For most Germans the most visible manifestation of National Socialism in their daily lives was the ubiquitous presence of the brown-shirted SA—Storm Troopers handing out leaflets, canvassing, marching in never-ending parades, collecting money for various National Socialist causes—and it was among the SA that the public encountered the most violent expressions of Nazi anti-Semitism. The pitched battles with the Communists and Social Democrats drew the most extensive coverage in the press, but the Storm Troopers also regularly harassed Jews on the streets and smashed up Jewish shops. SA battle songs spewed hatred against the Jews and issued appallingly bloodthirsty threats. “Sharpen the long knives on the pavement,” one such song began, “let the knives plunge into the body of the Jew, blood must flow in streams, and we shit on the freedom of this Jew Republic.”
Nor were the party’s anti-Semitic pitches limited to lower-middle-class audiences, as is so often assumed, but appeared frequently in Nazi appeals to workers, where anti-Semitism could be interwoven with the party’s anticapitalist rants. Aimed primarily at a working-class readership, Der Angriff was saturated with images of the Jew as “the wirepuller of international capital,” and articles with headlines such as “Vote for Communism and Jewry,” or “SPD—the Jewish Party,” appeared with regularity. So relentless was Der Angriff in its attacks on Jews that the Prussian government banned the paper for a week in January for “holding the Jewish religion up to contempt.”
Nazi strategists clearly believed that anti-Semitism was not enough to galvanize voters and propel the party into power. “People became anti-Semites because they became Nazis,” one historian has argued, “not the other way around,” and there is much truth to that. And yet, anti-Semitism had entered the bloodstream of German politics, and the fact that none of the other parties felt moved to challenge the Nazis for their brutish Jew baiting is in itself revealing. All the mainstream parties except the Conservatives, who sought to exploit it for their own ends, issued perfunctory condemnations of Nazi anti-Semitism and then moved on to more pressing problems. The Communists and Social Democrats were quick to dismiss anti-Semitism as shallow demagoguery intended to divert attention from the reactionary nature of National Socialism, while the left-liberal DDP, the party of choice for many middle-class Jews, downplayed anti-Semitism as “a fire made of straw—it flames up brightly but quickly burns out.” Left-liberals simply could not believe that it was an issue to be taken seriously. On a more unsettling note, they may also have calculated that in the end there were no votes to be gained by making it one.
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On July 31, the NSDAP took 38.8 percent of the vote. The parties of mainstream center and right—the system parties so reviled by Hitler—suffered staggering losses, as their constituents defected to the NSDAP in droves. Together the liberal parties managed to win only 2 percent of the vote, the Conservatives a mere 5.9 percent, and the bevy of specialinterest, regional, and single-issue parties saw their vote plummet to 3 percent. On the other side of the social divide, the Social Democrats sustained serious losses as well, falling from 24.5 percent in 1930 to 20.4 percent, while the Communist vote nudged upward from 13.1 to 14.3 percent. The NSDAP, a party that only four years before had been unable to attract even 3 percent of the electorate, had become Germany’s largest political party. It was the most dramatic ascent in modern political history. The man with the funny mustache (it looked strange to Germans, too), thick Austrian accent, appalling grammar, and odd mannerisms, an unelectable outsider ridiculed by the national press and Berlin intelligentsia, stood improbably on the threshold of power.
Contemporary analysts, political opponents, and many subsequent historians were convinced that the apparently unstoppable surge of National Socialist support could be explained as a “revolt of the lower middle class,” a movement of the undereducated, downwardly mobile, and economically marginal who deserted the traditional parties of the moderate center and right after 1928. Driven by economic despair and desperately afraid of “proletarianization,” so the argument goes, the resentful and frightened “little men” of German society flocked to the NSDAP. It is true that the base of the Nazi support was to be found among the shopkeepers, small farmers, schoolteachers, and clerks of the embattled Mittelstand, but by 1932 the NSDAP was far from being a party of the lower middle class.
