Hitler

by Peter Longerich

  Yet, in the meantime, throughout Germany Hitler and the NSDAP had become a factor the established parties had to reckon with. He was now intervening more and more frequently in public discourse,25 and doing so with increasing self-confidence and in the manner of the towering ‘Führer’, who stood above the banalities of everyday politics. For example, in June 1930 he intervened in the electoral battle for the Saxon parliament with the surprising declaration ‘that he did not care to make an election speech’, and thus preferred ‘not to comment on the conditions in Saxony’.26 As the Nazis ‘encompassed all social classes in the nation he could not, unlike individual interest groups, work with propaganda slogans and promises’. National Socialism was rather built on a ‘basic principle’: ‘The fate of the individual is determined by the fate of the nation as a whole.’27 What he actually had to offer revolved mainly around the all too familiar slogans and topics: the ‘value of personality’, to which the Nazis, by contrast with democrats, accorded supreme significance; the ‘blood value’ of the German nation, the racial composition of which made it superior to every other nation; ‘struggle, without which nothing comes into being in the world and nothing is preserved’.28 Anti-Semitism was a further integral part of these speeches, even if Hitler basically avoided any detailed statements about his aims regarding the Jews living in Germany. If ever he did give more away, he did not go beyond what was already in the 1920 Party programme. ‘A National Socialist will never tolerate an alien – and that is what the Jew is – having a position in public life’, Hitler said in November 1929. ‘He will never ask, “Is he up to the job?” No, my world view tells me that I must keep the national body free from alien blood.’29

  In virtually every speech Hitler emphasized ‘lack of space’; this had become the norm from 1928 onwards: ‘A healthy nation always seeks to extend its space.’30 Thus, if the ‘balance of numbers and space’ is crucial, then National Socialism must clearly respond ‘that every nation has the right to take the territory it needs and can cultivate and manage.’31 Emigration, limiting the number of births or increasing exports did not provide the answer,32 as he explained in an article in the Illustrierter Beobachter of 15 February, for what was important was ‘the creation of a living space for our nation, not only to provide enough food for our present population but to allow it to grow. . . . To that end we need for the foreseeable future in Europe to look for allies whose interests are least in conflict with Germany’s and most with France’s.’ Italy was the most obvious choice.33 As usual, he was unwilling to be more specific, although he informed Robert Wagner, the Gauleiter of Baden, in November 1929 that he had ‘the acquisition of territory in Central Europe in mind’, for this would be ‘much more important than territory overseas for the political power of the German Reich’. In the final analysis this was a commitment to war rather than to the acquisition of colonies. The latter were not to be dismissed but it was necessary to be ‘vigilant in case striving for colonies diverted the German nation, possibly intentionally, from more important matters’.34 All in all, although Hitler varied the tone of his statements, he did not alter their content. Mixing vague pronouncements with allegedly universally accepted ones had proved a successful formula in elections and neither he nor his public was much concerned about the specifics.

  Upheavals in the Reich and the Party

  In March 1930 the Reich government under the Social Democrat Hermann Müller and formed from the Centre Party, SPD, DDP, and DVP collapsed, after finding it impossible to reach agreement on the issue of the future financing of unemployment insurance. The background to this disagreement was the dramatic rise during the winter in the numbers of unemployed. In January the total reached 3.2 million, the highest figure to date, and as spring approached no real recovery was on the horizon.35 The world economic crisis had a devastating effect on Germany. In this situation President Hindenburg appointed the Centre Party’s leader, Heinrich Brüning, as Müller’s successor. Hindenburg explicitly instructed Brüning not to try in the first instance to form a new coalition, but instead, given that he had no majority in parliament, to rely on the Reich President’s extraordinary powers under Article 48 of the Weimar constitution. Hindenburg’s aim was to use this arrangement to keep the SPD, the strongest party, perpetually out of government, to marginalize parliament, and to transform the Weimar democracy into an authoritarian regime.36

