Things were also beginning to look up for Hitler personally. Thanks to the generosity of patrons, the sales of his works and a systematic under-reporting of his actual income to the tax authorities, his finances had stabilized.95 In October 1929, Hitler moved to a large unfurnished flat on the affluent Munich Prinzregentenplatz with a staff of two live-in housekeepers, Ernst and Maria Reichert, his former landlords in the Thierschstrasse.96 The furnishings were made by the Jewish-owned M. Ballin Royal Bavarian Furniture Factory;97 the nephew of the celebrated German-Jewish writer Lion Feuchtwanger lived only 100 yards away.98 Hitler’s emotional life, too, appeared to be stabilizing. Geli Raubal was registered as a subtenant with the Reicherts, clearly with the purpose of avoiding awkward questions about why she was sleeping under the same roof as her uncle. Among the Nazi inner circle, though, her close relationship with Hitler was no secret. Geli acted as hostess, or at least was often present, when Hitler received guests.99 She also accompanied him to numerous events: to a dinner with the Hesses,100 to Bayreuth (chaperoned by her patron Helene Bechstein),101 to various performances in Munich, on excursions into the countryside, and even to the famous Passion Play at Oberammergau.102 Geli, a spirited young woman who does not appear to have had serious political interests of her own, was popular with everybody.
Beneath the surface, however, Hitler’s emotional life was complex and even turbulent.103 Goebbels noted in his diary that he had heard ‘incredible things of the chief. He and his niece and Maurice [the chauffeur].’104 Things were to become even more complicated. In the autumn of 1929, Hitler first encountered Eva Braun, who was working as an assistant in Heinrich Hoffmann’s photo atelier. Hitler, then forty years of age, was clearly charmed by the seventeen-year-old girl; he made compliments and brought her presents.105 Their relationship at this time was almost certainly not physical, but Hitler’s attentiveness may well have infuriated Geli. A few months later Goebbels complained that his leader was involved in ‘too many affairs’.106 Moreover, Hitler was a highly controlling presence in Geli’s life. Helene Hanfstaengl, who knew Geli well, remembers that ‘I always had the feeling he [Hitler] was trying to run her life and tyrannizing her’.107 Despite her vaunted high spirits, she generally looks glum, aloof and even caged in surviving photographs. The result of all this was a rather overwrought atmosphere in Hitler’s apartment on the Prinzregentenplatz.
The picture that emerges of Hitler around this time is of a man lonely, but not withdrawn; sociable, but not gregarious. He spoke openly about himself to men and women; he was not emotionally ‘buttoned-up’. Hitler was determined, however, not to commit himself to a woman. Marriage made sense only if one wished to establish a family, he remarked to his confidant Otto Wagener around this time. Though he professed to love children, he claimed that he had to deny himself this happiness, because he had another bride–Germany–and was married: to the German Volk, and its destiny.108 It was an important part of his public persona, as well as his charismatic status within his entourage, that Hitler had a right to deviate from the norm. ‘A genius is entitled to be different and to live differently from others,’ Goebbels wrote in his diary, adding that ‘The myth of Hitler must remain like a rocher de bronze,’ a phrase which invoked the Prussian ‘soldier king’s’ famous statement about the sovereignty of the monarch.109
At home or in politics, Hitler remained at the centre of things. He made all the major decisions, and his leadership style was distinctive. He had his own way of choosing his associates, he explained privately. Rather than choosing someone on the basis of qualification or favour, he would give him a chance to busy himself in the general area.110 If the individual succeeded, he would grow into his new role and if not he would be replaced by someone else. This approach resulted in rapid turnover of staff. Moreover, far from being controlling, Hitler was loath to involve himself in matters of detail. He remarked that his memory automatically jettisoned any unnecessary ballast whenever things are going well and there was no needed for him to involve himself.111 ‘The chief,’ Goebbels observed in frustration in late November 1928, ‘stays out of everything–a convenient tactic–and leaves everything to his officials.’112
