Hitler

by Joachim C. Fest

  Contrary to his usual inclination to exult over any triumphs, Hitler followed up his victory at Bamberg with conciliatory personal gestures. When Gregor Strasser was injured in an auto accident, Hitler appeared at his bedside “with a gigantic bouquet of flowers” and was, according to a letter of the patient himself, “very nice.” He used the same approach with Goebbels, who had the worst reputation at Munich party headquarters as spokeman for the Strasser clique. Goebbels found himself suddenly being wooed. He was asked to be the principal speaker at a meeting in the Munich Biirgerbrau, and at the end of his speech Hitler embraced him with tears in his eyes. “He is embarrassingly good to us,” Goebbels noted, deeply moved. At the same time, however, Hitler began to create the party machinery that would safeguard his newly acquired authority.

  A general membership meeting held in Munich on May 22, 1926, established new bylaws for the NSDAP that were undisguisedly tailored to Hitler’s personal needs. The National Socialist German Workers’ Club in Munich was to be the cornerstone of the party; its directors also constituted the directorate of the party throughout Germany. The first chairman would still be elected—that was required by the laws regulating associations—but the electoral college for the entire party was to consist of the few thousand members of the Munich Ortsgruppe (“local group”). Thus the rest of the party was completely disenfranchised. Moreover, the Munich group alone had the right to demand an accounting of the first chairman—and the procedure for doing so was extremely complicated. In practice, therefore, Hitler’s total control over the party was assured. There would be no majority decisions binding on him. Hereafter, in fact, even the gauleiters would not be elected by local party meetings, and the same was true of the chairmen of committees. Thus factions could not form, not even powerless ones.

  In order to bolster this system even further, an investigation and mediation committee (USCHLA) was created, a kind of party tribunal whose sole importance lay in its right to expel individuals or even entire local groups from the NSDAP. Its first chairman, former Lieutenant General Heinemann, misunderstood the purpose of the committee. He thought it was meant to be an instrument for fighting corruption and immorality within the party. Hitler thereupon replaced him by the more docile Major Walter Buch, and as associate magistrates appointed his obedient Ulrich Graf and a young lawyer named Hans Frank.

  In early July, six weeks later, Hitler celebrated his victory at a party rally in Weimar, where the new trend was clearly manifest. All critical—or, as Hitler contemptuously phrased it, “ingenious”—notions, all “half-baked and vague ideas” were repressed. The practice that later became standard for party rallies was applied here for the first time: only those motions were admitted which “have received the signature of the First Chairman.” Instead of a wrangling party involved in differences over programs, the public image was to be that of “perfectly welded and consolidated leadership.” In his “Fundamental Directives” Hitler ruled that the chairmen of the various special sessions were “to feel themselves leaders and not executive organs of the results of voting.” In general, there was no voting, and Hitler wanted “endless discussions smothered.” For they led people to think that political questions “can be solved by people sitting on their bottoms at a club meeting.” Finally, strict bounds were set for speaking time in plenary sessions “so that the whole program cannot be wrecked by a single individual.”

  After the meeting in the National Theater, Hitler, dressed in a leather belted tunic and puttees, reviewed a parade by 5,000 of his followers and for the first time saluted them with outstretched arm in the fashion of the Italian Fascists. Goebbels, watching the uniformed columns of storm troopers, jubilantly saw the dawning of the Third Reich and the awakening of Germany. But other contemporary observers found the party rally a dull affair lacking in all spontaneity—the more so since Nazism had not yet developed the brilliant theatrical effects of later years that served to cover up its ideological poverty and ideational dreariness. Among the honored guests, it was true, was Theodor Duesterberg, leader of the Stahlhelm (the conservative veterans’ organization), and another was the Kaiser’s son, Prince August Wilhelm, soon afterward to join the SA. Also present, though in the background, was Gregor Strasser, who was heard muttering gloomily that National Socialism was dead.

