Hitler

by Joachim C. Fest

  The departure of Otto Strasser ended once and for all the sole conflict over principles within the Nazi party. It also meant a considerable loss in status for Gregor Strasser, who thereafter had no seat of power and no newspaper platform. He continued to be organization leader of the party, resided in Munich, and held many threads in his hand, but he became more and more remote from the members and the public. Only six months earlier the political journal Weltbühne had predicted that “one of these days not so far in the future he will overshadow his lord and master Hitler” and himself seize the power in the party. That was now out of the question. His more decisive defeat was to follow two years later, when he roused himself for one last opposition gesture and then, weary and broken, turned his back on the party.

  Among the afterpains of the Strasser crisis must be counted the mutiny of the Berlin SA under former Police Captain Walter Stennes. The discontent among the storm troopers had less to do with the wrangle over socialism than with the recurrent rumors about bossism and favoritism, as well as the poor pay for strenuous service during the election campaign. While the storm troopers had to be out on duty night after night until thoroughly exhausted, the Political Organization was making itself comfortable in a luxurious palace. That was the most common charge. Reminded that there was to be a monument in marble and bronze to the SA in the Brown House, the storm troopers responded that such a monument looked more like a mausoleum. “As far as the PO was concerned,” one SA Oberführer wrote, “the SA is here just to die.” Things were getting more and more out of hand, and Goebbels called for help from Hitler and the SS. Only a few days after his appeal, the dissident Berlin SA men stormed the district party office on Hedemannstrasse, and there was a bloody clash with Himmler’s biack-shirted elite guards. It speaks well for Hitler’s authority that he had only to appear for the rebellion to die down. Significantly, however, he made a point of avoiding a frank discussion with Stennes and instead tried to win over the rank-and-file storm trooper. Accompanied by armed SS men, he went from one beer hall to the next, seeking out the regular tables and guardrooms of the SA. He pleaded with the units, even occasionally broke into tears, spoke of impending victories and the rich rewards that would be due to them, the soldiers of the revolution. For the time being he promised them legal services and better treatment: the funds for these benefits would come from a special levy of twenty pfennig on every party member. As for the SS, he repaid it for its services in this juncture by awarding it the watchword: “Your honor is loyalty!”

  The collapse of the rebellion meant the departure of Captain Pfeffer von Salomon. With growing fatalism, the commander of the SA had watched the power of the Political Organization swell while that of the SA had dwindled perceptibly. One reason for this shift was Hitler’s own changing psychological requirements. With his sense of mission daily reinforced by mass cheering, he developed a craving for homage that could far more easily be paid by the petty bourgeois functionary type of the Political Organization than by the soldierly leaders of the SA. Consequently, the PO received the lion’s share of the party’s limited funds and was distinctly favored in the drawing up of deputy lists and other acts of patronage. But there was also the personal incompatibility between Hitler, with his semiartistic and South German temperament, and the austere, “Prussian”-minded Pfeffer von Salomon.

  At the end of August Hitler relieved Pfeffer of his duties and then, as he was to do later on after his conflicts with the army in 1938 and 1941, himself assumed the post of supreme SA leader. Ernst Röhm, who had meanwhile become a military instructor in Bolivia, was called back to take over the day-to-day work of SA leader. By becoming Oberster SA-Führer (OSAF) Hitler finally made himself master of the movement; all the special privileges Pfeffer had obtained or claimed now devolved upon Hitler himself. Only a few days after assuming the post, Hitler issued an order requiring every SA leader to take an “unconditional oath of loyalty” to him personally and subsequently to have every single member of the SA do the same. This reinforced the oath taken by every member on entering the SA: “To carry out all orders fearlessly and conscientiously, since I know that my leaders will require of me nothing illegal.”

  It was significant that no resistance was offered to the total subordination implicit in such formulas. Institutionally as well as psychologically the movement had at last prepared its members to fit into the totalitarian framework. In June, as a matter of fact, Hitler had revealed his totalitarian vision to a number of chosen party journalists. Speaking to them in the Senators’ Hall of the new Brown House, he had sketched a picture of the hierarchy and organization of the Catholic Church. The party, he declared, must build its leadership pyramid after the model of the church, “on a broad pedestal of… political parish priests who stand in the midst of the people.” The pyramid itself must “rise above the tiers of the Kreisleiter and Gauleiter to the body of Senators and finally to the Leader-Pope.”

