Hitler 1889-1936: Hubris

by Ian Kershaw

  IV

  During the summer of 1930, the election campaign built up to fever pitch. The campaign was centrally organized by Goebbels, under broad guidelines laid down by Hitler. A wide array of different techniques was available to local party branches. Lists were circulated of over a hundred Reich speakers with expertise capable of appealing to different interest groups – farmers, civil servants, workers, and so on. The overriding theme was an attack on the disintegration of German political life into a ‘heap of special interests’ (Haufen von Interessenten).80

  Two years earlier, the press had largely ignored the NSDAP. Now, the Brownshirts forced themselves on to the front pages.81 It was impossible to ignore them. The high level of agitation – spiced with street violence – put them on the political map in a big way. Their political opponents provided confirmation of the maxim that all publicity is good publicity. In the Ruhr, one of the toughest areas for the NSDAP, given the strength of support for the Socialists, Communists and Zentrum, a hostile Dortmund newspaper did not let up in its fierce attacks on the Nazis. But it had to acknowledge the dynamism of the party’s propaganda. ‘Here one can only accord the strongest recognition to the organization, activity, and will to power which inspires the National Socialists,’ the newspaper commented. ‘For years, the flag-bearers of the party have not avoided going into the most outlying villages and casting their slogans to the masses in at least a hundred meetings a day in Germany.’82 The energy and drive of the National Socialist agitation were truly astonishing. No fewer than 1,000 meetings saturated Upper and Middle Franconia during the campaign.83 The authorities in the area expected big Nazi gains, noting the attractiveness of their agitation rooted in disaffection at the ‘inability of parliaments to regulate the finances’ and corresponding sympathy for a ‘fundamental alteration of the state of political affairs’.84 In Germany as a whole, as many as 34,000 meetings were planned for the last four weeks of the campaign.85 No other party remotely matched the scale of the NSDAP’s effort.

  Hitler himself gave twenty big speeches in the six weeks running up to polling-day.86 The attendances were massive. At least 16,000 came to listen to him in the Sportpalast in Berlin on 10 September.87 Two days later, in Breslau, as many as 20–25,000 thronged into the Jahrhunderthalle, while a further 5–6,000 were forced to listen to the speech on loudspeakers outside.88 In the early 1920s, Hitler’s speeches had been dominated by vicious attacks on the Jews. In the later 1920s, the question of ‘living-space’ became the central theme. In the election campaign of 1930, Hitler seldom spoke explicitly of the Jews. The crude tirades of the early 1920s were missing altogether. ‘Living-space’ figured more prominently, posed against the alternative international competition for markets. But it was not omnipresent as it had been in 1927–8. The key theme now was the collapse of Germany under parliamentary democracy and party government into a divided people with separate and conflicting interests, which only the NSDAP could overcome by creating a new unity of the nation, transcending class, estate and profession. Where the Weimar parties represented only specific interest groups, asserted Hitler, the National Socialist Movement alone stood for the nation as a whole.89 In speech after speech, Hitler hammered this message home. Again and again he pilloried the Weimar system, not now crudely and simply as the regime of the ‘November criminals’, but for its failed promises on tax reductions, financial management and employment. All parties were blamed. They were all part of the same party system that had ruined Germany. All had had their part in the policies that had led from Versailles through the reparations terms agreed under the Dawes Plan to their settlement under the Young Plan. Lack of leadership had led to the misery felt by all sections of society. Democracy, pacifism, and internationalism had produced powerlessness and weakness – a great nation brought to its knees. It was time to clear out the rot.90

