Likewise, Hitler attempted to appease the agrarian conservatives, no easy task given his own well-documented hostility and that of his agricultural adviser Walther Darré. The latter’s demand for ‘new aristocracy of blood and soil’ had put a big question-mark over the supposed racial value of the German nobility.60 At a meeting with the prominent East Elbian landowner Prince Eulenburg-Hertefeld in January 1931, Hitler reassured him that he did not plan to expropriate anybody within Germany (except, implicitly, the Jews), not least because the land available was not sufficient for his purposes. Referring Eulenburg to the relevant passages in Mein Kampf, he explained that the necessary land would be secured further east.61 In effect, Hitler was proposing to bypass awkward distributional questions by enlarging the cake.
Thirdly, Hitler began not merely to outline but to conduct an active foreign policy. He was now a power in the land, a fact which brought with it both dangers and opportunities. Hitler was very concerned that Brüning’s aggressive push for German rearmament, partly designed to deflect attention from internal woes, would provoke pre-emptive strikes from France and Poland. The Poles were prepared to meet him halfway. In the autumn of 1930, an emissary from Marshal Piłsudski came to Munich. He proposed a ten-year peace and friendship treaty after a Nazi takeover of power, based on close economic ties, the resolution of outstanding border issues and some form of central European federation directed against the Soviet Union. Hitler, who was a keen admirer of the marshal, needed no persuading. He remarked privately that he was determined to follow Piłsudski’s advice and conclude a ten-year pact with Poland immediately after taking over the government. Hitler saw a treaty with Poland as the first step towards the consolidation of central Europe.62 Unlike some in his entourage, he was optimistic that Britain would not oppose these schemes.
Even more important than keeping the Poles at arm’s length, in Hitler’s mind, was wooing Anglo-America. After all, London and Washington would have to agree not only to Hitler’s plans for a new European order, but to his assumption of power in the first place. This now seemed possible. The election changed the international standing of the Nazis, which had been generally low after the failed Munich Putsch.63 The Anglo-American press, especially The Times and the newspapers owned by William Randolph Hearst, now besieged Hitler with requests for interviews. ‘The domestic and foreign press is beating down the doors,’ Hess exulted; they were wiring from America, telephoning from London and were ‘plunged into despair when Hitler coolly declared that he was not available’. 64 Hitler gave a series of international interviews immediately after the election, principally to the British and American press, including the Daily Mail, the Sunday Express and The Times. He told his economic adviser Otto Wagener that he needed to win over England.65
In public and in private, Hitler was convinced that a deal with the British–whom he regarded as a ‘fraternal people’66–could be done on the basis of the territorial status quo in the west, the renunciation of colonies and common enmity against the Soviet Union.67 In his charm offensive in the British media in the autumn of 1930, Hitler therefore emphasized the threat of Bolshevism. He stressed the commonality of interest between the two countries and showed himself knowledgeable about British history.68 Hitler hoped that agreement would be reached without recourse to war, hoping that an 1866-style conflict like that between Austria and Prussia could be avoided.69 The allusion to the Austro-Prussian War of 1866 was significant, partly because it suggested that he regarded the differences between Germans and Britons as no greater than those between Reich Germans and those in Austria, but also for the way in which he conceived a future war with Britain. It should be avoided if possible, and if waged should be conducted swiftly and followed by a generous compromise peace similar to the one that Bismarck concluded with the Austrians after their defeat at Sadowa, enabling the rapid conclusion of the Austro-German Dual Alliance at the end of the subsequent decade. The contours of the 1940 constellation are already visible here.
