by Ian Kershaw
9
BREAKTHROUGH
‘I had lost all I possessed through adverse economic conditions. And so, early in 1930,I joined the National Socialist Party.’
An unskilled labourer,
newly won over to the Hitler Movement
‘How many look to him in touching faith as the helper, saviour, the redeemer from overgreat distress. To him, who rescues the Prussian prince, the scholar, the clergyman, the peasant, the worker, the unemployed.’
Luise Solmitz, a schoolteacher,
on hearing Hitler speak in Hamburg, April 1932
The terrible burden of the breakdown threatened to bring all economic life to a standstill. Thousands of factories closed their doors. Hunger was the daily companion of the German working man. Added to this was the artificial whip of scarcity, wielded by the Jews, which sent working men scurrying from their homes to beg for food from the farmers… The government carried its measures against the public so far that many an honest working man had to resort to theft to obtain food… Burglaries, too, became daily occurrences, and the police had their hands full protecting the citizens’ property. All fellow citizens, with the exception of the Communists, yearned for better times. As for me, like many another, I had lost all I possessed through adverse economic conditions. And so, early in 1930, I joined the National Socialist Party.1
This was one individual’s story of how he became a Nazi. Another recounted:
When we consider that on the one hand the policies of the Red government, particularly the inflation and taxes, deprived me of all means of livelihood, while on the other hand we soldiers of the front were being ruled by a gang of exploiters ready to stoop to any means to seize the starvation wages of our suffering, duped comrades, it will become clear why a number of us welcomed the activities of patriotic groups, particularly those of the Hitler movement. The combination of patriotic aims along with social reform led many an old soldier and idealist under the banner of the National Socialist Workers’ Party.2
These two new recruits were won over to the NSDAP as the economic crisis began to grip Germany. Neither the first, an unskilled labourer in his early thirties, nor the second, a small trader of around the same age who had been forced to sell up his bakery in 1926 for a low price (which he blamed on Jewish creditors) and eke out a living thereafter as a pedlar, were exact fits for the abstract sociological model of a typical Nazi supporter.3 But their short accounts offer a glimpse of the type of psychology and motivation that were beginning to drive thousands – predominantly male, and for the most part young – to join the Hitler Movement as the storm-clouds gathered over Germany in 1930. In each case the personal bitterness and loss of self-esteem found a simple explanation in policies of the ‘Red’ government and a ready scapegoat in the Jews. The sense of betrayal and exploitation was acute. And it was not just a feeling that a change of government was needed. Among those drawn in increasing numbers from a wide variety of motives to the NSDAP in 1930 there was a common feeling of elemental, visceral hatred for the Weimar state itself, for the ‘system’ as it was so often called. Hatred, as Hitler had recognized, was among the most powerful of emotions. That was what he consciously appealed to. That is what drove so many of his followers. But there was idealism, too – misplaced, certainly, but idealism none the less: hopes of a new society, of a ‘national community’ that would transcend all existing social divides. There would, recruits to the Nazi Party believed, be no return to the class-ridden, hierarchical society of the past, resting on status, privilege, and the wealth of the few at the expense of the many. The new society would be fair without destroying talent, flair, ability, initiative, creativity in the way they saw threatened by the social egalitarianism preached by the Marxists. It would be one in which achievement, not status, would gain recognition, where the high-and-mighty would be deprived of their seeming God-given rights to lord it over the humble and lowly, where sweeping social reform would ensure that those who deserved it would gain their just rewards, where the ‘little man’ would no longer be exploited by big capital or threatened by organized labour, where Marxist internationalism would be crushed and replaced by loyal devotion to the German people. Discriminatory feelings were built into the idealism. Those who did not belong in the ‘national community’ – ‘shirkers’, ‘spongers’, ‘parasites’, and, of course, those deemed not to be German at all, notably Jews – would be ruthlessly suppressed. But for true ‘comrades of the people’ (Volksgenossen) – the term the Nazis invented to replace ‘citizen’ (Bürger) for those who did belong – the new society would be a genuine ‘community’, where the rights of the individual were subordinated to the common good of the whole, and where duty preceded any rights. Only on this basis could the German nation become strong again, recover its pride, cast aside the shackles unfairly imposed on it by its enemies in the Versailles Treaty. But only through complete destruction of the hated, divisive democratic system could the ‘national community’ be accomplished at all.
