Hitler

by Brendan Simms

  Hitler was under no illusions about the timescale for the national and racial regeneration of Germany. The failure of the coup had cured him of any vanguardism. He was now thinking in terms not of years, or even decades, but of centuries. In late June 1924, he made a public announcement that ‘the re-establishment of the German people is by no means a matter of the acquisition of technical weapons, but rather a question of the regeneration of our character’. ‘Spiritual renewals,’ Hitler continued, ‘require, if they are to be more than just a passing phenomenon, many centuries [emphasis in the original]’ to be ‘successful’.25 Five months later, Hess recorded that Hitler ‘is under no illusions about the extent to which the “idea” can be implemented by him’. ‘The ripening of ideas, the adapting of reality to the idea and the idea to reality,’ he continued, ‘will probably require many generations.’ Hitler, Hess went on, saw his own role as merely ‘setting up a new marker in the distance’, ‘loosening the soil’ around the existing pole, which ‘represented a major era in the development of mankind’. The task of ‘ripping out’ the pole and advancing it some way towards the goal, by contrast, would be the task ‘of another, a greater man yet to come’.26 In other words, after the certainty of 1923, Hitler was once again unsure whether he was the messiah himself rather than just John the Baptist, the ‘drummer’ of 1919–20.

  In the second half of 1924, the internal disputes rumbled on.27 In late July, there was a particularly acrimonious meeting at Weimar. Esser and Streicher undermined Rosenberg at every turn. Feder, Strasser, Gräfe and Ludendorff ganged up on him as well. Ludendorff eventually flounced out. Hitler did not send a deputy. The NSDAP and the DVFP went ahead with a shaky merger in the late summer to form the National-Sozialistische Freiheitsbewegung (NSFB). The North German Directory formed the National-Sozialistische Arbeitsgemeinschaft (NSAG), whose distinctly socialist leanings were anathema to Esser and Streicher in Bavaria. Throughout all this Hitler maintained a pointed silence in prison. One despairing member wrote to Hess ‘Where do you belong now that the movement is splintered’, receiving the reply ‘To Hitler. To Hitler, who stands above it all.’28 It was clear that the movement was in suspended animation, a Hamlet without a prince.

  Hitler was released on probation on 20 December 1924. The iconic photograph by Heinrich Hoffmann of him beside a car in driving gear was not taken, as Hitler had wanted, just outside the prison itself, because the authorities objected, but in front of the historic city gate.29 It was intended to convey a message of determination and dynamism, though Hitler himself could not drive and indeed never learned.

  Despite the bravado, Hitler trod very carefully. Shortly after his release, Hitler had two meetings with the Bavarian minister president, Heinrich Held, at which he assured him that he would not attempt another putsch. He toned down some of the rhetoric in Mein Kampf, the second volume of which he was writing in the calm of his mountain retreat at Berchtesgaden, the use of which had been given to him by a well-wisher.30 Hitler also moved to sort out his national status, which acquired renewed importance after the speaking ban. In early April 1925, he wrote to the authorities in Linz requesting his ‘release from Austrian citizenship’. Hitler also had a long discussion with the Austrian consul in Munich and expressed his desire to surrender his nationality.31 On 30 April 1925, the Austrian authorities finally stripped him of the citizenship he had never accepted. This did not mean that Hitler had established his right to stay in Germany beyond all doubt–he was now formally ‘stateless’–but he had at least ensured that it would be more difficult to deport him somewhere else. The threat of removal, however, remained, and the Bavarian authorities reminded him of it from time to time.32

  Hitler’s next moves were also closely watched by his followers, who waited impatiently for his lead. The divisions of the previous year did not end with Hitler’s return from Landsberg but rather erupted with new ferocity as every faction, hiding behind a bewildering jungle of movements and acronyms, sought to win over the Führer. Hitler avoided confrontation, partly in order to concentrate on the completion of Mein Kampf.33 ‘Not a word from Hitler,’ Goebbels noted right at the end of 1924, ‘Oh this sly fox with the political instinct.’ A fortnight later, he asked anxiously, ‘What will Hitler do? That is the anxious question every day. Hopefully he will not go over to the camp of reaction.’34 Hitler’s reticence annoyed some of the rank and file, who complained that it would be better for him to sort out the ‘problems’ in the movement than to work on a ‘high political work’. The Bavarian police, which kept a close eye on Hitler after his release, also reported that he seemed to be absorbed by Mein Kampf, which was concerned ‘exclusively with Marxism and Jewry’.35 This was, as we shall see, by no means a completely accurate summary, but it must have been read with relief by many in Munich because it suggested that Hitler was not intending to pursue his vendetta against Kahr, Lossow and Seisser.

