The Third Reich

by Thomas Childers

  On February 28, Reich President Friedrich Ebert died suddenly of complications from an appendectomy. Ebert’s death at fifty-four was a tragedy for Weimar democracy but a godsend for Hitler. There would be presidential elections, and Hitler recognized an opportunity to deal a blow to Ludendorff. Playing to the general’s vanity, Hitler convinced him to enter the race as the National Socialist candidate. Some in Hitler’s inner circle felt this a risky move, but Hitler was convinced that Ludendorff could not win and saw in it the possibility of eliminating him as a serious rival. The general took the bait. Throughout the March campaign, the Völkischer Beobachter, with its modest and overwhelmingly regional readership, issued perfunctory endorsements, and Hitler sounded all the right notes. But the party’s ability to mobilize was still weak, and Hitler’s support was a masterpiece of understatement. He wrote respectfully of Ludendorff, addressing him always as “his Excellency,” and as “the military leader” of the Völkisch right, a formulation that implicitly if none too subtly suggested that he, Adolf Hitler, was its true political leader. Adding to Ludendorff’s meager prospects, the other Völkisch organizations chose to back another candidate—Karl Jarres—put forward by the mainstream Conservatives.

  Underfunded and poorly organized, Ludendorff’s candidacy proved to be exactly the disaster that Hitler had anticipated. Out of the roughly two million votes cast in the first round of the election on March 29, only 285,793 Germans cast ballots for the general—a humiliating 14 percent of the total. Since no candidate won a majority of the vote, a second round was necessary. The discredited Ludendorff chose not to enter the runoff, and the Nazis shifted their support to another hero of the Great War, Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg. Standing as a man above party and supported by a combination of right/center-right parties, Hindenburg carried the election with a mere plurality. At seventy-seven years of age, Hindenburg was a living legend, associated with the glories of the old empire. He had been called out of retirement in 1914 and dealt the Russians a major defeat at Tannenberg—the first great German victory of the war. Hindenburg quickly became Germany’s most celebrated war hero, and by 1916 was by far the most revered man in the Reich. Although he was a conservative, a devout monarchist, in fact, the very embodiment of the old order, he took his oath to defend the Republic seriously, as a matter of honor. Despite his reservations about parliamentary democracy, his assumption of the Reich presidency lent the struggling Republic a degree of legitimacy it had hitherto lacked. Yet, unlike Ebert, Hindenburg was hardly devoted to the Weimar Republic he agreed to serve, and in time he would play a crucial role in the final collapse of German democracy.

  The elections of 1925 shattered Ludendorff’s standing as leader of the “national opposition,” and in the following years his increasingly eccentric views pushed him beyond even the outer fringes of German politics. He launched occasional thunderbolts aimed most frequently at the Catholic Church, but his threat to Hitler’s leadership of the radical right was at an end. The Völkisch party began a slow but relentless slide into irrelevance. Its followers drifted gradually to the NSDAP, joined by many of its leaders, and after 1928 it virtually vanished from the political stage.

  With Ludendorff’s position gravely weakened and the DVFP’s influence rapidly ebbing, Hitler faced another, potentially more serious problem, one arising from within the party’s ranks. In the run-up to the Putsch, Ernst Röhm had worked assiduously to build bridges to other right-wing paramilitary organizations. He had played a central role in the events of November 9, 1923, and had spent two months in prison as a consequence. Upon being granted parole, he once again took up the organizational reins, hoping to bring about an amalgamation of the same armed groups with which he had worked in 1923. Traveling around the country, he made contact with different paramilitary organizations and began welding them into an umbrella organization, the Frontbann, which he hoped would function as a purely military formation, free from the endemic factional bickering that plagued the right in 1924. The Frontbann, as Röhm envisioned it, would be the military arm of the NSDAP but remain an autonomous organization within the party owing allegiance to him personally.

