Hitler

by Ian Kershaw

In the ‘Jewish Question’, the ‘question of [living] space’, and the ‘social question’, Hitler suggested a vision of a distant utopia. He did not chart the path to it. But no other Nazi leader or völkisch politician could match the internal unity, simplicity, and all-encompassing character of this ‘vision’. His sense of conviction – he spoke frequently of his ‘mission’, ‘faith’, and of the ‘idea’ – combined with an unrivalled talent for mobilization through reduction to simple ‘black–white’ choices, was where the ideologue and the propagandist came together.

  The interdependence of the various strands of Hitler’s pernicious ‘world-view’ is most plainly evident in his ‘Second Book’ (an updated statement of his views on foreign policy, left, in the event, unpublished), dictated hurriedly to Max Amann during a stay on the Obersalzberg in the summer of 1928. Hitler felt prompted to produce the book by the heated debates at the time about policy towards South Tyrol. Under Mussolini, Fascist policies of Italianization of the largely German-speaking area had stirred strong anti-Italian feeling in nationalist circles in Austria and Germany, particularly in Bavaria. Hitler’s readiness to renounce German claims on South Tyrol in the interest of an alliance with Italy had seen him attacked by German nationalists as well as being accused by socialists of taking bribes from Mussolini. Hitler had dealt with the South Tyrol issue in Mein Kampf, and published the relevant sections from the second volume as a separate pamphlet in February 1926. When the issue flared up again in 1928, he was driven to outline his position at length. Probably financial considerations – Amann may well have advised against having the ‘Second Book’ compete against the second volume of Mein Kampf, with its disappointing and diminishing sales – dissuaded Hitler from publishing the book. But in addition, as the South Tyrol question lost its urgency, new issues like the Young Plan arose, and Hitler had neither time nor inclination to revise the text, it may have been felt that its publication would have offered political hostages to fortune.

  If occasioned by the South Tyrol question, the ‘Second Book’ went far beyond it, ranging more expansively than Mein Kampf had done over Hitler’s broad ideas on foreign policy and ‘territorial issues’ (Raumfragen), linking them, as always, with his racial interpretation of history and, in the final pages, with the need to destroy what he saw as the threat of ‘Jewish domination’. But the ‘Second Book’ offered nothing new. As we have seen, the essence of Hitler’s ‘world-view’ was fully developed by the time he wrote the second volume of Mein Kampf in 1926, existent in embryonic form, in fact, since late 1922. The ideas dominating the ‘Second Book’ – including the issue of South Tyrol and his interest in the growing economic power of the United States of America – were repeatedly advanced in Hitler’s speeches and writings from 1927 onwards. Several passages from these speeches recur almost verbatim at key points in the ‘Second Book’.

  Long before the dictation of the ‘Second Book’, then, Hitler was a fixated ideologue. His own inner certainty of the ‘truths’ about history as racial struggle, and Germany’s future mission to obtain ‘living space’ and, at the same time, eradicate the power of the Jews for ever, were of immense importance as a personal driving-force. Their significance in attracting support for National Socialism can, however, easily be exaggerated. The growth of the NSDAP to a mass party had little directly to do with the arcanum of Hitler’s personalized ‘world-view’. More complex processes have to be taken into account.

  IV

  At the end of January 1927, Saxony became the first large German state to lift the speaking ban on Hitler. On 5 March, the Bavarian authorities finally conceded to the pressure to allow Hitler to speak again. His return to the public arena caused little of a stir. Reports from the Bavarian provinces indicated little interest in the NSDAP, for all its vigorous propaganda. Party meetings were often badly attended. Hitler’s magic was no longer working, even in Munich. In January 1928, the Munich police reported that ‘the advances of the National Socialist Movement repeatedly claimed by Hitler are not true, especially in Bavaria. In reality, interest in the movement both in the countryside and in Munich is strongly in decline. Branch meetings attended by 3–400 people in 1926 now have an attendance of at most 60–80 members.’ Even the Party Rally, held for the first time at Nuremberg, on 19–21 August 1927, despite careful orchestration for maximum propaganda effect, failed to raise the expected level of support or interest.