Immediately after the election, Putzi Hanfstaengl was recalled and instructed to mount a proper foreign press effort.70 It became his job to manage relationships with the large numbers of journalists in Berlin, most of them British and American. This was not an easy task. Although Hitler was intrinsically ‘good copy’, he was also erratic in his behaviour, missed deadlines and never really understood the concept of an ‘exclusive’. To Hanfstaengl’s frustration, he often made policy announcements prematurely and in obscure places. There could be no doubting the content of Hitler’s message to the Americans, however. In an interview with Hearst’s New York American, Hitler railed against ‘war debt slavery’ and the fact that the reparations settlement had turned German workers into ‘convict labour for an entire generation and, in addition, bequeathed to its children and children’s children the Versailles Treaty and Young Plan, endless slavery, and the sentences of unforgettable tribute paying’. As with Britain, what Hitler wanted was an accommodation with the United States, in this case on the basis of a hemispheric partition of the world. ‘Our whole movement,’ he announced in mid October 1930, ‘aims at a German Monroe Doctrine. This demands Germany for the Germans just as America demands America for the Americans’.71 Here Hitler was reprising a concept which he had first ventilated before the 1923 putsch, and to which he would return repeatedly in 1940–41.
Mussolini, so long aloof, began to come off the fence. As late as May 1930, he had told a German journalist that fascism was not ‘an article for export’, mainly in order to reassure the German government. Now he began to view the rise of Nazism as an opportunity for Italy. A year later, in May 1931, Mussolini received Hermann Göring, the first high-ranking Nazi to be so honoured.72 His confidant Giuseppe Renzetti met with Hitler on no fewer than ten occasions in 1930–31, and another sixteen times after that before the takeover of power.73 In an interview with the Gazzetta del Popolo two weeks after the election, Hitler repeated his views on South Tyrol. The purpose here was not primarily to establish common ground between Nazism and fascism; in fact he insisted upon the differences between the two movements. Hitler’s main motive was strategic: to break open the ring of encircling alliances around Germany, and to dissuade the great powers from stopping a Nazi victory at the polls. In short, whether with Poland, Anglo-America or Italy, Hitler was already beginning to conduct an active foreign policy long before his takeover of power.
More mundane matters soon intruded. Hitler was to spend much of 1931 not so much selling the movement abroad as trying to deal with its liabilities at home. One of these was Göring, whose high-level connections, both to German high society and internationally, were indispensable to the party. His growing importance, and the drugs he took to ease the pain from his injuries, unbalanced him not merely politically but mentally, and caused Hitler considerable anxiety. Worse still was the problem of the new SA leader, Ernst Röhm, whose obvious homosexuality, and that of his entourage, not only repelled other party leaders but was also a gift to the enemy press. ‘Disgusting!’ Goebbels wrote in late February 1931. ‘Hitler doesn’t pay enough attention here,’ with the result that the party risked becoming an ‘El Dorado for queers’.74 Hitler, though vehemently opposed to homosexuality in theory, was in fact remarkably tolerant of Röhm’s activities in practice. ‘The SA,’ he pronounced, ‘is not a moral institution for the education of upper-class girls but an association of raw fighters.’ Their ‘private life’, Hitler continued, ‘can only be taken into consideration if it violates important principles of the National Socialist world view’.75
More worryingly, the SA was also continuing to challenge Hitler’s authority. Behind the scenes, Röhm not only was developing his own foreign policy positions, but engaged in private diplomatic contacts with foreign powers.76 Just how much of this Hitler knew by the spring and summer of 1931 is unclear. It was no secret, though, that many SA leaders, especially Walter Stennes, remained committed to a strategy of revolutionary upheaval. They were egged on by their men, who had been com
prehensively ‘mobilized’ for the electoral battles and now struggled to get down from their ‘highs’. In March 1931, Hitler endorsed Röhm by name but only ambivalently. ‘I am the SA,’ he announced, ‘and you belong to the SA,’ warning that ‘if I am ever in the situation where I have to give up the SA, I would do it with a bleeding heart to rescue the [rest of] the movement’. This was a clear shot across the bows. In April 1931, Stennes finally broke away from the NSDAP, attacking ‘bigwigification’ (Verbonzung) within the party and the unnecessary expenditure on ‘bronze and marble’ in the new party headquarters. He also played on the divisions between Munich and the northern Nazis. But when Stennes loyalists occupied the party headquarters, Hitler acted. Stennes was replaced with Göring.77 Not long afterwards, he joined forces with Otto Strasser, but even together they failed to gain much traction. Once again, Hitler conducted a controlled explosion within the party, which was smaller than it would have been if Stennes and Otto Strasser had left together.
