The referendum, which aimed to institute a Law against the Enslavement of the German People, was a failure. While its backers did succeed, just barely, in getting enough signatures to force a vote, only 13.8 per cent of the electorate turned out for the plebiscite on 22 December 1929—far below the 50 per cent participation needed to pass the referendum. Nonetheless, the NSDAP’s involvement in the initiative paid dividends. Hitler was now an accepted figure in traditional conservative and nationalist circles, and with the help of Hugenberg’s press empire, he had been in the public eye for months. At the conclusion of the campaign, Hitler and Hugenberg made a joint appearance in the packed Zirkus Krone, at which it was clear that the press mogul was no match for the Nazi chairman as a public speaker.172 The NSDAP in general looked like a dynamic young movement, far superior to its conservative allies in terms of organisation and will-power. The Landtag elections in the autumn of 1929 also suggested that Hitler’s party benefited from their opposition to the Young Plan. On 27 October in Baden, the NSDAP polled 7 per cent, and in Thuringia on 8 December, it took 11.3 per cent of the vote. The party also did well in district elections that November.173
On the morning of 3 October 1929, Reich Foreign Minister Gustav Stresemann died after suffering two strokes. One of the most important advocates of Weimar democracy was gone. “It is an irreparable loss whose consequences cannot be foreseen,” wrote Count Harry Kessler, who was in Paris at the time. “Everyone here is talking about it—the hairdressers, the waiters, the chauffeurs and the newspaper sellers…All of Paris is treating his death almost like a national tragedy.” A similar mood prevailed among the pro-democracy camp in Germany. In Berlin 200,000 people turned out to accompany Stresemann to his final resting place on 6 October. “It was a popular funeral, not a state function,” Kessler wrote.174
Three weeks later, on 24 October 1929, Black Friday plunged the global economy into turmoil. The crisis Hitler had waited for was now at hand. It was no coincidence that at precisely that moment Hitler exchanged his humble lodgings in Thierschstrasse for a nine-room apartment on the second floor of Prinzregentenstrasse 16 in the upper-class district of Bogenhausen.175 The breakthrough to power seemed to be in reach, and Hitler needed a new domicile that would reflect his new status within German politics.
9
Dark Star Rising
“In the past I have been a prophet in many things…at least concerning the big picture,” Hitler declared in a private missive in early February 1930. Previously, he had refused to set a timetable for Nazi success. Now he claimed he could predict with “near oracular certainty” that “Germany will have overcome the lowest point of its humiliation in two and a half to three years.” He went on: “I believe that our triumph will come about in this period. With that our phase of decay will be over, and the resurgence of our people will begin.”1 In the spring of 1930 such predictions looked like the fantasies of a provincial politician convinced that he was on a divine mission. But only a few months later, after the Reichstag election of 14 September, the NSDAP could celebrate a sudden, massive upsurge in support. The Führer, previously a curiosity on the outer fringe of the political right wing, found himself catapulted into the centre of German politics. All at once what had been vague promises to his followers seemed on the verge of becoming reality. Hitler’s party was very close to assuming power.
This development was hardly a total surprise. The Landtag and district elections in 1929 had shown that the NSDAP was on the rise, as the party noticeably increased its share of the vote wherever it chose to stand. Moreover, the campaign against the Young Plan had allowed it to position itself as the protest party on the far right. But the Nazis’ definitive breakthrough towards becoming a mass party only happened with the onset of the Great Depression. The economic crisis hit Germany particularly hard.2 The upturn during the Golden Twenties had been financed with short-term foreign credit, particularly from the United States, and after Black Friday, American banks had to call in their loans. That hastened the collapse of the German economy, which had already begun to decline in 1928 and 1929. The number of unemployed leapt from 1.3 million in September 1929 to 3.4 million in February 1930. One year later 5 million people were out of work, and at the height of the crisis in 1932, Germany had 6 million jobless. In fact, the number of people who were out of work was far higher, since the official statistics did not include those who, for whatever reasons, did not register at unemployment offices. In the words of the historian Hans-Ulrich Wehler, the Weimar Republic was “cast down into the abyss of an unprecedented economic depression.”3
The psychological consequences were overwhelming. The trying experiences of the post-war period of turmoil and hyperinflation had left many Germans without the emotional strength to deal with an economic crisis that exceeded everything that had come before. An apocalyptic mood of hopelessness began to take hold, even among those segments of the populace that were not primarily affected by the Depression. Faith in democratic institutions and democratic political parties dissolved, and anti-parliamentary sentiment, already rife in the Weimar Republic, was given a huge boost. Those in power appeared to have no solutions to the crisis, and the more helpless they seemed to be, the greater the demand became for a “strong man,” a political messiah who would lead Germany out of economic misery and point the way towards renewed national greatness. More than any other German politician, Hitler presented himself as the answer to these hopes for salvation.4 The hour was at hand for the man who already enjoyed the quasi-religious worship of his supporters and who had long identified with the role of the charismatic Führer.
