Hitler
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The main focus of Hitler’s alliance policy, as in Mein Kampf, remained Britain. Hitler rejected the idea that Britain would never accept German continental hegemony on account of its traditional balance of power policy. He believed that a grand bargain which left Britain supreme overseas and Germany in Europe was possible.65 It proved to be a fatal misunderstanding of the principles of British foreign policy. Even more pernicious in the long run was Hitler’s belief that Anglo-American commercial and political rivalry would ultimately end in war, driving Britain into Germany’s arms. The ultimate global balance he envisaged, therefore, was an Aryan triumvirate, in which a rejuvenated Reich and the British Empire faced off against the North American Union.
Restoring Germany’s diplomatic position, Hitler argued, depended on eliminating the global power of the Jews. To him, the struggle against world Jewry was an international contest, but it would primarily be waged internally. By Hitler’s reckoning, the Jews had prevailed in France, where the ‘Jewish stock exchange’ reigned supreme, and Russia. They had been defeated in Mussolini’s Italy, he believed. ‘The most bitter struggle for the victory of Jewry,’ he argued, ‘is currently taking place in Germany’, where the NSDAP was the sole standard-bearer of the resistance. Crucially, Hitler added, ‘this battle has not yet been decided in Britain’, where the ‘Jewish invasion was still resisted by the old British tradition’. ‘The instincts of Anglo-Saxondom are still so strong and vibrant,’ Hitler continued, ‘that one cannot speak of a complete victory of Jewry.’ If the Jews prevailed, he thought, then England would be lost, ‘but if the British win, then a change of policy by Britain towards Germany could still happen’.66 In other words, the question of whether Britain would become an ally of the German Reich would be decided not so much by German diplomacy as by the alleged internal battle against Jewry in the United Kingdom itself.
Hitler had set himself an enormous task, and he was not sure that he would, or even could, prevail. He was convinced, however, that he must make the attempt, even if the chances for success were slim. ‘If a decision has clearly been found to be necessary,’ Hitler wrote, then it must be carried out ‘with brutal ruthlessness and all means at one’s disposal’, even ‘if the final result were to be itself unsatisfactory or require improvement’ or if the likelihood of success was as low as ‘a few per cent’. He compared the situation of Germany with that of a dying cancer patient. Did it make sense to hold off operating just because the chances of success were very small, or there was no chance of a full recovery? Worst of all, Hitler continued, would be for the surgeon to carry out the necessary operation with less than full commitment. By analogy, Hitler argued, Germany needed a ‘political operation’ to rescue it from ‘a mob of greedy enemies at home and abroad’. ‘The continuation of this situation is our death,’ he went on, so that ‘any opportunity’ of escaping it should be ‘seized’. ‘What is lacking in terms of likelihood of success,’ Hitler concluded, ‘must be made up for through vigour of execution.’67 This insistence on the need to take risks, to at least attempt the impossible, was a theme to which Hitler would return repeatedly in the years ahead.
Even if he succeeded across the board, Hitler did not expect to crush Anglo-America or achieve German world hegemony. He called for ‘a Europe of free and independent national states with separate and clearly limited spheres of influence’. In terms of international governance, Hitler stated that one could imagine ‘a new Association of Peoples in the far future, consisting of individual states of national value’ which might ‘resist the threatened domination of the world through the American Union’. ‘Because it seems to me,’ he continued, ‘that the nations of today are less harmed by the continuation of British world domination than by the rise of an American one.’68 In short, Hitler argued, the best Germany could hope for was to achieve global parity with the United States through confederation with like-minded European states, especially the British Empire.
Hitler probably planned to publish the Second Book up to the spring and early summer of 1929.69 Thereafter, he appears to have laid the project to one side, for what reason is not clear. The most probable explanation is that the bleak view of the racial quality of the German people in the book, expressed far more radically than in Mein Kampf, risked alienating a core constituency among nationalists and indeed the population at large. That sentiment, which continued to inform his thinking and was to guide his policies after the seizure of power, was now locked away in Hitler’s desk. It would only resurface, privately, during the final showdown with the United States.
