Hitler

by Volker Ullrich

  Hitler was soon gifted an unforeseen chance to deal a blow to Ludendorff’s reputation. On 28 February 1925, worn out by the constant attacks of his enemies, Reich President Friedrich Ebert died at the age of 54. Hitler persuaded Ludendorff to stand as a candidate for the far right in the resulting elections. The other candidates were the Duisburg mayor Karl Jarres for the moderately right-wing DNVP and DVP, the Social Democrat Otto Braun, the Centre Party leader Wilhelm Marx and the Communist Ernst Thälmann. Hitler knew that Ludendorff stood no chance, but on the surface he did everything to suggest that the reconstituted NSDAP was completely behind the general’s candidacy. The Völkischer Beobachter published constant appeals to its readers to vote for Ludendorff with the slogan “He who wants freedom must choose the man with the iron fist.”18

  The first round of voting on 24 March was a debacle for Ludendorff, who only received 286,000 votes, or 1.1 per cent of the ballots cast, by far the fewest of any of the candidates. “Bismarck too was not made chancellor of the German people by the result of an election,” Hitler wrote in a disingenuously encouraging article in the Völkischer Beobachter.19 In truth, Hitler was delighted. “Very good so—now we’ve taken care of him,” Hitler allegedly remarked after Ludendorff’s complete defeat became clear.20 Because none of the candidates achieved an absolute majority, however, a run-off election was called for 26 April. Former Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg, representing all the parties on the right, won a narrow victory over Marx, who stood for the SPD, the DDP and the Centre Party. Hindenburg’s election might have been prevented had not Thälmann insisted on running for the KPD. The Communists thus played a role in installing a dyed-in-the-wool monarchist in Germany’s highest political office. “Who would have imagined two years ago that Paul von Hindenburg could become German president?” exulted the right-wing paramilitary leader Georg Escherich. “Now we have an unimpeachable, reasonable man at the head of the Reich.”21 In fact, Hindenburg had a fractured relationship with the democratic institutions of the Weimar Republic, and the fatal consequences would become apparent when German democracy came under attack in the 1930s.

  Hitler, who had called upon the members of his party to vote for Hindenburg, was satisfied with the election outcome, which saw “the top hat give way to the steel helmet.” Under Hindenburg, Hitler reasoned, “a better future would be coming for Germany.”22 Ludendorff, however, was no longer a suitable figurehead for the far-right, ethnic-chauvinist movement, and he immediately sank into political irrelevance. In September 1925, he founded a group called the Tannenberg League, but under the influence of his second wife, the physician Mathilde von Kemnitz, it was transformed into a sect that spread abstruse conspiracy theories about Freemasons, Jews and Jesuits and preached neopagan religious beliefs.23

  The other rival whom Hitler manoeuvred onto the margins was Ernst Röhm. While Hitler was confined in Landsberg, the former army captain had organised members of the disbanded SA and the Fighting Association into a new paramilitary group, the Frontbann. Röhm intended it to be a militia independent from the party, which collided with Hitler’s aim of subjugating the SA to the NSDAP. “The purpose of the new SA,” read Hitler’s guidelines of 26 February 1925, “remains the same as the original one of before February 1923: to steel the bodies of our youth, to teach them discipline and commitment to our great, common ideal and to train them to become a security and propaganda service for the party.”24 Their differences caused Hitler and Röhm to fall out. In late April 1925, Röhm resigned as the head of the SA and the Frontbann and withdrew from the movement; in 1928, he became a military adviser in Bolivia. Hitler named Franz Pfeffer von Salomon as his successor in November 1926.

