Hitler
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While anti-Semitism generally receded as a theme in Hitler’s speeches in the early 1930s, perhaps for tactical reasons, it was by no means concealed. In late February 1930, Hitler condemned the Jews as a ‘world plague whose flags fly from Vladivostok to the heart of the American Union’. In early March 1930, he spoke of the ‘real rulers’ of ‘German parliamentary democracy’, namely the ‘Jewish world money power’. In late July 1930, Hitler inveighed again against the ‘string-pullers of humanity, the Jews’.19
When the votes were counted in mid September 1930, it became clear that the Nazis had made a colossal breakthrough. Hitler had been optimistic about the outcome, but the final tally of about 18 per cent of the national vote far exceeded his expectations. It was a massive increase on the pathetic 2.6 per cent secured in the 1928 elections. The NSDAP was now the second-largest party in the Reichstag after the Social Democrats. In Franconia, the result was particularly good, with most areas registering a Nazi vote of well over 30 per cent, and in Coburg as high as 43 per cent.20 The Nazi vote was preponderantly but by no means exclusively Protestant and middle-class, with the self-employed more represented than workers; the membership tended to be young and male. That said, the NSDAP won votes from across the entire spectrum, and the range of its supporters was growing.21 What these results signified about the appeal of Hitler’s programme to the various sections of the electorate is impossible to say for certain. There is no evidence, for example, that the unemployed voted for him in disproportionate numbers, in either this contest or the subsequent elections; instead, they seem to have trended towards the communists.22 Nor do we know for sure whether those who did cast their ballot for the NSDAP did so in support of Hitler’s Lebensraum vision or his anti-Semitism, or for some other reason.23
One way or the other, the political implications of the vote were enormous. Hitler’s strategy had been vindicated. Otto Strasser was left completely isolated. The legal path to power now seemed realistic on a shorter timeframe than anybody had dared hope. Success also bred success. ‘You have no idea,’ Rudolf Hess wrote to his parents, ‘how the situation of the movement and especially of Hitler himself has really changed overnight’, so that ‘we have suddenly become presentable’. ‘People who previously gave Hitler a wide berth,’ he continued, ‘now suddenly “must” speak to him.’24 The Nazis became attractive for a new type of man. It was around this time that Albert Speer, a talented young architect, first encountered Hitler and was mesmerized by him.25 In early January, Hitler met former Reichsbank president Hjalmar Schacht at Göring’s flat; Mussolini’s liaison man Giuseppe Renzetti was also present.26
Electoral success did not change the content of Hitler’s speeches, which remained more or less unchanged until the takeover of power, but were continually elaborated and refined. Hitler still refused to engage with day-to-day politics, and claimed this as a virtue. ‘[Our] fate will not be decided by the issues of the day,’ he announced in mid November 1930. This was because in his view day-to-day politics were a distraction from the issues that really mattered. ‘The politician,’ he told the Nationalklub in Hamburg at the start of December 1930, ‘must not limit himself to the issues of the day but must devote himself to matters of principle.’27 With some exceptions, there was no sign of any ideological softening or repositioning, even for tactical purposes.
Hitler’s hostility to the world of finance, especially in its international form, remained undimmed; it was also closely connected to his anti-Semitism. ‘If a people dissipates its strength,’ he warned in mid November 1930, it would be dominated by another force, that of ‘supra-state finance’.28 The economic programme of the NSDAP remained ferociously anti-capitalist with its demand to nationalize major banks, to ban trading in stocks and bonds, to limit interest rates, and to confiscate ‘illicit’ gains from speculating on the stock market, war, revolution and inflation.29 It supported the metalworkers’ strike in the autumn of 1930, during which Hitler claimed that ‘behind these forces supporting our enslavement [lay] the inexplicable narrow-mindedness of German business, or at least part of that business’.30 In the budget debate in the following year, the party chose as its spokesman none other than Gottfried Feder, the scourge of capitalism, interest payments and ‘debt-slavery’. If the NSDAP was generally on the extreme left of the extreme right, it was economically on the extreme right of the extreme left.
