In his public speeches, especially in their final crescendos, Hitler often utilised religious vocabulary. He would conclude with a final “Amen!” or invoke his “faith in a new Holy German Empire” or call upon “Our Lord to give me the strength to continue my work in the face of all the demons.”91 He constantly warned his followers that there would be no shortage of sacrifices along the way. Here, too, he drew parallels with early Christianity: “We have a path of thorns to go down and are proud of it.” The “blood witnesses” who had lost their lives for the Nazi movement, Hitler promised, would enjoy the sort of reverence once reserved for the Christian martyrs.92 To reinforce this idea, the annual party rally rituals included the reverent handing over of the “bloody banner” carried during the putsch of 1923, combined with a personal oath of loyalty to the Führer.
Yet although the Nazis had no scruples about appropriating religious sentiments and customs for political purposes, they also maintained strict neutrality towards the Christian confessions. In his lead article concerning the reconstitution of the party in February 1925, Hitler had opposed any attempt to “drag religious quarrels into the movement,” insisting that the “members of both confessions must be able to peacefully coexist” in the NSDAP.93 Hitler was thus enraged when the Gauleiter of Thuringia and author of the anti-Semitic bestseller Sin against Blood, Arthur Dinter, began promoting the “pure gospel of the saviour” and advocated dismantling the Protestant and Catholic Churches. In late September 1927, Hitler removed Dinter from office,94 informing him the following July: “As the leader of the National Socialist movement and as a person who has a blind faith in belonging one day to the ranks of those who make history, I see your activity as damaging the National Socialist movement by connecting the party with your reformist goals.” Dinter was subsequently kicked out of the NSDAP.95
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The party made little headway from the mid-1920s, as the period of relative stability for the Weimar Republic continued. Nonetheless, those years were crucial to its internal development. It was then that the foundations were laid for the movement’s later dramatic rise. “It may not be visible from the outside and it may be more in silent preparation for future triumphs,” Hess wrote to Walter Hewel in late November 1927, “but gradually the predictions for the year 1927, and our cause, are coming to pass.”96 Between 1925 and 1928, the NSDAP was irrevocably transformed into a “Führer party,” focused around a single leader at its head. “There can be no doubt who the leader and commander is,” Hess wrote. In that letter to Hewel, Hess expanded upon the importance for the movement of the so-called “Führer principle,” based on “absolute authority directed downwards and absolute duty directed upwards.” As Hess explained, Hitler “issues commands to the Gauleiter, the Gauleiter issue commands to the Ortsgruppenführer [local leaders] and the Ortsgruppenführer issue commands to the broad masses of supporters directly under them. Duty…follows the reverse path.” This, for Hess, represented “Germanic democracy.”97
The system relied on party members’ sense of personal connection to their Führer and their unquestioning subordination. Anyone who violated this principle was sure to be sanctioned. When a local Nazi leader from the Munich district of Schwabing, Ernst Woltereck, complained about Hitler’s unsatisfactory public image and threatened to resign, Hitler called a meeting of the Schwabing chapter in June 1926, at which he made clear that the party was built on authority and subordination. He as Führer would not tolerate a minor chapter leader criticising his superiors. “Were this to be tolerated,” Hitler asserted, “the party would be dead and buried.”98 In May 1927, frustrated by the lack of progress the party was making, the Munich SA under Edmund Heines rebelled. Once again Hitler took a hard line, ordering that “those who refuse to subordinate themselves have no place in the party and especially not in the SA.”99 By the end of the month, Heines had been expelled from both the party and the SA. When internal disagreements did not call his leadership into question, however, Hitler refused to get involved. Indeed, his leadership style encouraged rivalries between his subordinates. In his crudely Darwinist world view, such feuds were part of a process of natural selection that would favour the strongest and most capable of his followers. “He keeps considerable distance from minor everyday questions,” Hess wrote approvingly. That contributed to his aura as a “coolly superior…born politician of stature—a statesman.”100
