Hitler

by Joachim C. Fest

  After concluding the alliance, the Nazi party for the first time had funds enough to crank up its excellent propaganda apparatus. It at once began showing the public a style of propaganda of unprecedented radicality and impact. Nothing of the kind had ever existed in Germany, Hitler declared in a letter of that period. “We have thoroughly worked over our people as no other party has done.” None of the other partners in the nationalist alliance could approach the Nazi party in stridency, sharpness, and psychological cunning. From the start the Nazis made it plain that the Young Plan was only the pretext for the campaign. They broadened their attack to include the whole “system,” which they claimed was collapsing from incompetence, treason, and corruption. “The time will come,” Hitler cried out in a speech at Hersbruck, near Nuremberg, toward the end of November, “when those responsible for Germany’s collapse will laugh out of the other side of their faces. Fear will grip them. Let them know that their judgment is on the way.” Fascinated by the demogogic wildness of the Nazis, Hugenberg and the rest of the conservatives in the coalition stared at the tremendous wave they had set in motion. They encouraged it, repeatedly lent impetus to it, and in their smug faith in their natural leadership thought they were riding it when they had long since been swamped by it.

  In these circumstances it did not very much matter to Hitler that the campaign was less than a smashing success. The referendum was held; the draft proposal for a “law against the enslavement of the German people” barely received the 10 per cent of the votes required if it were to be submitted to the Reichstag. But in the Reichstag the proposal was accepted by only eighty-two representatives, with 318 votes against it. The third stage in the process, the holding of a plebiscite on December 22, 1929, likewise ended in defeat. The proponents of the draft law won barely 14 per cent of the votes, about a quarter of the number needed—some 5 per cent less than the votes the Nazi party and the Nationalist party had won in the Reichstag elections the previous year.

  Nevertheless, this campaign meant for Hitler the final breakthrough into national politics. Thanks to the support provided by the many and variegated publications of the Hugenberg empire, he had made a name for himself nationally and had proved himself the most energetic and purposeful force on the divided and directionless Right. He himself spoke of the “extremely great reversal” in public opinion and marveled at “the way arrogant, snobbish or stupid rejection of the party, which was the rule only a few years ago, has been transformed into expectant hope.” On August 3 and 4, 1929, after the opening of the campaign, he convoked a party rally in Nuremberg, probably to show his conservative partners something of the mettle of his movement. By now he knew a great deal about staging such demonstrations. More than thirty special trains brought some 200,000 followers (if the figures are correct) from all over Germany. For several days their uniforms, banners, and bands dominated the scene in the medieval walled city. The majority of the twenty-four new standards, which were consecrated in a highly emotional ceremony, came from Bavaria, Austria, and Schleswig-Holstein. At the grand final muster, some 60,000 SA men, by this time all in uniform and provided with active-service field equipment, paraded past Hitler for three and a half hours. In the euphoria of the day some units threatened to take immediate violent action. A similar mood underlay a motion by the party’s radical wing proposing that any participation in government by the NSDAP should be “forbidden now and for ever.” With the terse and characteristic remark that any step was justified that might “lead the movement into the possession of political power,” Hitler rejected the motion. Nevertheless, his adherence to legality was now threatened anew by the self-assurance of the rapidly growing party army. By the end of the year the SA was the equal of the Reichswehr in manpower.

  The alliance with Hugenberg also provided Hitler with many connections among industrialists who by and large had over the years supported Stresemann’s foreign policy but who now vigorously opposed the Young Plan. Hitherto, Hitler had received material support only from small factory owners—aside from such notable exceptions as the industrialist Fritz Thyssen. His antisocialist, proproperty attitude on the question of the expropriation of the sovereigns had made him no new friends. Now, suddenly, he could draw on more opulent sources. While still banned from public speaking, he had used his time in systematically traveling through the industrial regions of Germany, primarily the Ruhr, talking at closed meetings often to several hundred largely skeptical businessmen and endeavoring to remove their fears of his form of nationalistic socialism by presenting himself as a staunch defender of private property. True to his belief that success was an index of aristocracy, he hailed the large-scale entrepreneur as the type of a superior race, “destined for leadership.” On the whole he tried to convey that what he was “demanding was nothing employers need object to.”

