The election campaign had just begun when the Berlin SA decided to flex its muscles. The conflict arose from the demand made by the SA leadership to be included on the NSDAP’s electoral list. Pfeffer, the SA leader, had already been rebuffed over this matter on 1 August, but this did not prevent Walther Stennes, leader of the SA in Eastern Germany, from demanding three seats from Goebbels, the Gauleiter of Berlin, for his area of command a few days later. Failing that, Stennes had, according to Goebbels, threatened a ‘palace revolution’. Hitler, however, was not prepared to agree and described Stennes’s move, as Goebbels learnt from Pfeffer, as ‘mutiny’ and ‘conspiracy’.77
At the end of the month the SA launched an open revolt. Stennes issued an ultimatum demanding seats, finance, and more independence for the SA78 and decided to speak in person to the Party boss in Munich. Hitler, however, refused to see him. In response, the SA leaders under Stennes resigned their posts and decided that the SA would withdraw support for the Party until their demand for at least two seats was met. Stennes and his SA men took part in a rally at the sports stadium on 29 August, at which Goebbels dismissed reports about disunity in the NSDAP as mere rumour, and Stennes also made a declaration of loyalty in Der Angriff.79 The following day, however, an SA squad stormed the Party offices and engaged in a brawl with the SS guards posted there; the latter called the police, who brought the situation under control.
Alerted by Goebbels, Hitler arrived in Berlin on 31 August. In the evening Hitler and Goebbels toured the SA pubs where, according to Goebbels, Hitler was greeted everywhere ‘with enthusiasm’. And yet, they could clearly sense a ‘subdued atmosphere’ everywhere they went, and the animated exchange of views with SA leaders in Goebbels’s apartment failed to resolve matters. Stennes, who joined the group during the discussion, talked for hours with Hitler without achieving any concrete results.80 On 1 September, the following day, however, Hitler finally arrived at a decision. He demoted Pfeffer, took over himself as head of the SA, and at the same time granted increased financial support to the SA to be paid for by the Party and its members.81 The rebellious SA leaders accepted this proposal and the same evening a demonstrative reconciliation took place at the premises of the Veterans’ Association. The Berlin police report recorded that Hitler made a long speech calling for loyalty from the SA, in the process ‘raising his already over-strained voice until he was shouting almost hysterically’. He ‘waved aside’ the ensuing shouts of ‘Heil’, ‘because, his hands folded and as though immersed in prayer, Hitler was still hearing the echo of his own words’. Stennes spoke after Goebbels, and according to the same report was applauded as the victor in the dispute he had initiated.82 A final confrontation with Stennes had, however, simply been postponed.
Breakthrough
In the 14 September elections the NSDAP greatly increased its share of the vote from 2.6 per cent to 18.3 per cent. Its total number of seats therefore rose from 12 to 107, making it after the SPD the second biggest party in the Reichstag. In spite of the 14.4 per cent the Party had already gained in Saxony’s elections in June, the scale of its success surprised supporters as much as opponents. The Party had succeeded in triggering the greatest migration of voters in the history of parliamentary government in Germany. It was now at Reich level a political force that could not be ignored.
In the early 1990s a team working with the psephologist Jürgen W. Falter produced the hitherto most complete analysis of this movement of voters. According to their calculations 24 per cent of NSDAP voters were voting for the first time, 22 per cent were former DNVP voters, 18 per cent came from the liberal camp, and at least 14 per cent from the Social Democrats. To put it another way, by comparison with 1928 the DNVP lost 31 per cent of its voters to the NSDAP, among the non-voters it was 14 per cent, among liberal voters it was 26 per cent, and among SPD voters it was 10 per cent. Analysis of these changes of allegiance indicates that the most important movements of voters were from the conservative and liberal parties to the NSDAP.83 These parties suffered correspondingly large losses. The right-wing conservative DNVP’s share of the vote dropped from 14.2 per cent to 7 per cent, the right-wing liberal DVP’s from 8.7 per cent to 4.7 per cent. Only the left liberal DDP, renamed from that summer the German State Party (DStP), escaped with relatively little damage, securing 3.8 per cent as against 4.7 per cent in 1928. The SPD achieved only 24.5 per cent as against 29.8 per cent, while on the other hand the KPD managed to increase its share from 10.3 per cent to 13.1 per cent and the Catholic parties, namely the Centre and the Bavarian BVP, maintained their support with 14.8 per cent (as against 15.2 per cent in 1928). The remaining parties (splinter groups from the DNVP and a miscellany of groupings representing regional, agricultural, and small business interests) together gained an almost unchanged share at 13.8 per cent. At the next elections these splinter parties would prove to be one of the essential reservoirs of voters for the NSDAP.