In this crude but powerful imagery that attracted many who found their way to the NSDAP, nationalism and socialism were not seen as opposites; they went together, were part of the same Utopian dream of a reborn nation, strong and united. Many who, as the crisis set in during 1930, came to vote for the NSDAP or even to join the party had never encountered Hitler personally and were often becoming interested in him for the first time. Usually, they were already predisposed to the Nazi message. Its ideology did not in itself distinguish the Nazi Party from its rivals on the Right. Nationalism and anti-Marxism were, in different shadings, common currency in all but the parties of the Left. Antisemitism was far from the preserve of the NSDAP. What set Hitler’s movement apart was above all its image of activism, dynamism, élan, youthfulness, vigour. To many, it marked the future, ‘the new Germany’, born out of a complete break with the present, but resting on the true values – as they saw it – of the Teutonic past. Hitler encapsulated their hopes of a ruthless showdown with their enemies and exploiters, and embodied their dreams of a reborn Germany. ‘Any true German,’ declared another new member around this time, ‘in his soul longed for a German saviour, and sought to raise his eyes in trust and confidence to a truly great leader.’4
Economic crises frequently unseat governments. It is much rarer for them to destroy systems of government. Even the extreme severity of the Depression of the early 1930s was compatible in some countries with the survival of democracy – where democracy was already firmly anchored, and not undermined by a lost war. The terrible privations that accompanied mass unemployment and economic collapse in the US A and Britain brought turbulence but no serious challenge to the democratic state. Democracy could emerge intact, perhaps strengthened. Even France, where democracy had a much more flimsy base, survived with some scares. But in Germany, the ‘system’ itself, the very nature of the state, was at stake from the beginning of the crisis. Hitler and his party were the beneficiaries of this systemic crisis of the Weimar state. They were not its primary cause. Even in its ‘golden’ years, Weimar democracy had never won the hearts and minds of large numbers of Germans. And even in those years, powerful sectors of society – business, the army, big landowners, leading civil servants in charge of government administration, academics, many intellectuals and opinion-leaders – had tolerated rather than actively supported the Republic. Not a few among the power élites were awaiting the opportunity to discard the democracy they detested so much. Now, as the crisis started to unfold, such groups began to show their true colours at the same time as the masses began to desert the Republic in droves. In Britain and America, the élites backed the existing, and long-established, democratic system, deeply embedded constitutionally, because it continued to serve their interests. In Germany, where the roots of democracy were far more shallow, they looked to change a system which, they felt, less and less upheld their interests, and to move to authoritarian rule. (For most of them this did not mean, at the time, Nazi rule.) In Britain and America the masses
were, despite misery and discontent, faced with little alternative to the existing, well-established political parties. Nor, with few exceptions, did they look for any. In Germany, ‘political space’ was opened up for the Nazi breakthrough by the prior fragmentation of support for the parties of the centre and Right.5 In Germany, therefore, the economic crisis ushered in from the beginning a fundamental crisis of the state. The battleground was, from the outset, the state itself. That was what Hitler wanted.