By early 1930, it was clear that the Weimar Republic was built on sand. On 27 March, the grand coalition of Social Democratic Chancellor Hermann Müller collapsed after the SPD and the DVP became embroiled in a petty quarrel about whether to raise unemployment insurance contributions from 3.5 to 4 per cent. Underlying the squabbling was a fundamental disagreement about who should bear the brunt of the costs of combating the economic crisis. After Stresemann’s death, under the leadership of its new chairman, Ernst Scholz, the big-business-friendly DVP had become more conservative, and influential forces within the party, supported by the Reich Association of German Industry (RDI), were calling for it to end its cooperation with the Social Democrats.5 Conversely, the SPD felt that it could no longer demand any further political compromises of its constituency. The supply of common ground, as Müller put it when he announced the end of the grand coalition, was exhausted. The liberal Frankfurter Zeitung newspaper called 27 March 1930 a “black day,” and indeed the date marked a watershed in the history of the Weimar Republic. Henceforth, no government would enjoy a parliamentary majority. The dissolution of German democracy was under way.6
Reich President Paul von Hindenburg and his closest advisers were by no means dismayed that government and parliament were shooting themselves in the foot. Hindenburg had long been pondering how to remove the SPD from power and subordinate Germany’s political parties to an authoritarian rule by the presidency.7 That was the brief handed to Heinrich Brüning, the chairman of the Centre Party, who was appointed Germany’s new chancellor. He governed without a parliamentary majority in the interest of Hindenburg and his camarilla, relying on the president’s support and on Article 48 of the Reich constitution, which accorded the president extensive powers in states of emergency. As a result Brüning was able to form a cabinet of “experts” that excluded the SPD. This was equivalent to a tacit abrogation of the constitution. From the very beginning of his tenure, Brüning made no secret of the fact that he was willing to dissolve the Reichstag and rule by emergency decree if parliament refused to follow his lead.8
The NSDAP played no part in their plans as Hindenburg and Brüning installed this presidential regime. The Nazi faction in parliament was too small to merit attention. Nonetheless, the government’s turn away from parliamentarianism and the undermining of democracy played into Hitler’s hands. When the Brüning cabinet was formed o
n 30 March 1930, Goebbels noted: “Perhaps this cabinet will be immediately brought down. Then the Reichstag will be dissolved. Bravo! These are marvellous times!”9 The NSDAP could count on increasing its share of the vote if fresh elections were called. Thus the party actively worked towards a dissolution of parliament, for instance by supporting a vote of no confidence brought against Brüning on 4 April. The new chancellor survived that motion, however, after the DNVP withheld support. “The DNVP as a whole caved in…” Goebbels noted. “The boss is furious.”10 That very day, Hitler announced he was quitting the committee advocating the popular referendum against the Young Plan.11 On 12 April, when the budget came up for a decisive vote, the DNVP again sided with the government, sparing Brüning’s cabinet an early parliamentary defeat.
