Hitler
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Hitler’s personal conduct also met with criticism, particularly his arrogance toward tried-and-true party comrades. One old party man objected to “the much-discussed wall around Herr Hitler.” There were murmurings about Hitler’s negligent conduct of party business and his jealousy complex in regard to his niece. In the early summer of 1928, when his chauffeur Emil Maurice surprised him in Geli Raubal’s room, Hitler raised his riding whip in such threatening fury that Maurice saved himself only by leaping out the window. With “unconditional devotion” the chairman of the Investigation and Mediation Committee, Walter Buch finally felt compelled to express his view “that you, Herr Hitler, are gradually falling into a degree of misanthropy that causes me worry.”38
Faced with these rumblings within the party, Hitler canceled the planned party rally for 1928 and instead convoked a meeting of the leaders in Munich. He forbade all preparatory local meetings, and when he opened the session on August 31 he delivered a highly charged speech in praise of obedience and discipline. Only totally committed elites could constitute a “historic minority,” he declared, and thus shape history. To remain operative, the NSDAP must have at most 100,000 members: “That is a number to work with!” All the rest must be followers, rallying around and serving the purposes of the party only in specific cases. Scornfully, he dismissed a motion to elect a “senate” to aid him. He did not think much of advisers, he said. The motion had been offered by Gauleiter Artur Dinter of Thuringia; he had Dinter removed from his post and soon afterward expelled from the party. There had, it is true, been some background to this seemingly arbitrary action. Hitler had previously had a correspondence with Gauleiter Dinter in which he announced that as a politician he “claimed infallibility” and “had the blind faith that he would some day belong among those who make history.”
Shortly afterward, a meeting was convoked that had not been organized in the form by then becoming customary: a briefing session in which Hitler simply issued commands. During the discussion Hitler sat silent, with a markedly bored or sardonic expression, gradually creating such a sense of paralysis and futility that the meeting wound to an end in general resignation. One of the participants later conjectured that Hitler had permitted the meeting to be held only in order to show how his indifference could ruin it.
Hitler felt his chance would come as leader of an inconspicuous but rigorously organized party. Personally, he saw no reason for discouragement, for in establishing his hold over the party he had made important progress. Henceforth, the party sometimes referred to itself officially as the “Hitler movement.” Without significant support from influential patrons and powerful institutions, the movement was now proving that if it could not win, it could at least survive on its own resources.
On May 20, 1928, a new Reichstag was elected. The NSDAP placed ninth, with 2.6 per cent of the votes, winning twelve seats. Among its deputies were Gregor Strasser, Gottfried Feder, Goebbels, Frick, and Hermann Göring, who in the interval had returned home from Sweden bringing with him a wealthy wife and extensive connections. Hitler himself, being “stateless,” had not been a candidate. But with his remarkable capacity for turning his embarrassments and disabilities to advantage, he used this circumstance to reinforce his pose of the unique leader who refused to make any concessions to the despised parliamentary system and stood far above the scramble, the deals and greeds of daily life. If he had decided to let the party participate in the elections—a decision taken only after long vacillation—it had been partly out of the desire to get a share in the privileges of Reichstag deputies. Sure enough, a week after the elections Goebbels wrote an article that cast quite another light on the party’s pretense to legalism: “I am not a member of the Reichstag. I am an HOI. A Holder of Immunity. An HORP. A Holder of a Railroad Pass. What do we care about the Reichstag? We have been elected against the Reichstag, and we will exercise our mandate in the interests of our employer…. An HOI is allowed to call a dungheap a dungheap and does not have to use such euphemisms as ‘government.’ ” Goebbels concluded this amazing confession with: “This startles you, does it? But don’t think we’re finished yet…. You’ll have lots more fun with us before it’s over. Just wait till the comedy begins.”
Yet such remarks seemed mere rhetorical taunts. The NSDAP remained a splinter party given to outré gestures. But Hitler himself, sure of his ground, his cadres ready for action, waited coolly for a new radicalization of the masses. Once conditions had brought that about, he would be able to make the breakthrough and transform his following into a mass party. In spite of all his organization bustle, he had so far not managed to emerge from the shadow of the republic, which by now was functioning competently, if without any special brilliance. It sometimes seemed as if the nation were at last ready to make its peace with the republic, to accept the gray dullness of Weimar and be reconciled to the ordinariness of history. The Reichstag election had, it is true, revealed a degree of disintegration going on in the bourgeois center, as manifested by the rise of many splinter parties. The Nazi party, moreover, could now count 150,000 members. But at the beginning of 1929 the Bonn sociologist Joseph A. Shumpeter spoke of the “impressive stability in our social conditions” and concluded: “In no sense, in no area, in no direction, are eruptions, upheavals or disasters probable.”
