by Ian Kershaw
The election results confirmed to many observers that the Hitler Movement was finished.283 The Prussian government also thought so. At the end of September it lifted the ban preventing Hitler speaking at public meetings.284 On 16 November, he spoke for the first time in the Sportpalast in Berlin. The gigantic hall was packed to capacity by the time he arrived, accompanied by fanfares and banner-waving SA men. The atmosphere bore little resemblance to a conventional political meeting. His speech on ‘The Struggle that Will Sometime Break the Chains’ was repeatedly interrupted by storms of applause.285 There was nothing new in the speech. Presentation, not content, was what counted. As always, the appeal was solely to the emotions. The Revolution, pacifism, internationalism, democracy were all inevitably castigated. Economic recovery could only be brought about through national freedom. And ‘the premiss of freedom is power’. For this, heroic leaders were needed. Hitler did not explicitly refer to the ‘Jewish Question’. But he soon turned to his central obsession of ‘racial defilement’. The ‘bastardization’ of culture, morals and blood was undermining the value of the individual. But ‘a people that resists the bastardization of its spirit and blood can be saved. The German people has its specific value and cannot be set on an equal level to 70 million negroes… Negro music is dominant, but if we put a Beethoven symphony alongside a shimmy, victory is clear… From our strong faith the strength will come to deploy self-help against this bastardization. That is the aim that the NSDAP has set itself: to lift the terms nationalism and socialism out of their previous meaning. To be national can only mean to be behind your people, and to be socialist can only be to stand up for the right of your people, also externally.’286
With this vaguest of definitions, he was keeping open the appeal to all sections of society. Class divisions could only be overcome by national unity. The NSDAP stood above classes. It was ‘not purely nationalist or socialist, bourgeois or proletarian’ but stood for all ‘who honestly want to construct the national community, put aside class-pride and conceit in order to fight together’. As a result, he went on, ‘the party is a movement which can call itself with pride a workers’ party because there is no one in it who is not toiling and working for the existence of the people’. The NSDAP was engaged in a ‘gigantic struggle against internationalism’. It did not rest on ‘votes’ and the ‘error’ of democracy, but on the ‘authority of the leader’.287 This was the way to overcoming Marxism and attaining the land and soil that would remove Germany’s slavery. He ended by pouring scorn on the speaking-ban that had succeeded in filling ‘the biggest hall in the Reich’, and with an appeal to God to bless Germany’s struggle. The crowd went delirious. Critical observers could remain uncomprehending at a mélange of half-truths, distortions, over-simplifications, and vague, pseudo-religious redemptionist promises.288 But the 16,000 people jammed into the Sportpalast had not turned up to listen to an intellectual discourse. They had heard what they had come to hear.
By the time Hitler spoke in the Sportpalast, the first dark clouds were already gathering over Germany’s economy. The mounting crisis in agriculture was leading to widespread indebtedness, bankruptcies, forced sales of land, and enormous bitterness in the farming community. In the biggest industrial belt, Ruhr industrialists refused to accept an arbitration award and locked out the whole work-force of the iron and steel industry, leaving 230,000 workers without jobs or wages for weeks.289 Meanwhile, unemployment was sharply on the rise, reaching almost 3 million by January 1929, an increase of a million over the previous year.290 Politically, too, there were growing difficulties. The ‘grand coalition’ under the SPD Chancellor Hermann Müller was shaky from the outset. A split, and serious loss of face for the SPD, occurred over the decision to build a battle cruiser (a policy opposed by the Social Democrats before the election). The Ruhr iron dispute further opened the rifts in the government and exposed it to its critics on Left and Right. It was the first shot of the concerted attempt by the conservative Right to roll back the social advances made in the Weimar welfare state. The ensuing conflict over social policy would ultimately lead to the demise of the Müller government. And by the end of the year, the reparations issue began to loom again. It would become acute in 1929.