The psephologists in Falter’s team also brought to light a series of trends that were to become typical of the NSDAP’s electoral successes in the years to come. Men voted NSDAP significantly more than women, and even more striking were confessional differences. The probability that a Protestant would vote NSDAP was twice as high in 1930 as for a Catholic. Catholic voters were remarkably resistant to the temptations of National Socialism.84 Admittedly, at most only half of German Catholics (in 1930 making up about a third of the total population) still had strong ties to the Catholic Church and thus an overwhelmingly negative attitude to the Party. Those Catholics who had no strong Church ties were much more open to the Nazi movement.85 A quarter of Nazi voters came from the working class and 40 per cent from the middle class (the population as a whole was made up roughly of the same proportions). In particular, members of the ‘old middle classes’ – small independent retailers, artisans, and farmers – were more likely to support the NSDAP, whereas white collar workers and civil servants developed no greater liking for the NSDAP than was the average for the population as a whole.86 As far as the working class was concerned, the Party most likely appealed above all to craft apprentices, agricultural workers, workers in small businesses and in the service sector, and less to industrial workers, who continued to form the bedrock of the parties of the Left. Leaving aside these refinements, this analysis demonstrates that the NSDAP was the only party in Germany that was attractive to people from all social classes, and to both Protestants and Catholics. To that extent it really was a people’s party.
As far as the Party’s core areas in the regions were concerned, in 1930 it was above all the constituencies in the more rural and predominantly Protestant provinces, as well as the smaller, independent states in northern Germany that produced a disproportionately large vote (over 20 per cent) for the NSDAP: East Prussia, Pomerania, Hanover, Schleswig-Holstein (where the Party’s 27 per cent was its best result), Brunswick, and Oldenburg. The Party was equally successful in Protestant Lower Silesia (although, significantly, not in Catholic Upper Silesia, where it achieved only 9.5 per cent) and in other predominantly Protestant regions such as the Bavarian Palatinate, the Prussian province of Hesse-Nassau, the Prussian district of Merseburg, and the Saxon constituency of Chemnitz-Zwickau. The Party’s performance was also above average in Franconia, although not in Catholic Lower Franconia.
The question of what political motives influenced these voters is harder to answer. First of all, the link to the economic crisis that began in 1929/30 is undeniable. Here the mass of voters turning to the NSDAP must be seen less as the direct consequence of economic misery than as a reaction to the absence of any active measures to tackle the crisis on the part of the government and to the praxis of the presidential system: the government was no longer firmly anchored in parliament and it marched into the crisis without attempting to include broad sections of the electorate in its policies. The inevitable results were a loss of confidence in the political system and a widespread collapse of social cohesion. A crucial factor in this is that the massive support
for the NSDAP was mainly drawn from sections of the population that, as a result of the erosion of the liberal and conservative milieus in the 1920s, had already lost their connection with particular parties and their social world and were in search of a new political direction. The hostility of the conservative DNVP towards democracy and the scepticism with which it was regarded by the nationalist liberal DVP made it easier for their supporters to make the transition from a moderate right-wing stance to an extreme right-wing one. Fundamental beliefs such as nationalism, militarism, hatred of socialism, and anti-Semitism, which were shared by all parties of the Right, acted in this process of radicalization as a bridge to the extreme Right camp. A further factor was that, by contrast with other extreme Right groups, the NSDAP was able to make a broad offer to the masses flocking to it. That was true ideologically as well as organizationally. The NSDAP was not only a political party but in the shape of the SA and SS it had its own paramilitary organizations, while its numerous specialized affiliated groups offered alternatives to the organizations and associations representing particular interests that were losing significance in this crisis period. As the 1930s began, the Party was creating a dense network of organizations and a high level of local activity, such that it was taking over the functions of the traditional German clubs and associations and was able to build up structures that absorbed and retained many ‘refugee’ voters from the former liberal and conservative milieus. If one attempted to explain the mass movement of voters to the NSDAP in terms of the social history of politics, one might speak of a change of milieu affecting above all the middle classes.