  Röhm’s extensive military experience, his contacts with the army and other paramilitary leaders, as well as his determination to transform the SA into a mass organization made him an invaluable asset for the party, but his vision of an autonomous SA, technically subordinate to the party but in fact largely independent, was unacceptable to Hitler. The Storm Troopers, in Hitler’s view, were to be integrated into the party and subordinated to his leadership. The SA was to be an instrument of the party’s political strategy—providing protection for Nazi speakers at mass rallies, handing out leaflets, posting placards, staging gigantic parades and other demonstrations. The SA was to be an integral part of the party’s propaganda offensives. Above all, Adolf Hitler, not Ernst Röhm, would be its supreme leader.

  During 1924 Röhm made several visits to Hitler in Landsberg, hoping to convince him of his plans, only to be rebuffed time and again. With the reestablishment of the NSDAP in 1925, matters came to a head. In Hitler’s first programmatic statement in the Völkischer Beobachter, he spelled out the SA’s role as an instrument for political agitation. In mid-April Röhm presented Hitler with a memorandum that suggested that the thirty thousand men he had organized in the Frontbann could serve as the basis for a national political organization, albeit under his control. When Hitler failed to respond, Röhm issued an ultimatum, threatening to resign from his post as leader of the SA. This he intended as an opening gambit in a difficult bargaining process, and he was shocked when Hitler simply refused to reply. In fact, Hitler never offered a response of any kind to his old comrade.

  In late April, Röhm formally resigned his position as head of the SA and the Frontbann. He made several personal appeals to Hitler, appeals in which he used the familiar “du,” and invoked the “memory of the fine and difficult days we have lived through together,” begging Hitler “not to exclude me from your personal friendship.” Hitler still did not reply, leaving Röhm offended and deeply hurt. To a party colleague he grumbled about Hitler’s unwillingness to tolerate any opposition to his ideas and his notorious indecisiveness when faced with difficult choices. When problems arose, Röhm complained, Hitler would resolve them “suddenly, at the very last minute,” after allowing the situation to fester, sometimes for weeks or months on end. The situation often became “intolerable and dangerous only because he vacillates and procrastinates.” Hitler wanted “things his own way and gets mad when he strikes firm opposition.” He didn’t “realize how he can wear on one’s nerves,” and he didn’t understand “that he fools only himself and those worms around him” with his fits and histrionics. For the time being the SA question was not so much resolved as simply left in limbo. Göring, formerly head of the SA, was still in exile (he would not return to Germany for five years when the Reich government issued an amnesty for political criminals) and SA units were to organize themselves at the local level, with little in the way of a national structure or clear chain of command. It was symptomatic of Hitler’s leadership style that he did not address the SA question or move to appoint a new leader of the Storm Troopers for more than a year.

  Meanwhile another threat was brewing in the north. In March 1925, only days after he was banned from speaking, Hitler deputized Gregor Strasser to take charge of the party in northern Germany. From his days working with the NSFB in the Nazi-Völkisch alliance of the previous year, Strasser had many contacts in the north, and, armed with the free railroad pass given to all Reichstag deputies (he had been elected in December 1924), he crisscrossed northern Germany, giving speeches, founding local chapters of the party, and revitalizing old ones. With Hitler sidelined, Strasser spoke at ninety-one Nazi events in 1925, the vast majority in the north. As one political commentator observed, Strasser lacked “Hitler’s oratorical gift, but possessed something just as rare: the power to move an audience by his very personality.” He also prove
d to be a master organizer. By the end of the year, the northern party could boast 272 local chapters compared to a mere 71 prior to the Putsch, and Strasser had become the most visible Nazi leader in the country.

  Leaders in northern Germany were drawn to Strasser both for his strong anticapitalist, “socialist” stance and his emerging role as a counterpoise to the domination of the party by the Bavarian faction. Many were also disturbed by Hitler’s apparent indifference to their concerns. Banned from speaking in public, Hitler spent much of 1925 concentrating his energies almost exclusively on Bavaria and, inexplicably to many party leaders, spent long weeks virtually secluded in the mountains outside Berchtesgaden writing the second volume of Mein Kampf. Leaders in the north, many of whom had never actually met Hitler, grew increasingly restless. They chafed at what they considered Munich’s attempt to impose its control over the entire party and hoped to break the dominance of the Bavarian camarilla at party headquarters. They were convinced that Esser, Streicher, and Amann were leading Hitler astray, pushing him in a bourgeois, reactionary direction that might play well in rural Bavaria but would ultimately limit the party’s appeal in urban Germany. They were also increasingly frustrated by Hitler’s inattention to party matters—a passivity that de facto left Esser, Streicher, and the Munich clique in charge.