Instead, from now on, Hitler sought to play down the racial fissures in non-Jewish German society, and indeed to talk up its supposed racial quality. In blatant contradiction to his consistently vowed sentiments in the 1920s, he wrote that ‘our government sometimes tries to convince our people that we are not an equal people to, for example, [those of] America and Britain’, and to ‘inculcate a spirit of second-classness’. ‘And yet,’ Hitler continued, ‘we know that it is not so,’ and he asked where one would find a people which ‘head for head, man against man, was more energetic, and as capable as the German people’.70 This was partly racial whistling in the wind, to keep up the spirits of a population battered by present economic woes and past military defeats. In part, Hitler’s rhetoric was also designed to paper over the cracks between the various German tribes, of whose differences and varying racial value, in his terms, he was painfully aware.
Slowly, the NSDAP regrouped after the 1928 election fiasco. Hitler urged Goebbels to take one of the few seats the party did win, in order to gain a parliamentary platform for propaganda and the prized legal immunity from prosecution for libel or incitement to violence.71 The Nazis now made their voice increasingly heard in the Reichstag and Berlin generally. The party also began to reorganize nationally. The failure of the NSDAP at the 1928 election, together with Hitler’s protestations of legality, persuaded the authorities across Germany to start relaxing the restrictions on the party and on him. In the autumn of 1928, the speaking bans were lifted in Anhalt and in Prussia, the largest state. In the face of the failure of a national strategy aimed at winning over patriotic workers, Hitler switched tack. The NSDAP began to put greater focus on rural areas.
The essentially ‘socialist’ nature of NSDAP economic policy did not change, however. Its small delegation in the Reichstag distinguished itself largely by its ferocious anti-capitalism. In keeping with Hitler’s own repeatedly expressed antipathy to international finance capitalism, members put forward proposals to confiscate ‘the fortune of the princes of bank and stock market’. The party was well to the left of the spectrum on taxation and called for more state and social spending. To the charge that they were mere clones of Mussolini, NSDAP Reichstag members responded, ‘We are not fascists. We are socialists.’ Emil Kirdorf, one of the few big business figures already aligned with the Nazis, was so infuriated by the relentless anti-capitalist barrage that he resigned his membership in August 1928, though he continued to profess loyalty to Hitler personally. Neither the party nor Hitler himself, however, changed course. In August 1928, he authorized the establishment of the ‘Greater German Trade Union’, a trade union with strong nationalist sentiments. A year later, in August 1929, Hitler approved the creation of the ‘National Socialist Factory Cell Organization’ (NSBO), effectively a Nazi trade union organization, which was regarded with a very jaundiced eye by employers. That same year he authorized a strongly anti-capitalist ‘catechism’ on Nazi economic policy penned by Hans Buchner, the economics editor of the Völkischer Beobachter.72
The propaganda effort was greatly improved. In late January 1928, Hitler had attended a screening of the first (silent) film of the Nuremberg Party Congress in the Munich Bürgerbräukeller, accompanied live by Arthur Seidel’s arrangement of music from Wagner’s Walküre.73 For financial reasons, however, there was no party congress in 1928, so a ‘leadership conference’ was held in Munich in late August and early September instead. Hitl
er, who did not go to Bayreuth in 1927 and 1928, began to plan for a conference the next year which would be synchronized with the Festival.74 At Hitler’s request, the new Reichsorganisationsleiter, Gregor Strasser, began to reorganize the party bureaucracy. A Reichsrednerschule was set up under Fritz Reinhardt to train speakers. Far from hogging the limelight, Hitler sought to develop a cadre of capable orators and sub-leaders capable of deputizing for him. Over time, the school was to train some 6,000 speakers, a massive increase which considerably amplified the reach of the party across the Reich.75 The NSDAP was developing the capacity to grow into a mass party.
