by Ian Kershaw
Goebbels and some other northern leaders thought of themselves as revolutionaries, with more in common with the Communists than with the hated bourgeoisie. There were some sympathies for Russia. And there was talk of a party trade union. Finally, there was the attitude towards Hitler and towards the party’s programme. All the north German leaders accepted Hitler’s position, and his right to head the party. They recognized him as the ‘hero of Munich’ for his part in the putsch, and for his stance at the trial. His standing and reputation needed no emphasis. But many of the north German party faithful did not know Hitler personally, had not even met him. Their relationship to him was, therefore, quite different from that of Bavarian party members, especially those in Munich. Hitler was their leader; that was not in question. But Hitler, too, in their eyes, was bound to the ‘idea’. Moreover, the 1920 Programme that outlined the ‘idea’ in terms of the aims of the party was itself in their view deficient and in need of reform.
By late summer 1925, the northern leaders, differing among themselves in matters of interpretation and emphasis on points of the programme, aims, and meaning of National Socialism, were at least agreed that the party was undergoing a crisis. This was reflected in declining membership and stagnation. It was associated by them, above all, with the state of the party in Munich. But all that could be achieved was the establishment, under Strasser’s leadership, of a ‘Working Community of the North- and West-German Gaue of the NSDAP’, a loose organization of northern party districts, mainly for arranging the exchange of speakers.
This was not in any way intended as a challenge to Hitler. Even so, it did come to pose a threat to his authority. The clashes over the Esser clique, and over electoral participation, were not in themselves critical. Of far greater significance was the fact that Gregor Strasser and Goebbels, especially, looked to the Community as an opportunity to reshape the party’s programme. Ultimately, Strasser hoped to replace the Programme of 1920. In November, he took the first steps in composing the Community’s own draft programme. It advocated a racially integrated German nation at the heart of a central European customs union, the basis of a united states of Europe. Internally, it proposed a corporate state. In the economy, it looked to tying peasants to their landholdings, and public control of the means of production while protecting private property.
Not only was the draft vague, incoherent, and contradictory. It could only be divisive. Hitler plainly recognized the danger signals. He summoned about sixty party leaders to a meeting on 14 February 1926 at Bamberg, in Upper Franconia. There was no agenda. Hitler, it was stated, simply wanted to discuss some ‘important questions’.
He spoke for two hours. He addressed in the main the issue of foreign policy and future alliances. His position was wholly opposed to that of the Working Community. Alliances were never ideal, he said, but always ‘purely a matter of political business’. Britain and Italy, both distancing themselves from Germany’s arch-enemy France, offered the best potential. Any thought of an alliance with Russia could be ruled out. It would mean ‘the immediate political bolshevization of Germany’, and with it ‘national suicide’. Germany’s future could be secured solely by acquiring land, by eastern colonization as in the Middle Ages, by a colonial policy not overseas but in Europe. On the question of the expropriation of German princes without compensation (a proposal by the Left, but supported by north German Nazi leaders), Hitler again ruled out the position of the Working Community. ‘For us there are today no princes, only Germans,’ he declared. ‘We stand on the basis of the law, and will not give a Jewish system of exploitation a legal pretext for the complete plundering of our people.’ Such a rhetorical slant could not conceal the outright rejection of the views of the northern leaders. Finally, Hitler repeated his insistence that religious problems had no part to play in the National Socialist Movement.
Goebbels was appalled. ‘I feel devastated. What sort of Hitler? A reactionary? Amazingly clumsy and uncertain … Probably one of the greatest disappointments of my life. I no longer believe fully in Hitler. That’s the terrible thing: my inner support has been taken away.’
Hitler had reasserted his authority. The potential threat from the Working Community had evaporated. Despite some initial signs of defiance, the fate of the Community had been sealed at Bamberg. Gregor Strasser promised Hitler to collect all copies of the draft programme he had distributed, and wrote to members of the Community on 5 March asking for them to be returned. The Community now petered out into non-existence. On 1 July 1926, Hitler signed a directive stating that ‘since the NSDAP represents a large working community, there is no justification for smaller working communities as a combination of individual Gaue’. By that time, Strasser’s Working Community of northern and western Gauleiter was finished. With it went the last obstacle to the complete establishment of Hitler’s supreme mastery over the party.