But Hitler understood things much more keenly. In a speech given during this brief happy period in the history of the republic, he remarked on the psychology of the Germans: “We have a third value: our fighting spirit. It is there, only buried under a pile of foreign theories and doctrines. A great and powerful party goes to a lot of trouble to prove the opposite, until suddenly an ordinary military band comes along and plays. Then the straggler comes to, out of his dreamy state; all at once he begins to feel himself a comrade of the marching men, and joins their columns. That’s the way it is today. Our people only have to be shown this better course—and you’ll see, we’ll start marching.”39
He was waiting for his cue. The question was whether the party could preserve, over the long pull, its dynamism, its hopes, its conception of its aims, and its image of the chosen leader—the whole system of fictions and credulities on which it was founded. In an analysis of the May, 1928, elections Otto Strasser had complained that “National Socialism’s tidings of redemption” had not caught the ear of the masses and that the party had failed to make any inroads into the proletarian circles. In fact, the party’s following consisted chiefly of lower-grade white-collar workers, artisans, some farm groups, and young people inclined to romantic protest—the advance guard of those classes of the German population who were especially susceptible to the rousing music of “an ordinary military band.”
Only a few months later, the scene had totally changed.
IV. THE TIME OF STRUGGLE
From Provincial to National Politics
Following our old method, we once more take up the struggle and say: Attack! Attack! Always attack! If someone says we can’t possibly have another try, remember that I can attack not just one more time but ten times over.
Adolf Hitler
Hitler launched his first massive offensive against the consolidated system of the republic in the summer of 1929, and at once his advance carried him a long way. He had long been in search of a slogan that could mobilize the masses. Suddenly, Gustav Stresemann’s foreign policy offered a breach into which he could hurl the full weight of his propaganda. The debate over reparations had broken out afresh, and Hitler mustered all his energy to move the NSDAP from its role of isolated sectarian party and propel it into the limelight of national politics. By good luck his campaign coincided in time with the world-wide Depression, and derived its psychological impact from economic conditions. This gave him the opportunity to test his forces, his organization, and his tactics in a kind of prelude. The struggle that raged around the reparations question brought on the crisis that was to grip the republic to the very end, a crisis initiated by Hitler and cleverly fomented until the republic brok
e down.
Strictly speaking, the point of departure came with the death of Gustav Stresemann at the beginning of October, 1929. The German Foreign Minister had worn himself out trying to put over his subtle foreign policy. Branded as a “compliance policy,”[9] it actually aimed at gradual abrogation of the Versailles Treaty. Until shortly before his death Stresemann, though with considerable doubts, had backed the reparations arrangements drafted by a committee of experts under the chairmanship of Owen D. Young, the American banker. The Young Plan represented a distinct improvement on the existing conditions. Moreover, thanks to Stresemann’s obstinacy and diplomatic adroitness, it had been coupled with the promise of the Allied occupying forces evacuating the Rhineland before the date stipulated by treaty.
Nevertheless, the agreement encountered vehement opposition inside Germany. It even disappointed many of those who had a clear view of the Reich’s predicament. For there was an element of cruel mockery in having Germany undertake obligations for payments extending over nearly sixty years when she did not even have the first few annual payments at her disposal. Two hundred and twenty notables of economics, science, and politics, among them Carl Duisberg, of I. G. Farben, the theologian Adolf Harnack, the physicist Max Planck, Konrad Adenauer, then mayor of Cologne, and former Chancellor Hans Luther, issued a public statement expressing their great concern. It would appear that the many conciliatory gestures had been a mere front; eleven years after the war, the Young Plan exposed the merciless attitude of the victors toward the vanquished. What was more, the plan once again adverted to the war-guilt clause, Article 231 of the Versailles Treaty, which had earlier inflicted such wounds to the nation’s self-esteem. With payments continuing until 1988, the Young Plan was fundamentally unrealistic, and the radical nationalist groups were able to make effective capital out of the phrase le boche payera tout. Conceived as a further step in a gradual process of softening the penalties of the war, and thus supposedly serving to stabilize the republic, the Young Plan became just the contrary, the “point of crystallization for fundamental opposition to the Weimar ‘system.’”1
On July 9, 1929, the radical Right united to form a national committee for a plebiscite to reject the Young Plan. They staged a wild and vehement campaign (joined by the Communists on the extreme Left) that never let up until the agreement was eventually signed nine months later. The issue brought together a strange assortment of associations and interdependencies whose differences were temporarily forgotten in favor of a few hypnotic slogans. These, endlessly repeated, tried to concentrate hatred upon a few sharply etched images of the enemy. The plan was described as the “death penalty on the unborn,” the “Golgotha of the German people” whom the executioners were “nailing to the cross with scornful laughter.” Along with this the “Nationalist Opposition” demanded annulment of the war-guilt clause, the end of all reparations, immediate evacuation of the occupied territories, and the punishment of all cabinet ministers and members of the government aiding and abetting the “enslavement” of the German people.
The committee was headed by privy councillor Alfred Hugenberg, an ambitious, narrow-minded, and unscrupulous man of sixty-three who had served as settlement commissioner in the East, had been a director of the Krupp Company, and finally had built up an intricate and far-ranging press empire. In addition to an extensive list of newspapers, he controlled a news agency and UFA, the motion picture company. As the political liaison man of heavy industry, he also had sizable sums at his disposal. This money he deliberately committed to undermining the “Socialist Republic,” to smashing the unions, and to answering “class struggle from below,” as he put it, with “class struggle by the upper class.” A short, rotund figure with a mustache and close-cropped hair, he looked like a pensioned-off sergeant posing for a martial photo, not like the proud and embittered patrician he wished to be.
