Hitler
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Yet one matter went on troubling Hitler after the elections, namely whether his position on the South Tyrol question, which he had not successfully communicated to the voters, had been an important factor in the poor election result. Only three days after the Party’s disappointing performance, he spoke at great length to a meeting of the NSDAP in Munich attended by some 3,000 people, defending himself against the accusation of having ‘betrayed’ the South Tyrolians. By advertising the meeting under the title of ‘Adolf Hitler Unmasked’ he was taking to its absurd limit the accusation the SPD had levelled against him in the final phase of the election campaign. Yet he was also revealing how much the attack had hit home, so much so that he made the elementary tactical mistake of making his Party comrades focus on this subject again, whereas it would have been much simpler to draw a veil over it.34
If that were not enough, Hitler also wanted to clarify his foreign policy once again in a lengthy memorandum of principle. He therefore retreated over the summer to Berchtesgaden to write that ‘second book’ that was never to be published in his lifetime. During this period he was hardly ever seen in public.
The manuscript of 239 pages contained a condensed version of his foreign policy goals that did not differ essentially from what he had set out in Mein Kampf.35 In the introduction he expanded on the meaning of ‘struggle for existence’ [Lebenskampf] and ‘living space’ [Lebensraum] as determining factors in the history of nations. Then he went into detail on the possible combinations of alliances for Germany. Russia, he wrote in his summing up, could never, even under a non-communist regime, be considered as a possible ally. The obvious allies were rather Great Britain and Italy, and he expatiated on relations with Italy in the last and longest chapter, which made up almost a quarter of the manuscript and in which he once again set out in detail his argument concerning the South Tyrol. These discussions certainly constitute the real heart of the manuscript, while the earlier chapters are geared to his efforts to present his thoughts on the South Tyrol as the logical outcome of a comprehensive programme. In his view the only future foreign policy option for Germany was to decide ‘to adopt a clear and far-sighted politics geared to living space. In doing so it will turn away from all experiments in global industry and the politics of global trade, and will concentrate all its resources on giving our nation a direction for the future, by securing sufficient living space for the next hundred years’.36 He made no bones about the fact that this ‘great geopolitical goal’ lay in the east,37 while the obvious implication was that it could be achieved only by means of a war of conquest. The book naturally also contained a lengthy passage about ‘Jewish dominance’; any ‘victory of Jewry’ would be, he wrote, an ‘accursed crime against humanity’, and the Nazi movement had ‘taken up the struggle’ against it.38 It was most probably precisely these unambiguous statements about his goals in foreign and racial policy, which he usually avoided in his speeches, that in the following months made him judge it inopportune to publish this text.39
One new aspect of his thinking was his estimation of the United States, which in Mein Kampf he had not yet recognized as a vital factor in world politics. He now realized that it was a growing economic power but regarded it therefore primarily as a challenge because it was in essence a ‘Nordic-Germanic’ state. Under German leadership there might admittedly be scope ‘in the distant future perhaps for a new union of nations, which, consisting of nation states with high ethnic value, might oppose any threatened world domination by the American Union’. This, however, was obviously a task that stretched beyond his own lifetime.40
In the middle of July Hitler interrupted his stay in Berchtesgaden in order to present the most important results of his foreign policy deliberations to a closed meeting for members of the NSDAP in Berlin (in Prussia he was still banned from speaking in public). Hitler summed up his aims in two points: ‘The first is to gain freedom and the second is to gain territory, so that we never again get into the same position that the World War and even the pre-war period put us in.’ He explained the possible implications as he had outlined them in his manuscript. He spoke against any alliance with Russia and in favour of one with Italy, even if that meant giving up any claim to the South Tyrol. This, he was sure, was a price worth paying, for ‘the day will come when France and Italy will face each other as mortal enemies’. For Great Britain, on the other hand, any further war with Germany was ‘even more senseless, as the enemy of the future will be North America’. What was going through Hitler’s mind (and this sentence makes it clear once again) was less the vision of a decisive struggle between Germany and the United States for world domination but rather the expectation that increasing rivalry between Britain and the United States would offer Germany the chance to move closer to Britain and take over the leading role on the continent.41
He returned to this idea in February 1929 in an article for the Party’s Illustrierter Beobachter: the ‘great conflict to come’ between the United States and Great Britain, as he wrote here, could ‘bring our people freedom too . . . if our political leaders do not indulge in the historical folly of wanting to remain neutral, and if they also do not fall victim to our old German tradition of choosing if at all possible the weakest and most backward state as an ally’ (alluding to Russia). What was needed, in other words, was a shrewd and long-term strategy to exploit the emerging competition between the United States and Great Britain.42 During the following months he was frequently to set out his position regarding the South Tyrol, the starting point for his sweeping thoughts on foreign policy, both in speeches and in writing.43 In addition, in May 1929, he brought an action for libel in the Munich magistrates court against those who had started the rumour that he had been in the pay of Mussolini.