—
Right from the start, Hitler was set on unscrupulously exploiting the political and economic crisis, and the way that the state government of Thuringia was formed in early 1930 amply illustrated Hitler’s strategy. In Landtag elections in December 1929, the NSDAP had polled 11.3 per cent in Thuringia, giving them six parliamentary seats. If the conservative and liberal parties wanted to govern without the SPD, they needed the support of the National Socialists. Hitler decided that the party would join a governing coalition, but only if it were given two key ministries, those of the interior and of culture and popular education. “He who possesses these two ministries and uses his power within them unscrupulously and with determination can achieve the extraordinary,” Hitler wrote in a confidential missive on 2 February. The Interior Ministry gave the NSDAP oversight of the state police force; the Culture Ministry put the party in charge of the entire Thuringian school and educational system. Hitler was not interested in participating in government per se: he was aiming to take over the executive branch from the inside. As his candidate for both ministerial posts, Hitler put forward Wilhelm Frick, his comrade from the Beer Hall Putsch. The DVP initially rejected the appointment. “So I travelled to Weimar and informed these gentlemen, succinctly and in no uncertain terms, that either Dr. Frick would be our minister or there would be fresh elections,” Hitler related. The potential coalition was set a deadline of three days to accept Frick. New elections were anathema to the centre-right parties since they would certainly have strengthened the NSDAP’s position. Thus the DVP gave in to Hitler’s ultimatum, and on 23 January 1930, Wilhelm Frick was named Thuringia’s new interior and education minister.12
During his fourteen-month term in office, Wilhelm Frick gave Thuringians a preview of what would be visited upon Germany as a whole when the Nazis came to national power on 30 January 1933. Veteran, highly skilled civil servants suspected of sympathising with the SPD were fired and replaced with Nazi stooges. Prayers were made mandatory in schools in order, as Frick told the Landtag, to “prevent the people being swindled by Marxism and the Jews.” The University of Jena was given a chair in racial sciences, which was filled by the notorious anti-Semite Hans F.K. Günther. The new director of the Weimar Academy of Art and Architecture, the National Socialist true believer Paul Schultze-Naumburg, removed modernist works of art from the city’s Royal Museum. There was little resistance to such iconoclasm. The former home of Goethe and Schiller had become a Nazi stronghold: in the 1929 elections, the Nazis had polled 23.8 per cent of the vote in the city of Weimar.13
It took quite some time before the Thuringian DVP realised what sort of partners it had taken on board. Eventually, on 1 April 1931, the party supported a vote of no confidence brought by the SPD, which led to Frick’s downfall. But in September 1932, the NSDAP would return to power on the back of an election in which the party took 42 per cent of the vote. Frick, for his part, earned Hitler’s gratitude for putting Thuringia “at the centre of the national, political and economic renovation of Germany” and was made Reich interior minister when Hitler became chancellor the following year.14
By the spring of 1930, it was also clear that the NSDAP would do well in the Landtag election in Saxony the following June. Unfortunately for Hitler, the long-simmering conflict between Goebbels and the Strasser brothers was about to break out in public. On the surface, the rivalry revolved around who would be responsible for Nazi publicity in Berlin and be given commensurate authority. With their Kampf Verlag publishing house, the Strassers directly competed with Goebbels’s periodical Der Angriff. But the competition was also about ideological issues. Unlike Goebbels and his brother Gregor, Otto Strasser had never backed away from the “socialist” line of the Working Association North-west. Since Gregor was busy as Reich organisational director, Otto was primarily responsible for Kampf Verlag’s publications, which promoted a mélange of nationalist and anti-capitalist ideas with a pronounced anti-Western and pro-Soviet slant.15
The power struggle between Goebbels and Otto Strasser escalated in late January 1930, when Kampf Verlag announced it would begin publishing a daily newspaper in Berlin in March. “This is a true stab in the back,” Goebbels fumed, lobbying Hitler to block the new periodical and to make Der Angriff into a daily paper.16 Hitler promised to rein in Otto Strasser but did nothing, and when the first issue of Der Nationale Sozialist appeared on schedule on 1 March, Goebbels’s patience was at an end. He threatened to resign from the party and confided to his diary: “Hitler…has broken his word to me five times. That’s a bitter realisation and I’m drawing my conclusions from it. Hitler has gone into hiding. He’s not making any decisions. He’s not leading. He’s just going with the flow.”17 Goebbels’s annoyance about Hitler’s lack of intervention was increased by his disappointment that the party chairman declined to attend Horst Wessel’s funeral on 1 March. The former university student and SA Sturmführer had been shot by a Communist in late January and died of his wounds on 23 February. Goebbels had decided to mould him into “a new martyr for the Third Reich” and make him the focus of ritual celebrations. “Die Fahne hoch”—“Hold High the Flag”—the song which Wessel had written, became the official party anthem and was played after the German national anthem at official state functions as of 1933.18
The fact that Hitler shied away from getting involved in the Goebbels–Strasser conflict had less to do with indecisiveness than his desire to avoid making public the fact that the party was internally divided on the verge of its political breakthrough. But in late April, at an internal NSDAP leadership conference in Munich, Hitler dropped his guard. “A complete excoriation of Strasser, Kampf Verlag and the salon Bolshevists,” a relieved Goebbels crowed. “Hitler is leading once again. Thank God. Everyone enthusiastically behind him. Strasser and his crowd have been smashed.”19 At the end of the conference, Hitler named Goebbels Reich propaganda director. For the latter that was the icing on the cake: he now took over the office that Gregor Strasser had given up, in Hitler’s favour, in 1927.