The behaviour of the SA put a lot of strain on Hitler’s ‘legality strategy’. This was always something of a euphemism. It did not mean that the Nazis never broke the law; they did this all the time through attacks on political rivals.78 Rather, it signified that Hitler was committed not to stage another 1923-style insurrection, or confront the state directly with violence. This strategy was critical not only to denying the Weimar authorities a pretext to shut down the NSDAP, but also to reassuring bourgeois opinion about the respectability of the movement. In the spring and summer of 1931, these concerns came to the fore during the Eden Dance Trial. When four SA men were put on trial for assault and attempted murder, the prosecutor, a young Jewish lawyer called Hans Litten, called Hitler as a witness. Though Hitler was no stranger to court appearances, he had generally got the better of his interlocutors. This time, however, he was deeply embarrassed under a forensic cross-examination which showed his complicity in Nazi street violence. Litten’s probing put salt in Hitler’s wounds, because he could not openly disavow the SA without widening the gulf left by the Stennes revolt nor embrace them without abandoning the legality strategy.79
For Hitler, the SA rebellion was partly about the maintenance of his authority. ‘I am not the attorney of the National Socialist movement,’ he insisted, ‘but its founder and leader.’ He therefore laid down the new structure of the SA. Hitler’s emphasis on the importance of ‘leadership’ also stemmed from his concern for the long-term regeneration of German society. Somewhat in violation of his own call not to speak of supposed German racial divisions, he explained in early May 1931 that ‘Germany is not racially pure’ but was ‘composed of purely Nordic, eastern elements and of mixtures of all these parts’. ‘That is why,’ he continued, ‘in every question which requires a blood-based position there will be different answers,’ which in a democracy will fall on the ‘racially inferior side’. ‘For this reason,’ Hitler concluded, ‘there is no other form of organization conceivable for us than one based on the recognition of the Führer and his authority.’80 The Germans, he seemed to be suggesting once again, were not yet ready for democracy; they were not racially coherent enough. Later that month, Hitler established the Reichsführerschule in Munich to train a new generation of leaders. Far from believing the Germans to be naturally disciplined, therefore, Hitler believed that they needed strong leadership to knock them into racial shape.
The crushing of the Stennes revolt did not end the divisions within the NSDAP. Göring continued to feud with Goebbels. ‘Göring continues to agitate uninterruptedly against me,’ Goebbels complained in early June 1931, ‘because of a pathological jealousy’, adding that his rival was trying ‘literally [to] crawl into Hitler’s arse’ and that ‘he would manage to do so if he were not so fat’.81 Röhm remained a liability. Moreover, Hitler and he had still not sorted out Gregor Strasser, together with Röhm the last grandee on the ‘left’ of the party, who remained loyal after his brother Gregor and Stennes had left. To the frustration of many, Hitler continued to prevaricate. This was a matter partly of temperament and partly of calculation. He could not afford to lose a confrontation and even to win one, if the result was to split the party. Doing nothing, Hitler told Wagener, generally worked in politics. Politics was always a struggle, he continued, a pressure one side tries to exert. If one pushed back, the attack might be reinforced, but if one evaded and offered no resistance whatsoever, then the push stopped being a push and became mere a gust of wind which dissipated itself. But, as such, it could not pull down anything.82
Even as he battled his enemies within the party throughout the spring and early summer of 1931, Hitler kept a watchful eye on the international scene. In early May 1931, he established the ‘Foreign Section’ in Hamburg, a symbolic move in a city which regarded itself as ‘the gateway to the world’. Around the same time Hitler assured the Daily Express correspondent Sefton Delmer in a Berlin restaurant: ‘From now on, you just watch! My men will be quiet and disciplined and orderly. My job is to prevent the millions of Germans unemployed from coming under communist influence, as they easily might. I want to turn them instead into an orderly citizen force for the defence of Germany against the internal and external Bolshevik enemy.’ Not long after he told Delmer that he had two main foreign policy aims, the cancellation of reparations and ‘a free hand in the east’ to enable ‘the surplus millions of Germans to expand into the Soviet Union’. When challenged how he could attack Russia without crossing Polish land, Hitler replied, ‘A way can be found for everything.’83 Hitler repeated these remarks in an interview with the London Times in early June 1931. ‘Germany,’ he told them, ‘must export men… particularly towards the east. Herr Hitler does not specify this conception precisely, but his mind seems to take the Polish Corridor in its stride and to contemplate German colonisation of an unlimited eastern area.’84 If Mein Kampf had not been clear enough, Hitler was now openly signalling his strategic intent to the west.85
