8
MASTERY OVER THE MOVEMENT

‘Duke and liegeman! In this ancient German… relationship of leader to companions, lies the essence of the structure of the NSDAP.’

Gregor Strasser, 1927

‘I subordinate myself without further ado to Herr Adolf Hitler. Why? He has proved that he can lead; on the basis of his view and his will, he has created a party out of the united national socialist idea, and leads it. He and the party are one, and offer the unity that is the unconditional premiss of success.’

Ernst Graf zu Reventlow,
a former critic of Hitler, 1927

Between the refoundation of the NSDAΡ in February 1925 and the beginnings of the new political and economic turmoil that was to usher in the shattering impact of the world economic crisis, the Nazi Movement was no more than a fringe irritant in German politics. Its leader, Hitler, faced with the rebuilding of his party from scratch after it had fractured into warring factions during his imprisonment in 1924, and banned from speaking in public in most of Germany until 1927 (in the biggest state of all, Prussia, until 1928), was confined to the political wilderness. A confidential report by the Reich Minister of the Interior in 1927, pointing out that the NSDAΡ ‘was not advancing’, realistically described the party as ‘a numerically insignificant… radical-revolutionary splinter group incapable of exerting any noticeable influence on the great mass of the population and the course of political events’.¹

In the conditions of economic recovery and apparent consolidation that prevailed in the four years following the currency stabilization the major props of Nazi success before 1923 were removed. A semblance of ‘normality’ came over the Weimar Republic. These were Weimar’s ‘golden years’. With Stresemann at the helm, the Locarno Treaty of 1925 (recognizing the western borders of the Reich as determined in the Versailles Treaty) and Germany’s entry into the League of Nations the following year brought the country back into the international fold. At home, despite nationalist opposition, the Dawes Plan took much of the heat out of the reparations issue by regulating and substantially easing the rate of German repayment. It would be five years before the issue became sensitive again, when a further attempt – the Young Plan – in 1929 to establish terms for clearing the reparations burden stirred a new wave of nationalist agitation. Meanwhile, despite governmental instability, the new Republic seemed to be settling down. Beneath the four changes of administration between 1925 and 1927, there was a good deal of continuity in government coalitions.² In the economy, after a sharp but short-lived recession in 1926, industrial production for the first time came to surpass the pre-war level. Real wages did the same. The welfare state made impressive progress. Health provision was far superior to the pre-war period. Public spending on housing increased massively. By the later 1920s, over 300,000 new houses a year were being built – a level to be reached in only two years during the Third Reich. Industrial disturbances fell. So did crime levels. The first glimmers of a mass-consumer society were visible. More people had radios, telephones, even cars.³ Shopping was increasingly carried out in big department stores. In all this, Germany in the mid-1920s followed patterns recognizable in much of Europe. America was the model, though Germany lagged far behind. These years also marked the high-point of Weimar culture, of neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) and the thriving of an extraordinary cultural avant-garde. The modernist architectural experiments of the Bauhaus, the Expressionist painting of leading artists such as Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky, the biting social commentaries in the pictures of Otto Dix and caricatures of George Grosz, the bold new musical forms attained by Arnold Schönberg and Paul Hindemith, the poetic genius of Bertolt Brecht’s plays: all became synonymous with Germany’s cultural pre-eminence in the 1920s.⁴ Mass entertainment also flourished. Sporting events drew increasing numbers of spectators. Boxing, football, and motor-sports were especially popular.⁵ Cinemas and dance-halls sprouted up on urban street-corners. The Charleston, shimmy and foxtrot were the rage. Young people in big cities were more likely to be attracted to hot jazz than to Heimatlieder.⁶ In the countryside, life continued at a more leisurely pace. ‘Apart from a few cases of fire, there are no notable disturbances of public safety to report,’ began the sleepy half-monthly dispatch of the Government President of Upper Bavaria in February 1928.⁷ Five years earlier, his reports had been dominated by the activities of Hitler and his Movement. It was as if a storm had burst in 1923. The calm that followed held out little hope of future success for the Nazi Party.

The völkisch Right’s residual support had dwindled to around 3 per cent of the population by late 1924. In the 1928 Reichstag election this fell still further: the NSDAΡ (campaigning in a Reichstag election for the first time under its own name) gained a mere 2.6 per cent of the vote. Over 97 per cent of the electorate did not want Hitler. Under the present-day constitution of the Federal Republic, the Nazis’ percentage of the vote would have gained them no seats at all. Even under the Weimar electoral system, only twelveNazis took their seats among the 491 deputies returned to the Reichstag.⁸ Growing unrest in farming communities and agitation surrounding the Young Plan helped the NSDAΡ to improve on this disastrous performance in regional elections in 1929. Even so, without the Depression and the calamitous effect upon Germany from the end of that year, the Nazi Party may well have broken up and faded into oblivion, remembered essentially as a passing phenomenon of the post-war upheaval. Hitler himself would have been recalled as a one-time firebrand who burnt his fingers in an absurd putsch attempt and never again became a force in German politics.

As long as the German economy offered prospects of recovery and future prosperity, the fragile political fabric of the new democracy did not collapse. Without such a collapse, and as long as the anti-democratic élites with a leverage on power – particularly the army leadership, but also the big landowners, many of the captains of industry, and the top echelon of the civil service – retained their detached loyalty to the Republic, there was little or nothing that Hitler and his party could do to gain a foothold in the mainstream of politics, let alone to stake a claim to power. However, it is as well not to be dismissive of the importance of these ‘wilderness years’ between 1924 and 1929 in laying the platform for the later triumphant rise of Hitler and the Nazi Party. During this period, Hitler became incontestably established as the leader of the radical Right. In the process, the NSDAP was transformed into a ‘leader party’ of a unique kind, with the character it was to retain, and later to impart to the German state. Hitler by this time was no conventional party chairman, nor even a leader among others, primus inter pares. He was now ‘the Leader’. Between 1925 and 1929, at first with some difficulty, he had established outright and complete mastery over his movement.

By 1929, the organization of the party, which had been built up to accompany its nationwide expansion (however thinly spread at first), bore little comparison with the hand-to-mouth administration of the pre-putsch party, and placed it in a far stronger position to exploit the new crises that descended on Germany from the autumn of that year. The activist cadres had also grown in strength. Despite its miserable showing at the polls, the party’s own figures of 100,000 members in October 1928 were almost twice as high as the membership rolls on the eve of the putsch.⁹ Though the voters were still few in number, the activist core of mainly dedicated fanatics was relatively large.¹⁰ Finally, though the factionalism inherent in radical rightist movements still simmered just below the surface, not infrequently breaking through into open conflict, the NSDAP was a far more cohesive force by 1929 than it had been before the putsch. And by then, its rivals on the extreme Right had disappeared, lost all significance, or been absorbed into the Nazi Movement.

These developments were strongly influenced by Hitler’s changed leadership position. As we have noted, Hitler was before the putsch only one of the leaders of the Right, and, with the main emphasis in 1923 on paramilitary politics, heavily dependent upon forces outside his own movement. Despite the beginnings of the leadership cult which some of his followers attached to him, he was still regarded at that time as merely one exponent – however important – of National Socialism (with its myriad forms of emphasis and interpretation). By 1929, his dominance in the movement was absolute, the ‘idea’ now as good as inseparable from the Leader. The Hitler cult had caught hold among the party faithful in ways scarcely imaginable before 1923, and was now well on the way to elevating the Leader above the party. For some leading figures in the party, the cult was encouraged, or at least tolerated, because it served successfully as the focus of growing support. Above all, it was accepted because it was a crucial adhesive, alone capable of holding together the party which otherwise, as 1924 had shown, was likely to splinter into feuding factions. But for opponents and for supporters alike, National Socialism came in these years to mean exclusively ‘the Hitler Movement’. The platform was created for the subsequent rapid spread of the Leader cult, once the breakthrough of popular support had been attained in 1930, and for the later near deification of Hitler in the Third Reich itself.

Hitler’s own contribution to the transformation of the NSDAP in these years should not be exaggerated. What is remarkable, indeed, is not how much, but how little, Hitler personally had to do to bring about the restructuring of the NSDAP in these years so that it was in a position to challenge for power once circumstances again began to favour it.