The Nazis always vehemently rejected such characterizations, claiming that National Socialism represented “a new political synthesis of seemingly antagonistic and contradictory currents.” It was, they claimed, a Volksbewegung, a people’s movement that stood above class, region, and religion, and as such a novelty in German political culture. The other parties scoffed. Virtually all the parties maintained that they were Volksparteien; virtually all invoked “the people’s community” well before the NSDAP appropriated it. What was striking—and baffling—to contemporaries was the fact that the Nazis actually attempted to translate that claim into political reality, to mobilize support in every sector of German society, in every occupational group, in every demographic, in every region, and in both Protestant and Catholic populations. It mounted serious campaigns to recruit not only the small shopkeeper and farmer but the day laborer and steelworker as well, attacking both Marxist socialism and large-scale corporate capitalism in the process.
According to well-established traditions of German political culture, parties made little effort to cross social boundaries in mobilizing support. The parties of the left appealed to workers, the liberals and conservatives to elements of the middle class. This practice extended back into the Wilhelmine period but was greatly exacerbated by the Weimar electoral system. If a party secured 60,000 in one of the country’s 35 electoral districts, it earned a seat in the Reichstag for every additional sixty thousand votes it received nationwide, securing its base—the operational imperative of all campaigning. If a party picked up votes here and there beyond that base, well and good, but securing the base was the key to its success. The parties of the middle class—the liberals and conservatives and the plethora of special interest parties—were, therefore, determined above all else to establish their credentials as stalwart defenders of middle-class interests against the threat of the Marxist left. Similarly, the Social Democrats and Communists competed fiercely for the blue-collar vote but made little effort to draw support from the fractious bourgeoisie. Only the Catholic Zentrum, whose appeal was based on religious affiliation, sought to straddle the great social divide of German politics, but almost exclusively within the Catholic community.
From the beginning, the NSDAP refused to follow in these well-worn grooves of German politics. The Nazis were charting a radically new course, pursuing a catchall strategy that aimed at capturing support from all across the social and cultural landscape. The result was considerable uncertainty as to the party’s proper placement on the political spectrum—was it a party of the reactionary right, as the Communists and Social Democrats maintained, or, as the conservatives charged, a party of the socialist left? Even within the NSDAP’s own ranks, local party officials occasionally expressed confusion about the social locus of the movement. “Are we a worker’s party or a middle-class party?” one perplexed member of the Stuttgart NSDAP inquired of the leadership in 1923. The question might just as easily have been posed ten years later.
In pursuing this catch-all strategy, the Nazis had two major assets. Unlike the other parties, the NSDAP was neither associated with any clearly defined set of economic interests nor had it been saddled with government responsibility in the discredited Weimar state. It could not be held responsible for any failed policy or unpopular measure. The Communists, too, stood on the outside, free of the taint of participation in the discredited Weimar state, but while the KPD continued to confine its recruitment efforts to the working class, the Nazis cast their net wide. The NSDAP’s unique appeal across the traditional social divides of German politics and its simultaneous insistence that it stood above special interests, that it was, in fact, a genuine people’s party, c
arried a significant measure of plausibility to an increasingly desperate public. It also positioned the Nazis to assume the mantle of the bold outsider fighting the debilitating corruption and divisiveness of the system. They alone could give voice to the protest of the angry masses against the failed establishment. While the other parties talked, the NSDAP projected itself as a party of action, of dynamism and energy. The Nazis would get things done. And Hitler, the ultimate anti-establishment candidate, could posture as the unsullied idealist at war with the Berlin insiders, foreign oppressors, stock market swindlers, and the special interests, a role he played with consummate skill.
