7

Mastery over the Movement

I

Hitler spent Christmas Eve 1924 at the Hanfstaengls’ in their splendid new villa in Munich’s Herzogpark. He had put on weight during his time in prison, and looked a little flabby. His blue suit was flecked with dandruff on the collar and shoulders. Four-year-old Egon Hanfstaengl was glad to see his ‘Uncle Dolf’ again. Within two minutes, Hitler was asking to hear Isolde’s ‘Liebestod’ on Hanfstaengl’s elegant Blüthner grand piano. Wagner’s music, as Hanfstaengl had often noticed, could transform Hitler’s mood. His initial nervousness and tension disappeared. He became relaxed and cheerful. He admired the new house, then suddenly stopped in mid-sentence, glanced over his shoulder, and explained that he had not lost his habit from prison of imagining he was being observed through the peephole. It was, as Hanfstaengl realized, a pathetic piece of play-acting. Putzi had seen Hitler in Landsberg, relaxed and comfortable; and there had been no peephole in his room. He noticed that Hitler had a good appetite during the meal of turkey followed by his favourite Viennese sweet pastries, but that he scarcely touched the wine. Hitler subsequently explained that he had begun on leaving Landsberg to cut out meat and alcohol in order to lose weight. He had convinced himself that meat and alcohol were harmful for him, and, ‘in his fanatical way’, went on Hanfstaengl, ‘finally made a dogma out of it and from then on only took vegetarian meals and alcohol-free drinks’. After the meal, Hitler treated the family to his war-memories, marching up and down the room, imitating the sounds of different sorts of artillery fire at the battle of the Somme. Late in the evening, a well-connected artist, Wilhelm Funk, dropped in at the Hanfstaengls’. He had known Hitler for quite some time, and now ventured his views on how the party could be built up again. Hitler replied in a familiar, and revealing, tone. For one who had ‘come up from the bottom’, he said, ‘without name, special position, or connection’, it was less a matter of programmes than hard endeavour until the public was ready to see ‘a nameless one’ as identical with a political line. Hitler thought he had now reached that position, and that the putsch had been of value to the movement: ‘I’m no longer an unknown, and that provides us with the best basis for a new start.’

The new start was Hitler’s priority. The immediate aim was to have the ban on the NSDAP lifted. His first political act was to call on his old ally Ernst Pöhner, the former Munich Police President. Through a well-placed intermediary, Theodor Freiherr von Cramer-Klett, a meeting with the Bavarian Minister President Heinrich Held was arranged for 4 January. Pöhner was also influential in persuading Franz Gürtner, the Bavarian Minister of Justice (whom Hitler was to make Reich Minister of Justice in 1933), to have the other Nazis detained in Landsberg released, among them Rudolf Heß.

The meeting with Minister President Held on 4 January, only a fortnight after Hitler’s release and the first of three meetings between the two, went well. No one else was present. Hitler was prepared to act humbly. He agreed to respect the authority of the state without condition, and to support it in the struggle against Communism. He distanced himself sharply from Ludendorff’s attacks on the Catholic Church, a necessary step since the General’s vociferous anti-clericalism – scarcely a winning formula in Bavaria – had recently become notably strident, and linked to an all too public row (involving a court case for libel, which Ludendorff lost) with Rupprecht, the Crown Prince of Bavaria. Behind the public façade of continued reverence for the figurehead of the völkischmovement, Hitler’s willingness during his meeting with the Bavarian premier to dissociate himself from Ludendorff was not only shrewd, but also a sign of his increasing estrangement from the General, which would rapidly accelerate into complete alienation by 1927.

Not least, Hitler promised Held – an easy promise to make in the circumstances – that he would not again attempt a putsch. Held told Hitler in the most forthright terms that times had changed. He would not tolerate any return to the sort of circumstances that had prevailed before the putsch. Nor would the constitutional government treat the revolutionaries of yesterday’ as an equal partner. But Hitler got what he wanted. With Gürtner’s backing, the way was now paved for the removal of the ban on the NSDAP and the Völkischer Beobachter on 16 February. By that time, Hitler’s relations with his rivals in the NSFB had been clarified.

By mid-February, events were moving in Hitler’s way. On 12 February, Ludendorff dissolved the Reich Leadership of the NSFB. Shortly afterwards, just before the lifting of the ban on the party, Hitler announced his decision to re-found the NSDAP. A flood of declarations of loyalty now poured in.

On 26 February, the Völkischer Beobachter appeared for the first time since the putsch. Hitler’s leading article ‘On the Renewal of Our Movement’ placed the emphasis on avoiding recriminations for the divisions in the völkisch movement and, learning from past mistakes, on looking towards the future. There was to be no place in the movement for religious disputes – a necessary disclaimer in mainly Catholic Bavaria, and a criticism of the völkisch movement which had accused Hitler of making concessions to Catholicism. He refused to accept any external conditions limiting his own leadership, proclaimed the aims of the movement as unchanged, and demanded internal unity. His ‘Call to Former Members’ in the same edition struck the same tone. Where party members rejoined, said Hitler, he would not ask about the past, and would concern himself only that past disunity should not repeat itself. He demanded unity, loyalty, and obedience. He made no concessions. What was on offer was a ‘pax Hitleriana’. The newspaper also carried the new regulations for the reformed NSDAP, based on the statutes of July 1921. Leadership and unity were once more the keynotes. All splits were to be avoided in the struggle against ‘the most terrible enemy of the German people … Jewry and Marxism’. The SA was to return to the role of party support troop and training ground for young activists that it had occupied before becoming incorporated in the Bavarian paramilitary scene in February 1923. (This was to prove, within weeks, the breaking-point with Ernst Röhm, who, unable to persuade Hitler to agree to retaining the SA as a conventional paramilitary organization, withdrew from political life and departed for Bolivia.) Entry into the refounded party could only come about by taking out new membership. There could be no renewal or continuation of former membership. This both had symbolic value, and also accorded with the stipulation of centralized control of membership from Munich. Retention of his Munich power-base was vital to Hitler. When Lüdecke suggested moving the headquarters to Thuringia – strategically well situated in central Germany, associated with Luther and the cultural traditions of Weimar, in a Protestant area which did not have to reckon with the opposition of the Catholic establishment, as in Bavaria, and, not least, a region with an existing strong base of völkisch sympathizers – Hitler conceded that there was something to be said for the idea. ‘But I can’t leave Munich,’ he immediately added. ‘I’m at home here; I mean something here; there are many here who are devoted to me, to me alone, and to nobody else. That’s important.’

At eight o’clock on the evening of 27 February 1925, Hitler, with his usual sense of theatre, made his re-entry to the Munich political scene where he had left it sixteen months earlier: at the Bürgerbräukeller. Just as before the putsch, red placards advertising the speech had been plastered around Munich for days. People began to take up their seats in the early afternoon. Three hours before the scheduled start, the huge beerhall was packed. Over 3,000 were jammed inside, 2,000 more turned away, and police cordons set up to block off the surrounding area. Some prominent faces were missing. Rosenberg was one. He was irritated at being excluded from Hitler’s inner circle in the weeks since his return from Landsberg. He told Lüdecke: ‘I won’t take part in that comedy … I know the sort of brother-kissing Hitler intends to call for.’ Ludendorff, Strasser, and Röhm were also absent. Hitler wanted the first party-leader, Drexler, to chair the meeting. But Drexler insisted that Hermann Esser be evicted from the party. Hitler would accept no conditions. And for him, Esser had ‘more political sense in his fingertips than the whole bunch of his accusers in their buttocks’. So one of Hitler’s most trusted Munich followers, his business-manager Max Amann, opened the meeting.

Hitler spoke for almost two hours. The first three-quarters of his speech offered his standard account of Germany’s plight since 1918, the Jews as the cause of it, the weakness of bourgeois parties, and the aims of Marxism (which, he stated, could only be combated by a doctrine of higher truth but ‘similar brutality of execution’). Hitler was frank about the need to focus all energy on one goal, on attacking a single enemy to avoid fragmentation and disunity. ‘The art of all great popular leaders,’ he proclaimed, ‘consisted at all times in concentrating the attention of the masses on a single enemy.’ From the context, it was plain that he meant the Jews. Only in the last quarter of the speech did Hitler arrive at his real theme of the evening. No one should expect him, he said, to take sides in the bitter dispute still raging in the völkisch movement. He saw in each party comrade only the supporter of the common idea, he declared, to lasting applause. His task as leader was not to explore what had happened in the past, but to bring together those pulling apart. At last he came to the climacteric. The dispute was at an end. Those prepared to join should sink their differences. For nine months, others had had time to ‘look after’ the interests of the party, he pointed out with sarcasm. To great and lasting applause, he added: ‘Gentlemen, let the representation of the interests of the movement from now on be my concern!’ His leadership had, however, to be accepted unconditionally. ‘I am not prepared to allow conditions as long as I carry personally the responsibility,’ he concluded. ‘And I now carry again the complete responsibility for everything that takes place in this movement.’ After a year, he would hold himself to account. There were tumultuous cheers and cries of ‘Heil’. Everyone stood for the singing of ‘Deutschland, Deutschland über alles’.

