Hitler
Page 20
PaRt II
Creating a Public Image
6
A Fresh Start
On 20 December 1924 Hitler was released from custody; after the Supreme State Court of Bavaria had rejected an objection from the Attorney General, he was let off the remainder of his sentence.
In the first few weeks after his release Hitler kept a distinctly low profile as far as his political future and the issue of the re-founding and leadership of the NSDAP were concerned; he was reluctant to be drawn into the disputes among the various factions and instead wanted to preserve his special role as ‘leader’ of the ‘movement’ as a whole.1 He was quick to get to work behind the scenes, however. With the help of Pöhner he was given an appointment with the Bavarian prime minister, Heinrich Held (BVP), on the day after his release; on the following day they met again. During these talks Hitler promised not to attempt any further putsch and distanced himself from Ludendorff. This clearly made a favourable impression, for Held, as a Catholic politician, objected to Ludendorff’s repeated anti-clerical attacks. Hitler also gained Held’s consent for his fellow prisoners to be released.2 On 23 December Hitler was a guest for the first time at the home of the publisher Hugo Bruckmann, whose wife Elsa, a fervent supporter of Hitler’s, had visited him in prison. By inviting him to her salon on numerous occasions, she was to provide him with the opportunity of meeting members of Munich high society. Hitler used these invitations to attract attention by delivering endless monologues – a crass violation of the unwritten rules of the salon!3
The new year brought renewed infighting in the völkisch camp. On 17 January, at a conference in Berlin, three leading representatives of the NSFB, the Reichstag deputies Reinhold Wulle, Wilhelm Hennig, and Albrecht von Graefe, strongly objected to Hitler as the new leader. According to Wulle, Hitler was in danger of giving in to Ultramontanism; his meeting with Held was the first indication that he was moving in that direction. His leadership style, it was stressed, relied too much on emotional appeal and he lacked well thought out policies; Hitler was being influenced by ‘immature young blabbermouths’.4 Immediately after the conference Graefe, along with Wulle, Ernst Graf zu Reventlow, and Theodor Fritsch (who had already all played a leading role in the NS Freedom Party) founded a German-Völkisch Freedom Movement (DVFB) and began to put pressure on the NSFB members to decide between this new party and the Munich National Socialists.5 In the light of Held’s agreement to lift the ban on the NSDAP, Hitler told his supporters in the north that he had no intention of ‘doing deals’ with the Freedom Party, but would use Bavaria as a base from which to rebuild the Nazi Party in the Reich as a whole.6 On 12 February Ludendorff smoothed the way for this project by dissolving the leadership of the NSFB, in other words the troika he had formed with Graefe and Strasser. He did, however, wish to continue as ‘patron’ of the various völkisch organizations.7
In the middle of February the bans affecting the NSDAP and the Völkischer Beobachter, which had already been lifted in the other German states, were lifted in Bavaria too.8 The GVG responded by calling on all ‘Hitler’s loyal supporters’ to join it.9 At a gathering in Hamm on 22 February numerous functionaries from western and northern Germany, which during Hitler’s detention had developed into a main focus of Nazi activities, affirmed to Hitler their ‘steadfast loyalty and allegiance’.10 On 26 February, Hitler used the first issue of the Völkischer Beobachter since the ban was lifted to address the Party comrades.11 He claimed the leadership of the Party for himself, emphasizing that he opposed any attempt ‘to drag religious controversies into the Party’, thereby distinguishing it from other völkisch organizations. In the same issue Hitler proclaimed that Party comrades could ‘now feel themselves brothers again in a great fighting community’. His call on readers to ‘honour’ Ludendorff, the ‘immortal leader of the heroic German armies’12 was a blatant political obituary; Hitler was in fact determined to exclude Ludendorff from the ‘movement’.13
A suitable opportunity arose very soon after. Friedrich Ebert’s death on 28 February 1925 triggered an unexpected election for the office of Reich President. Hitler pushed Ludendorff as National Socialist candidate for the office, even though – or precisely because – he reckoned Ludendorff had no chance of winning.14 His appeal for support for Ludendorff in the 19 March issue of the Völkischer Beobachter appeared only five days after he had declared in an article in the same paper that the result of the election was completely irrelevant to the nation’s fate.15 Ludendorff’s prospects faded altogether when the DVFP decided to support Karl Jarres, the right-wing parties’ candidate. In the first round of voting on 29 March Ludendorff won only 1.1 per cent of the votes, significantly less than extreme Right candidates in the December 1924 election. In the second round the parties of the Right exchanged Jarres for a new candidate, sponsoring Field-Marshal Paul von Hindenburg. Hitler now used the Völkischer Beobachter to call for him to be elected, while the abandoned Ludendorff pulled out of the race.16 In the second round on 26 April Hindenburg was victorious over Wilhelm Marx, the candidate of the parties supporting the Weimar constitution. For Ludendorff this meant a considerable loss of prestige and he never recovered politically. In addition, primarily through the influence of his second wife, Mathilde von Kemnitz, he adopted some decidedly strange, cultish ideas and thus finally lost any kind of role as a figurehead of the Right, standing above the grubby world of everyday politics, and so ceased to pose a threat to Hitler’s absolute claim to lead. Ludendorff’s lacklustre candidacy marked the beginning of the end of the German-Völkisch Freedom Movement.