The NSDAP that emerged triumphant from the 1932 elections was far more than a party of angry déclassés and petit bourgeois misfits. Between 1929 and 1933 Hitler managed to attract a following of unprecedented demographic diversity, drawing support from elements of the affluent upper crust, the blue-collar labor force, and the lower middle class in both town and countryside. To the surprise of many, the party had done unexpectedly well in affluent, upper-middle-class neighborhoods and among civil servants of the upper ranks. Even more unprecedented, the NSDAP had found considerable support within the German working class, considered by many, both then and for decades afterward, to be immune to Nazi appeals. Although the Nazis proved unable to make dramatic inroads into the industrial strongholds of the SPD and KPD, they did succeed in attracting a substantial following among workers in handicrafts, small-scale manufacturing, and agriculture. These workers were usually employed in small plants, in government enterprises, or in the countryside, and were rarely integrated into the ranks of organized labor. It has been estimated that as much as 40 percent of the National Socialist vote by 1932 was drawn from these elements of the working class. Despite sustained efforts to court the Church and its flock (as an act of piety, the SA in many towns even marched to church—in uniform), the Nazis continued to have problems in Catholic areas. As the frustrated Gauleiter of Cologne-Aachen reported in March 1932, “the effectiveness of our work was hindered by the systematic counter activities of the Catholic clergy, who . . . proceeded to proclaim from the confessional box, from the pulpit, and in the press that Catholics could not work or vote for the National Socialists if they wished to receive the holy sacraments.” The clergy continued to characterize National Socialism as a pagan, anti-religious, anti-church movement and in doing so, the Gauleiter complained, “has made the most unbelievable accusations.” Still, in 1932 support for the party among Catholics was increasing but it was a work in progress.
From the earliest days of the party, the NSDAP had relentlessly projected an image of youthful dynamism, proclaiming itself “the party of young Germany.” Its leaders, especially by German standards, were young: Goebbels was thirty-four; Himmler, thirty-two; Göring, thirty-nine; Röhm, forty-five; Hitler, forty-one; Gregor Strasser, forty; Rosenberg, thirty-nine; and 60 percent of the party’s Reichstag deputies in 1930 were under forty—compared to the SPD’s 10 percent. Its membership was also young. Of the 720,000 new members who joined the NSDAP between 1930 and 1933, 43 percent were between the ages of eighteen and thirty; another 27 percent were between thirty and forty. Between 1930 and 1932 the party made impressive gains in student elections in various German universities; the party also established a youth organization for boys ages sixteen to eighteen that would evolve into the Hitler Youth (Hitlerjugend or HJ) in 1932 and a similar organization for girls, the League of German Girls (Bund deutscher Mädel or BdM).
At the same time, the Nazis made a systematic, sustained, and surprisingly successful effort to attract older Germans to the cause, especially pensioners, widows, and veterans. Since 1930 the Nazis had remorselessly lambasted Brüning’s austerity program, warning older voters that it would lead to a reduction of their health benefits and pensions—a claim given credibility by the government’s first emergency decree in July 1930. In every regional and national campaign in 1932 they accused the Brüning and Papen governments of attempting to balance the budget by slashing the benefits of veterans, especially disabled veterans, and retirees. The deepest cuts came in Papen’s emergency decree of June 14, and the Nazis loudly demanded a restoration of the funds. “With one stroke of the pen,” the chancellor, operating by emergency decree, had “taken away the rights of pensioners,” reducing their benefits to little more than “beggars’ pennies.” They fumed against the cold insensitivity of a system that would swindle society’s most vulnerable, while giving tax breaks to the rich. Millions of ordinary Germans had “saved and paid for decades in order to have a secure retirement,” only to be fleeced by a heartless government and the feckless middle-class parties that “no longer have either the strength or the will to help you.” Only the NSDAP could save retirees and the disabled heroes of the Great War. The Nazis would not only preserve retirement and health benefits but increase payments and services. The strategy paid off. In 1932 the “party of youth” drew considerable support from fearful older Germans trying to stay afloat.
