. It felt good. He made no attempt to resist. ‘It was mass hysteria of such thrilling intensity that when Hitler finally appeared we sighed with relief and listened to his words as if to a revelation,’ he said. Hitler’s rhetorical skill was such, Starcke added, that he could talk to ordinary people in a way they understood without seeming superficial to the educated. That was one reason for his popularity; another, Starcke said, ‘was that he said out loud what all Germans felt about Versailles’, and about the failure of the Weimar Republic.
As the applause broke over Starcke’s head, he knew he’d found what he was looking for. For the first time in his life he had direction. That same year he joined the National Socialists, membership no. 226,814. A profession of faith, as opposed to cool consideration. He became a party official in Berlin-Gesundbrunnen, designing flyers and writing for the party newspapers. Before long, something happened that had never happened to him before. He was in demand; he was praised and promoted.
• • •
In the election races of the early 1930s, Hitler was the focal point of a powerful campaign driven by the party machine. To set himself apart from the austere Brüning, he dashed from one event to the next, by car or plane. Soon every German child knew his name and face. Renate Finkh hadn’t yet started school when the word ‘Nazi’ became common currency at the family dinner table. Her parents attended all the Nazis’ political meetings in Ulm, and Renate noticed that they came home different people. ‘When they talked about it, Mum’s eyes, usually so dark and sad, lit up. If the Nazis won the elections, she said, then things would be better for everyone, including us.’ The communists—the peaked-cap men and their hungry wives—would vanish, because they’d all have work again. There was relief in her mother’s voice, and her father, a goldsmith, who had recently been grumpy about the dwindling number of customers in his shop, began to talk of ‘the good Lord’—something he’d never done before. ‘He said the good Lord had sent us a man called Adolf Hitler,’ Renate recalled. ‘He’d sent him to save Germany.’
‘Germany, that’s all of us,’ her father said.
One evening, a packed Lindenhof was in turmoil. But this time, instead of peaked caps, Renate saw brown uniforms in flickering torchlight. She was a little scared, but left her curtains open. ‘Songs are sung, over and over. They are tunes that rouse me. There is joy and excitement among these people. I can sense it, even without understanding what’s going on.’ A flag hung from her window. Renate saw her parents waving to her from below.
There is something different in their joy as they come hand in hand up the wide stairs, their faces bright. All of a sudden, I know what it is: they are happy with a common happiness. I am six years old. Behind my closed eyelids, the fire is dancing.
In mid-1932, the Brüning government collapsed. Hitler emerged victorious in the July elections. More than thirteen million Germans followed the cult of his personality to the ballot boxes. He was the only person they trusted to lead Germany out of crisis. Letters of homage arrived in Hitler’s private office, addressing their ‘redeemer’ in a naive, confiding tone. One follower, a man named Hoffmann, wrote a long poem to the Führer in rhyming verse, entitled ‘The Saviour’:
Trusting, helpless and silent.
Germany bleeds from a thousand wounds.
At the eleventh hour, I have
At last found a saviour.
Although the majority of Germans were still undecided, they did nothing to halt Hitler’s advance. Democracy had not put down roots—that was the view of René Juvet, a thirty-year-old Swiss notary employed in a factory in Augsburg. Hardly any of his colleagues were ardent Nazis. ‘But no one was prepared to champion any other conviction, and all too many had no convictions whatsoever.’ Then Juvet’s boss, Waldmeyer, an educated man, asked his employee whether he’d got himself membership papers. There was no point, he said, in denying the coming reality. From that day on, Juvet felt a gradual change in Waldmeyer’s behaviour. The confidently superior, sarcastic Prussian grew cagey, strategic.
No one on the factory staff mourned the defeat of Chancellor Brüning in 1932. But they all felt that something had come to an end with his downfall.
Brüning may not have had many sympathisers, but we had a vague feeling that the ground was starting to slip now that he’d been removed from office. And nobody doubted that Hitler would be the beneficiary of that landslide.
Soon the first brown shirt appeared in the factory, worn by a weedy bookkeeper called Neder. Some of Juvet’s office colleagues now had gleaming badges pinned to their lapels, the size of a thumbnail. Director Waldmeyer grew even cagier.