Occasionally, Hitler played down the role of the Jews in all this, for example in that speech to the Nationalklub in Hamburg, which contains no anti-Semitic outbursts.31 Privately, though, Hitler was much exercised about the alleged power of the Jews in the US. He believed them to have seized almost all the key positions in American society, giving them total control. Their headquarters, Hitler argued, lay in New York, where, on his reckoning, about 3 million Jews sat like tapeworms at the source.32 In an interview with a Jewish Associated Press journalist, moreover, Hitler went out of his way to tell his American audience that ‘Germany’s situation was the fault of Jewish capital’.33 This was clearly a shot across the bows of Wall Street. More generally, Hitler saw himself as a victim of the ‘Jewish press’, and anti-Semitism simply as a form of German ‘self-defence’.34
On Hitler’s reading, the German people remained enslaved: by international capital, the Jews and the victor powers. The United States remained the dominant force in the world. ‘Excessively rich America,’ he pronounced in early December 1930, as the country reeled under the impact of the Depression, ‘is conquering the whole with its unlimited opportunities.’ The hated Young Plan, which remained at the heart of Hitler’s critique of the status quo, epitomized the master–slave relationship. German hunger was blamed on the Young Plan. He even portrayed the 300 dead of a mining accident in the North-Rhine Westphalian town of Alsdorf as ‘the victims of the Young system of robbery’. In his speech to the Hamburg Nationalklub he spoke of the ‘tribute’ payments to international masters. This slavery, he claimed, also had a devastating psychological effect on the nation, by inhibiting creativity in music and art. Hitler thus feared that the ‘German people would slowly die out [and] perish for lack of importance’. He argued that Germany was simply the ‘plaything of the nations’ and was at best condemned to the indignity of being simply ‘a second Holland, a second Switzerland’.35
Even after the 1930 election, Hitler did not depart from his view that Germany was racially fragmented, and the German people themselves of decidedly mixed quality. He seemed at this point to include Germans, Romans, Celts and even Slavs among the Aryans. They were subdivided into families of nations. The Italians, Spaniards and southern Frenchmen were part of the Romance family; the Danes, Swedes, Germans and Anglo-Saxons formed the Germanic family; and the Ukrainians, White Russians, Bulgarians and Yugoslavs were part of the Slavic family. Far from believing in existing racial purity, it seems, Hitler was clear that patterns of migrations over the past millennium had led to displacements and admixtures, rather than pure races, generally speaking.36 The only people, Hitler claimed, who had managed to maintain their blood completely pure and unadulterated, thanks to their marriage laws and other factors, were the Jews. Everybody else, and particularly the fragmented Germans, were racially a melange.
This presented a problem for Hitler. On the one hand, he wanted German racial purity to overcome the divisions of the past; that was a central part of his programme. On the other hand, the public diagnosis of current German racial inferiority could only deepen divisions and damage the NSDAP at the polls. The German Volk, he remarked privately, would be only more splintered, set against one another, and atomized by stirring up the racial problems. This would render it insignificant as far as foreign policy goes. Racial theories could be discussed among the inner circle, Hitler explained, but for the public at large they were poison. Such discussion would only rouse superiority and inferiority complexes.37 For all the candour in Mein Kampf and his various speeches, Hitler could not level with the German people on this matter. The Second Book remained safely loc
ked in a drawer.
