by Ian Kershaw
‘The basis of the political organization is loyalty. In it is revealed as the most noble expression of emotion (Gefüblsausdruck) the recognition of the necessity of obedience as the premiss for the construction of every human community. Loyalty in obedience can never be replaced by formal technical measures and institutions, of whatever sort. The aim of the political organization is the enabling of the widest possible dissemination of the knowledge seen as necessary for the maintenance of the life of the nation as well as the will that serves it. The final aim is thereby the mobilization (Erfassung) of the nation for this idea. The victory of the National Socialist idea is the goal of our struggle, the organization of our party a means to attaining this goal.’ Such ethereal language emphasizes how remote Hitler’s conception of the party was from any notion of a bureaucratic organization. Ideal, though in practice impossible, he went on, would be to do without organization altogether. As it was, organization should be kept to a minimum since ‘a world-view (Weltanschauung) needs for its dissemination not civil servants but fanatical apostles’. In preparing for the time when it would be able to permeate the state with this world-view, it was important to remember that the state too offered no end in itself, but was merely ‘an institution that had to serve the maintenance and continuation of the life of a people’. The ‘supreme and most sublime mission’ of the party was, therefore, to provide for the expansion of the ‘idea’. To do this, it had continually to return to its ‘greatest and first task: propaganda’. Leaders were not to be imposed from above, because of their administrative competence, but to emerge from below, through their talents and achievements on behalf of the movement’s struggle. There would be inevitable difficulties in working together between individual leaders of different temperament and ability. But this must be taken on board. The key issue was ‘that the essentials of unconditional party discipline should not be affected by this’. The party was engaged in ‘the hardest ideological struggle’. Hence, Hitler underlined once more, ‘all its institutions have somehow to serve the propaganda of ideas’.153
For Hitler, the organization of the party, his memorandum makes clear, had no meaning in itself. It was there solely to serve the ends of propaganda, as a means to obtaining power.154 Propaganda and mobilization remained for Hitler the purpose of the party. Where Strasser had worked, conventionally enough, towards a bureaucratic structuring of the party, mirroring in essence the administrative framework of the state, Hitler intentionally destroyed any inherent bureaucratic rationality in favour of an instrument devoted solely to propaganda, to upholding the ‘idea’ of National Socialism as embodied in the Leader. The intrinsic contradiction between ‘leadership of people’ (Menschenführung) and ‘administration’ (Verwaltung), which would be laid bare during the Third Reich, was, his memorandum plainly shows, inherent to Hitler’s conception of the party and approach to power. The untrammelled personalized form of power that he represented could not dispense with bureaucratic organization, but was nevertheless inimical to it. As long as the party existed only to attain power, the contradiction could be sustained. In government, it was a recipe for chaos.
IV
The mass of the German people had no part in, or knowledge of, the intrigues of high politics in the second half of 1932. They were by now largely powerless to affect the political dramas which would determine their future. As autumn turned to winter, they were entering upon the fourth year of deepening misery in the apparently unending Depression.
Statistics provide only an abstract glimmer of the human suffering. Industrial production had fallen by 42 per cent since 1929. The stocks and shares index had dropped by more than two-thirds. In the hard-hit agrarian sector, which had felt crisis long before the general Depression had caught hold, compulsory farm-sales had more than doubled. Falling demand, prices, and income had brought mounting indebtedness.155 Above all, the dark shadow of mass unemployment on an unprecedented scale hung over the country. The Employment Offices recorded 5,772,984 persons without work at the end of 1932; in January 1933 the figure was 6,013,612. Taking into account short-time workers and hidden unemployment, it was reckoned that the real total already in October 1932 had reached 8,754,000.156 This meant that close on half of the work-force was either fully or partially unemployed.157 Towns offered free meals at soup kitchens, cheap or free warm baths for the unemployed, and warming-houses where they could shelter in winter.158
The politically radicalized among the unemployed had fed mainly the ranks of the KPD – par excellence the party of the young, unemployed males – the overwhelming proportion of whose 320–360,000 members by late 1932 had no work.159 Not a few also found their way to the Nazi stormtroopers.160 Both the Communists and the Nazis offered an organizational framework of support, forms of political activism, and the vision of a better society to the young unemployed.161 But alongside the unemployed who became radicalized, a great number were simply resigned and apathetic, imagining that all governments had failed and none was capable of mastering the problems which had brought about their fate. A few days before Hitler’s appointment to the Chancellorship, in conditions of freezing cold, the people of the small town of Ettlingen in Baden could not engender the slightest interest in an SA parade. There had been no shortage of demonstrations, they said. ‘If only we had as much bread and work.’162
Nor could a younger generation whose ‘working lives’ had been entirely without work find much enthusiasm for a self-professed working-class party, the SPD, which had – however necessary it had objectively been – kept Brüning in office and voted Hindenburg back into power. Not a few would shrug their shoulders several years later and say that at least Hitler had brought them work, which the working-class parties before 1933 had failed to do. It was abbreviated logic. But it was how many felt.