None of this could disguise the fact that Hitler was in something of a rut in early 1929. He was making some electoral inroads in Protestant rural areas, but with a few exceptions he had nowhere advanced beyond ten per cent at the polls, and generally the party scored much lower. That said, support was more evenly distributed than before the failed Putsch, with a higher presence in the north and west, and a lower standing in Bavaria. The situation was transformed by two developments, both of them concerning Hitler’s main preoccupation, the United States. The first was a new scheme of reparations payments worked out by the Wall Street banker Owen Young. This was in gestation since January 1929, and its terms were formally announced in early June.76 Germany was actually required to pay less than under the Dawes Plan, and less up front, but the resulting longer period of obligations–last payments were scheduled for 1988–was a profound psychological blow.
The Young Plan rejuvenated the Nazi campaign against the attempt to turn Germans into ‘slaves of global loan and commercial capitalism’ by subjecting them to annual ‘Tributes’; anti-capitalist anti-Semitism dominated the discourse.77 Picking up one of Hitler’s most common themes, Fritz Reinhardt predicted that the plan would lead to mass emigration, or ‘the export of people’, as he put it.78 Hitler himself claimed that the aim of the plan and its alleged Jewish and other backers from ‘international high finance’ was ‘to turn our people economically and spiritually into white world Negroes’.79 The main emphasis of his visual propaganda during the election campaign was on the way in which international finance had imposed its ‘bondage’ on Germany.80 The battle against the enslavement of Germany by international capitalism thus remained at the heart of the Nazi critique of Weimar foreign policy.81 The campaign against the Young Plan not only became Hitler’s most important activity over the next two years, it also enabled him to take the stage nationally. In other words, his return to prominence was a reaction to the threat not of world communism but of global capitalism.
For the first time since the ill-fated Munich Putsch, Hitler now joined a broader conservative and right-wing front. In April 1929, he entered into an alliance with the DNVP. ‘The chief considers the political situation very positive,’ Goebbels noted in late May 1929, ‘and that we must learn to wait and avoid a banning [of the party] in all circumstances.’82 In July 1929, Hitler, the DNVP and various other right-wing organizations came together to launch the campaign against the Young Plan, which they hoped to stop through a referendum. Hitler’s main target was nationalist workers, who were to be mobilized through attacks on plutocratic exploitation and patriotic sentiment, both classic Nazi themes. Hitler’s decision was partly tactical. ‘Tactical considerations have caused us to wage the struggle together with a number of other groups,’ he wrote not long afterwards. He stressed the necessity of mobilizing the German people ‘beyond the limits of our party against this renewed monstrous attempt at enslavement’.83 From his point of view, the alliance made eminent political and ideological sense, as it aligned the NSDAP with German national capitalism, which he approved of, against the might of international finance capitalism, his great enemy.84
The second development was the Wall Street Crash of October 1929, which eventually triggered the Great Depression, which formed the backdrop to German politics in the early 1930s.85 As US banks came under pressure, they recalled or refused to renew short-term loans. This resulted in a crisis of liquidity for the heavily indebted business and public sector in Germany. The economy, never as robust as it appeared during the brief period of ‘normality’, began to slide. Unemployment began to rise, and after a series of bank failures it skyrocketed.