  But his speeches were not simply negative, not just an attack on the existing system. He presented a vision, a utopia, an ideal: national liberation through strength and unity. He did not propose alternative policies, built into specific election promises. He offered ‘a programme, a gigantic new programme behind which must stand not the new government, but a new German people that has ceased to be a mixture of classes, professions, estates’. It would be, he declared, with his usual stress on stark alternatives (and, as it turned out, prophetically) ‘a community of a people which, beyond all differences, will rescue the common strength of the nation, or will take it to ruin’.91 Only a ‘high ideal’ could overcome the social divisions, he stated.92 It was to be found, he claimed, in National Socialism, which placed the nation, the people as a whole, above any individual sector of society. In place of the decayed, the old, a new Reich had to be built on racial values, selection of the best on the basis of achievement, strength, will, struggle, freeing the genius of the individual personality, and re-establishing Germany’s power and strength as a nation.93 Only National Socialism could bring this about. The NSDAP was not about day-to-day policies like other parties. It could not tread the path of other parties. ‘What we promise,’ Hitler proclaimed to storms of frenetic cheers from his massive audience in the Sportpalast on 10 September, ‘is not material improvement for the individual estate (Stand), but increase in the strength of the nation, because only this indicates the way to power and with it to the liberation of the entire people.’94 It was not a conventional political programme. It was a political crusade. It was not about a change of government. It was a message of national redemption. In a climate of deepening economic gloom and social misery, anxiety, and division, amid perceptions of the failure and ineptitude of seemingly puny parliamentary politicians, the appeal was a powerful one.

  ‘This idea has no idea and no principle, and will therefore be unable to live,’ pronounced Carl von Ossietzky, pacifist and outspoken defender of democracy, in the Weltbühne, the radical journal he edited, shortly before the election. ‘No National Socialist is in a position to define the “socialism” of his party… So nothing remains but the rather peculiar dogma of the calling of Adolf Hitler to save the German nation,’ he continued. ‘The belief in the personality called to leadership is the only thing at all that has developed into a sort of theory of National Socialism. But that is mysticism, and with mysticism it’s possible to pull the wool over people’s eyes for a while, but you can’t fill their stomachs with it.’95 As an intellectual analysis of Nazi ideology, this showed notable insight. But politically, the judgement was less astute. Ossietzky joined the army of those premature in their obituaries of National Socialism, grossly underestimating the missionary appeal, emotive force, and potential for mobilization of Hitler’s message of national salvation, to be attained through the strength of social unity and solidarity.

  The message appealed not least to the idealism of a younger generation, not old enough to have fought in the war, but not too young to have experienced at first hand little but crisis, conflict, and national decline. Many from this generation, born between about 1900 and 1910, coming from middle-class families, no longer rooted in the monarchical tradition of the pre-war years, outrightly rejecting socialism and Communism, but alienated by the political, economic, social, and ideological strife of the Weimar era, were on the search for something new.96 Laden with all the emotive baggage that belonged to the German notions of ‘Volk’ (ethnic people) and ‘Gemeinschaff (community), the aim of a ‘national community’ which would overcome class divisions seemed a highly positive one.97 That the notion of ‘national community’ gained its definition by those it excluded from it, and that social harmony was to be established through racial purity and homogeneity, was taken for granted if not explicitly lauded. It would become clear, once the Third Reich was established, that discriminatory policies directed at those groups to be excluded were easier to bring about than was the reality of a harmonious ‘national community’.

  In the absence of opinion surveys, the motivating factors behind support of the NSDAP cannot be established with precision. B
ut an indication – even if the sample cannot be regarded as a representative one – is provided by the life stories of 581 ordinary members of the NSDAP, collected in 1934, most of whom joined before Hitler gained power and a majority even by 1930.98 In almost a third of the cases, the social solidarity of the ‘national community’ was the most dominant ideological theme. A further third were prompted mainly by nationalist, revanchist, super-patriotic, and German-romantic notions. In only about an eighth of the cases was antisemitism the prime ideological concern (though two-thirds of the biographies revealed some form of dislike of Jews). Almost a fifth were motivated by the Hitler cult alone. From a different angle, ranked by chief object of hostility, two-thirds of the party members were predominantly anti-Marxists, while over a half of the respondents looked forward to a ‘nation reborn’ and free of ‘the system’.99 The figures are no more than suggestive. But they are sufficient to show again that the appeal of Hitler and his Movement was not based on any distinctive doctrine.100 It was a pastiche of different ideas drawn from the ideological baggage mainly of pan-Germanism and neo-conservatism, blended with an amalgam of varying phobias, resentments, and prejudice. All were represented, in some form, by other political parties and movements. But none of these had National Socialism’s image of strength and dynamism, the missionary drive of the national crusade. And Hitler was simply better than anyone else at tapping the rich vein of raw anger, barely concealed in the 1920s and now opened up by the perceived failure of democracy amid mounting crisis. In addition, and something contemporaries could easily overlook in their scornful dismissal of the poverty of Nazism’s intellectual offerings, the Hitler Movement alone on the Right offered an idealistic vision of a new society in a reborn Germany. This, it is clear, was the leading attraction for many.

