During this period, Hitler continued to elaborate and develop his strategic thinking. Throughout 1923, he lambasted international capitalism–
Jewish and non-Jewish–as the source of Germany’s ills. Hitler provided a brief foreword to Gottfried Feder’s book on the subject describing it as a ‘catechism’ of National Socialism.20 The salience of anti-capitalism, fears of expropriation and exploitation and enslavement by foreign masters is very clear in the party’s ‘work of the committee for food security of the National Socialist movement’, which Hitler blessed in the summer of 1923. It defined the ‘internal enemy’ as ‘profiteering in the system of the national economy’, the ‘idea of class conflict’ and ‘immoral tendencies in government and law-making’. It lamented the crucifixion of the German middle class by the ‘massive fraud’ of ‘our money economy’, the general ‘spirit of speculation’ and the ‘terror of the capitalist idea’. The document made no direct mention of Bolshevism or the Soviet Union. It recommended–with Hitler’s approval–that the state protect the ‘basic assets of the nation’, namely ‘foodstuffs and manpower’ through ‘an anti-capitalist legislation in the fields of land and settlement, housing, but also in the first instance in the field of the supply of necessities’. This would require the ‘exclusion of foreign capital from German land and soil, businesses and cultural assets’.21
Like the Ludendorff circle, Hitler was much less worried about the fate of German minorities and the peripheral lands of the Reich than about the fate of the core area, which he believed to be threatened with subjection and even extinction.22 Hitler was also beginning to look at long-term solutions to Germany’s predicament. He rejected the common notion of an ‘internal’ colonization of sparsely populated German lands in favour of territorial expansion. ‘The [re-]distribution of land alone,’ he warned in the spring of 1923, ‘cannot bring relief. The living conditions of a nation can at the end of the day only be improved through the political will to expand.’23 The concept of Lebensraum is already clearly visible here, though the term itself was not used.
Throughout the spring and summer of 1923, Hitler steadily became more aggressive. In early March 1923 there was a meeting of paramilitary formations in Munich at which Hermann Esser suggested that if the French advanced across the Rhine, the Entente should be informed that all Jews would be interned and shot if they did not withdraw.24 It is not clear whether this thought originally came from Hitler, but if it did it would be the first example of his subsequent strategy of using the Jews as hostages for the good behaviour of the western powers. In mid April 1923, a massive joint paramilitary exercise was held at the Fröttmaninger Heide near Freimann, followed by a march to the government quarter in Munich. A fortnight later, on May Day, there was a serious confrontation with organized labour at the Oberwiesenfeld. Hitler encouraged this escalation. He personally ordered the Sturmabteilungen not merely to defend their own assemblies, by beating up hecklers, but also to disrupt those of their enemies. Hitler further instructed them to abuse Jews on the streets and in cafés.25 Rumours abounded that the NSDAP and the nationalist organizations would ‘march on Berlin’, clean out the stables there and establish a government capable of facing down the Entente.
Hitler also worked to expand his international links. These were partly designed to secure funding. One of the figures of whom Hitler had high hopes was the American automobile tycoon and Democratic Party Congressional candidate Henry Ford, who not only symbolized the kind of national productive capitalism he so admired but was an active anti-Semite into the bargain. His book, translated as Der internationale Jude (1921), had been a great success in Germany.26 It was well known at the time that Hitler kept a portrait of Ford in his office, and there was talk of inviting the American to speak.27 His overtures to Ford were a failure. According to Robert D. Murphy, US vice consul in Munich, who met Hitler in early March 1923, ‘Mr Ford’s organization had so far made no money contributions to the party’ and ‘his funds were principally contributed by patriotic Germans living abroad’.28 Press reports spoke of Nazi hopes for ‘America’ and a joint struggle against Jews and capitalism.29 At the end of August 1923, Hitler travelled to Switzerland in search of financial backing. ‘Hitler is very engaging,’ one of the ladies of the house of a wealthy Swiss supporter noted in her diary, ‘his whole body trembles when he speaks,’ which he did ‘wonderfully’. Hitler told the Swiss general Wille: ‘I will strike in the autumn.’30
