Hitler

by Volker Ullrich

  “My heart was beating so hard it almost burst,” Goebbels noted about his two-and-a-half-hour address. “I was giving everything I had. There were cheers and commotion. At the end, Hitler embraced me, tears in his eyes. I’m so overjoyed.” The next day, Hitler gave Goebbels a personal tour of the party headquarters. The two men met several times, and Hitler employed his full power of persuasion to quell Goebbels’s doubts. In the end, Goebbels was converted: “I am relieved on all counts. He is a man who only sees the big picture. Such an effervescent mind can be my leader. I bow before my superior, the political genius!”

  On 19 April, Goebbels spoke alongside Hitler in Stuttgart, and the two celebrated Hitler’s thirty-seventh birthday when the clock struck midnight. “Adolf Hitler, I love you, because you are simultaneously great and simple,” Goebbels gushed in his diary.53 In mid-June Hitler spoke in Essen. “A wonderful triad of gestures, facial expressions and words,” Goebbels noted. “A born motivator! One could conquer the world with this man.”54 In July, Goebbels was permitted to spend a few days with Hitler on the Obersalzberg, and he requited that honour with a pledge of absolute loyalty: “Yes, this is a man I can serve. This is what the creator of the Third Reich looks like…I am knocked sideways. This is how he is: as sweet-natured, good-hearted and mild as a child; as sly, clever and adroit as a cat; as roaringly great and gigantic as a lion. A capital fellow, a true man.”55 Goebbels’s conversion was complete. In late October 1926, Hitler named him Gauleiter of Greater Berlin, one of the most significant posts in the party’s struggle for political power.

  Hitler’s triumph over the Strasser faction consolidated his position within the party, and at the party conference in Munich on 22 May 1926, he had his leadership confirmed by the rank and file. His re-election as party chairman was a foregone conclusion: the delegates burst out laughing when Max Amann asked if “someone other than Adolf Hitler should lead the party in the future.” The newly ratified constitution of the NSDAP declared the party programme of 24 February 1920 as “immutable” and decreed that the party chairman be given “the most generous leeway…and independence from majority decisions of committees.” In his state-of-the-party address, Hitler stressed that the organisation was in a “better than previous” position one year after its reconstitution. The NSDAP, Hitler said, had gained a foothold throughout Germany and recruited a number of “first-rate speakers.” He specifically mentioned “our friend from Elberfeld, Goebbels,” which the latter noted with great satisfaction in his diary.56

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  At the first post-ban NSDAP rally, on 3 and 4 July 1926 in Weimar, the once-fractious party was the picture of harmony. Weimar was chosen because Thuringia was one of the few German states where Hitler was still allowed to speak publicly. All petitions that could have been the source of conflict were sent in advance to “special commissions” so that the impression of internal unity would not be disrupted. In his speech at the German National Theatre on the afternoon of 4 July, Hitler summoned party members’ faith and readiness for sacrifice. “Deep and mystical—almost like a Gospel,” Goebbels noted. “I thank destiny for giving us this man!”57 After his speech, Hitler, dressed in an overcoat and puttees and with raised right arm, stood in an open-top car and inspected a parade of several thousand SA men. The Weimar rally was a milestone in the NSDAP’s transition to a “Führer party.” There had been no objections to Hitler’s claim of absolute leadership, and the reconciliation of rival factions seemed to have succeeded. Summing up the proceedings in the Völkischer Beobachter, Rosenberg wrote: “Longing became strength. That is one of the major results from Weimar. And it has its flag. And its Führer.”58

  In truth, the Nazi Party’s development in 1926 and 1927 was far less impressive than party propaganda made it out to be. Growth in membership was slow. In late 1925, the party had little more than 27,000 members, and in late 1926 that figure was still only 50,000. It was not until March 1927 that enrolment reached 57,477—the number of members the NSDAP had had in November 1923. By the end of 1927, the number had reached 72,590 people.59 Even in Munich, where the party had its headquarters, the signs of stagnation were unmistakable. Little remained of the party’s dynamism, its near-constant presence on the streets from the early 1920s. Between 1926 and the spring of 1928, the Munich chapter never counted more than 2,500 members and thus failed to match its strength of 1923.60 Local meetings were, as a rule, poorly attended, and only a small percentage of members were actively involved in party life. The declining willingness of members to pay their dues also indicated that interest was waning.61

