by Ian Kershaw
Not least, Hitler promised Held – an easy promise to make in the circumstances – that he would not again attempt a putsch.18 Held told Hitler in the most forthright terms that times had changed. He would not tolerate any return to the sort of circumstances that had prevailed before the putsch. Nor would the constitutional government treat the ‘revolutionaries of yesterday’ as an equal partner.19 But Hitler got what he wanted. With Gürtner’s backing, the way was now paved for the removal of the ban on the NSDAP and the Völkiscber Beobachter on 16 February.20 By that time, Hitler’s relations with his rivals in the NSFB had been clarified.
A meeting of the NSFB in Berlin on 17 January marked the effective end of the attempt to create a unified völkisch movement. Reinhold Wulle, one of the original DVFP founders, sought to undermine Hitler’s authority, especially among the strong north German contingent present. He accused Hitler of being worn-out through his imprisonment and of giving in to the international power of the Catholic Church. Wulle reckoned this to be a bigger threat than ‘the Jewish danger’. The point carried some weight among völkisch leaders in the Protestant North. He also suggested that under Hitler’s weakened leadership Bavarian particularism would come to dominate. It would be South against North. Playing to his audience, Wulle emphasized his own Prussian orientation. Clever politicians were needed in the present conditions. Hitler was not one of them. Henning, another co-founder of the DVFP, was even plainer. Hitler was ‘perhaps the drummer, but no politician’. Another vehement critic claimed that Hitler wanted to be ‘pope’ of the movement, to which he had contributed nothing, and accused him of breaking his word of honour. Graefe reinforced the accusation. He said he passed no judgement on Hitler. The facts spoke for themselves. The alleged breach of trust was seen as Hitler’s refusal to answer a letter by Graefe earlier in January, effectively posing him an ultimatum to break his links with the Streicher and Esser faction, or the DVFP would go its own way. The accusations produced a tumult. The National Socialists present were outraged. The meeting ended with the swapping of insults and all hopes of unity in the völkisch movement dead.21
A glimpse of National Socialist thinking at the meeting can be gleaned from the comments of Walther von Corswant-Cuntzow, later Gauleiter of Pomerania. ‘Rather,’ he said, ‘that the one leader in whom one has most trust fails, than this hither and thither of the many from whom everybody wants something different. I now believe in the godly grace of Hitler, whom I have personally never seen, and believe that God will enlighten him now to find the correct way out of this chaos.’22 The patent inability to reach any basis of unity in the völkisch movement over the previous year made increasing numbers now susceptible to such sentiments.
But not everyone in the völkisch movement felt the same way. Some still stated openly that Ludendorff was the leader they wanted.23 There was said to be a rising anti-Hitler mood in one of the Munich branches of the NSFB after the Nazi leader had brusquely refused to meet a deputation from the branch for even a few minutes and had stated that its written submission had gone, like all others he received, unread into the waste-paper basket.24
Hitler himself was concerned only with the removal of the ban on his party in Bavaria, which he knew was imminent. He was prepared to undertake nothing which would jeopardize it. He let the north German National Socialists know, however, that he had no intention of entering into any pact with Graefe’s Freedom Party, and that a statement refounding the party throughout the Reich would be made once the ban was lifted. He insisted that his hands were free. He had entered into no political arrangements, and had promised Held only that he would not undertake a putsch. As regards his relationship with Ludendorff, he commented, referring to the position he had adopted during the days of the pre-putsch Kampfbund and subsequently at his trial, he had viewed the General only as the military leader, with himself as the political leader. The only breach of faith towards Ludendorff, he added, had come from those who had dragged his name through the ‘swamp of the parliament’, devaluing it in the process. He wanted ‘only true National Socialists’ in leadership positions after the refoundation. Far from being worn down by his imprisonment, he was more flexible than ever. But his line was unchanged: the fight above all against Marxism.25 Its positive expression was the ‘nationalization of German workers’. As for his attitude towards the heavily criticized leaders of the GVG – Streicher, Esser and Dinter – Hitler had a characteristic reply. All that mattered for him, he stated, was what those concerned had achieved. Streicher had built a following of more than 60,000 supporters in Nuremberg – more than the Reich Leadership of the NSFB had in the remainder of Bavaria. He could not offend these supporters for the sake of any personal antipathy.26