Since November 1928 the Illustrierter Beobachter had been offering Hitler the opportunity under the heading ‘This week in Politics’ of making statements in extended leading articles about topical matters (something that in the main he expressly refused to do in his speeches).44 Adopting the worldly-wise tone of a writer who was familiar with how to deal confidently with complex political and historical events, at times adding explanatory or sarcastic comments, he used these articles principally as a polemical running commentary on the foreign policy pursued by Stresemann, whose efforts to secure a peaceful revision of the Versailles Treaty were defamed by the entire political right as ‘fulfilment policy’. Thus, for example, he informed his readers, in positively statesmanlike cadences and imbued with the conviction that he was imparting irrefutable insights into political and historical truths, that ‘I have therefore regarded Italy as the most suitable ally for Germany, because even pursuing its interests in the most level-headed way must at some stage bring it to the point of decisive conflict with France’. And: ‘I have rejected any thought of an agreement with France as absurd. I have become more and more convinced of this from year to year.’45 He presented Stresemann, on the other hand, as an inexperienced dilettante, and, alluding to his doctoral dissertation,46 derided him as a ‘born bottled-beer salesman’47 and, in addition, as a tool of ‘Jewry’*: ‘But Gustav Stresemann is only in charge of German foreign policy because the Jews know for certain that they need not fear any resurgence of Germany under this intelligent leadership.’48 At the end of January 1929 he went so far as to express his ‘fervent wish’ with regard to the German Foreign Minister: ‘May Heaven grant him long life so that this man, who today is shielded by the Constitutional Court for the Protection of the Republic, receives that sentence from a Constitutional Court for the protection of the honour and life of the German nation that history has hitherto been used to imposing for deeds of this enormity.’49
Hitler’s public call for Stresemann’s execution (and earnest hope that this outcome would not be frustrated by his arch-enemy’s death from natural causes) makes one thing clear: There was no other politician in the Weimar ‘system’, nor any ‘Marxist’ or figure with a Jewish background who annoyed Hitler to the same extent. Stre
semann’s policy of a peaceful revision of the Treaty of Versailles in the context of a system of European security seemed to reduce the premises of Hitler’s foreign policy – an alliance with Italy and Great Britain against the ‘mortal enemy’ France and the conquest of living space in the East – to absurdity. Stresemann had been particularly instrumental in stabilizing the Republic in 1923 and had thus cut the ground from under Hitler’s putsch. In Hitler’s eyes he represented the loss of face he had suffered in the 1928 election campaign as a result of his slogans concerning the South Tyrol. All these insults could be blotted out only through the physical annihilation of his hated opponent. When at the beginning of October 1929 Stresemann died suddenly of natural causes Hitler used the Illustrierter Beobachter to taunt him one last time. The ‘generation ruling today’, he wrote, which would soon be labelled the generation ‘that cast away and surrendered all the sovereign rights of our nation’, had indubitably found in ‘Gustav’ its perfect representative; in short, he was ‘the epitome of our times’.50
When, more than three months after their electoral defeat, the NSDAP set about discussing their future strategy at a leaders’ conference, it was not, however, foreign policy that was prominent, but rather another source of conflict that Hitler was determined at all costs to sort out. With the ‘Dinter case’ in mind, those assembled focused on the issue of the attitude the NSDAP should adopt towards the Christian Churches.