Even women, who had been the most reluctant demographic to embrace the Nazis, were turning to the party in ever-increasing numbers. In July 1931 the party created its own national women’s organization, the National Socialist Women’s League (Nationalsozialistische Frauenschaft (NS-F). The NS-F, as its first declaration of principles stated, stood for “a German women’s spirit which is rooted in God, nature, family, nation, and homeland.” Although it tended to be underfunded and encountered some resistance from regional party leaders, the NSDAP lavished increasing attention on its new women’s organization, especially during the campaigns of 1932. The party sought to mobilize middle-class women with appeals that pledged the NSDAP’s support for the traditional religious and cultural values of Kinder, Kirche, und Küche. In addressing working women, the party attacked Weimar’s “sham liberation” of women, which had merely exposed them to shameless exploitation by greedy capitalists and deprived them of their most cherished role, that of wife and mother. National Socialism would restore the honor of women, who, safe in their domestic sphere, would play a central role in the creation of the Third Reich. The Nazis, as one historian has cogently put it, were offering women emancipation from emancipation. “The woman judges things primarily with the heart,” a Nazi women’s leader asserted. “For her it is not logical and purely reasoned considerations that are decisive but the intuitive recognition of the moral and spiritual worth of a person or an idea. . . . At the same time the woman wants to be instructed and lifted up, whether by the spoken or written word.”
These efforts were not without effect. Although women still tended to favor parties with a strong religious orientation and remained underrepresented in the party’s membership, the NSDAP made enormous strides with women voters after 1930, especially in 1932. In those areas where votes were tabulated by sex, women for the first time outnumbered men in the Nazi constituency in Protestant areas but still lagged behind in Catholic districts. Fighting off charges of misogyny, the Nazis discovered that women, no less than men, were disillusioned with the failures of the system and were searching for alternatives.
By the summer of 1932 the NSDAP could claim, with some credibility, that it was what it always claimed to be—a genuine people’s party. Although the hard core of its following was composed overwhelmingly of elements of the lower middle class, what made the party such a powerful political force was its ability in a period of severe economic and political crisis to reach far beyond this limited reservoir of support and mobilize protest voters from a surprisingly broad range of social and demographic groups. Germany had seen nothing like it.
But there was a problem lurking behind the party’s spectacular election numbers. As a catchall party of protest, its surprisingly diverse following was a highly unstable political compound. Goebbels recognized that the millions who had flocked to the NSDAP were not drawn to the cause by a commitment to National Socialist ideology, to the “idea.” What held the party’s uniquely heterogeneous following together was the con
viction that the political system in Germany was broken, its institutions hopelessly dysfunctional, and its mainstream parties ineffective, fatally contaminated by participation in the hapless government at one time or another. As Weimar’s most relentlessly militant and uncompromised critic, the NSDAP skillfully mobilized that sense of protest in each of the elections of the Depression era. Why not let Hitler have a go, many people felt. Maybe the Nazis could shake things up, make things work. Anyway, how could they be worse than those who had wielded power and gotten Germany into this abysmal situation?
Manipulating this deep-seated anger and anxiety had served the party well in the short term, but maintaining a firm grip on a socially diverse mass constituency held together less by a commitment to Nazi ideology than by protest and vague, often contradictory promises of dramatic “change” would grow increasingly problematic if the party did not actually come to power—and soon. Nazi leaders understood the potential perils of the party’s position. As Goebbels noted in his diary in the full afterglow of the party’s greatest triumph, “Now we must come to power and annihilate Marxism. One way or the other. Something has to happen. The time for talk is over. Now action!”
6
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THE NAZIS HIT A WALL
In the heady days of late summer, Hitler seemed to stand on the threshold of power. All parliamentary logic dictated that as leader of the largest party in the Reichstag, he would be summoned to form a government. Within the party’s rank and file anticipation of the long-awaited “seizure of power” skyrocketed. The Storm Troopers were straining at the leash, poised for action. Many units had been given specific orders for actions to be taken, radio stations, courthouses, municipal buildings to be seized, once Hitler’s appointment was announced. The party’s political functionaries were almost giddy with expectation. At last, after years of struggle, power was virtually within their grasp.
The Third Reich Page 22