In essence, Hitler’s crude scheme of the path to national redemption and rebirth remained as it had been since his entry into politics: mobilization of the masses, takeover of the state, destruction of internal enemies, preparation for external conquest.¹¹ His ideological ‘vision’ was, at this stage at least, of importance mainly in further ‘rationalizing’ to himself the prejudices and phobias he had long carried with him, and in conveying a compelling image of a political ‘visionary’ to his followers. His sole recipe, as always, was to work for the ‘nationalization’ of the masses through ceaseless propaganda and agitation, and to wait for events to turn in his favour. The certainty that they would do so – the certainty of the fanatic – impressed those drawn to his message. It helped to shape the aura around Hitler, the ‘messianic’, ‘visionary’ image. However, the growth of the Führer cult – though Hitler did nothing to prevent it, other than prohibiting its most tasteless excesses – was brought about by his followers. And the important restructuring of the party’s organization was largely the work of Gregor Strasser. Hitler’s indispensability to the völkiscb Right had been demonstrated when it disintegrated during his time in Landsberg. No other leader could rally it and hold it together as he could. And no speaker could draw the crowds like he could. Beyond that, his main contribution to the inner strengthening of the NSDAP in this period amounted to an uncompromising stance – even in adversity – towards all potential threats to his authority, and the utilization of his unique leadership position to bypass or override all ideological conflicts in the single-minded pursuit of power.

Despite the modest growth (from a low base) in party support in 1929, neither Hitler nor any other leading Nazi had any inkling about the speed with which the political breakthrough was to follow. But once the breakthrough came, the party was, following the changes since its refoundation in 1925, in a position to exploit the new conditions it had been powerless to produce.

I

Hitler spent Christmas Eve 1924 with 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.¹² 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.¹³ 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.’¹⁴ 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.’¹⁵

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 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 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.¹⁶

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. It was his ‘journey to Canossa’. 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.¹⁷ Behind the public façade of continued reverence for the figurehead of the völkisch movement, 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.¹⁸ 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.¹⁹ 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 theVölkiscber Beobachter on 16 February.²⁰ By that time, Hitler’s relations with his rivals in the NSFB had been clarified.

A meeting of the NSFB in Berlin on 17 January marked the effective end of the attempt to create a unified völkisch movement. Reinhold Wulle, one of the original DVFP founders, sought to undermine Hitler’s authority, especially among the strong north German contingent present. He accused Hitler of being worn-out through his imprisonment and of giving in to the international power of the Catholic Church. Wulle reckoned this to be a bigger threat than ‘the Jewish danger’. The point carried some weight amongvölkisch leaders in the Protestant North. He also suggested that under Hitler’s weakened leadership Bavarian particularism would come to dominate. It would be South against North. Playing to his audience, Wulle emphasized his own Prussian orientation. Clever politicians were needed in the present conditions. Hitler was not one of them. Henning, another co-founder of the DVFP, was even plainer. Hitler was ‘perhaps the drummer, but no politician’. Another vehement critic claimed that Hitler wanted to be ‘pope’ of the movement, to which he had contributed nothing, and accused him of breaking his word of honour. Graefe reinforced the accusation. He said he passed no judgement on Hitler. The facts spoke for themselves. The alleged breach of trust was seen as Hitler’s refusal to answer a letter by Graefe earlier in January, effectively posing him an ultimatum to break his links with the Streicher and Esser faction, or the DVFP would go its own way. The accusations produced a tumult. The National Socialists present were outraged. The meeting ended with the swapping of insults and all hopes of unity in the völkisch movement dead.²¹

A glimpse of National Socialist thinking at the meeting can be gleaned from the comments of Walther von Corswant-Cuntzow, later Gauleiter of Pomerania. ‘Rather,’ he said, ‘that the one leader in whom one has most trust fails, than this hither and thither of the many from whom everybody wants something different. I now believe in the godly grace of Hitler, whom I have personally never seen, and believe that God will enlighten him now to find the correct way out of this chaos.’²² The patent inability to reach any basis of unity in the völkisch movement over the previous year made increasing numbers now susceptible to such sentiments.

But not everyone in the völkisch movement felt the same way. Some still stated openly that Ludendorff was the leader they wanted.²³ There was said to be a rising anti-Hitler mood in one of the Munich branches of the NSFB after the Nazi leader had brusquely refused to meet a deputation from the branch for even a few minutes and had stated that its written submission had gone, like all others he received, unread into the waste-paper basket.²⁴

Hitler himself was concerned only with the removal of the ban on his party in Bavaria, which he knew was imminent. He was prepared to undertake nothing which would jeopardize it. He let the north German National Socialists know, however, that he had no intention of entering into any pact with Graefe’s Freedom Party, and that a statement refounding the party throughout the Reich would be made once the ban was lifted. He insisted that his hands were free. He had entered into no political arrangements, and had promised Held only that he would not undertake a putsch. As regards his relationship with Ludendorff, he commented, referring to the position he had adopted during the days of the pre-putsch Kampfbund and subsequently at his trial, he had viewed the General only as the military leader, with himself as the political leader. The only breach of faith towards Ludendorff, he added, had come from those who had dragged his name through the ‘swamp of the parliament’, devaluing it in the process. He wanted ‘only true National Socialists’ in leadership positions after the refoundation. Far from being worn down by his imprisonment, he was more flexible than ever. But his line was unchanged: the fight above all against Marxism.²⁵ Its positive expression was the ‘nationalization of German workers’. As for his attitude towards the heavily criticized leaders of the GVG – Streicher, Esser and Dinter – Hitler had a characteristic reply. All that mattered for him, he stated, was what those concerned had achieved. Streicher had built a following of more than 60,000 supporters in Nuremberg – more than the Reich Leadership of the NSFB had in the remainder of Bavaria. He could not offend these supporters for the sake of any personal antipathy.²⁶

By mid-February, events were moving Hitler’s way. On 12 February, Ludendorff dissolved the Reich Leadership of the NSFB.²⁷ Shortly afterwards, just before the lifting of the ban on the party, Hitler announced his decision to refound the ΝSDAΡ. A flood of declarations of loyalty to Hitler now poured in. At a meeting at Hamm in Westphalia on 22 February, Gauleiter of the former NSFB from Westphalia, the Rhineland, Hanover and Pomerania, together with over 100 district leaders from the northern provinces of Germany, attested anew their ‘unshakeable loyalty and adherence(Gefolgscbaft) to their leader Adolf Hitler’.²⁸ The refounded NSDAP would not, unlike its pre-putsch predecessor, be largely confined to Bavaria.²⁹

On 26 February, the Völkiscber 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.³⁰ 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 obedience³¹ He made no concessions. What was on offer was a ‘pax Hitleriana’.³² 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’.³³ 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 Rohm, who, unable to persuade Hitler to agree to retaining the SA as a conventional paramilitary organization, withdrew from political life and departed for Bolivia.)³⁴ 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 had both symbolic value, and also accorded with the stipulation of centralized control of membership from Munich.³⁵ 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.’³⁶

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. The meeting had originally been envisaged for the 24th. But that was Fasching-Tuesday.³⁷ So the Friday was settled upon. 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.³⁸ 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.³⁹ He told Lüdecke: ‘I won’t take part in that comedy… I know the sort of brother-kissing Hitler intends to call for.’⁴⁰ Ludendorff, Strasser and Rohm were also absent.⁴¹ Hitler wanted the first party-leader, Drexler, to chair the meeting. But Drexler insisted that Hermann Esser be evicted from the party.⁴² 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’.⁴³ So one of Hitler’s most trusted Munich followers, his business-manager Max Amann, opened the meeting.

Hitler spoke for almost two hours.⁴⁴ 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.⁴⁵ There were tumultuous cheers and cries of ‘Heil’. Everyone stood for the singing of ‘Deutschland über alles’.⁴⁶

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.⁴⁷ 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.⁴⁸ 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. In his proclamation of 26 February, Hitler had referred merely in bland terms to the General as ‘the most loyal and selfless friend’ of the National Socialist Movement. In his speech, he had not mentioned Ludendorff at all. Only in the scenes that followed, as calls of ‘Heil’ to the General were heard in the hall, had he spoken – diplomatically, but vaguely – of belonging to him ‘in heart’ even though he had not referred to his name.⁴⁹ Ludendorff’s supporters saw Hitler’s treatment of him as a calculated insult. Ludendorff’s standing remained a potential problem.⁵⁰ 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, died at the age of fifty-four from the effects of an appendicitis operation. The Right had so persistently tried to defame him for his participation in the munitions strike of January 1918 – when the SPD leadership had become involved in the unrest (demanding democratization and peace without annexations) that spread from the Berlin armaments factories, bringing a million workers out on strike, temporarily threatening war production, and later fostering the ‘stab-in-the-back’ legend – that he had been forced to defend himself in 170 libel cases.⁵¹ Such was the feeling against Ebert, and such was the level of anti-socialism in conservative Catholic as well as in nationalist circles, that the Archbishop of Munich and Freising, Cardinal Faulhaber, who had notoriously on one occasion dubbed the 1918 Revolution ‘high treason’, refused to have the church bells rung in his diocese in honour of the dead President.⁵² The NSDAP had no expectation of having any significant influence on the election of Ebert’s successor. Hitler openly as good as admitted this. He told a party meeting that it was immaterial who became Reich President. Whoever it was would be ‘Only a man who is in reality no “man” at all’.⁵³ But 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.⁵⁴ He regarded the General as no more than a token candidate, without a chance of winning.⁵⁵ 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.⁵⁶ 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. ‘Hitler knows perfectly well that although he has a great following in Bavaria he can count on very few votes in North Germany and East of Berlin,’ the General told his dismayed wife, who immediately foresaw the likely consequences to which the arrogant former warlord was blind. ‘In particular, the East Prussians and Silesians have been bound to me by gratitude and devotion ever since the war,’ he went on, his mind made up. They, in fact, showed their gratitude and devotion by almost completely ignoring him in the poll.⁵⁷ Probably Ludendorff reckoned, too, with the backing of his völkisch friends. But when the DVFΒ decided – in order not to split the right-wing vote – to put their support behind Jarres, the General’s fate was effectively sealed.⁵⁸ 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.⁵⁹