  Most other German states followed the examples of Saxony and Bavaria in lifting the ban on Hitler speaking in public. Only Prussia, the largest state, and Anhalt held out until autumn 1928. The authorities, it seemed with justification, could believe that the Nazi menace had passed. Hitler no longer appeared a threat. A confidential report by the Reich Minister of the Interior in 1927 had already judged that the NSDAP was no more than a ‘splinter group incapable of exerting any noticeable influence on the great mass of the population and the course of political events’.

  Though outwardly making little or no headway in the more settled political climate of the mid-1920s, as Germany’s new democracy at last showed signs of stability, significant developments were taking place within the NSDAP. Eventually, these would help to place the party in a stronger position to exploit the new economic crisis that was to hit Germany in autumn 1929.

  Most importantly, the NSDAP had become a self-conscious ‘leader-movement’, focused ideologically and organizationally on the Hitler cult. In retrospect, the ‘leaderless time’ of 1924, and Hitler’s obstinacy – born out of weakness – in refusing to take sides in the internecine strife of the völkisch movement, had been enormously advantageous. The defeat at Bamberg of those looking to programmatic changes was, then, at the same time the victory of those loyalists prepared to look no further than Hitler as the embodiment of the ‘idea’. For these, the programme detached from the leader had no meaning. And, as 1924 had proven, without Hitler there could be no unity, and hence no movement.

  The establishment of the Führer cult was decisive for the development of the Nazi Movement. Without it, as 1924 had shown, it would have been torn apart by factionalism. With it, the still precarious unity could be preserved by calling on loyalty to Hitler as a prime duty. Among the party leadership, feelings had to be subordinated to the overriding need for unity.

  Within the movement, the SA had always been the most difficult element to control – and so it would continually prove down to 1934. But here, too, Hitler was successfully able to diffuse trouble by invoking loyalty to his own person. In May 1927, he made an impassioned speech to the Munich stormtroopers, demoralized and rebellious towards the SA leader Franz Pfeffer von Salomon. At the end of his speech, he resorted to his usual ploy. He stepped down from the rostrum, shook hands with each SA man, and gained their renewed pledge of personal loyalty to him.

  Clashes over strategy, factional disputes, personal rivalries – all were endemic in the NSDAP. The interminable conflicts and animosities, normally personal or tactical rather than ideological, almost invariably stopped short of any attack on Hitler. He intervened as little as possible. In fact, the rivalry and competition simply showed him, according to his own concept of social-Darwinist struggle, who among his competing underlings was the stronger. Nor did Hitler make any effort to reconcile ideological nuances within the party, unless they threatened to become counter-productive by deviating the single-minded drive for power through mass mobilization into sectarian squabbling. The Führer cult was accepted because it offered all parties the only remedy to this. Personal loyalty to Hitler, whether genuine or forced, was the price of unity. In some cases, Nazi leaders were wholly convinced of Hitler’s greatness and ‘mission’. In others, their own ambitions could only be upheld by lip-service to the supreme Leader. Either way, the result was that Hitler’s mastery over the movement increased to the position where it was well-nigh unchallengeable. And either way, the transmission belt within the party faithful had been manufactured for the subsequent extension of the Führer cult to wider sectors of the G
erman electorate. The Leader cult was indispensable to the party. And the subsummation of the ‘idea’ in Hitler’s own person was necessary, if party energy was not to be dissipated in harmful factional divides. By avoiding doctrinal dispute, as he had done in 1924, and focusing all energies on the one goal of obtaining power, Hitler could – sometimes with difficulty – hold the party together. Along the way, the Führer cult had developed its own momentum.

  With the build-up of the Führer cult, Hitler’s image was at least as important as his practical contribution to the modest growth of the party in the ‘wilderness years’. Of course, a Hitler-speech remained a major event for a local party branch. And Hitler retained the ability in his mass-meetings to win over initially sceptical audiences. But whatever limited success the NSDAP enjoyed before the Depression cannot simply – or even mainly – be attributed to Hitler. As an agitator, Hitler was distinctly less directly prominent than he had been before the putsch. The speaking-ban was, of course, a major hindrance in 1925 and 1926. He spoke at only thirty-one meetings in 1925 and thirty-two in 1926, mainly internal party affairs, a good number of them in Bavaria. In 1927, his speeches increased in number to fifty-six, more than half of them within Bavaria. Most of his sixty-six speeches in 1928 took place in the first five months, up to the Reichstag election. More than two-thirds of them were held in Bavaria. During the whole of 1929, as the NSDAP began to gain ground in regional elections, he held only twenty-nine speeches, all but eight in Bavaria.