Before the Beer Hall Putsch, individual party members worshipped their leader to varying degrees, but between 1926 and 1928 devotion was institutionalised. The “Heil Hitler” greeting was made mandatory for all NSDAP members “in recognition of Hitler’s position of unlimited leadership and as a kind of canonisation during his lifetime,” as Hanfstaengl described it.101 Nazi propaganda became obsessed with popularising the Führer cult and ensuring that it spread to the smallest party chapter. Among the most effective pieces of propaganda were Heinrich Hoffmann’s first photographic brochures, “Germany’s Awakening in Word and Image,” from 1924 and 1926. They reinforced Hitler’s quasi-religious aura as a man who had emerged from the people and who was preaching the gospel of love for the fatherland.102 Goebbels, who after his “conversion” had become a fervent admirer of the party chairman, emerged as one of the active propagators of Hitler’s larger-than-life status. Only those in the know, wrote Goebbels in July 1926 in the Völkischer Beobachter, could judge “what Adolf Hitler’s personality had meant for the solidarity of the movement in the past few years of struggle.” In Goebbels’s view, Hitler alone had prevented the movement from being “scattered in a thousand winds.”103
Here, too, we can see how Hitler’s sense of mission and the expectations of those who saw him as the coming messiah, the saviour of Germans, reinforced each other. As Hess wrote in November 1927: “For me, being constantly in his presence, it is astonishing to see how he grows day by day, continually acquiring new fundamental wisdom, developing new ways of dealing with problems, gushing with ideas and constantly excelling himself in his speeches.”104 The Nazi Party rally in August 1927, the first one to take place in Nuremberg, became an extended celebration of the Führer. Hitler himself was deeply involved in the preparations, calling upon his “German ethnic comrades to join the coalescing army of a young Germany in which the faith in the Führer and not the weakness of the majority is decisive.”105 Between 15,000 and 20,000 of his supporters showed up in Nuremberg. On 21 August, after the “consecration of standards” in Luitpoldshain Park, Hitler—dressed in a brown SA shirt—inspected the columns of his subordinates on the main market square. There, as one report had it, he was “enthusiastically greeted and given flowers.”106 The young Berliner Horst Wessel, who took part, later recalled: “Flags, enthusiasm, Hitler, all of Nuremberg a brown army camp. It made an enormous impression.”107
As the cult of the Führer was established, the party also became more organised. In March 1925, Philipp Bouhler took over the post of the secretary of the Munich party, with Franz Xaver Schwarz as treasurer. Other key figures included Hess, who acted as an intermediate between Hitler and the Reich leadership, and Max Amann, the head of the party’s publishing house. In September 1926, Gregor Strasser succeeded Hermann Esser as Reich director of propaganda. In January 1928, the retired major Walter Buch became chairman of an investigatory and mediating committee which had been set up in December 1925 to settle internal party conflicts. It was an “essential institution”108 and Buch understood that the main purpose of the body was to keep disagreements under wraps. One of his major aides was Hans Frank, later Governor General of occupied Poland.109 In June 1925, the party headquarters had relocated from its provisional home at the offices of Eher Verlag in Thierschstrasse 15, to Schellingstrasse 50, where Hitler’s photographer Hoffmann had provided the use of several rooms. “We are establishing our new offices,” Hess reported. “At the moment it is still provisional. The Tribune hopes to build our own headquarters soon, with all the modern furnishings.”110 Here the pride of the party was a handwritten cen
tral card catalogue of all members. On 2 January 1928, Hitler appointed Gregor Strasser as Reich organisational director, with the party chairman himself now assuming responsibility for the propaganda division.111 Strasser unified party organisation throughout the Reich. Among other things, the Gaue were redrawn to reflect Germany’s electoral districts. The result was an efficient bureaucratic apparatus that provided the framework for later mass mobilisation.