Then came the finale. It was a piece of pure theatre. But it had symbolic meaning, not lost on those present. Arch-enemies over the past year and more – Hermann Esser, Julius Streicher, Artur Dinter from the GVG, Rudolf Buttmann, Gottfried Feder, Wilhelm Frick from the ‘parliamentary’ Völkischer Block – mounted the platform and, among emotional scenes, with many standing on chairs and tables and the crowd pressing forward from the back of the hall, shook hands, forgave each other, and swore undying loyalty to the leader. It was like medieval vassals swearing fealty to their overlord. Others followed. Whatever the hypocrisy, the public show of unity, it was plain, could only have been attained under Hitler as leader. He could with some justice claim to have restored the ‘homogeneity’ of the party. In the following years, it would become more and more apparent: Hitler, and the ‘idea’ increasingly embodied in his leadership, constituted the sole, indispensable force of integration in a movement that retained the potential to tear itself apart. Hitler’s position as supreme leader standing over the party owed much to the recognition of this fact.

Outside loyalist circles, the immediate response to Hitler’s speech on the völkisch Right was often one of disappointment. This was mainly because of the way Hitler was plainly distancing himself from Ludendorff, still seen by many as the leader of the völkischmovement. Ludendorff s standing remained a potential problem. But as so often, luck came to Hitler’s aid.

On 28 February 1925, the day after the refoundation of the NSDAP, the first Reich President of the Weimar Republic, the Social Democrat Friedrich Ebert, still vilified by the Right, died at the age of fifty-four from the effects of an appendicitis operation. Against the arguments of some of his advisers, Hitler insisted on putting forward Ludendorff as the National Socialist candidate, and persuaded the General to stand. He regarded the General as no more than a token candidate, without a chance of winning. Why Ludendorff agreed to stand is less easy to understand than why Hitler wanted the candidacy of a rival of whom he was by now in private extremely scathing. It seems that Hitler persuaded the General that the conservative candidate of the Right, Karl Jarres, had to be stopped, and, flattering Ludendorff ’s prestige, inveigled him into standing. Probably Ludendorff reckoned with the backing of his völkisch friends. But when they decided – in order not to split the right-wing vote – to put their support behind Jarres, the General’s fate was sealed. What had seemed to some in Hitler’s entourage a risky strategy was, in fact, no great risk at all, and was more or less guaranteed to damage Ludendorff. That this was the intention was scarcely concealed, even by some leading Nazis.

For Ludendorff, the election on 29 March was a catastrophe. He polled only 286,000 votes, 1.1 per cent of the votes cast. This was 600,000 fewer than the völkisch Right had gained at the Reichstag election in December 1924, itself a disastrous result. Hitler was anything but distressed at the outcome. ‘That’s all right,’ he told Hermann Esser, ‘now we’ve finally finished him.’ The election winner in the run-off on 26 April was another war-hero, Field-Marshal Hindenburg. Weimar democracy was now in the hands of one of the pillars of the old order. Ludendorff never recovered from his defeat. Hitler’s great rival for the leadership of the völkisch Right no longer posed a challenge. He was rapidly on his way into the political wilderness. By 1927, Hitler was openly attacking his former ally – and accusing him of freemasonry (an accusation which was never countered).

The völkisch movement itself, in 1924 numerically stronger and geographically more widespread than the NSDAP and its successor organizations, was not only weakened and divided, but had now effectively lost its figurehead. At first, especially in southern Germany, there were difficulties where local party leaders refused to accede to Hitler’s demand that they break their ties with völkisch associations and subordinate themselves totally to his leadership. But increasingly they went over to Hitler. Most realized the way the wind was blowing. Without Hitler, they had no future. For his part, Hitler was particularly assiduous during the coming months in visiting local party branches in Bavaria. The ban on speaking at public meetings which the Bavarian authorities had imposed on him on 9 March (followed in subsequent months by a similar ban in most other states, including Prussia) gave him more time for speaking in closed party meetings. The handshake with individual members, invariably a part of such meetings, symbolically cemented the bonds between himself and the local membership. A sturdy platform of support for Hitler’s leadership was thus laid in Bavaria. In the north, the path was less even.

II

On 11 March, two days after the speaking ban had been imposed, Hitler commissioned Gregor Strasser to organize the party in north Germany. Strasser, a Landshut apothecary, a big, bluff Bavarian, in the pre-putsch days SA chief in Lower Bavaria, a diabetic who mixed it with the roughest in beerhall brawls but relaxed by reading Homer in the original, was probably the most able of the leading Nazis. Above all he was a superb organizer. It was largely Gregor Strasser’s work, building on the contacts he had established while in the Reich Leadership of the NSFB, that resulted in the rapid construction of the NSDAP’s organization in north Germany. Most of the local branches in the north had to be created from scratch. By the end of 1925, these branches numbered 262, compared with only seventy-one on the eve of the putsch. While Hitler spent much of the summer of 1925 in the mountains near Berchtesgaden, working on the second volume of his book, and taking time out to enjoy the Bayreuth Festival, bothering little about the party outside Bavaria, Strasser was unceasing in his efforts in the north. His own views on a ‘national socialism’ had been formed in the trenches. He was more idealistic, less purely instrumentalist, than Hitler in his aim to win over the working class. And, though of course strongly antisemitic, he thought little of the obsessive, near-exclusive emphasis on Jew-baiting that characterized Hitler and his entourage in the Munich party. In fact, dating from the period of the rancorous split in 1924, he could barely tolerate the leading lights in the Bavarian NSDAP, Esser and Streicher. Even if he expressed them somewhat differently, however, he shared Hitler’s basic aims. And though he never succumbed to Hitler-worship, he recognized Hitler’s indispensability to the movement, and remained a Hitler loyalist.

Strasser’s views, and his approach, fitted well into the way the party had developed in north Germany, far away from the Bavarian heartlands. A central issue there was the intense detestation, deriving from the deep clashes of the ‘leaderless time’ of 1924, of the three individuals they saw as dominating affairs in Bavaria – Esser, Streicher, and Amann. The rejection of these figures was to remain a point of tension between the north German NSDAP and the Munich headquarters throughout 1925. This went hand in hand with the refusal to be dictated to by the Munich headquarters, where the party secretary, Philipp Bouhler, was attempting to impose centralized control over party membership, and with it Munich’s complete authority over the whole movement. A further integrally related factor was the concern over Hitler’s continuing inaction while the crisis in the NSDAP deepened. It was his passivity, in the eyes of the northern party leaders, that allowed the Esser clique its dominance and kept him far too much under the unsavoury influence of the former GVG leaders. His support for them remained a source of intense disappointment and bitterness. Hitler had also disappointed in his neglect of the north, despite his promises, since the refoundation. Beyond this, there were continuing disagreements about electoral participation. The Göttingen party leadership, especially, remained wholly hostile to parliamentary tactics, which, it felt, would result in the ‘movement’ being turned into a mere ‘party’, like others. Not least, there were different accents on policy and different emphases on the National Socialist ‘idea’. Some of the north German leaders, like Strasser, advocated a more ‘socialist’ emphasis. This aimed at maximum appeal to workers in the big industrial regions. The different social structure demanded a different type of appeal than that favoured in Bavaria.

But it was not just a matter of cynical propaganda. Some of the leading activists in the north, like the young Joseph Goebbels in the Elberfeld area, close to the Ruhr, were attracted by the ideas of ‘national Bolshevism’. Possessed of a sharp mind and biting wit, the future Propaganda Minister, among the most intelligent of the leading figures in the Nazi Movement, had joined the NSDAP at the end of 1924. Brought up in a Catholic family of moderate means, from Rheyd, a small industrial town in the Rhineland, his deformed right foot exposed him from childhood days to jibes, taunts, and lasting feelings of physical inadequacy. That his early pretensions as a writer met with little recognition further fostered his resentment. ‘Why does fate deny to me what it gives to others?’ he asked himself in an entry in March 1925 in the diary he would keep till nearly the end of his days in the Berlin bunker twenty years later, adding, self-pityingly, Jesus’s words on the Cross – ‘My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?’ His inferiority complex produced driving ambition and the need to demonstrate achievement through mental agility in a movement which derided both physical weakness and ‘intellectuals’. Not least, it produced ideological fanaticism.

Goebbels and some other northern leaders thought of themselves as revolutionaries, with more in common with the Communists than with the hated bourgeoisie. There were some sympathies for Russia. And there was talk of a party trade union. Finally, there was the attitude towards Hitler and towards the party’s programme. All the north German leaders accepted Hitler’s position, and his right to head the party. They recognized him as the ‘hero of Munich’ for his part in the putsch, and for his stance at the trial. His standing and reputation needed no emphasis. But many of the north German party faithful did not know Hitler personally, had not even met him. Their relationship to him was, therefore, quite different from that of Bavarian party members, especially those in Munich. Hitler was their leader; that was not in question. But Hitler, too, in their eyes, was bound to the ‘idea’. Moreover, the 1920 Programme that outlined the ‘idea’ in terms of the aims of the party was itself in their view deficient and in need of reform.

