Hitler’s most immediate outside inspirations, though, were the two countries which had undergone a fundamental domestic transformation since the end of the war. The first of these was Kemal Atatürk’s Turkey, which came back from the brink of partition to see off the Greeks in 1922.174 Germany had sunk so low, Hitler remarked in mid September 1922, scarcely ten days after Atatürk had recaptured Smyrna, that ‘one must say today that the simplest Turk is more of a human being than we are’. Secondly, he enthused about Italy, where Mussolini and his fascists seized power in late October 1922 through his iconic ‘March on Rome’. Shortly after, Hitler remarked coyly: ‘one calls us German fascists’, adding that he did not want to go into ‘whether his comparison is true’. He was soon more forthright, demanding ‘the establishment of a national government in Germany on the fascist model’. A year later, he told an interviewer from the Daily Mail that ‘If a German Mussolini is given to Germany, people would fall down on their knees and worship him more than Mussolini has ever been worshipped.’175
Hitler now broke with the mainstream nationalist and revisionist consensus, which demanded that Italy surrender German-speaking South Tyrol. He argued that any new ‘national government’ would only be able to establish itself if it secured some major victories. These would be hard to achieve on the economic front, Hitler believed, and so the best bet was the incorporation (Anschluss) of Austria. This would require not only British but Italian approval. Moreover, Germany should align itself more generally with Mussolini’s Italy, ‘which has experienced its national rebirth and has a great future’. For both of these reasons, he condemned the ‘palaver’ about South Tyrol of the other nationalists in the strongest terms, emphasizing that ‘there are no sentiments in politics, only the cool calculation of interest’.176 Significantly, Hitler’s support for an Italian alliance was primarily driven by geopolitics, not ideological affinity, because his first remarks to that effect were made not only well before the fascist takeover but also before his first mention of Mussolini.177
Hitler sometimes liked to say that the hard part was reviving Germany domestically; thereafter, dealing with her foreign enemies would be easy. In reality, he was under no illusions. A nationalist revival would make Germany ‘capable of making an alliance’ again, but this was only a necessary, not a sufficient condition to secure her position in the world. That would require actual allies. Temperamentally, Hitler was not averse to a Russian alliance, preferably without the communists, but if necessary with them. ‘We must try to connect to the national [and] anti-Semitic Russia,’ he demanded, ‘not to the Soviets.’ That said, in August 1920, nineteen years before the Hitler–Stalin Pact, he remarked that he would ‘ally not only with Bolshevism but even with the devil in order to move against France and Britain’.178 He feared, however, that this attempt to break free through a Russo-German pact would simply be crushed by the British and French. A British alliance was far more desirable, if that country could be kept out of the hands of the Jews.
Instead, Hitler looked further afield, at least conceptually. He hoped that he could confront the forces of international financial capitalism with the united front of the ‘International of the productive’, to mobilize ‘voices for the defence of the rights of the productive peoples’. Germany would spearhead this effort, by purifying itself first. Hitler demanded no less than a pan-Aryan international anti-Semitic front. Inverting the Communist Manifesto’s famous slogan, he announced: ‘not proletarians of all countries unite, but anti-Semites of all countries unite!’ ‘Aryans and anti-Semites of all peoples,’ he elaborated, ‘unite to fight against the Jewish race of exploiters and oppressors of all peoples.’179 He repeated these injunctions in various forms on many occasions throughout the early 1920s,180 and indeed beyond. Though Hitler never suggested that Nazism was ‘for export’, he was clear from the beginning that his programme required a high degree of international cooperation among international anti-Semites to compensate for Germany’s weakness.