  He did not shy away from the comparison between gauleiters and bishops, and between future senators and cardinals, one of those present reported; and similarly he boldly transferred the concepts of authority, obedience, and faith from the spiritual to the secular realms in a series of bewildering parallels. He concluded by saying, without a trace of irony, that he did not “wish to contest the Holy Father in Rome his claim to mental—or is the word spiritual—infallibility on questions of faith, I don’t know much about that. But I think I know a great deal more about politics. Therefore I hope that the Holy Father henceforth will not contest my claim. And herewith I now lay claim, for myself and my successors in the leadership of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, to political infallibility. I hope the world will bow to that as quickly as it has bowed to the Holy Father’s claim.”7

  Perhaps even more illuminating than these remarks was the reaction to them. There was no sign of astonishment or demur among the party journalists. Here is proof of the effectiveness of Hitler’s policy of subjugating the entire internal life of the Nazi party to himself personally. Many circumstances had aided him. The movement had always viewed itself as a militant community founded upon charismatic leadership and the discipline of faith. This was the source of the dynamic confidence so lacking in the traditional parties with their interests and programs. In addition Hitler had been able to count on the background and experience of the “Old Fighters.” Almost all of them had taken part in the World War. They had grown to manhood in a climate of strict orders and obedience. Many of them, moreover, came from homes whose pedagogical patterns were based on the rigid mores of the cadet schools. Altogether, Hitler profited greatly from the peculiarities of an authoritarian educational system. It is surely more than a matter of chance that of his seventy-three gauleiters, no fewer than twenty were drawn from the teaching profession.

  Once the two intraparty crises of the summer of 1930 had been mastered with relative ease, there no longer existed any office or authority within the Nazi party that did not emanate directly from Hitler. However slight a danger Otto Strasser, Stennes, or Pfeffer may have been—their names stood for at least a theoretical alternative which set certain limits to any claim to absolute power. Now the South German SA commander August Schneidhuber issued a memorandum giving full credit for the growing might of the movement not to any of its functionaries but entirely to Hitler. With busy propagandists singing his praises in more and more transcendental terms, “der Führer” was on his way to becoming a legendary figure, immune from all criticism, standing far above any intraparty voting procedures. One observer commented that the party press at this time contained nothing but deifications of Hitler and attacks on the Jews.

  Still, the complaint arose that Hitler was putting himself at too great a remove from his followers. The loyal Schneidhuber described the sense of desertion that filled “almost every SA man.” He wrote: “The SA is struggling with the Führer for his soul and does not yet have it. But it must have it.” He spoke of the “clamor for the Führer,” which remained unanswered.r />
  It was at this period, and not by chance, that the greeting “Heil Hitler” became generally established. (It had cropped up occasionally before and had been deliberately introduced into Berlin practice by Goebbels.) At the same time, posters announcing meetings no longer mentioned “Adolf Hitler” as the speaker. Instead, nameless and already with the aloofness of a general concept, he appeared simply as the Führer. If party members thronged around him in hotel lobbies or offices, he reacted with irritation, would take.notice of them only reluctantly; he was bothered by so much familiarity. Nor was he happy at having hard-working party members introduced to him; he shunned social occasions with unknown persons.

  To be sure, he could also show an engaging side. If he dropped his pose of unapproachability, he might chat charmingly in a group of ladies, might present himself to a group of workers as one of them, with the bluff manner of the common man, or might appear in a fatherly role, gazing benevolently over the heads of blond children. “In solemn handshakes and wide-open eyes he is unmatched,” a contemporary noted. But his intimates could not help observing how much deliberate play-acting was involved. He was constantly calculating effects, practicing the touching as well as the grand gesture. He had grasped precisely what makes a celebrity, what laws he must follow, and to what extent he must conform to a specific craving of the age. His delicate health had made him give up smoking some time ago; in the meantime, he had also been compelled to give up alcohol. Both these facts he used to cultivate a reputation for asceticism. With his clear awareness of role-playing, he was certainly the most modern phenomenon in the German politics of the period. At any rate, he knew the secrets of public effectiveness far better than any of his rivals, from Hugenberg to Brüning. These politicians had never even considered their public image, showing again their rootedness in past conditions and their lack of instinct for the mood of the present.

  From this point on, there was no one who could be said to exert a significant, demonstrable influence upon Hitler. The days of Dietrich Eckart, even those of Alfred Rosenberg, lay far behind. “I never make a mistake. Every one of my words is historic,” he had screamed at Otto Strasser in the course of their quarrel. His intellectual curiosity continued to dwindle the more he fitted himself into the stylized role of “LeaderPope.” Surrounded entirely by sycophants and simple-minded members of his retinue, he gradually slid intellectually also into a state of isolation. His onetime model Karl Lueger, the mayor of Vienna, had impressed him with his pessimistic opinion of mankind. Now he himself scarcely troubled to conceal his own contempt for his followers as well as his opponents. In keeping with his fundamentally conservative instinct, he insisted that man was evil by nature, “stuff running rampant on this earth,” as he put it in a letter. And: “The masses are blind and stupid and do not know what they do.”

