It was also at the Weimar rally that Hitler introduced the “blood flag” into the National Socialist liturgy. The flag had been carried at the head of the procession on November 9, 1923, stained, presumably, with the blood of the “martyrs” who died at the Feldherrnhalle. In a reverent, almost mystical ceremony enacted before the massed formation of the party’s uniformed minions, Hitler solemnly touched the sacred blood flag to the banner of each SA and SS unit, an act of consecration that symbolically bound the Storm Troopers and SS men to him in eternal loyalty. It was a ceremony to be enacted with solemn piety at all subsequent national party rallies.
By the end of 1927, with Hitler’s dominance over the NSDAP firmly established, a “Führer cult” gradually took hold within the party. Before the Putsch, he was simply “Herr Hitler” or “the boss,” but after his release from prison, Hess and then others began referring to him as “the Führer,” the leader. It caught on. The “German greeting” of “Heil” morphed into “Heil Hitler,” and although the idea did not originate with Hitler, he did nothing to discourage it. Adding to his mystique, he grew more aloof in his personal and professional activities, a being apart, hard to reach, his movements, his whereabouts, shrouded in mystery. Even high-ranking party officials often had to wait days or weeks before being granted an audience.
Much of 1926 he spent away from Munich, retreating to the Alpine village of Berchtesgaden, where he worked feverishly on the second volume of Mein Kampf. There above the village on the slopes of the Obersalzberg he rented a cottage, Haus Wachenfeld, from a widowed party member. Within a short time he was able to buy the cottage on very favorable terms and expanded it gradually, until, during the Third Reich, it was transformed into the grand villa, the Berghof. The first volume of Mein Kampf appeared in July 1925, the second in December 1927. The book registered only modest sales but contributed mightily to his reputation within the party as a political visionary, a man of piercing political insights and profound philosophical depths. Couched in portentous biblical imagery, Hitler presented himself as the prophet called by providence to unite the German peoples of Europe and lead them from the depths of their humiliation to redemption. “Today,” the book begins, “it seems to me providential that Fate should have chosen Braunau on the Inn as my birthplace. For this little town lies on the boundary between two German states which we of the younger generation at least have made it our life work to reunite by every means at our disposal.” Sounding the essential racial and expansionist themes that reverberated through the roughly thousand pages of text that followed, he proclaimed that “one blood demands one Reich. . . . Only when the Reich borders include the very last German, but can no longer guarantee his daily bread, will the moral right to acquire foreign soil arise from the distress of our own people. Their sword will become our plow, and from the tears of war the daily bread of future generations will grow. And so this little city on the border seems to me the symbol of a great mission.”
Aside from detailing his ideas about marketing for a mass public, Mein Kampf offered nothing new to the party faithful. Hitler’s obsessive racial anti-Semitism and his genocidal rhetoric; his determination to expunge “Judeo-Marxism” from the face of the earth; his calls for Lebensraum in the East had been loudly proclaimed in innumerable speeches and articles for years. Readers of the book might find it convoluted, contradictory, turgid, and virtually unreadable (it was, and they did), but party members were wise to have a copy on hand. The book was a collection of dubious aphorisms, backward projections of Hitler’s views, a semifictional portrayal of his past, stray thoughts on alcohol, diet, dress, and sex, historical observations, and a tangled effort at theory. What came through loud and clear was Hitler’s insatiable hatred, his enraged self-pity. Sales of Mein Kampf remained disappointing until the Nazi electoral breakthrough in 1930, when the book’s popularity followed the sharp upward curve of Nazi electoral fortunes. Even then, the tragic irony of Mein Kampf was not that people read it and were convinced by it, but that people did not read it.
