Hitler

by Volker Ullrich

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  By early 1931, the growing radicalism of political conflicts created conditions that were akin to a civil war.83 In most cases, it was the SA who started the violence. Packs of SA men tried to create an atmosphere of intimidation and convince their political enemies of their omnipresence by marching through working-class districts or suddenly appearing en masse in smaller “red” towns. Such acts of provocation, which often precipitated brawls, were like invasions of hostile territory. As a rule, public action taken by the German communists and socialists were aimed at defending themselves against the SA’s increasingly aggressive behaviour in working-class areas, which the police frequently refused to prevent and thus tacitly supported.84 Hitler’s oft-repeated contentions that the street fights were “without exception the work of Communists and Social Democratic activists” and that the SA was “mostly outnumbered and only defending itself” were a crass reversal of the facts.85

  Nonetheless, SA violence was a double-edged sword for the party leadership. Rowdyism constantly threatened to get out of hand and give the lie to Hitler’s assurances that the party was acting within the bounds of the law. In the midst of the 1930 campaign, this conflict had broken out openly, reflecting an unresolved yet fundamental structural problem running through the entire history of the SA. It was unclear whether the SA was an ancillary apparatus that only existed to help the NSDAP come to power, or whether it was, in parallel to the party, a “self-defence organisation” of equal status which would be given a key military role in the new “Third Reich.” Dissatisfied by a chronic lack of funding and the fact that the organisation had not been consulted about the list of candidates for the Reichstag election, the Berlin chapter of the SA, under its commander, Walter Stennes, refused to provide security for party events. The conflict escalated to the point that in late August 1930, while Goebbels was away campaigning in Breslau, SA men stormed the Gau directorship’s headquarters and caused significant damage.86 Hitler hurried to Berlin to nip the rebellion in the bud. In a Nazi clubhouse in Chausseestrasse, he tried to regain the trust of some 2,000 SA men. The police report noted that his “hoarse voice became an almost hysterical scream.” Hitler’s speech ended with a melodramatic oath of solidarity: “We will use this hour to swear that nothing will drive us apart, if God grants us His assistance against all the devils! May Almighty God bless our struggle.”87

  “Stennes seems to want to keep calm,” Goebbels noted on 3 September.88 Yet although the revolt was over for the time being, the underlying conflict continued to percolate. Hitler had relieved the SA leader, Pfeffer von Salomon, of his duties and nominally taken over command himself. Otto Wagener, previously Pfeffer’s chief of staff, was in charge of the day-to-day running of the organisation. Wagener had previously been the managing director of a small industrial company and had only joined the party at the Nuremberg rally in 1929. Then, at the end of November 1930, at a meeting of SA leaders in Munich, Hitler astonished everyone by announcing that Ernst Röhm, who had just returned from Bolivia, would be taking over as SA leader. Röhm, of course, had been rudely pushed aside in 1925 due to disagreements with Hitler about the role of the SA, so this was most likely a concession by Hitler to the still-dissatisfied SA leaders, most of them former military officers and Freikorps fighters, who saw Röhm as one of their own. In early January 1931, Röhm assumed the post of SA chief of staff.

  Just as the NSDAP was achieving its great political breakthrough, the SA developed into a mass organisation. In January 1931, it had 77,000 members. One year later that figure had risen to 290,000, and by August 1932, the SA numbered 445,000 men. It recruited from diverse segments of society, although the percentage of working-class members was higher than in the Nazi Party as a whole. The SA particularly appealed to young unemployed men from middle-class backgrounds who worried about falling to the bottom of the social ladder. The organisation offered them not only a social safety net, for instance free food in SA soup kitchens or a place to stay in SA men’s homes, but also a forum for releasing their aggression. The SA “storm pubs,” with their atmosphere of incipient violence, were like outposts for a coming German civil war and greatly shaped the fearsome public image of Hitler’s brown-shirted battalions.89