Hitler’s other motivation was to persuade the great powers to tolerate the rise of the NSDAP and to accept the outcome of any revolutionary action. His main targets here were the Americans and Italy. In April 1923, he told the prominent German-American journalist Karl von Wiegand that he rejected the claims of ‘Bolshevik’ Berlin ‘just as the American colonists of Washington’s times refused to appear before the courtly tribunal of George III’.31 In June 1923, the Völkischer Beobachter formally announced that the NSDAP would not insist on the return of South Tyrol by Italy. In August 1923, Hitler sent Lüdecke to Italy to make contact with the fascist regime, but without success.32 Hitler tried to win over the Americans through a series of interviews. In mid August 1923 he gave a fire-breathing interview to the New York World promising a ‘fascist dictatorship’ and demanding that ‘officialdom must be reduced to a minimum’, perhaps a sop to the ‘small government’ preferences of his American readers.33
These overtures suggest that Hitler’s overwhelmingly negative image of Anglo-America had given way to a more positive attitude. This was partly tactically motivated, because he realized that his domestic aims could only be achieved with the support or at least the toleration of London and Washington. It was also partly driven by a shift in his strategic conception, which saw Britain less and less as the ‘absolute enemy’ of 1919–20 and more as a potential ally. A large part of Hitler’s shift, however, seems to have been driven by a much broader engagement with the American ‘way of life’, probably the result of prolonged exposure to Hanfstaengl, with whom he was in almost daily contact at this time. This was reflected in the new large ‘American’ format given to the Völkischer Beobachter on 29 August 1923, which was much remarked upon at the time. Not everybody was happy with this trend or Hanfstaengl’s associated swagger and American ‘slang’. Friedrich Plumer, an early Nazi who later broke with Hitler, accused Hanfstaengl of ‘Americanizing’ the movement.34
Despite these strides, Hitler was now under severe pressure. Relations with the Munich authorities were extremely poor. He had already been imprisoned twice, and at the start of the year he was hauled in before the police to explain his behaviour at Coburg.35 The Bavarian interior minister Schweyer attempted to ban the NSDAP party congress in Munich a fortnight later, and though he failed he did ensure that they were unable to meet in the open air, thus reducing the number of attendees.36 Schweyer had another go at charging Hitler over the Oberwiesenfeld brawls, forcing the latter to write a memorandum to the Bavarian legal authorities in his own defence.37
Hitler could continue to play grandmother’s footsteps with the authorities, by promising betterment and then going back on his commitments, but for how long? A mass rally at the Zirkus Krone in mid July 1923 was so full that he had to shut the doors half an hour before it started. The police commander on the night warned Hitler that he would not be allowed to unfurl the party banners inside the building.38 The subsequent march to the main station in Munich led to a clash with the police; Hitler, on foot, confronted rubber-truncheon-wielding mounted officers. At the same time, Hitler was being criticized by the SA. Not for the last time in his career, their rank and file were straining at the leash, and could not understand why Hitler was not leading them to Berlin, or at least to the City Hall in Munich. Keeping large numbers of armed men in a state of semi-permanent revolution was not possible. If something was not undertaken soon, there was a real danger that the pot would either go off the boil, or boil over prematurely.
Hitler was thus at a strategic crossroads. On the one hand
, he was calling for a long-term propagandistic effort to prepare the German people for a return to great power status. This implied a kind of revolutionary attentism, not unlike that of the pre-war Social Democrats,39 in which the NSDAP would simply reap the fruits of its work further down the line. Hitler suggested as much at the start of the year, when he announced that ‘one day the day will come at which we will launch a putsch, no not a putsch,’ he added with contempt, ‘but a puff of air and then this rock will disappear.’40 When the time came, in other words, the NSDAP would simply huff and puff and blow the house down. On the other hand, the internal and external situation was constantly changing, presenting him with new opportunities but also new threats. He had long argued that there was no quick fix to Germany’s ills. Could it be, however, that history could be speeded up, that destiny might be embraced rather than awaited?