In this extreme right-wing Nazi milieu that developed rapidly and extensively in the early 1930s the idea of subordination to a commanding leader (‘Führer’) figure was widespread. Indeed, it was probably essential to the cohesiveness of the whole, not only because so many adherents looked obsessively for authority figures, hoping for ‘redemption’ through a saviour, but above all because the ‘Führer’ with his ‘vision’ had to hold things together in spite of irresolvable contradictions. Hitler was now confronted with the complicated task of living up to the high expectations of his supporters, while avoiding being completely imprisoned by this role. What he needed to achieve was rather the maximum scope for political action.
The first event immediately after the great electoral successes, however, was a high-profile trial heard before the Supreme Court in Leipzig that promised to shed light on the future stance of the NSDAP. Three army officers stationed at Ulm had attempted to form a Nazi cell within the army and were now accused of high treason. To clarify the NSDAP’s attitude towards the Republic and its constitution, the court had summoned leading Nazis as witnesses.
Hitler, who after all had already been convicted of treason himself, had been brought in as a witness by the defence attorney, the Nazi Hans Frank, to convince the court that the NSDAP aimed to acquire power only by ‘legal’ means. When he was called, Hitler at first spoke at length, as he usually did, on the subject of the founding and early development of the Party, as though he was making one of his popular speeches. In particular, he tried to persuade the court that in the attempted putsch of November 1923 he had been in a dilemma and did his best to portray himself with hindsight as the victim of a complex power struggle. He explained that he had not been responsible for the move to build up the SA into a fighting force, but rather it had been ‘initiated by official agencies’. In the final analysis, he said, the conflict in the autumn of 1923 was about ‘whether it [would be] a struggle under the Bavarian flag against the Reich government or under the banner of Greater Germany’. In this dilemma he had been ‘forced into deciding to fight for Greater Germany’. In 1925, however, he had realized ‘that the transitional period of 1923 had come to a complete end and that the movement had to be brought back to its original fundamental purposes’. He had done everything possible, he claimed, to demilitarize the SA. In the course of his testimony Hitler grew increasingly fired up, so that in the end the chair of the judges, Alexander Baumgarten, pointed out that he was ‘beginning to give a propaganda speech’ and should calm down. When asked to comment on ‘revolutionary’ tendencies in the present NSDAP, Hitler distanced himself from Otto Strasser and his associates and explained that Strasser had recently left the Party.
The chairman confronted Hitler with various quotations from the Nationalsozialistische Briefe that expressed support for a Nazi revolution. Below them was a statement attributed to Hitler: ‘Adolf Hitler leaves us in no doubt as to the ferocity of the battle when he says: “In this struggle heads will roll in the sand, whether ours or others’. So let’s make sure it’s the others’.” ’ Hitler insisted that the author had surely ‘been referring to the great intellectual revolution we find ourselves in today. But I can assure you that if our movement is victorious in its lawful struggle, there will be a German State Court, November 1918 will be avenged, and heads will roll.’ The National Socialist movement, Hitler continued, ‘will seek to achieve its aim in this state by constitutional means. The constitution prescribes only the methods but not the goal. We shall seek to take the constitutional path by gaining decisive majorities in legislative bodies, in order, as soon as we succeed in this, to pour the state into the mould shaped by our ideas.’87
Soundings
The trial attracted attention because, after his electoral success, Hitler found himself at a stroke in a key political position. He now began to test the waters to see whether and under what conditions it might be possible to participate in the government. The best chance would be to form part of a Reich government led by the Centre Party. For Hitler two things were at stake: the Centre Party not only provided the Reich Chancellor, now backed by the President, but also shared in the government of Prussia, by far the largest state, under the Social Democrat prime minister, Otto Braun. Hitler, therefore, aimed to achieve a comprehensive deal with the Centre, involving both the Reich and the Prussian governments. On a visit to Berlin in September he spelt out his demands to Goebbels: Foreign Office, Reich Interior Ministry, and Reich Defence Ministry for Rosenberg, Frick, and von Epp and, in addition, the Centre had to abandon the coalition government in Prussia. If this were to happen, Goebbels noted, he would ‘provisionally gain power in Prussia’, which suggests that, in the event of cooperation between the NSDAP and the Centre Party, Hitler may have raised the prospect of his becoming Minister of the Interior (or even Prime Minister?) of Prussia.88
