by Ian Kershaw
Even on the ‘Jewish Question’, the wild tirades, vicious as they were, offered no concrete policies. ‘Getting rid of the Jews’ (Entfernung der Juden) could only reasonably be taken to mean the expulsion of all Jews from Germany, as when Hitler called for chasing ‘that pack of Jews… from our Fatherland… with an iron broom’.200 But even this aim seemed less than clear when Hitler stated – to tumultuous applause from the stalwarts of the Movement gathered in Munich’s Hofbröuhaus on 24 February 1928 to celebrate the eighth anniversary of the launch of the Party Programme – that ‘the Jew’ would have to be shown ‘that we’re the bosses here; if he behaves well, he can stay – if not, then out with him’.201
In the ‘Jewish Question’, the ‘question of [living]-space’, and the ‘social question’, Hitler suggested a vision of a distant utopia. He did not chart the path to it. But no other Nazi leader or völkisch politician could match the internal unity, simplicity, and all-encompassing character of this ‘vision’. His sense of conviction – he spoke frequently of his ‘mission’, ‘faith’, and of the ‘idea’ – combined with an unrivalled talent for mobilization through reduction to simple ‘black-white’ choices, was where the ideologue and the propagandist came together.
The interdependence of the various strands of Hitler’s pernicious ‘world-view’ is most plainly evident in his ‘Second Book’ (an updated statement of his views on foreign policy, left, in the event, unpublished), dictated hurriedly to Max Amann during a stay on the Obersalzberg in the summer of 1928.202 Hitler felt prompted to produce the book by the heated debates at the time about policy towards South Tyrol. Under Mussolini, Fascist policies of Italianization of the largely German-speaking area had stirred strong anti-Italian feeling in nationalist circles in Austria and Germany, particularly in Bavaria. Hitler’s readiness to renounce German claims on South Tyrol in the interest of an alliance with Italy had seen him attacked by German nationalists as well as being accused by socialists of taking bribes from Mussolini.203 Hitler had dealt with the South Tyrol issue in Mein Kampf, and published the relevant sections from the second volume as a separate pamphlet in February 1926.204 When the issue flared up again in 1928, Hitler was driven to outline his position at length.205 Probably financial considerations – Amann may well have advised against having the ‘Second Book’ compete against the second volume of Mein Kampf, with its disappointing and diminishing sales – dissuaded Hitler from publishing the book.206 But in addition, as the South Tyrol question lost its urgency, new issues like the Young Plan arose, and Hitler had neither time nor inclination to revise the text, it may have been felt that its publication would have offered political hostages to fortune.207
If occasioned by the South Tyrol question, the ‘Second Book’ went far beyond it, ranging more expansively than Mein Kampf had done over Hitler’s broad ideas on foreign policy and ‘territorial issues’ (Raumfragen), linking them, as always, with his racial interpretation of history and, in the final pages, with the need to destroy what he saw as the threat of ‘Jewish domination’.208 But the ‘Second Book’ offered nothing new.209 As we have seen, the essence of Hitler’s ‘world-view’ was fully developed by the time he completed the second volume of Mein Kampf in 1920, existent in embryonic form, in fact, since late 1922. The ideas dominating the ‘Second Book’ including the issue of South Tyrol and his interest in the growing economic power of the United States of America – were repeatedly advanced in Hitler’s speeches and writings from 1927 onwards. Several passages from these speeches recur almost verbatim at key points in the ‘Second Book’.
Long before the dictation of the ‘Second Book’, then, Hitler was a fixated ideologue.210 His own inner certainty of the ‘truths’ about history as racial struggle, and Germany’s future mission to obtain ‘living-space’ and, at the same time, eradicate the power of the Jews for ever, were of immense importance as a personal driving-force. Their significance in attracting support for National Socialism can, however, easily be exaggerated. The growth of the NSDAP to a mass party had little directly to do with the arcanum of Hitler’s personalized ‘world-view’. More complex processes have to be taken into account.