  Moreover, the rivalries of 1924 persisted even after the carefully staged reconciliation. The everyday life of the party was full of feuding and resentment. In Munich, Goebbels’s rise in Hitler’s favour was viewed with envy. In February 1927 an essay by the Berlin Gauleiter in the Natio​nalso​ziali​stische Blätter (National Socialist Newsletter) caused a furore. “This ever more intolerable youth has been insolent enough…to rebuke Frick so that even this level-headed man is upset,” Rudolf Buttmann wrote to his wife. “H[itler] will no doubt put the upstart scribbler back in his place in writing.”62 In fact, Hitler merely had Gottfried Feder give Goebbels a mild scolding. Just as he had in Landsberg, the Führer declined to involve himself or take sides in quarrels between his underlings.

  As reflected in their election results, in the first few years after the party was reconstituted, the NSDAP played only a marginal role in German politics. The party got a scant 4,607 votes (1.7 per cent) in the Landtag election in Mecklenburg-Schwerin on 6 June 1926 and only 37,725 (1.6 per cent) in a state poll in Saxony on 31 October 1926. The NSDAP did slightly better in Thuringia on 30 January 1927, taking 27,946 votes (3.5 per cent).63 Hitler may have been convinced, as Hess reported in early 1927, that the party was headed for an imminent “upturn” but that was not the case.64 In March 1927, the Reich commissioner for public order, who was charged with monitoring the NSDAP, deemed that overall the party had made no progress: “It has not been able to bring its membership anywhere near the level it had in 1923.”65 By the summer of 1927, the liberal Reichstag deputy and lecturer at the German Academy of Politics in Berlin, Theodor Heuss, opined that the NSDAP was merely “a reminder of the period of inflation.”66 Foreign observers felt likewise. In a memorandum in late 1927, the British Foreign Office’s Germany expert John Perowne suggested that Hitler’s star was declining: “His figure and that of Ludendorff fade into insignificance.”67

  With the NSDAP’s popularity fading, Bavarian Interior Minister Karl Stützel saw no reason to extend the ban on Hitler appearing publicly. On 5 March 1927, after considerable dithering, the prohibition was lifted, and Hitler was free to speak again. The following day, he took to the stage in the town of Vilsbiburg, and on 9 March he celebrated a triumphant comeback in Zirkus Krone. Some 7,000 people packed the venue, among them “members of the better classes, ladies in fur coats and representatives of the intelligentsia.” “Lust for the sensational lay in the hot, sickly-sweet air,” noted a Munich police observer. At around 9 p.m., Hitler finally appeared with his entourage. “The people acted happy and excited, waving, constantly crying ‘Heil,’ standing on the benches and stamping their feet. Then a fanfare as in the theatre. Immediate silence.” The dramaturgy of Hitler’s appearances had not changed since 1923. Hitler marched into the auditorium, followed by two rows of drummers and some 200 SA men in rank and file. “The people greeted him in the Fascist way with outstretched arms…” the police observer wrote. “Music blared. Flags were paraded, and spit-polished standards with wreathed swastikas and eagles copied from Ancient Roman insignia.”

  The observer seems to have been less than impressed by Hitler’s rhetorical skills. Hitler began slowly, but then the words came tumbling out, barely comprehensible: “He gesticulated with his hands and arms, jumped about this way and that and sought to keep his audience captivated. Whenever he was interrupted by applause, he theatrically extended his arms.” Nor was the police obse
rver, obviously no Nazi sympathiser, captivated by what Hitler had to say:

  In his speech, Hitler used vulgar comparisons, tailor-made to the intellectual capacities of his listeners, and he did not shy away from even the cheapest allusions…His words and opinions were simply hurled out with dictatorial certainty as if they were unquestionable principles and facts. All this manifests itself in his language as well, which is like something merely expulsed.68