While Hitler in private appeared distant, disconnected to those around him, an empty shell, he came alive when he strode onstage. To read Hitler’s speeches is to miss entirely the passion, the power, and electricity of his performances. Parades, spectacles, rallies were important, but for Hitler “the power which has always started the greatest religions and political avalanches in history rolling has from time immemorial been the magic power of the spoken word, and that alone.” The “broad masses of the people,” he declared, “can be moved only by the power of speech. All great movements are popular movements, stirred either by the cruel Goddess of Distress or by the firebrand of the word hurled among the masses. . . . Only a storm of hot passion can turn the destinies of peoples, and he alone can rouse passion who bears it within himself. It alone gives its chosen one the words which like hammer blows can open the gates to the heart of a people.”
Between 1925 and 1928 Hitler’s grand vision of propaganda was the ideal; practice was another matter. For most of the period the party relied on the regional chiefs and a cadre of dedicated activists sprinkled thinly across the country. The Storm Troopers, whose parades, demonstrations, house-to-house canvassing, and other activities Hitler considered essential to political mobilization, were certainly the most visible and energetic elements of Nazi propaganda. The party had neither the money nor the manpower to create a national network of propaganda cells, and its organization was still too loose to guarantee the party leadership the degree of control it desired. The Gauleiter, although appointed by Hitler and loyal to him, displayed a tenacious independence, choosing to emphasize the themes they favored and to target the constituencies they thought most susceptible in their area. As a consequence, while the forms and techniques of Nazi political mobilization were becoming more uniform, the party could look quite different from region to region.
In January 1926, Strasser left the Propaganda Leadership to take command of the party’s Organization Section, recommending his young adjutant Heinrich Himmler to run the party’s national propaganda operation. Himmler, twenty-eight with a degree in agriculture from Munich’s Technical University, had participated in the Putsch and thereafter served as Strasser’s deputy in Lower Bavaria in 1924–25, hurrying on his motorbike along narrow country lanes to deliver messages, give speeches, and arrange meetings. When Strasser moved to Berlin in 1925, Himmler served as his surrogate in Lower Bavaria. Strasser found Himmler, with his thick rimless glasses and pale owlish face, humorless and uncomfortably formal, but he recommended him to the party leadership nonetheless. Punctilious, obsessed with detail and discipline, Himmler combined a prodigious bureaucratic talent for organization with a cold ideological fervor. Hitler was duly impressed. In January 1928 Himmler assumed the reins of the Propaganda Section and began preparations for the first national election since 1924.
The party, though still very small, was better organized and prepared for a national campaign than four years earlier, but major problems remained. Communications between Munich and the regional and local party organizations were unreliable, compelling the Propaganda Section on occasion to publish directives openly in the Völkischer Beobachter, to which all party chapters were required to subscribe. Mixups and miscommunication were common. The Propaganda Section found itself fielding endless queries and complaints on matters large and small.
Complaints and demands went both ways. If a local group decided to draft its own leaflets, the text had to be first submitted to and approved by the Propaganda Section. Himmler chided affiliates that failed to comply with directives from Munich. All chapters were ordered to send regular reports on their activities and those of the party’s enemies to the Propaganda Section, and if Himmler discovered an Ortsgruppe or district underperforming, he fired off threatening dispatches. He always seemed to be watching, attentive to even the smallest detail. Whereas Strasser drew followers to him through the strength of his personality, Himmler compelled cooperation with pettifogging harassment
of the local groups.
With much enthusiasm but also with a campaign apparatus that was underfunded and far from the smooth-functioning organization Hitler envisioned, the NSDAP prepared for Reichstag elections on May 20, 1928. The Nazis wanted to enter the Reichstag, Goebbels forthrightly stated, in order “to arm ourselves with democracy’s weapons. If democracy is foolish enough to give us free railway passes and salaries that is its problem. It does not concern us. Any way of bringing about the revolution is fine by us.” This was the very public position the party had taken since 1925, and it had paid very poor dividends. The NSDAP had staggered through the regional state elections of 1926 and 1927, faring miserably all across the board. In none of the ten provincial elections of the period could the NSDAP muster even 4 percent of the vote. Despite the fierce intensity of their efforts, the Nazis had shown themselves remarkably inept in the arts of democratic electoral politics.