In addition, a network of special bodies and associations was formed to attract various groups and professions. In February 1926, the National Socialist German Students’ League came into being, and a German literature student from a highly respected Weimar family, Baldur von Schirach, took over the organisation in July 1928. In August 1927, Alfred Rosenberg initiated the founding of the Fighting League for German Culture, whose aim was to oppose the “corrosive” influence of artistic modernism; its supporters included the Bruckmanns, Hitler’s influential Munich patrons. In January 1928 the German Women’s Order was subsumed as the “Red Swastika” by the NSDAP: it would become the National Socialist Women’s League in 1931. In September 1928, Hans Frank founded the League of National Socialist Lawyers, and 1929 would see the establishment of the National Socialist League of German Teachers, the National Socialist League of School Pupils and the National Socialist League of Doctors. As of 1926, the Hitler Youth was appealing to 14- to 18-year-old boys; in 1929 it was joined by the League of German Girls.112
In the spring of 1925, Hitler had told his old associate and occasional bodyguard Julius Schreck to form a “Staff Guard” along the lines of the Stosstrupp Hitler. It was soon renamed the Schutzstaffel, or SS. Its membership initially consisted of a few hundred men responsible for the personal safety of the Führer. They considered themselves an elite body that united the best and most active forces within the party. Their leader received the somewhat pompous title of Reichsführer-SS, but as of 1926 the SS was subordinated to the reconstituted SA under Pfeffer von Salomon. Heinrich Himmler became deputy Reichsführer-SS in September 1927, eventually taking over the organisation in January 1929.
Born in 1900 as the son of a Gymnasium teacher in Munich, Himmler grew up in a sheltered, well-educated Catholic environment and, like his two brothers, enjoyed an excellent humanist education. He was a typical representative of what Germans called the “war youth generation”: he was too young to have served at the front but old enough for the First World War to be one of the defining experiences of his life. Even after defeat and revolution had put an end to his dream of becoming a military officer, the physically frail Himmler still worshipped the ideal of the soldier. Noticeably self-conscious in his dealings with others, he learned to conceal his insecurities behind a shield of coldness, severity and sobriety.113 He studied agricultural sciences at Munich University in the early 1920s, when he became involved in paramilitary associations. After the Beer Hall Putsch, the unemployed university graduate put his future in the hands of Hitler’s party, earning his spurs as a rural agitator for the NSDAP in northern Bavaria. In 1926, Gregor Strasser named him deputy propaganda director at Munich party headquarters. In contrast to other Nazi leaders, Himmler does not seem to have undergone an epiphany that drew him into Hitler’s charismatic orbit. Hitler himself maintained his distance from the externally nondescript, pedantic Himmler, but valued him as a skilled organiser. Upon becoming Reichsführer-SS, Himmler devoted all his attention to liberating the organisation from subordination to the SA leadership and to establishing its reputation as a disciplined, elite formation utterly loyal to Hitler. He encouraged solidarity within his “order” with a number of cult rituals, and instituted a strict code of behaviour to which SS men were expected to conform.114
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With the party’s progress beginning to stagnate again, Hitler increased his efforts to elicit support from the business community. In June 1926 he spoke for the first time to fifty or sixty representatives of Ruhr Valley industry. As he had talked to the nationalist club in Hamburg, Hitler did not engage in any of his customary tirades against Jews, focusing instead on “dealing with Marxism.” He also tried to assuage industrialists’ fears about his economic and political aims, assuring them that he would stand up for the inviolability of private property. “The free market will be protected as the most sensible or only possible economic order,” the Rheinisch-Westfälische Zeitung newspaper, a mouthpiece of heavy industry, wrote in summing up Hitler’s speech. The paper’s publisher, Theodor Reismann-Grone, had supported the NSDAP since the early 1920s.115
In late April in Essen, Hitler spoke again to a large circle of invited guests from the realms of business and politics. This time he sought support for his idea of symbiotically merging nationalism and socialism and reinstituting “the authority of personality.” Hess, who accompanied him, described the effect of Hitler’s speech: “I seldom heard him like that. Irritated by the icy silence [of the audience] during the first hour, he increased his intensity so much that by the end the audience of around 400 broke out in hurricanes of applause in ever-decreasing intervals!” According to Hess, Emil Kirdorf—the 80-year-old patriarch of Rhineland and Westphalian industry and long-time director of the Gelsenkirchner Bergwerk mining company—“stood up, visibly moved, at the end and shook the Tribune’s hand.”116
