by Ian Kershaw
In the worsening conditions of the winter of 1928–9, the NSDAP began to attract increasing support. By the end of 1928, the number of membership cards distributed had reached 108,717. Social groups that had scarcely been reached before could now be tapped. In November 1928, Hitler received a rapturous reception from 2,500 students at Munich University. Before he spoke, the meeting had been addressed by the recently appointed Reich Leader of the Nazi Students’ Federation, the twenty-one-year-old future Hitler Youth leader Baldur von Schirach.
The student union elections gave Hitler an encouraging sign of gathering Nazi strength. But it was above all in the countryside, among the radicalized peasants, that the Nazis began to make particularly rapid advances. In Schleswig-Holstein, bomb attacks on government offices gave the clearest indication of the mood in the farming community. In January 1929, radicalized peasants in the region founded the Landvolk, an inchoate but violent protest movement that rapidly became prey to Nazi inroads. Two months later, following an NSDAP meeting in the village of Wöhrden, a fight between SA men and KPD supporters led to two stormtroopers being killed and a number of others injured. Local reactions showed graphically the potential for Nazi gains in the disaffected countryside. There was an immediate upsurge in Nazi support in the locality. Old peasant women now wore the party badge on their work-smocks. From conversations with them, ran the police report, it was clear that they had no idea of the aims of the party. But they were certain that the government was incapable and the authorities were squandering taxpayers’ money. They were convinced ‘that only the National Socialists could be the saviours from this alleged misery’. Farmers spoke of a Nazi victory through parliament taking too long. A civil war was what was needed. The mood was ‘extraordinarily embittered’ and the population were open to all forms of violent action. Using the incident as a propaganda opportunity, Hitler attended the funeral of the dead SA men, and visited those wounded. This made a deep impression on the local inhabitants. He and the other leading Nazis were applauded as ‘liberators of the people’.
As the ‘crisis before the crisis’ – economic and political – deepened, Hitler kept up his propaganda offensive. In the first half of 1929 he wrote ten articles for the party press and held sixteen major speeches before large, rapturous audiences. Four were in Saxony, during the run-up to the state elections there on 12 May. Outright attacks on the Jews did not figure in the speeches. The emphasis was on the bankruptcy at home and abroad of the Weimar system, the exploitation of international finance and the suffering of ‘small people’, the catastrophic economic consequences of democratic rule, the social divisions that party politics caused and replicated, and above all the need to restore German strength and unity and gain the land to secure its future. ‘The key to the world market has the shape of the sword,’ he declared. The only salvation from decline was through power: ‘The entire system must be altered. Therefore the great task is to restore to people their belief in leadership,’ he concluded.
Hitler’s speeches were part of a well-organized propaganda campaign, providing saturation coverage of Saxony before the election. It was planned by Himmler, but under Hitler’s own supervision. The growing numerical strength of the party, and the improvements made in its organization and structure, now allowed more extensive coverage. This in turn helped to create an image of dynamism, drive, and energy. Local activism, and the winning of influential figures in a community, usually held the key to Nazi progress. Hitler had to be used sparingly – for best effect, as well as to avoid too punishing a schedule. A Hitler speech was a major bonus for any party branch. But in the changing conditions from 1929 onwards, the NSDAP was chalking up successes in places where people had never seen Hitler.
The NSDAP won 5 per cent of the vote in the Saxon election. The following month, the party gained 4 per cent in the Mecklenburg elections – double what it had achieved the previous year in the Reichstag election. Its two elected members held a pivotal position in a Landtag evenly balanced between Left and Right. Towards the end of June, Coburg, in northern Bavaria, became the first town in Germany to elect a Nazi-run town council. By October, the NSDAP’s share of the popular vote had reached 7 per cent in the Baden state elections. This was still before the Wall Street Crash ushered in the great Depression.
