The business was far slower and more toilsome than Hitler had imagined, and was accompanied by repeated setbacks, obstacles, and conflicts. As luck would have it, he himself was to blame for the first severe setback. The Bavarian government had taken note of his remark that one could speak of one enemy and mean another and had interpreted it—just as it was meant—as proof of his inveterate hostility to the Constitution. It also resented his remark that either the enemy would pass over his dead body or he over the enemy’s. “It is my wish,” he had continued, “that the swastika flag shall be my shroud if next time the struggle lays me low.” This sort of talk cast such question on his pledge to be law-abiding that the authorities in Bavaria, and soon afterward in most of the other German states, simply forbade him to make public speeches. In conjunction with his parole, with the ever-present threat of deportation, and with the changes in the general situation, this ban seemed to put an end to all his prospects. It came as a surprise and a terrible reversal, for it seemed to scotch his idea of working with the government.
Nevertheless, Hitler seemed totally unperturbed. A year and a half before, in the summer of 1923, a setback would have thrown him off balance, would have thrust him back into the lethargy and weaknesses of his youth. Now he remained unaffected. He did not even seem to mind the personal consequences of the ban on public speaking: the loss of his chief source of income. He depended instead on fees for the editorials he was now writing for the party press. In addition, he frequently addressed groups of from forty to sixty guests at the home of his friends, the Bruckmanns, where the small audience and the absence of intoxicants produced a new atmosphere that called for another style of propaganda. Contemporary observers all report the changes Hitler seems to have undergone during his imprisonment, the sterner, more rigorous expression that gave a new stamp to his countenance. “The thin, pale, sickly, often seemingly empty face was more forcefully composed; the strong bony structure from brow to chin emerged more distinctly; what formerly might have given the effect of sentimentality had yielded to an unmistakable note of hardness.”
He had also acquired that arrogant tenacity which would serve him well through all misfortunes, enabling him to keep going throughout the period of stagnation and persist until the march to victory began at the outset of the thirties. In the summer of 1925, when his hopes were at their nadir, a meeting of party leaders discussed a motion to appoint a deputy for him; he would not hear of it, on the infuriating ground that the movement would stand or fall with him alone.
Undoubtedly, anyone observing his immediate entourage would have had to concede that he was right. After the deliberate clashes and schisms of the preceding months, it was in the nature of things that most of the followers who remained with him were the mediocrities. His retinue had shrunk again to that cohort of cattle dealers, chauffeurs, bouncers, and onetime professional soldiers with whom he had formed, ever since the murky beginnings of the party, a curiously sentimental and almost human relationship. The unsavory reputation of most of these satellites bothered him no more than did their rowdy manners. His keeping such company above all showed how far he had come from the bourgeois aesthete he had once been. In answer to occasional reprimands, he would say, with a trace of embarrassment, that he too could make a wrong choice; it was human nature to be “not infallible.” And yet, right on into his years as Chancellor such types remained his preferred associates; they were always on hand in these long, empty evenings when Hitler, watching movies or engaging in trivial chitchat in the rooms that had once been Bismarck’s, unbuttoned his jacket and slumped in the big armchair with his legs stretched out before him. These men without background, without families or professions, all of them with some crack in their characters or their careers, aroused familiar associations in the former inmate of the home for men. Admiration and sincere devotion were all they could offer him, and these they gave without reserve. They listened raptly when he sat with them in the Italian restaurant Osteria Bavaria or the Café Neumaier and embarked on one of his tirades. Perhaps their uncritical devotion served him as a substitute for that mass enthusiasm he needed like a drug and which for the time being he had to do without.
