Hitler

by Brendan Simms

  The city was not chosen because of its closeness to National Socialism–the sobriquet ‘capital of the movement’ was still ten years off13–but for the opposite reason. Official Munich was now deadly hostile, and Hitler was banned from public speaking in Bavaria for more than two years after his release from Landsberg. Some suggested that the NSDAP should shift base to Thuringia, which would have better reflected its Schwerpunkt at the time. Hitler accepted ‘that he now had more followers in the former red Saxony and Thuringia than in nationalist Bavaria’, and that ‘the liberation of Germany might come from the water’s edge [that is from the north] and no longer from Bavaria. Hitler countered, however, that Munich was the Golgotha of Nazism, ‘hallowed ground’, where the ‘blood’ of ‘martyrs’ had been shed in 1923. To leave the city for an ‘easier’ patch would be to break faith with the dead, and indeed would mean ‘the end of the movement’. The fight in Munich should not be ducked. ‘Precisely because’ the NSDAP was being ‘fought the hardest’ in Munich, he explained at an NSDAP ‘leaders conference’ in Rosenheim, ‘this position must not be abandoned’. In his mind, the Bavarian capital was the theatre of a political war of attrition. For all these reasons, Hitler determined that the movement should stick it out in Munich and announced plans to build a party headquarters in the city.14

  Munich was also ‘geopolitically’ significant. Hitler explained that it was ‘closer to [our] German brothers in Austria than any other place and provided the best connection to the Anschluss movement’ there.15 Perhaps more importantly, the city was also an excellent jumping-off point to conquer Franconia, which was far more promising terrain in the mid to late 1920s. Hitler’s first major engagement after the refounding of the NSDAP was a speech to 5,000 people in Nuremberg in early March 1925, at a time when he was still banned from speaking in Munich.16 There were more party members there than in Munich.17 He backed Julius Streicher to the hilt, not just against the Weimar authorities but also in the face of bitter criticism within the party. In early December 1925, Hitler went to Nuremberg to testify on Streicher’s behalf in a court case spawned by his persecution of Lord Mayor Luppe. Six months later, Hitler celebrated Nuremberg as a ‘mighty fortress in our movement’.18 It was also no accident that Hitler convened the crucial party congress in the Franconian city of Bamberg, which gave the appearance of meeting the northerners halfway but actually gave him a much greater home advantage than he would have enjoyed in the now largely unsympathetic Bavarian capital. Coburg was another focus of activity.19 Pivoting on Franconia, the party could spread out like an oil slick, especially into Thuringia. Convinced of the effectiveness of the ‘southern’ strategy, Hitler held his nose, tolerated Streicher and Esser and demanded that the rest of the NSDAP fall in line behind them.

  The political centrality of Franconia was underlined by the growth of the Nuremberg annual party rally. In August 1927, Nazis converged on the city from all directions; 10,000–15,000 of them, according to the hostile authorities, more if the NSDAP is to be believed. Despite the rain, which forced the cancellation of several events, and the vast expense, it was generally believed to be a success. In a remarkable physical feat, Hitler kept his arm outstretched in salute for more than ninety minutes as his cohorts filed by.20 It was the first time he wore an SA uniform in public, a mark of favour towards his party soldiers but also a sign of confidence that it had internalized his message that power could only be achieved through legal means. Afterwards, attendees repaired to the Luitpoldhain, a large park, where Hitler performed a ‘dedication’ ceremony for twelve NSDAP banners by touching them with another banner, stained with the sacred blood of the hatter Andreas Bauriedl, ‘martyred’ during the failed Munich Putsch.