By mid-February, events were moving Hitler’s way. On 12 February, Ludendorff dissolved the Reich Leadership of the NSFB.27 Shortly afterwards, just before the lifting of the ban on the party, Hitler announced his decision to refound the ΝSDAΡ. A flood of declarations of loyalty to Hitler now poured in. At a meeting at Hamm in Westphalia on 22 February, Gauleiter of the former NSFB from Westphalia, the Rhineland, Hanover and Pomerania, together with over 100 district leaders from the northern provinces of Germany, attested anew their ‘unshakeable loyalty and adherence (Gefolgscbaft) to their leader Adolf Hitler’.28 The refounded NSDAP would not, unlike its pre-putsch predecessor, be largely confined to Bavaria.29
On 26 February, the Völkiscber Beobachter appeared for the first time since the putsch. Hitler’s leading article ‘On the Renewal of Our Movement’ placed the emphasis on avoiding recriminations for the divisions in the völkisch movement and, learning from past mistakes, on looking towards the future. There was to be no place in the movement for religious disputes – a necessary disclaimer in mainly Catholic Bavaria, and a criticism of the völkisch movement which had accused Hitler of making concessions to Catholicism.30 He refused to accept any external conditions limiting his own leadership, proclaimed the aims of the movement as unchanged, and demanded internal unity. His ‘Call to Former Members’ in the same edition struck the same tone. Where party members rejoined, said Hitler, he would not ask about the past, and would concern himself only that past disunity should not repeat itself. He demanded unity, loyalty, and obedience31 He made no concessions. What was on offer was a ‘pax Hitleriana’.32 The newspaper also carried the new regulations for the reformed NSDAP, based on the statutes of July 1921. Leadership and unity were once more the keynotes. All splits were to be avoided in the struggle against ‘the most terrible enemy of the German people… Jewry and Marxism’.33 The SA was to return to the role of party support troop and training ground for young activists that it had occupied before becoming incorporated in the Bavarian paramilitary scene in February 1923. (This was to prove, within weeks, the breaking-point with Ernst Rohm, who, unable to persuade Hitler to agree to retaining the SA as a conventional paramilitary organization, withdrew from political life and departed for Bolivia.)34 Entry into the refounded party could only come about by taking out new membership. There could be no renewal or continuation of former membership. This had both symbolic value, and also accorded with the stipulation of centralized control of membership from Munich.35 Retention of his Munich power-base was vital to Hitler. When Lüdecke suggested moving the headquarters to Thuringia – strategically well situated in central Germany, associated with Luther and the cultural traditions of Weimar, in a Protestant area which did not have to reckon with the opposition of the Catholic establishment, as in Bavaria, and, not least, a region with an existing strong base of völkisch sympathizers – Hitler conceded that there was something to be said for the idea. ‘But I can’t leave Munich,’ he immediately added. ‘I’m at home here; I mean something here; there are many here who are devoted to me, to me alone, and to nobody else. That’s important.’36
At eight o’clock on the evening of 27 February 1925, Hitler, with his usual sense of theatre, made his re-entry to the Munich political scene where he had left it sixteen months earlier: at the
Bürgerbräukeller. The meeting had originally been envisaged for the 24th. But that was Fasching-Tuesday.37 So the Friday was settled upon. Just as before the putsch, red placards advertising the speech had been plastered around Munich for days. People began to take up their seats in the early afternoon. Three hours before the scheduled start, the huge beerhall was packed. Over 3,000 were jammed inside, 2,000 more turned away, and police cordons set up to block off the surrounding area.38 Some prominent faces were missing. Rosenberg was one. He was irritated at being excluded from Hitler’s inner circle in the weeks since his return from Landsberg.39 He told Lüdecke: ‘I won’t take part in that comedy… I know the sort of brother-kissing Hitler intends to call for.’40 Ludendorff, Strasser and Rohm were also absent.41 Hitler wanted the first party-leader, Drexler, to chair the meeting. But Drexler insisted that Hermann Esser be evicted from the party.42 Hitler would accept no conditions. And for him, Esser had ‘more political sense in his fingertips than the whole bunch of his accusers in their buttocks’.43 So one of Hitler’s most trusted Munich followers, his business-manager Max Amann, opened the meeting.