  As a last element of restlessness and rebellious energy there remained the SA, in whose ranks the radical slogans of the Strasser clique had struck lasting reverberations. Hitler therefore let a year elapse after Röhm’s resignation before he appointed a supreme leader for the new SA: onetime Captain Franz Pfeffer von Salomon, who had been involved in various Free Corps and vigilante activities and had most recently been gauleiter of Westphalia. Together with Pfeffer, Hitler fried to settle the traditional problem of the SA’s role and to shape it into an organization that would be neither a military auxiliary nor a secret society nor a brutish bodyguard for local party leaders. Rather, it was to become a specialized instrument for propaganda and mass intimidation, under firm control from party headquarters. Hitler wanted the SA to be the translation of the National Socialist idea into fanatical, unadulterated fighting power. To underline the SA’s complete and final incorporation into the Nazi party, he arranged a ceremony at the National Theater in Weimar. The new SA units were put through mystical rituals culminating in the “oath of loyalty” and the presentation of standards Hitler had himself designed. “The training of the SA,” he decreed in a letter to Pfeffer, “must be guided by party needs rather than by military points of view.” The military associations of the past had been powerful but had had no underlying doctrines, he went on to say, and therefore had failed. The secret organizations and terrorist units, on the other hand, had not realized that the enemy operated anonymously in men’s brains and souls, so that there was little good in assassinating individual spokesmen. Consequently, the struggle must “b.e lifted out of the atmosphere of minor acts of revenge and conspiracy, raised to the grandeur of an ideological war of annihilation against Marxism, its structures and its henchmen…. The work must be conducted not in secret conventicles, but in huge mass processions. The way can be cleared for the Movement not by dagger and poison or pistol, but by conquering the streets.”

  In a succession of orders and basic instructions Pfeffer further delineated the special character of the SA. He evidenced a remarkable feeling for the mass psychological effectiveness of strict, drillmasterly arrangements. His orders for meetings and ceremonies reveal the point of view of a theatrical director as much as that of a leader; he regulated every platform appearance, every marching movement, every salute with raised arms or shout of Beil. His dictates often sounded like lessons in the techniques of mass psychology. Thus he would state: “The only form in which the SA displays itself to the public must be en masse. This is one of the most powerful forms of propaganda. The sight of a large body of disciplined men, inwardly and outwardly alike, whose militancy can be plainly seen or sensed, makes the most profound impression upon every German and speaks to his heart in a more convincing and persuasive language than writing and oratory and logic ever can. Calm composure and matter-of-factness emphasizes the impression of strength—the strength of marching columns.”

  But the attempt to transform the SA into an unarmed host of propagandists and to give to it the glamour but not the arrogance of the military remained on the whole a failure. Despite all his efforts, Hitler never really succeeded in shaping it into an obedient instrument for his political aims. The reason was only in part the rough cut-and-thrust temperament, the raw mercenary spirit of these perpetual soldiers. Another explanation lay in the traditions of a country that assigned special moral prerogatives to the military as opposed to the civilian, political authorities. Pfeffer’s re-educational slogans could never change the fact that the SA considered itself the “Fighting Movement” in contrast to the Political Organization (PO). It viewed the PO as merely the talking branch of the party, and contemptuously spoke the initials as “P-Nought.” In
line with this attitude, the SA regarded itself as “the crown of our organization.” With a scathing glance at the “parliamentary” parties, the spokesmen for the SA declared: “One thing they can’t copy from us is our SA man.” On the other hand, those parliamentary parties escaped the permanent difficulties in which the NSDAP was embroiled because of its party army. The trouble was that the World War I officers and soldiers, with their heavy baggage of complexes, could not be expected to execute the delicate balancing acts required of the other servile members of the master race. Only the next generation was able to do that. Soon Hitler began quarreling with Pfeffer, who proved to be as unmanageable as Röhm. In fact, more so, for he did not have Röhm’s streak of sentimentality. He was not impressed by Hitler, that “flabby Austrian,” as he termed him. Pfeffer was, after all, the son of a Prussian privy councilor.