  The SA’s thirst for action, however, threatened to scupper the strategy of legality that the party leadership had chosen to pursue. On 18 February 1931 Hitler had to deny in the Völkischer Beobachter the rumour that the NSDAP was preparing “a coup d’état by means of force.” He also warned SA men be on guard against “spies and provocateurs” trying to tempt them into breaking the law: “Our legality will smash and deflect all measures taken by those currently in possession of state power.”90 Hitler’s appeal was not universally popular. Goebbels noted in his diary: “Great disgruntlement among the SA with Munich.”91 At a meeting of the Munich SA brigade in early March 1931, Hitler had to defend himself against the charge that he was “too cowardly” to fight with illegal means. Hitler told those present that he did not want to send them out to be cut down by machine guns, because he needed them for more important tasks, namely constructing the Third Reich.92 Hitler had even more reason to fear that the SA, and perhaps the party as a whole, could be banned when Hindenburg issued an emergency decree on 28 March giving the Brüning government additional powers to combat political extremism. The NSDAP chairman saw himself forced to intervene again to end the simmering conflict within the Berlin SA. On 30 March, he ordered all party members to strictly observe the emergency decree. Anyone violating that command would be immediately kicked out of the party. At a leadership conference in Weimar on 1 April, he announced that Stennes had been fired. “This has been the greatest but perhaps final crisis of the party—we have to get through it,” Goebbels noted. The Berlin Gauleiter travelled with a “broken-looking” Hitler on the night train back to Munich. “A sad trip,” he recorded. “I feel sorry for Hitler. He’s thin and pale.”93

  Stennes and his supporters did not take his dismissal lying down. That very day, 1 April, they occupied the Berlin Gau directorate and the offices of Der Angriff; and the following day, they issued a statement condemning Hitler’s “un-Germanic and uninhibited despotism within the party and [his] irresponsible demagoguery.”94 But the attempt to extend the rebellion beyond Berlin to north-western Germany failed. In Munich Hitler and Goebbels immediately took counter-measures. On 2 April, Hitler entrusted Goebbels as Berlin Gauleiter with unlimited authority to “take the renewed cleansing of the party into his own hands and carry it out.”95 The 4 April edition of the Völkischer Beobachter contained a long article by Hitler, in which he justified the demotion and exclusion of Stennes from the party. For months, Hitler wrote, the “retired policeman…who had never really been a National Socialist…had tried to infuse the poison of disloyalty into the minds of courageous SA men” by depicting the party as “settled, timid and bourgeois.” That conspiracy, Hitler claimed, had been uprooted: “I know that eight million unemployed will breathe more easily now that we have put a stop to the dirty work of those who would destroy Germany’s final hope for the future.”96 Faced with the choice of following the “founder and Führer” Adolf Hitler or a “pack of mutineers,” SA units all over Germany hastened to declare their loyalty to the party leadership. The revolt quickly collapsed. Only a few hundred men supported Stennes. By 16 April, at an event in the Sportpalast, Stennes’s successor could present a Berlin SA that took orders only from Hitler. “Many wept,” Goebbels recorded. “It was a great hour. The game is up for Stennes. The SA Berlin is solidly in the fold.”97 But the events of the spring of 1931 had long-term political consequences as they led to the rise of the SS, which at the time was still subordinate to the SA. During the crisis, the SS had proved absolutely loyal to the party leadership, and the resulting political capital left that group able to rival the SA.

  After the September elections, people at the Nazi Party headquarters in Munich had to work through the night to process all the new membership applications. At
the end of 1930, the NSDAP had 389,000 members; by the end of 1931, that number had risen to 806,294.98 Space at Schellingstrasse 50 had long been insufficient to meet the demands of the organisation, and the building was not grand enough for a party that aspired to take over power. Hitler therefore decided to purchase the Palais Barlow on elegant Brienner Strasse. Built in 1828, it had been on the market since 1928; the contract of sale was finalised in late May 1930. The price for this prime piece of Munich property was more than 800,000 marks, some of which was raised by Hitler calling upon members to pay special one-off dues.99 The building had to be significantly renovated, and Hitler hired the architect Paul Ludwig Troost, whom he had met in late September 1930 at the Bruckmanns’ salon. Troost was primarily known as an interior designer who specialised in luxury ocean liners like the MS Europa. He had come to Hitler’s attention in the late 1920s, and the NSDAP chairman had furnished his private apartment partly with Troost’s designs. The architect was bowled over by the favour shown to him by the man who had become one of Germany’s leading political lights. “Personally, Hitler is a capital fellow, very educated and modest—it’s moving,” Troost’s wife Gerdy wrote to an acquaintance in November 1930. “So much feeling for and understanding of architecture. My Paulus says he’s never met anyone like him.”100 Troost quickly became Hitler’s preferred architect and received commissions for new party buildings on Arcisstrasse and the “House of Art,” which was completed in 1937.