Hitler spoke for almost two hours.44 The first three-quarters of his speech offered his standard account of Germany’s plight since 1918, the Jews as the cause of it, the weakness of bourgeois parties, and the aims of Marxism (which, he stated, could only be combated by a doctrine of higher truth but ‘similar brutality of execution’). Hitler was frank about the need to focus all energy on one goal, on attacking a single enemy to avoid fragmentation and disunity. ‘The art of all great popular leaders,’ he proclaimed, ‘consisted at all times in concentrating the attention of the masses on a single enemy.’ From the context, it was plain that he meant the Jews. Only in the last quarter of the speech did Hitler arrive at his real theme of the evening. No one should expect him, he said, to take sides in the bitter dispute still raging in the völkisch movement. He saw in each party comrade only the supporter of the common idea, he declared, to lasting applause. His task as leader was not to explore what had happened in the past, but to bring together those pulling apart. At last he came to the climacteric. The dispute was at an end. Those prepared to join should sink their differences. For nine months, others had had time to ‘look after’ the interests of the party, he pointed out with sarcasm. To great and lasting applause, he added: ‘Gentlemen, let the representation of the interests of the movement from now on be my concern!’ His leadership had, however, to be accepted unconditionally. ‘I am not prepared to allow conditions as long as I carry personally the responsibility,’ he concluded. ‘And I now carry again the complete responsibility for everything that takes place in this movement.’ After a year, he would hold himself to account.45 There were tumultuous cheers and cries of ‘Heil’. Everyone stood for the singing of ‘Deutschland über alles’.46
Then came the finale. It was a piece of pure theatre. But it had symbolic meaning, not lost on those present. Arch-enemies over the past year and more – Hermann Esser, Julius Streicher, Artur Dinter from the GVG, Rudolf Buttmann, Gottfried Feder, Wilhelm Frick from the ‘parliamentary’ Völkischer Block – mounted the platform and, among emotional scenes, with many standing on chairs and tables and the crowd pressing forward from the back of the hall, shook hands, forgave each other, and swore undying loyalty to the leader.47 It was like medieval vassals swearing fealty to their overlord. Others followed. Whatever the hypocrisy, the public show of unity, it was plain, could only have been attained under Hitler as leader. He could with some justice claim to have restored the ‘homogeneity’ of the party.48 In the following years, it would become more and more apparent: Hitler, and the ‘idea’ increasingly embodied in his leadership, constituted the sole, indispensable force of integration in a movement that retained the potential to tear itself apart. Hitler’s position as supreme leader standing over the party owed much to the recognition of this fact.
Outside loyalist circles, the immediate response to Hitler’s speech on the völkisch Right was often one of disappointment. This was mainly because of the way Hitler was plainly distancing himself from Ludendorff, still seen by many as the leader of the völkisch movement. In his proclamation of 26 February, Hitler had referred merely in bland terms to the General as ‘the most loyal and selfless friend’ of the National Socialist Movement. In his speech, he had not mentioned Ludendorff at all. Only in the scenes that followed, as calls of ‘Heil’ to the General were heard in the hall, had he spoken – diplomatically, but vaguely – of belonging to him ‘in heart’ even though he had not referred to his name.49 Ludendorff’s supporters saw Hitler’s treatment of him as a calculated insult. Ludendorff’s standing remained a potential problem.50 But as so often, luck came to Hitler’s aid.
