The first official meeting of the working group took place on 22 November 1925 in Hanover. High on the agenda was the task of developing their own draft programme for the NSDAP, one that in particular would contain concrete social policies (even though in August Hitler had declared the 1920 programme to be ‘immutable’). Strasser expounded some initial thoughts on the matter to representatives of eleven Gaus47 and by December they had been developed into a written version.48 In it Strasser envisaged an authoritarian constitution, with a President elected for a seven-year term and equipped with extensive powers, and a ‘Reich Chamber of Estates’, an economy based in part on private capital, in part on state control, in part on cooperatives, and in part on corporatist organizations. The 1914 borders would be re-established and Austria annexed, including the South Tyrol and the Sudetenland, which had been separate since 1918. Strasser’s draft programme fell into the hands of Gottfried Feder, who by this time had made himself the Party’s chief economic ideologue; as Strasser informed Goebbels, Feder was ‘furious that it had been disseminated without Hitler’s or his knowledge’ and intended ‘to prime Hitler’.49 On 24 January the working group had another meeting in Hanover to discuss the programme.50 Feder arrived uninvited to represent Party HQ. According to Goebbels, ‘an interminable, confused debate’ then followed,51 and in the end a programme committee was set up under Strasser to produce a final version of the draft. In addition, the working group decided that royal houses should not be given compensation for their expropriation during the revolution. This issue was high on the national political agenda as the result of an initiative, originating with the KPD and finally co-sponsored by the SPD, to make it the subject of a referendum.52 Feder had heard enough to let Hitler know that the Party’s inner cohesion was threatened.53
The decision on the NSDAP’s programme was scheduled to be taken at a leaders’ conference that Hitler called for Sunday 14 February 1926 in Bamberg. Some sixty Party functionaries attended at his invitation. There Hitler pushed through a decision that determined the Party’s direction: in a speech lasting several hours he swept aside all the basic concerns raised by the working group. He expressed support, among other things, for the alliance with Italy and thus rejected any attempt to reverse the annexation of the South Tyrol. He also spoke out sharply against any cooperation with Russia, of the kind contemplated by Goebbels,54 for this would be ‘national suicide’. What was needed was rather ‘a focus on and colonization of the East’.55 That was precisely the line he had taken in the as yet unpublished second volume of Mein Kampf. Hitler went on to express views that were as shocking as they were depressing for the North German functionaries. While the working group had expressed support for the planned referendum opposing the settlement being offered to royal houses, Hitler took the opposing view: ‘The law must remain the law. Even for princes. Don’t cause an upset over private property! Ghastly!’, as Goebbels noted with horror. He was also disappointed that Hitler did not want to open up discussion again about the matter of the programme: ‘The programme is OK. It will do. Feder nods. Ley nods. Streicher nods. Esser nods. “It grieves me deeply to see you in that company!!!”’* After a brief discussion Strasser spoke up: ‘Hesitating, trembling, clumsy.’ It was a total defeat: ‘. . . Oh God, we’re just no match for those swine down there!’56
Through his performance at Bamberg Hitler had once and for all gained acceptance for the principle of the NSDAP as a Führer Party. The Party’s political line was not linked to a precise programme but rather to an abstract ‘idea’ that only the ‘Führer’ himself could interpret in an authoritative manner.57 In the months following he set about shaping the Party organization in accordance with this principle and in the process to put his various rivals firmly in their places.