The revival of the reparations issue provided further grist to the mill of Nazi agitation. The results of the deliberations of the committee of experts, which had been working since January 1929 under the chairmanship of Owen D. Young, an American banker and head of the General Electric Company, to regulate the payment of reparations, were eventually signed on 7 June. Compared with the Dawes Plan, the settlement was relatively favourable to Germany. Repayments were to be kept low for three years, and would overall be some 17 per cent less than under the Dawes Plan. But it would take fifty-nine years before the reparations would finally be paid off. The nationalist Right were outraged. Alfred Hugenberg, former Krupp director, leader of the DNVP and press baron, controlling the nationalist press and with a big stake in the UFA film company, formed in July a ‘Reich Committee for the German People’s Petition’ to organize a campaign to force the government to reject the Young Plan. He persuaded Hitler to join. Franz Seldte and Theodor Duesterberg from the Stahlhelm, Heinrich Claß from the Pan-German League, and the industrial magnate Fritz Thyssen were all members of the committee. Hitler’s presence in this company of capitalist tycoons and reactionaries was not to the liking of the national revolutionary wing of the NSDAP, headed by Otto Strasser, Gregor’s brother. But, ever the opportunist, Hitler recognized the chances the campaign offered. The draft ‘Law against the Enslavement of the German People’ drawn up by the committee in September, rejecting the Young Plan and the ‘war guilt lie’, marginally gained the necessary support to stage a plebiscite. But when the plebiscite eventually took place, on 22 December 1929, only 5.8 millions – 13.8 per cent of the electorate – voted for it. The campaign had proved a failure – but not for Hitler. He and his party had benefited from massive exposure freely afforded him in the Hugenberg press. And he had been recognized as an equal partner by those in high places, with good contacts to sources of funding and influence.
Some of Hitler’s new-found bedfellows had been honoured guests at the Party Rally that took place in Nuremberg from 1 to 4 August 1929. The deputy leader of the Stahlhelm, Theodor Duesterberg, and Count von der Goltz, chairman of the Vereinigte Vaterländische Verbände (United Patriotic Associations) graced the rally with their presence. The Ruhr industrialist, and benefactor of the party, Emil Kirdorf had also accepted an invitation. Winifred Wagner, the Lady of Bayreuth, was also an honoured guest. Thirty-five special trains brought 25,000 SA and SS men and 1,300 members of the Hitler Youth to Nuremberg. Police estimated an attendance of around 30–40,000 in all. It was a far bigger and more grandiose spectacle than the previous rally, two years earlier, had been. It reflected a new confidence and optimism in a party whose membership had grown by this time to some 130,000. And compared with two years earlier, Hitler’s dominance was even more complete. Working sessions simply rubber-stamped policy determined from above. Hitler showed little interest in them. His only concern, as always, was with the propaganda display of the rally.
He had reason to feel satisfied with the way his movement had developed over the four years since its refoundation. The party was now almost three times as large as it had been at the time of the putsch, and growing fast. It was spread throughout the country, and making headway in areas which had never been strongholds. It was now far more tightly organized and structured. There was much less room for dissension. Rivals in the völkisch movement had been amalgamated or had faded into insignificance. Not least, Hitler’s own mastery was complete. His recipe for success was unchanged: hammer home the same message, exploit any opportunity for agitation, and hope for external circumstances to favour the party. But although great strides forward had been made since 1925, and though the party was registering modest electoral gains at stat
e elections and acquiring a good deal of publicity, no realist could have reckoned much to its chances of winning power. For that, Hitler’s only hope was a massive and comprehensive crisis of the state.
He had no notion just how quickly events would turn to the party’s advantage. But on 3 October, Gustav Stresemann, the only statesman of real standing in Germany, who had done most to sustain the shaky Müller government, died following a stroke. Three weeks later, on 24 October 1929, the largest stock-market in the world, in Wall Street, New York, crashed. The crisis Hitler needed was about to envelop Germany.