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.⁶⁰ Hitler was anything but distressed at the outcome. ‘That’s all right,’ he told Hermann Esser, ‘now we’ve finally finished him.’⁶¹ 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. Not only did the national-conservative Right vote for him. Had the ΒVP and the KPD supported the Centre Party’s candidate Wilhelm Marx, instead of the ΒVP perversely supporting the candidate of the reactionary Right and Communists sticking with Ernst Thälmann, Hindenburg would have lost. The price would be paid heavily in 1933.

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. Influenced by Mathilde von Kemnitz, who in 1926 would become his second wife, he had since around 1924 become increasingly susceptible to a persecution complex bound up with conspiracy theories, which included freemasons, Jews, Marxists, and also Jesuits. His increasing eccentricity – bolstered by Mathilde’s even greater zaniness – now took him increasingly to the fringes of the radical Right, itself scarcely renowned for its cool rationality. The curious sect he and Mathilde founded in 1925, the Tannenbergbund, published a wealth of literature which was so hair-brained in its persecution paranoia that even Nazi ideologues rejected it. Not only was Ludendorff no longer of any use to Hitler; he was outrightly counter-productive. By 1927, Hitler was openly attacking his former ally – and accusing him of freemasonry (an accusation which was never countered).⁶²

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.⁶³ 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.⁶⁴ 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.⁶⁵ 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.⁶⁶ 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 ΝSDAΡ’s organization in north Germany.⁶⁷ 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.⁶⁸ 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.⁶⁹

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 had been practically the sole area of agreement between the Directorate and the NSFB leaders in 1924. It was to remain a point of tension between the north German NSDAP and the Munich headquarters throughout 1925.⁷⁰ 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.⁷¹ 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 G V G leaders. His support for them remained a source of intense disappointment and bitterness.⁷² 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.⁷³ 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 of the Ruhr, were attracted by the ideas of ‘national Bolshevism’.⁷⁴ 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 NSDAΡ at the end of 1924. Brought up in a Catholic family of moderate means, from Rheydt, 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 the end of his days in the Berlin bunker twenty years later, adding, self-piteously, Jesus’s words on the Cross – ‘My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?’⁷⁵ 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 showed his own ideological preferences at that time in an exchange in mid-September 1925 with the head of the Pomeranian Gau, Theodor Vahlen, a professor at Greifswald University and owner of a small printing-house in the town, whose incompetence alongside the animosity he attracted from the future Propaganda Leader led to his replacement as Gauleiter by 1927.⁷⁶ ‘National and socialist! What goes first, and what comes afterwards? With us in the west, there can be no doubt. First socialist redemption, then comes national liberation like a whirlwind. Professor Vahlen takes a different view. First nationalize the workers. But the question is, how?’ Goebbels had gained a false impression of Hitler’s position. ‘Hitler stands between both opinions,’ he wrote. ‘But he is on the way to coming over to us completely.’⁷⁷ 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.⁷⁸

Finally, there was the attitude towards Hitler and towards the party’s programme. The north German Directorate had been fanatically pro-Hitler during the time of his imprisonment. But it had been disappointed at his equivocal stance towards the NSFB, and the issue of elections. And its leaders, Adalbert Volck and then Ludolf Haase, had shied away from the way a personality cult was being built around Hitler, and its implications for the party. 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, and faults were attributed to those around him – especially Esser and Streicher.⁷⁹ But many of the north German party faithful did not know Hitler personally, had not even met him.⁸⁰ Their relationship to him was, therefore, quite different than 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.⁸¹

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.⁸² Hitler himself was totally taken up with work on Mein Kampf and, they felt, prepared to do nothing. In the circumstances, this amounted to support for Esser. Hitler defended Esser and his clique on the grounds that their usefulness was the decisive factor, ignoring how limited this ‘usefulness’ was if it meant the opposition of the party in the rest of the Reich.

It was to create a counter to the ‘Esser dictatorship’ that Gregor Strasser, described by Fobke as ‘the honest, extraordinarily diligent, if not genial, collaborator of Hitler’, summoned a meeting of northern party leaders to Hagen in Westphalia on 10 September 1925. Strasser himself had to drop out at the last minute because of the serious illness of his mother.⁸³ As a result, the discussions did not go entirely according to plan. But most of the northern and western party leaders were present. In Strasser’s absence, the intention (which had not been revealed to most of those attending) of forming a block to combat ‘the harmful Munich direction’ could not be fulfilled. Divisions were quickly revealed. When the issue of Esser was raised, there was resistance to anything that smacked of a ‘palace revolution’. A unanimous rejection of participation in elections, recorded and sent on to Hitler, simply papered over other serious divisions. Beyond that, all that could be achieved was the establishment, under Strasser’s leadership, of a loose organization of northern party districts, mainly for arranging the exchange of speakers.⁸⁴

This ‘Working Community (Arbeitsgemeinschaft) of the North and West German Gaue of the NSDAP’ (AG), and its publicity organ, the National-sozialistische Briefe (National Socialist Letters), edited by Goebbels, were not in any way intended as a challenge to Hitler.⁸⁵ His approval was explicitly acknowledged in the Community’s statutes, and its members committed themselves to work ‘in comradely spirit of the idea of National Socialism under their leader Adolf Hitler’.⁸⁶ Hitler recommended the publications of the Community to party members. The members of the Community opposed Hitler’s entourage, not Hitler himself. And here, too, there were compromises in practice – even stretching to relations with Esser and Streicher.⁸⁷ There was, therefore, no hint of a secession.

Even so, despite its internal divisions, the Community did come to pose a threat to Hitler’s 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 1920.⁸⁸ In November, Strasser 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.⁸⁹

Not only was the draft vague, incoherent, and contradictory. It could only be divisive. So it proved even before the Community’s meeting in Hanover on 24 January 1926 to consider it.⁹⁰ The meeting resolved to consider the suggestions sent in by various members in a commission run by Gregor Strasser.⁹¹ But this bland resolution did not reflect a heated, acrimonious debate, at which uncomplimentary comments were made about Gottfried Feder, the party’s economics ‘expert’ whose ideas had made a strong impression on Hitler while the latter was undergoing his ideological training course for the Reichswehr in the summer of 1919. The Community’s draft programme had not been sent to either Feder or Hitler. When he obtained a copy, Feder, the self-styled ‘father’ of the original party programme – though his influence had probably extended no further than the inclusion of his obsessive demand for the ‘breaking of interest slavery’ – was furious. He turned up unannounced at Hanover and did not hide his anger at the direction of the intended changes.⁹² Feeling aggrieved and insulted, he made notes of what was said, plainly with a view to reporting them in Munich.⁹³ Some of the Gauleiter – the party’s regional bosses, in charge of the thirty or so sizeable districts (Gaue) into which the Reich was divided – present did not shy away from direct criticism of Hitler’s leadership qualities – though they realized they could not do without him.⁹⁴The meeting had previously also decided unanimously to support the plebiscite (to take place in June) for the expropriation of the German princes without compensation – an initiative of the Left, and at the time a significant and divisive public issue.⁹⁵

Hitler had previously been unconcerned about the Working Community. But Feder now prompted him into action. Hitler plainly recognized the danger signals. He summoned about sixty party leaders to a meeting on 14 February 1926 at Bamberg, in Upper Franconia.⁹⁶ There was no agenda. Hitler, it was stated, simply wanted to discuss some ‘important questions’. The local branch in Bamberg, large and loyalist, had been well cultivated by Hitler and Streicher during 1925. The northern leaders, though several of the most prominent among them were present, were both outnumbered and could not but be impressed by the show of support for Hitler which had been orchestrated in the town.⁹⁷ On the journey to Bamberg, Feder had once more taken the opportunity to underline to Hitler the threat to his authority.⁹⁸

Hitler spoke for two hours.⁹⁹ 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 the princes, 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.¹⁰⁰

Goebbels was appalled.