  Hitler closely followed the construction work. Starting in the autumn of 1930, he had regular meetings with Troost, and every time Goebbels was in Munich, he took him to the building site. “A tour of the new party home,” Goebbels noted in July 1930. “Pompous and grand. Hitler is in his element.” Four months later Goebbels recorded: “The boss was at the site. He showed me the latest progress. My room was fabulous. The whole place is a jewel.” At the same time, Goebbels was worried that Hitler’s enthusiasm for architecture might lead him to neglect more pressing political tasks. On 26 February 1931, as the conflict with the Berlin SA was coming to a head, Goebbels noted: “All the boss’s thoughts on the party home. At a time like this. I don’t like that.”101

  The new party headquarters opened in March 1931. In the Völkischer Beobachter, Hitler looked back upon the party’s humble origins and praised its new home as “the perfect marriage of functionality and beauty.”102 The former vestibule on the ground floor had become the “Hall of Banners” while the forecourt on the first floor was christened the “Hall of Standards.” It led to an opulent room for gatherings known as the “Hall of Senators.” In the basement there was a canteen. The card catalogue containing the names of party members was housed in an extension to the northern side of the Palais. The first two floors as well as the previously unused top floor were filled with offices. Bursting with pride, Hess wrote to his parents: “The showcase rooms, including the Führer’s office, are so wonderfully beautiful that they could be used to receive any representatives of foreign states…My office is directly next to the Führer’s, and next to his are the people who work for me, my office manager and two typists.”103

  Hitler’s office was in a large room in the corner of the first floor. In addition to a bust of Mussolini and a portrait of Friedrich the Great, it contained a painting depicting an attack by the List Regiment in Flanders. But anyone who hoped that the clean lines of his office would inject discipline into Hitler’s working habits was disappointed. Hitler quickly lapsed into his chaotic unpredictability, much to the dismay of those who worked with him. He loathed bureaucracy and did not think much of appointments. The Nazi lawyer Hans Frank remembered Hitler seldom being at the “Brown House,” as the Nazi headquarters became known, and if his underlings brought important documents to their party leader, he might suddenly go to the telephone or have himself driven away, leaving his visitor in limbo. Sometimes Hitler would keep an appointment and quickly dispatch whatever bureaucratic business it concerned, only to subject his unfortunate interlocutor to an hour-long monologue about whatever topic he found particularly fascinating at the moment.104 Hitler preferred to meet up with his old chums in his favourite café, Heck am Hofgarten. Goebbels was horrified by this “bunch of petty bourgeois.” “How can a person like Hitler stand these people for even five minutes?” he repeatedly asked himself as he tried to protect his boss from the corrupting influence of others. “He has to get out of this Munich scene.”105 What Goebbels failed to recognise was that Hitler’s Munich clique helped him wind down. With them he could relax and hold court away from the demands that his rise to a much-loved and much-hated political star had placed upon him.

  The Palais Barlow had ample room for the expanding party apparatus. The existing departments of organisation and propaganda were joined by new ones like the economic department under Otto Wagener, the agrarian division under Richard Walter Darré, the legal department under Hans Frank and, in August 1931, the Reich press office run by the business journalist Otto Dietrich, the son-in-law of publisher Theodor Reismann-Grone.106 But the Brown House was much more than an administrative headquarters. For the masses of true believers it was a “temple devoted to the cult of the Führer” and “a site of almost sacred significance.”107 For disgruntled SA men, on the other hand, the luxury villa was the headquarters of the Munich “bigwigs,” and for the Nazis’ political adversaries, it became an object of scorn since the building’s splendour sharply contrasted with the lip service the party paid to socialism. With an eye towards Hitler’s luxury apartment on Prinz​regen​tenst​rasse and the party headquarters, the Munich anarchist Erich Mühsam composed a poem:

  In Munich the Nazis

  Have two fine palazzis

  One serves as Hitler’s home

  In the other he learns to rule alone

  For the Third Reich and its dons

  With swastikas made of bronze

  Granite and building blocks so brown

  Like prison towers over the town

  Loom the palaces all around.