The former Gauleiter of Thuringia, Artur Dinter, was attempting, in the tradition of the ‘völkisch movement’, to get the Party to adopt an anti-Church policy and to found a German–völkisch religion. This had already led Hitler, who vigorously opposed the NSDAP’s involvement in religious matters,51 to remove Dinter from his post as Gauleiter at the end of September 1927, officially citing ‘work overload’; but Dinter was not to be silenced. On 25 July 1928,52 Hitler felt he had to write again to Dinter:
As leader of the National Socialist movement and as someone who possesses a blind faith that one day he will be among those who make history, I regard your activities, in so far as they relate to your reforming purposes, as damaging to the National Socialist movement. . . . At a time when perhaps a matter of a few years will be decisive for the very life and future of our nation, the National Socialist movement, in which I can see the only real force opposing the annihilation threatening us, will be weakened internally if it involves itself with religious problems. . . . The fate of our nation, at least in so far as it is a racial issue, will be decided faster than it would take to complete a religious reformation. Either our nation will be pulled back as quickly as possible from the downfall that threatens it, racially in particular, or it will degenerate.
Hitler went on to insist that this was an existential matter – for him personally and thus also for Germany’s destiny: ‘I am 39 years old, Dr Dinter, so that, unless fate decrees otherwise, I have at best just 20 years remaining to me when I will still have the energy and resolve demanded by such an immense task. During these 20 years it may well be that a new political movement can be victorious in the struggle for political power.’ That length of time was, on the other hand, much too short for a religious reformation.53
In his reply of 19 August Dinter asked to be allowed to address the next general members’ meeting, which took place in parallel with the leaders’ conference.54 He also included a request to that members’ meeting that a Party senate should be formed as the supreme NSDAP ruling body. This was a direct attack on the position of the supreme Party leader and at the leaders’ conference at the end of August Hitler dismissed it out of hand.55
Hitler sent Dinter a reply via Hess saying there was no opportunity to address the general meeting but that he should present the issue at the next leaders’ conference.56 When Dinter rejected this,57 Hitler, again through Hess, sent him an ‘official command’ to be in Munich on 1 September. Dinter, however, was unwilling to fall in with this suggestion.58 After further fruitless correspondence,59 Hitler finally withdrew from Dinter the authority to represent Party interests in the Thuringian state parliament60 and on 11 October excluded him from the Party.61
At the three-day leaders’ conference held in Munich in late August/early September 1928 in place of the Party Rally, which had been called off for financial reasons,62 Hitler addressed not only the inadequacies of the Party organization but also expressly opposed any comment on religious matters as damaging to the Party: ‘The issue of Catholic or Protestant is as irrelevant to a National Socialist as are the issues of monarchy or republic, middle class or working class, Prussian or Bavarian. His central concerns are state and nation. Religion is the least of a nationalist’s concerns. At any rate, founders of religions have no place whatever in our movement.’63
The most important outcome of the leaders’ conference was, however, the matching of the boundaries of twenty-two Party Gaus to the Reichstag constituencies, a reform prepared in essence by Strasser, who since the beginning of the year had been head of the Reich Party administration.64 From now on the only ‘Greater Gau’ was Bavaria. Consisting of eight Gaus, this unit was controlled by Hitler alone. In addition, Party Gaus were set up beyond the Reich borders, in Austria, the Saarland, and in Danzig (Gdansk). This significant organizational improvement with an eye to the next elections complemented the orientation of Party propaganda towards middle-class voters.65
In addition, in September an Association of National Socialist Lawyers was created66 as the first step towards organizing a middle-class membership around ‘professional status’. In April 1929 the NS Teachers’ Association was founded, followed in August 1929 by the NS German Doctors’ Association, and in November 1929 by the NS Pupils’ Association, which recruited members almost exclusively from grammar schools.67 On 1 October 1929, a few weeks after the leaders’ conference, the NSDAP issued membership number 100,000. The actual total of members was lower, as numbers that became vacant could not be reallocated;68 when in February 1929 Hitler claimed the movement had 115,000 members he was presumably using this method and not the actual headcount.69
‘The lesser of two evils’: Rapprochement with the right-wing Conservatives
At the state parliament elections in Saxony on 12 May 1929 the NSDAP achieved 5 per cent of the vote, in Mecklenburg-Schwerin on 23 June they reached 4 per cent, and in the same month in Coburg they even became the majority party on the city council.70 By now they were concentrating their efforts on gaining middle-class votes, and their propaganda had become largely purged of ‘socialist demands’, thus resembling that of the right-wing conservative camp. The obvious next move, therefore, was to make overtures to these groups and offer themselves as political allies against Weimar democracy, with the ultimate aim of assuming the leadership as soon as possible in this marriage of convenience and taking as many voters as possible away from the right-wing conservative and moderate middle-class sections of the electorate.