  In the course of 1925 they gravitated naturally toward Strasser, who operated out of Berlin and was visible on the ground all across northern Germany. He organized meetings of regional district leaders (Gauleiter) from the north and west where disgruntled leaders could voice their frustration with Munich—and by implication, Hitler. In September, inspired by Strasser, these leaders formed the Working Group of Northern and Western German Gauleiter of the NSDAP (Arbeitsgemeinschaft or AG), intended to be a sounding board for like-minded Gauleiter and a counterweight to party headquarters. They insisted that they were not challenging Hitler’s leadership, but the northern leaders were determined to create an alternative center of power to Munich.

  Strasser was loyal to Hitler, recognizing him as the indispensable leader of the party, the glue that held it together. But, like Röhm, he considered himself a “colleague” of Hitler rather than a follower. Strasser’s unwavering loyalty to Hitler did not, however, extend to the program or the Munich headquarters. He believed that the program—the “immutable” Twenty-five Points of 1920—needed serious revision. Like many leaders in the industrial north, Strasser believed that the party should place far greater stress on its radical “socialist” impulses. He was wary of the southern faction’s heavy emphasis on fanatical nationalism and anti-Semitism and was convinced that the NSDAP should develop a labor-oriented, anticapitalist stance that would appeal to the industrial working class. His brand of “socialism,” as he made clear on numerous occasions, was not a form of Marxism but a radical national socialism, a German socialism rooted in the Volk. Speaking in the Reichstag in November 1925, Strasser explained: “We National Socialists want the economic revolution involving the nationalization of the economy. . . . We want in place of an exploitative capitalist economic system a real socialism, maintained not by a soulless Jewish-materialist outlook but by the believing, sacrificial, and unselfish old German community sentiment, community purpose and community feeling. We want the social revolution in order to bring about the national revolution.”

  To provide a platform for these views, he and his younger brother Otto established their own publishing house, the Kampfverlag (Struggle Publishing), in Berlin, which would publish a variety of National Socialist newspapers and journals. Foremost among them was the daily Workers’ Press (Arbeiterzeitung), which focused largely on Berlin, and the National Socialist Letters, a bimonthly journal that was intended to produce serious intellectual articles devoted to National Socialist ideology and strategy. Strasser was the Kampfverlag’s publisher, but for its managing editor (and chief writer) he selected a young Rhinelander, a university graduate, would-be novelist, poet, freelance journalist, and political agitator who had joined the party only in late 1924. Dr. Joseph Goebbels (he received his PhD in Romantic Literature from Heidelberg in 1921) was short in stature and slight of build; he walked with a pronounced limp due to a crippled foot from a childhood illness. He was filled with a deep-seated rage at his failed career aspirations and his physical deformity, a burning resentment that he projected onto the German nation and its unjust treatment by Fate. Inspired by Hitler’s defiant words in the Munich courtroom, he became a fervent adherent, worshipping Hitler from afar as the ordained savior who would restore the soul of Germany and lead the nation once more to greatness.

  Based in Elberfeld in the Rhineland and working as a freelance journalist, Goebbels was drawn to the NSDAP and to Strasser, acquiring a reputation as a firebrand, both for his incendiary articles in the Völkisch press and his equally biting oratory. He proved to be a creative and gifted public speaker, sharp-tongued, clever, a master of unabashed demagoguery. He quickly became a popular speaker at National Socialist and Völkisch gatherings throughout the Rhineland and across northern Germany, drawing on an extensive repertoire of radical rhetoric. Goebbels shared Strasser’s vision of National Socialism that emphasized the socialist strains of the party’s ideology, at times swerving toward a form of national Bolshevism. In 1925 he was appointed business manager of the Gau (party district) Rhineland-North, overseeing its press and its propaganda. He showed remarkable skill at both.