  At Hitler’s second appearance in Zirkus Krone in late March, however, the hall was only two-thirds full. In early April, around 3,000 people showed up, and on 6 April Hitler was only drawing half that number. “Hitler back in front of empty seats,” the Social Democratic Münchener Post newspaper gleefully reported.69 After his involuntary two-year hiatus, Hitler no longer possessed the appeal as a speaker he once had. That had less to do with fatigue, even among his Munich followers, than with his refusal to take account of all the recent changes in his speeches, which still relied upon the crisis rhetoric of 1923. Hitler stodgily ignored all signs of economic recovery. “The German collapse continues,” he asserted in December 1925, declaring a few months later: “Today we are a pitiable people, plagued by misery and poverty…Seven years on from 1918, we can say that we have sunk lower and lower.”70 Hitler liked to use comparisons with Italy under Mussolini to portray conditions in Germany in the worst possible light. “There they have a flourishing economy, while here we have a decrepit industrial sector with twelve million unemployed,” he declared at a rally in Stuttgart in April 1926.71 In reality, an average of only two million Germans were unemployed that year.

  Hitler paired his extreme exaggeration of Germany’s economic plight with extremist polemics against Gustav Stresemann’s policy of international reconciliation. For Hitler, the 1924 Dawes Plan was nothing but a grandiose way of sapping the German people’s energy. The 1925 Treaty of Locarno represented “boundless subordination and the deepest dishonour.”72 As he had previously with Walther Rathenau, Hitler did not shy away from ad hominem attacks on Stresemann, accusing him of being a traitor. For Hitler, reaching any agreements with Germany’s “irreconcilable enemy” France was like “trying to form a coalition between the goose and the fox.” The German foreign minister owed his office to “the grace of France,” Hitler sneered, and thus was more concerned about the interests of his French colleague Aristide Briand than those of the German people.73

  Hitler took the same view that conservatives in general did of “Weimar culture,” seeing it only as a symptom of decadence and decline. In Hitler’s mind, German literature and art had been “made obscene and dirty.” Even in the birthplace of German classicism itself, Weimar, Hitler raged in one of his speeches, “the poisoners of the German soul are leading their filthy existence and defiling the sites of the most elevated art with nigger and jazz music.” One task of National Socialism was to “clean out this manure.”74 Hitler blamed the “degeneration” of German culture on the “corrosive” influence of Jews. Not only did Jews control the economy via the banks and the stock exchanges, Hitler thundered in August 1925, they also dominated German journalism, literature, art, theatre and cinema: “Today, they are in almost complete control culturally just as they are in total control economically over the entire world.”75 Incarceration had done nothing to dampen Hitler’s fanatic anti-Semitism, which he put on display not only at closed party meetings, but in public mass events. No other speaker in the NSDAP—not even Goebbels or Julius Streicher—raged more furiously against the “Galician riff-raff and criminal gangs…the international Jewish stranglers of blood…[and] the drones of international high finance.”76 The people of the world, he promised in June 1927, would “breathe easier” once they were liberated from the Jews. On 24 February 1928, the eighth anniversary of the announcement of the party programme, Hitler may have proclaimed: “If [the Jew] behaves, he can stay—if not, out with him!” But in the same breath he insisted that “We are the masters of our house” and issued an unmistakably murderous threat: “One cannot compete with parasites, one can only remove them.”77

  Hitler could, of course, moderate his anti-Semitism when he was speaking before smaller, select audiences. One example is the speech he gave on 28 February 1926 in front of an exclusive conservative-nationalist club in Hamburg, in the great hall of the luxury Atlantic Hotel. Here Hitler’s talk avoided any mention of the “Jewish question,” focusing instead on the “danger of the Marxist movement.” His understanding of the term “Marxist” was very broad, however, and included both the Social Democrats and the Communists. But because the moderate Hamburg SPD, which cooperated with bourgeois liberals, was not a suitable target for attack, Hitler concentrated his bile on the KPD, whose leader, Ernst Thälmann, came from the northern German port city. Hitler deliberately called upon the fears of his audience, which included leading Hamburg merchants, of the Communists coming to power. “If Communism were to triumph today, two million people would be making their way to the gallows,” he prophesied. But there was a way of “smashing and eradicating the Marxist world view,” which was the aim of his own movement. The NSDAP, Hitler proclaimed, knew “that toxins could only be combated with anti-toxins,” and the party would not rest “until the last Marxist has either been converted or eliminated.” The initially reserved audience greeted these words with frenetic applause, and at the end of the speech, when Hitler proclaimed his vision of a “Germany of freedom and power,” he was showered with ovations and shouts of “Heil.”78