I feel devastated. What sort of Hitler? A reactionary? Amazingly clumsy and uncertain. Russian question: completely by the way. Italy and England natural allies. Terrible! Our task is the smashing of Bolshevism. Bolshevism is a Jewish creation! We must be Russia’s heir! 180 Millions! Expropriation of the princes! Law is law. Also for the princes. Don’t shake the question of private property! (sic!)¹⁰¹ Dreadful! Programme is sufficient! Content with it. Feder nods. Ley nods.¹⁰² Streicher nods. Esser nods. I’m sick at heart when I see you in such company!!! Short discussion. Strasser speaks. Hesitant, trembling, clumsy, the good, honest Strasser. God, how poor a match we are for those swine down there!… 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.¹⁰³

The potential threat from the Working Community had evaporated. Hitler had reasserted his authority. 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.¹⁰⁴ 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’. ¹⁰⁵ 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. He voiced no objection to the creation in March of a greatly enlarged Gau in the Ruhr under the combined leadership of the Working Community members Goebbels, Karl Kaufmann (an energetic activist in his mid-twenties, later Gauleiter of Hamburg, who had cut his teeth through organizing sabotage in the French-occupied Ruhr), and 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).¹⁰⁶ He paid Gregor Strasser, recovering from a car accident, a surprise visit at his Landshut home. Following discussions with Strasser, he excluded Esser from the Reich Leadership of the NSDAP in April.¹⁰⁷ And by September, Strasser had himself been called to the Reich Leadership as Propaganda Leader of the party, while Franz Pfeffer von Salomon was appointed head of the SA.¹⁰⁸ 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.¹⁰⁹ 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. ¹¹⁰ ‘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.’¹¹¹ Like others in the Working Community, he had wanted only to liberate Hitler from the clutches of the Esser clique.¹¹² 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.¹¹³ At the end of the month he received a letter from Hitler inviting him to speak in Munich on 8 April.¹¹⁴ Hitler’s car was there to meet him at the station in Munich to take him to his hotel. ‘What a noble reception,’ noted Goebbels in his diary.¹¹⁵ 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. His north German colleagues, Kaufmann and Pfeffer, were less impressed. Disappointed at his sudden reversal of the opposition to Munich he had up to then so vehemently advocated, they told Goebbels his speech was ‘rubbish’.¹¹⁶ The next morning Goebbels was taken to party headquarters. He, Kaufmann, and Pfeffer were summoned to Hitler’s room. There they were subjected to a dressing-down for their parts in the Working Community and Gau Ruhr. But Hitler promptly offered to wipe the slate clean. ‘At the end unity follows,’ wrote Goebbels. ‘Hitler is great. He gives us all a warm handshake.’ In the 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.’¹¹⁷ 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.’¹¹⁸ 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.¹¹⁹Goebbels 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.¹²⁰

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.’¹²¹ 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.¹²²

By the time of the General Members’ Meeting on 22 May, attended by 657 party members,¹²³ 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.¹²⁴ Following his ‘report’ on the party’s activities since its refoundation, Hitler was unanimously ‘re-elected’ as party chairman.¹²⁵ The party administration remained in the hands of those close to Hitler.¹²⁶ 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 NSDAΡ had become.¹²⁷ 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.¹²⁸

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. The rally was intended as ‘a great display of the youthful strength of our movement’. What was expected was ‘an image of disciplined force… visible proof of the regained inner health of the movement’. The events of 1924 were held up as a warning. All potential for discord was to be avoided. Matters of substance were referred to special commissions. Discussion was to be kept to a minimum. The chairman of each commission was to be held personally responsible for any resolutions, which were then subject to Hitler’s own veto.¹²⁹ Otherwise, the rally consisted of speeches, ritual, and marching. An estimated 7–8,000, including 3,600 stormtroopers and 116 SS men, attended.¹³⁰ 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 Stoétrupp Adolf Hitler (Adolf Hitler Assault Squad), had been on public display.¹³¹ 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.¹³² The party leader received a rapturous reception from delegates after his speech.¹³³ ‘Deep and mystical. Almost like a gospel… I thank fate, that it gave us this man,’ wrote Goebbels.¹³⁴

The Nazi Party was still far smaller than it had been at the time of the putsch.¹³⁵ 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.¹³⁶ 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.¹³⁷ 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 prove inaccessible for weeks at a time.¹³⁸ 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.¹³⁹

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.¹⁴⁰ 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.¹⁴¹ 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.¹⁴² 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 chocolate to children, a simple man of the people shaking the calloused hands of peasants and workers.’¹⁴³ 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. But for one perceptive and critical observer, the one-time Gauleiter of Hamburg, Albert Krebs, Hitler’s ability to sway the masses rested essentially on a Very conscious art’ of manipulation – cool calculation, ‘without inner sympathy and truthfulness’.¹⁴⁴ Krebs summed up: ‘The art of the mask and dissimulation should not be forgotten. It made it so difficult to grasp the core of Hitler’s being.’¹⁴⁵

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.¹⁴⁶ 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.¹⁴⁷ Even one of his leading supporters accused him of ‘contempt for mankind’ (Menschenveracbtung) in 1928.¹⁴⁸ 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 oubursts of hatred’ were seen by Putzi Hanfstaengl as a sign of sexual deficiency.¹⁴⁹ 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.¹⁵⁰

In physical appearance, Hitler was little changed from the time before the putsch. Away from the speaker’s podium he looked anything but impressive.¹⁵¹ His face had hardened.¹⁵² 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.¹⁵³ 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.¹⁵⁴ Has dress sense was anything but stylish. He still often favoured his plain blue suit.¹⁵⁵ 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.¹⁵⁶ For relaxation, he preferred to wear traditional Bavarian lederhosen.¹⁵⁷ But even when he was in prison, he hated to be seen without a tie.¹⁵⁸ 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.¹⁵⁹ 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.¹⁶⁰ 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 alterative 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.¹⁶¹ 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.¹⁶²

Shortly after the Weimar Party Rally, in mid-July 1926, Hitler left Munich with his entourage for a holiday on the Obersalzberg.¹⁶³ 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 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 when he needed peace and quiet to dictate parts of the second volume of Mein Kampf. ¹⁶⁴ Whenever he could, 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.¹⁶⁵ Hitler had his summer retreat. He could look down from his ‘magic mountain’ and see himself bestriding the world.¹⁶⁶ 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.¹⁶⁷ 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.¹⁶⁸ Three years later, Geli was to be found dead in Hitler’s flat in Munich.

By 1926 the Büchners had sold Pension Moritz and were gone. Hitler detested the new owner, a Saxon named Dressel, and moved – the Bechsteins had asked him to join them – to the Marineheim. He did not enjoy the stuffy atmosphere there, and moved down the mountain to Berchtesgaden itself and the Deutsches Haus, a hotel where he spent his time in summer 1920 finishing the second volume of Mein Kampf and relaxing with his cronies.¹⁶⁹ Rudolf Heß, Emil Maurice (Hitler’s chauffeur), and Heinrich Hoffmann were among them. Gregor Strasser and Bernhard Rust, the Gauleiter of Hanover-North (later to become Reich Minister of Education) were also there. Goebbels, already on holiday himself in Berchtesgaden, joined them for drives through the mountains, and down to the Königssee for boat-rides. As usual, they were subjected at length to ‘the chief’s’ monologues – on ‘the social question’, ‘racial questions’, the meaning of political revolution, how to gain control of the state, the architectural shape of the future, the nature of a new German constitution. Goebbels was ecstatic. ‘He is a genius,’ he gushed. ‘The natural, creative instrument of a divine fate… Out of deep distress a star is shining! I feel completely bound to him. The last doubt in me has disappeared.’¹⁷⁰

During a further stay at the Deutsches Haus in Berchtesgaden in early autumn 1926, Hitler came into contact with Maria Reiter. Her friends called her Mimi. For Hitler she was Mimi, Mimilein, Mizzi, Mizzerl – whichever diminutive occurred to him. He also called her ‘my dear child’. He was thirty-seven years of age; she was sixteen. Like his father, he preferred women much younger than himself – girls he could dominate, who would be obedient playthings but not get in the way. The two women with whom he would become most intimately associated, Geli Raubal (nineteen years younger than he was) and Eva Braun (twenty-three years younger), fitted the same model – until, that is, Geli became rebellious and wanted a level of freedom which Hitler was unwilling to permit. But these relationships were still to come when Hitler encountered Mimi Reiter.