In the long run he believed that none of this would make any difference unless Germany solved the question of ‘space’. At first, Hitler put his faith in colonial expansion, or restoration, as the way in which to solve the question of food supply and emigration.181 ‘Thanks to the loss of colonies,’ he lamented, ‘our industry is on the verge of collapse.’ Germany had been punching well below its weight before 1914, he argued, because it had missed out on overseas expansion. There was an important shift in Hitler’s spatial thinking around 1922, however. He came to see eastward expansion as the solution. ‘In terms of foreign policy,’ Hitler said in December 1922, ‘Germany should prepare for a purely continental policy’ and ‘avoid violating British interests’. ‘One should try to destroy Russia with the help of Britain,’ he continued. ‘Russia,’ Hitler went on, ‘would provide sufficient soil for German settlers and a wide area of activity for German industry.’182 Though he had not yet alighted on the phrase Lebensraum, a further major plank of Hitler’s thinking, the need for territorial enlargement to the east in order to secure the food supply of the German people and staunch the haemorrhage of emigration, was now in place. This was a policy primarily driven by fear and emulation of Anglo-America rather than anxiety about eastern communism or a desire to eliminate the Jews living there.
During the early 1920s, the broad outline of Hitler’s domestic and foreign policy became increasingly clear, and most of it remained fixed until the end of his life. His hatred of the Jews was unmistakable, so was his fear of the western powers, which had evolved from rank hatred into something like awe. His admiration for the British and–as yet less markedly–the North Americans was evident. Hitler’s elective affinity with Mussolini and others was freely avowed. There were, however, some surprising absences. For a man of strong subsequent opinions on the subject, he had said remarkably little so far–beyond a few swipes at Jewish Cubism, Futurism and ‘kitsch’ generally–about the role of culture in Germany’s revival. Hitler had said much less than one might expect about the Soviet Union, and his fear of communism was dwarfed by that of capitalism. Even more remarkably, though there were some routine scatter-gun imprecations against the Poles in specific contexts to do with disputed territories in the east,183 he had shown no signs of a blanket hostility towards Slavs in general or the Russian people in particular. What later became the Lebensraum conception was visible, but only in outline. His intellectual formation was not yet complete.
His authority in the party, by contrast, was now well established. The ‘Führer principle’ commanded widespread acceptance, even if his writ did not run equally in every part of his fiefdom. ‘The Führer,’ he said in late July 1922, ‘must be an idealist, not least because he is leading those against whom everything has apparently conspired.’ ‘Nobody, great or small, needs to be ashamed of obedience,’ he argued in mid November 1922 with regard to the SA, because ‘they can elect their own leaders,’ and those who are not worthy can be ‘cast out’. ‘Hitler took the view,’ one witness to a speech given a few days later noted ‘that only the leader was responsible to the mass. Commissions, committees’ and other entities would ‘slow down’ not ‘encourage the movement’. Occasionally, he reverted to the rhetoric of the ‘drummer’, for example when he lamented that Germany had not had a ‘drum’ like Lloyd George during the war.184
For the first eighteen months or so after his political emergence in 1919, Hitler seems to have conceived of the revival of Germany as a long-term process, in which he would play a supporting role, and which he might not live to witness himself. Even after his shift from Trommler to Führer in mid 1921, he advocated a steady process of ideological transformation rather than an insurrectionary takeover. During this period Hitler was an attentist, waiting for his propaganda and the march of events to turn the German population in his direction. ‘People are still far too well off,’ he remarked to Hanfstaengl, ‘only when things are really bad will they flock to us.’185
In the second half of 1922, however, in the
first of many temporal shifts in Hitler’s career, he began to envisage a much shorter timeline. A new urgency crept into his rhetoric and actions; evolutionary languor gave way to revolutionary fervour. Germany, he argued, needed a ‘dictator’, that is, ‘a man who if necessary can go over blood and corpses’. His regime ‘could then be replaced by a form of government similar to that of the Lord Protector’, which in turn could be followed by a monarchy.186 This recourse to English history, which gives a sense of Hitler’s range of historical reference, was a clever pitch for conservative backing for a coup which would give him dictatorial power, but held out the prospect of an evolution via a German Cromwell and a General Monk to the restoration of the monarchy. Driving this process was Hitler’s growing conviction not only that he alone could save the country, but that a perfect storm of domestic challenges and external threats made it imperative that he do so soon. Time was speeding up. Germany was out of joint, and Hitler was more and more convinced that only he could put things right.