  Hitler’s connections with the Munich salons, in which he continued to be something of a lion, also proved their value once again. Elsa Bruckmann had by now made it her “life task to bring Hitler into contact with the leading men in heavy industry,” as she herself put it. In 1927 she arranged for him to meet old Emil Kirdorf, who became extremely important to Hitler—not only as an influential industrialist but also as administrator of a political fund known as the “Ruhr Treasury.” Hitler was deeply impressed by this rough old man who had spent his life plotting against those above him and despising those below him. And Kirdorf in turn was fascinated by Hitler; he soon became one of his most valuable supporters, possibly the most valuable. Kirdorf participated as a guest of honor in the party rally in Nuremberg, and subsequently wrote to Hitler that those days had been an overwhelming experience he would never forget.

  All this new assistance and new money would be translated into significant successes in the regional elections of 1929. In Saxony and Mecklenburg-Schwerin the Nazis had won nearly 5 per cent of the vote the previous spring. But their progress in the Prussian community elections was more impressive. In Coburg they elected the mayor, and in Thuringia they succeeded in voting into office the first Nazi provincial government minister, Wilhelm Frick. Frick soon made a stir by introducing Nazi prayers into the schools and came into conflict with the national government—although on the whole he tried to demonstrate that his party was quite capable of cooperating in coalitions.

  In keeping with his greed for public display, Hitler set about creating a glorious backdrop for his newly won success. The setting, in turn, was to prepare the ground for future successes. Since 1925, the Munich party headquarters had been located in an unostentatious, utilitarian building on Schellingstrasse. Now, with funds supplied largely by Fritz Thyssen, Hitler bought the Barlow Palace on Briennerstrasse in Munich and renovated it to serve as the “Brown House.” Together with the architect Paul Ludwig Troost, he spent much of his time planning the interior decoration. It was as if he were returning to his youthful dreams of a fine, aristocratic mansion. He sketched furniture, doors, and designs for marquetry. A grand open stairwell led up to his office, which was furnished with a few outsized pieces, a portrait of Frederick the Great, a bust of Mussolini, and a painting of an attack by the List Regiment in Flanders. Adjoining was the so-called Senate Hall. Here, around a gigantic horseshoe-shaped table, stood sixty armchairs in red morocco, their backs displaying the party eagle. Bronze tablets to either side of the entrance listed the names of the victims of the abortive putsch of November 9, 1923. In the room itself there were busts of Bismarck and Dietrich Eckart. This hall, however, never served its ostensible purpose. It existed solely to satisfy Hitler’s theatrical needs, for he had always firmly rejected any thought of placing a senate or any other group of advisers at his side. The canteen in the cellar of the Brown House had a “Fuhrer’s seat” reserved for him under a portrait of Dietrich Eckart. Here he would sit for hours in his circle of adjutants and reverent chauffeurs, indulging in the idle chatter beloved by Vienna coffeehouse habitues.

  His personal affairs also reflected the improved financial state of the party. In t
he course of 1929, the interest and amortization payments for his considerably swollen debts abruptly disappear from the documents concerning his personal finances. At the same time he moved into an opulent nine-room apartment at 16 Prinzregentenstrasse in one of the solidly middle-class residential districts of Munich. Frau Reichert, his former landlady from Thierschstrasse, and Frau Anny Winter did the housekeeping for him, while Frau Raubal, his half-sister, continued to run Haus Wachenfeld on the slope of Obersalzberg. His niece Geli, who had picked up her uncle’s love for the theater and was now taking singing and acting lessons, soon moved into the apartment. The gossip about this relationship bothered him somewhat, but he also rather enjoyed the aura of bohemian freedom and the suggestion of a grand and fateful passion in this liaison between uncle and niece.