  When the SPD’s parliamentary group moved a vote of no confidence in this new government, made up exclusively of members of bourgeois parties, the DNVP in the Reichstag found itself in a key position: If it voted for the motion supported by SPD, KPD, and NSDAP, new elections would be necessary. In a long discussion with Hugenberg, the party chairman, on 31 March Hitler tried to convince him to do this, gambling on his own party’s success in new elections.37 In the end, however, the DNVP voted against the motion of no confidence.38 Hitler took the DNVP’s stance as an excuse to stop participating in the Reich Young Plan committee, as the DNVP had ‘expressed confidence in the parties guilty of accepting the Young Plan’.39 Although he told Hugenberg he was prepared to wait for fourteen days before making this step public (the DNVP leader having assured him he would topple the Brüning cabinet by then), to Hitler’s annoyance it became known prematurely, as the result of an indiscretion that appeared in the National Socialist, the Strasser brothers’ paper.40 A few days later, the DNVP once again rescued Brüning’s government: on 12 and 14 April the majority of the party, in spite of Hugenberg’s opposition, voted for the budget thereby preventing the dissolution of the Reichstag.41 Goebbels noted that Hitler, who had come to Berlin specially, was ‘seething with rage at the DNVP’. He had ‘let his illusions run away with him’.42

  The fact that the secret of Hitler’s departure from the Reich Young Plan committee was given away by a Strasser publication in the spring of 1930 was not down to chance. For just as the NSDAP was getting ready to profit from the emerging widespread economic and political crisis in the elections, which were now about to be brought forward, the conflict that had long been smouldering between Hitler and the Strasser brothers came to a head in public. Hitler benefited from the fact that in 1926 he had succeeded in playing off individual members of the so-called left wing of the Party against each other. This was particularly true of Goebbels and the Strassers. The Gauleiter of Berlin had for some time been annoyed that in the Kampf-Verlag Gregor and Otto Strasser had at their disposal an active publishing house in the Reich capital that was not under his control. He was also offended that Otto in particular, who along with a series of like-minded comrades was steering the Kampf-Verlag in a ‘national-revolutionary’ direction, presented himself openly as his rival within the Party.43 Otto Strasser above all criticized Hitler’s tendency to be drawn into parliamentary alliances or arrangements with right-wing conservatives, as had happened with the formation of the government in Thuringia in 1929.44

  From the beginning of 1929, Goebbels had been pursuing the idea of expanding his newspaper Der Angriff, which appeared twice a week, into a daily, not least in order to win the newspaper battle with the Strassers. In January 1930, however, he found that the Strassers were also planning their own daily. Although, when approached, Hitler took Goebbels’s side, from 1 March onwards, to the latter’s dismay, the Nationaler Sozialist began appearing as a daily in Berlin and Hitler lacked the resolve to take effective action against the Strasser brothers,45 trying to avoid committing himself in the conflict. At all costs he wanted to avoid an open rupture with the Strassers as it might lead to the ‘left wing’ breaking away. Thus he was prepared to turn a blind eye to the independent line they were taking in their publishing operation. Goebbels was forced to shelve his ambitious newspaper plans and was as a result very annoyed, but Hitler could live with that. By repeatedly holding out to Goebbels the prospect of his own daily newspaper and of taking over as head of Reich propaganda, he could keep the ambitious Gauleiter on side. By deliberately avoiding settling the quarrel between the Strassers a
nd Goebbels, he ensured that these former allies did not combine to form any internal opposition to him.

  However, in the spring of 1930 Hitler gave instructions not to support a strike called by the unions in the Saxon metal industry, whereas Otto Strasser and the Kampf-Verlag came out on the side of the strikers.46 It was only now that his authority was being plainly challenged that Hitler decided to nail his colours to the mast. At the NSDAP leaders’ conference on 26 and 27 April in Munich he openly criticized the two brothers, the Kampf-Verlag, the ‘drawing-room Bolsheviks’, and other undesirable groups in the Party. At the same time he finally announced that Goebbels had been appointed as the NSDAP’s head of Reich propaganda.47 Shortly after, when on a visit to Berlin at the beginning of May, Hitler banned the sale of the Nationaler Sozialist.48 Gregor Strasser felt in the end compelled to agree to sell his share of the paper to Amann and announce that its final edition would appear on 20 May.49 Yet in spite of this agreement, the Nationaler Sozialist continued to appear after this date. Although Hitler again made very negative remarks to the deeply disappointed Goebbels about Otto Strasser, no action followed.50 On 21 and 22 May Hitler had long discussions with Otto Strasser, in Berlin, and these gave the latter the final impetus he needed to leave the Party.