Hitler, however, was not ready to break once and for all with Otto Strasser and his supporters. In late May he made one last attempt at an amicable reconciliation, summoning the dissident to his Berlin residence, the Hotel Sanssouci on Linkstrasse. For two days Hitler employed all of his rhetorical talents in an attempt to win over Strasser, but the latter proved surprisingly unimpressed by the characteristically long-winded mix of enticements and threats. Strasser categorically refused to consider Hitler’s offer of naming him Reich press secretary if he would sell Kampf Verlag to Max Amann. The core of the two men’s disagreement, however, was their varying interpretation of what was meant by the term “socialism” in the party programme. Strasser accused Hitler of “choking off revolutionary socialism in the interest of keeping the party legal and…cooperating with the mainstream right-wing parties (Hugenberg, Stahlhelm, etc.).” An agitated Hitler responded: “I am a socialist…But what you mean by socialism is nothing but crass Marxism. The masses of workers only want panem et circenses. They have no comprehension of any sort of ideals.” Hitler also reaffirmed his axiomatic belief that race and not class warfare was the motor of history. “There can only be one revolution, the revolution of race,”
he proclaimed. “There is no economic, political or social revolution. The fundamental struggle is always the same: the struggle of a racially inferior lower class against a dominant high race. The day the higher race forgets this iron law, it has lost the battle.”
Strasser wanted certainty, so he posed the cardinal question of what Hitler intended to do after coming to power. Would he, for instance, preserve the assets of large privately owned companies like Krupp? “Of course!” Hitler replied. “Do you think I’m crazy enough to destroy German heavy industry?” Strasser shot back: “If you want to retain the capitalist regime…you have no right to talk about socialism.”20 With that, all bridges were burned. After their discussion, Hitler described Strasser as “an intellectual white Jew” and “the purest sort of Marxist.”21 He waited to take action until after the Saxony election on 22 June, in which the NSDAP almost tripled their share of the vote to 14.4 per cent and emerged as the second-strongest party behind the SPD (33.4 per cent) and ahead of the KPD (13.6 per cent).22 Eight days later, Hitler ordered Goebbels in an open letter to purge the Berlin party chapter of all “salon Bolshevists,” telling him to “act ruthlessly and severely.”23 Goebbels read Hitler’s message out loud at a general party meeting in Berlin on 30 June, where it was greeted with cries of “String them up!” With satisfaction, Goebbels noted in his diary: “The whole thing ended with an oath of loyalty to the movement, to Hitler and to me!”24
Otto Strasser and his followers avoided being expelled from the party by voluntarily resigning their membership. “The socialists are leaving the NSDAP,” read the headline in Strasser’s mouthpiece, Der Nationale Sozialist. But he had overestimated his status within the party. Few NSDAP supporters followed his call. Strasser founded the Fighting Society of Revolutionary National Socialists, later known as the Black Front, but these organisations never attracted more than a few thousand members. Gregor Strasser had already broken with his brother. Otto’s tendency to act on his own, Gregor claimed, had “fully destroyed their relationship.”25 In any case, the crisis within the party was resolved without attracting much notice in the wider public.
Hitler Page 29