By late summer 1925, the northern leaders, differing among themselves in matters of interpretation and emphasis on points of the programme, aims, and meaning of National Socialism, were at least agreed that the party was undergoing a crisis. This was reflected in declining membership and stagnation. It was associated by them, above all, with the state of the party in Munich. But all that could be achieved was the establishment, under Strasser’s leadership, of a ‘Working Community of the North- and West-German Gaue of the NSDAP’, a loose organization of northern party districts, mainly for arranging the exchange of speakers.

This was not in any way intended as a challenge to Hitler. Even so, it did come to pose a threat to his authority. The clashes over the Esser clique, and over electoral participation, were not in themselves critical. Of far greater significance was the fact that Gregor Strasser and Goebbels, especially, looked to the Community as an opportunity to reshape the party’s programme. Ultimately, Strasser hoped to replace the Programme of 1920. In November, he took the first steps in composing the Community’s own draft programme. It advocated a racially integrated German nation at the heart of a central European customs union, the basis of a united states of Europe. Internally, it proposed a corporate state. In the economy, it looked to tying peasants to their landholdings, and public control of the means of production while protecting private property.

Not only was the draft vague, incoherent, and contradictory. It could only be divisive. Hitler plainly recognized the danger signals. He summoned about sixty party leaders to a meeting on 14 February 1926 at Bamberg, in Upper Franconia. There was no agenda. Hitler, it was stated, simply wanted to discuss some ‘important questions’.

He spoke for two hours. He addressed in the main the issue of foreign policy and future alliances. His position was wholly opposed to that of the Working Community. Alliances were never ideal, he said, but always ‘purely a matter of political business’. Britain and Italy, both distancing themselves from Germany’s arch-enemy France, offered the best potential. Any thought of an alliance with Russia could be ruled out. It would mean ‘the immediate political bolshevization of Germany’, and with it ‘national suicide’. Germany’s future could be secured solely by acquiring land, by eastern colonization as in the Middle Ages, by a colonial policy not overseas but in Europe. On the question of the expropriation of German princes without compensation (a proposal by the Left, but supported by north German Nazi leaders), Hitler again ruled out the position of the Working Community. ‘For us there are today no princes, only Germans,’ he declared. ‘We stand on the basis of the law, and will not give a Jewish system of exploitation a legal pretext for the complete plundering of our people.’ Such a rhetorical slant could not conceal the outright rejection of the views of the northern leaders. Finally, Hitler repeated his insistence that religious problems had no part to play in the National Socialist Movement.

Goebbels was appalled. ‘I feel devastated. What sort of Hitler? A reactionary? Amazingly clumsy and uncertain … Probably one of the greatest disappointments of my life. I no longer believe fully in Hitler. That’s the terrible thing: my inner support has been taken away.’

Hitler had reasserted his authority. The potential threat from the Working Community had evaporated. Despite some initial signs of defiance, the fate of the Community had been sealed at Bamberg. Gregor Strasser promised Hitler to collect all copies of the draft programme he had distributed, and wrote to members of the Community on 5 March asking for them to be returned. The Community now petered out into non-existence. On 1 July 1926, Hitler signed a directive stating that ‘since the NSDAP represents a large working community, there is no justification for smaller working communities as a combination of individual Gaue’. By that time, Strasser’s Working Community of northern and western Gauleiter was finished. With it went the last obstacle to the complete establishment of Hitler’s supreme mastery over the party.

Hitler was shrewd enough to be generous after his Bamberg triumph. By September, Strasser himself had been called to the Reich Leadership as Propaganda Leader of the party, while Franz Pfeffer von Salomon (Gauleiter of Westphalia, a former army officer who had subsequently joined the Freikorps, participated in the Kapp Putsch, and been active in opposition to the French in the Ruhr) was appointed head of the SA. Most important of all, the impressionable Goebbels was openly courted by Hitler and completely won over.

To bring about what has often been called Goebbels’s ‘Damascus’ in fact took little doing. Goebbels had idolized Hitler from the beginning. ‘Who is this man? Half plebian, half God! Actually Christ, or only John [the Baptist]?’ he had written in his diary in October 1925 on finishing reading the first volume of Mein Kampf. ‘This man has everything to be a king. The born tribune of the people. The coming dictator,’ he added a few weeks later. ‘How I love him.’ Like others in the Working Community, he had wanted only to liberate Hitler from the clutches of the Esser clique. Bamberg was a bitter blow. But his belief in Hitler was dented, not destroyed. It needed only a sign from Hitler to restore it. And the sign was not long in coming.

In mid-March Goebbels made his peace with Streicher after a long talk in Nuremberg. At the end of the month he received a letter from Hitler inviting him to speak in Munich on 8 April. Hitler’s car was there to meet him at the station to take him to his hotel. ‘What a noble reception,’ noted Goebbels in his diary. Hitler’s car was again provided the next day to take Goebbels to visit Lake Starnberg, a few miles outside Munich. In the evening, after Goebbels’s speech in the Bürgerbräukeller, in which he evidently retreated from his more radical version of socialism, Hitler embraced him, tears in his eyes. Next afternoon Hitler spent three hours going over the same ground he had covered at Bamberg. Then, Goebbels had been sorely disappointed. Now, he thought it was ‘brilliant’. ‘I love him … He has thought through everything,’ Goebbels continued. ‘He’s a man, taking it all round. Such a sparkling mind can be my leader. I bow to the greater one, the political genius.’ Goebbels’s conversion was complete. A few days later, he met Hitler again, this time in Stuttgart. ‘I believe he has taken me to his heart like no one else,’ he wrote. ‘Adolf Hitler, I love you because you are both great and simple at the same time. What one calls a genius.’ Towards the end of the year, Hitler appointed Goebbels as Gauleiter of Berlin – a key position if the party were to advance in the capital. Goebbels was Hitler’s man. He would remain so, adoring and subservient alike to the man he said he loved ‘like a father’, down to the last days in the bunker.

The Bamberg meeting had been a milestone in the development of the NSDAP. The Working Community had neither wanted nor attempted a rebellion against Hitler’s leadership. But once Strasser had composed his draft programme, a clash was inevitable. Was the party to be subordinated to a programme, or to its leader? The Bamberg meeting decided what National Socialism was to mean. It was not to mean a party torn, as the völkisch movement had been in 1924, over points of dogma. The Twenty-Five-Point Programme of 1920 was therefore regarded as sufficient. ‘It stays as it is,’ Hitler was reported as saying. ‘The New Testament is also full of contradictions, but that hasn’t prevented the spread of Christianity.’ Its symbolic significance, not any practical feasibility was what mattered. Any more precise policy statement would not merely have produced continuing inner dissension. It would have bound Hitler himself to the programme, subordinated him to abstract tenets of doctrine that were open to dispute and alteration. As it was, his position as Leader over the movement was now inviolable.

At Bamberg, too, an important ideological issue – the anti-Russian thrust of foreign policy – had been reaffirmed. The alternative approach of the northern group had been rejected. The ‘idea’ and the Leader were coming to be inseparable. But the ‘idea’ amounted to a set of distant goals, a mission for the future. The only way to it was through the attainment of power. For that, maximum flexibility was needed. No ideological or organizational disputes should in future be allowed to divert from the path. Fanatical willpower, converted into organized mass force, was what was required. That demanded freedom of action for the Leader; and total obedience from the following. What emerged in the aftermath of Bamberg was, therefore, the growth of a new type of political organization: one subjected to the will of the Leader, who stood over and above the party, the embodiment in his own person of the ‘idea’ of National Socialism.

By the time of the General Members’ Meeting on 22 May, attended by 657 party members, Hitler’s leadership had emerged inordinately strengthened. He frankly admitted that he attributed no value to the meeting, which had been called simply to meet the legal requirements of a public association. The forthcoming Party Rally in Weimar – the opportunity for a visual display of the new-found unity – was what counted in his eyes. Following his ‘report’ on the party’s activities since its refoundation, Hitler was unanimously ‘re-elected’ as party chairman. The party administration remained in the hands of those close to him. A few amendments were made to the party statutes. Altered five times since 1920, these were now couched in their finalized form. They assured Hitler of the control of the party machine. The appointment of his most important subordinates, the Gauleiter, was in his hands. In effect, the statutes reflected the leader party which the NSDAP had become. In the light of the conflict with the Working Community over a new programme, not least significant was the reaffirmation of the Twenty-Five Points of 24 February 1920. ‘This Programme is immutable,’ the statutes unambiguously declared.

A few weeks later, the Party Rally held at Weimar – where Hitler was permitted to speak in public – on 3–4 July 1926 provided the intended show of unity behind the leader. An estimated 7–8,000, including 3,600 stormtroopers and 116 SS men, attended. It was the first time that the Schutzstaffel (SS, Protection Squad), founded in April 1925 and arising initially out of Hitler’s personal bodyguard, the Stoßtrupp Adolf Hitler (Adolf Hitler Assault Squad), had been on public display. Also on display for the first time, and handed to the SS as a sign of Hitler’s approbation of his new élite organization, was the ‘Blood Flag’ of 1923, which had led the procession to the Feldherrnhalle. Every stormtrooper present swore a personal oath of loyalty to Hitler. The party leader received a rapturous reception from delegates after his speech. ‘Deep and mystical. Almost like a gospel … I thank fate, that it gave us this man,’ wrote Goebbels.