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  Before November 1923, the NSDAP had essentially been a home-grown Bavarian product, only weakly represented in northern Germany. Hitler now wanted to change that. Even before the party was officially reconstituted on 27 February 1925, he had charged Gregor Strasser with building up the party in north-western Germany. Strasser, whose storm battalion had taken part in the Beer Hall Putsch, had become one of the far right’s best-known politicians during Hitler’s imprisonment. In April 1924, he was elected a VB deputy to the Bavarian Landtag and had quickly become the chairman of his parliamentary faction. Together with Ludendorff and Albrecht von Graefe, he had been part of the Reich leadership triumvirate of the National Socialist Liberation Movement, and he won a mandate to represent that group in the Reichstag in December 1924. Strasser was not only a good public speaker, but an organisational talent. He valued Hitler as an irreplaceable unifying figure for the movement, and later told an intimate that he had found Hitler’s “tempestuous and winning personality” impossible to resist.25 But unlike most people in the Führer’s entourage, Strasser did not blindly worship him. As Strasser himself once remarked, he was not “one of those proverbial satellites who always revolves around the sun to draw light from it.”26 Hitler’s bohemian habits infuriated Strasser, and although he was a committed anti-Semite himself, he did not share Hitler’s rabid Jew-hatred.

  Like that of many war veterans, Strasser’s notion of “national socialism” reflected his experience in the trenches. But Strasser was more a socialist than a nationalist, and he took the anti-capitalist planks in the party programme quite seriously. In a reflection on the new year in the Völkischer Beobachter in early 1926, Strasser wrote: “We National Socialists fight passionately not only for national liberation but with great conviction for social justice, for the nationalisation of the economy.”27 The immunity Strasser enjoyed as a member of the Reichstag and the privilege of free rail travel given to deputies granted him great mobility, which he used tirelessly to promote the NSDAP in northern and western Germany. By the end of 1925, there were already 262 local Nazi chapters in those regions—almost four times as many as there had been at the time of the Beer Hall Putsch.28

  Strasser’s most important associate was a young intellectual named Paul Joseph Goebbels. Born in 1897 as the son of a business manager in the western German industrial city of Rheydt (today’s Mönchengladbach), Goebbels suffered from a clubbed right foot—the deformity was the source of a deep-seated inferiority complex for which Goebbels tried to compensate with intellectual achievements. After graduating from high school in 1917, Goebbels studied German literature in Bonn, and he received his doctorate in Heidelberg in 1921 with a dissertation about the Romantic dramatist Wilhelm Schütz. But that did not satisfy Goebbels’s ambitions. He longed to make a name for himself as a writer or a journalist and applied for a job at the liberal Berliner Tageblatt in January 1924. The application was summarily rejected, which was likely one of the roots of Goebbels’s hatred of Jews and the “Jewish press.” For a short time he worked at a branch of Dresdner Bank in Cologne, and his experiences of rampant hyperinflation encouraged his critical attitudes towards capitalism. The frustrated young man first became aware of Hitler in connection with the latter’s trial in Munich in early 1924. The Führer “spoke straight from my soul,” Goebbels would tell Hitler two years later. “God granted you the ability to articulate our suffering. You put our pain into words of deliverance and transformed confidence in the coming miracle into sentences.”29

  After visiting the unity conference of right-wing parties in Weimar in August 1924, where he met Gregor Strasser for the first time, Goebbels and a friend from school formed the local Rheydt chapter of the National Socialist Liberation Movement (NSFB). It was at the organisation’s meetings that the physically slight intellectual with the pronounced limp discovered his rhetorical abilities. For several months he took over as the editor of Völkische Freiheit, the weekly “fighting newsletter” of the NSFB in Elberfeld, in Germany’s industrial heartland. When the NSDAP was reconstituted in February 1925, Goebbels immediately joined. On the recommendation of Karl Kaufmann, a Strasser intimate, he was made the secretary of the North Rhineland party district or Gau, whereupon he moved to Elberfeld. Goebbels quickly became known as one of the party’s most effective speake
rs, and his public appearances constantly provoked fights with Communists in the industrial Ruhr Valley.