8
Breakthrough
I
The Nazi leadership did not immediately recognize the significance of the American stock-market crash in October 1929. The Völkischer Beobachter did not even mention Wall Street’s ‘Black Friday’. But Germany was soon reverberating under its shock-waves. Its dependence upon American short-term loans ensured that the impact would be extraordinarily severe. Industrial output, prices, and wages began the steep drop that would reach its calamitous low-point in 1932. The agricultural crisis that had already been radicalizing Germany’s farmers in 1928 and 1929 was sharply intensified. By January 1930, the labour exchanges recorded 3,218,000 unemployed – some 14 per cent of the ‘working-age’ population. The true figure, taking in those on short-time, has been estimated as over 4½ million.
The protest of ordinary people who took the view that democracy had failed them, that ‘the system’ should be swept away, became shriller on both Left and Right. Nazi advances in regional elections reflected the growing radicalization of the mood of the electorate. The Young Plan plebiscite had given the party much-needed publicity in the widely-read Hugenberg press. Its value, said Hitler, was that it had provided ‘the occasion for a propaganda wave the like of which had never been seen in Germany before’. It had allowed the NSDAP to project itself as the most radical voice of the Right, a protest-movement par excellence that had never been tarnished with any involvement in Weimar government. In the Baden state elections on 27 October 1929, the NSDAP won 7 per cent of the vote. In the Lübeck city elections a fortnight or so later, the percentage was 8.1. Even in the Berlin council elections on 17 November, the party almost quadrupled its vote of 1928, though its 5.8 per cent was still marginal, compared with over 50 per cent that went to the two left-wing parties. Most significantly of all, in the Thuringian state elections held on 8 December, the NSDAP trebled its vote of 1928 and broke the 10 per cent barrier for the first time, recording 11.3 per cent of the 90,000 votes cast. Should the Nazi Party exploit the situation by agreeing to enter government for the first time but run the risk of courting unpopularity through its participation in an increasingly discredited system? Hitler decided the NSDAP had to enter government. Had he refused, he said, it would have come to new elections and voters could have turned away from the NSDAP. What happened gives an indication of the way at this time the ‘seizure of power’ in the Reich itself was envisaged.
Hitler demanded the two posts he saw as most important in the Thuringian government: the Ministry of the Interior, controlling the civil service and police; and the Ministry of Education, overseeing culture as well as policy for school and university. ‘He who controls both these ministries and ruthlessly and persistently exploits his power in them can achieve extraordinary things,’ wrote Hitler. When his nominee for both ministries, Wilhelm Frick, was rejected – the German People’s Party (DVP) claimed it could not work with a man who (for his part in the Beerhall Putsch) had been convicted of high treason – Hitler went himself to Weimar and imposed an ultimatum. If within three days Frick were not accepted, the NSDAP would bring about new elections. Industrialists from the region, lobbied by Hitler, put heavy pressure on the DVP – the party of big business – and Hitler’s demands were finally accepted. Frick was given the task of purging the civil service, police, and teachers of revolutionary, Marxist, and democratic tendencies and bringing education in line with National Socialist ideas.
The first Nazi experiment in government was anything but successful. Frick’s attempts to reconstruct educational and cultural policy on a basis of ideological racism were not well received, and moves to nazify the police and civil service were blocked by the Reich Ministry of the Interior. After only a year, Frick was removed from office following a vote of no-confidence supported by the NSDAP’s coalition partners. The strategy – to prove so fateful in 1933 – of including Nazis in government in the expectation that they would prove incompetent and lose support was, on the basis of the Thuringian experiment, by no means absurd.
In a letter of 2 February 1930 to an overseas party supporter outlining the developments that led to participation in the Thuringian government, Hitler pointed to the rapid advances the party was making in gaining support. By the time he was writing, party membership officially numbered 200,000 (though the actual figures were somewhat lower). The Nazis were starting to make their presence felt in places where they had been scarcely noticed earlier.