A fortnight or so before she met Hitler, Mimi’s mother had died of cancer. During her mother’s illness, her father, a founder member of the Berchtesgaden branch of the SΡD, had brought Mimi home from a boarding-school run by nuns in the Catholic pilgrimage centre, Altötting, to help run the family clothes shop on the ground-floor of the Deutsches Haus, where Hitler was staying. She had already heard that the famous Adolf Hitler had taken rooms in the hotel when he introduced himself one day when she was sitting on a bench in the nearby Kurpark, together with her sister Anni, playing with their alsatian dog, Marco. Soon, he was flirting with her. She and Anni were invited to a meeting he addressed in the hotel.¹⁷¹ ‘Wolf’, as he asked her to call him, using his own favourite nickname, took her for trips in his Mercedes, driven by the discreet Maurice. Hitler was evidently taken with the attractive, blonde young girl, charming in her naïve, youthful way, flirtatious, hanging on his every word. He flattered her, and played with her affections. She may have been emotionally disturbed, so soon after her mother’s death. At any rate, a sense of being courted by one enveloped in such an aura of power and fame must also have played its part. She found him an imposing figure. His manner of dress – complete with knee-length boots and whip – impressed her. Hitler demonstrated his domination by thrashing his own dog, an Alsatian called Prinz, when it misbehaved by fighting Mimi’s dog. She was in awe of him, and plainly became completely infatuated. According to her own account, long after the war, on one trip into the countryside near Berchtesgaden, Hitler took her to a remote forest glade, stood her against a tree, admired her from a distance, calling her his ‘woodland spirit’, then kissed her passionately. He intimated his undying love. Soon afterwards, he was gone – back to real life: politics, meetings, speeches, the regular whirl of activities in Munich. He gave her a leather-bound copy of Mein Kampf forChristmas; she gave him two sofa-cushions that she had embroidered. It was not enough. She dreamt of marriage. Nothing was further from his thoughts. Still following her own story, she attempted to hang herself in despair the following year but was found by her brother-in-law and rescued in time. She also told of visits to Hitler’s flat in Munich, on one occasion, in 1931, staying overnight, being held tightly by her lover, and letting ‘everything happen to me’. At this precise time, however, another woman-Geli Raubal-was the centre of Hitler’s attention. Whether Mimi’s story is located in the earlier part of 1931, when Geli was residing in Hitler’s apartment, or towards the end of the year, when the scandal of Geli’s death was reverberating through Munich, it is stretching belief to accept that she slept with Hitler in his flat at that time. This alone prompts suspicion that much of Mimi’s later story was an elaboration of part-fantasized memories of a lovestruck young girl who, through three marriages, never lost a devotion to Hitler which saw her make frequent visits to his mother’s grave in Leonding.¹⁷²

She wrote him a number of fond letters. His own letters to her (whose authenticity has not been called into question) were affectionate, though in a fatherly, patronizing fashion. ‘My dear, good child,’ began his reply on 8 February 1927 to a letter from her, thanking her belatedly for her present – presumably the cushions,

I was truly happy to receive this sign of your tender friendship to me. I have nothing in my apartment whose possession gives me more pleasure. I am given a constant reminder of your cheeky head and your eyes… As regards what is causing you personal pain, you can believe me that I sympathize with you. But you should not let your little head droop in sadness and must only see and believe: even if fathers sometimes don’t understand their children any longer because they have got older not only in years but in feelings, they mean only well for them. As happy as your love makes me, I ask you most ardently to listen to your father. And now, my dear treasure (Goldstück), receive warmest greetings from your Wolf, who is always thinking of you.¹⁷³

For Mimi, Germany’s great leader had fallen in love with her in the late summer of 1926. For Hitler, Mimi – a child holding the allure of a lover – had been an attractive temporary distraction.

While dictating the last chapters of Mein Kampf during his stay on the Obersalzberg, Hitler had, as we have seen, consolidated his thinking on foreign policy, notably 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.¹⁷⁴ His tone was different to 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 Circus Krone would be counter-productive in this audience. Instead, the emphasis was placed entirely on the need to eliminate Marxism as theprerequi-site 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, and by this time had a substantially smaller membership than in 1923.¹⁷⁵ 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. As a rhetorical device, therefore, ‘Marxism’ served a multiplicity of purposes. 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’ (ausgerottet), Germany would never rise again. The task of the National Socialist Movement was straightforward: ‘the smashing and annihilation of the MarxistWeltanschauung’. ¹⁷⁶ 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 no longer to get higher wages, but 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’.¹⁷⁷ What the mass had to feel was its own strength.¹⁷⁸ 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.¹⁷⁹ ‘The broad masses are blind and stupid and don’t know what they are doing,’ he claimed.¹⁸⁰ They were ‘primitive in attitude’. For them, ‘understanding’ offered only a ‘shaky platform’. ‘What is stable is emotion: hatred.’¹⁸¹ 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’.¹⁸²

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 to 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.¹⁸³ 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.¹⁸⁴ 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.’¹⁸⁵

Between 1926 and 1918, Hitler became more preoccupied with the ‘question of [living]-space’ (Raumfrage) and ‘land policy’ (Bodenpolitik), ¹⁸⁶ 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 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.¹⁸⁷ He remarked on the need for a colonial policy in eastern Europe at Bamberg in February 1926.¹⁸⁸ And he returned to the theme as a central element of his speech at the Weimar Party Rally on 4 July 1926.¹⁸⁹ The completion of Mein Kampf, which ends with the question of eastern colonization, must have further focused his mind on the issue.¹⁹⁰ 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 (Raumnot) 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.’¹⁹¹ Three values determined a people’s fate: ‘blood-’ or ‘race-value’, the ‘value of personality’, and the ‘sense of struggle’ (Kampfsinn) or ‘self-preservation drive’ (Selbsterbaltungstrieb). 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’.¹⁹² 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’.¹⁹³The art of being leader lay in assembling the ‘stones of the mosaic’¹⁹⁴ The leader was the ‘central point’ or ‘preserver’ of the ‘idea’.¹⁹⁵ This demanded, Hitler repeatedly underlined, blind obedience and loyalty from the followers.¹⁹⁶ 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.¹⁹⁷

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.¹⁹⁸ 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’(Voiksgemeinschaft) 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.¹⁹⁹ 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’ (Entfernung der Juden) 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’.²⁰⁰ But even this aim seemed less than clear when Hitler stated – to tumultuous applause from the stalwarts of the Movement gathered in Munich’s Hofbröuhaus 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’.²⁰¹

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 1928.²⁰² 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.²⁰³ Hitler had dealt with the South Tyrol issue inMein Kampf, and published the relevant sections from the second volume as a separate pamphlet in February 1926.²⁰⁴ When the issue flared up again in 1928, Hitler was driven to outline his position at length.²⁰⁵ 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.²⁰⁶ 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.²⁰⁷

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’.²⁰⁸ But the ‘Second Book’ offered nothing new.²⁰⁹ As we have seen, the essence of Hitler’s ‘world-view’ was fully developed by the time he completed the second volume of Mein Kampf in 1920, 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.²¹⁰ 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. One of the conditions was that his first public speech in the state should not be held in Munich.²¹¹ Consequently, when, on 6 March, he spoke publicly in Bavaria for the first time in two years, it took place well away from Munich, at Vilsbiburg in the backwaters of Lower Bavaria. Many of the 1,000-strong audience, only two-thirds filling the hall, were party members and SA men who had been brought from outside to ensure the occasion was a success.²¹²

But three days later, he was back in Munich – in the Circus Krone again, for the first time since 1923. Everything was done to make it a theatrical success. The huge hall was nearly full to its 7,000 capacity by the time Hitler, in a brown raincoat, preceded by marching SA men, accompanied by his retinue, took the rostrum to the sound of fanfares. Most of the audience were from the lower-middle classes, though some were plainly well-to-do, their wives in fur coats. A good number were young, many of them dressed in windjammers. The crowd went wild at Hitler’s entrance, standing on chairs and benches, waving, shouting ‘Heil’, stamping their feet. Around 200 stormtroopers in serried ranks with banners filed past Hitler greeting him with the fascist salute. Hitler returned the greeting with outstretched arm. The speech met with the usual euphoric applause. The audience regarded Hitler’s comments as ‘gospel’, even though what he said could have been nothing new to them. The police reporter was less impressed. He thought the speech long-winded in structure, repetitive, with dull passages and illogical arguments full of crude comparisons and cheap allusions. Nor was Hitler’s performance as a speaker, studded with theatrical and exaggerated gestures, to his liking. He was only surprised that Hitler had been so highly praised, if his speeches had been similar in 1923. The applause, in his eyes, was directed not at what Hitler had to say, but at the person of the speaker.²¹³

Some of the dullness of Hitler’s speech was because he was unduly anxious to avoid any comments likely to land him in further trouble with the authorities. The report of the speech in the Völkiscber Beobachter was surprisingly short.²¹⁴ The shorthand writer who had taken it down had lost her notes.²¹⁵

For his next big speech in Munich at the end of the month, the Circus Krone was only between a half and three-quarters full.²¹⁶ Another week later, on 6 April, only 1,500 were present, in a hall that accommodated almost five times that many.²¹⁷ Hitler’s magic was no longer working, even in Munich. Outside Munich, his return to the public arena caused little of a stir. ‘In Ingolstadt, earlier a party bastion, Hitler’s renewal of his speaking activity was scarcely noted by the population, not even by most of the former supporters,’ it was reported.²¹⁸ Other reports from the Bavarian provinces indicated little interest in the NSDAP, for all its vigorous propaganda. Party meetings were often badly attended. 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.’²¹⁹ 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.²²⁰

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 1928.²²¹ The authorities, it seemed with justification, could believe that the Nazi menace had passed. Hitler no longer appeared a threat.