The Nazi Party was still far smaller than it had been at the time of the putsch. In the overall framework of national politics, it was wholly insignificant. To outside observers, its prospects seemed bleak. But internally, the crisis period was over. Though small, the party was better organized as well as geographically more widespread than the pre-putsch party had been. Its image of unity and strength was beginning to persuade other völkisch organizations to throw in their lot with the NSDAP. Above all, it was turning into a new type of political organization – a leader party. Hitler had established the basis of his mastery over the movement. In the next years, while still in the political wilderness, that mastery would become complete.

III

Few people saw Hitler on a regular basis in these years. Only his substitute family – the trusted and devotedly loyal group of Munich cronies who formed his coterie of bodyguards, chauffeurs, and secretaries – were in constant touch with him. Some, like Julius Schaub (his general factotum) and Rudolf Heß (his secretary), had served in Landsberg with Hitler for their part in the putsch. This ‘houseguard’ escorted him, protected him, shielded him from the increasing numbers wanting an audience. Getting to see Hitler was difficult. Those running party business in Munich often had to wait for days before they could sort out some matter with him. For leading figures in the movement, too, he could proved inaccessible for weeks at a time. Even on public occasions he was largely unapproachable. Before a speech, he would remain closeted in his room. Only once the hall was reported as full would he set out. Afterwards, when away from Munich, he would immediately return to his hotel. Journalists might be permitted to see him for a few minutes, if an interview had been prearranged. But scarcely anyone else was allowed an audience.

Hitler’s pronounced sense of ‘mission’, his heroic self-image of ‘greatness’, the necessity of upholding the aura increasingly attached to him by his supporters, and the Olympian detachment from the intrigues and in-fighting of his subordinates demanded a high degree of isolation. Beyond this, the distance he deliberately placed between himself and even high-ranking members of his movement was calculated to emphasize the sense of awe and admiration in those admitted to his presence, or encountering him at a theatrically staged mass-meeting or rally. At the same time, it enhanced the enigmatic in him. Even those who knew him found it hard to dissect and understand his personality. Hitler was happy to encourage the sense of mystery and fascination.

He was above all a consummate actor. This certainly applied to the stage-managed occasions – the delayed entry to the packed hall, the careful construction of his speeches, the choice of colourful phrases, the gestures and body-language. Here, his natural rhetorical talent was harnessed to well-honed performing skills. A pause at the beginning to allow the tension to mount; a low-key, even hesitant, start; undulations and variations of diction, not melodious certainly, but vivid and highly expressive; almost staccato bursts of sentences, followed by well-timed rallentando to expose the emphasis of a key point; theatrical use of the hands as the speech rose in crescendo; sarcastic wit aimed at opponents: all were devices carefully nurtured to maximize effect. As in the meticulous attention to detail in the preparations for the party rallies at Weimar in 1926 and Nuremberg in 1927 and 1929, Hitler was preoccupied with impact and impression. His clothing was also selected to match the occasion: the light-brown uniform with swastika armband, belt, attached diagonal strap crossing over the right shoulder, and knee-high leather boots when among the faithful at big party meetings and rallies; dark suit, white shirt, and tie, when appropriate to conveying a less martial, more ‘respectable’, appearance to a wider audience.

But the acting was not confined to such occasions. Those who came into contact with Hitler, while retaining a critical distance from him, were convinced that he was acting much of the time. He could play the parts as required. ‘He was a kindly conversationalist, kissing the hands of ladies, a friendly uncle giving chocolates to children, a simple man of the people shaking the calloused hands of peasants and workers,’ one of his associates later recalled. He could be the model of friendliness in public to someone he was privately castigating and deriding. The play-acting and hypocrisy did not mean that he was solely a cynical manipulator, that he did not believe in the central tenets of his ‘world-view’. This fervent belief, coupled with the strength of his domineering personality, carried conviction among those drawn to his message.

The irresistible fascination that many – not a few of them cultured, educated, and intelligent – found in his extraordinary personality-traits doubtless owed much to his ability to play parts. As many attested, he could be charming – particularly to women – and was often witty and amusing. Much of the time it was show, put on for effect. The same could be true of his rages and outbursts of apparently uncontrollable anger, which were in reality often contrived. The firm handshake and ‘manly’ eye-to-eye contact which Hitler cultivated on occasions when he had to meet ordinary party members was, for the awestruck lowly activist, a moment never to be forgotten. For Hitler, it was merely acting; it meant no more than the reinforcement of the personality cult, the cement of the movement, the bonding force between Leader and followers. In reality, Hitler showed remarkably little human interest in his followers. His egocentrism was of monumental proportions. The propaganda image of ‘fatherliness’ concealed inner emptiness. Other individuals were of interest to him only in so far as they were useful.

Hitler’s ‘coffee-house tirades, his restlessness, his resentments against possible rivals in the party leadership, his distaste for systematic work, his paranoid outbursts of hatred’ were seen by Putzi Hanfstaengl as a sign of sexual deficiency. This was no more than guesswork. But Hitler’s relations with women were indeed odd in some ways. Why this was so can only be surmised. Yet here, too, he was often acting out a role. On one occasion, he took advantage of Putzi Hanfstaengl’s brief absence from the room to fall on his knees in front of Helene Hanfstaengl, describing himself as her slave and bemoaning the fate that had led him to her too late. When Helene told him of the incident, Putzi put it down to Hitler’s need to play the role of the languishing troubadour from time to time.

In physical appearance, Hitler was little changed from the time before the putsch. Away from the speaker’s podium he looked anything but impressive. His face had hardened. But, as he told Hanfstaengl would be the case, he soon lost the weight he had put on in Landsberg once he started speaking again. Hitler reckoned he lost up to five pounds in weight through perspiration during a big speech. To counter this, his aides insisted on twenty bottles of mineral water being provided at the side of the lectern. His dress sense was anything but stylish. He still often favoured his plain blue suit. His trilby, light-coloured raincoat, leather leggings, and riding-whip gave him – especially when arriving with his bodyguards in the big black six-seater Mercedes convertible he had bought in early 1925 – the appearance of an eccentric gangster. For relaxation, he preferred to wear traditional Bavarian lederhosen. But even when he was in prison, he hated to be seen without a tie. During the heat of the summer, he would never be seen in a bathing costume. Whereas Mussolini revelled in virile images of himself as a sportsman or athlete, Hitler had a deep aversion to being seen other than fully clothed. More than petty-bourgeois proprieties, or prudishness, image was the vital consideration. Anything potentially embarrassing or inviting ridicule was to be avoided at all costs.

As they had done before the putsch, the Bruckmanns helped him to establish useful contacts in ‘better’ social circles. He had to adjust to a different type of audience from that in the beerhalls – more critical, less amenable to crude sloganizing and emotion. But in essence, little or nothing had changed. Hitler was at ease only when dominating the conversation. His monologues were a cover for his half-baked knowledge. There was no doubting that he had a quick mind and a biting and destructive wit. He formed instant – often damning – judgements on individuals. And the combination of a domineering presence, resort to factual detail (often distorted), for which he had an exceptional memory, and utter conviction (brooking no alternative argument) based on ideological certitude was impressive to those already half-persuaded of his extraordinary qualities. But those with knowledge and critical distance could often quickly see behind his crude arguments. His arrogance was breathtaking. ‘What could I learn that’s new?’ he asked Hanfstaengl, on being encouraged to learn a foreign language and travel abroad.

Shortly after the Weimar Party Rally, in mid-July 1926, Hitler left Munich with his entourage for a holiday on the Obersalzberg. He stayed in a secluded and beautiful spot situated high in the mountains on the Austrian border above Berchtesgaden, flanked by the Untersberg (where legend had it that the medieval emperor, Frederick Barbarossa, lay sleeping), the Kneifelspitze, and the highest of them, the Watzmann. The scenery was breathtaking. Its monumental grandeur had first captivated Hitler when, under the pseudonym of ‘Herr Wolf ’, he had visited Dietrich Eckart there in the winter of 1922–3. The Büchners, owners of the Pension Moritz where he stayed, were early supporters of the Movement. He liked them, and could enjoy in this mountain retreat a level of seclusion which he could never expect in Munich. He had, he later recalled, gone there in 1925 when he needed peace and quiet to dictate parts of the second volume of Mein Kampf. Whenever he could in the next two years, he returned to the Obersalzberg. Then he learnt that an alpine house there, Haus Wachenfeld, belonging to the widow of a north German businessman, was available to let. The widow, whose maiden name had been Wachenfeld, was a party member. He was offered a favourable price of 100 Marks a month. Soon, he was in a position to buy it. That the widow was in financial difficulties at the time helped. Hitler had his summer retreat. He could look down from his ‘magic mountain’ and see himself bestriding the world. In the Third Reich, at enormous cost to the state, Haus Wachenfeld would be turned into the massive complex known as the Berghof, a palace befitting a modern dictator, and a second seat of government for those ministers who each year had to set up residence nearby if they had a hope of contacting the head of state and expediting government business. Before that, on renting Haus Wachenfeld back in 1928, Hitler had – rather surprisingly since they had never been close – telephoned his half-sister Angela Raubal in Vienna and asked her to keep house for him. She agreed, and soon brought her daughter, a lively and attractive twenty-year-old, also named Angela, though known to all as Geli, to stay with her. Three years later, Geli was to be found dead in Hitler’s flat in Munich.