  There was also the considerable cultural importance of Franconia. Hitler drew on the Wagnerian tradition in Bayreuth for strength and inspiration. He invited Winifred and Siegfried to his first major speech after his release in the Munich Bürgerbräukeller on 27 February 1925. Afterwards, he was chauffeured to Plauen and stayed at Wahnfried. Hitler remained in close contact with the Wagners from now on. Sometimes, they came to his Munich flat in Thierschstrasse 41, but more often Hitler went to Bayreuth, regularly stopping off on his way to Berlin. He would then stay in a nearby hotel, and slip into Wahnfried under the cover of darkness. He attended the festival for the first time in August 1925, though as the guest of an unknown benefactor, not as an official invitee; Hitler signed the Bayreuth ‘List of Arrivals’ as a writer, reflecting the fact that he was engaged on volume two of Mein Kampf at the time. Even in that exacting environment, people were impressed by Hitler’s knowledge of music.21 Winifred joined the party in January 1926. Despite rumours at the time and since, her relationship with Hitler–for all its intensity–was not romantic, at least not on his side. Nor was Wagner the inspiration behind Hitler’s anti-Semitism; the composer merited only the briefest of mentions in Mein Kampf.22 Rather, Hitler’s interest in Wagner was artistic and metaphysical; he used the relationship with Winifred to recharge his spiritual batteries. After 1933, his annual visit to Bayreuth would become part of the Nazi political calendar.

  Hitler’s interest in Bayreuth was not just personal. Wagner’s operas expressed for him the very profundity of the German soul. Hitler was therefore determined to rescue the Wagnerian tradition from what he classed as foreign contamination, especially the Jews. Here he was somewhat at odds with Winifred and Siegfried, who were desperate to bring Americans to Bayreuth, if only for financial reasons.23 Many of those attending, and some of those performing in the 1920s, were Jews. Hitler refused to attend in 1927, because the bass-baritone singing Wotan, Friedrich Schorr, was of Jewish origin; in fact, he stayed away for the next four years. Goebbels accused Siegfried of crawling to the Jews. More generally, Hitler saw cultural activity and production as an integral part of the racial elevation of the German people. Bringing them to broader attention and understanding was a major concern for him. In the debate between left and right Wagnerians, Hitler sided with the ‘left-winger’ Wilhelm Ellenbogen, who argued that Wagner should be brought to the masses.24

  Central, western and northern Germany was as yet less fertile ground for Hitler, but he was determined to change that. In November 1926, he persuaded a reluctant Goebbels to take charge of the party in the imperial capital.25 Goebbels now took the fight to the left in the streets and the neighbourhoods of working-class Berlin. His aim in this ‘battle for Berlin’ was no less than the ‘conquest’ of the city.26 On 1 May 1927, Hitler spoke in the capital at a meeting organized by Goebbels, albeit not in public, because he was still banned from speaking in Prussia. Progress in the north and west was held up by the emergence of a new antagonism in the party, this time between Goebbels and the Strasser brothers. Gregor Strasser had been appointed propaganda leader in September 1926, much to the chagrin of Goebbels, who coveted the role for himself.

  Slowly but surely, Hitler sorted out the party. One of the leading conservatives, Count Reventlow, abandoned his cronies Wulle and Gräfe, and swore loyalty to Hitler; Gräfe was ostracized. The leading ‘Völkisch’ critic Artur Dinter was sacked as Gauleiter of Thuringia. ‘There is not the slightest doubt,’ Hess wrote in late March 1927, ‘as to who leads and gives the orders.’ ‘The Führer principle,’ he added, meant that there was ‘absolute authority downward and responsibility upward.’27 Looking back in the summer of 1927, Hitler claimed that he had now cleared up ‘the whole jumble of mutually antagonistic, abusive and slandering groups’ after his release from prison. ‘They had to be disciplined again,’ he said. Dissent was not tolerated. ‘The number of proposals is so great,’ Hitler explained, ‘that they cannot be treated at one great meeting’, quite apart from the fact that such a way of proceeding resembled despised ‘parliamentarism’. These events were intended for mobilization, not consultation or deliberation. ‘The party congress,’ Hitler explained, ‘should fulfil its purpose of giving the movement new impetus through a large assembly of delegates.’28 Most submissions at Nur
emberg in 1927 were summarily dismissed by Hitler: ‘Petition pointless’, he would say, ‘petition cannot be implemented’, ‘petition impossible’ or even ‘petition violates our principles’.29 In this sense, Hitler was already practising ‘Germanic Democracy’.