  The Nazi star gleams shiny

  But what’s the source of the money

  That’s something kept underground.108

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  In fact, we do know where the NSDAP got the money to pay for the Palais Barlow: the industrialist Fritz Thyssen personally guaranteed a 300,000-mark bank loan for the party.109 Thyssen, the eldest son of the legendary steel tycoon August Thyssen, was the supervisory board chairman and largest shareholder of the Vereinigte Stahlwerke, the biggest steelworks in Europe. He first heard Hitler speak shortly before the Beer Hall Putsch and then met Hitler and Ludendorff in Max Erwin von Scheubner-Richter’s apartment. The NSDAP leader made a “very good impression,” Thyssen testified in 1948. Initially, Thyssen supported the traditional nationalists and the policy of fundamental opposition which the DNVP began pursuing under Alfred Hugenberg from October 1928. In July 1929, he joined Hugenberg and Hitler in promoting the referendum on the Young Plan. After the September 1930 election, Thyssen advocated a right-wing coalition that included the National Socialists and started supporting the NSDAP financially. Most of his monetary favours went to Göring, Hitler’s personal representative in Berlin whose task it was to establish useful contacts among the wealthy and well-born and make the party suitable for high society. Göring used two donations of at least 50,000 marks apiece for personal purposes, refurbishing his large Berlin apartment to reflect his growing status and financing his extravagant lifestyle. Nonetheless, Thyssen considered the donations money well spent, as Göring was a leader of the NSDAP’s “moderate” wing in contrast to its anti-capitalist faction.110

  Thyssen was not the only prominent economic figure who wanted to see the National Socialists claim a share of power. Another was Hjalmar Schacht, who resigned as Reichsbank president in March 1930 when he argued that the conditions of the Young Plan, which he himself had helped negotiate, were being altered to Germany’s detriment.111 Schacht had originally co-founded the left-liberal DDP, but by February 1930 t
here was no mistaking where his new political sympathies lay. At a social occasion at the home of a banker, Schacht’s wife openly wore a necklace with a swastika pendant. When questioned about this by the society reporter of the Vossische Zeitung, Schacht replied: “Why not give the National Socialists a chance? They seem pretty gutsy to me.”112 After the September election, Schacht made his admiration of the NSDAP known publicly, saying that one “could not govern in the long term against the will of 20 per cent of the electorate.”113 In December, Schacht’s old friend, Deutsche Bank chairman Emil Georg von Stauss, invited him to his villa in Berlin’s exclusive Wannsee district to have dinner with Hermann Göring. Stauss was a deputy in what was left of the DVP faction in the Reichstag, and he had extended his feelers to test the possibility of collaborating with the NSDAP. The dinner seems to have gone swimmingly. Schacht recalled Göring as an “urbane and pleasant man of society,” and on 5 January 1931, Schacht was invited to Göring’s apartment. Thyssen, the NSDAP’s new patron, was also in attendance.114

  Goebbels, who was present as well, wrote: “Schacht strikes me as something of an arriviste, whereas Thyssen is one of the old guard. Excellent. He may be a capitalist, but it’s hard to have anything against captains of industry like this.”115 After dinner, Hitler joined the group. “His manner was neither pretentious nor laboured; on the contrary, he acted naturally and modestly,” Schacht recalled in his memoirs. “There was nothing to betray the fact that he was the leader of the second-strongest party in the Reichstag. After all the rumours we had heard and all the public criticisms we had read, we were pleasantly surprised by the whole atmosphere.”116 As was his wont, Hitler held a long monologue, during which the other guests barely got a word in edgeways. Schacht was nevertheless impressed. After that initial meeting, he already recognised “that Hitler’s propagandistic force has excellent prospects among the German populace, as long as the economic crisis is not solved and the masses are not thereby diverted away from radicalism.” Soon afterwards, Schacht claimed, he had encouraged Brüning to invite the National Socialists to join the governing coalition as a way of “directing the movement into orderly channels.”117