PART TWO
Fragmentation
In 1923–7, Hitler grappled with the forces of disintegration in Germany. The most immediately threatening of these remained German particularism, which was largely indistinguishable in his mind from separatism. Hitler was also deeply exercised by the supposed racial fragmentation of the German people. This he attributed partly to deep political divisions, aggravated by foreign and Jewish support for parliamentarism, and partly to the historical legacy of confessional strife. Hitler attempted to head off these dangers through a putsch in Munich. In his subsequent speeches and writing, Hitler contrasted this miserable vista with the natural coherence of the Anglo-American world, which now dominated Germany more than ever, not just militarily, but economically and culturally as well. Last but not least, during his prison term at Landsberg and after his release, Hitler fought the threatened fragmentation of the NSDAP. It was only with difficulty that Hitler re-established his authority over the ideological direction of the movement and the party apparatus, a process that was not yet complete by the late 1920s.
4
The Struggle for Bavaria
Weimar Germany faced many challenges in its early years, but the most existential was the threat of territorial disintegration. In the Rhineland and the Palatinate, the French authorities made sustained efforts to encourage groups which favoured regional autonomy, or even independence, at the expense of the Reich as a whole.1 In Hanover and other parts of Germany there was a revival of traditional monarchist and anti-Prussian sentiment directed against Berlin. The main threat to the authority of the central state, however, came from Bavaria. This was partly a question of ideology and culture, pitting the Catholic, traditional and more conservative Bavarians against the often more Protestant or progressive areas of Germany. The main point at issue, though, was constitutional. In the Second Reich established by Bismarck in 1871, Munich had secured extensive reserved rights, many of which were lost to the Weimar Republic in 1919. The Bavarian People’s Party, the principal political force in the region, was committed by its ‘Bamberg Programme’ of 1920 to a revision of the constitution in favour of greater powers for the constituent states, in effect a return to the status quo ante. Much of the early history of the Weimar Republic, in fact, was dominated by the question of the relations between Bavaria and the Reich, a conflict in which the threat of armed force was always implicit and sometimes overt.
These tensions were aggravated by a whole raft of other problems, which escalated throughout 1923. In January, the French occupied the Rhineland in retaliation for Germany’s failure to keep up with her reparations payments. The Reich government proclaimed ‘passive resistance’. There was intense social unrest, partly driven by galloping inflation, which wiped out middle-class savings and ruined pensions, and partly by the German Communist Party. A workers’ revolt or a nationalist coup, or both, seemed likely. To make matters worse, there was widespread fear that the French would seek to occupy other parts of the country, ostensibly to enforce the peace terms, but actually to keep Germany in permanent subjection. For all their dreams of returning to the offensive, the government and the military leadership were profoundly conscious of the Reich’s military weakness; the disarmament clauses at Versailles had left Germany defenceless.2 This forced them to rely on paramilitary formations, both to suppress internal unrest and to provide some sort of credible resistance to a French invasion. Chancellor Cuno and General von Seeckt drew up a plan for a secret mobilization, in which the Reichswehr stored weapons and supported the paramilitaries. Hitler, like many other leaders, agreed to place his SA under army command in the event of a French attack. To that extent, the NSDAP was already part of the national establishment.3
Hitler’s position at this time was complicated. He was still virtually unknown in most of Germany. The main Berlin newspapers ignored him and his party. They didn’t even report on the riotous Deutscher Tag at Coburg, whose resonance was confined to south Germany.4 Hitler had very few funders outside of Bavaria, with the notable exception of the Ruhr industrial baron Fritz Thyssen, who contributed substantially in the course of 1923.5 That said, within the non-particularist Bavarian right-wing nationalist milieu, Hitler now enjoyed a commanding position. He was well known in Munich, which Thomas Mann described in a 1923 letter to the American journal The Dial as ‘the city of Hitler’. His speeches drew large and ecstatic crowds. Karl Alexander von Müller, who heard him speak for the first time at the Löwenbräukeller in late January 1923, describes the ‘burning core of hypnotic mass excitement’6 created by the flags, the relentless marching music and the short warm-up speeches by lesser party figures before the man himself appeared amid a flurry of salutes. Hitler would then be interrupted at almost every sentence by tempestuous applause, before departing for his next engagement.