On 29 September Hitler held a two-hour meeting with the former Chancellor and Hamburg shipping magnate Wilhelm Cuno in the Hotel Esplanade in Berlin. Among those present were Göring, retired Rear Admiral Magnus von Levetzow, who played an important role in the right-wing conservative scene as the former Kaiser’s go-between in the Reich and who had arranged the meeting, and retired General Rüdiger von der Goltz, the leader of the United Fatherland Associations. This group of ultra-conservative politicians wanted to find out if the NSDAP would support Cuno’s candidacy for the office of Reich President in the elections due in 1932. Hitler delivered a lengthy monologue setting out his foreign policy goals, in particular: ‘An end to Stresemann’s policy of rapprochement with France’, and instead rapprochement with Italy and ‘via Italy with England’. He wished also to adopt a hostile stance ‘to France’s satrap Poland with the aim of regaining the Corridor and Upper Silesia’. As the status quo of 1914 could not be restored at the moment, he said, the immediate political aim should be the ‘restoration of the eastern border’. Young Plan payments should cease, as France would not respond militarily. With regard to Hitler’s ideas on domestic policy Levetzow noted: ‘The most radical break with the present democratic system.’ He noted also that Hitler had said emphatically: ‘No measures to be taken against Jewish people as such but an end to Jewish dominance in the state.’ As far as support for his candidacy for the office of Reich President was concerned, however, Cuno was no further forward. The following day Göring signalled to Levetzow that the NSDAP could see i
tself presenting Cuno for that office; it was, he said, more probable, however, that Brüning would offer the National Socialists two ministerial posts, to which they would respond by demanding the Reich Interior Ministry, the Defence Ministry, and the office of Prussian Prime Minister (there was no more mention of the Foreign Office). For his part, Cuno wondered if it would not be better to support Hitler as candidate for the Reich Presidency instead of making himself dependent on Hitler.89 Although in the ensuing months Levetzow, Göring, and Cuno continued to pursue the idea of a Cuno candidacy for the highest office, the following year the plan was dropped, above all, evidently, because soundings among the other right-wing parties did not progress. On the evening of 29 September, in other words on the same day he had met with Cuno, Hitler was a guest at Göring’s home, where Göring introduced him to Frau von Dirksen, who had an influential salon in Berlin, as well as to the head of Deutsche Bank, Emil Georg von Stauss, a DVP Reichstag deputy. Thus Hitler was now considered socially acceptable in Berlin.90
On 5 October Hitler, accompanied by Frick and Strasser, discussed with Chancellor Brüning the general situation after the election. To ensure the meeting was confidential it was held in the apartment of Gottfried Treviranus, minister without portfolio in Brüning’s cabinet. According to his own account, Brüning expounded to the Nazi delegation the core elements of his future policy: The economic crisis should be used to get rid of reparations; the precondition for this would be an international disarmament agreement. Brüning emphasized that the NSDAP’s fierce opposition to his foreign policy would chime in well with his plans and suggested that he would reach detailed agreement with the NSDAP on the form this opposition would take. In other words, by colluding behind the scenes, the NSDAP would form an integral part of his government’s policy. Hitler’s response was at first reserved, even ‘shy’ and ‘hesitant’, as Brüning recalled it, but then it quickly rose to a crescendo, a two-hour tirade in which there was one main theme, namely the annihilation of all enemies of National Socialism. That meant the SPD and KPD at home, followed by France and the Soviet Union. Hitler did not even engage with Brüning’s remarks but merely declared himself prepared to have three ministers in the latter’s government, but without committing himself to any future course of action. Brüning ignored this request and instead offered the NSDAP the prospect of forming coalitions with the Centre Party in those state parliaments where they had a combined majority.91 After the talks Hitler told Goebbels he was convinced that he had ‘hugely impressed’ Brüning.92 For his part, Goebbels hoped that the break-up of the coalition in Prussia would mean ‘my hour’ would come.93
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