On 28 February 1925, the day after the refoundation of the NSDAP, the first Reich President of the Weimar Republic, the Social Democrat Friedrich Ebert, died at the age of fifty-four from the effects of an appendicitis operation. The Right had so persistently tried to defame him for his participation in the munitions strike of January 1918 – when the SPD leadership had become involved in the unrest (demanding democratization and peace without annexations) that spread from the Berlin armaments factories, bringing a million workers out on strike, temporarily threatening war production, and later fostering the ‘stab-in-the-back’ legend – that he had been forced to defend himself in 170 libel cases.51 Such was the feeling against Ebert, and such was the level of anti-socialism in conservative Catholic as well as in nationalist circles, that the Archbishop of Munich and Freising, Cardinal Faulhaber, who had notoriously on one occasion dubbed the 1918 Revolution ‘high treason’, refused to have the church bells rung in his diocese in honour of the dead President.52 The NSDAP had no expectation of having any significant influence on the election of Ebert’s successor. Hitler openly as good as admitted this. He told a party meeting that it was immaterial who became Reich President. Whoever it was would be ‘Only a man who is in reality no “man” at all’.53 But against the arguments of some of his advisers, Hitler insisted on putting forward Ludendorff as the National Socialist candidate, and persuaded the General to stand.54 He regarded the General as no more than a token candidate, without a chance of winning.55 Why Ludendorff agreed to stand is less easy to understand than why Hitler wanted the candidacy of a rival of whom he was by now in private extremely scathing.56 It seems that Hitler persuaded the General that the conservative candidate of the Right, Karl Jarres, had to be stopped, and, flattering Ludendorff’s prestige, inveigled him into standing. ‘Hitler knows perfectly well that although he has a great following in Bavaria he can count on very few votes in North Germany and East of Berlin,’ the General told his dismayed wife, who immediately foresaw the likely consequences to which the arrogant former warlord was blind. ‘In particular, the East Prussians and Silesians have been bound to me by gratitude and devotion ever since the war,’ he went on, his mind made up. They, in fact, showed their gratitude and devotion by almost completely ignoring him in the poll.57 Probably Ludendorff reckoned, too, with the backing of his völkisch friends. But when the DVFΒ decided – in order not to split the right-wing vote – to put their support behind Jarres, the General’s fate was effectively sealed.58 What had seemed to some in Hitler’s entourage a risky strategy was, in fact, no great risk at all, and was more or less guaranteed to damage Ludendorff. That this was the intention was scarcely concealed, even by some leading Nazis.59
For Ludendorff, the election on 29 March was a catastrophe. He polled only 286,000 votes, 1.1 per cent of the votes cast. This was 600,000 fewer than the völkisch Right had gained at the Reichstag election in December 1924, itself a disastrous result.60 Hitler was anything but distressed at the outcome. ‘That’s all right,’ he told Hermann Esser, ‘now we’ve finally finished him.’61 The election winner in the run-off on 26 April was another war-hero, Field Marshal Hindenburg. Weimar democracy was now in the hands of one of the pillars of the old order. Not only did the national-conservative Right vote for him. Had the �
�VP and the KPD supported the Centre Party’s candidate Wilhelm Marx, instead of the ΒVP perversely supporting the candidate of the reactionary Right and Communists sticking with Ernst Thälmann, Hindenburg would have lost. The price would be paid heavily in 1933.
Ludendorff never recovered from his defeat. Hitler’s great rival for the leadership of the völkisch Right no longer posed a challenge. He was rapidly on his way into the political wilderness. Influenced by Mathilde von Kemnitz, who in 1926 would become his second wife, he had since around 1924 become increasingly susceptible to a persecution complex bound up with conspiracy theories, which included freemasons, Jews, Marxists, and also Jesuits. His increasing eccentricity – bolstered by Mathilde’s even greater zaniness – now took him increasingly to the fringes of the radical Right, itself scarcely renowned for its cool rationality. The curious sect he and Mathilde founded in 1925, the Tannenbergbund, published a wealth of literature which was so hair-brained in its persecution paranoia that even Nazi ideologues rejected it. Not only was Ludendorff no longer of any use to Hitler; he was outrightly counter-productive. By 1927, Hitler was openly attacking his former ally – and accusing him of freemasonry (an accusation which was never countered).62
The völkisch movement itself, in 1924 numerically stronger and geographically more widespread than the NSDAP and its successor organizations, was not only weakened and divided, but had now effectively lost its figurehead.63 At first, especially in southern Germany, there were difficulties where local party leaders refused to accede to Hitler’s demand that they break their ties with völkisch associations and subordinate themselves totally to his leadership. But increasingly they went over to Hitler.64 Most realized the way the wind was blowing. Without Hitler, they had no future. For his part, Hitler was particularly assiduous during the coming months in visiting local party branches in Bavaria. The ban on speaking at public meetings which the Bavarian authorities had imposed on him on 9 March (followed in subsequent months by a similar ban in most other states, including Prussia) gave him more time for speaking in closed party meetings.65 The handshake with individual members, invariably a part of such meetings, symbolically cemented the bonds between himself and the local membership. A sturdy platform of support for Hitler’s leadership was thus laid in Bavaria. In the north, the path was less even.