Over the next few months, the tempo of Nazi events and activities increased. There were in excess of 20,000 NSDAP members at the start of 1923, and that figure more than doubled over the next ten months to 55,000;7 the SA nearly quadrupled from around 1,000 men to almost 4,000 during the same period.8 Hitler himself was so prominent that the NSDAP was widely known as the ‘Hitler-Movement’, the term under which his activities were now recorded by the Bavarian police. He had become a cult figure. The Völkischer Beobachter became a daily paper in February 1923, giving preferential treatment to the printing of Hitler’s speeches. Two months later, it began marking the Führer’s birthday, an honour not accorded any other Nazi leader.9 He had long given up the humble role of drummer.10 Hitler spoke once again of the need for a dictator. The German people, he claimed, ‘are waiting today for the man who calls out to them: Germany, rise up [and] march’.11 There was no doubt from the context and rhetoric that he planned to play that role himself. His followers styled him not merely the leader of the national movement but Germany’s saviour and future leader. The Oberführer of the SA, Hermann Göring, acclaimed him at his birthday rally on 20 April 1923 as the ‘beloved Führer of the German freedom movement’. Alfred Rosenberg described him simply as ‘Germany’s leader [Führer]’.12
Conscious of his tenuous position within the Catholic Bavarian mainstream, Hitler continued to try to build bridges to the Church, or at least to its adherents. ‘We want,’ Hitler pledged, ‘to see a state based on true Christianity. To be a Christian does not mean a cowardly turning of the cheek, but to be a struggler for justice and a fighter against all forms of injustice.’13 The NSDAP did succeed in making some inroads among Catholic students at the university and the peasantry and in winning over quite a few clerics, including for a while Cardinal Faulhaber, but for the most part Hitler made little headway.14 He also struggled to connect with the Bavarian aristocracy, which remained firmly focused on the Wittelsbach dynasty, especially Crown Prince Rupprecht, a credible figure on account of his role as a commander in the war.15
The French occupation of the Rhineland, the dire economic situation which escalated into a hyperinflation by the middle of the year, and the
resulting rise in communist and other extreme left-wing agitation made Hitler’s breeze blow stronger. Albert Leo Schlageter, executed in late May 1923, the great martyr of the nationalist resistance against the French occupiers in the Ruhr, was appropriated by the Nazis, even though it is unclear whether he was ever a member of the party.16 That said, Hitler refused to join the cross-party non-violent Ruhrkampf against France. He argued that the real culprits lay in Berlin, not Paris. Shortly after the French struck, Hitler called on his audience in the Zirkus Krone to pursue ‘a general settling of accounts with the domestic political enemies’; the slogan should be ‘not down with France, but down with the November criminals’. ‘No battle abroad,’ he elaborated on another occasion, ‘until victory has been secured at home.’ Moreover, Hitler interpreted the French move within his established framework of an international capitalist plot against the Reich. France, he claimed, was ‘in cahoots with international high finance’ to subjugate Germany and seize her lands. Rejecting the call for national solidarity, Hitler was playing on a much larger stage. ‘Down with the other parties, down with the unity front,’ he demanded, ‘that is the slogan, and the growth of anti-Semitism in England and France is more important than the struggle for the Ruhr.’17
In this perfervid atmosphere, Hitler deepened his links with the various paramilitary organizations in Bavaria, and the Reichswehr command in Munich. Under the patronage of Ernst Röhm, in whose Reichswehr office they met, the SA, the Bund Oberland, the Organisation Niederbayern, the Reichsflagge and Organisation Lenz formed a ‘working group’ in mid March 1923. The military command was entrusted to Hermann Kriebel, but the political direction largely devolved to Hitler. The Reichswehr Commander in Munich, General Otto von Lossow, introduced Hitler to the army chief of staff, Hans von Seeckt, in the Bavarian capital on 11 March 1923. The meeting was not a success. Hitler made a wild speech offering his support for an immediate military coup against the Reich government.18 At Röhm’s request, he produced a memorandum on the political situation five weeks later.19 This warned that ‘time’ was running out: France would soon have Bolshevized Germany and thus completed its subjection. Now, Hitler argued, was the moment to ‘seize power’ and ‘brutally cleanse’ the country of its domestic enemies. The move from attentism to revolutionary activism, which had begun towards the end of the previous year, was now very evident.
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