IV
At the end of January 1927, Saxony became the first large German state to lift the speaking ban on Hitler. On 5 March, the Bavarian authorities finally conceded to the pressure to allow Hitler to speak again. One of the conditions was that his first public speech in the state should not be held in Munich.211 Consequently, when, on 6 March, he spoke publicly in Bavaria for the first time in two years, it took place well away from Munich, at Vilsbiburg in the backwaters of Lower Bavaria. Many of the 1,000-strong audience, only two-thirds filling the hall, were party members and SA men who had been brought from outside to ensure the occasion was a success.212
But three days later, he was back in Munich – in the Circus Krone again, for the first time since 1923. Everything was done to make it a theatrical success. The huge hall was nearly full to its 7,000 capacity by the time Hitler, in a brown raincoat, preceded by marching SA men, accompanied by his retinue, took the rostrum to the sound of fanfares. Most of the audience were from the lower-middle classes, though some were plainly well-to-do, their wives in fur coats. A good number were young, many of them dressed in windjammers. The crowd went wild at Hitler’s entrance, standing on chairs and benches, waving, shouting ‘Heil’, stamping their feet. Around 200 stormtroopers in serried ranks with banners filed past Hitler greeting him with the fascist salute. Hitler returned the greeting with outstretched arm. The speech met with the usual euphoric applause. The audience regarded Hitler’s comments as ‘gospel’, even though what he said could have been nothing new to them. The police reporter was less impressed. He thought the speech long-winded in structure, repetitive, with dull passages and illogical arguments full of crude comparisons and cheap allusions. Nor was Hitler’s performance as a speaker, studded with theatrical and exaggerated gestures, to his liking. He was only surprised that Hitler had been so highly praised, if his speeches had been similar in 1923. The applause, in his eyes, was directed not at what Hitler had to say, but at the person of the speaker.213
Some of the dullness of Hitler’s speech was because he was unduly anxious to avoid any comments likely to land him in further trouble with the authorities. The report of the speech in the Völkiscber Beobachter was surprisingly short.214 The shorthand writer who had taken it down had lost her notes.215
For his next big speech in Munich at the end of the month, the Circus Krone was only between a half and three-quarters full.216 Another week later, on 6 April, only 1,500 were present, in a hall that accommodated almost five times that many.217 Hitler’s magic was no longer working, even in Munich. Outside Munich, his return to the public arena caused little of a stir. ‘In Ingolstadt, earlier a party bastion, Hitler’s renewal of his speaking activity was scarcely noted by the population, not even by most of the former supporters,’ it was reported.218 Other reports from the Bavarian provinces indicated little interest in the NSDAP, for all its vigorous propaganda. Party meetings were often badly attended. In January 1928, the Munich police reported that ‘the advances of the National Socialist Movement repeatedly claimed by Hitler are not true, especially in Bavaria. In reality, interest in the movement both in the countryside and in Munich is strongly in decline. Branch meetings attended by 3–400 people in 1926 now have an attendance of at most 60–80 members.’219 Even the Party Rally, held for the first time at Nuremberg, on 19–21 August 1927, despite careful orchestration for maximum propaganda effect, failed to raise the expected level of support or interest.220
Most other German states followed the examples of Saxony and Bavaria in lifting the ban on Hitler speaking in public. Only Prussia, the largest state, and Anhalt held out until autumn 1928.221 The authorities, it seemed with justification, could believe that the Nazi menace had passed. Hitler no longer appeared a threat.
Though outwardly making little or no headway in the more settled political climate of t
he mid-1920s, as Germany’s new democracy at last showed signs of stability, significant developments were taking place within the NSDAP. Eventually, these would help to place the party in a stronger position to exploit the new economic crisis that was to hit Germany in autumn 1929.
Most importantly, the NSDAP had become a self-conscious ‘leader-movement’, focused ideologically and organizationally on the Hitler cult. In retrospect, the ‘leaderless time’ of 1924, and Hitler’s obstinacy – born out of weakness – in refusing to take sides in the internecine strife of the völkisch movement, had been enormously advantageous. The defeat at Bamberg of those looking to programmatic changes was, as we have seen, at the same time the victory of those loyalists prepared to look no further than Hitler as the embodiment of the ‘idea’. For these, the programme detached from the leader had no meaning. And, as 1924 had proven, without Hitler there could be no unity, and hence no movement.