In the fall of 1928 Hugenberg had emerged as a dark horse and assumed leadership of the Deutschnationale Volkspartei (the German Nationalist People’s Party). He promptly made himself the spokesman of radical resentment. The Right had been slowly warming toward the republic; but under Hugenberg’s control all such signs of rapprochement abruptly came to an end. Both in methods and in some points of its program, the DNVP began copying the Hitler party. It never succeeded in being more than the bourgeois caricature of the Nazis. Still and all, Hugenberg broke all limits in his battle against the hated republic. The first signs of the world-wide Depression were beginning to be felt in Germany; but during the storm over the Young Plan, Hugenberg warned 3,000 American businessmen, in a circular letter, against granting credits to Germany.2 Under this leader, the German Nationalists quickly lost something like half their membership. But this made little impression on Hugenberg; he declared coolly that he preferred a small block to a large pulp.
The campaign against the Young Plan gave Hugenberg the chance to assert leadership over the scattered forces of the Right, mainly the Stahlhelm (Steel Helmets), the Pan-Germans, the Landbund (Agrarian League), and the Nazis. His larger purpose was to reconquer for the old upper class some of its lost initiative. The misfired revolution of 1918 had not deprived that class of influence, positions of status, money, and property, but it no longer had any credit with the people. With all the arrogance of one of the “top-drawer people” toward a figure associated with the rabble, Hugenberg thought he could make use of Hitler. Here was someone with a proven gift for agitation, he calculated, the very man to lead the masses back to conservatism. For Hugenberg was intelligent enough to see that the usual spokesmen for the conservative cause were largely isolated by their social vanity. When the time came, he thought, he would know how to put Hitler in his place.
Hitler’s own thoughts were far less devious. When Reichstag deputy Hinrich Lohse heard of the alliance, he commented anxiously: “Let’s hope the Führer knows how to pull a fast one on Hugenberg.” But Hitler was not thinking of deceptions. From the start he came on with an air of unmistakable superiority. He scarcely bothered to hide his contemptuous opinion of Hugenberg, the bourgeois reactionary, and all the “gray, moth-eaten eagles,” as Goebbels called them. He said no to the concessions Hugenberg demanded—all the more flatly since the “Left” within the Nazi party was keeping a suspicious watch over the proceedings. What it amounted to was that Hitler alone named the conditions under which he would permit these new backers to help him move forward. At first he proposed marching separately but finally let himself be coaxed into the alliance. However, he demanded complete independence in propaganda and a sizable share of the proffered funds. Then, as if bent on confounding or humiliating his new allies, he appointed the most prominent anticapitalist in the ranks of the Nazi party, Gregor Strasser, to be his representative on the joint financing committee.
The alliance was his first success in a remarkable series of maneuvers that brought Hitler a long way ahead and finally to his goal. His insight into the true nature of situations, his knack for penetrating the various strata of interests, for spotting weaknesses and setting up temporary coalitions, in short, his tactical instinct, certainly contributed as much to his rise as his oratorical powers, the backing of the army, industry, and the judiciary, and the terrorism of his brown shirts. To insist on the magical, the conspiratorial, or the brutal elements in Hitler’s rise to power certainly betrays an inadequate understanding of the course of events. But beyond that, it perpetuates the erroneous notion of the leader of the Nazi party as a mere propagandist or tool. All the facts belie that picture. Hitler was consummately skillful in the field of politics.
With an actor’s agility, at first playing hesitant, conducting his negotiations in a sometimes provocative, sometimes sulky manner, while at the same time conveying an impression of sincerity, ambition, and drive, Hitler finally lured his partners into such a position that they were furthering and financing his rise even as they were paying for it politically. A factor in this particular success, however, was the leftist element in his own ranks, which kept him f
rom making any significant concessions. While the negotiations were going on, Strasser’s militant newspapers carried banner headlines featuring a saying of Hitler’s: The greatest danger to the German people is not Marxism but the bourgeois parties.
In evaluating this episode we must not overlook the power-hungry blindness of the German nationalist conservatives. By parasitically seizing on the force and vitality of the Nazi movement, by uniting with the secretly despised but also admired upstart Hitler, they were trying to forestall German nationalist conservatism’s departure from the stage of history, when that departure had been long since decided. Still, Hitler’s success remains remarkable. For four and a half years he had waited, preparing himself and, in keeping with the unforgotten doctrine of Karl Lueger, working toward alliance with the “powerful institutions,” the holders of political and social influence. When the offer was finally made to him, he had coolly and firmly named his terms. For years Adolf Hitler had stood at the head of an inconspicuous extremist party, ignored or an object of mockery. Only in the light of that fact can we grasp what is meant to him to team up with Hugenberg. It freed him from the noisome odor of being a crackpot revolutionary and putschist. He could appear in public within a circle of respectable, influential patrons and make their good reputation his own. Once before he had had that chance and thrown it away; now he indicated that he meant to behave much more circumspectly.