  After quitting the Party at the beginning of July he went on to publish a detailed account of these discussions, effectively a public denunciation of Hitler, who made no attempt to challenge his account.51 According to Strasser, Hitler had at first offered to buy the Kampf-Verlag from him and his brother. He, Otto, had refused and, according to his altogether credible version of events, had succeeded during the ensuing argument, which stretched over two days, in goading Hitler to come out with a clear statement opposing socialist policies: demands for socialist policies for large-scale industries or for their nationalization, or even for workers to be given a larger share in the profits or management of businesses were, Hitler had said, frankly nonsensical.

  Although this clarification of their differences made his split with Otto Strasser inevitable, Hitler at first wanted to wait for the Saxon parliamentary elections on 22 June.52 Elections had become necessary because the NSDAP had terminated its toleration of the state government after the coalition of bourgeois parties had voted for the Young Plan in the federal council (Reichsrat). On 22 June 1930 the NSDAP gained 14.4 per cent of the votes, a clear success. The NSDAP at first tolerated the new bourgeois ‘ministry of experts’, but in the end brought it down after a few weeks in conjunction with the parties of the left.53

  Meanwhile, to Goebbels’s annoyance,54 Hitler’s conflict with the ‘left wing’ of the Party had led only to his excluding a few insignificant rebels from the Berlin Gau.55 Gregor Strasser decided against his brother and for Hitler and, at the end of June, finally stepped down as head of the Kampf publishing house and editor of the Nationaler Sozialist.56 On 1 July the paper printed a rallying call with the headline ‘Socialists quit the N.S.D.A.P.’ in which Otto Strasser and those loyal to him broke with the Party,57 whereupon Hitler declared that the Kampf-Verlag publications were to be treated from then on as ‘hostile’.58 Without the support of his brother, however, Otto Strasser’s efforts to develop a national socialist alternative under the banner of ‘Revolutionary Socialists’ were destined to pose little threat to Hitler.

  Hitler now came up with the idea of none other than Gregor Strasser, who in the NSDAP had always opposed compromise with the bourgeois parties, taking up the post of Minister of the Interior in the Saxon government. Presumably Hitler intended this tactical move to bind the head of the Reich Party organization more closely to the Party, while compromising him in the eyes of his supporters. This venture collapsed, however, when the bourgeois parties opposed it, and in future Saxony was no longer to provide the venue for further internal conflicts over Hitler’s policy of trying to work with them. For, in the end, the former Saxon government remained in office, tolerated by the Social Democrats, an arrangement that held until 1933.59

  The 1930 Reichstag elections

  On 18 July the Reich President dissolved the Reichstag. Chancellor Brüning had intended to rescue his Reich budget proposal, after parliament had rejected it, with recourse to an emergency decree issued by President Hindenburg, but parliament had also defeated this, leaving Hindenburg no option under the Constitution but to dissolve the Reichstag.60 In view of the deepening economic crisis and the considerable electoral successes of the NSDAP in recent months, fresh elections were risky. The Reich President and Chancellor, who took the decision, and the leaders of the parties that had provoked it through their inability to compromise with Brüning accepted the consequences with their eyes open, namely to maintain a parliament that was incapable of producing a majority and thus to turn the use of Article 48 into a permanent state of affairs. The decision to hold fresh elections in such circumstances thus set a course in which Weimar democracy moved towards becoming an authoritarian regime – precisely the goal that the President and his Chancellor, as well as right-wing conservative interest groups influencing them, were aiming for.