While dictating the last chapters of Mein Kampf during his stay on the Obersalzberg in summer 1926, Hitler had, as we saw, consolidated his thinking on foreign policy, especially the acquisition of territory in the east. This idea, especially, was to dominate his speeches and writings of the mid-1920s. However, he was skilful in tailoring his speeches to his audience, as he showed in an important speech he delivered a few months earlier. Hopes of gaining financial support and of winning influential backing for his party had made him keen to accept the invitation of the prestigious Hamburger Nationalklub to address its members in the elegant Hotel Atlantic on 28 February 1926. It was not his usual audience. Here, he faced a socially exclusive club whose 400–450 members were drawn from Hamburg’s upper bourgeoisie – many of them high-ranking officers, civil servants, lawyers, and businessmen. His tone was different from that he used in the Munich beerhalls. In his two-hour speech, he made not a single mention of the Jews. He was well aware that the primitive antisemitic rantings that roused the masses in the Zircus Krone would be counter-productive in this audience. Instead, the emphasis was placed entirely on the need to eliminate Marxism as the prerequisite of Germany’s recovery. By ‘Marxism’, Hitler did not merely mean the German Communist Party, which had attained only 9 per cent of the vote at the last Reichstag election, in December 1924. Beyond the KPD, the term served to invoke the bogy of Soviet Communism, brought into power by a Revolution less than a decade earlier, and followed by a civil war whose atrocities had been emblazoned across a myriad of right-wing publications. ‘Marxism’ had even wider application. Hitler was also subsuming under this rubric all brands of socialism other than the ‘national’ variety he preached, and using it in particular to attack the SPD and trade unionism. In fact, to the chagrin of some of its followers, the SPD – still Germany’s largest political party – had moved in practice far from its theoretical Marxist roots, and was wedded to upholding the liberal democracy it had been instrumental in calling into being in 1918–19. No ‘Marxist’ apocalypse threatened from that quarter. But Hitler’s rhetoric had, of course, long branded those responsible for the Revolution and the Republic which followed it ‘the November Criminals’. ‘Marxism’ was, therefore, also convenient shorthand to denigrate Weimar democracy. And to his well-heeled bourgeois audience in Hamburg, anti-Marxist to the core, his verbal assault on the Left was music to the ears.

Hitler reduced it to a simple formula: if the Marxist ‘world-view’ was not ‘eradicated’, Germany would never rise again. The task of the National Socialist Movement was straightforward: ‘the smashing and annihilation of the Marxist Weltanschauung’. Terror must be met with terror. The bourgeoisie itself was incapable of defeating the threat of Bolshevism. It needed a mass movement as intolerant as that of the Marxists themselves to do it. Winning the masses rested on two premisses. The first was to recognize their social concerns. But in case his audience thought this was back-door Marxism, Hitler was quick to reassure them: social legislation demanded ‘the promotion of the welfare of the individual in a framework that guaranteed retention of an independent economy’. ‘We are all workers,’ he stated. ‘The aim is not to get higher and higher wages, but to increase production, because that is to the advantage of each individual.’ His audience was unlikely to disagree with such sentiments. The second premiss was to offer the masses ‘a programme that is unalterable, a political faith that is unshakeable’. The usual party programmes, manifestos, and philosophies of bourgeois parties would not win them over. Hitler’s contempt for the masses was plain. ‘The broad mass is feminine,’ he stated, ‘one-sided in its attitude; it knows only the hard “either-or”.’ It wanted only a single viewpoint upheld – but then with all available means, and, he added, now mixing his genders and pointing to what is normally taken to be a more masculine characteristic, ‘does not shrink from using force’. What the mass had to feel was its own strength. Among a crowd of 200,000 in Berlin’s Lustgarten, the individual felt no more than ‘a small worm’, subject to mass-suggestion, aware only of those around him being prepared to fight for an ideal. ‘The broad masses are blind and stupid and don’t know what they are doing,’ he claimed. They were ‘primitive in attitude’. For them, ‘understanding’ offered only a ‘shaky platform’. ‘What is stable is emotion: hatred.’ The more Hitler preached intolerance, force, and hatred, as the solution to Germany’s problems, the more his audience liked it. He was interrupted on numerous occasions during these passages with cheers and shouts of ‘bravo’. At the end there was a lengthy ovation, and cries of ‘Heil’.

National revival through terroristic anti-Marxism built on the cynical manipulation and indoctrination of the masses: that was the sum total of Hitler’s message to the upper-crust of the Hamburg bourgeoisie. Nationalism and anti-Marxism were scarcely peculiarities of the Nazis alone. Nor did they amount in themselves to much of an ideology. What distinguished Hitler’s approach to his Hamburg audience was not the ideas themselves, but the impression of fanatical will, utter ruthlessness, and the creation of a nationalist movement resting on the support of the masses. And it was plain from the enthusiastic response that selective terror deployed against ‘Marxists’ would meet with little or no opposition from the élite of Germany’s most liberal city.

Back among his ‘own sort’, little or nothing had changed. The tone was very different from that adopted in Hamburg. In closed party meetings or, after the speaking ban had been lifted in early 1927, once more in Munich beerhalls and the Circus Krone, the attacks on the Jews were as vicious and unconstrained as ever. In speech after speech, as before the putsch, he launched brutal assaults against the Jews, bizarrely depicted both as the wire-pullers of finance capital and as poisoning the people with subversive Marxist doctrine. Explicit attacks on the Jews occurred more frequently and extensively in 1925 and 1926 than in the subsequent two years. Antisemitism seemed now rather more ritualist or mechanistic. The main stress had moved to anti-Marxism. But only the presentation of his ideas had been modified to some extent; their meaning had not. His pathological hatred of Jews was unchanged. ‘The Jew is and remains the world enemy,’ he once more asserted in an article in the Völkischer Beobachter in February 1927, ‘and his weapon, Marxism, a plague of mankind.’

Between 1926 and 1928, Hitler became more preoccupied with the ‘question of [living] space’ (Raumfrage) and ‘land policy’ (Bodenpolitik). Though, as we have seen, the idea of an eastern ‘land policy’ at the expense of Russia had been present in Hitler’s mind at the latest by the end of 1922, he had mentioned it in his public statements – written or spoken – only on a handful of occasions before the end of 1926. He referred in a speech on 16 December 1925 to the ‘acquisition of land and soil’ as the best solution to Germany’s economic problems and alluded to the colonization of the east ‘by the sword’ in the Middle Ages. He remarked on the need for a colonial policy in eastern Europe at Bamberg in February 1926. And he returned to the theme as a central element of his speech at the Weimar Party Rally on 4 July 1926. The completion of Mein Kampf, which ends with the question of eastern colonization, must have further focused his mind on the issue. Once he was allowed to speak in public again in spring 1927, the question of ‘living space’ became frequently, then from the summer onwards, obsessively emphasized in all his major addresses. Speech after speech highlights in more or less the same language ideas that became embodied in the ‘Second Book’, dictated during the summer of 1928. Other economic options are mentioned only to be dismissed. The lack of space for Germany’s population could be overcome only by attaining power, then by force. The ‘eastern colonization’ of the Middle Ages was praised. Conquest ‘by the sword’ was the only method. Russia was seldom explicitly mentioned. But the meaning was unmistakable.

The social-Darwinist, racist reading of history offered the justification. ‘Politics is nothing more than the struggle of a people for its existence.’ ‘It is an iron principle,’ he declared: ‘the weaker one falls so that the strong one gains life.’ Three values determined a people’s fate: ‘blood-’ or ‘race-value’, the ‘value of personality’, and the ‘spirit of struggle’ or ‘self-preservation drive’. These values, embodied in the ‘aryan race’, were threatened by the three ‘vices’ – democracy, pacifism, and internationalism – that comprised the work of ‘Jewish Marxism’.

The theme of personality and leadership, little emphasized before 1923, was a central thread of Hitler’s speeches and writings in the mid-and later 1920s. The people, he said, formed a pyramid. At its apex was ‘the genius, the great man’. Following the chaos in the völkisch movement during the ‘leaderless time’, it was scarcely surprising that there was heavy emphasis in 1925 and 1926 on the leader as the focus of unity. In his refoundation speech on 27 February 1925, Hitler had stressed his task as Leader as ‘bringing together again those who are going different ways’. The art of being Leader lay in assembling the ‘stones of the mosaic’. The Leader was the ‘central point’ or ‘preserver’ of the ‘idea’. This demanded, Hitler repeatedly underlined, blind obedience and loyalty from the followers. The cult of the Leader was thus built up as the integrating mechanism of the movement. With his own supremacy firmly established by mid-1926, Hitler never lost an opportunity to highlight the ‘value of personality’ and ‘individual greatness’ as the guiding force in Germany’s struggle and coming rebirth. He avoided specific reference to his own claims to ‘heroic’ status. This was unnecessary. It could be left to the growing number of converts to the Hitler cult, and to the orchestrated outpourings of propaganda. For Hitler himself, the ‘Führer myth’ was both a propaganda weapon and a central tenet of belief. His own ‘greatness’ could be implicitly but unmistakably underscored by repeated references to Bismarck, Frederick the Great, and Luther, along with allusions to Mussolini. Speaking of Bismarck (if without mentioning his name) in May 1926, he commented: ‘It was necessary to transmit the national idea to the mass of the people.’ ‘A giant had to fulfil this task.’ The sustained applause showed that the meaning was not lost on his audience.