  By the end of 1927, things were looking up for Hitler and National Socialism. The speaking bans were progressively lifted: in late January for Saxony, and in early March for Bavaria; he was still not allowed to appear in public in Prussia. Hitler had enforced his ideological line across the board. He had built a capable team. Göring, at least in those days, provided social connections and a sense of élan. Goebbels, who was a genuine intellectual, had a genius for communication. Gregor Strasser brought his considerable organizational skills to the table. Hess, although widely considered to be a crank, was in fact well educated, spoke several languages and wrote extremely well. Many of Hitler’s associates were highly intelligent, none were conventionally stupid. They were, to say the least, a diverse group, intellectually and temperamentally, but each of them brought a range of talents to the party. With the exception of Röhm, who had left in a huff, they were all in for the long haul.

  Hitler was also finding his niche personally. He was now very much rooted in a section of Munich society, surrounded by well-wishers and a frequent guest at various salons. His emotional life at the time remains a mystery.30 In March 1925, Hitler felt obliged to deny rumours of an engagement. ‘I am so deeply married to politics,’ he proclaimed, ‘that I cannot allow myself to get engaged.’31 He was close to the daughters and wives of his associates, especially the photographer Heinrich Hoffmann’s daughter Henriette and Hanfstaengl’s wife Helene, a statuesque German-American. These ‘safe’ relationships were completely unphysical. One day in the mid to late 1920s, Hitler reportedly placed his head in Helene’s lap and proclaimed himself her slave. ‘If only,’ he sighed, ‘I had someone like you to look after me.’ When she asked why he did not marry, he replied, ‘I can never marry because my life is dedicated to my country,’ his stock response.32 Hitler’s relationship with his niece Geli, by contrast, was intense and may have been intimate. When she announced in November 1927 that she wanted to marry Emil Maurice, the chauffeur and bodyguard, Hitler erupted in fury. Maurice was sacked the next day.33

  Though Hitler had reasserted control over most of the party, the Weimar Republic in turn had stabilized. It was increasingly Americanized, partly in the technological sense that Hitler applauded, but mainly in the financial and cultural sense he so despised. Moreover, the party remained divided both ideologically and in terms of personalities. Few grasped the significance of the United States to Hitler’s thinking, and although the Russian issue was now largely resolved, a new gulf was opening up over the question of European integration, on which the left-wingers remained keen. The ‘left’ had shifted from north Germany to Berlin, and was itself divided between the Strassers and Goebbels. The party was flatlining electorally. Its message seemed oddly out of tune with the parochial concerns of the German people.

  Hitler, however, remained unconcerned. He pointedly refused to engage in day-to-day politics, which he accused of ‘smothering’ the idea.34 ‘The life of a people,’ Hitler proclaimed, ‘is not determined by the so-called issues of the day.’ Instead, he argued that ‘the issues of the day are just products of [one] great circumstance which is that we signed the peace treaty [of Versailles] some time ago’. This is why Hitler continued to stress the misery of the German people, even during the relatively good times of what were later known as the ‘golden years’. ‘Even in the field of economics,’ he argued in August 1927, ‘the so-called consolidation is a fallacy or an intentional lie.’ In any case, as we have seen, his timeline for the regeneration of the German people was at this point a very long one. That said, Hitler was also conscious that his opportunity might come well before that. ‘The current period of tranquillity in the world,’ he wrote, ‘gives one the impression that we are standing on firm ground,’ but this was mistaken. ‘The quiet of today,’ Hitler warned, ‘can also be seen’ as merely ‘a lull in the fighting which might already be over tomorrow’.35

  PART THREE

  Unification

  In his New Year’s greetings to Winifred Wagner, Hitler looked forward to 1928 with optimism. ‘I must only look to the future,’ he wrote, ‘and at the end of this year I now once again joyfully believe in it.’ ‘I now know once more,’ Hitler continued, ‘that fate will bring me to the point where I had hoped to come four years ago [1923].’1 It is hard to tell the reasons for his optimism, but Hitler was to be proved right. Within five years of writing these lines, he had taken power in Germany, not through revolutionary violence as he had attempted in 1923, but by quasi-legal means. Throughout this period, Hitler grappled with questions of unification. He engaged in greater detail with the United States as both a model and a challenge. Hitler also took issue with the idea of European unity, which many Germans then saw as the answer to the twin challenges of Soviet communism and American capitalism. Instead of the chimera of a United States of Europe, he promoted the unification of Germany under his leadership, a prospect which seemed realistic after his election successes in 1930 and 1932. Finally, Hitler also sought to reunify the NSDAP, which was in danger of disintegrating even as his chances of assuming the chancellorship grew.