Among the few successes Hitler could tote up during this period of paralysis was the winning over of Gregor Strasser. Until the failure of the November putsch Strasser, a pharmacist from Landshut and the gauleiter of Lower Bavaria, whom “experience at the front” had brought to politics, could hardly have been considered prominent. But he had profited by the absence of Hitler to push forward and had won a considerable following for Nazism in North Germany and the Ruhr. The National Socialist Freedom Movement was his personal vehicle. This hulking but sensitive man who brawled in taverns and read Homer in Greek was of impressive appearance. He was an excellent speaker and had an important ally in his brother Otto, a skillful journalist. It was hard for him to work with the cold, slippery, neurasthenic Hitler; for a man like Gregor Strasser there was something repellent about Hitler’s personality. Nor could he stomach Hitler’s entourage. Ail that the two men had in common was allegiance to an as yet shifting, ill-defined concept of “National Socialism.” Nevertheless, Strasser admired Hitler’s magnetism and his grip over his followers.
Strasser had not taken part in the meeting aimed at refounding the party. In March, 1925, to compensate Strasser for his resignation from the National Socialist Freedom Movement, Hitler offered him the largely independent post of leader of the Nazi party in the entire North German area. Strasser accepted with the proud proviso that he was joining Hitler not as a follower but as a fellow warrior. He still had his moral scruples and his doubts, but felt that the essential cause, the idea promising the birth of the future, must stand above all else. “That is why I have offered Herr Hitler my co-operation.”
But this addition to the ranks was balanced out by a major loss. While Strasser applied his vast energy to building up a party organization in North Germany, within a short time establishing seven new gaus between Schleswig-Holstein, Pomerania, and Lower Saxony, Hitler showed how bent he was on imposing his own authority, no matter what the cost. For now he broke with Ernst Röhm. After Röhm’s brush with the Munich People’s Court (he was pronounced guilty but given no sentence), the former army captain had promptly begun to unite his old comrades of the Free Corps and Kampfbund days in a new association, the Frontbann (“the Front-liners”). These “liners,” who knew only soldiering and were totally unable to adjust to the increasingly normal conditions, almost to a man were recruited into the new movement.
Even while he was still in Landsberg, Hitler had looked askance at Röhm’s activities, since everything Röhm was doing was a threat to his parole, his power within the nationalist movement, and his new tactics. One of the lessons of November had been to have done, once and for all, with the swaggering ways and conspiratorial games of the military leagues. What the NSDAP needed, Hitler had decided, was a party force organized on paramilitary lines and totally subordinate to the political leadership, hence to himself personally. Röhm, on the other hand, was still clinging to the idea of an underground auxiliary army that would enable the Reichswehr to evade the provisions of the Versailles Treaty. He even thought of making the SA completely independent of the party and turning it into a subordinate unit of his Frontbann.
Fundamentally, this was a renewal of the old dispute over the SA’s function and command status. In contrast to the slower-minded Röhm, Hitler had in the interval acquired new insights and resentments. He had not forgiven Lossow and the officers of his staff for their betrayal on November 8 and 9. But at the same time he had learned from the events of that night that the majority of army officers were morally fettered by their oath and their respect for legality.
During the first half of April the quarrel erupted into the open. Röhm had a strong sentimental attachment to Hitler; he was forthright, easygoing, and as doggedly faithful to his friends as he was to his views. Presumably Hitler had not forgotten all he had owed to Röhm since
the beginnings of his political career. But he also realized that times had changed. This once-influential person who in the past could be counted on to round up money, machine guns or members at the drop of a hat, had by now turned into a stubborn, difficult friend awkward to fit into the more solid establishment Hitler was trying to create.
Nevertheless, for some time Hitler said neither yes nor no to Röhm’s urging. But at last he decided to take a stand. During a conversation in mid-April Röhm once more demanded strict separation between the National Socialist Party and the SA. Moreover, he wanted to lead his units as a nonpolitical private army that would be above all partisan strife and the issues of the day. A heated quarrel ensued. Hitler was particularly incensed, because Röhm’s idea would once again degrade him to the “drummer” of the movement. What is more, it would return him to the subordinate role forced on him in the summer of 1923, that of adjunct to aims set by others. Full of hurt feelings, he charged Röhm with betraying their friendship. Röhm thereupon cut the conversation short. The following day he formally resigned in writing his leadership of the SA. Hitler did not answer. At the end of April, after Röhm had also resigned the leadership of the Frontbann, he wrote Hitler once again, closing his letter on the significant note: “I take this opportunity, in memory of the great and the trying times we have been through together, to thank you warmly for your comradeship and to ask you not to deprive me of your personal friendship.” But that, too, was not answered. The following day, when he sent a note on his resignation to the nationalist newspapers, the Völkische Beobachter printed it without comment.