Goebbels had been thrilled on more than one occasion in 1926 by Hitler’s exposition of the ‘social question’. ‘Always new and compelling’ was how Goebbels described his ideas. In reality, Hitler’s ‘social idea’ was simplistic, diffuse, and manipulative. It amounted to little more than what he had told his bourgeois audience in Hamburg: winning the workers to nationalism, destroying Marxism, and overcoming the division between nationalism and socialism through the creation of a nebulous ‘national community’ (Volksgemeinschaft) based on racial purity and the concept of struggle. The fusion of nationalism and socialism would do away with the class antagonism between a nationalist bourgeoisie and Marxist proletariat (both of which had failed in their political goals). This would be replaced by a ‘community of struggle’ where nationalism and socialism would be united, where ‘brain’ and ‘fist’ were reconciled, and where – denuded of Marxist influence – the building of a new spirit for the great future struggle of the people could be undertaken. Such ideas were neither new, nor original. And, ultimately, they rested not on any modern form of socialism, but on the crudest and most brutal version of nineteenth-century imperialist and social-Darwinistic notions. Social welfare in the trumpeted ‘national community’ did not exist for its own sake, but to prepare for external struggle, for conquest ‘by the sword’.

Hitler repeatedly stated that he was uninterested in day-to-day issues. What he offered, over and over again, was the same vision of a long-term goal, to be striven after with missionary zeal and total commitment. Political struggle, eventual attainment of power, destruction of the enemy, and build-up of the nation’s might were stepping-stones to the goal. But how it was to be then attained was left open. Hitler himself had no concrete notion. He just had the certainty of the fanatical ‘conviction politician’ that it would be attained. Clarity was never aimed at. The acquisition of ‘living space’ through conquest implied at some distant future date aggression against Russia. But it had no more precise meaning than that. Hitler’s own firm belief in it need not be doubted. But, even for many of his followers, in the world of the mid-1920s, with Germany engaged diplomatically with the Soviet Union following the Rapallo Treaty of 1922 as well as improving relations with the western powers through the 1925 Treaty of Locarno then membership of the League of Nations, this must have seemed little more than sloganizing or a pipe-dream.

Even on the ‘Jewish Question’, the wild tirades, vicious as they were, offered no concrete policies. ‘Getting rid of the Jews’ could only reasonably be taken to mean the expulsion of all Jews from Germany, as when Hitler called for chasing ‘that pack of Jews … from our Fatherland … with an iron broom’. But even this aim seemed less than clear when he stated – to tumultuous applause from the stalwarts of the movement gathered in Munich’s Hofbräuhaus on 24 February 1928 to celebrate the eighth anniversary of the launch of the Party Programme – that ‘the Jew’ would have to be shown ‘that we’re the bosses here; if he behaves well, he can stay – if not, then out with him’.

In the ‘Jewish Question’, the ‘question of [living] space’, and the ‘social question’, Hitler suggested a vision of a distant utopia. He did not chart the path to it. But no other Nazi leader or völkisch politician could match the internal unity, simplicity, and all-encompassing character of this ‘vision’. His sense of conviction – he spoke frequently of his ‘mission’, ‘faith’, and of the ‘idea’ – combined with an unrivalled talent for mobilization through reduction to simple ‘black–white’ choices, was where the ideologue and the propagandist came together.

The interdependence of the various strands of Hitler’s pernicious ‘world-view’ is most plainly evident in his ‘Second Book’ (an updated statement of his views on foreign policy, left, in the event, unpublished), dictated hurriedly to Max Amann during a stay on the Obersalzberg in the summer of 1928. Hitler felt prompted to produce the book by the heated debates at the time about policy towards South Tyrol. Under Mussolini, Fascist policies of Italianization of the largely German-speaking area had stirred strong anti-Italian feeling in nationalist circles in Austria and Germany, particularly in Bavaria. Hitler’s readiness to renounce German claims on South Tyrol in the interest of an alliance with Italy had seen him attacked by German nationalists as well as being accused by socialists of taking bribes from Mussolini. Hitler had dealt with the South Tyrol issue in Mein Kampf, and published the relevant sections from the second volume as a separate pamphlet in February 1926. When the issue flared up again in 1928, he was driven to outline his position at length. Probably financial considerations – Amann may well have advised against having the ‘Second Book’ compete against the second volume of Mein Kampf, with its disappointing and diminishing sales – dissuaded Hitler from publishing the book. But in addition, as the South Tyrol question lost its urgency, new issues like the Young Plan arose, and Hitler had neither time nor inclination to revise the text, it may have been felt that its publication would have offered political hostages to fortune.

If occasioned by the South Tyrol question, the ‘Second Book’ went far beyond it, ranging more expansively than Mein Kampf had done over Hitler’s broad ideas on foreign policy and ‘territorial issues’ (Raumfragen), linking them, as always, with his racial interpretation of history and, in the final pages, with the need to destroy what he saw as the threat of ‘Jewish domination’. But the ‘Second Book’ offered nothing new. As we have seen, the essence of Hitler’s ‘world-view’ was fully developed by the time he wrote the second volume of Mein Kampf in 1926, existent in embryonic form, in fact, since late 1922. The ideas dominating the ‘Second Book’ – including the issue of South Tyrol and his interest in the growing economic power of the United States of America – were repeatedly advanced in Hitler’s speeches and writings from 1927 onwards. Several passages from these speeches recur almost verbatim at key points in the ‘Second Book’.

Long before the dictation of the ‘Second Book’, then, Hitler was a fixated ideologue. His own inner certainty of the ‘truths’ about history as racial struggle, and Germany’s future mission to obtain ‘living space’ and, at the same time, eradicate the power of the Jews for ever, were of immense importance as a personal driving-force. Their significance in attracting support for National Socialism can, however, easily be exaggerated. The growth of the NSDAP to a mass party had little directly to do with the arcanum of Hitler’s personalized ‘world-view’. More complex processes have to be taken into account.

IV

At the end of January 1927, Saxony became the first large German state to lift the speaking ban on Hitler. On 5 March, the Bavarian authorities finally conceded to the pressure to allow Hitler to speak again. His return to the public arena caused little of a stir. Reports from the Bavarian provinces indicated little interest in the NSDAP, for all its vigorous propaganda. Party meetings were often badly attended. Hitler’s magic was no longer working, even in Munich. In January 1928, the Munich police reported that ‘the advances of the National Socialist Movement repeatedly claimed by Hitler are not true, especially in Bavaria. In reality, interest in the movement both in the countryside and in Munich is strongly in decline. Branch meetings attended by 3–400 people in 1926 now have an attendance of at most 60–80 members.’ Even the Party Rally, held for the first time at Nuremberg, on 19–21 August 1927, despite careful orchestration for maximum propaganda effect, failed to raise the expected level of support or interest.

Most other German states followed the examples of Saxony and Bavaria in lifting the ban on Hitler speaking in public. Only Prussia, the largest state, and Anhalt held out until autumn 1928. The authorities, it seemed with justification, could believe that the Nazi menace had passed. Hitler no longer appeared a threat. A confidential report by the Reich Minister of the Interior in 1927 had already judged that the NSDAP was no more than a ‘splinter group incapable of exerting any noticeable influence on the great mass of the population and the course of political events’.

Though outwardly making little or no headway in the more settled political climate of the mid-1920s, as Germany’s new democracy at last showed signs of stability, significant developments were taking place within the NSDAP. Eventually, these would help to place the party in a stronger position to exploit the new economic crisis that was to hit Germany in autumn 1929.

Most importantly, the NSDAP had become a self-conscious ‘leader-movement’, focused ideologically and organizationally on the Hitler cult. In retrospect, the ‘leaderless time’ of 1924, and Hitler’s obstinacy – born out of weakness – in refusing to take sides in the internecine strife of the völkisch movement, had been enormously advantageous. The defeat at Bamberg of those looking to programmatic changes was, then, at the same time the victory of those loyalists prepared to look no further than Hitler as the embodiment of the ‘idea’. For these, the programme detached from the leader had no meaning. And, as 1924 had proven, without Hitler there could be no unity, and hence no movement.

The establishment of the Führer cult was decisive for the development of the Nazi Movement. Without it, as 1924 had shown, it would have been torn apart by factionalism. With it, the still precarious unity could be preserved by calling on loyalty to Hitler as a prime duty. Among the party leadership, feelings had to be subordinated to the overriding need for unity.

Within the movement, the SA had always been the most difficult element to control – and so it would continually prove down to 1934. But here, too, Hitler was successfully able to diffuse trouble by invoking loyalty to his own person. In May 1927, he made an impassioned speech to the Munich stormtroopers, demoralized and rebellious towards the SA leader Franz Pfeffer von Salomon. At the end of his speech, he resorted to his usual ploy. He stepped down from the rostrum, shook hands with each SA man, and gained their renewed pledge of personal loyalty to him.