For this reason, Hitler was careful to avoid public rhetoric which would divide Germans racially. References on his part to blond hair and blue eyes were relatively rare, not just because Hitler possessed neither. The only known remark he made at this time was with reference to his American prisoners of July 1918, supposedly descended from German emigrants. He remarked in private conversation that one should not harbour the narrow belief that every teacher must be a blond Germanic type. This he considered complete nonsense. For this reason, Hitler expressly and repeatedly forbade any talk of dividing the German people into two racial halves: the Germanic and the non-Germanic people, even though this was very much his own view. Instead, Hitler laid down that the Germans in particular must avoid anything that tended to create even more divisiveness in the religious, political and ideological spheres. If people were told that they were racially different, then the result would be not the unification of all Germans, but the bringing about of the final separation and dissolution of the concept of Germany.38
Instead, Hitler planned a more gradual and comprehensive racial reformation of the Germans over the longer term. One should accept the mixing of blood as it was, Hitler argued privately, and not call one [German] blood worse than the other, one mixture better than another. Rather, one should employ other means to breed a higher form from what he rather unflatteringly described as the existing grey mass. Here Hitler had not so much medical eugenics in mind as a much broader range of social and cultural instruments. One must try to bring to the surface the valuable traits of the people living in Germany, Hitler argued, in order to cultivate and to develop them. This required ways and means to prevent the propagation of all the bad, inferior, criminal, decadent tendencies and congenital diseases likely to damage the people. Central to this project, Hitler explained, would be educating young people in the beauty of movement, the beauty of the body and the beauty of the spirit, through athletics, personal grooming, physical training, public performances of competitive games and contests and the revival of the performing arts along the old Greek models. This selective breeding would be furthered by the encounter of Germans of all backgrounds in kindergarten, primary school, the Hitler Youth and the League of German Girls. Then, when these children grew up, they would be able to leave all party considerations behind and elect the man, the only one, who represented them and went to the Reichstag on their behalf. Only then, Hitler claimed, would they see true democracy in Germany.39
Once again, Hitler was reviewing his timetable. Even as he celebrated the party’s advance at the polls, he foresaw the road ahead to be a long and hard one. He expected the takeover of power after a final election victory to be preceded, rather than be followed, by the racial regeneration of Germany. He confided that he sometimes had the feeling that it would not be granted to him to experience the great future which lay ahead, and that only a coming generation would be mature enough to translate his ideas and plans into action. He therefore saw it as his mission to bring about the basis for such a community of the Volk, especially to guide the young people of Germany along the paths that lead to this goal.40
The way forward, Hitler continued to argue, lay in a domestic regeneration, which would enable a radical new foreign policy. Ending Germany’s internal divisions remained his priority.41 Again and again, Hitler returned to the theme of the Thirty Years War and the deep rift it had created in the life of the nation, ultimately leading to the catastrophe of 1918–19.42 He also lamented the split caused by class conflict, which had weakened the Reich in the face of its internal and external enemies. Far from trying to spare bourgeois sensibilities for electoral purposes, Hitler continued to lambast ‘prejudice’, and ‘class madness’. ‘The smallest title,’ he complained, tried to ‘elevate itself over the even smaller title.’ The NSDAP, Hitler proclaimed, was against ‘class antagonism and class prejudice’.43 Central to this integrative and modernizing project was the motorization of Germany, which Hitler regarded as essential to reaching social and racial parity with the United States. In 1930, picking up on the widespread contemporary discussions about the development of a ‘people’s car’, he remarked that Germany would need a version of the Model T. Ford within the budget of an ordinary family.44
In strategic terms, Hitler stuck to Lebensraum as the universal panacea throughout 1930–31, in public and in private. Because of Germany’s past internal divisions, especially the religious ones, she had been ‘left out’ of the first partition of the world. ‘We had to watch,’ he complained, ‘how nations [such as] the Portuguese and the Dutch divided up the world with the British.’45 ‘If a people is starving,’ he argued, ‘then it has the right to seize territory for itself.’46 Lebensraum also drove his understanding of international economics. ‘In the final analysis,’ he remarked of the economic crisis in early December 1930, ‘the question of participation in world trade is not a matter of the raising of production but exclusively a question of the conquest of markets. Sales is the greatest problem, not production.’47 Returning to old themes from Mein Kampf and the Second Book, he argued that there were only two ways of feeding the German people. ‘Either one pursues export, which means competing with the world,’ Hitler suggested, ‘or we create ourselves a new market through the expansion of our living space.’48
For this reason Hitler continued to reject solutions based on ‘world economy and world trade’;49 only living space in the east would do. Significantly, Hitler did not seek present-day world domination for Germany; that ship had already sailed. He spoke conditionally of a claim which would have existed in the past, had Germany not been so divided. ‘No people would have had a better right to the concept of world domination,’ he lamented, ‘than the German people’, but that moment had passed.50 All that Hitler was seeking in the here and now was simple parity with Anglo-America.