This point alone was sufficient to persuade even those, like Gregor Strasser, who retained their critical distance from Hitler that the Führer cult had to be built up in order to hold the party together. An outward sign of the unity invested in the person of the Leader was the ‘German greeting’ of ‘Heil Hitler’ with outstretched arm, the fascist-style salute increasingly used since 1923 and compulsory within the Movement since 1926.222 The ‘Heil Hitler’ greeting, Strasser wrote in January 1927, was not only a symbol of personal dependence on the Leader, but contained in itself the pledge of loyalty. The ‘great secret’ of the movement was the combination of ‘the inner devotion to the idea of National Socialism, a glowing faith in the victorious strength of this doctrine of liberation, of redemption’ with ‘a deep love of the person of our Leader, who is the shining duke of the new freedom fighters’. ‘Duke and liegeman!’ he continued. ‘In this ancient German,… both aristocratic and democratic, relationship of leader to companions, lies the essence of the structure of the NSDAP… Friends, raise your right arm and cry out with me proudly, eager for the struggle, and loyal to death “Heil Hitler”.’223
For Rudolf Heß, for years a submissive, fawning Hitler-devotee, the leader-cult was a matter of deep belief, even psychological necessity, not just functional value.224 In a letter to Walter Hewel, later to be one of Ribbentrop’s right-hand men in the Foreign Ministry, Heß reminded him of the ‘leadership principle’ that Hitler had already outlined while they were all in Landsberg: ‘unconditional authority downwards, and responsibility upwards’. He called it ‘Germanic democracy’.225 He underlined the importance of the image of discipline, unity, and strength.226 He ended by comparing ‘the great popular leader’ with ‘the great founder of a religion’. His task was not to weigh up pros and cons like an academic; not to allow freedom to reach alternative judgements. ‘He must communicate to his listeners an apodictic faith. Only then can the mass of followers be led where they should be led. They will then also follow the leader if setbacks are encountered; but only then, if they have communicated to them unconditional belief in the absolute rightness… in the mission of the Führer and… of their own people.’227
Hitler idolatry was deliberately fostered by the party leadership. In a booklet published in 1926, Goebbels – well on the way, as we have seen, to becoming that very year a worshipper of Hitler – used mystical language redolent of German romanticism and the ideology of the pre-Nazi Youth Movement, to describe his Leader as ‘the fulfilment of a mysterious longing’, bringing faith in deepest despair, ‘a meteor before our astonished eyes’, working ‘a miracle of enlightenment and belief in a world of scepticism and despair’.228 But such sentiments, whatever their propaganda intent, obviously struck a rich vein among the rank-and-file membership. A war veteran dated his Führer worship to Hitler’s speeches during his trial in 1924. ‘From that time on I had no thought for anyone but Hitler. His behaviour moved me to give him my whole faith, without reserve.’229 One party member who heard Hitler speak in Bonn in 1926 thought he evoked ‘the feelings of every good German. The German soul spoke to German manhood in his words. From that day on I could never violate my allegiance to Hitler. I saw his unlimited faith in his people and the desire to set them free.’230 A Russian refugee, a former aristocrat, also heard Hitler speak in 1926, in Mecklenburg. The content of the speech evidently left no mark on him. But by the end he was crying with emotion: ‘a liberating scream of the purest enthusiasm discharged the unbearable tension as the auditorium rocked with applause’.231
The longing for authority and subaltern mentality was widespread in those who found appeal in the early Nazi movement. Romantics, neo-conservatives, those fixated on mythical glories of the past, despairing and resentful of the present, dreaming of a heroic future, could all find hope in a coming ‘great leader’, a national redeemer. Whether such individuals looked subconsciously to a monarch, a military commander, a statesman, a priest, or simply a father-figure, their naïve feelings about the need for authority, bringing with it, they imagined, the yearned-for national unity, were hugely magnified by the evident divisions in Weimar politics and society, which could only too easily be exploited by the nationalist Right. The ‘search for the strong man’ was commonplace in inter-war Europe as part of the assault on democracy. It is not surprising that it was at its most vehement in the two democracies – Italy and Germany – that experienced the deepest crises of pluralist politics.