I
The Nazi leadership did not immediately recognize the significance of the American stock-market crash in October 1929. The Völkischer Beobachter did not even mention Wall Street’s ‘Black Friday’.6 But Germany was soon reverberating under its shock-waves. Its dependence upon American short-term loans ensured that the impact would be extraordinarily severe. Industrial output, prices, and wages began the steep drop that would reach its calamitous low-point in 1932.7 The agricultural crisis that had already been radicalizing Germany’s farmers in 1928 and 1929 was sharply intensified. By January 1930, the labour exchanges recorded 3,218,000 unemployed – some 14 per cent of the ‘working-age’ population. The true figure, taking in those on short-time, has been estimated as over 41/2 million.8
The protest of ordinary people who took the view that democracy had failed them, that ‘the system’ should be swept away, became shriller on both Left and Right. Nazi advances in regional elections reflected the growing radicalization of the mood of the electorate. The Young Plan plebiscite had given the party much-needed publicity in the widely read Hugenberg press. Its value, said Hitler, was that it had provided ‘the occasion for a propaganda wave the like of which had never been seen in Germany before’.9 It had allowed the NSDAP to project itself as the most radical voice of the Right, a protest-movement par excellence that had never been tarnished with any involvement in Weimar government. In the Baden state elections on 27 October 1929, the NSDAP won 7 per cent of the vote. In the Lübeck city elections a fortnight or so later, the percentage was 8.1. Even in the Berlin council elections on 17 November, the party almost quadrupled its vote of 1928, though its 5.8 per cent was still marginal, compared with over 50 per cent that went to the two left-wing parties. Most significantly of all, in the Thuringian state elections held on 8 December, the NSDAP trebled its vote of 1928 and broke the 10 per cent barrier for the first time, recording 11.3 per cent of the votes cast. The Nazi votes were won mainly at the expense of the DVP, the DNVP, and the Landbund. In many of the small towns and villages of the Thüringer Wald, where the craftsmen producing toys and Christmas-tree decorations had been hard hit by the onset of the Depression, the Nazis were able to increase their vote five-fold. The six seats (from fifty-three) that the NSDAP won in the Landtag left the construction of a Thuringian anti-Marxist coalition government in the hands of the Nazis.10 Should the Nazi Party exploit the situation by agreeing to enter government for the first time but run the risk of courting unpopularity through its participation in an increasingly discredited system? Hitler decided the NSDAP had to enter government. Had he refused, he said, it would have come to new elections and voters could have turned away from the NSDAP.11 What happened gives an indication of the way at this time the ‘seizure of power’ in the Reich itself was envisaged.12
Hitler demanded the two posts he saw as most important in the Thuringian government: the Ministry of the Interior, controlling the civil service and police; and the Ministry of Education, overseeing culture as well as policy for school and university. ‘He who controls both these ministries and ruthlessly and persistently exploits his power in them can achieve extraordinary things,’ wrote Hitler.13 When his nominee for both ministries, Wilhelm Frick, was rejected – the DVP claimed it could not work with a man who (for his part in the Beerhall Putsch) had been convicted of high treason – Hitler went himself to Weimar and imposed an ultimatum. If within three days Frick were not accepted, the NSDAP would bring about new elections. Industrialists from the region, lobbied by Hitler, put heavy pressure on the DVP – the party of big business – and Hitler’s demands were finally accepted. Frick was given the task of purging the civil service, police, and teachers of revolutionary, Marxist, and democratic tendencies and bringing education in line with National Socialist ideas. A first step would be to appoint Dr Hans Günther, a race-theory ‘expert’, to a new chair of Racial Questions and Racial Knowledge (Rassenfragen und Rassenkunde) at the University of Jena.14
The first Nazi experiment in government was anything but successful. Frick’s attempts to reconstruct educational and cultural policy on a basis of ideological racism were not well received, and moves to nazify the police and civil service were blocked by the Reich Ministry of the Interior. After only a year, Frick was removed from office following a vote of no-confidence supported by the NSDAP’s coalition partners.15 The strategy – to prove so fateful in 1933 – of including Nazis in government in the expectation that they would prove incompetent and lose support was, on the basis of the Thuringian experiment, by no means absurd.
In his letter of 2 February 1930 to an overseas party supporter outlining the developments that led to participation in the Thuringian government, Hitler pointed to the rapid advances the party was making in gaining support. By the time he was writing, party membership officially numbered 200,000 (though the actual figures were somewhat lower).16 The Nazis were starting to make their presence felt in places where they had been scarcely noticed earlier.