Hitler was shrewd enough to be generous after his Bamberg triumph. By September, Strasser himself had been called to the Reich Leadership as Propaganda Leader of the party, while Franz Pfeffer von Salomon (Gauleiter of Westphalia, a former army officer who had subsequently joined the Freikorps, participated in the Kapp Putsch, and been active in opposition to the French in the Ruhr) was appointed head of the SA. Most important of all, the impressionable Goebbels was openly courted by Hitler and completely won over.
To bring about what has often been called Goebbels’s ‘Damascus’ in fact took little doing. Goebbels had idolized Hitler from the beginning. ‘Who is this man? Half plebian, half God! Actually Christ, or only John [the Baptist]?’ he had written in his diary in October 1925 on finishing reading the first volume of Mein Kampf. ‘This man has everything to be a king. The born tribune of the people. The coming dictator,’ he added a few weeks later. ‘How I love him.’ Like others in the Working Community, he had wanted only to liberate Hitler from the clutches of the Esser clique. Bamberg was a bitter blow. But his belief in Hitler was dented, not destroyed. It needed only a sign from Hitler to restore it. And the sign was not long in coming.
In mid-March Goebbels made his peace with Streicher after a long talk in Nuremberg. At the end of the month he received a letter from Hitler inviting him to speak in Munich on 8 April. Hitler’s car was there to meet him at the station to take him to his hotel. ‘What a noble reception,’ noted Goebbels in his diary. Hitler’s car was again provided the next day to take Goebbels to visit Lake Starnberg, a few miles outside Munich. In the evening, after Goebbels’s speech in the Bürgerbräukeller, in which he evidently retreated from his more radical version of socialism, Hitler embraced him, tears in his eyes. Next afternoon Hitler spent three hours going over the same ground he had covered at Bamberg. Then, Goebbels had been sorely disappointed. Now, he thought it was ‘brilliant’. ‘I love him … He has thought through everything,’ Goebbels continued. ‘He’s a man, taking it all round. Such a sparkling mind can be my leader. I bow to the greater one, the political genius.’ Goebbels’s conversion was complete. A few days later, he met Hitler again, this time in Stuttgart. ‘I believe he has taken me to his heart like no one else,’ he wrote. ‘Adolf Hitler, I love you because you are both great and simple at the same time. What one calls a genius.’ Towards the end of the year, Hitler appointed Goebbels as Gauleiter of Berlin – a key position if the party were to advance in the capital. Goebbels was Hitler’s man. He would remain so, adoring and subservient alike to the man he said he loved ‘like a father’, down to the last days in the bunker.
The Bamberg meeting had been a milestone in the development of the NSDAP. The Working Community had neither wanted nor attempted a rebellion against Hitler’s leadership. But once Strasser had composed his draft programme, a clash was inevitable. Was the party to be subordinated to a programme, or to its leader? The Bamberg meeting decided what National Socialism was to mean. It was not to mean a party torn, as the völkisch movement had been in 1924, over points of dogma. The Twenty-Five-Point Programme of 1920 was therefore regarded as sufficient. ‘
It stays as it is,’ Hitler was reported as saying. ‘The New Testament is also full of contradictions, but that hasn’t prevented the spread of Christianity.’ Its symbolic significance, not any practical feasibility was what mattered. Any more precise policy statement would not merely have produced continuing inner dissension. It would have bound Hitler himself to the programme, subordinated him to abstract tenets of doctrine that were open to dispute and alteration. As it was, his position as Leader over the movement was now inviolable.