  On 19 July Hitler held a meeting to discuss the line to be taken in the election campaign and the selection of candidates.61 On this occasion he took those present, among them Epp, Frick, Goebbels, Göring, Hierl, Rosenberg, and Strasser, to the future Party headquarters, the Palais Barlow on Königsplatz, which Hitler had ordered the Party to purchase in May. Goebbels considered the building, which was still being renovated, ‘pompous and spacious’,62 a mixed response that he shared with others. Faced with such criticism Hitler felt obliged in February 1931, before its grand opening, to print a detailed justification of its purchase in the Völkischer Beobachter: ‘The National Socialist movement is a power political phenomenon and cannot be compared with our ridiculous main-stream parties, with their focus on the economy and parliament’, he wrote. ‘The object of its struggle and exertions is so immeasurably great that its overwhelming significance must be evident to everyone, even in its external appearance.’63 Given his limited emotional range, Hitler was incapable of experiencing personal satisfaction and contentment through success achieved. If he wished to give expression to his political achievements he could do so only through triumphal gestures and overpowering symbols.

  At the end of July, the campaign strategy and candidates were finalized at a Gauleiters’ conference. In an address Hitler told them that ‘from the start they had to go on the fiercest and most ruthless offensive against the combined forces of the Young parties’. Goebbels was officially put in charge of managing the election campaign,64 although this undertaking had its limitations, as the Party’s propaganda apparatus was anything but unified, but instead highly dependent on regional and local initiatives.65 What Goebbels could manage to arrange was that the entire campaign would be fought, as Hitler wished, under the banner ‘Fight the Young parties’. The Party’s propaganda directed against the ruling parties of the SPD, Centre, DVP, and DDP, which had voted for the new schedule for reparations in March, harked back to the anti-Young Plan campaign of the previous year, although this had been controversial within the Party. Hitler may also have regarded this as a retrospective justification for his strategy.

  Posters, marches, and mass events were set in motion.66 For the last four weeks alone before the election on 14 September Reich propaganda headquarters was planning 34,000 rallies.67 Naturally, the speeches the Party leader was scheduled to make were regarded as especially important. He made twenty appearances between 3 August and 13 September in towns and cities all over Germany, where before audiences of thousands and sometimes tens of thousands68 he tore into the ‘Young parties’ for having ‘accepted the revolution . . . accepted subjugation, the lot of them’. How could anyone give them credence, if monarchist parties ‘acknowledge the Republic’, bourgeois parties make pacts with ‘Marxists’, Christian parties ‘give a leg up to the Jews’, socialist parties ‘march hand in hand with international finance and deliver a whole nation into its power
’? ‘At moments of crisis’, Hitler impressed on his audiences, nations should look ‘always to dictatorship and never to democracy’, for ‘the highest concentration [of power and energy; P. L.] is always to be found in the superior individual’.69 The democratic parties, on the other hand, had ‘sinned for years. For years they have focused their policies on the most petty interests and for years they have appealed only to particular groups, and now they no longer have a German nation but tenants, landlords, clerks, workers, employers, civil servants, and so on. The nation is fragmented and today we have reached a low point.’70 There then followed, in a manner typical of these speeches, the rhetorical turning point, the vision of national unity under the leadership of National Socialism: ‘A German nation must again emerge from the confusion of interest groups.’71 That was also, he proclaimed on 12 September in Breslau, the foundation for true socialism, and there is no doubt that this remark was a sideswipe at his critics inside the Party. ‘The sham of party politics cannot give rise to a German nation. Nationalism is the only option. If this nationalism means the dedication of each individual to the whole then it has in fact become the most noble form of socialism.’72 Although his other standard topics, such as diatribes against the Jews and on the Germans’ lack of space, came up in these speeches, they took second place to the election slogan. In fact, Hitler, who was presenting himself above all as an aggressive demagogue and polemicist against the ‘system’, touched on the demand for ‘living space’, which was after all part of his core ideology, only three times during the entire election campaign.73

  In the press there was much speculation that big business had made this expensive campaign possible, yet this assumption was incorrect. In fact it is likely that for the most part the Party financed the organization and propaganda itself.74 For the NSDAP took up a strongly ‘anti-capitalist’ stance in the election, in spite of the fact that the ‘Party’s ‘left wing’ had recently split off, and this tended rather to arouse mistrust within business.75 Thus the journal of the employers’ association carried a critical appraisal of the Nazi economic programme, and the Reich Federation of Industry called on its members to support only parties that scrupulously abided by the constitution and rejected all ‘collectivist experiments’, comments that referred to the NSDAP.76