Hitler

by Joachim C. Fest

  All these elements had had a place in the party since 1929, even before the sudden large-scale influx of members. But the sociological range of the party remained vague. In fact, it was deliberately obscured by pretentious slogans, behind which Hitler tried to disguise the fact that he had made few conquests among the politically conscious working class and that the National Socialist Party on the whole remained restricted to its original strata of the population. Moreover, the government began again to show displeasure. On June 5, 1930, Bavaria issued a ban on the private wearing of uniforms. A week later Prussia forbade the brown shirt, so that the storm troopers henceforth had to appear in white shirts. Only two weeks later the state of Prussia prohibited membership in the National Socialist or the Communist Party for all civil servants. The new toughness of the Weimar Republic was expressed in the increasing number of court cases against members of both parties. Up to 1933 some 40,000 trials were held, as a consequence of which a total of 14,000 years’ imprisonment and nearly 1.5 million marks in fines were imposed.5

  Such measures, however, did not dispel the impression of weakness that clung to the “system.” After the inglorious end of the Great Coalition there was pressure within the government itself for some sort of change in the machinery of rule. Up to this point President von Hindenburg had conducted his office with fidelity to the letter of the Constitution, although he had no particular respect for its spirit. But some members of his entourage began to say that the incompetent parliamentary regime should be replaced by authoritarian presidential rule. It is difficult to judge to what extent the President accepted such counsels; but in any case he for the first time intervened vigorously and decisively in the formation of the new government. His choice of Heinrich Brüning for Chancellor indicated that from now on he would exert influence on the daily business of government. The personality of the new Chancellor combined integrity, austerity, and sense of duty. He seemed ready for those mute self-sacrifices that Hindenburg demanded of his associates. Soon after taking office, with unseemly haste, without exhausting the possibilities for compromise, Brüning risked a vote of confidence and dissolved the Reichstag. The moment was particularly ill chosen; unemployment was increasing sharply, and terror of the Depression was mounting. In vain Interior Minister Wirth implored the antagonists to compromise and not to expand the parliamentary crisis into a crisis of the system, as if democracy were tired of itself. No one yielded, and new elections were set for September, 1930.

  Nazi propaganda immediately flared to new heights. Once again the mobil agitation squads made loud and turbulent irruptions into towns and rural areas, organizing an endless succession of open-air concerts, sports festivals, “rallyes,” solemn bugling of taps church meetings. Their stock-in-trade was diatribes against their competitors. “Throw the scum out! Tear the masks off their mugs! Take them by the scruff of the neck and kick them in their fat bellies on September 14, and sweep them out of the temple with trumpets and drums!” Goebbels wrote; in this election campaign he was undergoing his first test since his appointment as Reich propaganda chief. The philosopher Ernst Bloch has spoken contemptuously of the Nazis’ “stupid enthusiasm.” But in fact that was their greatest strength. The Communists, by contrast, in spite of their grandiloquent faith in ultimate victory, seemed colorless and without élan, as though they had, not history, but only the daily grind on their side. The 2,000 to 3,000 graduates of the Nazi party speakers’ school were now thrown into the fray for marathon sessions. And though their expositions of party doctrine often sounded crude and memorized, and probably won few new adherents, the mere appearance of these hordes of preachers spread the impression of a vast party engaged in tireless and overwhelming activity. Simultaneously, the better-known and experienced party speakers addressed the populace at large-scale meetings. “Meetings attended by between a thousand and five hundred persons are of daily occurrence in the larger cities,” a memorandum of the Prussian Interior Ministry noted. “Often, in fact, one or several parallel meetings have to be held because the previously selected halls cannot hold the number of persons wishing to attend.”

  Heading it all as leader, star performer, and organizer was Hitler himself. He had led off the campaign with a mass meeting in Weimar and continued his tour indefatigably, by car, by train, or by plane. Wherever he turned up, he set the masses into motion, although he had no plan, no theory of the Depression and how to fight it. But he could name those responsible : the Allies, the corrupt politicians of the system, the Marxists, and the Jews. And he had his formula for ending the distress of the people: determination, self-assurance, and recaptured power. His emotional appeals remained in the realm of generalities. Topical concerns be damned, he would declare. The German people had been ruined by wrestling with such petty matters. “Topical concerns blind our eyes to greatness.” The crisis of the parliamentary system arose from the very fact that the parties were focusing their attention on the “everyday junk,” for which people were not “willing to make sacrifices.”

  Hitler’s effectiveness was due as much to the decisiveness of his manner and the impressive ritual with which he was surrounded as to his oratorical powers. His ideas could easily be translated into slogans; once planted, these sank into the deeper layers of men’s mind, took root and grew. During those weeks of the election campaign he acquired, in addition to a vast amount of organizational experience, the refined psychological technique for the larger and stormier campaigns he was to launch two years later.