Clashes over strategy, factional disputes, personal rivalries – all were endemic in the NSDAP. The interminable conflicts and animosities, normally personal or tactical rather than ideological, almost invariably stopped short of any attack on Hitler. He intervened as little as possible. In fact, the rivalry and competition simply showed him, according to his own concept of social-Darwinist struggle, who among his competing underlings was the stronger. Nor did Hitler make any effort to reconcile ideological nuances within the party, unless they threatened to become counter-productive by deviating the single-minded drive for power through mass mobilization into sectarian squabbling. The Führer cult was accepted because it offered all parties the only remedy to this. Personal loyalty to Hitler, whether genuine or forced, was the price of unity. In some cases, Nazi leaders were wholly convinced of Hitler’s greatness and ‘mission’. In others, their own ambitions could only be upheld by lip-service to the supreme Leader. Either way, the result was that Hitler’s mastery over the movement increased to the position where it was well-nigh unchallengeable. And either way, the transmission belt within the party faithful had been manufactured for the subsequent extension of the Führer cult to wider sectors of the German electorate. The Leader cult was indispensable to the party. And the subsummation of the ‘idea’ in Hitler’s own person was necessary, if party energy was not to be dissipated in harmful factional divides. By avoiding doctrinal dispute, as he had done in 1924, and focusing all energies on the one goal of obtaining power, Hitler could – sometimes with difficulty – hold the party together. Along the way, the Führer cult had developed its own momentum.

With the build-up of the Führer cult, Hitler’s image was at least as important as his practical contribution to the modest growth of the party in the ‘wilderness years’. Of course, a Hitler-speech remained a major event for a local party branch. And Hitler retained the ability in his mass-meetings to win over initially sceptical audiences. But whatever limited success the NSDAP enjoyed before the Depression cannot simply – or even mainly – be attributed to Hitler. As an agitator, Hitler was distinctly less directly prominent than he had been before the putsch. The speaking-ban was, of course, a major hindrance in 1925 and 1926. He spoke at only thirty-one meetings in 1925 and thirty-two in 1926, mainly internal party affairs, a good number of them in Bavaria. In 1927, his speeches increased in number to fifty-six, more than half of them within Bavaria. Most of his sixty-six speeches in 1928 took place in the first five months, up to the Reichstag election. More than two-thirds of them were held in Bavaria. During the whole of 1929, as the NSDAP began to gain ground in regional elections, he held only twenty-nine speeches, all but eight in Bavaria.

One limitation on Hitler’s availability as a speaker in these years was posed by his frequent trips to try to establish important contacts and drum up funding for a party with chronic financial problems. Not surprisingly, for a party in the political doldrums, his efforts met with little success. Though (not to the liking of the ‘social-revolutionaries’ in the NSDAP) he courted Ruhr industrialists and businessmen in a number of speeches in 1926 and 1927, which went down well, they showed little interest in a party that seemed to be going nowhere. The Bechsteins and Bruckmanns, long-standing patrons, continued to give generously. But the aged Emil Kirdorf, whom Frau Bruckmann had brought into personal contact with Hitler, was almost alone among leading Ruhr industrialists in sympathizing with him to the extent of joining the NSDAP, and in making a sizeable donation of 100,000 Marks that went a long way towards overcoming the party’s immediate financial plight. As would remain the case, the party was heavily dependent for its income on the contributions of ordinary members. So the stagnation, or at best slow growth, in party membership meant continued headaches for the party treasurer.

As earlier, Hitler paid little attention to administration and organization. Party bosses were resigned to his lengthy absences and inaccessibility on even important concerns. He left financial matters to his trusted business manager Max Amann, and the party treasurer, Franz Xaver Schwarz. Behind the scenes in Munich, Hitler could rely in the party’s secretariat upon the indefatigable and subservient Philipp Bouhler, the retiring but inwardly ambitious individual who was later to play a central role in the emergence of the ‘euthanasia action’. Above all, it was Gregor Strasser, as Propaganda Leader between September 1926 and the end of 1927 (during which time he streamlined and coordinated propaganda activities throughout the Reich) and especially after he was made Organizational Leader on 2 January 1928, who built up, from the faction-ridden and incoherently structured movement, the nationwide organization that from 1929 onwards was in a position to exploit the new crisis conditions. Hitler’s part in this development was minimal, though placing Strasser in charge of organizational matters was one of his more inspired appointments.

Hitler’s instinct, as ever, was for propaganda, not organization. His ‘feel’, when it came to matters of mobilizing the masses, seldom let him down. As director of party propaganda, Gregor Strasser had been given a great deal of scope – Hitler’s usual style – to shape the character and pattern of agitation. Following his own leanings, Strasser had made a strong push to win over, especially, the urban proletariat. Even to outside observers, it was plain by autumn 1927 that this strategy was not paying worthwhile dividends, and was at the same time in danger of alienating the lower-middle-class support of the NSDAP. Reports came in from Schleswig-Holstein, Thuringia, Mecklenburg, Pomerania, and other areas indicating that growing unrest in rural areas offered promising terrain for the NSDAP. Hitler was evidently well-informed. And at a meeting of Gau leaders on 27 November 1927 in the ‘Hotel Elefant’ in Weimar, he announced a change of course. He made plain that significant gains could not be expected at the coming election from ‘the Marxists’. Small-shopkeepers, threatened by department stores, and white-collar workers, many of them already antisemites, were singled out as better targets. In December 1927, Hitler addressed for the first time a rally of several thousand peasants from Lower Saxony and Schles-wig-Holstein. In the New Year, he himself took over the position of party Propaganda Leader. His deputy, Heinrich Himmler, undertook the routine tasks. The future overlord of the SS empire was at this time still in his twenties, a well-educated and intelligent former agricultural student who had briefly worked for a fertilizer firm and reared chickens. With his short-back-and-sides haircut, small moustache, round glasses, and unathletic build, he resembled a small-town bank clerk or pedantic schoolmaster. Whatever appearances might have suggested, he had, however, few peers in ideological fanaticism and, as time would prove, cold ruthlessness. The young nationalist idealist, already imagining dire conspiracies involving ‘the red International’, Jews, Jesuits, and freemasons ranged against Germany, had joined the NSDAP in the summer of 1923, influenced by the man whose murder he would orchestrate eleven years later, Ernst Röhm. It was at Röhm’s side that, on 8 November that year, the night of the putsch, he had carried the banner at the head of the Reichskriegsflagge unit engaged in attempting to storm the Bavarian War Ministry. From the time of the party’s refoundation, he had been active, initially as secretary to Gregor Strasser, then, from 1926, as Deputy Gauleiter of Upper Bavaria-Swabia, and Deputy Reich Propaganda Leader. In the latter capacity in the later 1920s – he was also Deputy Reichsführer-SS from 1927 before being appointed to lead the SS two years later – he proved both efficient and imaginative – apparently coming up with the idea of blanket propaganda coverage of a specific area during a brief period of time, something that became a Nazi hallmark.

But significantly, and in contrast to his normal habits, Hitler intervened directly in drafting texts and in shaping central propaganda. In April 1928, he ‘corrected’ the interpretation of Point 17 of the party’s ‘unalterable’ 1920 Programme: ‘expropriation without compensation’ meant, for a party based on the principle of private property, merely the creation of legal means to take over land not administered in the public good; that is, Jewish land-speculation companies.

The shift in propaganda emphasis amounted to a further move away from a ‘programmatic’ stance directed primarily at winning workers from Marxism to a broader ‘catch-all’ approach to mobilization. It was a pragmatic readjustment, recognizing the possibility of a widened appeal to a variety of social groups not previously addressed in any systematic way in party propaganda. Unlike some in the party, wedded to a type of ‘social-revolutionary’ emotive anti-capitalism, which social groups were attracted to Nazism was for Hitler a matter of indifference. The important thing was that they were won over. His aim was to gain power. Any weapon to that end was useful. But it did mean that the NSDAP became even more of a loose coalition of competing interest-groups. Only the absence of a clear programme and a set of utopian, distant goals built into the image of the Leader could hold them together – for a time.

V

Few Germans had Hitler on their mind in Weimar’s ‘golden years’ of the mid-1920s. The internal developments within his party were of neither interest nor concern to the overwhelming majority of people. Little attention was paid to the former Munich troublemaker who now seemed no more than a fringe irritant on the political scene. Those who did take notice of Hitler were often dismissive or condescending, or both.

The results of the Reichstag election on 20 May 1928 appeared to confirm the correctness of those commentators who for years had been preaching the end of Hitler and his movement. The electorate showed relatively little interest in the campaign – a reflection of the more settled conditions. With its miserable return of 2.6 per cent, the NSDAP won only twelve seats. Electorally, it had lost ground, compared with the Völkischer Block in December 1924. There was at least the consolation that the twelve Nazis who entered the Reichstag now had immunity from legal action for their venomous attacks on opponents and – if anything even more important – daily allowances and free rail passes for first-class travel on the Reichsbahn to ease pressure on party finances. Among the new deputies were Gregor Strasser, Frick, Feder, Goebbels, Ritter von Epp – the former Freikorps leader, a new, much-trumpeted convert from the BVP – and Hermann Göring, recently returned to the fold after his absence since the putsch. ‘We are going into the Reichstag … like the wolf into the sheepflock,’ Goebbels told his readers in the Angriff, his Berlin newspaper.