  Goebbels and Strasser both emotionally rejected capitalism and rapturously embraced socialism: “National and socialist!” Goebbels wrote in his diary. “What has priority and what comes second? There’s no doubt about the answer among us here in the west. First socialist redemption, and then national liberation will arrive like a powerful storm wind.”30 Goebbels also shared Strasser’s antipathy for the “dirty, whorish dealings” within the Nazi Party’s Munich headquarters.31 They particularly despised Hermann Esser, who they thought exerted a bad influence on Hitler; and they considered it their main goal to free the party chairman from the putative clutches of the Munich clique and tie him to the “socialist” line of the Strasser wing of the NSDAP. As a means of creating an opposite pole to the “decadent Munich direction,” a “Working Association North-west” was founded at a meeting in Hagen on 10 September 1925.32 The organisation, based in Elberfeld, was a loose association of the Gaue in northern and western Germany, with Strasser as its director and Goebbels as its secretary. Goebbels also edited the fortnightly newsletter, the Natio​nalso​ziali​stische Briefe. The working association was not directed against Hitler: on the contrary, it explicitly recognised his right to lead the party. In its statutes, adopted on 9 October, all the regional party leaders, the Gauleiter, pledged “to put aside all selfish aims and serve in the spirit of camaraderie the National Socialist idea under the Führer Adolf Hitler.”33

  At this point, Goebbels still had his doubts whether Hitler, whom he met for the first time in person at a Gauleiter convention in Weimar in July 1925, would in fact be able to fulfil the role of the much-longed-for political messiah. When Goebbels finished reading the first volume of Mein Kampf in mid-October, he asked himself: “Who is this man? Half plebian, half deity! Is he in fact Christ or only John the Baptist?”34 But by the time Goebbels encountered Hitler for a second time, at a Gau conference in Braunschweig on 6 November, his doubts were resolved. Hitler had greeted him “like an old friend,” Goebbels rejoiced in his diary. “Those large, blue eyes. Like stars…This man has everything he needs to become king. He is a born popular Tribune. The coming dictator.”35

  At the first meeting of the working association on 22 November in Hanover, Strasser unveiled the draft of a “comprehensive manifesto of national socialism.” It was intended to make the NSDAP party programme more specific on a number of points, not replace it. The general thrust was most clear in Strasser’s demand that key industries be nationalised, by “transferring ownership of most of the means of production to the general public.” On the foreign-policy front, Strasser envisioned all Germans being united in a “greater German empire” that would be the basis for a Central European customs union and a “United States of Europe.”36 The new Reich should try to conclude an alliance with Bolshevik Russia, Strasser argued in an article in the Völkischer Beobachter, and the deal should be concluded in the spirit of mutual German and Russian opposition to the capitalist West and to the order imposed by the Treaty of Versailles.37

  On 24 January 1926, the north-western Gauleiter came together for a second time to discuss the revised party programme. In attendance also was Gottfried Feder from Munich, who had vigorously protested in the name of the NSDAP against any changes to the earlier twenty-five-point manifesto. Feder took copious notes during the debates—much to the dismay of many conference participants, who feared that Hitler would be informed about any critical remarks they made. The decision about whether to write a new programme was postponed, while Strasser’s draft and all other suggestions were passed along to a committee. The conference did, however, vote to support a popular referendum, sponsored by the SPD and the Communists, calling for the expropriation of German princes without compensation.38

  Initially, Hitler had not paid much attention to the doings of the Working Association North-west. As was his wont with internal party conflicts, he let things take their course. In July 1925 he attended the Wagner Festival in Bayreuth for the first time. Accompanied by his Munich patroness, Elsa Bruckmann, he resided with the Bechsteins and enjoyed the luxury. It was not until the seventh day of the festival that Hitler met Winifred Wagner. The two called one another “Winnie” and “Wolf,” and Wagner was soon one of the few people allowed to address Hitler with the informal second-person pronoun “du.” “Those were sunny days,” Hitler recalled in February 1942. “I was 36 years old and had not a care in the world. The sky was hung with violins. I was popular enough that everyone treated me well without wanting anything from me. People left me in peace. During the day I walked around in my lederhosen, to the festival I wore a tuxedo or tails.”39

  After the festival, Hitler retreated for several weeks to a guest house in Berchtesgaden to resume work with Max Amann on the second volume of Mein Kampf.40 He only returned to Munich at the end of September. With the party leader nearly invisible for two months, Gregor Strasser was ambitiously making a name for himself in north-western Germany. Hitler did not yet see Strasser as a rival. On the contrary, at the NSDAP leadership conference in Landshut in October 1925, Hitler praised Strasser “for opening up large sections of Germany to National Socialism.”41