After the Bamberg defeat Strasser and his supporters gave up the struggle for a time. Strasser was forced to promise Hitler that he would ask the members of the working group to return all copies of the draft programme.58
At the same time Hitler, now triumphant, was conciliatory over other matters. He stood by as in March the Greater Ruhr Gau was created without prior permission from the Party leadership; he also accepted the fact that Goebbels, Pfeffer, and Kaufmann had taken on the leadership of this new unit as a team, which hardly exemplified the Führer principle.59 At the beginning of April he even invited them all to Munich and courted the delegates from West Germany with all means at his disposal.60 Goebbels returned the favour on the evening of 8 April, when he made a speech at the Hackerbräukeller presenting the ‘social question’ as the key problem the NSDAP needed to resolve, while at the same time rejecting the demand for ‘socialism’.61 Hitler, who was present, was extremely pleased with this, whereas Kaufmann and Pfeffer were openly critical of Goebbels’s speech.62
The following morning on a visit to the Party offices the three guests had to put up with Hitler subjecting them to a ‘whole mish-mash of accusations’. However, after this philippic he shook hands with them in a gesture of reconciliation. In the afternoon he lectured them for three hours on foreign policy and economic matters, which led to a sharp exchange of views. Goebbels was not convinced by all of Hitler’s arguments, but set aside his reservations because he was so impressed by the Party leader as a personality: ‘I bow before a greater man, a political genius!’ The three ambassadors from the Ruhr were, according to Goebbels, given ‘decisive confirmation’ of their position in the Party and Kaufmann and Pfeffer returned to Wuppertal. Goebbels, however, spent several more days with Hitler, who gave him the impression of having ‘taken him to his heart like no other’. Goebbels’s verdict on the visit was clear: ‘Adolf Hitler, I love you because you are both great and unassuming at the same time. That is what is called genius.’63 Hitler responded to criticism of the Party leadership, in so far as he moved Esser out of Party HQ in April and a few months later transferred Esser’s brief, namely propaganda, to Strasser.64 For his part, Goebbels revised his views on foreign policy with regard to the Soviet Union and the South Tyrol.65
In May Hitler called a general meeting of the Party membership in Munich. In his report he made it clear that he did not ascribe any particular political significance to this meeting, which was a legal requirement for associations. The meeting passed off in a remarkably low-key manner. As expected, Hitler was, by unanimous acclamation, confirmed as Party chairman; the question whether there was any other candidate met with laughter among those present.66 Hitler used the opportunity to expatiate once again on the history of the NSDAP, while vigorously defending the decision to participate in elections. His central point, however, was an attack on the Left: It was, he said, the ‘Nazi movement’s mission . . . to oppose this red torrent, which one day will turn into a violent and brutal force, with a national one that is no less ideologically charged and no less determined to use brute force. . . . One of the two will succumb and the other will triumph’. Goebbels, who had made a special journey from Elberfeld, was gratified that the Party leader had praised him by name several times.67
The general meeting decided in particular to amend the statutes, as a result of which Hitler’s power within the Party was strengthened still further: Whereas up to that point the Party chairman had been at the head of a committee elected by the membership, made up, in addition to him, of a second chairman, a first and second secretary, and a first and second treasurer, now the membership had the right to elect only the chairman, one of the treasurers (up to then it had been Schwarz), and one of the two secretaries (until then it had been Hermann Schneider). The deputy positions disappeared, in particular that of Hitler’s deputy, which up to then had been filled by Amann. The demise of the original committee also removed the possibility that did still formally exist of using it to call extraordinary general meetings and thus provide a platform for any opposition within the Party to the chairman. The elected members of the committee were now joined by six chairmen of special ‘committees’ (for propaganda, finance, youth, the SA, complaint
s and disputes, and organization), all of whom were appointed by Hitler, and by a chief secretary (Bouhler’s role was enhanced by this) also appointed by the Party chairman. It was also Hitler’s prerogative to appoint Gauleiters. It was typical of Hitler’s leadership style that in his words of introduction at the meeting he said nothing at all about these important changes to the structure of the Party organization; no discussion was scheduled, in any case.