At Bamberg, too, an important ideological issue – the anti-Russian thrust of foreign policy – had been reaffirmed. The alternative approach of the northern group had been rejected. The ‘idea’ and the Leader were coming to be inseparable. But the ‘idea’ amounted to a set of distant goals, a mission for the future. The only way to it was through the attainment of power. For that, maximum flexibility was needed. No ideological or organizational disputes should in future be allowed to divert from the path. Fanatical willpower, converted into organized mass force, was what was required. That demanded freedom of action for the Leader; and total obedience from the following. What emerged in the aftermath of Bamberg was, therefore, the growth of a new type of political organization: one subjected to the will of the Leader, who stood over and above the party, the embodiment in his own person of the ‘idea’ of National Socialism.
By the time of the General Members’ Meeting on 22 May, attended by 657 party members, Hitler’s leadership had emerged inordinately strengthened. He frankly admitted that he attributed no value to the meeting, which had been called simply to meet the legal requirements of a public association. The forthcoming Party Rally in Weimar – the opportunity for a visual display of the new-found unity – was what counted in his eyes. Following his ‘report’ on the party’s activities since its refoundation, Hitler was unanimously ‘re-elected’ as party chairman. The party administration remained in the hands of those close to him. A few amendments were made to the party statutes. Altered five times since 1920, these were now couched in their finalized form. They assured Hitler of the control of the party machine. The appointment of his most important subordinates, the Gauleiter, was in his hands. In effect, the statutes reflected the leader party which the NSDAP had become. In the light of the conflict with the Working Community over a new programme, not least significant was the reaffirmation of the Twenty-Five Points of 24 February 1920. ‘This Programme is immutable,’ the statutes unambiguously declared.
A few weeks later, the Party Rally held at Weimar – where Hitler was permitted to speak in public – on 3–4 July 1926 provided the intended show of unity behind the leader. An estimated 7–8,000, including 3,600 stormtroopers and 116 SS men, attended. It was the first time that the Schutzstaffel (SS, Protection Squad), founded in April 1925 and arising initially out of Hitler’s personal bodyguard, the Stoßtrupp Adolf Hitler (Adolf Hitler Assault Squad), had been on public display. Also on display for the first time, and handed to the SS as a sign of Hitler’s approbation of his new élite organization, was the ‘Blood Flag’ of 1923, which had led the procession to the Feldherrnhalle. Every stormtrooper present swore a personal oath of loyalty to Hitler. The party leader received a rapturous reception from delegates after his speech. ‘Deep and mystical. Almost like a gospel … I thank fate, that it gave us this man,’ wrote Goebbels.
The Nazi Party was still far smaller than it had been at the time of the putsch. In the overall framework of national politics, it was wholly insignificant. To outside observers, its prospects seemed bleak. But internally, the crisis period was over. Though small, the party was better organized as well as geographically more widespread than the pre-putsch party had been. Its image of unity and strength was beginning to persuade other völkisch organizations to throw in their lot with the NSDAP. Above all, it was turning into a new type of political organization – a leader party. Hitler had established the basis of his mastery over the movement. In the next years, while still in the political wilderness, that mastery would become complete.
III
Few people saw Hitler on a regular basis in these years. Only his substitute family – the trusted and devotedly loyal group of Munich cronies who formed his coterie of bodyguards, chauffeurs, and secretaries – were in constant touch with him. Some, like Julius Schaub (his general factotum) and Rudolf Heß (his secretary), had served in Landsberg with Hitler for their part in the putsch. This ‘houseguard’ escorted him, protected him, shielded him from the increasing numbers wanting an audience. Getting to see Hitler was difficult. Those running party business in Munich often had to wait for days before they could sort out some matter with him. For leading figures in the movement, too, he could proved inaccessible for weeks at a time. Even on public occasions he was largely unapproachable. Before a speech, he would remain closeted in his room. Only once the hall was reported as full would he set out. Afterwards, when away from Munich, he would immediately return to his hotel. Journalists might be permitted to see him for a few minutes, if an interview had been prearranged. But scarcely anyone else was allowed an audience.