Hitler could hold his cards very close to his chest. He argued that knowledge of plans, and certainly concrete intentions, should be restricted on a need-to-know basis, and even then the executors should be told only as much as was absolutely necessary. This was probably a necessary precaution in the highly porous environment of the Nazi leadership, in which–as in any other organization–gossip and loose talk were rife.113 At the same time, Hitler was pathologically reluctant to take decisions. ‘Hitler,’ his economic adviser Otto Wagener recalls, ‘actually never issued instructions. He wanted to refrain from making decisions.’ Instead, Hitler would outline his general principles, and then it ‘was up to the individual to issue instructions in his area and to work in such a way that the general direction laid out by Hitler, the great goal crystallized from these conversations, was striven for and, in time, attained.’114 The result was a confusing leadership style, in which the uncontested charisma of the leader was matched by an equal lack of clarity about what he was concretely asking his following to do. Still, Goebbels conceded in late 1929 that for all his faults–‘he is too soft and works too little’–Hitler ‘has instinct, can handle people, is a tactician of genius, and has the will to power’.115
The improved prospects for the NSDAP caused Hitler to reconsider his timeline, well before his actual electoral breakthrough. Power, though still far off, was no longer a complete impossibility. ‘In three years,’ he predicted with remarkable accuracy in November 1929, ‘we will be the masters of Germany’.116 At the same time, Hitler was still planning for a long campaign, with the realization of his ultimate aims in the distant future, perhaps even after his death. It is telling that the second of the two ministries he had demanded in Thuringia was that for Volksbildung, which was in charge not merely of primary and secondary education, but also of the University of Jena and the theatres. Hitler wanted Frick to use this power to turn the population into ‘fanatical National Socialists’.117 Central to this project was the appointment of the Nazi racial theorist Hans Günther to a newly established ‘Chair for Racial Questions’ at Jena, another indication that Hitler was thinking of a long-term racial regeneration of the German people, rather than just a quick political fix.118
Much the same thinking informed Hitler’s conception of the SA. He was at pains to stress, even in private, that they were not expected to prepare for another putsch. The SA had neither the arms nor the training to stage one. Instead, Hitler told Otto Wagener that he wanted the SA to provide a reservoir of trainable German youth as a preparation for military service in a future new German army.119 Meanwhile, in January 1929, Hitler made Heinrich Himmler head of the SS.120 It was Hitler who gave the organization its notorious motto ‘My Honour Is Loyalty’. In addition to its security functions, Hitler wanted the SS to act as the guardian of the supposed German racial community, beginning with strict racial selection criteria for admission to its own ranks. In other words, Hitler’s domestic policy should not be dated from his seizure of power. He was already engaged in the long-term attempted transformation of the German people while in opposition.
8
Breakthrough
In early 1930, the plates of German politics began to shift under the impact of the economic crisis. There were 3.2 million men out of work at the start of the year–about 14 per cent of the labour force–and the number was rising. Agriculture had been in crisis since the late 1920s. The SPD government under Chancellor Hermann Müller buckled under the pressure and finally disintegrated in March 1930. The new chancellor was the Centre Party leader in the Reichstag, Heinrich Brüning, who embarked on a course of austerity measures which deepened, or at least did not end, the economic crisis. He skilfully blamed all cuts on external constraints, particularly French policy.1 Fresh elections were set for the autumn. From then on, until the end of the Weimar Republic, the N
SDAP was in permanent campaign mode, as one election followed another–Reichstag, Landtag and presidential in quick succession. German politics never really settled down again, as contests in even the smallest of territories took on a disproportionate importance in the national context.