  Hitler only began to see the activities of the working association as a threat to his own leadership in January 1926, when, probably at Feder’s behest, he was given Strasser’s draft party programme.42 “Hitler is furious about the manifesto,” Goebbels noted.43 Only then did Hitler feel compelled to intervene, and as he had in previous crisis situations, he now could not engineer the decisive test of strength quickly enough. At short notice, he called a leadership conference for 14 February in Bamberg. Goebbels was confident that the spokesmen for the working association would be successful in advocating their suggestions for the party programme. “In Bamberg we’ll play the role of the standoffish beauty and win Hitler over to our side,” Goebbels predicted. “In every city, I see with great joy that our spirit, i.e. the socialist one, is on the march. No one puts their faith any more in Munich. Elberfeld shall become the mecca of German socialism.”44

  The conference, however, did not go at all as Goebbels anticipated. The representatives from northern and western Germany were in a clear minority among the approximately sixty participants, and from the very start, Hitler was intent on confronting them. In a speech that went on for hours, he dismissed the ideas of the working association point by point. When it came to foreign policy, Hitler advocated alliances with Britain and Italy, both of which made for potential partners owing to shared differences with Germany’s “mortal enemy” France. Hitler categorically rejected any agreement with Russia, which, he said, would lead to the “immediate political Bolshevisation” of Germany. As he had outlined in Mein Kampf, he made the acquisition of “territory and soil” the centrepiece of his foreign policy, demanding that Germany “reorient itself towards the east and colonise the area as it had in the Middle Ages.” He also ruled about the expropriation of the German princes, declaring that aristocrats were, in the first instance, Germans. “We will not tolerate that what belongs to them is being taken from them,” Hitler thundered. “We believe in the law and will not give a Jewish system of exploitation any legal justification for completely plundering our people.” Finally, Hitler forbade any discussions about the party programme. It was “the movement’s article of faith” and thus “sacrosanct.”45

  Goebbels felt as though he had been slapped in the face. “Was this the real Hitler?” he asked. “A reactionary?…The Russian question: completely off the mark. Italy and England: Germany’s natural allies. How horrible! Our main task is to smash Bolshevism. Bolshevism is a Jewish instrument! We must inherit Russia!” Goebbels was also shocked by Hitler’s attitude towards the expropriation issue. “The law must remain the law for aristocrats as well,” he noted in horror. “No questioning of private property! How terrible!”46 Yet despite his profound disappointment, the otherwise so loquacious secretary of the Elbe
rfeld faction did not dare oppose Hitler openly. While Goebbels stubbornly remained silent, it was left to Gregor Strasser to defend their positions, and he was apparently so shocked by Hitler’s fury that he failed miserably. “Hesitant, tremulous and clumsy” was how Goebbels described Strasser’s reply. Feder characterised Strasser as “a beaten dog.”47 The triumph of the Munich faction was absolute. In the wake of the Bamberg conference, the Working Association North-west was finished politically, even if it did not immediately disband. In early March 1926, Strasser wrote to the Gauleiter asking them to send back all the copies of his draft manifesto, saying that he had “promised Herr Hitler to bring about the total recall of the programme.”48 It was the last time there would be any debate about the party’s main political orientation.

  Hitler was clever enough not to revel in his victory. Instead of humiliating his rivals he sought to win them over with conciliatory gestures. When Gregor Strasser was injured in a car accident in Landshut, Hitler made a point of visiting him in his sickbed.49 The following September, Strasser was called to join the party leadership in Munich as propaganda director; he succeeded Hermann Esser, the very object of the initial attacks by the working association.50 Hitler was particularly eager to court Goebbels, whose political talent he had recognised early on and whose need for praise and acknowledgement were equally obvious. The way he massaged the bruised ego of the “little doctor” demonstrated his instinctive understanding of people. “Once he’s here, I’ll win him over to our side,” Hitler told his intimates in Munich. “I’ll take care of him myself. The rest of you keep your hands off.”51 In late March, Hitler invited Goebbels to come to Munich and give a speech at the prestigious Bürgerbräukeller. The man from the Rhineland was courted as soon as he arrived in Munich on the evening of 7 April. Hitler sent his personal Mercedes to pick him up. “What a reception!” Goebbels crowed.52 During the drive to his hotel, he saw giant posters advertising his speech the following evening.