The examples of Turkey and Italy seemed to suggest that it could. In the autumn of 1923, he let it be known that what Atatürk had done ‘is what we will have to do in the future as well in order to liberate ourselves’.41 Hitler subsequently cited him as a model for his ‘beer hall’ putsch. Hitler also acclaimed Mussolini as a model; he used Roman-style standards for the SA in explicit homage.42 Though there is no evidence that Mussolini supported Hitler’s plans for a coup, there is equally no doubt that he served as an important inspiration.43
In the late summer and autumn, the situation escalated still further. The French-backed separatist Hans Adam Dorten proclaimed a ‘Rhenish Republic’ in July 1923;44 his supporters occupied government buildings in Aachen. On 26 September 1923, the Stresemann government announced the end of passive resistance against the French, its objectives unmet. The resulting sense of humiliation fuelled a widespread belief that a coup to establish a new ‘national’ government in Berlin was imminent. At around the same time, the communists were making substantial inroads in central Germany, especially Thuringia. In Bavaria, right-wing militias, including the SA, enjoying the full cooperation of the local Reichswehr, prepared to repel both communists and the French if necessary. They met repeatedly at rallies–‘German days’–across the province, first in Nuremberg, then at Hof, where Hitler gave one of the speeches, and finally in Bayreuth. The Generalstaatskommissar for Bavaria, and its de facto ruler, Gustav von Kahr, was known to be pondering his next move.
Hitler was not too worried about the communists, who had been crushed by the end of October. The real danger lay on the right. First, that the leaders of the national opposition in Bavaria would fluff the task of marching on Berlin. Hitler relentlessly pushed for action: ‘either Berlin marches and ends in Munich,’ he warned, ‘or Munich marches and ends in Berlin’.45 Secondly, there was the possibility that the NSDAP would be coopted as footsoldiers in support of an alien agenda, especially that of social conservatism. Thirdly, and most importantly, Hitler was worried about the ultimate intentions of the Bavarian government and many of the organizations which provided its political and military muscle. He feared that they wanted not to renationalize Germany through capturing Berlin but a separate conservative Bavaria instead. Whether this was their main aim or might simply be the default option in the face of determined republican and left-wing resistance in the rest of the Reich did not greatly matter to him. Nor, as we have seen, did Hitler distinguish between full-blown separatism and the claims of the Bavarian particularists to be returning to the old federal arrangements of the Second Empire. The result, in his view, would be the same: the fragmentation of the Reich in the face of extreme internal and external danger.
The Bavarian government and many of the groups associated with it were indeed planning to recalibrate the federal relationship with Berlin; they made no secret of it. Otto Pittinger, the leader of the ‘Bund Bayern und Reich’, was open about his desire to re-establish the Wittelsbach monarchy in Bavaria, and to return to the looser federal bonds of Bismarck’s time. Kahr himself had repeatedly spoken at meetings in favour of the restoration of the Bavarian monarchy.46
Hitler responded to this existential challenge with a nuanced strategy. On the one hand, he relentlessly attacked the conservative monarchists. ‘One should not imagine,’ he pronounced in his speech to the Deutscher Tag in Hof in mid September 1923, ‘that nationalism expresses itself’ by demanding ‘that the old flags should fly again, that the old authoritarian state should be resurrected and that the old conditions should be restored’. ‘That,’ he claimed, ‘is not nationalism.’47 On the other hand, Hitler sought to create a common front with conservatives and monarchists against the external enemy. On 25 September 1923, Scheubner-Richter was tasked with bringing about a meeting between Hitler and Crown Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria; the hope was that he could be persuaded to support a march on Berlin.48 Party members were instructed, on pain of expulsion, to resign from all paramilitary formations not under the political leadership of the Kampfbund, that is, his own.49 A drumbeat of mass meetings was planned.50
Hitler flanked this rhetoric with a carefully calibrated propagandistic effort. He gave a speech at Bayreuth–Wagner’s city–in mid September 1923, and returned about a fortnight later to speak again. On that occasion, taking up the invitation of Winifred Wagner, the English-born wife of Wagner’s son Siegfried, he went to the Wagner shrine at Wahnfried. There Hitler spoke to the composer’s son-in-law, the racist political philosopher Houston Stewart Chamberlain, author of the best-selling Foundations of the Nineteenth Century, upon whom he made a very favourable impression.51 Hitler paid homage at Wagner’s grave. He also published an autobiographical text and a selection of his speeches under the title of Adolf Hitler: His Life and His Speeches.52 The name on the front page was that of his associate Victor von Koerber, but the real author was Hitler. He rehearsed his political positions, including his attacks on ‘Bolshevism’ and ‘international Jewish mammonism’, but pointedly deleted all negative references to the United States, most likely in order to encourage US toleration of a successful coup. The principal purpose of the book was to cast Hitler as the saviour of Germany. Koerber-Hitler spoke of him no longer as a ‘drummer’ but as ‘an architect who is building the mighty German cathedral’. No doubt drawing on his overtures to Bavarian Catholics, Hitler had himself styled as a messianic figure, whose political awakening was compared to the resurrection of Christ, and whose writings were a kind of holy writ.