In the Völkischer Beobachter of 26 February Hitler had also published ‘Basic Guidelines for the Reestablishment of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party’. He stated clearly that the new party would adopt ‘in its principles and programme the guidelines of the old Nat. Soc. G. W. P. that was dissolved on 9 November 1923’, while the ‘Reestablishment of the SA . . .’ would take place ‘on the same lines that applied up to February 1923’. Armed groups or organizations were, he said, to be excluded from the SA, the purpose of which was ‘as before February 1923 to make our young people physically tough, to train them in discipline and devotion to the great common ideal, and in service to the movement by keeping order and spreading the word’. He was thus rejecting plans to use the SA as a paramilitary organization, in other words the organizational model that the army had introduced into the Party in the spring of 1923: Hitler was no longer prepared to accept such a restriction on the scope of his power as leader.17 These different perspectives led quickly to a rupture with Röhm, who wished to incorporate the SA in the Frontbann, which he had been building up in the meantime, with the aim of creating a ‘National Socialist paramilitary movement’. This movement would exist independently of the NSDAP and have only a loose association with the ‘Adolf Hitler idea’. Since Hitler insisted on the SA being integrated into the NSDAP, Röhm rejected the leadership of the SA when it was offered to him and withdrew from political life.18
In the new NSDAP Esser took over propaganda; Philipp Bouhler, who before the ban had been the second Party secretary and after that secretary of the GVG, now had the same function in the NSDAP; Amann remained as director of the Party’s publishing company, Eher, and Franz Xaver Schwarz, who had been treasurer of the GVG, became the Party’s Reich Treasurer.
On 27 February 1925 Hitler made a speech at the first big Party occasion since the lifting of the ban; it was, of course, held at the Bürgerbräukeller, where Hitler had last appeared on 8 November 1923. Ludendorff, Strasser, and Röhm were not present and even Rosenberg chose to stay away, as the whole business risked taking on too much of a ‘theatrical quality’ for his liking.19 Before an audience of 3,000 Hitler began with a detailed exposition of the reasons that had originally led to the founding of the DAP. After some lengthy anti-Semitic tirades he stated that the aim of the NSDAP remained clear: ‘To fight against the satanic power that plunged Germany into this misery; to fight against Marxism an
d the intellectual carriers of this world-wide plague and epidemic, the Jews; to fight, but not “tentatively” in a bourgeois fashion so that it does not hurt too much.’ Finally, he came to the central point of the speech. He did not intend, he said, to take up a position in favour of one side or the other in the quarrels within the Party: ‘Gentlemen, from now onwards let me be responsible for representing the interests of the movement!’ And addressing his critics he added, not without some malice: ‘You had ten months in which to “look after” the interests of the movement.’ Now he was leader of the movement and ‘nobody is going to tell me how to do it’. He would soon call together a provisional membership meeting and there hold elections for the leadership of the Party. Until then all criticism, particularly of him personally, should be put aside. After a year he intended, he said, to appear before the Party comrades and give an account of himself. There followed the great reconciliation scene, in which, amid thunderous applause from the audience, Esser, Streicher, and Artur Dinter from the GVG, as well as Buttmann, Feder, and Frick from the Völkisch Block, all shook hands on the podium and swore an oath of loyalty to Hitler.