Since the Young Campaign the previous autumn, rejecting the plan for long-term repayment of reparations, the NSDAP had been building up to around a hundred propaganda meetings a day. This would reach a crescendo during the Reichstag election campaign later in the summer. Many of the speakers were now of good quality, hand-picked, well-trained, centrally controlled but able to latch on to and exploit local issues as well as putting across the unchanging basic message of Nazi agitation. The National Socialists were increasingly forcing themselves on to the front pages of newspapers. They began to penetrate the network of clubs and associations that were the social framework of so many provincial communities. Where local leaders, enjoying respectability and influence, were won over, further converts often rapidly followed. Other non-Marxist parties seemed, in the gathering crisis, to be increasingly weak, ineffectual, and discredited, or to relate, like the Zentrum (the Catholic party), to only one particular sector of the population. Their disarray could only enhance the appeal of a large, expanding, dynamic and national party, seen more and more to offer the best chance of combating the Left, and increasingly regarded as the only party capable of representing the interests of each section of society in a united ‘national community’. And as increasing numbers joined the party, paid their entry fees to the growing number of Nazi meetings, or threw their Marks into the collection boxes, so the funds grew that enabled still further propaganda activity to unfold. The tireless activism was, then, already showing signs of success even in the early months of 1930. The extraordinary breakthrough of the September Reichstag election did not come out of thin air.
Even with the deepening Depression and every prospect of increasing National Socialist electoral gains, however, the road to power was blocked. Only crass errors by the country’s rulers could open up a path. And only a blatant disregard by Germany’s power élites for safeguarding democracy – in fact, the hope that economic crisis could be used as a vehicle to bring about democracy’s demise and replace it by a form of authoritarianism – could induce such errors. Precisely this is what happened in March 1930.
The fall of the Social Democrat Chancellor Hermann Müller and his replacement by Heinrich Brüning of the Zentrum was the first unnecessary step on the suicidal road of the Weimar Republic. Without the self-destructiveness of the democratic state, without the wish to undermine democracy of those who were meant to uphold it, Hitler, whatever his talents as an agitator, could not have come close to power.
The Müller administration eventually came to grief, on 27 March 1930, over the question of whether employer contributions to unemployment insurance should be raised, as from 30 June 1930, from 3.5 to 4 per cent of the gross wage. The issue had polarized the ill-matched coalition partners, the SPD and DVP, since the previous autumn. If the will had been there, a compromise would have been found. But by the end of 1929, in the context of the increasing economic difficulties of the Republic, the DVP had – in company with the other ‘bourgeois’ parties – moved sharply
to the right. With no way out of the government crisis, the Chancellor tendered his resignation on 27 March. It marked the beginning of the end for the Weimar Republic.
The fall of Müller had in fact been planned long beforehand. In December, Heinrich Brüning, parliamentary leader of the Zentrum, learnt that Hindenburg was determined to oust Müller as soon as the Young Plan had been accepted. Brüning himself was earmarked to take over as Chancellor, backed where necessary by the President’s powers under Article 48 of the Weimar Constitution (enabling him to issue emergency decrees to by-pass the need for Reichstag legislation). The Reich President was anxious not to miss the chance of creating an ‘anti-parliamentary and anti-Marxist government’ and afraid of being forced to retain a Social Democrat administration.
Brüning was appointed Chancellor on 30 March 1930. His problems soon became apparent. By June, he was running into serious difficulties in his attempts to reduce public spending through emergency decrees. When an SPD motion, supported by the NSDAP, to withdraw his proposed decree to impose swingeing cuts in public expenditure and higher taxes was passed by the Reichstag, Brüning sought and received, on 18 July 1930, the Reich President’s dissolution of parliament. New elections were set for 14 September. For democracy’s prospects in Germany, they were a catastrophe. They were to bring the Hitler Movement’s electoral breakthrough.