The right-wing conservatives were, however, already trying to initiate another plebiscite, this time opposing the Young Plan, which had been accepted by the Reich government on 21 June. Although this Plan made certain concessions to Germany in respect of reparation payments, its opponents argued that it preserved German payments and so set them in stone. And this time Hitler agreed. On 9 July he supported a call from the Reich Committee for German Plebiscites that had the backing of, amongst others, the DNVP chairman and media tycoon Alfred Hugenberg, Franz Seldte, the national leader of the Stahlhelm, as well as Privy Councillor Class of the Pan-Germans. It was in other words a campaign platform of the combined parties of the right and had a national network at its disposal.77
Writing to Party comrades in the Völkischer Beobachter on 25 July 1929, Hitler made it clear that his participation arose ‘from a desire to achieve a tactical subordinate goal on a broad basis’, which did not affect the Party’s ‘ultimate goal’.78 On the same day he ordered Party functionaries79 not to be drawn into joint activities by ‘partner organizations’ without express permission from the leadership.80 The article was paving the way for the Party Rally, which this year took place once again. Hitler’s opponents in the Party were also positioning themselves.
On 28 July Otto Strasser published ‘14 Theses on the German Revolution’ in the newspapers of Kampf publishing house. In its essentials, this manifesto drew heavily on the 1920 Party programme and thus presented an alternative model to Hitler’s approach to the conservatives. At the fourth Party Rally at the beginning of August 1929 in Nuremberg Hitler found himself having, on the one hand, to defend the fact that he had made approaches to the right-wing conservatives and, on the other, to make clear to Party comrades that he was not prepared to be co-opted by the ‘reactionaries’. This dual strategy determined the character of the Rally, whose respectability was to be emphasized in this particular year by a number of prominent honorary guests. Winifred Wagner attended as did the leading industrialist Emil Kirdorf, who for some time had been sympathetic to the NSDAP. In addition, Theodor Duesterberg, the second Reich chairman of the Stahlhelm was there, demonstrating the controversial policy of alignment with the Conservatives, also Count von der Golz, the leader of the Union of Völkisch Associations. Some 30,000–40,000 Party supporters had made the journey, around double the number that had attended two years before.
On 1 August, a Thursday, the nineteen panel meetings of the Rally began. Hitler had issued the instruction ‘to ensure that, in spite of the grand setting for these Rallies and the freedom to discuss, they do not degenerate into general chaos. Experience shows that nothing ever came of endless discussions.’81 The atmosphere that prevailed during the panel meetings was characterized by Goebbels in a lapidary and telling manner: ‘Everyone in agreement because nobody dared say anything.’82 Yet contrary to Hitler’s intentions controversial views could not be suppressed altogether. At the section for members of the Reich and state parliaments, Rudolf Rehm, the deputy Gauleiter of Brandenburg and one of Strasser’s circle, moved that the Party should pronounce a general ban on coalitions at Reich and state level. This was a direct attack on Hitler’s approach to the parties of the right. Hitler put a stop to this initiative, citing as a reason that this move would be ‘the equivalent of forbidding a nation state ever to make alliances’. The panel then declared that it had no authority to make a decision about this matter.83
The actual delegates’ conference, with some 1,200–1,500 participants, met in three big sessions from Friday to Sunday. Hitler exploited his wide-ranging opening remarks, read out by Gauleiter Adolf Wagner, to make pointed attacks on the ‘bourgeois parties’ in addition to ‘Marxists’ and ‘Jews’: they ‘do not wish to achieve any fundamental separation of the Germans from Marxism. . . . Our bourgeoisie has in general abandoned the völkisch approach with its focus on and commitment to the issue of blood.’ The bourgeois parties were thus turning into ‘defenders of the poisoning of the nation, and in fact were downright advocates of the racial violation of their own nation’. This vehement attack was Hitler’s demonstrative attempt to answer criticism from the Party and he spoke twice more on the last day of meetings.84 For several days the city was dominated by the presence of the NSDAP: the city centre was decorated with swastikas; Nazi uniforms and cries of ‘Heil’ were everywhere. By mounting a firework display in the evening and a concert in the stadium, the Party also used the conference programme to make its mark.85
On the Saturday 18,000 uniformed Nazis marched through the city. On the Sunday a ‘commemoration of the fallen’ took place outside the hall of honour on the Luitpoldhain, followed by the presentation of standards and flags to the SA and SS units.86 More than 25,000 Nazis were said to have taken part in the march afterwards through the city. On the periphery of the Party Rally there were numerous clashes with members of the Reichsbanner† and with communists. An exchange of gunfire in the inner city left a female NSDAP member dead and another shooting incident caused the deaths of two further Party supporters. These acts of violence were quite useful to the NSDAP, as they provided confirmation that the Party was fighting in the front line against ‘Marxism’.87
The National Socialist parade in Nuremberg emphasized the fact that, compared with the last such event two years previously, the NSDAP had grown considerably in strength. Even so, this was still a small party on the edge of the extreme right. The subsequent months would have to demonstrate whether Hitler’s new direction – the plan to use an alliance with the right-wing conservative parties to lure away some of their core voters, above all among the urban middle classes and the rural population – would be successful.