  The style of the Berlin SA was particularly mutinous. Its auxiliary organizations went their own way, frequently marked by criminal tendencies and gangster behavior. The Berlin gauleiter, Dr. Schlange, could do nothing to control the storm troopers. In fact, there were instances of fist fights between the Berlin leaders of the Political Organization and the SA. But the hullabaloo was somewhat out of proportion to the size of the Berlin branch of the Nazi party. Its membership was below 1,000 and only began to attract some attention after the Strasser brothers had started building up their newspaper in the city early in the summer of 1926. “The situation within the party this month has not been a good one,” a report noted in October, 1926. “Things have reached such a pass in our district [gau] that complete shattering of the Berlin organization may be imminent. The tragedy of the gau is that it has never had a real leader.”

  At this juncture Hitler decided to clean up the untenable state of affairs in Berlin. His move was a masterly one, for he made use of the crisis to shake the local party organization free of the influence of Gregor Strasser. He also stole away Strasser’s most capable adherent, for he appointed Joseph Goebbels new gauleiter of the capital. As early as July that ambitious rebel, under the impact of a magnanimous invitation to Munich and Berchtesgaden, had developed strong doubts about his radical leftist convictions. In his diary he now described Hitler, whom he had reviled so often, as “a genius… the naturally creative instrument of a divine destiny.” He confided: “I stand before him deeply moved. This is how he is: like a child, lovable, good, merciful. Like a cat, cunning, prudent and agile; like a lion, roaringly great and gigantic. A hell of a fellow; a man… He pampers me like a child. My kindly friend and master!”32 Yet raptures such as these are still accompanied by compunctions. Opportunist though Goebbels was, he was uneasy about his defection from Strasser, for he went on to say of the latter: “I suppose in the end he cannot follow along with his mind. With his heart, always. Sometimes I love him dearly.”

  However, Hitler knew how to make Goebbels his man. He gave him special powers that were not only designed to strengthen the new gauleiter’s position but to create areas of friction with Strasser. For example, Hitler explicitly withdrew Goebbels from subordination to Strasser, while on the other hand subordinating the SA to Goebbels, although everywhere else the SA was jealously defending its independence from the Gauleiters. In order to placate Strasser, or at any rate to soften his resistance, Hitler promoted him to the post of Reich propaganda leader of the party. But in order to make the conflict between Goebbels and Strasser inevitable and permanent, he made Goebbels autonomous in the field of propaganda also. Goebbels’s erstwhile friends and party comrades thereupon charged him with shameful treachery—but in the short or long run all these leftist Nazi factionalists committed exactly the same treachery—unless, like the Strasser brothers, they chose expulsion, exile, or death.

  With Goebbels as gauleiter of Berlin, things went from bad to worse for the already shattered power of the Left in northern Germany. The unsuspecting Strasser had supported the appointment of his supposed ally against the opposition of such Munich party dignitaries as Hess and Rosenberg. But Goebbels seemed to have had a keener grasp of Hitler’s secret intentions. At any rate, he was soon openly warring with his recent cronies. He staged brawls and started a rival newspaper, Der Angriff [“The Attack”], directed against the Strasser brothers. He even spread rumors that they were of Jewish descent and had been bought by finance capital. Gregor Strasser, remembering how he had been taken in by Goebbels, later branded himself “a dopey super-idiot.”

  Cold-blooded, a master of sophistry and emotional manipulation, Goebbels started a new era in demagoguery, whose potentialities under modern conditions he perceived and exploited with unique success. To gain attention for the little-known Berlin party organization, he set up a ferocious band of toughs, who were continually instigating meeting-hall battles, brawls, and shootouts. These—in the words of a police report on a bloody battle with Communists at the Lichterfelde-Ost railroad station in March, 1927—put “anything seen previously into the shade.”33 By these tactics Goebbels was undoubtedly risking a ban on the Nazi party in Berlin—which came soon enough. But his followers were acquiring a sense of martyrdom and solidarity. At any rate, the Berlin organization emerged from unimportance and in the course of time was able to make considerable breaches in the massive walls of so-called Red Berlin.