The NSDAP’s poor performance at the polls was not simply a consequence of its organizational shortcomings; it also reflected the effects of a hopeful though fragile economic recovery. The Dawes Plan had ushered in a period of relative economic stability and political calm, wedged between the seismic disruptions of the hyperinflation and the Great Depression. The Golden Twenties, as the period from 1924 to 1929 came to be called, saw a resurgence of the pro-Weimar parties and a serious setback for both the conservative and radical right. For the first time in Germany’s tumultuous postwar history, it seemed to have achieved a measure of domestic stability. The Weimar government also jettisoned its policy of noncompliance and obfuscation and moved to reintegrate Germany into the European state system. In 1926 Germany signed the Locarno Pact with England, France, Belgium, and Italy recognizing the western borders of the Reich as set by Versailles and pledging not to go to war with its western neighbors. Significantly, no such agreement was reached on Germany’s eastern frontier. In 1928, Germany was a signatory to the Kellogg-Briand Pact, an international agreement in which signatory states promised not to resort to war to resolve “disputes or conflicts of whatever nature or of whatever origin they may be, which may arise among them.” Germany was at last admitted to the League of Nations and reentered the community of nations. It was no longer a pariah state.
The Reichstag election of May 1928 seemed to confirm that newfound economic and political stability. The Nazis could muster only a dismal 2.6 percent of the vote. Many, using the poor performance of the anti-Republican parties as a yardstick, have interpreted the 1928 elections as a triumph of Weimar democracy, and used the abysmal Nazi vote as a baseline from which to measure its dramatic breakthrough in 1930 and its breathtaking ascent thereafter. After all, for the first time since 1923, a Social Democrat, Hermann Müller, assumed the chancellorship, leading a broadly based pro-democratic coalition (the Great Coalition) that stretched from the SPD to the liberal but right-of-center German People’s Party.
Yet the elections of 1928 reveal not that German democracy was on solid ground but rather offer subtle manifestations of a momentous transformation within the Weimar party system and within the middle-class electorate in particular. This trend was not reflected in the growth of radicalism but in the steady growth of special-interest, single-issue, and regional parties. Greatly facilitated by Weimar’s radical system of proportional representation, sixty thousand votes nationwide earned a party a seat in the Reichstag, parties such as the Bavarian Peasants Party, the Hanoverian Party, the Homeowners Party, the Christian Service and Peoples Party, the Christian-National Peasants and Rural People’s Party, the People’s Justice Party, the Revalorization and Reconstruction Party, not to be confused with the Revalorization and Construction Party, both representing people who were irate at the government’s harsh stabilization of the economy after the hyperinflation. Altogether some thirty such parties crowded onto the ballot in every state.
These small splinter parties drew their support almost exclusively from middle-class voters and although they claimed to be “above politics,” their programs contained an implicit ideological message. They attacked big business, big labor, and big government. They dismissed Weimar’s parliamentary system as the tool of powerful special interests and assailed the liberal and conservative parties that had sold out the small businessman, the small farmer, the small homeowner, civil servants, and pensioners. Instead, they advocated various forms of corporatist government, where representation would be based on occupational or interest blocs, each given equal weight. In this way, the “disenfranchised” of the Weimar system could compete on equal terms with the powerful entrenched interests. Although most of these parties were not radical, they represented a mounting anti-system protest that went far beyond simple interest politics. Under more desperate circumstances, circumstances that would soon come with the onset of the Great Depression, their message of protest could—and would—be nestled quite snugly within the ideological framework of National Socialism.