On 4 July 1927, Elsa Bruckmann arranged a meeting between Kirdorf and Hitler at her home in Munich. The leader of the NSDAP and the industrialist talked for four hours, after which the latter was so impressed that he asked Hitler to put his thoughts down in a pamphlet that Kirdorf would distribute to the most important business figures in the Ruhr Valley. Hugo Bruckmann had it printed up as a brochure entitled “The Road to Resurgence.” Hitler sent it to Kirdorf in August with the request that “the honourable Privy Councillor” help spread the thoughts therein among his circles. In this brochure, Hitler again made it clear that he did not intend to attack private industry. On the contrary, he wrote, “only a strong nationalist state can provide industry with the protection and the freedom to continue to exist and develop.” Hitler also played down his anti-Semitism, although in one passage he mentioned “the international Jew” disparagingly as the “most active propagator of the theory of pacifism, reconciliation between peoples and eternal world peace.”117
The pamphlet does not seem to have created much of a stir. Leading industrialists in the Ruhr Valley kept their distance from the NSDAP, which at the time was regarded as barely more than a marginal party. “Hitler won’t bring much joy either to us or the region,” magnate Paul Reusch wrote to Albert Vögler, the chairman of the United Steelworks, in December 1927.118 Hess’s report that month, that “excellent progress” was being made in the Ruhr Valley—“the important people simply follow the Tribune”—was clearly wishful thinking.119 Even Kirdorf, who joined the NSDAP on 1 August 1927 and attended the party rally in Nuremberg as an honorary guest, turned his back on the party a year later, dismayed at its constant anti-capitalist agitation in the Ruhr Valley. He did, however, remain a supporter of Hitler personally. After the 1929 Nuremberg rally, the industrialist wrote to the party chairman: “Anyone who had the privilege of taking part in the rally…even though he may be sceptical or opposed to specific points in the party programme, has to acknowledge the significance of your movement for the recovery of our German fatherland and hope that it is a success.”120 Hitler’s courting of Ruhr industrialists may not have yielded many concrete results, and it certainly did not land him massive donations, as was speculated in the contemporary press; nonetheless, it was not a total failure since it established Hitler as an economic moderate. This reputation would serve him very well after 1930, when the NSDAP’s electoral breakthrough had made the party far more interesting to businessmen and entrepreneurs.
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As 1927 came to an end, Hitler was confident. “I know again that Providence will lead me where I had hoped to arrive four years ago,” he wrote to Winifred Wagner on 30 December 1927. “A time will come when pride in your friend will be y
our reward for many things for which at present I cannot repay you.”121 Hitler pinned his hopes on the Reichstag election scheduled for 20 May 1928. In January of that year, Hitler reckoned the party could win fifteen seats, although he also said, “If we get twenty-five, we’ll enter into a government coalition, only to leave it with aplomb, the first time circumstances permit.”122 The NSDAP began campaigning intensively. On the evening of 14 May, Hitler appeared alongside the leading candidate, General Franz von Epp, at twelve large-scale Munich events. “We feel like soldiers,” Hitler proclaimed on one occasion, “soldiers of a coming German army, of a new Reich and of the ideas that shall forge this Reich.”123 Goebbels noted that Hitler had never looked forward to an election as much as this one, hoping that “the results will be commensurate to the willingness for sacrifice we have shown thus far.”124
The outcome was a major setback for the NSDAP. The clear winners of the election were the left-wing parties. The SPD’s share of the vote rose from 26 to 29.8 per cent, and the KPD’s from 9 to 10.6 per cent. The Social Democrat Hermann Müller formed a grand coalition consisting of the SPD, the Centre Party, the BVP, the DDP and the DVP. The big loser was the conservative German National People’s Party (DNVP), which saw its share of the vote decline from 20.5 to 14.2 per cent. The NSDAP only polled 2.6 per cent, slightly down from their last election results in December 1924.125 Instead of fourteen, the party now had only twelve Reichstag deputies. They included Epp, Goebbels, Frick, Gregor Strasser, Feder and Göring, who had returned from Sweden to Germany in the autumn of 1927 under a general amnesty declared by Reich President von Hindenburg. Hitler put a positive spin on the election, which also saw the VB take a catastrophic 0.9 per cent. That caused Hitler to crow that in future there would be “only one ethnic-popular movement”—the NSDAP.126 But his followers were bitterly disappointed. Gregor Strasser complained that 20 May had given National Socialists “no cause for satisfaction,” while Goebbels merely noted, “Depression in me.”127
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