After the re-founding of the NSDAP the GVG was dissolved and its members joined the newly formed NSDAP local branches. Most members of the Völkisch Block, which was also dissolved, followed suit, even though its leaders had not advised them to, but had merely said they were free to do so.20 The same thing happened with the Munich branch of the NSFB, though elsewhere it remained in existence as an independent party and continued to compete with the NSDAP outside Bavaria in particular. Its gradual decline continued until 1932.21
Yet even the NSDAP soon suffered a setback. On 9 March 1925, after making only a few speeches in Nuremberg and Munich,22 Hitler was banned by the Munich police headquarters from making any more public appearances. The reason given was that in his speech at the re-founding of the Party on 27 February 1925 Hitler had attempted ‘in an unmistakable manner to incite the masses to acts of violence or to prepare them to commit such acts’.23 Other states joined in the ban, such as Baden in April and Prussia in September.24 The NSDAP was thus deprived of its most important propaganda tool; Hitler was obliged in future to confine himself to closed members’ meetings.
The situation was made more complicated by the fact that in May 1925 Anton Drexler, a co-founder and former honorary chairman of the NSDAP, founded the National-Sozialer Volksbund [National-Social People’s League] in Munich along with a number of city councillors and state assembly deputies from the Völkisch Block. This grouping kept going until 1927. Although its members regarded themselves as supporters of Hitler, his close circle of Party associates – Hermann Esser was considered the most objectionable – put them off joining the NSDAP and they quarrelled irreconcilably with it.25
Creation of the Führer Party
This time Hitler was determined to establish the NSDAP across the whole Reich. Apart from anything else, he was compelled to take this step by the fact that numerous local Nazi branches existed outside Bavaria and his völkisch competitors were extremely active. However, the centrality of Munich as the Party’s base had, in his view, to be preserved, for his name was closely linked with the city.
Gregor Strasser was the man Hitler entrusted with the task of establishing the NSDAP in the north of Germany. In February Strasser organized a regional conference of Nazi functionaries in Hamm and in March a similar one in Harburg.26 He then appointed a number of men who had emerged as leaders in their regions as Gauleiters: Heinrich Haake for Cologne, Hinrich Lohse for Schleswig-Holstein, Franz Pfeffer von Salomon for Westphalia, Bernhard Rust for Hanover, Josef Klant for Hamburg, and Axel Ripke for Rhineland North. Hitler formally confirmed these appointments in March.27 As a rule Gauleiters also sought the approval of their regional organizations.28 In this way the Party headquarters accepted the power relations in the regions29 and tolerated changes. When, for example, in the middle of 1925 Haake, the Gauleiter of Cologne, invited Robert Ley to succeed him, Hitler recognized Ley as the new Gauleiter30 and in August 1925, when Axel Ripke was replaced at a meeting of Gauleiters by Karl Kaufmann, Party headquarters knew nothing about it until five months later, when Kaufmann asked for confirmation in Munich.31
The Party was thus not structured in a rigidly hierarchical and centralized manner, but rather activists recruited members at a regional level and organized them, while accepting the authority of the Munich HQ, which in turn recognized them as ‘Gauleiters’. Only in Bavaria (which up until 1926 was not split into Gaus) were the local branches directly subordinated to the Munich HQ. Hitler kept out of staffing disputes as far as possible. In October 1925 Amann told a party comrade from Hanover: ‘Herr Hitler’s view today is clearer than it has ever been that the most effective fighter in the National Socialist movement is the man who can assert himself as leader on the basis of his own efforts. If you yourself say that you have the confidence of virtually all the members in Hanover, why do you not simply take over the leadership of the local branch?’32 The Party leadership, which had at first been housed in the offices of the Völkischer Beobachter and in June 1925 moved to Schellingstrasse 50,33 the business premises of Hitler’s personal photographer Heinrich Hoffmann, did, however, gradually centralize the issuing of membership documents.34