Individually these small splinter parties were utterly insignificant, but together they attracted a sizable chunk of the middle-class electorate, revealing in the process that traditional political allegiances had been badly shaken and that a major migration of middle-class voters was under way. In 1919 and 1920 these Lilliputian parties had garnered only 3 percent of the national vote; by 1924 they won 10 percent, and even when the economy rebounded during the Golden Twenties, their vote inched upward in regional elections, while the liberals and conservatives stumbled. In May 1928, they captured 13.7 percent of the national vote, matching the Conservatives and surpassing the two liberal parties combined. More than a year before the Great Depression crashed over Germany, roughly one third of the middle-class electorate had deserted their traditional parties and were clearly searching for political alternatives.
In 1928, the high-water mark of Weimar stability, Germans, especially middle-class Germans, were not ready to embrace the radical politics of Hitler and the NSDAP, but they were increasingly disenchanted with the political mainstream. The Nazis were not yet able to capitalize on this growing disaffection, and for them the outcome of the Reichstag election of 1928 was a disappointing surprise. After all the reorganization, all the propaganda innovations, all the ideological fervor, the party had actually lost ground since 1924. With 2.6 percent of the vote, the NSDAP was again relegated to the fringes of German politics, and Hitler, the Führer, the self-proclaimed savior of Germany, seemed condemned to remain a marginal, quixotic figure in German political life. That was the verdict of an undercover official from the Reich Ministry of the Interior whose confidential report on the NSDAP declared: “This is a party that is not going anywhere. It is a numerically insignificant . . . radical revolutionary splinter group incapable of exerting any noticeable influence on the great mass of the population and the course of political events.” On the eve of the Great Depression, few would have disputed his judgment.
4
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INTO THE MAINSTREAM
The Nazis desperately needed an issue, something that would thrust them into the mainstream of German political consciousness. The Wall Street crash and the onset of the Great Depression in the fall of 1929 did just that. As the stock market in New York collapsed, the Americans withdrew their short-term loans, and the German economy, so dependent on those loans, careened downward like the tail of a falling kite. Between June 1928 and May 1930, industrial production in Germany dropped by 31 percent; unemployment, especially among blue-collar workers, catapulted by 200 percent, and the government deficit mushroomed as claims for unemployment compensation skyrocketed. Bankruptcies soared, as small businesses failed in record numbers. It was only the beginning. By the summer of 1932, over one third of the German labor force was out of work, and over two million more had simply vanished from the unemployment rolls, having exhausted their meager benefits. Armies of shabby, jobless men drifted through the streets; bread lines and soup kitchens appeared in every community and squalid shantytowns sprouted like weeds on the fringes of the cities. A ri
sing wave of foreclosures swept across the rural countryside, leaving hundreds of family farms up for auction. For three dismal years the economic news remained grim: there was no light at the end of the tunnel, no recovery predicted for the next quarter, or the next, or the next. The economy plunged in a free fall, and an atmosphere of mounting fear, tinged with anger, settled over the country. It was just the situation the Nazis needed.
In the aftermath of the party’s poor showing in the 1928 elections, the Nazi leadership began a reevaluation of the NSDAP’s considerably muddled public image. Especially dispiriting for Nazi strategists was the party’s consistently poor performance in the large cities. Despite years of intense agitation, the Nazis had made only marginal inroads into the urban working class. In 1928, however, the NSDAP had done surprisingly well in a number of rural areas, notably the farm communities of Schleswig-Holstein, Lower Saxony, Thuringia, and Upper Bavaria. Almost immediately, party leaders renewed their calls for a greater cultivation of the rural and small-town electorate as well as a sharper focus on the middle class. While the Social Democrats and Communists blocked the Nazi advance into the mainstream of working-class politics, the declining popularity of the traditional liberal and conservative parties seemed to offer a promising opportunity for a revitalized NSDAP. Evaluating the outcome of the election, the Völkischer Beobachter of May 31, 1928, signaled the party’s new direction. “The results in the countryside have shown that greater successes can be achieved with less expenditure of energy, money, and time than in the large cities. National Socialist rallies with good speakers are real events in small towns and villages and are talked about for weeks. In the large cities, on the other hand, even rallies with three or four thousand people disappear and are forgotten.”
The Third Reich Page 13