  Though the NSDAP claimed to be above sectional interest, it was, in fact, as the crisis gripped ever more tightly, better than any other party in tapping a whole panoply of mainly middle-class interest-groups through the sub-organizations it built up. From the ‘Agrarian Apparatus’ set up under R. Walther Darre, the party’s ‘Blood and Soil’ (Blut und Boden) theorist, in August 1930, through organizations to cope with the special interests of workers, civil servants, lawyers, doctors, pharmacists, teachers, university lecturers, students, women, youth, small traders, even coal dealers, the party erected – mainly from 1930 onwards – a framework of affiliations that enabled it at one and the same time to speak to those specific interests but claim best to represent them by incorporating them in an appeal to the overriding interest of the nation.101 In this sense, the NSDAP came to function increasingly as a ‘super-interest-party’. The rhetoric of the ‘national community’ and the Führer cult stood for a rebirth for Germany in which all the various interests would have a new deal. As the economic and political situation deteriorated, the rationality of voting for a small and weak interest party rather than a massive and strong national party – upholding interests but transcending them – was less and less compelling. A vote for the Nazis could easily seem like common sense. In this way, the NSDAP started to penetrate and destroy the support of interest-parties such as the Bayerischer Bauernbund (Bavarian Peasants’ League) and seriously to erode the hold of the traditional parties such as the DNVP in rural areas.102 This process was only in its early stages in summer 1930. But it would make rapid advances following the Nazi triumph of 14 September 1930.

  V

  What happened on that day was a political earthquake. In the most remarkable result in German parliamentary history, the NSDAP advanced at one stroke from the twelve seats and mere 2.6 per cent of the vote gained in the 1928 Reichstag election, to 107 seats and 18.3 per cent, making it the second largest party in the Reichstag. Almost 61/2 million Germans now voted for Hitler’s party – eight times as many as two years earlier.103 The Nazi bandwagon was rolling.

  The party leadership had expected big gains. The run of successes in the regional elections, the last of them the 14.4 per cent won in Saxony as recently as June, pointed to that conclusion.104 Goebbels had reckoned in April with about forty seats when it looked as if there would be a dissolution of the Reichstag at that time.105 A week before polling-day in September he expected ‘a massive success’ (einen Riesenerfolg).106 Hitler later claimed he had thought 100 seats were possible.107 In reality, as Goebbels admitted, the size of the victory took all in the party by surprise. No one had expected 107 seats.108 Hitler was beside himself with joy.109

  The political landscape had dramatically changed overnight. Alongside the Nazis, the Communists had increased their support, now to 13.1 per cent of the vote. Though still the largest party, the SPD had lost ground as, marginally, did the Zentrum. But the biggest losers were the bourgeois parties of the centre and Right. The DNVP had dropped in successive elections since 1924 from 20.5 to only 7.0 per cent, the DVP from 10.1 to 4.7 per cent.110 The Nazis were the main profiteers. One in three former DNVP voters, it has been estimated, now turned to the NSDAP, as did one in four former supporters of the liberal parties. Smaller, but still significant gains, were made from all other parties. These included the SPD, KPD, and Zentrum/BVP, though the working-class milieus dominated by the parties of the Left and, above all, the Catholic sub-culture remained, as they would continue to be, relatively unyielding terrain for the NSDAP.111 The increased turn-out – up from 75.6 to 82 per cent – also benefited the Nazis, though less so than has often been presumed.112