Thus the Party leader made it increasingly difficult for any internal opposition to organize. Even the trio leading the Greater Ruhr Gau were left stranded after Goebbels’s demonstrative show of friendship with the Party leader.68 In the middle of June Hitler travelled to western Germany in order to settle the disagreements at the Gau conference in Kaufmann’s favour with Kaufmann then taking over as Gauleiter.69 Meanwhile Hitler was already planning more wide-ranging personnel changes: he proposed to Goebbels that he should move to Munich as ‘General Secretary of the movement’, while also weighing up whether to make him Gauleiter of Berlin.70
In July 1925, however, before these plans could come to fruition, the Party held its first Party rally since 1923; Hitler chose Weimar as its location, for it was there that in August 1924 the NSDAP and the DVFP had joined to form the National Socialist Freedom Movement – a move he had disapproved of. It was also a place where he was not banned from speaking. In Weimar the Party leadership established a ritual that was to guide all subsequent Party Rallies. Hitler gave the lead and set the tone in an article in the Völkischer Beobachter, stressing that this was not the place to give vent to ‘personal quarrels’ or to attempt to ‘clarify confused and vague ideas’.71 It was no accident that only two days before, on 1 July, he had banned working groups such as the unwelcome one involving the north-western Gauleiters; since the NSDAP was itself one ‘big working group’, there was ‘no justification for individual Gaus to join together’.72 No, he said, they should work to make the Party Rally ‘a great demonstration of the youthful vigour of our movement’.73 Hence Hitler ruled that instead of discussing matters raised in plenary sessions they should be referred to special panels holding their own sessions. There such matters as electoral issues, press affairs, propaganda and organization, as well as, for example, social topics, were debated vigorously, though no votes were taken. The chairmen he appointed for the special panels had, as Hitler instructed, the freedom and authority to deal with the matters raised as they saw fit, but he himself reserved the right to decide finally whether they would be taken further or not.74 In the face of this careful stage-management, the attempts made by several NSDAP politicians to secure a resolution against participation in elections did not get off the ground. Instead, Hitler insisted on his view that the matter of elections should be treated purely tactically and that the Party should therefore not allow itself to be drawn into ‘positive’ cooperation with other parties.75
The Party Rally, attended according to the police by between 7,000 and 8,000 people and according to the Völkischer Beobachter by 10,000,76 opened early in the morning with a speech by Hitler to more than 3,000 members of the SA in the National Theatre. He also used the occasion to hand over the ‘Blood Flag’ to Joseph Berchtold, the Reich leader of the ‘Schutzstaffel’ (Protection Squad) or SS, which had been set up the previous year with the special task of guaranteeing the safety of the ‘Führer’ when he appeared in public and hence saw itself as something of an elite unit. The Blood Flag, as Hitler put it, was the ‘assault flag of 9 November 1923, consecrated with the blood of a comrade who fell as a martyr to the vision’ of National Socialism. After that special standards were distributed to the individual SA groups, who then had to take the following oath: ‘I swear to you, Adolf Hitler, that I will be faithful to our flag to the last drop of my blood.’77 The actual delegates’ conference began at 10 a.m. with addresses by Dinter, Feder, and Schwarz. From 12 noon onwards the chairmen of the special panels, some of which had met the previous day, gave their reports. Then, as the climax of the rally Hitler gave a keynote address in which he invoked the ‘spirit through which the Reich to come is embodied in us, in which the union of nationalism and socialism is realized in an idealized form.’ This speech was far removed from the political issues of the day. ‘Deep and mystical. Almost like a gospel’, was how Goebbels, who was in the audience, described it.78 There followed a march through Weimar that culminated in a demonstration on the market square and led to some serious rioting.79 Munich HQ considered the event a total success.
Hitler now attempted to use preferential treatment and promotion to build closer ties with the main representatives of the ‘north-west German’ opposition. First of all he invited Goebbels straight after the Party conference to his house on the Obersalzberg, where, accompanied by Hess, Rust, Strasser, and others they went sightseeing in the area. During these days Hitler managed, through hours of monologues, to impress Goebbels so much that the latter considered him the ‘self-evidently creative instrument of divine fate’. Hitler had quite obviously recognized Goebbels’s weak spot, his intensely narcissistic personality causing him to respond with positive rapture to Hitler’s attentions.80 The first results of Hitler’s tactics were soon evident: in August Goebbels and Strasser conducted a controversial correspondence about their relationship, and Goebbels believed it necessary to defend himself in the Nationalsozialistische Briefe over his changed attitude to the question of socialism: it was, he claimed, no ‘Damascene conversion’ to be solidly behind the ‘Führer’, who was after all ‘an instrument of that divine will that shapes history’.81 In September, on the other hand, Hitler made Strasser NSDAP propaganda chief,82 and at the beginning of October Strasser announced in the Nationalsozialistische Briefe that the working group had been dissolved.83 At the end of October 1926 Goebbels was rewarded by being made boss of a new Gau, which Hitler created for this occasion from the two existing Gaus of Berlin and Brandenburg.84 He also appointed the retired Captain von Pfeffer in November to be the new head of the SA.