  7

  The American Challenge

  Germany in the late 1920s appeared increasingly stable. Governments and population were becoming more and more reconciled to the power of Anglo-America and international capitalism. Partly, this was for lack of choice. Germany was still subject to a punitive reparations regime, which threatened control of national assets such as the Reichsbahn. Parker Gilbert, the American banker who was agent-general for reparations, insisted on balanced budgets before he would start talks on the remission of reparations payments. Austerity and external subjection seemed to go hand in hand. There was widespread anxiety about the threat of mass emigration, particularly if the economy worsened. Many felt that Germany was too weak to survive as an independent national state and should seek shelter within a United Europe.1 The idea of ‘Pan-Europa’, first mooted in 1923 by Count Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi, the son of an Austro-Hungarian diplomat who had married a Japanese woman, was gaining ground; among his early backers was the Hamburg banker Max Warburg, pointed in his direction by the Rothschilds.2 In 1924 Heinrich Mann published a tract calling for a ‘United States of Europe’ to prevent the continent from becoming an ‘economic colony of America or a military colony of Asia’.3 The Heidelberg Programme of the SPD in 1925 supported the idea of a ‘United States of Europe’. European integration was also very much on the diplomatic agenda with calls for a Franco-German rapprochement finding widespread support in both countries. Others rejected the idea, claiming, as the senior German diplomat Bernhard Wilhelm von Bülow wrote, that ‘in Pan-Europa Germany would play the role of Saxony, at best that of Bavaria’, and that it was in any case with regard to its notions of an ‘international currency’ and ‘absolute freedom of movement’ not ‘realizable’.4

  There was also a more positive embrace of the new order, culturally, economically and politically. The largely benevolent conquest of Europe by the United States continued.5 American-style capitalism attracted many Germans.6 The American values of hard work, energy and opportunity were seen as ways of reviving Germany.7 German businessmen made regular pilgrimages across the Atlantic to observe ‘Fordism’ in action. German commentators remarked not merely on the wealth of Americans, but on their splendid physique and open countenance, which contrasted unfavourably with the wizened and downcast aspects of their own compatriots.8 Hollywood took Germany by storm.9 In 1928, the first transatlantic flight by a Zeppelin airship took place, linking the new continent more closely with the Reich from which so many Americans had emigrated. Meanwhile, the economy improved. Radical parties steadily lost ground. A new Germany appeared in the making. It seemed unpromising territory for Hitler and the NSDAP, w
hich had shot to brief prominence in 1923 on the back of severe economic and political dislocation.

  Despite this, Hitler threw himself into the Reichstag elections of 1928 with gusto. He raced from meeting to meeting. On one day, Hitler spoke at no fewer than eleven venues in Munich: the Bürgerbräukeller, Augustinerkeller, Hofbräuhauskeller, Franziskanerkeller, Restaurant ‘Zur Blüte’, Malthäserbräu, Arzbergerkeller, Thomasbräukeller, Hackerbräukeller, Schwabingerbräu and Altes Hackerbräuhaus.10 He campaigned on what he regarded as the central issue of the day: Germany’s continuing enslavement by her wartime enemies as represented by the forces of western imperialism and international capitalism. ‘The situation of Germany is comparable to that of a colony,’ he stated. ‘Germany no longer has any sovereignty.’ Famine and emigration, he charged, stalked the land: ‘Ireland’s fate looms threatening before Germany’s future.’ ‘Hitler compares Germany with India,’ one audience member recalls him saying during the latter stages of the Reichstag campaign, ‘which was allowed to keep its princes by Britain, [and] its own representation, [with] the whole parliamentary glamour’, in order to distract from the ‘real truth, that the Briton is the sole lord and the Indian is the slave’. Whether he was speaking of colonialism, Ireland or India, what was driving Hitler was not solidarity with the wretched of the earth, but Germany’s racial relegation. There was, however, also a socialist tinge to his claims. Marxists, Hitler argued, should criticize not German society, but the ‘unjust distribution of the world’s resources’.11 Germany, he was effectively arguing, had been proletarianized in geopolitical terms. It was a theme to which Hitler would return at length after he took power.