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 thevölkisch movement, had been enormously advantageous. The defeat at Bamberg of those looking to programmatic changes was, as we have seen, 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.

This point alone was sufficient to persuade even those, like Gregor Strasser, who retained their critical distance from Hitler that the Führer cult had to be built up in order to hold the party together. An outward sign of the unity invested in the person of the Leader was the ‘German greeting’ of ‘Heil Hitler’ with outstretched arm, the fascist-style salute increasingly used since 1923 and compulsory within the Movement since 1926.²²² The ‘Heil Hitler’ greeting, Strasser wrote in January 1927, was not only a symbol of personal dependence on the Leader, but contained in itself the pledge of loyalty. The ‘great secret’ of the movement was the combination of ‘the inner devotion to the idea of National Socialism, a glowing faith in the victorious strength of this doctrine of liberation, of redemption’ with ‘a deep love of the person of our Leader, who is the shining duke of the new freedom fighters’. ‘Duke and liegeman!’ he continued. ‘In this ancient German,… both aristocratic and democratic, relationship of leader to companions, lies the essence of the structure of the NSDAP… Friends, raise your right arm and cry out with me proudly, eager for the struggle, and loyal to death “Heil Hitler”.’²²³

For Rudolf Heß, for years a submissive, fawning Hitler-devotee, the leader-cult was a matter of deep belief, even psychological necessity, not just functional value.²²⁴ In a letter to Walter Hewel, later to be one of Ribbentrop’s right-hand men in the Foreign Ministry, Heß reminded him of the ‘leadership principle’ that Hitler had already outlined while they were all in Landsberg: ‘unconditional authority downwards, and responsibility upwards’. He called it ‘Germanic democracy’.²²⁵ He underlined the importance of the image of discipline, unity, and strength.²²⁶ He ended by comparing ‘the great popular leader’ with ‘the great founder of a religion’. His task was not to weigh up pros and cons like an academic; not to allow freedom to reach alternative judgements. ‘He must communicate to his listeners an apodictic faith. Only then can the mass of followers be led where they should be led. They will then also follow the leader if setbacks are encountered; but only then, if they have communicated to them unconditional belief in the absolute rightness… in the mission of the Führer and… of their own people.’²²⁷

Hitler idolatry was deliberately fostered by the party leadership. In a booklet published in 1926, Goebbels – well on the way, as we have seen, to becoming that very year a worshipper of Hitler – used mystical language redolent of German romanticism and the ideology of the pre-Nazi Youth Movement, to describe his Leader as ‘the fulfilment of a mysterious longing’, bringing faith in deepest despair, ‘a meteor before our astonished eyes’, working ‘a miracle of enlightenment and belief in a world of scepticism and despair’.²²⁸ But such sentiments, whatever their propaganda intent, obviously struck a rich vein among the rank-and-file membership. A war veteran dated his Führer worship to Hitler’s speeches during his trial in 1924. ‘From that time on I had no thought for anyone but Hitler. His behaviour moved me to give him my whole faith, without reserve.’²²⁹ One party member who heard Hitler speak in Bonn in 1926 thought he evoked ‘the feelings of every good German. The German soul spoke to German manhood in his words. From that day on I could never violate my allegiance to Hitler. I saw his unlimited faith in his people and the desire to set them free.’²³⁰ A Russian refugee, a former aristocrat, also heard Hitler speak in 1926, in Mecklenburg. The content of the speech evidently left no mark on him. But by the end he was crying with emotion: ‘a liberating scream of the purest enthusiasm discharged the unbearable tension as the auditorium rocked with applause’.²³¹

The longing for authority and subaltern mentality was widespread in those who found appeal in the early Nazi movement. Romantics, neo-conservatives, those fixated on mythical glories of the past, despairing and resentful of the present, dreaming of a heroic future, could all find hope in a coming ‘great leader’, a national redeemer. Whether such individuals looked subconsciously to a monarch, a military commander, a statesman, a priest, or simply a father-figure, their naïve feelings about the need for authority, bringing with it, they imagined, the yearned-for national unity, were hugely magnified by the evident divisions in Weimar politics and society, which could only too easily be exploited by the nationalist Right. The ‘search for the strong man’ was commonplace in inter-war Europe as part of the assault on democracy. It is not surprising that it was at its most vehement in the two democracies – Italy and Germany – that experienced the deepest crises of pluralist politics.

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. When there was criticism of Hitler, and Ludendorff was advanced as ‘the greater man’ in a dispute in the Hanover party in April 1927, Karl Dincklage, the Deputy Gauleiter and an important party speaker, wrote: ‘We in Gau Hanover retain our loyal following to Hitler. It’s quite immaterial whether we think Ludendorff or Hitler is the greater. That’s left to each one of us to decide.’’²³² And when a serious conflict dividing allegiances in the faction-ridden Berlin party arose in June that year, the loyalty-card was played once more. The bitter dispute was occasioned by the competition between Goebbels’s new Berlin newspaper Der Angriff (The Attack), and the struggling Berliner Arbeiter-Zeitung (Berlin Workers’ Newspaper), edited by Gregor Strasser. It rapidly degenerated into the trading of personal insults between the two former allies, gratefully exploited by the Nazis’ political enemies. The row dragged on until the winter. It was ended when Hitler brought both rivals to Munich to offer to a packed Hofbräuhaus their public demonstration of unity ‘bolstered by the common belief in a lofty, holy mission and by the feeling of loyalty binding them to the common idea and also to the common leader in the person of Adolf Hitler’. Party members were told that ‘the authority of the idea and the authority of the Leader’ had ‘become one in the person of Adolf Hitler’.²³³

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 defuse 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 von Pfeffer. 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.²³⁴

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.²³⁵ 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. Though he fully recognized its propaganda value, Hitler himself was on occasion forced to intervene to prevent absurdities of excess, which only brought merciless lampooning from his political enemies.²³⁶

Hitler’s supremacy now paid dividends in its impact on his former rivals. In February 1927, Graf Reventlow, one of the most prominent members of the DVFP, whose social revolutionary position had brought him into increasing conflict with the more conservative German nationalist leadership around Graefe and Wulle, joined the NSDAP. He was accompanied by Wilhelm Kube and Christian Mergenthaler, the leading figures in the DVFP in Brandenburg and Württemberg respectively. Another Reichstag deputy, Franz Stöhr, also deserted the DVFP in favour of the NSDAP. Hitler and Goebbels travelled to Stuttgart to welcome Mergenthaler personally into the party, amid festive scenes. As one who had earlier crossed swords with Hitler, Reventlow’s justification for joining the NSDAP was significant:

I have gone over to the National Socialist German Workers’ Party without so-called leadership claims and without reservations. I subordinate myself without further ado to Herr Adolf Hitler. Why? He has proved that he can lead; on the basis of his view and his will, he has created a party out of the united national socialist idea, and leads it. He and the party are one, and offer the unity that is the unconditional premiss of success. The previous two years have shown that the National Socialist German Workers’ Party is on the right road, that it is on the march, that it possesses unbroken and unbreakable social-revolutionary energy.²³⁷

It amounted to the seal of approval on the leadership principle, and the merging of the ‘idea’ and organization in Hitler’s person.