* Translators’ note: Stresemann’s father had run a small business making and distributing bottled Berlin Weiss beer and Stresemann had written his doctoral dissertation on the Berlin bottled beer industry.
† Translators’ note: The Reichsbanner Black-Red-Gold was a paramilitary organization established in 1924 to defend parliamentary democracy against right-wing and communist paramilitaries. It was mainly composed of members of the SPD.
9
Conquering the Masses
In spite of his vehement criticism of the ‘bourgeois’ parties, after the 1929 Party Rally Hitler continued to join in the campaign against the Young Plan. Up to September 1929 the Reich Committee for the German Plebiscite was working on a draft plebiscite that would ban the Reich government from accepting further financial burdens or commitments arising from the Treaty of Versailles. Instead, it was to make a solemn declaration retracting Germany’s acknowledgement of responsibility for the war, as set down in the treaty, and to annul any obligations deriving from that acknowledgement. Furthermore, members of the government or any of its agents who concluded any agreements at variance with these provisions would be punished as traitors. In the concluding phase of discussions this final stipulation led to disagreement, with Hitler, who favoured a more aggressive form of words, unable to get his way.1
In the end the plebiscite took place in the second half of October. During this period the sponsors had to gather the signatures of 10 per cent of all those entitled to vote as a precondition for the actual referendum. The campaign propaganda was carried out by the participating organizations – the DNVP, the Stahlhelm, and the NSDAP – by Hugenberg’s press group, and by the Reich Committee, which produced large quantities of propaganda material and, importantly, raised donations that were shared among the participating organizations.2
On 25 October, Hitler himself, accompanied by Hugenberg, spoke at a large rally of the Bavarian State Committee for the German Plebiscite at the Circus Krone.3 He also defended the initiative in his weekly column in the Illustrierter Beobachter, accusing the government, among other things, of rigging the procedural arrangements.4 Looking back, he claimed that this move had at least led to the political forces in favour of the treaty measures showing their true colours.5 In using these arguments the Party leader was manifestly responding to crit
ics from his own ranks. For the ‘Party Left’ around the Strasser brothers viewed the behaviour of the DNVP as dishonest, given their earlier ‘fulfilment policy’, and Goebbels, the Gauleiter of Berlin, believed the NSDAP had been taken in by its partners in the Reich Committee.6 He did not want to take his criticism too far, however, because Hitler was still dangling in front of him the promise made in May 1929 that Goebbels should take over as head of Reich propaganda and so had him on a short lead.7 Even the Strasser brothers finally fell in with Hitler’s strategy and tried from inside the anti-Young campaign to emphasize the ‘nationalist revolutionary’ direction of the NSDAP, in contrast to the ‘reactionary’ Stahlhelm and ‘capitalist’ DNVP.8
Ostensibly, the Party gained very little from the considerable propaganda effort occasioned by the campaign against the Young Plan. The Hugenberg press gave the Nazis comparatively little space in the campaign, and it appears that the Party’s membership of the Reich Committee did little to improve its chances of receiving donations from industry.9 But in Hitler’s view one result outweighed everything: through the plebiscite the NSDAP had built bridges to the right-wing conservative camp and gained potential allies. At the same time, by repeatedly distancing himself from his new ‘partners’ and in fact even permitting himself furious and insulting tirades against them, he ensured that the NSDAP was not simply absorbed into a united front of the right but retained its own profile.
When at the end of October the opponents of the Young Plan had narrowly achieved the 10 per cent of signatures they needed and, as expected, parliament refused to agree to their request, the government scheduled the referendum for the last shopping Sunday before Christmas. In spite of another intensive propaganda effort on the part of the Reich Committee, the referendum was heavily defeated, with only 13.8 per cent of votes in favour.10 The initiators nevertheless agreed to maintain the Reich Committee for the time being and possibly use it as a platform for further joint initiatives.
Hitler continued to defend his actions, stressing that at least the referendum had ‘stirred up public opinion in Germany in such a way that the government parties are now feeling very uncomfortable today’.11 What ensued seemed to prove him right: the growth of the NSDAP into a mass movement began precisely at the time of the Young Plan campaign. Whereas the Party had never managed to gain more than 5 per cent of the votes in the 1929 elections up to that point, in the autumn it achieved significant electoral successes: 7 per cent in the state parliament elections in Baden on 27 October; 8.1 per cent in Lübeck on 10 November; 5.8 per cent a week later in the local elections in Prussia. In the elections taking place simultaneously for the assemblies in the Prussian provinces the Party made above-average gains in Brandenburg, Hanover, Hesse, Saxony, and Schleswig-Holstein, with results between 5.6 per cent and 10.3 per cent.12 The NSDAP’s propaganda machine was already in high gear as a result of the anti-Young Plan campaign, and the Party succeeded in focusing it immediately on the electoral battles, thereby securing a significant advantage over the DNVP, whose potential for mobilizing support was nowhere near as great.