  The paucity of the actual Nazi program, as against the energy and noise level of its agitation, caused many people to underestimate the NSDAP. In the view of intelligent contemporaries, the party was asserting itself as a noisy, bothersome and slightly crazy phenomenon in noisy and slightly crazy times. Thus, the political satirist Kurt Tucholsky made this quip about Hitler: “The man doesn’t exist; he is only the noise he makes.” Meanwhile, on a more serious plane, little attention was paid to a memorandum from the Reich Interior Ministry disclosing the anti-Constitutional character of the party, so thinly disguised by formal professions of legality.

  Instead, those most concerned with defense of the republic trusted to the pent-up explosive forces within the party. It was growing too fast, they thought; surely its inner contradictions would cause it to blow up. And surely it would be destroyed by the intellectual mediocrity, the crudeness and the warring ambitions of its corps of leaders.

  Such prognoses seemed confirmed by the upheavals within the National Socialist Party in the summer of 1930. Only in hindsight could these be recognized as purges which tightened party discipline and strengthened its thrust. First of all, Hitler forced the long-delayed confrontation with the party Left, whose position had patently become more contradictory. As long as the NSDAP had been a marginal party, making a considerable uproar but not having to put its ideas into practice in legislatures or administrations, it had been easy to conceal its internal ideological disagreements. But after the recent victories in regional elections, the party was being compelled to take a definite stand. Otto Strasser and his followers obstinately held to their old principles. They advocated aggressive “catastrophe tactics,” preached crude anticapitalism, came out for extensive nationalization of industry and an alliance with the Soviet Union, and flouted the party line by supporting local strike movements. This last activity, of course, was bound to strain the party’s new and highly profitable entente with industry. In addition their habit of rashly discussing programs caused trouble, for Hitler liked to skirt such questions and keep his options open.

  As early as January, 1930, the Führer had asked Otto Strasser to turn over the publishing house to him. Cunningly mixing flattery with threats and attempts at bribery, Hitler promised the refractory comrade the post of press chief at Munich headquarters and offered to pay some 80,000 marks for the publishing organization. He appealed to Strasser as an old soldier and a National Socialist of many years standing. But Strasser, who regarded himself as the repository of true Nationa
l Socialism, had rejected all such bids. The final showdown came on the night of May 21, 1930, in what was then Hitler’s Berlin headquarters, the Hotel Sanssouci on Linkstrasse. Max Amann was present, as well as Rudolf Hess and Otto Strasser’s brother Gregor, when the two sides fell into a heated debate that was to go on for seven hours and to expose the full extent of their differences.

  In that grandiloquent manner of the self-educated which was later to drive his entourage to distraction, Hitler began by sounding off on the subject of art (there are no revolutionary breaks in art; there is only “eternal art,” and whatever deserves the name is art of the Greco-Nordic type; anything else is fraud). He then expatiated on the role of personality, the problems of race, the global economy, Italian Fascism, and finally turned to socialism, which was the “Pilate’s question”—that is, the question of the nature of truth. That question, to be sure, had been present from the start. Now Hitler took Strasser to task for placing “the idea” above the Führer and wanting “to give every party comrade the right to decide the nature of the idea, even to decide whether or not the Führer is true to the so-called idea.” That, he cried angrily, was the worst kind of democracy, for which there was no place in their movement. “With us the Führer and the idea are one and the same, and every party comrade has to do what the Führer commands, for he embodies the idea and he alone knows its ultimate goal.” He was not going to allow the whole party organization, which was built up on the discipline of the members, “to be destroyed by a few megalomaniac scriveners.”

  Hitler’s incapacity to see human relationships in anything but hierarchic terms had seldom shown itself so clearly as in the course of this dispute. Compulsively, he answered every objection, every consideration, by referring back to the question of power: Who was to give the orders and who was the subordinate? Everything was mercilessly reduced to the contrast between master and servants; all that existed was the raw, unshaped mass and the great personality for which that mass was an instrument, material for manipulation. To satisfy the legitimate needs of this mass for protection and welfare was, to his mind, socialism. When Strasser came out with the charge that Hitler was trying to throttle the party’s revolutionary socialism in the interests of his new connections with bourgeois reaction, Hitler replied heatedly. “I am a socialist of an entirely different type from, for instance, the high and mighty Count Reventlow [an aristocratic party member], I started out as a plain workman. To this day I can’t bear to have my chauffeur eat less well than myself. But what you mean by socialism is simply crude Marxism. You see, the great mass of the workers don’t want anything but bread and circuses. They have no understanding for any kind of ideals and. we will never be able to count on winning over the workers to any considerable degree. We want an elite of the new master class who will not be motivated by any morality of pity, but who will realize clearly that they are entitled to rule because of their superior race and who will ruthlessly maintain and secure this rule over the broad masses…. Your whole system is a desk product that has nothing to do with real life.”

  He turned to his publisher: “Herr Amann, would you stand for it if your stenographers suddenly wanted to interfere with your work? The employer who bears the responsibility for production also provides the workers with their livelihood. Our biggest employers in particular are not so much concerned about amassing money, about luxurious living, and so on. What is most important to them is the responsibility and the power. Because of their capability they have worked their way to the top, and because of their selectness, which again only proves their superior race, they have a right to lead.”