  The landslide was greatest in the Protestant countryside of northern and eastern Germany. With the exception of rural parts of Franconia, piously Protestant, the largely Catholic Bavarian electoral districts now for the first time lagged behind the national average. The same was true of most Catholic regions. In big cities and industrial areas – though there were some notable exceptions, such as Breslau and Chemnitz-Zwickau – the Nazi gains, though still spectacular, were also below average. But in Schleswig-Holstein, the NSDAP vote had rocketed from 4 per cent in 1928 to 27 per cent. East Prussia, Pomerania, Hanover, and Mecklenburg were among the other regions where Nazi support was now over 20 per cent.113 At least three-quarters of Nazi voters were Protestants (or, at any rate, non-Catholics).114 Significantly more men than women voted Nazi (though this was to alter between 1930 and 1933).115 At least two-fifths of Nazi support came from the middle classes. But a quarter was drawn from the working class (though the unemployed were more likely to vote for Thälmann’s party, the KPD, than Hitler’s).116 The middle classes were indeed over-represented among Nazi voters. But the NSDAP was no mere middle-class party, as used to be thought.117 Though not in equal proportions, the Hitler Movement could reasonably claim to have won support from all sections of society. No other party throughout the Weimar Republic could claim the same.

  The social structure of the party’s membership points to the same conclusion.118 A massive influx of members followed the September election. The party recruited, if not evenly, from all sections of society. The membership was overwhelmingly male, and only the KPD was as youthful in its membership profile. The Protestant middle classes were, as among voters, over-represented. But there was also a sizeable working-class presence, even more pronounced in the SA and the Hitler Youth than in the party itself.119 At the same time, the political breakthrough meant that ‘respectable’ local citizens now felt ready to join the party.120 Teachers, civil servants, even some Protestant pastors were among the ‘respectable’ groups altering the party’s social standing in the provinces. In Franconia, for example, the NSDAP already had the appearance by 1930 of a ‘civil service party’.121 The penetration by the party of the social networks of provincial towns and villages now began to intensify notably.122

  There are times – they mark the danger point for a political system – when politicians can no longer communicate, when they stop understanding the language of the people they are supposed to be representing. The politicians of Weimar’s parties were well on the way to reaching that point in 1930. Hitler had the advantage of being undama
ged by participation in unpopular government, and of unwavering radicalism in his hostility to the Republic. He could speak in language more and more Germans understood – the language of bitter protest at a discredited system, the language of national renewal and rebirth. Those not firmly anchored in an alternative political ideology, social milieu, or denominational sub-culture found such language increasingly intoxicating.

  The results of what the Frankfurter Zeitung called the ‘bitterness election’ – seeing the electorate partly motivated by the desire to upturn the current political system, but largely stirred by protest at economic misery – were a sensation.123 The immediate reaction in some quarters was fear of a bloody takeover of power by the National Socialists.124 Herbert Blank, one of Otto Strasser’s associates, spoke of a ‘suitcase-packing mood’ in Berlin editorial offices, and of stock-market shares being packed into a descending paternoster-lift.125 The hysteria soon calmed. But democracy had certainly been dealt a heavy blow. The Nazis had moved at one fell swoop from the fringe of the political scene, outside the power-equation, to its heart. Before the election, commented Blank sardonically, the word ‘Nazis’ had immediately prompted thoughts of the madhouse. But no longer.126 Brüning could now cope with the Reichstag only through the ‘toleration’ of the SPD, which saw him as the lesser evil.127 The Social Democrats entered their policy of ‘toleration’ with heavy hearts but a deep sense of responsibility. As their leading theoretician, Rudolf Hilferding, put it, support for a government that had moved so far to the right amounted to a sacrifice comprehensible only ‘as necessary defence of democracy in a parliament with an anti-parliamentary majority’.128 As for Hitler, whether he was seen in a positive or a negative sense – and there was little about him that left people neutral or indifferent – his name was now on everyone’s lips. He was a factor to be reckoned with. He could no longer be ignored.