Remarkably, as intelligent an analyst as the economist Joseph Schumpeter could still, in autumn 1928, look with unclouded optimism at ‘the growing stability of our social relations’.291 More percipient was the Reich foreign minister Gustav Stresemann, who warned in November 1928 of the dire consequences for Germany should America withdraw its short-term credits, on which the economy had rested in the previous years.292
In reality, the ‘golden years’ of Weimar had been less ‘golden’ than they had seemed. Germany had been throughout a society profoundly divided. The brief interlude of relative stability had done nothing to diminish the depth of the class and confessional fissures.293 Social grievances remained acute. Relatively high levels of unemployment – over 2 million were out of work in 1926 – radicalized many workers, a good number of them young.294 Small shopkeepers and producers felt threatened and angered by department stores and consumer cooperatives. Along with many craftsmen, feeling their traditional status and livelihood undermined by modern mass-production, and white-collar workers keen to keep their distance from blue-collar wage-earners, they had no affection for Weimar democracy, even in its best years. Farmers, as already mentioned, were up in arms at the collapse of agricultural prices.
Culturally, the divisions were equally acute. Weimar avant-garde art forms repelled far more people than they attracted. Cultural conservativism and philistinism were, as ever, closely allied. Popular culture was equally decried. Goebbels’s attacks on ‘asphalt culture’ would later find an echo, not just among hard-core Nazis, but among a solid reactionary bourgeoisie, alienated by the ‘Americanization’ of big-city popular culture in the 1920s.
The sharply divided social milieus and ‘sub-cultures’ were reflected in a highly unstable political landscape. The 1928 election had only at the most superficial glance been a success for democracy. The increased KPD vote marked a shift away from democracy on the Left. The liberal parties of the centre and centre-right had lost an alarming proportion of their support since 1919. Their disintegration and fragmentation reflected disillusionment with democracy and a rightward shift of voters, even before the Nazis made a significant electoral mark.295 On the nationalist Right, the loss of support by the DNVP was only at first sight a comfort to democrats. Many of the party’s erstwhile supporters had drifted still further to the Right, into a variety of interest and protest parties that would ultimately be swept into the NSDAP ,296 Above all, Weimar democracy was unable, even in its ‘golden years’, to win a firm enough base of support to counter those powerful sectors of society that opposed its very existence. Its problem of legitimacy remained acute. Renewed economic crisis would evidently pose an immense threat.
And here, as Stresemann had emphasized, stability was far less assured than the outward glitter of the ‘golden twenties’ suggested. The German economy depended upon American short-term loans. Its own productivity and investment lagged, profitability was declining as wages were rising, public finances were coming increasingly under strain, and a heavily subsidized agricultural sector was lurching into deep crisis, following a collapse of world food-prices, at least two years before the Wall Street Crash.297
In the worsening conditions of the winter of 1928–9, the NSDAP began to attract increasing support. By the end of 1928, the number of membership cards distributed had reached 108,717.298 Social groups that had scarcely been reached before could now be tapped. In November 1928, Hitler received a rapturous reception from 2,500 students at Munich University.299 Before he spoke, the meeting had been addressed by the recently appointed Reich Leader of the Nazi Students’ Federation, the twenty-one-year-old Baldur von Schirach. The future Hitler Youth leader came from a highly cultured bourgeois family, based in Weimar – Germany’s literary capital – where his father had b
een a highly regarded director of the Court Theatre. Unusually for a leading Nazi, he spoke excellent English; his American mother, with imperfect command of the language of her adopted country, had spoken only English to him in his childhood, so that at the age of six he spoke, so he later said, not a word of German. The end of the war had brought tragedy for the Schirachs: Baldur’s father lost his job; his brother, Karl, committed suicide, despairing at the block on his officer’s career as a consequence of the Versailles Treaty and attributing his decision to kill himself to ‘Germany’s misfortune’. In Weimar, a town conscious of past glories but by now infested with völkisch nationalist and antisemitic clamour, Baldur had found his way – helped by his mentor, later Deputy Gauleiter in Thuringia, Hans Severus Ziegler – into a paramilitary youth organization and was an admirer of Ludendorff before