Mass unemployment split and atomized the working class not just at the party-political and ideological level, but at its social roots.163 For those still fortunate enough to have work, self-confidence was eaten away by fear of losing their jobs, by the loss of the power of the unions, exposure to employer aggressiveness, and – so far as they were sympathizers of the Social Democrats – by the SPD’s perceived failure to look after working-class interests. The disorientation and disillusionment of so many former SPD supporters after 1933, however little they were won over by the Nazi regime, stemmed from what they saw as its unmitigated failure in the crisis of the state of which it was the main pillar.
In the countryside, too, there was a widespread feeling of hopelessness.164 Apathy sprang from the sense that there was no sign of improvement, whoever was in government. The mood of deep resignation had spread in areas of bedrock Nazi support in autumn 1932 after Hitler had turned down the chance of entering government and the NSDAP’s promises were no nearer to realization.165 From one district of Franconia, where the NSDAP had built up a high level of support, it was reported in the first days of January 1933 that ‘the mood of the rural population is calm but extraordinarily depressed on account of the continued fall in prices of all agricultural products. A certain despondency has taken over. One gains the impression that many of those who had previously put their hopes in Hitler have become sceptical and have lost hope in any improvement.’ The sentiments, the report claimed, were general ones, not confined to that district.166
The disconsolate mood intermingled with enormous bitterness and political radicalization. From Lower Bavaria in January 1933 it was reported that ‘all attacks on the government find a lively echo among the peasants; the more caustic the language, the more pleasant it sounds in their ears’.167 The anger was further fired up by news that ‘Eastern Aid’ (Osthilfe), intended for restoring agricultural prosperity on impoverished properties in eastern Germany, was lining the pockets of big landowners and being used for luxury expenditure.168 Bitterness towards all Weimar governments and parties, each of which was seen to have failed the people, was a hallmark of popular feeling in the countryside as it was in the towns. ‘No one wants to know anythin
g of a parliamentary government, since all large parties had failed’ was the reported mood in one Bavarian region in December 1932. – a feeling certainly not confined to that part of the country. The Nazi Party was not excluded from such criticism. ‘The party leaders are blamed for being led in their decisions less by considerations of people and Fatherland than by those of the party and themselves. It is especially held against the NSDAΡ that it has recently shunned responsibility and does not follow its wide-ranging promises with action.’ No expectations were placed in Hitler in this region. ‘Apart from National Socialists,’ the report went on, at this point reflecting the weighting of a heavily Catholic region, ‘more or less all the remaining sections of society are negatively disposed towards a Hitler dictatorship.’ It concluded: ‘Under the impact of economic distress and the disunity of the other parties, the KPD is flourishing.’169 At the same time, the despair was such that any political leader outside the ranks of the dreaded Marxists who could bring about economic improvement was guaranteed – at least in the short term – to attract support. This was to Hitler’s advantage once he became Chancellor. The feeling that Hitler should at least be given the chance to see what he could do coexisted with initial scepticism.170
For other social groups, too, the expectations placed in Hitler’s movement and the motivations that underpinned their subsequent support or antipathy were strongly influenced by experiences in the Depression years. The way society and government had fallen apart in those years brought to the boil the welling resentment at the democratic system and sense of national humiliation that had been simmering throughout the Weimar era. The depth of anger towards those held responsible was one side of the response. The desire for social harmony and unity – to be imposed by the elimination of those seen to threaten it – was the other, and intrinsically related, side.171
The report from one locality in Franconia in December 1932 brought out how sectionalized grievances combined to create generalized disaffection. Businessmen were complaining about poor turnover, ran the report, farmers about low produce prices, teachers and civil servants about their salaries, workers about unemployment, the unemployed about levels of support, and war-cripples and war-widows about drops in their pensions. All in all, there was ‘general discontent, the best preparation (Wegbereiter) for Communism’.172
Middle-class disaffection was, naturally enough, fragmented along the lines of sectional interest. The outlook remained bleak. But despite some drop in confidence in Hitler in autumn 1932 from groups which had been a backbone of his support, no political alternatives were on offer on the Right which appeared capable of creating the conditions of national renewal and imposed social harmony needed for economic recovery. For businessmen, craftsmen and small-scale producers, the Nazis held out the prospect of salvation from the economic threat posed by department stores, consumer associations, mail-order firms and mass-production. Authoritarian rule was far from an unattractive proposition. Part of its illusion was an implied return to the ‘good old days’ before the First World War and protection of the ‘little man’ from the incursions of the modern, interventionist state.173 Civil servants, smarting under Brüning’s salary cuts, had their own illusions of a state which would restore their own traditional status – and financial position. Teachers and lawyers also looked to renewed authority once the shackles of democratic ‘interference’ had been removed, and to enhanced status. Doctors, too, like lawyers a social group traditionally sympathetic to the nationalist Right, had their resentment at diminished career prospects, falling earnings, and a ‘leftist’ imposed funding system greatly amplified during the Depression years.174 Many looked to a new, authoritarian regime for rescue.