  The campaign against the Young Plan had barely come to its end when Hitler once more committed an act of political audacity. He dramatically broke with Hugenberg’s conservative associates, on the grounds that their half-heartedness and bourgeois weakness had been responsible for the failure of the plebiscite. The ease with which he made such ruptures, undeterred by any sense of common purpose and common struggles, once more served him well. For this sudden swerve silenced the critics within the party who had been grumbling at his alliance with “the capitalist pig Hugenberg.” Moreover, the move enabled him to disavow his own share in the defeat, so that he could once again emerge as the only vigorous force on the antirepublican Right.

  Such bold gestures made all the more of an impression because they seemed entirely out of keeping with the numerical strength of the still small party. But Hitler had recognized that it was all important to keep alive that interest in the movement which he had at last succeeded in arousing. Stripping the party for more aggressive tasks, as it were, he undertook a reorganization of headquarters. Gregor Strasser was placed in charge of Organization Section I (Political Organization). Former Colonel Konstantin Hierl became head of Organization Section II (National Socialist State; the shadow government). Goebbels became propaganda chief. In a letter of February 2, 1930, Hitler predicted “with almost clairvoyant certainty” that “the victory of our movement will take place… at the most in two and a half to three years.”

  After the break with Hugenberg he continued without interruption, and with virtually undiminished violence, the campaign against the republic. Only now it was the Nazi party’s own campaign. The previous year, instructions from party headquarters, signed by the then director of propaganda Heinrich Himmler, had called for a series of “propaganda operations” that represented a new departure in the art of politicking. An onslaught would be made on a single district, down to its remotest villages. In the course of a week all the party’s top speakers would be hurled in to address several hundred meetings. They would be enlisted “to the extreme limit” of their capacities. During this period every city and town would be bombarded with posters, banners, and leaflets—with Hitler himself frequently deciding the designs and slogans. “Recruiting nights” would be staged, when the SA was to show—in the words of the directive—“what it can do out of its own resources, including: athletic events, living tableaus, plays, singing of songs, lectures by SA men, showing of the movie of the Party Rally.” In the period preceding the elections for the Landtag (legislature) of Saxony in June, 1930, the party held no fewer than 1,300 such affairs.

  Along with these regional actions the party continued its efforts to gain a foothold within specific social groups, and in particular to win over some of the white-color workers and the rural population. In a series of vigorous thrusts the party conquered leading positions in co-operatives, craft unions, and professional organizations. In some rural areas conditions of acute distress prevailed: a peasant protest movement in Schleswig-Holstein, for example, marched under black banners. The party responded with the elusive slogan of “land reform” and by blaming matters on the Jews—tapping the springs of latent peasant anti-Semitism, which, as the party training directive put it, “must be incited to the point of furious rage.” A young Auslandsdeutscher (German from abroad) named Walter Darre, whom Rudolf Hess had introduced to Hitler, was meanwhile working out an agrarian program that was published early in March, 1930. It combined a generous offer of subsidies with fulsome tributes to the “noblest class in the nation.” At the same time, the party took advantage, in its propaganda among white-collar workers, of that general sense of crisis which had been engendered by the outcome of the war, urbanization, and the pressure of changes in the social structure. For the time being the factory workers remained aloof from the party. But the influx of office and agricultural workers that started in 1929 seemed to justify the party’s claim to being the “party of all toilers.” Throughout the country there sprang into being a host of small cells and bases that prepared the way for the great breakthrough.

  Hitler kept whipping the party on; but these successes were not entirely the result of his drive or of his talent for addressing himself to the confused and emotional thinking of the traditionally splintered Right. Rather, the incipient world-wide Depression came to his aid. Signs of crisis became apparent in Germany by the beginning of 1929, when the number of unemployed for the first time passed the 3 million mark. In the course of the spring the number of business failures began to increase alarmingly. By the first five days of November, in Berlin alone, fifty-five bankruptcies were recorded and from 500 to 700 persons daily were taking the debtor’s oath that they were unable to satisfy their creditors. These figures partly reflected the economic and psychological consequences of October 24, 1929, the famous Black Friday on which prices on the New York Stock Exchange collapsed.