for the first time hearing Hitler speak, at the time of the elections for Reich President in March 1925. So thrilled was he at the experience that he ran home and wrote a poem about Hitler which was published, bringing him a signed photograph from his hero. He devoured the first volume of Mein Kampf in a single evening, and joined the party at the beginning of May. He was Hitler’s man – and would see to it that the Führer cult would flourish in the infant Nazi youth organization and in the Students’ League. By late 1928, Schirach could gain credit for a big increase in the Nazi vote in student union elections – up to 32 per cent in Erlangen, and 20 per cent in Greifswald and Würzburg. The success secured him Hitler’s support, paving the way for him to take over the leadership of the Hitler Youth in 1931.300
The student union elections gave Hitler an encouraging sign of gathering Nazi strength. But it was above all in the countryside, among the radicalized peasants, that the Nazis began to make particularly rapid advances. In Schleswig-Holstein, bomb attacks on government offices gave the clearest indication of the mood in the farming community. In January 1929, radicalized peasants in the region founded the Landvolk, an inchoate but violent protest movement that rapidly became prey to Nazi inroads. Two months later, following an NSDAP meeting in the village of Wöhrden, a fight between SA men and KPD supporters led to two stormtroopers being killed and a number of others injured. Local reactions showed graphically the potential for Nazi gains in the disaffected countryside. There was an immediate upsurge in Nazi support in the locality. Old peasant women now wore the party badge on their work-smocks. From conversations with them, ran the police report, it was clear that they had no idea of the aims of the party. But they were certain that the government was incapable and the authorities were squandering taxpayers’ money. They were convinced ‘that only the National Socialists could be the saviours from this alleged misery’. Farmers spoke of a Nazi victory through parliament taking too long. A civil war was what was needed. The mood was ‘extraordinarily embittered’ and the population were open to all forms of violent action. Using the incident as a propaganda opportunity, Hitler attended the funeral of the dead SA men, and visited those wounded. This made a deep impression on the local inhabitants. He and the other leading Nazis were applauded as ‘liberators of the people’.301
As the ‘crisis before the crisis’ – economic and political – deepened, Hitler kept up his propaganda offensive.302 In the first half of 1929 he wrote ten articles for the party press and held sixteen major speeches before large, rapturous audiences. Four were in Saxony, during the run-up to the state elections there on 12 May. Outright attacks on the Jews did not figure in the speeches.303 The emphasis was on the bankruptcy at home and abroad of the Weimar system, the exploitation of international finance and the suffering of ‘small people’, the catastrophic economic consequences of democratic rule, the social divisions that party politics caused and replicated, and above all the need to restore German strength and unity and gain the land to secure its future. ‘The key to the world market has the shape of the sword,’ he declared.304 The only salvation from decline was through power: ‘The entire system must be altered. Therefore the great task is to restore to people their belief in leadership (Fübrerglauben),’ he concluded.305
Hitler’s speeches were part of a well-organized propaganda campaign, providing saturation coverage of Saxony before the election. It was planned by Himmler, but under Hitler’s own supervision.306 The growing numerical strength of the party, and the improvements made in its organization and structure, now allowed more extensive coverage. This in turn helped to create an image of dynamism, drive and energy. Local activism, and the winning of influential figures in a community, usually held the key to Nazi progress.307 Hitler had to be used sparingly – for best effect, as well as to avoid too punishing a schedule.308 A Hitler speech was a major bonus for any party branch. But in the changing conditions from 1929 onwards, the NSDAP was chalking up successes in places where people had never seen Hitler.309
The NSDAP won 5 per cent of the vote in the Saxon election.310 The following month, the party gained 4 per cent in the Mecklenburg elections – double what it had achieved the previous year in the Reichstag election. Its two elected members held a pivotal position in a Landtag evenly balanced between Left and Right.311 Towards the end of June, Coburg, in northern Bavaria, became the first town in Germany to elect a Nazi-run town council.312 By October, the NSDAP’s share of the popular vote had reached 7 per cent in the Baden state elections.313 This was still before the Wall Street Crash ushered in the great Depression.