For young people, the Depression years had both in material and in psychological terms been appallingly damaging. Hopes and ideals had been blighted almost before they could take shape. By the end of 1932, four consecutive cohorts of pupils had left school to miserable prospects. Those lucky enough to find work had done so in deteriorating conditions, and were usually dismissed at the end of their apprenticeships. The youth welfare system was close to collapse. Growing suicide and youth criminality rates told their own tale. Those from more well-to-do backgrounds faced greatly diminished chances of launching a career in the professions to match their ambitions. Above average support for the Nazis among university students was one indication of middle-class youth’s alienation from the Weimar Republic. In fact, the attractiveness of extremist parties of Right and Left – the NSDAP and the KPD – to young people is an indication of their different forms of alienation from Weimar democracy and their readiness to resort to political radicalism. In many respects, it was a generational revolt against a system and a society that had failed them. Militant parties capable of playing to Utopian expectations could fill the void produced by the alienation. Young Germans in late 1932 were still split largely along party-political lines which themselves reflected in the main class and religious divisions. The socialist, Catholic, and – taken together – the collectivity of bourgeois youth organizations still dwarfed the Hitler Youth. But the overlap of ideals and ideology with the bourgeois youth organizations, especially, offered a rich potential for expansion to the Nazi youth leader, Baldur von Schirach, should his party start to recover from its setbacks of autumn 1932, and should his Leader manage to get to power soon.175
The disaffection in German society did not, it seems, divide on gender lines. The Depression heightened the discrimination against women in the jobs market that had existed throughout the Weimar Republic. Traditional prejudice that a woman’s role should be confined to ‘children, kitchen, and church’ was strongly reinforced. The witchhunt against ‘double-earners’ – where both husband and wife worked and the woman was regarded as unnecessarily occupying a ‘man’s job’ – was an indication of growing intolerance.176 Nazi propaganda had no difficulty in playing on such intolerance, both before and after 1933. But anti-feminism was by no means confined to Hitler’s Movement. Despite its ‘macho’ image, the NSDAP’s views on the role of women were essentially shared by all conservative and denominational parties. Women’s political behaviour in the Depression was little influenced by anti-feminism or, conversely, by pro-feminist issues. Women voted, it appears, much like men did, and presumably for the same reasons. They voted in disproportionately large numbers for the conservative and Christian parties, which were anti-feminist. They voted in smaller numbers than men for the radical parties of both Left and Right. The party with the most pronounced emancipatory stance regarding women, the KPD, was the least successful of all in attracting women’s votes, and was as male-dominated a party as was the NSDAP. Despite all the talk of Hitler’s mesmerizing attraction for women, the elderly, statesmanlike Hindenburg, not the dynamic Nazi leader, had been their choice in the presidential elections earlier in 1932. But by the November Reichstag election, the gap between female and male voting support for the NSDAP had narrowed almost to vanishing-point. Women were just about as likely as men to find the prospect of a Hitler dictatorship an attractive one. The mentalities which Nazism could build upon and exploit crossed the gender divide.
Despite the disappointment in Hitler and decline in support for the NSDAP in the autumn of 1932, such mentalities, which would benefit the Nazi regime once Hitler had taken power, were kept alive and given sustenance by the bruising years of the Depression. Though two-thirds of the people had not voted for Hitler, many were less than root-and-branch opposed to all that Nazism stood for, and could fairly easily be brought in the coming months to find some things in the Third Reich that they might approve of. The loathing and deep fear of Communism that ran through some four-fifths of society was one important common denominator. Faced with a stark choice between National Socialism and Communism-which was how Hitler was increasingly able to portray it after his takeover of power – most middle-class and well-to-do Germans, and even a considerable leaven of the working class, preferred the Nazis. The Communists were revolutionaries, they w
ould take away private property, impose a class dictatorship, and rule in the interests of Moscow. The National Socialists were vulgar and distasteful, but they stood for German interests, they would uphold German values, and they would not take away private property. Crudely put, this reflected a widespread train of thought, not least in the middle classes.
Fear, bitterness, and radicalization were part of a climate of political violence. These tensions of the Depression years had made political violence an everyday occurrence, even in the sleepiest of places.177 People became used to it. If it was targeted at the ‘Reds’ they often approved of it – even ‘respectable’ sections of society which decried the breakdown of ‘order’ in public life. Paradoxically, the party responsible for much of the mayhem, the NSDAP, could benefit by portraying itself – enhanced by the image of serried ranks of marching stormtroopers – as the only party capable of ending the violence by imposing order in the national interest. The acceptance of a level of outright violence in public life, which had been there at the birth and in the early years of the Weimar Republic and again become pronounced in the Depression years, helped to pave the way for the readiness to accept Nazi terror in the aftermath of the ‘seizure of power’.178
Along with this went a vindictiveness that the deprivations and tensions of the Depression years had promoted. Someone had to be blamed for the misery. Scapegoats were needed. Enemies were targeted. Political enemies were lined up for scores to be settled. Personal and political enmities often went hand in hand. If the anonymity of the big city could offer some protection, that was not the case in small towns and in villages. Here there was no hiding-place. Once the power of the state could be used to support violence, not contain it, there would be no shortage of those volunteering to participate in the bloodletting. For countless others, the social and political conflicts of the Depression years stored up personal grudges that would be paid back after 1933 through denunciation for real or fictional political ‘offences’.