During this same period an event occurred that showed Hitler how bleak his prospects had become and how wise he had been to separate his political fortunes from those of Ludendorff, though his reasons for the break had been largely personal. At the end of February, 1925, Friedrich Ebert, the Social Democratic President of Germany, died. The nationalist-racist groups put up Ludendorff, while the candidate of the bourgeois rightist parties was a competent but totally unknown person named Dr. Jarres. Despite his fame, the general suffered an annihilating defeat, receiving little more than 1 per cent of the national vote. Hitler noted the result with a measure of grim satisfaction.
A few days after the election, Dr. Pöhner, the only trustworthy and important associate Hitler had left, was killed in an accident. Hitler truly seemed to have reached the end of his political career. In Munich the party had no more than 700 members left. Anton Drexler seceded and despondently founded a party more congenial to his quieter tendencies. But Hitler’s bullies made a point of tracking down their erstwhile comrades and beating them up. In this way they smashed the rival enterprise. Other kindred groups suffered a similar fate. Quite often Hitler himself, leather whip in hand, stormed the meetings. Since he was not allowed to speak, he showed himself to the crowds from the platform, merely smiling and waving. Before the second round in the elections for the presidency, he called upon his followers to vote for Field Marshal von Hindenburg, who had meanwhile been nominated. Some writers have seen this choice as a farsighted political speculation. But he really had no ground for such speculation, as things stood; moreover, the few votes he controlled could not change anything. It was important, however, that he was ostentatiously aligning himself with the parties of order and that he was moving closer to the man of legend, the secret “ersatz kaiser” who had or some day would have a key to virtually all the powerful institutions in the country.
The continuing setbacks inevitably sapped Hitler’s position within the party. In Thuringia, Saxony, and Württemberg he had to fight for his challenged leadership; in North Germany Gregor Strasser went on building up the party. Strasser was forever on the move. He spent most of his nights on trains or in waiting rooms; by day he visited followers, founded branches, saw functionaries, conferred, or appeared at meetings. During 1925 and 1926 he appeared as principal speaker at nearly one hundred meetings, while Hitler was condemned to silence. This fact, less than any ambitions on Strasser’s part to rival Hitler, for a while made it seem as though the party’s center of gravity were shifting to the north. Thanks to Strasser’s loyalty, Hitler’s position as leader was on the whole acknowledged. But the sober Protestant North Germans’ suspicions of the flamboyant petty bourgeois bohemian with his alleged “pro-Rome” course came repeatedly to the fore, and many people would join the party only if they were assured considerable independence of Munich headquarters. For; quite a while Hitler had to waive his requirement that leaders of local groups in the north be appointed by party headquarters. Until the late autumn of 1925, moreover, the North Rhineland gau had membership cards of its own and would not use the membership booklets provided by Munich headquarters.
The business manager of this North Rhineland gau, with headquarters in Elberfeld, was a young academic who had made a stab at being a journalist, writer, and crier at the stock exchange, before he found a post as secretary to a nationalist-racist politician, made contact with the National Socialists, and met Gregor Strasser. His name was Paul Joseph Goebbels, and what had brought him to Strasser’s side was chiefly his intellectual radicalism, which he expounded in various literary works and diary notes, wherein he often marveled at his own personality. “I am the most radical. Of the new type. Man as revolutionary.” His style ranged from such incisiveness to rhapsody, which, however, at the time was found quite acceptable. His radicalism was a compound of nationalistic and social-revolutionary ideologies; it seemed a thinner, shriller version of the doctrine of his mentor. For, in contrast to the cold Hitler, who moved in a curiously abstract world of feeling, the more emotional Gregor Strasser had been affected by the misery of the postwar era. His heart went out to the common people. Sooner or later, he believed, the proletariat would embrace National Socialism. For a time Gregor Strasser found in Joseph Goebbels and in his brother Otto Strasser the advocates for an ideological course that no one ever followed. Gregor Strasser’s “program” won merely temporary importance as the fleeting expression of a socialist alternative to Hitler’s “Fascist” South German National Socialism.