There was understandable disappointment and dejection within the party. The need for a readjustment of party propaganda and organization was plain. Under Strasser’s organizational leadership, greater attention was paid to the countyside, and first steps were taken in constructing a panoply of affiliated sub-organizations that became extremely important in tapping the specific interests of middle-class groups.

Meanwhile, the first dark clouds were already gathering over Germany’s economy. The mounting crisis in agriculture was leading to widespread indebtedness, bankruptcies, forced sales of land, and enormous bitterness in the farming community. In the biggest industrial belt, Ruhr industrialists refused to accept an arbitration award and locked out the whole work-force of the iron and steel industry, leaving 230,000 workers without jobs or wages for weeks. Unemployment was by now sharply on the rise, reaching almost 3 million by January 1929, an increase of a million over the previous year. Politically, too, there were growing difficulties. The ‘grand coalition’ under the SPD Chancellor Hermann Müller was shaky from the outset. A split, and serious loss of face for the SPD, occurred over the decision to build a battle cruiser (a policy opposed by the Social Democrats before the election). The Ruhr iron dispute further opened the rifts in the government and exposed it to its critics on Left and Right. It was the first shot of the concerted attempt by the conservative Right to roll back the social advances made in the Weimar welfare state. The ensuing conflict over social policy would ultimately lead to the demise of the Muller government. And by the end of the year, the reparations issue began to loom again. It would become acute in 1929.

In the worsening conditions of the winter of 1928–9, the NSDAP began to attract increasing support. By the end of 1928, the number of membership cards distributed had reached 108,717. Social groups that had scarcely been reached before could now be tapped. In November 1928, Hitler received a rapturous reception from 2,500 students at Munich University. Before he spoke, the meeting had been addressed by the recently appointed Reich Leader of the Nazi Students’ Federation, the twenty-one-year-old future Hitler Youth leader Baldur von Schirach.

The student union elections gave Hitler an encouraging sign of gathering Nazi strength. But it was above all in the countryside, among the radicalized peasants, that the Nazis began to make particularly rapid advances. In Schleswig-Holstein, bomb attacks on government offices gave the clearest indication of the mood in the farming community. In January 1929, radicalized peasants in the region founded the Landvolk, an inchoate but violent protest movement that rapidly became prey to Nazi inroads. Two months later, following an NSDAP meeting in the village of Wöhrden, a fight between SA men and KPD supporters led to two stormtroopers being killed and a number of others injured. Local reactions showed graphically the potential for Nazi gains in the disaffected countryside. There was an immediate upsurge in Nazi support in the locality. Old peasant women now wore the party badge on their work-smocks. From conversations with them, ran the police report, it was clear that they had no idea of the aims of the party. But they were certain that the government was incapable and the authorities were squandering taxpayers’ money. They were convinced ‘that only the National Socialists could be the saviours from this alleged misery’. Farmers spoke of a Nazi victory through parliament taking too long. A civil war was what was needed. The mood was ‘extraordinarily embittered’ and the population were open to all forms of violent action. Using the incident as a propaganda opportunity, Hitler attended the funeral of the dead SA men, and visited those wounded. This made a deep impression on the local inhabitants. He and the other leading Nazis were applauded as ‘liberators of the people’.

As the ‘crisis before the crisis’ – economic and political – deepened, Hitler kept up his propaganda offensive. In the first half of 1929 he wrote ten articles for the party press and held sixteen major speeches before large, rapturous audiences. Four were in Saxony, during the run-up to the state elections there on 12 May. Outright attacks on the Jews did not figure in the speeches. The emphasis was on the bankruptcy at home and abroad of the Weimar system, the exploitation of international finance and the suffering of ‘small people’, the catastrophic economic consequences of democratic rule, the social divisions that party politics caused and replicated, and above all the need to restore German strength and unity and gain the land to secure its future. ‘The key to the world market has the shape of the sword,’ he declared. The only salvation from decline was through power: ‘The entire system must be altered. Therefore the great task is to restore to people their belief in leadership,’ he concluded.

Hitler’s speeches were part of a well-organized propaganda campaign, providing saturation coverage of Saxony before the election. It was planned by Himmler, but under Hitler’s own supervision. The growing numerical strength of the party, and the improvements made in its organization and structure, now allowed more extensive coverage. This in turn helped to create an image of dynamism, drive, and energy. Local activism, and the winning of influential figures in a community, usually held the key to Nazi progress. Hitler had to be used sparingly – for best effect, as well as to avoid too punishing a schedule. A Hitler speech was a major bonus for any party branch. But in the changing conditions from 1929 onwards, the NSDAP was chalking up successes in places where people had never seen Hitler.

The NSDAP won 5 per cent of the vote in the Saxon election. The following month, the party gained 4 per cent in the Mecklenburg elections – double what it had achieved the previous year in the Reichstag election. Its two elected members held a pivotal position in a Landtag evenly balanced between Left and Right. Towards the end of June, Coburg, in northern Bavaria, became the first town in Germany to elect a Nazi-run town council. By October, the NSDAP’s share of the popular vote had reached 7 per cent in the Baden state elections. This was still before the Wall Street Crash ushered in the great Depression.

The revival of the reparations issue provided further grist to the mill of Nazi agitation. The results of the deliberations of the committee of experts, which had been working since January 1929 under the chairmanship of Owen D. Young, an American banker and head of the General Electric Company, to regulate the payment of reparations, were eventually signed on 7 June. Compared with the Dawes Plan, the settlement was relatively favourable to Germany. Repayments were to be kept low for three years, and would overall be some 17 per cent less than under the Dawes Plan. But it would take fifty-nine years before the reparations would finally be paid off. The nationalist Right were outraged. Alfred Hugenberg, former Krupp director, leader of the DNVP and press baron, controlling the nationalist press and with a big stake in the UFA film company, formed in July a ‘Reich Committee for the German People’s Petition’ to organize a campaign to force the government to reject the Young Plan. He persuaded Hitler to join. Franz Seldte and Theodor Duesterberg from the Stahlhelm, Heinrich Claß from the Pan-German League, and the industrial magnate Fritz Thyssen were all members of the committee. Hitler’s presence in this company of capitalist tycoons and reactionaries was not to the liking of the national revolutionary wing of the NSDAP, headed by Otto Strasser, Gregor’s brother. But, ever the opportunist, Hitler recognized the chances the campaign offered. The draft ‘Law against the Enslavement of the German People’ drawn up by the committee in September, rejecting the Young Plan and the ‘war guilt lie’, marginally gained the necessary support to stage a plebiscite. But when the plebiscite eventually took place, on 22 December 1929, only 5.8 millions – 13.8 per cent of the electorate – voted for it. The campaign had proved a failure – but not for Hitler. He and his party had benefited from massive exposure freely afforded him in the Hugenberg press. And he had been recognized as an equal partner by those in high places, with good contacts to sources of funding and influence.

Some of Hitler’s new-found bedfellows had been honoured guests at the Party Rally that took place in Nuremberg from 1 to 4 August 1929. The deputy leader of the Stahlhelm, Theodor Duesterberg, and Count von der Goltz, chairman of the Vereinigte Vaterländische Verbände (United Patriotic Associations) graced the rally with their presence. The Ruhr industrialist, and benefactor of the party, Emil Kirdorf had also accepted an invitation. Winifred Wagner, the Lady of Bayreuth, was also an honoured guest. Thirty-five special trains brought 25,000 SA and SS men and 1,300 members of the Hitler Youth to Nuremberg. Police estimated an attendance of around 30–40,000 in all. It was a far bigger and more grandiose spectacle than the previous rally, two years earlier, had been. It reflected a new confidence and optimism in a party whose membership had grown by this time to some 130,000. And compared with two years earlier, Hitler’s dominance was even more complete. Working sessions simply rubber-stamped policy determined from above. Hitler showed little interest in them. His only concern, as always, was with the propaganda display of the rally.

He had reason to feel satisfied with the way his movement had developed over the four years since its refoundation. The party was now almost three times as large as it had been at the time of the putsch, and growing fast. It was spread throughout the country, and making headway in areas which had never been strongholds. It was now far more tightly organized and structured. There was much less room for dissension. Rivals in the völkisch movement had been amalgamated or had faded into insignificance. Not least, Hitler’s own mastery was complete. His recipe for success was unchanged: hammer home the same message, exploit any opportunity for agitation, and hope for external circumstances to favour the party. But although great strides forward had been made since 1925, and though the party was registering modest electoral gains at state elections and acquiring a good deal of publicity, no realist could have reckoned much to its chances of winning power. For that, Hitler’s only hope was a massive and comprehensive crisis of the state.

He had no notion just how quickly events would turn to the party’s advantage. But on 3 October, Gustav Stresemann, the only statesman of real standing in Germany, who had done most to sustain the shaky Müller government, died following a stroke. Three weeks later, on 24 October 1929, the largest stock-market in the world, in Wall Street, New York, crashed. The crisis Hitler needed was about to envelop Germany.