The process was still not complete by the end of 1927. However, the Nuremberg Party Rally in August 1927 depicted Hitler’s mastery over the Movement more emphatically than had the Weimar rally a year earlier. Hitler could afford to be relaxed about conflicting programmatic statements put forward by the arch-ideologues Feder and Rosenberg. Even Artur Dinter, who a few weeks later was to be removed from his post as Gauleiter of Thuringia and then the following year expelled from the party altogether, was allowed to speak, and received a favourable notice in theVölkischer Beobachter. What passed for ‘discussion’ at Nuremberg fell within the broad contours of the Nazi ‘actionist’ programme: anti-liberal, anti-Marxist, emotionally anti-capitalist and ‘national’ socialist, not least antisemitic. As long as doctrinaire ‘theorists’ did nothing to hinder this broad appeal of the party, and nothing to challenge Hitler’s leadership position, they were left a good deal of room for manoeuvre.²³⁸

In the case of Dinter, however, the strength of Hitler’s position became plain. Though once a powerful supporter of Hitler, Dinter’s religious obsessions – he insisted upon National Socialism being a religious reformation through purification of blood and race – incurred increasing unpopularity within the Movement, especially in Thuringia, his own Gau. Hitler felt compelled, therefore, to remove him as Gauleiter in September 1927. Dinter, as fanatically obsessive as Hitler, persisted. The religious neutrality which Hitler could not afford to endanger was placed in jeopardy by Dinter’s high profile and publicity.²³⁹ When, finally, Dinter challenged Hitler himself, accusing him of being a tool of the Catholic Church, and advocating a senate to advise the Leader, he had gone too far. Amid booing, his proposal was unanimously rejected by the General Members’ Meeting in September 1928. Even then, it was typical of Hitler that he was reluctant to expel Dinter, knowing the adverse publicity the expulsion would bring. Dinter refused, however, to accept Hitler’s exclusive authority, and publicly attacked him and the party programme. His expulsion, in early October 1928, was then inevitable.²⁴⁰ Strikingly, Gregor Strasser secured a written statement signed by at least eighteen Gauleiter expressing unanimity with Hitler’s decision. ‘In this situation,’ Strasser’s letter to the Gauleiter ran, ‘there must be a clear expression to the public, opponents, and especially our own party comrades, that every attempt to establish even the smallest difference of opinion in this question of principle [the mixing of religious issues with the political programme of the movement] between Adolf Hitler and his fellow workers is an impossibility.’²⁴¹ No less revealing was Hitler’s self-description in a letter he wrote to Dinter the previous July. ‘As leader of the National Socialist Movement and as a person who possesses the blind faith of someday belonging to those who make history,’ Hitler wrote, ‘I have [as a politician] the boldness to claim for myself in this sphere the same infallibility that you reserve for yourself in your [religious] reformationist area.’ He put the time at his disposal to attain power and shape Germany’s fate, at least as regards the ‘racial problem’, at most at twenty years.²⁴²

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’.²⁴³ 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.²⁴⁴ 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 gave only twenty-nine speeches, all but eight in Bavaria.²⁴⁵

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.²⁴⁶ 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.²⁴⁷ The Bechsteins and Bruckmanns, long-standing patrons, continued to give generously.²⁴⁸ 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 Hitler 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.²⁴⁹ 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.²⁵⁰

As earlier, Hitler paid little attention to administration and organization. Party bosses were resigned to his lengthy absences and inaccessibility on even important concerns.²⁵¹ He left financial matters to his trusted business manager, Max Amann, and the party treasurer, Franz Xaver Schwarz.²⁵²Behind 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’.²⁵³ Above all, it was Gregor Strasser, as Propaganda Leader between September 1920 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.²⁵⁴ 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.²⁵⁵ 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.²⁵⁶ 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.²⁵⁷ In December 1927, Hitler addressed for the first time a rally of several thousand peasants from Lower Saxony and Schleswig-Holstein.²⁵⁸ 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 Rohm. 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.²⁵⁹

But significantly, and in contrast to his normal habits, Hitler intervened directly in drafting texts and in shaping central propaganda.²⁶⁰ 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.²⁶¹

The shift in propaganda emphasis was less dramatic than the transformation of a failed ‘urban plan’ into a ‘rural-nationalist plan’.²⁶² But it did amount 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. The suggestion to move in this direction came, as we have noted, initially from several Gauleiter, recognizing the potential support in their own non-urban regions. Hitler’s positive response to their suggestions accorded with his own opportunistic approach to mobilization. Unlike some in the party, wedded to a type of ‘social-revolutionary’ emotive anti-capitalism, which social groups were attracted to Nazism was for him a matter of indifference. The important thing was that they were won over. Hitler’s 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 theabsence 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. Not untypical was the comment of Germany’s leading liberal daily, the Frankfurter Zeitung,casting as usual from time to time merely a contemptuous eye in the direction of the National Socialists. ‘Hitler has no thoughts, no responsible reflection, but nonetheless an idea. He has a demon in him,’ ran an article in the newspaper on 26 January 1928. ‘It is a matter of a manic idea of atavistic origin that pushes aside complicated reality and replaces it with a primitive fighting unit… Naturally, Hitler is a dangerous fool… But if one asks how the son of a petty Upper Austrian customs officer arrives at his craze, then one can only say one thing: he has taken war ideology perfectly literally and interpreted it in almost as primitive a way that one might be living in the era of the Völkerwanderung’ – the period of Barbarian invasions at the end of the Roman Empire.²⁶³

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.²⁶⁴ The electorate showed relatively little interest in the campaign – a reflection of the more settled conditions.²⁶⁵ As many as thirty-two parties put up lists, many representing specific interest-groups. Hitler would later make great play of this to parody the workings of pluralist democracy.²⁶⁶ The clear winners were the parties of the Left. Both the SPD and KPD made significant gains. The most serious losses were suffered by the German Nationalists (DNVP). Small parties and splinter-groups won, cumulatively, almost twice as many votes (13.9 per cent) as they had done in December 1924.²⁶⁷With 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 1924.²⁶⁸ In the cities, with a handful of exceptions, the results were disastrous. Despite Goebbels’s efforts to take the fight to the ‘red’ districts in Berlin, the Nazis won only 1.57 per cent of the vote in the capital city. In ‘red’ Wedding, typical of working-class districts of the inner city, the NSDAP’s 1,742 votes paled against the 163,429 votes cast for the parties of the Left. But there were some rays of light. The returns from some rural areas, as anticipated, held out hope for the future. The best results, apart from the traditional Franconian heartlands and parts of Upper Bavaria, were mainly to be found in the north German countryside, afflicted by the deepening agricultural depression.²⁶⁹ In Weser-Ems, for example, assisted by the propaganda razzmatazz of the tub-thumping, virulently antisemitic unfrocked pastor Ludwig Münchmeyer, a convert from the DVFB, the vote for the NSDAP was twice the national average.²⁷⁰ Even in eastern Germany, where support remained very low, the loss of confidence in the dominant DNVP gave some grounds for optimism.²⁷¹ Finally, 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.²⁷² Among the new deputies were Gregor Strasser, Frick, Feder, Goebbels, Ritter von Epp – the former Freikorps leader, a new, much-trumpeted convert from the ΒVP – 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. ²⁷³

There was understandable disappointment and dejection within the party. But the public response was one of resilience.²⁷⁴ Lessons were to be learnt. It was as obvious to Gregor Strasser as to other party leaders that the concentration on the industrial working class had not paid dividends. Richer potential lay in the countryside.²⁷⁵ The need for a readjustment of party propaganda and organization was plain. Hitler reinforced the message at the Leaders’ Meeting in Munich between 31 August and 2 September – replacing the Party Rally which lack of funds, following the election campaign, did not permit in 1928.²⁷⁶ He announced a thorough reorganization of the Gau structure, according to Gregor Strasser’s plan.²⁷⁷ 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.²⁷⁸

Hitler’s own reaction to the election disaster was characteristic. On election night itself, in a packed meeting in the Bürgerbräukeller, flanked by Epp and the recently returned Rohm, he rejoiced first in the dismal showing of rival parties. The first conclusion from the election, he stated, was that there was now only a single völkisch movement: the NSDAP. He emphasized the fact that in Munich, the party had gained some 7,000 votes compared with December 1924. The poor results in almost every other city were not mentioned. As a second consequence, he underlined the large increase in the ‘Marxist’ vote, after three years of government by the Bavarian People’s Party and the German Nationals. He contrasted this with the fall in the vote for the Left in Munich in 1924. Finally, he added a defiant third conclusion: ‘The election campaign is fought. The struggle continues!… For us there is no rest, no break. We carry on working…’²⁷⁹ In fact, Hitler left within days for a holiday in his mountain retreat, to recuperate and dictate his ‘Second Book’.²⁸⁰ He was forced to authorize a statement on 27 June to editors of the National Socialist press, reaffirming his commitment to the legal path to power, after the poor election result had led some to the conclusion that the party would again seek power through violent action.²⁸¹ Otherwise, he remained out of the public eye until early July.²⁸²