The steady advance of the NSDAP was epitomized by the new party headquarters in Munich. Hitler’s originally planned skyscraper was dropped on the grounds that National Socialism was ‘rooted… in not just the historical but also the cultural traditions of our people’. ‘Despite the apparent grandiosity of such a high structure,’ he went on, ‘one cannot overlook the fact that it would be an experiment, whose role models do not lie in us but outside us. What is natural in New York would be artificial in Munich.’ In late May 1930, Hitler settled for a large nineteenth-century neo-classical townhouse, the Palais Barlow on the Brienner Strasse. He went about the renovation of the building, which was financed through an extraordinary appeal to the membership, with great care. Hitler envisaged a ‘marriage of utility and beauty… which we also want to achieve in due course on a large scale’.2
As the party fortunes waxed, internal divisions came to the fore again. The main clash was between the Strasser brothers and Hitler. This was partly a question of authority. In April 1930, the Saxon Nazis supported a metalworkers’ strike on Gregor Strasser’s instructions over Hitler’s clearly expressed objections. Moreover, the Strassers and Goebbels were still engaged in a stagfight over propaganda; not for the first or last time, a frustrated Goebbels repeatedly considered resignation.3 Doctrinal differences were also very important, however, especially as there were many Strasser sympathizers in the SA and among the Gauleiter. Here the problem was not so much their ‘leftist’ stance on economics, which caused Hitler tactical problems with the middle class and business, but with which he did not fundamentally disagree, as their heterodox views on race and foreign policy, to which Hitler took violent exception. Contrary to Strasser’s repeated demand that Germany form a ‘League of the Oppressed’ against imperialism, Hitler refused to put Germans on the same level as the allegedly ‘inferior’ Egyptian fellahin, Hindus or Siamese. Hitler contrasted the ‘racial inferiority of the Indian’ with the qualities of the ‘Nordic Briton’. He rejected the demands of blacks and Indians as ‘an attempt’ to reverse the ‘natural ranking order of the races’. For this reason, Hitler warned against ‘joining the general world wailing and shrieking against Britain’. He dismissed Otto Strasser’s admiration for the Indian leader Gandhi as ‘a racial perversity’.4
Hitler trod carefully, too carefully for some party critics. Goebbels decried the delay in confronting the Strassers. ‘I don’t believe a word of this any longer,’ he wrote in his diary in mid March 1930. ‘Hitler is very nervous,’ Goebbels noted a few weeks later, ‘he obviously feels very insecure.’ Hope would alternate with despair as Hitler took action one day–‘Bravo! Hitler is starting to lead’–only to lapse back into hesitation the next. ‘He is avoiding taking a decision,’ Goebbels lamented in late June 1930, ‘that is the old Hitler. The vacillator! The eternal procrastinator!’ In part, no doubt, all this was due to his habitual indecisiveness. ‘He hasn’t got the courage to move against Strasser,’ Goebbels lamented, ‘how is that meant to work if he later has to act [sic] the dictator in Germany?’5 But there was method in Hitler’s tergiversation too. Where his charisma failed, he had no effective instruments to enforce his will. Hitler could not risk an internal party eruption which might set off so many secondary detonations as to consume the whole organization. The forces arrayed against him required a series of controlled explosions, in so far as they could not simply be defused.
In April 1930, Hitler moved to re-establish his authority among the Gauleiter and in the SA. Gauleiter Friedrich Hildebrandt in Mecklenburg-Lübeck was sacked for making Strasserite criticisms of Hitler’s approaches to industry; he was later reinstated. Hitler also reminded the SA, many of whom were straining to engage in revolutionary action, of its primary function. ‘Our weapons are not the dagger or the bomb, machine guns or hand grenades or military formations’ but rather ‘our weapons are exclusively the stringent truth of our idea, the victorious power of our theses, [and] the indefatigability of our propaganda work.’6 That said, Hitler encouraged the SA to take on the communist Rotfront cadres in the fight for the control of the streets, so that Nazi brawling became a standard feature of Weimar politics.
Otto Strasser, for his part, refused to knuckle under. In early July 1930, he established a ‘left-wing’ breakaway group of ‘Revolutionary National Socialists’. Its founding proclamation announced that ‘the socialists are leaving the NSDAP’. The new movement never got off the ground. Gregor Strasser, still under Hitler’s spell, broke with his brother. Only 800 party members and some functionaries defected, mainly in the north. Otto’s group remained propagandistically active over the next two and a half years, but it never mobilized more than 5,000 people.7 Despite extensive unhappiness in the SA, neither the organization nor any substantial part of it followed Otto into opposition. The rebellion was not trivial, but it was perfectly containable. Moreover, it allowed the party leadership to blame illegal tendencies on the Strasserite fringe.8 Hitler had read the situation correctly. In the first of a series of controlled explosions, one of his rivals had blown himself up without bringing the whole edifice down.