  In part, the disputes within the NSDAP were based on personal antipathy, or a struggle for access to Hitler, a theme which would grow in prominence as Hitler’s own power grew. ‘If one could have two hours alone with Hitler,’ Goebbels exclaimed in exasperation, ‘then everything could be sorted out, but he is surrounded like an old monarch.’36 Relations within the Munich party were particularly bad, where infighting between Rosenberg, Hanfstaengl and Esser culminated in law suits. The divide was also cultural in nature, pitting northern and western Germans against southerners. Hitler did not encourage these disputes in order to strengthen his own authority, but regarded them as a threat to the coherence of the movement. In early April 1925, he sent a long letter to Rosenberg pleading with him to drop his law suits for the good of the party.37 Henceforth disagreements were to be sorted out internally by the ‘Investigative and Mediatory Committee’, known as the USCHLA after its German acronym.38

  More important to Hitler than anything else, however, were the ideological fissures in the movement, which had widened in his absence. These sometimes mirrored the other divisions and sometimes cut across them. Nazis disagreed violently about participation in elections, which found more favour in the south than the north, and the armed struggle against the ‘system’. Conservative Völkisch elements faced off against those of a more ‘socialist’ disposition, principally in the north and west.

  Above all, there were profound differences over foreign policy. The northerners tended towards internationalism. ‘Is National Socialism a German matter or a world problem,’ Goebbels asked rhetorically, adding that ‘for me it goes well beyond Germany. What does Hitler think? The question needs to be answered.’39 They called for an alliance with Russia (which also appealed to more socially conservative elements, such as Reventlow). Territorially, they demanded only the return of the German colonies and the restoration of the borders of 1914. Relations between the Arbeitsgemeinschaft and the party in the south under Esser, Streicher and Amann were poisonous. Critics advanced the classic early-modern critique of a clique of ‘evil advisers’ who were monopolizing Hitler, keeping the truth from him and steering the movement in a reactionary direction.

  There were relatively few, such as Albrecht von Graefe, who wanted Hitler to return to the role of ‘drummer’ for the true nationalist messiah, Ludendorff.40 A much greater problem was the fact that many of his followers knew him only by reputation, having never met him in person or heard him speak.41 Hitler thus would have to move carefully in re-establishing his authority within the party. He had very few instruments at his disposal. He had next to no funds; he could only persuade and not command. One approach was to rely on his charisma communicated through speeches and personal contacts. Hitler gave thirty-eight speeches in 1925, and fifty-two in the following year.42 This gave him limited traction, however, partly because the numbers attending were substantially lower than during his heyday in 1923, and partly because he was still banned from appearing in public in much of Germany. Hitler was thus forced to speak to closed party meetings, in salons,43 or at private events. Nor could he put too much r
eliance on his personal magnetism. To be sure, individual doubters could be awed into line by his presence; they could convince themselves that he was interested in them, as they were in him. ‘Hitler has arrived,’ Goebbels wrote during one visit, ‘my joy is great. He greets me like an old friend [and] coddles me.’ ‘How I love him, what a guy,’ Goebbels went on. ‘I would like Hitler to be my friend.’44 Very often, however, doubts returned as soon as Hitler had left, particularly if he reneged on what had been agreed.