The electoral gains made by the NSDAP were possible only because the entire spectrum of predominantly middle-class parties was in the meantime in deep trouble.
Many of the ‘middle-class bloc’ coalitions formed in the mid-1920s at local and regional level were breaking apart, and the project of expanding the DNVP into a large nationalist-conservative party at national level was threatening to collapse under the weight of overwhelming conflicts of interest and the absence of compelling nationalistic slogans. In the 1928 Reichstag elections it had lost already almost a third of its voters, while the liberal parties’ share of the vote had also shrunk drastically: that of the centre Right German People’s Party (DVP) from 13.9 per cent in the Reichstag elections of 1920 to 8.7 per cent; that of the centre Left German Democratic Party (DDP) from 8.3 per cent to 4.9 per cent. At the end of the 1920s the numerous new parties, regional parties, and parties representing very narrow economic interests also found themselves in very choppy waters.
This crisis afflicting bourgeois parties was in essence caused by the fact that in the later 1920s both the conservative and the liberal milieus lost their integrative power. Neither was able, to the extent it had been in Imperial Germany, to hold people’s loyalty through a dense network of clubs and of associations representing economic interests. Large sections of the Protestant middle classes and also of the Catholic middle classes, in so far as they were not anchored in the Centre Party, were searching for new political allegiances.13 The momentum behind the NSDAP was now so evident that Strasser was already preparing his senior staff in the Party’s national organization to assume power in the Reich. In September 1929 he established a second branch of the organization (Organization II), led by the former Munich city commandant Konstantin Hierl, to make plans for the period following the appointment of a Nazi government. As head of the first branch of the Reich organization (Organization I), meanwhile, he retained actual control over the Party apparatus, which was to be significantly expanded during the following years.14
Just when the NSDAP had got its propaganda machine into high gear and was enlarging its central organization, a major economic slump began. On 25 October 1929 the New York stock exchange crashed. The American banks withdrew short-term loans from their main creditor, Germany, and in so doing hit an economy that was already heading towards recession. It was very quickly evident that the established parties were incapable of working together effectively to contain the crisis.15 The NSDAP was able to profit from the situation, as was shown by the hugely improved result it achieved in the Thuringian state elections on 8 December 1929: 11.3 per cent of the votes as compared with only 3.5 per cent in the 1927 elections. Against vehement opposition from the Left of the Party,16 Hitler insisted that the NSDAP should help form the state government along with the DNVP and DVP. He went in person to Weimar to take charge of the coalition negotiations and secured the Interior Ministry and Education Ministry for the Party. A further success he could chalk up was that Wilhelm Frick, whom the DVP had at first rejected because of his part in the Munich putsch, was put in charge of both ministries. Hitler himself attributed the fact that the DVP dropped their objections principally to a speech he made during his stay in Weimar to a gathering of middle ranking industrialists.17 After tolerating a bourgeois government in Saxony he was now able to consolidate his policy of alignment with the right-wing conservatives in Thuringia.18
Praised by Hitler as ‘the fiercest National Socialist fighter’,19 Frick immediately adopted a consistently racist policy in education and cultural matters and began to ‘purge’ the civil service. In doing so he was acting in accordance with Hitler’s aims in joining the coalition, which included the creation of a chair of ‘Racial Studies’ at the University of Jena. It was taken up by the ‘racial scientist’ Hans Günther and was regarded by Hitler as the ‘starting point for an . . . intellectual revolution’ that he compared with the Reformation.20 From now onwards Frick repeatedly tried to see how far he could implement Nazi policies in the context of the existing democratic state constitution.21 On the strength of an ‘enabling law’ he aimed to exclude the state parliament from the legislative process, although because of his concerns about constitutional legitimacy he had the decrees issued under the enabling law confirmed retrospectively by the state parliament. Frick brought the local police forces under state control, excluding many politically undesirable members. He removed democratically inclined civil servants from the administration and as education minister introduced prayers in schools that were full of bombastic völkisch language. With a range of measures he attempted to ‘purify’ cultural life, banishing the influence of ‘alien races’ and any elements of ‘negro culture’.22 By appointing the architect Paul Schultze-Naumburg as head of the Combined Art Schools in Weimar he chose someone with a racially based view of art. Amongst other things Schultze-Naumburg mounted a campaign against ‘degenerate art’ in the st
ate. His home, close to the ruined castle of Saaleck, became the meeting place for a circle of völkisch intellectuals that Hitler himself deigned to join on two occasions.23
The Nazis exploited their participation in government to establish important priorities in their propaganda campaign, emphasizing their aggressive opposition to democracy and modernist culture and thereby providing a foretaste of the so-called Third Reich. They did not succeed, however, in hollowing out the state of Thuringia from the inside and conquering it. In the end, Frick went too far with his radical policies and came to grief on 1 April 1931 through a perfectly normal parliamentary procedure: a motion of no confidence put by the SPD and KPD found support among the DVP, which had long grown tired of the NSDAP’s continuous attacks.24 Thus the first Nazi experiment in government in a German state ended in failure.
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