  One limitation on Hitler’s availability as a speaker in these years was posed by his frequent trips to try to establish important contacts and drum up funding for a party with chronic financial problems. Not surprisingly, for a party in the political doldrums, his efforts met with little success. Though (not to the liking of the ‘social-revolutionaries’ in the NSDAP) he courted Ruhr industrialists and businessmen in a number of speeches in 1926 and 1927, which went down well, they showed little interest in a party that seemed to be going nowhere. The Bechsteins and Bruckmanns, long-standing patrons, continued to give generously. But the aged Emil Kirdorf, whom Frau Bruckmann had brought into personal contact with Hitler, was almost alone among leading Ruhr industrialists in sympathizing with him to the extent of joining the NSDAP, and in making a sizeable donation of 100,000 Marks that went a long way towards overcoming the party’s immediate financial plight. As would remain the case, the party was heavily dependent for its income on the contributions of ordinary members. So the stagnation, or at best slow growth, in party membership meant continued headaches for the party treasurer.

  As earlier, Hitler paid little attention to administration and organization. Party bosses were resigned to his lengthy absences and inaccessibility on even important concerns. He left financial matters to his trusted business manager Max Amann, and the party treasurer, Franz Xaver Schwarz. Behind the scenes in Munich, Hitler could rely in the party’s secretariat upon the indefatigable and subservient Philipp Bouhler, the retiring but inwardly ambitious individual who was later to play a central role in the emergence of the ‘euthanasia action’. Above all, it was Gregor Strasser, as Propaganda Leader between September 1926 and the end of 1927 (during which time he streamlined and coordinated propaganda activities throughout the Reich) and especially after he was made Organizational Leader on 2 January 1928, who built up, from the faction-ridden and incoherently structured movement, the nationwide organization that from 1929 onwards was in a position to exploit the new crisis conditions. Hitler’s part in this development was minimal, though placing Strasser in charge of organizational matters was one of his more inspired appointments.

  Hitler’s instinct, as ever, was for propaganda, not organization. His ‘feel’, when it came to matters of mobilizing the masses, seldom let him down. As director of party propaganda, Gregor Strasser had been given a great deal of scope – Hitler’s usual style – to shape the character and pattern of agitation. Following his own leanings, Strasser had made a strong push to win over, especially, the urban proletariat. Even to outside observers, it was plain by autumn 1927 that this strategy was not paying worthwhile dividends, and was at the same time in danger of alienating the lower-middle-class support of the NSDAP. Reports came in from Schleswig-Holstein, Thuringia, Mecklenburg, Pomerania, and other areas indicating that growing unrest in rural areas offered promising terrain for the NSDAP. Hitler was evidently well-informed. And at a meeting of Gau leaders on 27 November 1927 in the ‘Hotel Elefant’ in Weimar, he announced a change of course. He made plain that significant gains could not be expected at the coming election from ‘the Marxists’. Small-shopkeepers, threatened by department stores, and white-collar workers, many of them already antisemites, were singled out as better targets. In December 1927, Hitler addressed for the first time a rally of several thousand peasants from Lower Saxony and Schles-wig-Holstein. In the New Year, he himself took over the position of party Propaganda Leader. His deputy, Heinrich Himmler, undertook the routine tasks. The future overlord of the SS empire was at this time still in his twenties, a well-educated and intelligent former agricultural student who had briefly worked for a fertilizer firm and reared chickens. With his short-back-and-sides haircut, small moustache, round glasses, and unathletic build, he resembled a small-town bank clerk or pedantic schoolmaster. Whatever appearances might have suggested, he had, however, few peers in ideological fanaticism and, as time would prove, cold ruthlessness. The young nationalist idealist, already imagining dire conspiracies involving ‘the red International’, Jews, Jesuits, and freemasons ranged against Germany, had joined the NSDAP in the summer of 1923, influenced by the man whose murder he would orchestrate eleven years later, Ernst Röhm. It was at Röhm’s side that, on 8 November that year, the night of the putsch, he had carried the banner at the head of the Reichskriegsflagge unit engaged in attempting to storm the Bavarian War Ministry. From the time of the party’s refoundation, he had been active, initially as secretary to Gregor Strasser, then, from 1926, as Deputy Gauleiter of Upper Bavaria-Swabia, and Deputy Reich Propaganda Leader. In the latter capacity in the later 1920s – he was also Deputy Reichsführer-SS from 1927 before being appointed to lead the SS two years later – he proved both efficient and imaginative – apparently coming up with the idea of blanket propaganda coverage of a specific area during a brief period of time, something that became a Nazi hallmark.