  After more excited discussion Strasser posed what to him was the key question: If the Nazis took power, would the means of production remain unchanged? Hitler replied: “But of course. Do you think I am so mad as to destroy the economy? The state would intervene only if the employers were not acting in the interests of the nation. But for that there would be no need for expropriation or the workers having any voice in the decisions.” Actually, he said, only one system existed: “Responsibility toward superiors, authority toward inferiors.” So it had been for thousands of years, and no other way was possible.

  Obviously, there was no humanitarian impulse or desire for a new form of society in Hitler’s version of socialism. He himself declared that his socialism had “nothing at all to do with a mechanical construction of economic life”; rather, it was the complementary concept to the word “nationalism.” Socialism meant the responsibility of the whole for the individual, whereas “nationalism” was the devotion of the individual to the whole; thus the two elements could be combined in National Socialism. This prestidigitation allowed all interest groups to have their way and reduced the ideas to mere counters: capitalism found its true and ultimate fulfillment in Hitler’s socialism, whereas socialism was only attainable under the capitalistic economic system. This ideology took a leftist label chiefly for tactical reasons. It demanded, within the party and within the state, a powerful system of rule that would exercise unchallenged leadership over the “great mass of the anonymous.” And whatever premises the party may have started with, by 1930 Hitler’s party was “socialist” only to take advantage of the emotional value of the word, and a “workers’ party” in order to lure the most energetic social force. As with Hitler’s protestations of belief in tradition, in conservative values, or in Christianity, the socialist slogans were merely movable ideological props to serve as camouflage and confuse the enemy. They could be changed or rearranged, depending on the situation. The leaders, at any rate, were totally cynical about the principles of the program—as one enthusiastic young convert learned from a talk with Goebbels. When the young man remarked that Feder’s call for smashing the enslaving system of interest payment did contain an element of socialism, Goebbels replied that what ought to be smashed was anyone who listened to such twaddle.

  Nevertheless, Otto Strasser’s reasoned attack on the inconsistencies of his position hit Hitler hard. Sulkily, he returned to Munich, and as was his way kept silent for weeks about the whole matter, so that Strasser was left in uncertainty. In fact, Hitler did not strike back until Strasser published a pamphlet entitled “Cushioned Ministerial Seats or Revolution,” in which he renewed the controversy and accused the party leader of betraying the socialist heart of their common cause. At this point, Hitler sent a letter to his Berlin gauleiter ordering Strasser and his followers to be expelled from the party.

  For months as responsible leader of the National Socialist Party I have been watching attempts to introduce strife, confusion and insubordination into the ranks of the movement. Under the mask of desiring to fight for socialism a policy has been advocated which corresponds totally to the policy of our Jewish-liberal-Marxist opponents. These cliques call for the very things our enemies desire…. I now consider it necessary to ruthlessly throw these destructive elements out of the party, every single one of them. We have shaped and determined the essential content of our movement; we who founded this movement and fought for it, suffered for it in the prisons, and we who led it back from collapse and up to its present height. Anyone who does not like the essential content of the movement which was established by us, and primarily by me, should not enter the movement or must leave it again. As long as I am leading the National Socialist Party, it will not become a debating club for rootless scribblers or unruly parlor Bolsheviks. It will remain what it is today: a disciplined organization which was not created for the doctrinaire games of political boy scouts, but for the fight for a future Germany in which the concepts of class will have been smashed.6

  On June 30 Goebbels called a membership meeting of the gau, to assemble at the Hasenheide in Berlin. “Those who do not fit in will be kicked out!” he thundered. Otto Strasser and his followers, who had come to argue their point of view, were forcibly ejected from the hall by the SA. The Strasser group thenceforth talked of “purebred Stalinism” and deliberate “persecution of socialists” on the part of the leadership;
however, the Strassers and their followers were put more and more on the defensive. On July 1 Gregor Strasser resigned his editorship of the Kampfverlag newspapers and disassociated himself from his brother’s views. Von Reventlow and other prominent members of the party’s left wing also abandoned the rebels. Some of them probably did so for economic reasons, since they owed a post, a living, a deputy seat to Hitler. But most of them acted out of that “almost perverse personal loyalty” that Hitler evoked and which persisted despite countless acts of disloyalty on his part. With great assurance Goebbels declared that the party would “sweat out this attempt at sabotage.”

  Thereupon, on July 4, Otto Strasser’s newspapers announced: “The socialists are leaving the NSDAP.” But hardly anyone followed Otto Strasser. It turned out that the party had virtually no socialist members and in general very few who cared about the theoretical aspects of their politics. Otto Strasser founded a new party which first called itself the Revolutionary National Socialists and later the Black Front but never escaped the odor of mere dogmatism. Hitler’s followers were forbidden to read’ the publications of the Kampfverlag; but the subjects belabored by these publications soon ceased to attract attention anyhow. Who cared about petty revelations of party secrets when the party was obviously answering the summons of history and valiantly struggling against world-wide disaster. The masses were fixing their hopes of salvation on Hitler, not on his program.