The election results confirmed to many observers that the Hitler Movement was finished.²⁸³ The Prussian government also thought so. At the end of September it lifted the ban preventing Hitler speaking at public meetings.²⁸⁴ On 16 November, he spoke for the first time in the Sportpalast in Berlin. The gigantic hall was packed to capacity by the time he arrived, accompanied by fanfares and banner-waving SA men. The atmosphere bore little resemblance to a conventional political meeting. His speech on ‘The Struggle that Will Sometime Break the Chains’ was repeatedly interrupted by storms of applause.²⁸⁵ There was nothing new in the speech. Presentation, not content, was what counted. As always, the appeal was solely to the emotions. The Revolution, pacifism, internationalism, democracy were all inevitably castigated. Economic recovery could only be brought about through national freedom. And ‘the premiss of freedom is power’. For this, heroic leaders were needed. Hitler did not explicitly refer to the ‘Jewish Question’. But he soon turned to his central obsession of ‘racial defilement’. The ‘bastardization’ of culture, morals and blood was undermining the value of the individual. But ‘a people that resists the bastardization of its spirit and blood can be saved. The German people has its specific value and cannot be set on an equal level to 70 million negroes… Negro music is dominant, but if we put a Beethoven symphony alongside a shimmy, victory is clear… From our strong faith the strength will come to deploy self-help against this bastardization. That is the aim that the NSDAP has set itself: to lift the terms nationalism and socialism out of their previous meaning. To be national can only mean to be behind your people, and to be socialist can only be to stand up for the right of your people, also externally.’²⁸⁶

With this vaguest of definitions, he was keeping open the appeal to all sections of society. Class divisions could only be overcome by national unity. The NSDAP stood above classes. It was ‘not purely nationalist or socialist, bourgeois or proletarian’ but stood for all ‘who honestly want to construct the national community, put aside class-pride and conceit in order to fight together’. As a result, he went on, ‘the party is a movement which can call itself with pride a workers’ party because there is no one in it who is not toiling and working for the existence of the people’. The NSDAP was engaged in a ‘gigantic struggle against internationalism’. It did not rest on ‘votes’ and the ‘error’ of democracy, but on the ‘authority of the leader’.²⁸⁷ This was the way to overcoming Marxism and attaining the land and soil that would remove Germany’s slavery. He ended by pouring scorn on the speaking-ban that had succeeded in filling ‘the biggest hall in the Reich’, and with an appeal to God to bless Germany’s struggle. The crowd went delirious. Critical observers could remain uncomprehending at a mélange of half-truths, distortions, over-simplifications, and vague, pseudo-religious redemptionist promises.²⁸⁸ But the 16,000 people jammed into the Sportpalast had not turned up to listen to an intellectual discourse. They had heard what they had come to hear.

By the time Hitler spoke in the Sportpalast, 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.²⁸⁹ Meanwhile, unemployment was sharply on the rise, reaching almost 3 million by January 1929, an increase of a million over the previous year.²⁹⁰ 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 Müller government. And by the end of the year, the reparations issue began to loom again. It would become acute in 1929.

Remarkably, as intelligent an analyst as the economist Joseph Schumpeter could still, in autumn 1928, look with unclouded optimism at ‘the growing stability of our social relations’.²⁹¹ More percipient was the Reich foreign minister Gustav Stresemann, who warned in November 1928 of the dire consequences for Germany should America withdraw its short-term credits, on which the economy had rested in the previous years.²⁹²

In reality, the ‘golden years’ of Weimar had been less ‘golden’ than they had seemed. Germany had been throughout a society profoundly divided. The brief interlude of relative stability had done nothing to diminish the depth of the class and confessional fissures.²⁹³ Social grievances remained acute. Relatively high levels of unemployment – over 2 million were out of work in 1926 – radicalized many workers, a good number of them young.²⁹⁴ Small shopkeepers and producers felt threatened and angered by department stores and consumer cooperatives. Along with many craftsmen, feeling their traditional status and livelihood undermined by modern mass-production, and white-collar workers keen to keep their distance from blue-collar wage-earners, they had no affection for Weimar democracy, even in its best years. Farmers, as already mentioned, were up in arms at the collapse of agricultural prices.

Culturally, the divisions were equally acute. Weimar avant-garde art forms repelled far more people than they attracted. Cultural conservativism and philistinism were, as ever, closely allied. Popular culture was equally decried. Goebbels’s attacks on ‘asphalt culture’ would later find an echo, not just among hard-core Nazis, but among a solid reactionary bourgeoisie, alienated by the ‘Americanization’ of big-city popular culture in the 1920s.

The sharply divided social milieus and ‘sub-cultures’ were reflected in a highly unstable political landscape. The 1928 election had only at the most superficial glance been a success for democracy. The increased KPD vote marked a shift away from democracy on the Left. The liberal parties of the centre and centre-right had lost an alarming proportion of their support since 1919. Their disintegration and fragmentation reflected disillusionment with democracy and a rightward shift of voters, even before the Nazis made a significant electoral mark.²⁹⁵ On the nationalist Right, the loss of support by the DNVP was only at first sight a comfort to democrats. Many of the party’s erstwhile supporters had drifted still further to the Right, into a variety of interest and protest parties that would ultimately be swept into the NSDAP ,²⁹⁶ Above all, Weimar democracy was unable, even in its ‘golden years’, to win a firm enough base of support to counter those powerful sectors of society that opposed its very existence. Its problem of legitimacy remained acute. Renewed economic crisis would evidently pose an immense threat.

And here, as Stresemann had emphasized, stability was far less assured than the outward glitter of the ‘golden twenties’ suggested. The German economy depended upon American short-term loans. Its own productivity and investment lagged, profitability was declining as wages were rising, public finances were coming increasingly under strain, and a heavily subsidized agricultural sector was lurching into deep crisis, following a collapse of world food-prices, at least two years before the Wall Street Crash.²⁹⁷

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 108,717.²⁹⁸ 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.²⁹⁹ Before he spoke, the meeting had been addressed by the recently appointed Reich Leader of the Nazi Students’ Federation, the twenty-one-year-old Baldur von Schirach. The future Hitler Youth leader came from a highly cultured bourgeois family, based in Weimar – Germany’s literary capital – where his father had been a highly regarded director of the Court Theatre. Unusually for a leading Nazi, he spoke excellent English; his American mother, with imperfect command of the language of her adopted country, had spoken only English to him in his childhood, so that at the age of six he spoke, so he later said, not a word of German. The end of the war had brought tragedy for the Schirachs: Baldur’s father lost his job; his brother, Karl, committed suicide, despairing at the block on his officer’s career as a consequence of the Versailles Treaty and attributing his decision to kill himself to ‘Germany’s misfortune’. In Weimar, a town conscious of past glories but by now infested with völkisch nationalist and antisemitic clamour, Baldur had found his way – helped by his mentor, later Deputy Gauleiter in Thuringia, Hans Severus Ziegler – into a paramilitary youth organization and was an admirer of Ludendorff before for the first time hearing Hitler speak, at the time of the elections for Reich President in March 1925. So thrilled was he at the experience that he ran home and wrote a poem about Hitler which was published, bringing him a signed photograph from his hero. He devoured the first volume of Mein Kampf in a single evening, and joined the party at the beginning of May. He was Hitler’s man – and would see to it that the Führer cult would flourish in the infant Nazi youth organization and in the Students’ League. By late 1928, Schirach could gain credit for a big increase in the Nazi vote in student union elections – up to 32 per cent in Erlangen, and 20 per cent in Greifswald and Würzburg. The success secured him Hitler’s support, paving the way for him to take over the leadership of the Hitler Youth in 1931.³⁰⁰

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’.³⁰¹

As the ‘crisis before the crisis’ – economic and political – deepened, Hitler kept up his propaganda offensive.³⁰² 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.³⁰³ 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.³⁰⁴ 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 (Fübrerglauben),’ he concluded.³⁰⁵

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.³⁰⁶ 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.³⁰⁷ Hitler had to be used sparingly – for best effect, as well as to avoid too punishing a schedule.³⁰⁸ 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.³⁰⁹

The NSDAP won 5 per cent of the vote in the Saxon election.³¹⁰ 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.³¹¹ Towards the end of June, Coburg, in northern Bavaria, became the first town in Germany to elect a Nazi-run town council.³¹² By October, the NSDAP’s share of the popular vote had reached 7 per cent in the Baden state elections.³¹³ 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.³¹⁴But it would take fifty-nine years before the reparations would finally be paid off. The Allies’ quid pro quo was the offer to withdraw from the Rhineland by 30 June, five years earlier than stipulated under the Versailles Treaty. Stresemann was therefore ready to accept.³¹⁵ 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.³¹⁶ 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.³¹⁷ 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.³¹⁸ 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 million – 13.8 per cent of the electorate – voted for it.³¹⁹ 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.³²⁰ 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 Golz, chairman of the Vereinigte Vaterländische Verbände (United Patriotic Associations) graced the Rally with their presence.³²¹ 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.³²²Thirty-five special trains brought 25,000 S A 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 130,00ο.³²³ 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.³²⁴

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 own 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.