  For Hitler the categories “Jewish” and “Marxist” were interchangeable. Depending on the situation, his warnings for the future could oscillate between “the international Jewish world enemy” and “the international Marxist poisoning of peoples.” On occasion he would combine the two objects of hatred. “The Jew is and remains the world’s enemy, and his greatest weapon, Marxism, is and remains a plague for humanity,” he wrote in February 1927 in the Völkischer Beobachter.79 By destroying Marxism, Hitler believed that he could eradicate class conflict and create a “genuine ethnic-popular community.” He was also constantly coming up with new phrases to describe the marriage of nationalism and socialism, the unification of “workers of the mind and workers of the fist.” National Socialism knew neither bourgeois nor proletarian, only “the German working for his people.”80 Sometimes Hitler recalled his experiences at the Western Front as a harbinger of the sort of national community he envisioned. “There once was a place in Germany without class divisions,” he declared in a speech. “That was among the companies of soldiers at the front. There were no recognisable bourgeois and proletarian characteristics there. There was the company and only the company.”81

  One of the few new topics Hitler adopted after 1924 was the necessity, first advanced in December 1925, of acquiring “living space” to secure adequate food supplies for the German people. His speech at the Weimar rally in 1926 made a special point of emphasising the demand that population size and available territory be calibrated—by force if necessary. “We have to solve this question with a rough hand and a sharp sword,” Hitler proclaimed.82 After finishing the second volume of Mein Kampf in the autumn of 1926, he had repeatedly included the “space question” in his speeches. Hitler made no bones of the fact that he intended to resolve this issue with violence as soon as Germany’s military position was strong enough. In his first public speech after the Bavarian ban was lifted, in Vilsbiburg, he had cited the example of eastern colonisation in the Middle Ages. Back then, Hitler claimed, “the territory east of the Elbe River had been conquered with the sword and handed over to the fist of the German farmer.” In early April 1927 in Zirkus Krone, he addressed an imaginary enemy: “And should you not give us space in the world, then we will take that space ourselves.”83 Later in 1927, Hitler took to citing the title of a popular novel of the previous year: Hans Grimm’s Volk ohne Raum—“A People without Space.” Then, in early February 1928, he first publicly used the term Lebensraum—“living space.”84 Hitler rarely made it explicitly
clear that the territory in question would come at the expense of the Soviet Union, but his audience could hardly have been under any illusions about the direction in which his expansionism was aimed.

  Hitler’s full-throated proclamations must have appeared rather delusional at a time when the NSDAP was still only a marginal player within German politics. To dispel doubts among his followers, Hitler seized every occasion to stress how crucial “blind, fanatical belief” was to the ultimate triumph of the movement. If one had “the holiest of faiths,” he reassured them, “even what is most impossible becomes possible.”85 That prompted Hess to write to their former fellow Landsberg inmate Walter Hewel in late March 1937:

  This is where the great popular leader coincides with the great founder of a religion. An apodictic belief has to be installed in listeners. Only then can the mass of followers be led where they are supposed to be led. They will follow their leader even in the face of setbacks, but only if they have been instilled with absolute faith in the absolute rectitude of their own will, of the Führer’s mission and the mission of their people.86

  National Socialism depicted itself as a political religion. “What does Christianity mean for us today?” Goebbels scoffed. “National Socialism is a religion.”87 This view corresponded to the party’s inflation of itself to a “community of faith” and its programme to an “ideological creed.” Like the biblical apostles, the task of the Führer’s disciples was to spread Nazi principles “like a gospel among our people.”88 This was one reason why Hitler staunchly refused to consider any amendment of the original twenty-five-point NSDAP manifesto. “Absolutely not,” he told Hanfstaengl. “It’s staying as it is. The New Testament, too, is full of contradictions, but that did nothing to hinder the spread of Christianity.”89 At the Nazi Party’s 1925 Christmas celebrations, Hitler drew a revealing parallel between early Christianity and the “movement.” Christ had also been initially mocked, and yet the Christian faith had become a massive global movement. “We want to achieve the same thing in the arena of politics,” Hitler stated. A year later he was explicitly casting himself as Jesus’s successor, who would complete his work. “National Socialism,” Hitler proclaimed, “is nothing other than compliance with Christ’s teachings.”90