In Northeim, a small town in Lower Saxony, divided along class lines but otherwise a fairly balanced and economically by no means deprived community, the NSDAP had been wholly insignificant before 1929. In the 1928 elections, the party had won only 2.3 per cent of the vote; the SPD’s share was almost 45 per cent.17 But local activists began to revitalize the party the following year. They peppered the town with propaganda in early 1930. Despite the fact that the town was at first relatively unaffected by the looming Depression, its middle class and the farmers in the adjacent countryside already felt aggrieved by levels of taxation, problems of credit, and economic competition. They blamed the government, which they saw as in the hands of Marxists. Nazi propaganda, makingfull play of well-chosen speakers, started to make inroads. Though attendance was still small, the image of the party was one of unparalleled vitality, drive, and youthful vigour. ‘There was a. feeling of restless energy about the Nazis,’ was one housewife’s comment. ‘You constantly saw the swastika painted on the sidewalks or found them littered by pamphlets put out by the Nazis. I was drawn by the feeling of strength about the party, even though there was much in it which was highly questionable.’18 Image was crucial to the spread of Nazi success. The NSDAP was known predominantly in Northeim as a vehemently anti-Marxist – that is, anti-SPD – party, and one that was avidly nationalist and militarist. The NSDAP had no special purchase on such ‘ideas’. Image counted for more. That was what distinguished them from rival parties with a not dissimilar message and ideology. Manipulation of nationalist and religious symbols helped to win middle-class support. Important, too, was the example set by well-respected figures in the town. That the popular and well-regarded local bookseller in Northeim, a local worthy, pillar of the Protestant Church in the town, was a member of the party made others take note. ‘If he’s in it, it must be all right,’ was what they said.19 Antisemitism was relatively unimportant as a drawing-card. It did not deter the townspeople from supporting the NSDAP. But it was seldom the prime reason for doing so.20 Few, if any, of the local inhabitants had seen Hitler in person by the time they started to find the NSDAP attractive. Again it was image – what Hitler was said to stand for, as relayed in innumerable propaganda meetings – that was important.
What was happening in Northeim was happening in countless other towns and villages the length and breadth of Germany. Since the Young Campaign the previous autumn, rejecting the plan for long-term repayment of reparations, the NSDAP had been building up to around a hundred propaganda meetings a day.21 This would reach a crescendo durin
g the Reichstag election campaign later in the summer. Many of the speakers were now of good quality, hand-picked, well-trained, centrally controlled but able to latch on to and exploit local issues as well as putting across the unchanging basic message of Nazi agitation. The National Socialists were increasingly forcing themselves on to the front pages of newspapers, forming more and more the talking-point around the Stammtisch. They began to penetrate the network of clubs and associations (Vereine) that were the social framework of so many provincial communities. Where local leaders, enjoying respectability and influence, were won over, further converts often rapidly followed.22 In the relatively homogeneous villages in Schleswig-Holstein, where feelings about the Weimar ‘system’ were, as we have seen, running high on account of the agrarian crisis, the push from one or two farmers’ leaders could result in a local landslide to the NSDAP.23 Other non-Marxist parties seemed, in the gathering crisis, to be increasingly weak, ineffectual and discredited, or to relate, like the Zentrum (the Catholic party), to only one particular sector of the population. Their disarray could only enhance the appeal of a large, expanding, dynamic and national party, seen more and more to offer the best chance of combating the Left, and increasingly regarded as the only party capable of representing the interests of each section of society in a united ‘national community’. And as increasing numbers joined the party, paid their entry fees to the growing number of Nazi meetings, or threw their Marks into the collection boxes, so the funds grew that enabled still further propaganda activity to unfold.24 The tireless activism was, then, already showing signs of success even in the early months of 1930. The extraordinary breakthrough of the September Reichstag election did not come out of thin air.