Strikingly, the Wall Street Crash seems to have made no impression on Hitler whatsoever. It did not dent Hitler’s belief in the power of the United States, which he attributed to race and space rather than economics alone.86 In a lecture on ‘Politics and Economics’ on 10 January 1930, by which time the Depression was raging in the United States, he contrasted Europe with America, ‘which has already long been pursuing a conscious policy of eugenics’, as her ‘immigration measures proved’. ‘Germany,’ he lamented once again, ‘had often lost its best elements and America had shown itself able to integrate these nationally into its state form’; here Hitler was referring to the Anglicization of German immigrants. ‘The new lands,’ he continued, ‘became more powerful as they were able to raise their hands against the motherlands.’ ‘Europe, hitherto the greatest actor in the world,’ Hitler went on, had yielded much in this regard to America. Far from being reassured by the Wall Street Crash that the colossus had feet of clay, Hitler was preaching the same sermon in late January 1930, which he delivered eighteen months earlier in the Second Book. ‘The whole of Europe,’ he warned, ‘is heading for a very unpleasant fate if it does not somehow put an end to America’s expansionist economic activity.’87
By contrast, Hitler continued to show little interest in the Soviet Union. He puzzled over the antagonism between Stalin and Trotsky, which he was inclined to consider a diversionary manoeuvre. In any case, Hitler did not think much of Stalin, who, even if he was not himself ‘circumcised’, allegedly largely associated with Jews and was their creature. He defined ‘Soviet power’ as the ‘Jewish dictatorship which currently carries the name of Stalin and tomorrow might be embodied by someone quite different’. He persisted in regarding Soviet communism as an affliction of the Russian people, which threatened Germany in the form of the virus of Bolshevism rather than the might of the Red Army. ‘In Stalin Jewry has finally found the man,’ Hitler remarked, ‘who like Lenin is destroying the last remains of Aryan culture with Asiatic brutality.’ Unless it was careful, he warned, Germany would suffer the same ‘fate’ as Russia, where 30 million had died slowly of hunger. Throughout the early 1930s, in fact, Hitler, in so far as he took any notice of the Soviet Union, simply dismissed Russia as ‘a hell of misery and deprivation’,88 which should serve as a warning for Germany.
The Anti-Young Plan coalition succeeded in forcing a plebiscite at the end of the year, but the result was a crushing defeat. Nor did the agitation really bring the Nazis and the Conservative right together, and it certainly did not increase funding for the party from business circles. The real significance of the campaign against the Young Plan lay elsewhere. It showed the continued relevance of Hitler’s critique to the current situation, and it provided him with a platform on which to renew his appeal to the electorate. Despite serious financial difficulties, the revived party congress at Nuremberg was a major event: forty special trains brought 23,000 SA and SS troopers and 40,000 ordinary members to the city. They totally dominated the city with three days of assemblies and speeches, a ‘dedication’ of the ‘blood flags’ at the Luitpoldhain and finally a parade through Nuremberg during which Hitler took the salute at a marchpast which lasted three full hours.89 Helped also by the growing world economic crisis, NSDAP fortunes at the polls began to improve, below the radar at first and then, in some places, dramatically. In Saxony, they trebled their previous result in the May 1929 Landtag elections, turning Otto Strasser into a major figure there, and even giving him some national prominence. In Coburg, Saxony, Baden and Thuringia the NSDAP regained some of the lost ground in Bavaria, especially in Munich, where Gauleiter Wagner–who was close to Hitler–took charge from the autumn of 1929.90 In Thuringia, they did so well in December 1929 that they held the bala
nce of power. The NSDAP, and Hitler, were back in the game.
Success brought new opportunities. In Thuringia, the Nazis took power as part of a coalition under Wilhelm Frick.91 In Saxony, with Hitler’s express approval, they tolerated an SPD-KPD cabinet. Hitler’s motivation was to show that the Nazis were ready for government. ‘In the course of the years,’ he explained, ‘the Jewish press managed to inculcate into the minds of millions of Germans the view that the National Socialists were completely unsuited ever to take over a governmental post, let alone the entire government.’92 This was why he had authorized Frick to go into government in Thuringia. Privately, Hitler added that he had demanded the Interior Ministry in order to enable Frick to conduct a ‘gradual purging’ of the administration of ‘revolutionary tendencies’.93 There were also risks, however. Frick’s unhappy tenure was not an advertisement for Nazi governance, and the coalition in Thuringia collapsed amidst much recrimination in April 1930. Participation in government, even at the local level, was also very unpopular among the more ‘revolutionary’ elements of the NSDAP. Hitler had to intervene directly, for example, to veto a demand from the Gau Brandenburg for a blanket ban on coalitions.94