On 26 September, on the same day as the end of passive resistance in the Ruhr, the Bavarian government announced a state of emergency. Kahr was made commissary general.53 That same day, too, Hitler signed a proclamation in support of a ‘Battle League to Break Interest Slavery’; pointedly, the main enemy was defined as international capitalism and the victor powers rather than the German left. In an accompanying ‘open letter to the Bavarian government’ in the Völkischer Beobachter, which he co-authored with–among others–Drexler and Gottfried Feder, Hitler criticized the planned handover of German national assets to support a new imposed Allied settlement.54 What had previously been a straightforward clash between Berlin and right-wing Munich was now about to become a triangular contest pitting Kahr, the Reich government and the Munich nationalist scene, most prominently Hitler, against each other.
The following day, Hitler’s intended series of mass meetings was banned. Nazi suspicions of Kahr’s intentions grew.55 Hitler condemned the measure as directed against the ‘Völkisch freedom movement’.56 He warned Kahr and federalists generally against ‘limiting’ the ‘historical mission of Bavaria purely to the jealous preservation of purely Bavarian concerns inside the white-blue Bavarian boundary posts’ and of ‘privileging’ the ‘justified demands for the recapture of Bavarian statehood within the framework of the Reich’ at the expense of the ‘necessary liberation of greater Germany’. This choice of words was already quite a concession to local sensitivities, but Hitler was quick to stress that he saw Bavaria’s mission as ‘coming to the aid of our threatened brothers in central and northern Germany’. ‘Not only the future of Bavaria,’ he added, ‘bu
t the future of Germany will be decided in Bavaria today.’57 The chief of police, Seisser, later recalled that Hitler dismissed anybody who did not support him as ‘either a nightwatchman or a separatist, Danube-monarchist, papal or French in sentiment’.58
Tension rose steadily throughout October. On 20 October, the Reich government in Berlin sacked Lossow, the army commander in Munich. Secure in Kahr’s backing, he refused to move. Otto Pittinger’s paramilitary Bund Bayern und Reich stood by to support them. The rest of the Reichswehr looked set to move against the ‘mutineers’. Armed groups assembled on the Bavarian-Thurinigian border. Germany seemed on the verge of falling apart. Once again, Hitler inveighed against the federalists, this time with an even greater sense of urgency. ‘The narrow-minded, purely Bavarian-oriented policy of the forces behind the Bavarian dictatorship,’ he told an assembly of SA leaders, meant that across Germany Bavaria was now seen as a ‘separatist’ state trying to exit the Reich, abandoned by all its allies. This situation, Hitler fulminated, suited only Poincaré’s France. The answer was ‘tackling the German question in the last minute from Bavaria’, culminating in the planting of the swastika on the Reichstag in Berlin. This was the Bavarian ‘mission’.59
Despite the local demands on his time, Hitler made serious efforts to square international opinion. He gave an interview to the American United Press at Bayreuth in which he said that the Bavarian ‘masses’ would back him over Kahr and announced that he was ‘no monarchist and would battle against all monarchic adventures, because the Hohenzollern and Wittelsbachers would merely encourage separatist divisions’.60 Hitler also gave an interview to the distinguished German-American journalist George Sylvester Viereck, in which he claimed to be the only bulwark against ‘Bolshevism’ and revealed his territorial ambitions. ‘We must regain our colonies and we must expand eastward,’ he argued. ‘There was a time when we could have shared the world with England. Now, we can stretch our cramped limbs only to the east. The Baltic is merely a German lake.’61 At around the same time, he told an American newspaper of his plans for a ‘Monroe Doctrine for Germany’,62 the first time he articulated a theme which was to run through his entire strategy. In mid October 1923, he made a public statement in Corriere Italiano once again renouncing any German claim to South Tyrol, as a gesture to Mussolini.63 He was convinced that France would support a separatist coup, but seems to have believed that Britain and the United States would at least tolerate his own Putsch.64
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