Hitler also remained preoccupied with the power of the United States, and still showed no sign of taking on board the shattering economic impact of the depression there. Reviewing the list of Germany’s rivals, he stated in early February 1931 that the United States had become a ‘competitor on the world market’, especially ‘since the war’ because it was ‘a giant state with unimaginable productive capacities’.86 The US was not merely an economic but also a cultural threat, most dramatically expressed through the ubiquitous American popular music. ‘If we believe,’ he warned, ‘that we must make American jazz music like American half-Negroes, then our own achievements must be lamentable’. Hitler also worried about Hollywood, and in particular its film version of Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front. He did not object to its portrayal of the horrors of war, on the contrary. The ‘frontline soldier’, Hitler wrote in a remarkably candid autobiographical passage, ‘knows that behind the term “glorious victory” there lies a huge amount of dirt, struggle, pain, misery and deprivation’, as well as ‘weakness’, meaning ‘the overcoming of one’s own weaknesses’ through ‘self-mastery’. ‘We are no warmongers,’ he claimed, ‘because we know war.’ Hitler objected to the Schandfilm because it claimed to show the futility of war, and thus undermined German capacity for future struggle.87
If Hitler did not pay much attention to the parlous economic situation of the United States, he was certainly aware of the collapse of the German economy. Output was declining steadily, be it because of a shortage of capital or of purchasing power. It was the crisis of the Austrian and German financial sector precipitated by the collapse of the Viennese Kreditanstalt bank in May 1931, however, which finally drove the economy off the cliff. Bankruptcies multiplied, share prices plummeted, and unemployment soared.88 The Brüning government responded by doubling down on its policy of austerity, which in turn doused demand and aggravated the depression. By the end of 1931, industrial production was only one-third of what it had been in 1928.
Hitler blamed all this not on economics but on politics. In
February 1931, he saw the ‘coming famine in Germany’ as the product of Versailles and the Young Plan. Two months later, Hitler traced the rise in unemployment back to geopolitical causes. In early May, he attributed the ‘great German deprivation’ to the ‘atomization’ of German political life in 1918–19. Two months after that, when the Kreditanstalt crisis was in full swing, he once again reminded his listeners that the real immediate cause of all their ‘economic worries, immiseration, unemployment, collapse, poverty, suicide, emigration and so on’ was the Young Plan. More fundamentally, Hitler continued to argue that the crisis was all the result of the Versailles Treaty. He continued to attack the reparations scheme to the end of the year and indeed beyond not only in speeches, but in interviews with the foreign press.89 It goes without saying, of course, that Hitler saw the pernicious power of the Jews behind Germany’s economic misery and indeed behind the workings of the financial system as a whole.90
Crucial for Germany’s international position, Hitler argued, was her relative not absolute economic deprivation. He described the ‘poverty’ of the German people as being relative to an advanced ‘living standard’ rather than an ‘absolute’ one.91 Here again, he was picking up on the appeal of the American way of life, which had preoccupied him since the mid 1920s. This is why he so feared American competition.92 In particular, Hitler feared that Germany would not be able to maintain the living standard differential with non-whites. ‘The white race,’ he explained in early September 1931, ‘was able on the basis of its greater strength to dominate other peoples of inferior worth’,93 but the increasing poverty of the Germans put a question-mark over their whiteness. If the depression caused many individuals to worry about slipping down the socio-economic ladder, what Hitler feared was the resulting racial relegation of the entire German people.
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