Hitler’s pronounced sense of ‘mission’, his heroic self-image of ‘greatness’, the necessity of upholding the aura increasingly attached to him by his supporters, and the Olympian detachment from the intrigues and in-fighting of his subordinates demanded a high degree of isolation. Beyond this, the distance he deliberately placed between himself and even high-ranking members of his movement was calculated to emphasize the sense of awe and admiration in those admitted to his presence, or encountering him at a theatrically staged mass-meeting or rally. At the same time, it enhanced the enigmatic in him. Even those who knew him found it hard to dissect and understand his personality. Hitler was happy to encourage the sense of mystery and fascination.
He was above all a consummate actor. This certainly applied to the stage-managed occasions – the delayed entry to the packed hall, the careful construction of his speeches, the choice of colourful phrases, the gestures and body-language. Here, his natural rhetorical talent was harnessed to well-honed performing skills. A pause at the beginning to allow the tension to mount; a low-key, even hesitant, start; undulations and variations of diction, not melodious certainly, but vivid and highly expressive; almost staccato bursts of sentences, followed by well-timed rallentando to expose the emphasis of a key point; theatrical use of the hands as the speech rose in crescendo; sarcastic wit aimed at opponents: all were devices carefully nurtured to maximize effect. As in the meticulous attention to detail in the preparations for the party rallies at Weimar in 1926 and Nuremberg in 1927 and 1929, Hitler was preoccupied with impact and impression. His clothing was also selected to match the occasion: the light-brown uniform with swastika armband, belt, attached diagonal strap crossing over the right shoulder, and knee-high leather boots when among the faithful at big party meetings and rallies; dark suit, white shirt, and tie, when appropriate to conveying a less martial, more ‘respectable’, appearance to a wider audience.
But the acting was not confined to such occasions. Those who came into contact with Hitler, while retaining a critical distance from him, were convinced that he was acting much of the time. He could play the parts as required. ‘He was a kindly conversationalist, kissing the hands of ladies, a friendly uncle giving chocolates to children, a simple man of the people shaking the calloused hands of peasants and workers,’ one of his associates later recalled. He could be the model of friendliness in public to someone he was privately castigating and deriding. The play-acting and hypocrisy did not mean that he was solely a cynical manipulator, that he did not believe in the central tenets of his ‘world-view’. This fervent belief, coupled with the strength of his domineering personality, carried conviction among those drawn to his message.
The irresistible fascination that many – not a few of them cultured, educated, and intelligent – found in his extraordinary personality-traits doubtless owed much to his ability to play parts. As many attested, he could be charming – particularl
y to women – and was often witty and amusing. Much of the time it was show, put on for effect. The same could be true of his rages and outbursts of apparently uncontrollable anger, which were in reality often contrived. The firm handshake and ‘manly’ eye-to-eye contact which Hitler cultivated on occasions when he had to meet ordinary party members was, for the awestruck lowly activist, a moment never to be forgotten. For Hitler, it was merely acting; it meant no more than the reinforcement of the personality cult, the cement of the movement, the bonding force between Leader and followers. In reality, Hitler showed remarkably little human interest in his followers. His egocentrism was of monumental proportions. The propaganda image of ‘fatherliness’ concealed inner emptiness. Other individuals were of interest to him only in so far as they were useful.
Hitler’s ‘coffee-house tirades, his restlessness, his resentments against possible rivals in the party leadership, his distaste for systematic work, his paranoid outbursts of hatred’ were seen by Putzi Hanfstaengl as a sign of sexual deficiency. This was no more than guesswork. But Hitler’s relations with women were indeed odd in some ways. Why this was so can only be surmised. Yet here, too, he was often acting out a role. On one occasion, he took advantage of Putzi Hanfstaengl’s brief absence from the room to fall on his knees in front of Helene Hanfstaengl, describing himself as her slave and bemoaning the fate that had led him to her too late. When Helene told him of the incident, Putzi put it down to Hitler’s need to play the role of the languishing troubadour from time to time.