  In Germany, especially, the devastating effects were felt almost immediately. The foreign loans, mostly short-term, that had underwritten the country’s economic revival and countenanced a certain recklessness on the part of some municipalities, were withdrawn by the anxious creditors. The abrupt recession in world trade simultaneously destroyed all prospects of making up for the losses, at least temporarily, by increased exports. As world market prices dropped, agriculture was drawn into the crisis; soon farms could be kept going only by subsidies which in turn increased the burden on the general public. One disaster fed the next in a classic chain reaction. In Germany, too, stock prices tumbled, unemployment grew by leaps and bounds, factories closed their doors, and new pawnshops opened theirs. Long columns in the newspapers announced forced auction sales. The political effects soon followed. Ever since the election of 1928 the country had been governed by a broad coalition painfully held together and straining to fly apart. This government was headed by the Social Democratic Chancellor Hermann Muller. When diminished tax receipts forced rigorous belt tightening, a stubborn fight ensued between the capitalistic and the left-wing groups within the government, each trying to make the other assume the burdens of the Depression.

  Actually, by this time it was obvious that nobody was going to be spared. The most prominent characteristic of the Depression in Germany was its totality. Although the ancillary economic and social consequences in, say, England—and especially in the United States—were no less far-reaching, they did not lead in those countries to an overwhelming psychological crisis that destroyed all political, moral, and intellectual standards and was felt to be something far greater than its specific causes: a shattering of faith in the existing order of the world. The turn of events in Germany simply cannot be adequately considered in terms of the objective economic conditions. For it was more than an economic slump; it was a psychological shock. Weary of everlasting troubles, their psychic resistance worn thin by war, defeat, and inflation, sick of democratic rhetoric with its constant appeals to reason and sobriety, people let their emotions run rampant.

  First reactions, to be sure, were nonpolitical: resignation in the face of the fatefulness and inscrutable character of the disaster. People thought primarily about their own survival, about the daily trek to the employment offices, standing in front of grocery stores
or on breadlines. And along with all the trivial daily vexations, there was the terrible idleness of men who had nothing to do but to hang around, apathetically or desperately, in dreary taverns, on street corners or in darkened apartments, feeling life was going to waste. In September, 1930, the number of jobless once again crossed the 3 million mark; a year later it had reached almost 4.5 million, and in September, 1932, more than 5 million—which was an improvement over the beginning of the year, for in January more than 6 million unemployed had been registered, not including temporary workers. Approximately every second family was directly affected, and from 15 million to 20 million persons found themselves dependent on the dole. This “relief” was in a sense sufficient to sustain life since, according to the figures of the American journalist H. R. Knickerbocker, it would take ten years to starve to death on it.

  A sense of total discouragement and meaninglessness pervaded everything. Among the most striking concomitants of the Great Depression was an unprecedented wave of suicides. At first the victims were chiefly failed bankers and businessmen, but as the Depression deepened, members of the middle class and the petty bourgeoisie more and more frequently took their own lives. With their keen sense of status, many office workers, owners of small shops, and persons with small private incomes had long regarded poverty as a badge of social degradation. They suffered less from the deprivations than the disgrace. Quite often whole families chose death together. Dropping birth rates and rising death rates led to decreasing populations in at least twenty of Germany’s major cities. The combination of public misery and the unfeelingness displayed by a hard-pressed and sickly capitalism led to the sense that everything was doomed to go down to destruction very soon. And, as always, such eschatological moods were accompanied by wild hopes that sprang up like weeds, along with irrational longings for a complete alteration of the world. Charlatans, astrologers, clairvoyants, numerologists, and mediums flourished. These times of distress taught men, if not to pray, pseudoreligious feelings, and turned their eyes willy-nilly to those seemingly elect personalities who saw beyond mere human tasks and promised more than normality, order, and politics as usual—who offered, in fact, to restore to life its lost meaning.