Nazism might have made an electoral breakthrough, but there were still huge barriers between Hitler and the takeover of power. The principal pillars of power within the state remained largely sceptical towards Hitler and the NSDAP. President Hindenburg, for example, stayed aloof. The chancellor, Heinrich Brüning, met with Hitler but no agreement was secured. To the fury of the government, Hitler leaked the content of their conversation. The Reichswehr was not only profoundly sceptical about the party’s commitment to legality, but also violently hostile to its ‘socialist’ domestic politics. These, the record of a conference in the Defence Ministry in late October 1930 claimed with reference to the nationalization measures set out in the Nazi economic programme, were ‘pure communism’.51 Hitler also hit the buffers in Nuremberg, which he acclaimed as ‘the most German city ever’,52 and where he planned to hold another party rally in 1931, in a central place easily accessible from Austria and Czechoslovakia. His appeal to Mayor Luppe fell on deaf ears, and the city council refused to authorize the annual party congress for the second year running.
Nor did the 1930 elections, despite claims to the contrary by the Nazis themselves and their enemies, reconcile big business to Hitler. A few bosses now began to ‘hedge’ against the eventuality of a Nazi victory by seeking a rapprochement. Hitler also made some headway with individual business figures. In late September 1930, he met with the shipping magnate Wilhelm Cuno in Hamburg,53 who arranged for him to address the Nationalklub in Hamburg two months later. The vast majority of business leaders, however, were still repelled by Hitler’s anti-capitalist rhetoric. His economics adviser Wagener was far to the left of any entrepreneur. Moreover, Nazi Party journals, especially that of the ‘Factory Cell Organization’ continued to lambast the ‘liberal-capitalist system’,54 to criticize bosses and to call for the nationalization of key industries. Throughout 1931, donations from business remained few and far between.
This meant that the party remained dependent on alternative sources of financing, especially donations and subscriptions by the membership or sympathizers. The NSDAP also made money selling newspapers, books, tickets to meetings and in many other ways.55
All SA members had to take out a party-organized insurance. Costs were generally low, as there were few salaried staff; most officers worked for free. Here the NSDAP much more closely resembled the SPD than the parties of the centre and right, who were generally in receipt of monies from big business or other vested interests. This model of financing was a response to weakness, but it became a source of strength. It gave the NSDAP a certain resilience and independence, and enabled Hitler to deal with potential donors more confidently; he could not simply be ‘bought’. Moreover, the fact that the party charged for entry to meetings also deterred hecklers and timewasters, as well as ensuring that those who attended were highly motivated.
Hitler’s political strategy after the election was three-pronged. First, Hitler sought to tighten his grip on the party organization. In early November 1930, Hitler issued an instruction to regulate relations between the SA and SS; the latter was beginning to grow in importance as the provider of a ‘police service inside the party’.56 Generally speaking, both organizations were forbidden to attempt to poach members from each other, although a request to transfer was not to be unreasonably refused, and neither was entitled to give orders to the other, unless the task specifically required it. Secondly, smarting after his rebuff by Brüning, and sensitive to the froideur coming from President Hindenburg, Hitler reached out to the mainstream right. In September 1930, he made Göring a special envoy to forge alliances with conservatives.57 Hitler tried to patch up relations with the nationalist paramilitary organization the Stahlhelm, meeting on several occasions with the leadership.58 He told the NSDAP ‘leaders’ conference’ in Cologne that while the election victory enabled the party to speak ‘in a different tone’ with the Stahlhelm, it was ‘wise’, given the size of that organization, ‘not to antagonize the Stahlhelm’. He left the question of tactical collaboration to the discretion of local leaders but in general he hoped that one would work more closely. ‘The brown and grey soldiers,’ he demanded, ‘must stand together in the battle against the current system.’59