The establishment of the Führer cult was decisive for the development of the Nazi Movement. Without it, as 1924 had shown, it would have been torn apart by factionalism. With it, the still precarious unity could be preserved by calling on loyalty to Hitler as a prime duty. Among the party leadership, feelings had to be subordinated to the overriding need for unity. When there was criticism of Hitler, and Ludendorff was advanced as ‘the greater man’ in a dispute in the Hanover party in April 1927, Karl Dincklage, the Deputy Gauleiter and an important party speaker, wrote: ‘We in Gau Hanover retain our loyal following to Hitler. It’s quite immaterial whether we think Ludendorff or Hitler is the greater. That’s left to each one of us to decide.’’232 And when a serious conflict dividing allegiances in the faction-ridden Berlin party arose in June that year, the loyalty-card was played once more. The bitter dispute was occasioned by the competition between Goebbels’s new Berlin newspaper Der Angriff (The Attack), and the struggling Berliner Arbeiter-Zeitung (Berlin Workers’ Newspaper), edited by Gregor Strasser. It rapidly degenerated into the trading of personal insults between the two former allies, gratefully exploited by the Nazis’ political enemies. The row dragged on until the winter. It was ended when Hitler brought both rivals to Munich to offer to a packed Hofbräuhaus their public demonstration of unity ‘bolstered by the common belief in a lofty, holy mission and by the feeling of loyalty binding them to the common idea and also to the common leader in the person of Adolf Hitler’. Party members were told that ‘the authority of the idea and the authority of the Leader’ had ‘become one in the person of Adolf Hitler’.233
Within the movement, the SA had always been the most difficult element to control – and so it would continually prove down to 1934. But here, too, Hitler was successfully able to defuse trouble by invoking loyalty to his own person. In May 1927, he made an impassioned speech to the Munich stormtroopers, demoralized and rebellious towards the SA leader Franz von Pfeffer. At the end of his speech, he resorted to his usual ploy. He stepped down from the rostrum, shook hands with each SA-man, and gained their renewed pledge of personal loyalty to him.234
Clashes over strategy, factional disputes, personal rivalries – all were endemic in the NSDAP. The interminable conflicts and animosities, normally personal or tactical rather than ideological, almost invariably stopped short of any attack on Hitler. He intervened as little as possible. In fact, the rivalry and competition simply showed him, according to his own concept of social-Darwinist struggle, who among his competing underlings was the stronger.235 Nor did Hitler make any effort to reconcile ideological nuances within the party, unless they threatene
d to become counter-productive by deviating the single-minded drive for power through mass mobilization into sectarian squabbling. The Führer cult was accepted because it offered all parties the only remedy to this. Personal loyalty to Hitler, whether genuine or forced, was the price of unity. In some cases, Nazi leaders were wholly convinced of Hitler’s greatness and ‘mission’. In others, their own ambitions could only be upheld by lip-service to the supreme Leader. Either way, the result was that Hitler’s mastery over the Movement increased to the position where it was well-nigh unchallengeable. And either way, the transmission belt within the party faithful had been manufactured for the subsequent extension of the Führer cult to wider sectors of the German electorate. The Leader cult was indispensable to the party. And the subsummation of the ‘idea’ in Hitler’s own person was necessary, if party energy was not to be dissipated in harmful factional divides. By avoiding doctrinal dispute, as he had done in 1924, and focusing all energies on the one goal of obtaining power, Hitler could – sometimes with difficulty – hold the party together. Along the way, the Führer cult had developed its own momentum. Though he fully recognized its propaganda value, Hitler himself was on occasion forced to intervene to prevent absurdities of excess, which only brought merciless lampooning from his political enemies.236