  Charisma and leadership had to be complemented by organization. In late February 1925 Hitler officially relaunched the NSDAP. In his ‘Basic guidelines for the re-establishment of the NSDAP’,45 Hitler laid down that existing members would have to reapply. He explicitly refused to take sides in the disputes of the past eighteen months and laid out his vision for the future. In a barnstorming first speech in Munich since his release, Hitler proclaimed all internal disputes ‘over’.46 Reconciliation was not so much negotiated as decreed. Hitler was realistic, even in public, about the difficulties of working with the very diverse group of individuals within the party. ‘I don’t regard it as the job of a political leader,’ he remarked, ‘to attempt to improve or even standardize the human material before him.’47 He could not hope to compensate for the differences in ‘temperament, character and capability’. Improving and harmonizing those, Hitler explained, would take centuries and required ‘changes of the basic racial elements’. All the leader could do was ‘to attempt through long engagement to find the “complementary” sides to each person’ which could be combined to form a ‘unity’. In other words, Hitler would have to work with the people he had rather than the people he would like to have had.

  Hitler knew that the party needed to transcend his own person. Personal loyalty was not enough; he needed party cadres to obey not just him but their immediate superiors. The Führer principle was thus extended beyond the Führer himself. More talented and trained speakers were needed, so that the entire strain of communicating the message did not fall on him and a few others. ‘We need speaker schools,’ he announced in March 1925, ‘because to this day this mass movement has only 10–12 good speakers.’48 In other words, Hitler was learning not to hog his charisma, but to spread it around. His speeches and instructions increasingly referred not just to the Führer in the singular, but to the plural Führers upon whom the leadership of the movement depended.

  Central to this was the establishment of a proper party bureaucracy.49 Here the Social Democrats explicitly served as a model.50 Hitler spoke grudgingly of the SPD as a party ‘organized like the SA’.51 Despite shortage of funds, the NSDAP moved to new premises in the Schellingstrasse in Munich in the summer of 1925, and Hitler signalled his plan to build a dedicated ‘Party Headquarters’ in Munich paid for by the membership; whether he still envisaged this as a skyscraper is not clear. Hitler also established the Gau structure, a ‘shiring’ of the whole country into administrative areas, which in turn were divided into Bezirke and Ortsgruppen.52 He encouraged the local membership to use their initiative and if possible settle disputes without reference to Headquarters. This was partly an acknowledgement of the fact that his direct control was limited, partly a desire to reduce the incessant squabbling, but mainly a reflection of his belief in bureaucratic Darwinism. ‘More than one committee can be set up in every area,’ he wrote in connection with the presidential campaign, ‘they can compete with each other, with the best committee being the one that has done most work.’53 This was one of the first examples of the tendency towards ‘polycracy’ which Hitler would later have occasion to regret.

  In March 1925, Hitler dispatched Gregor Strasser to restructure the party in north Germany. Strasser, though from Landshut in Bavaria, was temperamentally and ideologically much closer to the northerners. In September 1925, with Hitler’s approval, he helped to establish a working group at Hagen in Westphalia. Goebbels–now a major figure in the north-western NSDAP–was tasked with editing a publication called Nationalsozialistische Briefe. There was a danger in all this, as Hitler himself observed, which was that the resulting room for manoeuvre would lead to ‘the individual leader pursuing his own ideas’, rather than those of the supreme Führer himself.54 Hitler was also obliged by German associational law to hold an annual general meeting of the party in Munich, at which there should be elections and an opportunity to bring forward motions for discussion. None of this made the NSDAP a ‘bottom-up’ party. Hitler made no bones about the fact that the annual general meeting was just a charade to satisfy the rules of association.55 Debate was strongly discouraged and motions were strictly controlled.

  Hitler also resurrected the Sturmabteilungen, not as a paramilitary formation, as it had developed in the months preceding the Putsch, but as an organization dedicated to ‘strengthening of the bodies of our youth, bringing them up on discipline and dedication to the common great ideal [and] training in the marshalling and reconnaissance service of the movement’. There should be no weapons, either carried openly or stored in depots. Anybody who violated that rule was to be expelled.56 Hitler’s concern here was to avoid being dragged into illegality by armed hotheads. The immediate effect of this ruling was to precipitate a breach with Röhm, for whom the paramilitary aspects of the SA remained central. He resigned and eventually emigrated to South America.57 That same month Hitler created the ‘Protective Squadron’ soon known simply as the SS, a personal protection squad whose first leader, Josef Berchtold, placed particular stress on ideological purity.58 In a critical assertion of authority, Hitler had established a monopoly of violence within the movement.