The revival of the reparations issue provided further grist to the mill of Nazi agitation. The results of the deliberations of the committee of experts, which had been working since January 1929 under the chairmanship of Owen D. Young, an American banker and head of the General Electric Company, to regulate the payment of reparations, were eventually signed on 7 June. Compared with the Dawes Plan, the settlement was relatively favourable to Germany. Repayments were to be kept low for three years, and would overall be some 17 per cent less than under the Dawes Plan.314 But it would take fifty-nine years before the reparations would finally be paid off. The Allies’ quid pro quo was the offer to withdraw from the Rhineland by 30 June, five years earlier than stipulated under the Versailles Treaty. Stresemann was therefore ready to accept.315 The nationalist Right were outraged. Alfred Hugenberg, former Krupp director, leader of the DNVP and press baron, controlling the nationalist press and with a big stake in the UFA film company, formed in July a ‘Reich Committee for the German People’s Petition’ to organize a campaign to force the government to reject the Young Plan. He persuaded Hitler to join.316 Franz Seldte and Theodor Duesterberg from the Stahlhelm, Heinrich Claß from the Pan-German League, and the industrial magnate Fritz Thyssen were all members of the committee.317 Hitler’s presence in this company of capitalist tycoons and reactionaries was not to the liking of the national revolutionary wing of the NSDAP, headed by Otto Strasser.318 But, ever the opportunist, Hitler recognized the chances the campaign offered. The draft ‘Law against the Enslavement of the German People’ drawn up by the Committee in September, rejecting the Young Plan and the ‘war guilt lie’, marginally gained the necessary support to stage a plebiscite. But when the plebiscite eventually took place, on 22 December 1929, only 5.8 million – 13.8 per cent of the electorate – voted for it.319 The campaign had proved a failure – but not for Hitler. He and his party had benefited from massive exposure freely afforded him in the Hugenberg press.320 And he had been recognized as an equal partner by those in high places, with good contacts to sources of funding and influence.
Some of Hitler’s new-found bedfellows had been honoured guests at the Party Rally that took place in Nuremberg from 1 to 4 August 1929. The deputy leader of the Stahlhelm, Theodor Duesterberg, and Count von der Golz, chairman of the Vereinigte Vaterländische Verbände (United Patriotic Associations) graced the Rally with their presence.321 The Ruhr industrialist and benefactor of the party Emil Kirdorf had also accepted an invitation. Winifred Wagner, the Lady of Bayreuth, was also an honoured guest.322 Thirty-five special trains brought 25,000 S A and SS men and 1,300 members of t
he Hitler Youth to Nuremberg. Police estimated an attendance of around 30–40,000 in all. It was a far bigger and more grandiose spectacle than the previous rally, two years earlier, had been. It reflected a new confidence and optimism in a party whose membership had grown by this time to some 130,00ο.323 And compared with two years earlier, Hitler’s dominance was even more complete. Working sessions simply rubber-stamped policy determined from above. Hitler showed little interest in them. His only concern, as always, was with the propaganda display of the Rally.324
He had reason to feel satisfied with the way his movement had developed over the four years since its refoundation. The party was now almost three times as large as it had been at the time of the putsch, and growing fast. It was spread throughout the country, and making headway in areas which had never been strongholds. It was now far more tightly organized and structured. There was much less room for dissension. Rivals in the völkisch movement had been amalgamated or had faded into insignificance. Not least, Hitler’s own mastery was complete. His own recipe for success was unchanged: hammer home the same message, exploit any opportunity for agitation, and hope for external circumstances to favour the party. But although great strides forward had been made since 1925, and though the party was registering modest electoral gains at state elections and acquiring a good deal of publicity, no realist could have reckoned much to its chances of winning power. For that, Hitler’s only hope was a massive and comprehensive crisis of the state.
He had no notion just how quickly events would turn to the party’s advantage. But on 3 October, Gustav Stresemann, the only statesman of real standing in Germany, who had done most to sustain the shaky Müller government, died following a stroke. Three weeks later, on 24 October 1929, the largest stock-market in the world, in Wall Street, New York, crashed. The crisis Hitler needed was about to envelop Germany.