The special temper of the North German Nazis manifested itself in a committee organized in Hagen on September 10, 1925. Goebbels immediately took command of it, along with Gregor Strasser. And although the participants kept saying that they were not opposed to Munich headquarters, they nevertheless spoke of themselves as a “west bloc,” and of a “counterattack” against “the calcified big-shots in Munich.” They also criticized the party leadership for its meager interest in questions of program. Gregor Strasser deplored the “atrociously low level” of the Völkische Beobachter, Significantly, however, none of the reproaches were directed at Hitler in person or at his conduct of his office. In fact, what the critics wanted was to strengthen rather than to diminish his position. They were objecting to the “slovenly, lousy way they run things at headquarters,” and once again to the brashness of Esser and Streicher. Totally misconstruing the situation, this circle hoped to free Hitler from the clutches of the “corrupt Munich clique,” the “Esser dictatorship,” and win him over to their own cause. Here, in these early years, and not for the first time, we find that notion so widespread later on: that the “Führer” was frail and human, surrounded by bad advisers who prevented him from carrying out his honest intentions.
The program of the Strasser group was set forth in a fortnightly review, Nationalsozialistische Briefe (“National Socialist Letters”). Unpretentious in format, the magazine was edited by Goebbels and was chiefly concerned with escaping the narrowness of a nostalgic, backward-looking middle-class ideology and turning the movement’s face toward the present. Almost everything that “was held sacred in Munich was at some time or other thrown into question or frankly run down” in the magazine. There was constant stress on the difference in social conditions in Bavaria and the north. The magazine’s pronouncedly anticapitalist thrust was a response to the urban, proletarian social structure of North Germany. As a letter from a Berlin reader
put it, the National Socialist Party should not consist “of radicalized bourgeois” and “be afraid of the words worker and socialist.” Thus the magazine announced: “We are socialists; we are enemies, mortal enemies, of the present-day capitalist economic system with its exploitation of the economically weak, with its injustice in wages…. We are resolved to annihilate this system despite everything.” Looking for formulas which could unite the nationalistic socialists and Communists, Goebbels found a whole catalogue of identical attitudes and convictions. He by no means rejected the theory of class struggle. He contended that the collapse of Russia would “bury forever our dreams of a National Socialist Germany.” Moreover, he questioned Hitler’s theory of the Jews as the universal enemy, remarking: “It is by no means settled that the capitalist and the Bolshevik Jew are one and the same” and going so far as to say that the Jewish question in general was “more complicated than one imagines.”
The Strasser people also held quite different ideas on foreign policy from the Munich leadership. Strasser and his associates had responded to the socialist appeal of the times, but “not as to the call of the proletarian class but of proletarian nations,” in the forefront of which stood humiliated, betrayed, and plundered Germany. They saw the world as divided into oppressing and oppressed peoples and supported those very revisionist demands that Hitler in Mein Kampf had branded “political nonsense.” Where Hitler saw Soviet Russia as a target for conquest, and Rosenberg described her as a “Jewish colony of hangmen,” Goebbels spoke with deep respect of the Russian utopian impulse, while Strasser even called for an alliance with Moscow “against the militarism of France, against the imperialism of England, against the capitalism of Wall Street.” Even more socialistic was the group’s economic program: large landholdings were to be abolished, and all peasants were to be organized into agricultural cooperatives; small businesses were to be grouped in guilds; corporations with more than twenty employees were to be partially socialized. Where enterprises continued in private hands, the personnel were to be entitled to a share of 10 per cent of the profits, the national government to 30 per cent, the county to 6 and the local community to 5 per cent. The group also advocated simplification of legislation, creation of a school system open to all classes, and payment of wages partly in goods. This last was a romantic expression of the popular distrust of money resulting from the inflation.
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