  Along with these efforts at expansion, Hitler began upon a gradual but consistent strengthening of the internal party organization. He aimed at a coherent, centralized command structure under a single charismatic leader. The hierarchic chain of authority, the strict tone with which all orders and instructions came down from the top, and the growing practice of wearing uniforms underlined the paramilitary character of a party whose leadership had been molded by the war. That leadership, as Goebbels once phrased it, had to be ready to obey “the slightest pressure with all its limbs at the decisive moment.” The restrictions and governmental controls to which the party was subject merely furthered these aims—as in general the awareness of the outside world’s hostility tautened the apparatus and furthered Hitler’s drive for total leadership. It was easy now for Munich headquarters to impose its will on even the lowest branches of the party. In the first editions of Mein Kampf Hitler had made some slight concessions to democratic elements; in subsequent editions he revised these passages, laying stress, instead, on “Germanic democracy” and the “principle of unconditional authority of the Führer.” In the party, similarly, he now warned local groups against holding “too many membership meetings,” which would only constitute “a source of disputes.”

  Along with the party organization there now grew up a full-fledged bureaucracy, divided into numerous departments. The Nazi party was rapidly sloughing off its small-town club aspect—which it had retained even during its stormy early phase as a putschist party. Though Hitler’s personal life and working habits were anything but organized, he was childishly proud of the triple registration system for party members and reported with fervor on the acquisition of modern office equipment, filing cabinets, and the like. In place of the primitive master-sergeant bureaucracy of the early years, an extensive network of new bureaus and subdivisions was established; in one year, 1926, the space in the Munich central party office was expanded three times. Before long, this apparatus surpassed even the fabulous bureaucracy of the Social Democratic Party. Its size was altogether disproportionate to the small number of the NSDAP’s membership, which increased quite slowly. For Hitler himself seemed to want to build up the party in the form of a small, tough kernel of specialists in propaganda and violence. He repeatedly stressed that an organization of 10 million people was necessarily peaceable and could not be set in motion of its own accord; only fanatical minorities would be able, to move it. Of the 55,000 members the party had had in 1923, it had won back only half by the end of 1925. A year later the membership amounted to somewhat more than 108,000. But the seemingly swollen bureaucracy would be useful for the future mass party in which Hitler continued to believe with absolute confidence. What is more, the great number o
f party offices provided him with varied possibilities for patronage and for dividing the power of others, thus extending and securing his own.

  To this period belong the first efforts toward formation of a shadow government. Soon Gregor Strasser, who had been appointed Reich organization leader, took charge of this operation and pushed it vigorously. In Mein Kampf Hitler had already called for a movement geared for the coming overturn, because it would “already contain the future government within itself” and, moreover, would “be able to place the perfected body of its own government at the disposal” of the state. In these terms, the party posts also served as alternatives to the “Weimar mis-State,” challenging the republic’s authority and legitimacy in the name of the allegedly unrepresented people. The departments of the shadow government were set up to correspond with the state bureaucracy; thus the Nazi party had departments for foreign policy, justice, and defense. Other departments dealt with the favorite themes of Nazi policy: public health and race, propaganda, resettlement, and agrarian policy. They rehearsed their role in a new government with proposals and draft legislation marked to a large extent by bold amateurishness.

  From 1926 on, moreover, a host of auxiliary party organizations were set up: National Socialist Leagues of doctors, lawyers, students, teachers, and civil servants. Even gardening and poultry raising had their place in the network of bureaus and subdivisions. In 1927 the creation of a women’s SA was briefly considered but then rejected. The following year, however, the Red Swastika, which later became the Nazi women’s organization, was formed to receive the growing hordes of sharply politicized women and assign them a place—largely limited to practical works of mercy—in the men’s party, which at this time was still heavily homosexual.