  His consumption of people was as great as his contempt for them. He was forever demoting, rebuking, or elevating, juggling people and positions—this habit, in fact, was one of the secrets of his success. But experience had also taught him that followers wanted to be treated ruthlessly. Thus, in connection with the forthcoming election, he made impossible demands of his campaign workers. The nucleus of the party’s functionaries and auxiliaries came from the traditionally unpolitical classes of the population. They were brisk, brash, and ready to throw themselves heart and soul into the contest. Their tempestuousness was in marked contrast to the dull, routine way in which the established parties went through the motions of an election campaign. During the two days before the election, in Berlin alone the Nazis held twenty-four major demonstrations. Once more their posters were pasted on every wall and fence, immersing the city in shrieking red. The party newspapers were put out in huge editions and sold to members for a pfennig apiece to be distributed door-to-door or outside factories. Hitler himself regarded these activities of his followers as a kind of process of selection: “Now a magnet is simply being passed over a heap of dung; and afterwards we will see how much iron there was in the dung heap that has clung to the magnet.”

  The elections were set for September 14, 1930. Hitler hoped for fifty or, in exuberant moods, even sixty to eighty Nazi seats. He was counting on the voters of the crumbling bourgeois center, on the young people who were voting for the first time, and on inveterate nonvoters who by all political logic ought to fall to his party, assuming that they could be persuaded to vote at all.

  The Landslide

  At the right moment the right weapon must be employed. One stage is probing the opponent, a second is preparation, a third is assault.

  Adolf Hitler

  September 14, 1930, became one of the turning points in the history of the Weimar Republic. It signified the end of the reign of democratic parties, and announced the initial death throes of the republic. By the time the election results became available, toward three o’clock in the morning, everything had changed. With a single step the Nazi party had advanced into the anteroom of power, and its leader, object of ridicule and idolatry, the “drummer” Adolf Hitler, had become one of the key figures on the political scene. The fate of the republic was sealed, the Nazi press exulted. Now mopping-up operations could begin.

  No less than 18 per cent of the voters had responded to the appeals of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party. In the two years since the last elections the party had succeeded in increasing the number of votes it received from 810,000 to 6.4 million. Instead of 12 seats in the Reichstag, it now had 107; after the Social Democratic Party it was the second strongest in the Reich. No comparable breakthrough can be found in the history of German political parties. Of the bourgeois parties, only the Catholic Center Party had been able to maintain its position. All others had suffered severe losses. The four center parties henceforth held only seventy-two seats. Hugenberg’s rightist Deutschnationale Volkspartei (German National People’s Party) had been cut almost exactly by half; from 14.3 per cent of the vote it had fallen to 7 per cent. Its alliance with the more radical Nazis had proved to be suicidal. With only forty-one seats in the Reichstag it was now blatantly inferior to the Nazi party, and Hitler’s claim to leadership of the Right seemed to be impressively confirmed. The Social Democrats had also suffered considerable losses. The Communists were the only other party to have emerged from the elections with gains, although theirs were considerably more modest than the Nazis’. Their share in the vote had risen from 10.6 to 13.1 per cent. The Communists hailed the results in their usual fashion: “The only victor in the September elections is the Communist Party.”

  On the whole, most observers recognized the historic importance of what had happened. With varying accents they attributed it to the deep crisis of the party system or saw it as the expression of a spreading lack of faith in the liberal and capitalist systems, coupled with a desire for a fundamental change in all conditions of life. “Most of those who have given their vote to the extremist parties are not at all radical; they have only lost faith in the old way.” No less than a third of the people had rejected the existing system in principle without knowing or asking what would follow it. There was talk of the “bitterness vote.”

  At this point it is pertinent to recall once more the circumstances that had marked the birth of the republic ten years before; it came into being as a state no one had really wanted. Now those origins rebounded against it. It had never won more than the nation’s tolerance, and many seem to have considered it merely a transitional phase with “nothing inspiring” about it, which had brought forth “no bold crime,” “no memorable slogan” and “no great man,” to quote the rhetoric of Oswald Spengler. On both Left and Right visibly growing numbers waited for the state to recall its fundamental meaning and assert its old power. All the repressed doubts of the democratic party system, all the slumbering contempt for “un-German” parliamentarism, came to the fore once more and could not be argued away. Hitler’s thesis, repeated thousands of times, that this republic was a sop to Germany’s enemies and the worst shackle of the Treaty
of Versailles, was widely and eagerly embraced.

  Interestingly enough, a good deal of foreign opinion, particularly as expressed in the British and American journals, took a similar tone, interpreting the electoral results as a reaction to the impossible harshness of the peace-treaty provisions and the hypocritical conduct of the victorious powers. On the whole, only France was incensed, although she, too, cherished a secret hope that the extreme rightist tendencies might give her a reason for a more rigorous policy toward her neighbor across the Rhine. Out of the chorus of reactions there arose, for the first time, one of those voices that was to be heard for ten years to come, condoning all of Hitler’s excesses and provocation’s own purposes. Thus, Lord Rothermere in the Daily Mail of September 24, 1930, pointed out that Hitler’s victory should not be regarded as a danger; it should be recognized that the man offered all sorts of advantages; that he was building a bulwark against Bolshevism; that he was eliminating the grave danger that the Soviet campaign against European civilization might reach into Germany.8