  But significantly, and in contrast to his normal habits, Hitler intervened directly in drafting texts and in shaping central propaganda. In April 1928, he ‘corrected’ the interpretation of Point 17 of the party’s ‘unalterable’ 1920 Programme: ‘expropriation without compensation’ meant, for a party based on the principle of private property, merely the creation of legal means to take over land not administered in the public good; that is, Jewish land-speculation companies.

  The shift in propaganda emphasis amounted to a further move away from a ‘programmatic’ stance directed primarily at winning workers from Marxism to a broader ‘catch-all’ approach to mobilization. It was a pragmatic readjustment, recognizing the possibility of a widened appeal to a variety of social groups not previously addressed in any systematic way in party propaganda. Unlike some in the party, wedded to a type of ‘social-revolutionary’ emotive anti-capitalism, which social groups were attracted to Nazism was for Hitler a matter of indifference. The important thing was that they were won over. His aim was to gain power. Any weapon to that end was useful. But it did mean that the NSDAP became even more of a loose coalition of competing interest-groups. Only the absence of a clear programme and a set of utopian, distant goals built into the image of the Leader could hold them together – for a time.

  V

  Few Germans had Hitler on their mind in Weimar’s ‘golden years’ of the mid-1920s. The internal developments within his party were of neither interest nor concern to the overwhelming majority of people. Little attention was paid to the former Munich troublemaker who now seemed no more than a fringe irritant on the political scene. Those who did take
notice of Hitler were often dismissive or condescending, or both.

  The results of the Reichstag election on 20 May 1928 appeared to confirm the correctness of those commentators who for years had been preaching the end of Hitler and his movement. The electorate showed relatively little interest in the campaign – a reflection of the more settled conditions. With its miserable return of 2.6 per cent, the NSDAP won only twelve seats. Electorally, it had lost ground, compared with the Völkischer Block in December 1924. There was at least the consolation that the twelve Nazis who entered the Reichstag now had immunity from legal action for their venomous attacks on opponents and – if anything even more important – daily allowances and free rail passes for first-class travel on the Reichsbahn to ease pressure on party finances. Among the new deputies were Gregor Strasser, Frick, Feder, Goebbels, Ritter von Epp – the former Freikorps leader, a new, much-trumpeted convert from the BVP – and Hermann Göring, recently returned to the fold after his absence since the putsch. ‘We are going into the Reichstag … like the wolf into the sheepflock,’ Goebbels told his readers in the Angriff, his Berlin newspaper.

  There was understandable disappointment and dejection within the party. The need for a readjustment of party propaganda and organization was plain. Under Strasser’s organizational leadership, greater attention was paid to the countyside, and first steps were taken in constructing a panoply of affiliated sub-organizations that became extremely important in tapping the specific interests of middle-class groups.

  Meanwhile, the first dark clouds were already gathering over Germany’s economy. The mounting crisis in agriculture was leading to widespread indebtedness, bankruptcies, forced sales of land, and enormous bitterness in the farming community. In the biggest industrial belt, Ruhr industrialists refused to accept an arbitration award and locked out the whole work-force of the iron and steel industry, leaving 230,000 workers without jobs or wages for weeks. Unemployment was by now sharply on the rise, reaching almost 3 million by January 1929, an increase of a million over the previous year. Politically, too, there were growing difficulties. The ‘grand coalition’ under the SPD Chancellor Hermann Müller was shaky from the outset. A split, and serious loss of face for the SPD, occurred over the decision to build a battle cruiser (a policy opposed by the Social Democrats before the election). The Ruhr iron dispute further opened the rifts in the government and exposed it to its critics on Left and Right. It was the first shot of the concerted attempt by the conservative Right to roll back the social advances made in the Weimar welfare state. The ensuing conflict over social policy would ultimately lead to the demise of the Muller government. And by the end of the year, the reparations issue began to loom again. It would become acute in 1929.