  The principal method through which Hitler sought to re-establish control over the party was through ideological purity and coherence. He did this the hard way, seeking to achieve uniformity across a range of highly contentious issues. Hitler could not simply impose his views: he had to cajole and persuade. This was done through speeches, declarations, debates and, from the end of 1925, through the publication in succession of the two volumes of Mein Kampf.59 These were only partly written from scratch at Landsberg and after his release, the rest being cobbled together from various articles and instructions, and even from drafts dating back to before the Putsch. Much of Mein Kampf originated as a direct response to the political events of 1925–6,60 and Hitler used the text to lay down the law, at least implicitly, not just to the membership but also to his internal critics. For this reason the book needs to be seen in the context of the many contemporaneous statements he made before and after publication.

  Contrary to his earlier threats, Mein Kampf was not a settling of accounts with his erstwhile conservative Bavarian allies, though he waited until the final pages of the second volume to abjure any thought of such a ‘reckoning’.61 Instead, the autobiographical sections, which are mostly fictional, should be seen as a Bildungsroman,62 charting the political awakening of the hero. The chapter heading ‘Viennese year of learning and suffering’ was surely intended to echo Goethe’s famous novel The Sorrows of Young Werther. The main–doctrinal–sections were designed to orient the party in its post-Landsberg struggles and to communicate his final judgements on policy.63 With some important exceptions Mein Kampf proved a remarkably stable text, which changed little over nearly twenty years of reprinting.64 Though the book was highly unreliable as a biographical source, it did summarize the direction of Hitler’s thinking by the mid 1920s, key facets of which remained unchanged thereafter.

  Much of what Hitler said in Mein Kampf and his various speeches rehearsed familiar themes from the time before the Putsch. There was the same focus on the forces of domestic fragmentation. Hitler inveighed once more against the ‘mendacity of these so-called federalist circles’ who were only promoting their ‘dirty’ party interest.65 He continued to fulminate about the disintegrative effect of Marxism, and to lament the alienation of German workers. Hitler rose to new heights of invective against the German middle class, whom he dismissed as ‘philistines’, ‘bourgeois boobies’, who were so
befuddled by the ‘fug of associational meetings’ that they were unable to transcend the ‘usual jingoism of our bourgeois world of today’. He contrasted the robustness of the SA, who knew that ‘terror can only be broken by terror’, with ‘bourgeois wimpishness’. Hitler also trenchantly restated his objections to parliamentarism and electoral politics, and western democracy in general, concluding that the ‘majority principle’ amounted to ‘the demolition of the Führer idea as such’.66

  The main danger of Germany’s internal weakness was that it made her vulnerable to external attack, especially from the enemies that Hitler feared most: international capitalism, Anglo-America and the associated forces of world Jewry. Hitler critiqued the economics of inequality and exploitation, the ‘jarring juxtaposition of poor and rich so close to each other’, the ‘role of money’, in which ‘money [became] God’ and ‘the false God of Mammon was offered incense’. He became increasingly convinced that ‘the heaviest battle to be fought was no longer against enemy peoples but against international capital’.67 Here Hitler insisted more than ever on his earlier distinction between national capital, which the state could control, and pernicious international capital, which controlled states or sought to do so.68 One of its principal instruments of subjugation was revolutionary Marxism, which undermined national economies, societies and governments.69 Others were economic immiseration and racial contamination, both of which also reduced the capacity of nations to resist international takeover. For Hitler, maintaining an independent national economy was therefore absolutely central to the defence of national identity, sovereignty and racial purity.

  Hitler violently objected to international capitalism even when it was not Jewish, but he assigned the Jews a particularly malevolent role within the global capitalist system; this remained the principal root of his anti-Semitism. In Mein Kampf, as in his earlier rhetoric, Jews were inseparably linked with money and the whole capitalist system as ‘traders’, as ‘middlemen’, who levied an ‘extortionate rate of interest’ for their ‘financial deals’. Jewry, he claimed, aimed at nothing less that the ‘financial domination of the entire economy’. Yet because ‘a Bolshevized world can only survive if it encompasses everything’, a ‘single independent state’–such as a revived Germany–could bring the whole juggernaut to a standstill.70