  During the winter of 1925–26 Strasser and Goebbels set to work on a draft of a revised party program and distributed copies to a number of district leaders in the north. In it they endorsed a closer relationship with Russia and emphasized the party’s socialism and its determination to crush corrupt capitalism. To demonstrate the party’s leftist credentials they also advocated Nazi participation in a Communist- and Socialist-sponsored referendum to block a government plan that would compensate aristocratic and princely families for property lost in the 1919 revolution.

  They chose not to inform Hitler about this draft revision, though it was widely discussed by National Socialist leaders in the Northern Working Group. The draft did not find universal approval even in the North, but it was, by its very existence, a challenge to the established powers within the party. It was not until February 1926 that Hitler, informed by an incensed Gottfried Feder, came to understand fully the threat posed by Strasser and his draft. He immediately called a conference of party leaders to set matters straight. The meeting was to be held in the Baroque city of Bamberg, in Upper Franconia (northern Bavaria), in February. Goebbels and Strasser traveled to the conference intending to press their ideas, hopeful that Hitler could be won over to their views. But Hitler preempted them. The audience of some sixty participants consisted largely of leaders from the south, and Hitler, speaking first, delivered a powerful address of some two hours, scornfully dismissing the draft and insisting that the program of 1920 was inviolate.

  Without mentioning Strasser or Goebbels by name, he restated the party’s commitment to the principle of private property and firmly rejected any National Socialist participation in the leftist referendum on princely property. It would undermine the NSDAP’s standing with the already nervous middle class and undermine his efforts to win financial backing from prominent business interests. Most of all, the NSDAP could not, under any circumstances, afford to be seen as working with the Communists and Socialists. He was equally adamant about the party’s foreign policy. He restated his conviction that France was Germany’s implacable enemy and hence England and Italy offered the most as potential allies. Cooperation with Russia was unthinkable. “Anyone who talks about a Russo-German alliance hasn’t realized that such an alliance would result in the immediate political bolshevization of Germany and thus national suicide.”

  When he at last rose to speak, Strasser was clearly intimidated. He stumbled haltingly through his remarks, and Goebbels decided to pass on his opportunity to address the room. Both had assumed that Hitler would be sympathetic to their ideas and were s
hocked by his performance. “What Hitler is this? A reactionary?” Goebbels agonized in his diary that night. “Incredibly clumsy and uncertain. Russian question completely beside the point. Italy and England [Germany’s] natural allies. Awful! Our mission is the destruction of Bolshevism. Bolshevism and its Jewish progenitors.” Germany, Hitler had insisted, must ultimately secure Russia, with its vast lands and natural resources. Germany was to pursue a colonial policy, not in Asia or Africa, but on the European continent. On the home front, National Socialism must not shake the principle of private property. The party’s program, Hitler declared, was sufficient as it was. To Goebbels’s disgust, Hitler was obviously satisfied with it. “Feder nods. Ley nods. Streicher nods. Esser nods. It hurts me to the bottom of my soul,” Goebbels confided to his diary, “to see you in this company.”

  Bamberg was a decisive moment in the evolution of the NSDAP. At Bamberg, Hitler reasserted his control over the party. The National Socialists were fond of invoking “the idea” of the movement, but at Bamberg it was not so much this nebulous ideological idea that carried the day but Hitler’s powerful personality. He had become the embodiment of the “idea,” and to oppose the program was to oppose him. The NSDAP was now unequivocally Hitler’s party, and the leaders at Bamberg overwhelmingly swore fealty to him. He and he alone would ultimately decide the content of the program. Isolated in Bamberg, Strasser and Goebbels beat a hasty retreat. Hitler demanded that Strasser destroy all copies of his draft program, which he did. And Goebbels, mortified by Hitler’s speech, returned to Ebersfeld shaken, wondering how he could have been so wrong about Hitler.