In the summer of 1929, after some argument, Hitler managed to get agreement for the first time on this policy of approaching the Conservatives. The elections to the Saxon state parliament on 12 May 1929 had led to a stalemate between a centre-right bloc and the parties of the left, and at first it was impossible to see how a government could be formed. Then, in July 1929, Hellmuth von Mücke, who belonged to the ‘left wing’ of the Party, floated with the SPD and KPD the possibility of support from the NSDAP for a left-wing government. The workers’ parties refused the offer and made Mücke’s approach public, in spite of his request for confidentiality. Hitler distanced himself from Mücke, who in fact declared that he had taken his initiative with the agreement of the Party leader (a matter that can no longer be verified) and left the NSDAP. If ‘fate gives us the role of either being neutral and thus being useful to the Marxists or of acting and facilitating a government of nationalists, even if they are weak and hollow bourgeois nationalists’, Hitler now declared in the Völkischer Beobachter, ‘we must in spite of everything renounce neutrality and choose the lesser
of two evils’.71 This was a clear decision on the Party’s direction. Although a coalition with bourgeois parties of the kind Hitler advocated did not come about at this stage, as early as July 1929 the Nazis in Saxony were to help put a bourgeois government in power and tolerate it in parliament.72
The gradual approach of the NSDAP to the right-wing conservative camp, however, took place primarily through a joint initiative for a plebiscite. Since the autumn of 1928, the veterans’ organization, the Stahlhelm, had been pursuing a plan to use a plebiscite to change the constitution, transferring power from parliament to the Reich President, and thus to transform Weimar democracy into an authoritarian state.73 In its search for support the Stahlhelm turned to the NSDAP, where the project divided opinion; Goebbels, for example, feared that Hitler would go too far in making concessions to the Stahlhelm,74 and made a critical statement in his Berlin paper Der Angriff about ‘reactionaries’.75 Hitler responded to the initiative in April 1929 in a lengthy letter to the national leadership of the veterans’ organization: The changes to the constitution sought by the Stahlhelm were, he wrote, ‘irrelevant’ as far as the realization of a ‘German resurgence’ was concerned. For simply redistributing powers in the context of the Weimar constitution made no difference to the essential nature of ‘our “western-style” democracy’. ‘A man who has been chosen by Providence . . . to be the Führer, will in any case never allow his actions to be prescribed or confined by the ridiculous limits on powers imposed by a constitution, if acting in accordance with the constitution must bring his nation to ruin.’ And what, he asked more as a tactical objection, would the Stahlhelm do if a ‘Marxist’ President were to come to power? Besides, plebiscites must arise from issues of internal national conflict of a kind that ‘might literally split the nation in two’, such as the restoration of the monarchy, the continuation of war reparations, or the acknowledgement of war guilt.76 For all these reasons the NSDAP would not be involved.