Hitler envisaged the future role of the SA as being purely to support the Party: as he impressed on Pfeffer in SA Order No. 1, the NSDAP did not need ‘a couple of hundred bold conspirators, but rather hundreds of thousands of fanatical fighters for our world view’, who would appear in huge massed ranks and prepare the way for the NSDAP by ‘conquering the streets’.85 Hitler had already set the ball rolling by issuing a new set of statutes limiting the SA’s tasks essentially to ‘keeping order’, ‘protecting meetings’, and distributing propaganda material.86 It should specifically not develop once more into a paramilitary force, for the existing paramilitary organizations had in his view no concrete ‘political purpose of their own’ and it was out of the question to provide men with ‘paramilitary’ training for ‘today’s state’ by means of private associations.87 Thus in February 1927 Hitler went as far as to forbid National Socialists categorically to join paramilitary organizations, a measure that caused something of stir because it affected quite a number of Party members.88 The motive for Hitler’s rejection of paramilitary organizations was his fear that, as in 1923, they might extend their influence into his Party. At the same time, the NSDAP was interested in the men who belonged to these organizations, with their resolutely nationalist and militaristic mindset. The long-term aim was therefore to distance the Party from the standard model of the paramilitary organization and its hierarchy, while at the same time recruiting its members and convincing them of the NSDAP’s entitlement to political leadership.89
By the end of 1926 Hitler had carefully dismantled the core of the group that had put itself forward as the advocate of a ‘programmatic course’ for the NSDAP; in pushing through the new Party statutes he had structured the Party in such a way that its leaders were completely subordinate to him and could not turn into a body that might call him to account. The Party Rally was there essentially to applaud what had already been decided, the Party programme was ‘immutable’, and he was the only one who could interpret it. By re-establishing a central leader
ship for the SA, he had ensured that no new alien body controlled by military men would emerge within the NSDAP; he had distanced it from the milieu in which paramilitary organizations flourished, while also creating in the SS a second paramilitary organization that was specifically committed to him personally. Less than two years after the founding of the Party there appeared to be no one who could challenge his position as its absolute leader.
The Führer personality
By establishing a weak organizational structure for the NSDAP, Hitler had created an environment almost perfectly adjusted to his singular personality.90 The lack of formalized decision-making procedures permitted him to keep out of internal Party conflicts as far as possible, to place himself in authority over those in conflict, and to be the final court of appeal in deciding these disagreements. This lack of procedures enabled him to pursue a political strategy that was frequently ambivalent and multi-layered in order to avoid confrontation with opposing Party comrades, and to settle disputes about the programme through spontaneous, ‘lone’ decisions. Reluctant to commit himself, he was thus able to sidestep the need to turn the programme into concrete proposals and instead to focus on nebulous ‘visionary’ goals. Unpredictability was a carefully calculated element in his politics. ‘Personal’ access was another, as we have seen in the case of Goebbels. In this context ‘personal’ should not be understood as denoting either friendliness or commitment; what is crucial is rather the fact that, on the one hand, Hitler surrounded himself with people who never doubted his claim to be the ‘Führer’ and, on the other, was capable of neutralizing political disagreements by dispensing carefully calibrated doses of coolness or friendliness. When it suited him he could make himself inaccessible even to prominent Party comrades. In the Party complaints were heard about the Munich ‘clique’ that shielded him from the outside world91 and, it was assumed, had a negative influence on him.92 By contrast, anyone who was permitted to bask in the sunshine of his attention often repaid him with special devotion, particularly because it was well-known that Hitler as a rule kept aloof from people. The entourage that had again assembled around Hitler since 1925 in Munich was therefore a mixed bunch of ambitious political operators, willing helpers, and patient listeners; they included in particular his ‘private secretary’ Rudolf Hess, his factotum and later adjutant Julius Schaub, his personal photographer Heinrich Hoffmann, and his driver Julius Schreck. There was no discussion in this group, whether confidentially or in the wider circle. Instead Hitler preferred to come to his own conclusions about problems by pouring forth an endless torrent of words.93
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