Hitler now turned to deal with the crisis in the SA.9 Here the problem was not so much ideological–although many sympathized with the Strasserite left–as tactical. The north-eastern SA under the leadership of Walter Stennes demanded a much more radical approach to the seizure of power. Hitler insisted on a policy of legality, in rhetoric but also in practice, so as not to give the authorities an excuse to ban the party and its structures. This was an old debate, but it came to a head in the late summer and autumn of 1930. The SA leader, Pfeffer von Salomon, was both disaffected and ineffective. On the very first day of September, a squad of SA men demolished Goebbels’s offices in Berlin. The rebellion seemed on the verge of spreading to the countryside. Hitler did not try to confront Stennes directly.10 He was desperate to avoid a breach before the Reichstag elections of 1930. Instead, Hitler sought to end the controversy by sacking Salomon and taking over as (nominal) supreme commander of the SA himself. Röhm returned from Latin America to take over the actual running of the SA, with the formal title of ‘chief of staff’ (Stabschef). Stennes backed off. An uneasy peace returned. Once again, Hitler’s tactics had paid off, as another high-profile defection would surely have seriously damaged the party at the polls and possibly even led to its implosion.
Perhaps mindful of the dangers of too much consultation, the new edition of Mein Kampf in 1930 deleted references to ‘Germanic Democracy’, and to the ‘election of the Führer’, one of the few major changes to the text over time.11 The new passage stressed the ‘principle of Führer authority, paired with the highest responsibility’. In the same vein, Hitler also ordained that the local party organizations should no longer elect their own leaders–as envisaged in the first editions of Mein Kampf–but that these should be appointed from the top down.12 In other words, Hitler was not simply establishing his own absolute authority, but the primacy of the ‘Führer principle’ throughout the entire movement. The need for these ‘Führers’ was justified by necessity. ‘The ideal solution,’ he remarked later, ‘would be for the nation to be gripped by’ a single figure, ‘without any organizational intermediary bodies’, but he conceded that this was ‘unfortunately impossible’.13 Hitler’s largely rhetorical experiment with ‘Germanic Democracy’ was over. The NSDAP would be a party of one leader and many sub-leaders.
As always, ideological concerns rather than everyday issues were at the heart of the Nazi campaigning in advance of the 1930 Reichstag election. Hitler made a serious effort to conciliate Catholics, peppering his speeches with religious language; one appearance in Würzburg was even garnished with an ‘amen’.14 This was not just electoral opportunism, but reflect
ed Hitler’s desire to heal the confessional rift in Germany. He also reminded the electorate of the dangers of federalism and supposed racial division in two articles drawn directly from Mein Kampf.15 One of them appeared the same day as Goebbels tidied up his vandalized offices in Berlin. ‘The office looked awful,’ he noted, with ‘two big puddles of blood in my room’. This ‘blood of comrades’, he continued, was ‘a terrible sight’. ‘That is how we Germans are,’ Goebbels went on, which made him doubt that ‘we will ever be able to liberate this people’.16 Hitler elaborated his concerns about the cohesion of the German people in a more guarded form than he had expressed himself towards Strasser. ‘The German people may be made up of different races,’ he told an audience of students, but its external appearance was determined through the ‘higher-value racial elements’, the encouragement and improvement of which was the task of domestic policy. This would have to focus on the need for ‘breeding’ the German people onto a higher racial plane.17
The answer to these challenges, Hitler argued, was not a vote for one of the Weimar parties. ‘In elections,’ he explained, ‘there is never a victory but only the periodic exchange of overseers.’ If Germans wanted to do more than simply rotate their overseers, they would have to vote NSDAP and its programme of purported racial regeneration through the conquest of living space. ‘Adolf Hitler,’ one Saxon paper reported, ‘announced that the supreme principle of his party was the creation and securing of sufficient living space’; this–it argued–was what differentiated the NSDAP from both the Marxist and the bourgeois parties. Space was Hitler’s answer to everything, from reparations to inflation, unemployment and the crisis of German agriculture. ‘The life of the individual,’ he observed in mid August 1930, was ‘always determined by the space available to society. Whatever living space is available determines the life of the whole and with that the life of the individual.’ The Americans, he reminded his listeners, had solved this problem. This need for Lebensraum as a panacea for all Germany’s ills was hammered home to audiences again and again across Germany.18
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