In the summer Hitler set off on quite a long speaking tour that took him to Saxony, Württemberg, and several places in Bavaria.35 In his speeches he stressed repeatedly that the Party’s headquarters must remain in Munich,36 for ‘leaving Munich would spell the end of the Party’. For him and for the movement, he said, the city was ‘hallowed ground’.37 By founding the National Socialist German Workers’ Association on 21 August 1925 the NSDAP registered officially as an association, which was the precondition for its being a legal entity. In the clause inserted for this very purpose it was stated that the ‘association’s programme’ was the ‘basic programme of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party as issued on 24 February 1920 in Munich; it was ‘immutable’ and would ‘be terminated only through its fulfilment’. This clause also established that for the time being the national leadership would be linked to that of the Munich branch.38 This absolute insistence on Munich was Hitler’s response to the increasing influence of the Party organization in north-west Germany and its growing criticism of the Party’s leadership style. The Munich HQ’s structures were hard to discern from the outside, which suited Hitler very well when asserting his claim to absolute power. The dictatorial power he wished to continue to wield was bound up with the Munich location, with the structures of the Party HQ that he dominated, and with the myth of the November putsch, an important source for his claim to absolute power.
The DAP/NSDAP up to 1923 was very much the product of the Bavarian ‘counter-revolution’ and the desire to overturn the existing democratic order was central to its approach. In view of its basic orientation towards action and its militant character the Führer principle appeared as the appropriate organizational model. Now that the Republic had stabilized, the prospects of mounting a coup were zero, and the Party had to face the question of whether it would not be better to refocus its efforts on participating in regular elections; it had to produce concrete economic and social policies. The 1920 ‘programme’ had been largely non-committal about these matters. And if the NSDAP aimed to be successful in the industrial centres and densely populated regions of north-west Germany, it had in particular to clarify what the word ‘socialist’ in the Party’s name actually meant. The main concern of the group of branches that began to form in the north and west was to make the programme more concrete by tackling these issues.
On 20 August Gregor Strasser travelled to Elberfeld, where the Gau leadership of Rhineland North was located, and came to an agreement in principle with Kaufmann and Joseph Goebbels, who had joined the Party the previous year, to form a ‘western bloc’ in the Party, an idea that had already been aired at the February conference in Hamm.39 This would be a means of providing a counterweight to what Goeb
bels noted as the ‘total balls-up’ at HQ and the ‘big wig old fossils’ in Munich; Hitler, they said, was surrounded by the wrong people and ‘Hermann Esser will be the death of him’.40 This perception was reinforced in the weeks that followed. Esser, it was said, had absolute power in the Party administration and was the real cause of the slow-down in the growth of the NSDAP, while Hitler, who was busy writing the second volume of Mein Kampf, was letting things slide. To halt this development, on 10 September 1925 the Gauleiters from the north-west, spurred on by Strasser, set up a working group in Hagen to better coordinate their efforts. Strasser (who for personal reasons could not in the end attend the Hagen meeting) took over as chair with Goebbels as secretary. They also agreed to issue a fortnightly newsletter with the title Nationalsozialistische Briefe [National Socialist Letters], which Goebbels was responsible for editing.41 Although motivated to lay greater emphasis on the ‘socialist’ character of the NSDAP, the majority of the gathering opposed attempting anything that might be viewed as a rebellion against Munich, let alone as opposition to Hitler.42 They simply opposed participation in elections, demanding that the Party leadership issue a clear statement on the matter.43 At the end of September Strasser had a meeting with Goebbels in Elberfeld,44 to agree on ‘statutes’ for the working group, through which they hoped to achieve uniformity in the organization and promote the exchange of information.45
At the end of October Hitler was planning to travel to the Ruhr area with the aim of establishing contact with representatives of the working group. Then he cancelled at short notice, on the grounds that he would be on Prussian soil, where since the end of September he had been banned from speaking in public, and so feared he might be arrested. It is possible that he was trying to avoid pinning himself down on content. Hitler preferred to engage with the North German oppositional group on his own territory.46