Hitler

by Peter Longerich

  As Brüning would not countenance a coalition with the NSDAP and there was no possibility of a grand coalition because of Hindenburg’s refusal to accept SPD members in the cabinet, the Reich Chancellor continued in government propped up by the President’s emergency decrees. He had, however, to ensure that his government retained a majority in parliament, in other words that the Reichstag would not use its constitutional veto against the President’s emergency decrees. In the end the Social Democrats were prepared to accept this, on the one hand so that Brüning would not become totally dependent on the parties of the Right, and, on the other hand, so that its coalition with the Centre would hold in Prussia. In October Brüning even succeeded in gaining the Social Democrats’ consent to a law on amortization of debt and in recessing parliament until the beginning of December.94 In the course of 1931 the Social Democrats agreed further generous parliamentary recesses, thus giving the government some cover. For example, in March 1931, in particular, the Reichstag was sent on a Reich ‘summer recess’ that lasted until October.95

  Meanwhile, Brüning was handling the NSDAP with care. In October the cabinet refused the demand made by Joseph Wirth, the Interior Minister, for police funds for the state of Brunswick, where since September the Interior Minister had been a member of the NSDAP, to be curtailed. In December Brüning declared himself in favour of Nazis no longer being banned, as they had been up to this point, from the armed services and of Party members no longer being excluded from the volunteer border service.96

  German business was also affected by the NSDAP’s startling electoral success. Interest in the Party grew, as did donations, even if the amount of support was still comparatively modest. Big industrial concerns and other economically significant groups directed their funds primarily towards the bourgeois parties of the Right, namely the DVP and the DNVP, whereas the NSDAP still covered its costs first and foremost by means of membership dues, donations, and other monies contributed by its own members.97 From the point of view of business the NSDAP was not an ideal representative of its interests, as the Party showed no willingness to adopt the standpoint of business in its public pronouncements. On the contrary, the NSDAP even introduced a wide range of rabble-rousing ‘anti-capitalist’ motions in the new Reichstag, among them the nationalization of the major banks, a ban on bond trading, and a capping of interest rates.98 In addition, in autumn 1930 the Party supported the Berlin metal workers’ strike.99 Hitler’s refusal to support the Saxon metal workers’ strike a few months previously had provoked Otto Strasser to leave the Party, and Hitler’s comments were ambiguous: in the Illustrierter Beobachter he expressed sympathy for the workers’ standpoint, but also warned against any escalation of the strike.100 This ambivalence was typical of his statements on economic matters. He wished neither to alienate the business world nor to fan the flames of the Party’s social demagoguery, but neither did he want to turn his back publicly on the workers.

  The selection of Gottfried Feder to represent the NSDAP’s views in the budget debate in December 1930 makes clear once again that, in spite of the departure of the ‘socialists’ surrounding Otto Strasser, the NSDAP was not prepared to abandon its populist ‘anti-capitalist’ stance. This became apparent also when in December the Party twice voted in favour of KPD motions to raise significantly the state and social security payments to the unemployed. At the same time, articles appeared in the Völkischer Beobachter also emphasizing the NSDAP’s ‘left-wing’ stance.101

  When, however, on 1 December 1930, Hitler took the opportunity of again addressing leading business figures at the renowned Hamburg National Club (an invitation he owed to his dealings with Cuno in September), his audience was hoping to hear the very opposite, namely that Hitler distanced himself from the ‘anti-capitalist’ views of his Party. Hitler began with a depressing description of economic developments since the end of the war before arriving at the central argument of his speech: ‘Political power cannot be regained by economic means, but only through struggle. The nation’s vital strength must be utilized to preserve the state. The economy and business can exist only when protected by a strong state.’ It was, he said, ‘madness for Germany to starve when on its borders indolent nations leave vast territories unused. If we want these territories we can get them only through the law of might is right.’ That was certainly a very clear signal of his intention to take territory from other nations by force. The preconditions for this, however, were, he said, national reconciliation at home, which only the NSDAP could bring about, and the abandonment of ‘internationalism’, of ‘democratic rule’, and of ‘pacifism’. For as far as foreign policy was concerned, the world could not ‘be won through ideas of reconciliation, but rather the watchwords are: Seek, find, and fight to gain what is ours by right.’ The speech ended with a storm of applause from those present.102 Hitler’s argument about the primacy of politics had allowed him to avoid making any concrete economic statements.

  While Göring was working to dispel any misgivings on the part of industry about the NSDAP’s ‘socialist’ direction, Hitler went on extending his contacts in the business world, although he was far from making any kind of ‘breakthrough’ there. At the home of the coal magnate Emil Kirdorf, presumably at the end of November 1930, Hitler met a number of Ruhr industrialists, among them Ernst Poensgen, the head of United Steel. The only account of this meeting comes from Poensgen, who claims he approached Hitler candidly and stressed that industry supported Brüning.103 In January 1931, at Göring’s home and in the presence of Fritz Thyssen, another heavy industrialist sympathetic to the NSDAP, Hitler had a meeting with Hjalmar Schacht, who had resigned in March 1930 as head of the Reich Bank in protest at the acceptance of the Young Plan and, though formerly a liberal, was moving increasingly to the right. Schacht gained a positive impression of Hitler, although in public he remained reserved.104 Otto Wagener, who since January 1931 had been in charge of the economics department in the Brown House, reports in his memoirs that there were further contacts with business in the early months of 1931, among them with Emil von Stauss, the head of Deutsche Bank.105

  From Hitler’s point of view, however, these contacts with business in the aftermath of his big electoral success were in danger of becoming obsolete, when demands were again being heard within the Party for its economic statements to contain more details. Goebbels had already argued for more concrete statements in his paper, Der Angriff, at the end of September. In October he followed this up. The 1920 Party programme, which had referred in general terms to ‘profit-sharing in large firms’ and ‘agricultural reform’, was, he wrote, only the ‘bare bones’ and needed urgently to be fleshed out. Leading Party comrades (and not, for example the leader in isolation) should clarify the evident problems through discussion.106 That sounded suspiciously like a repeat of the discussion of the programme that Strasser, Goebbels, and others had attempted to bring about in 1925/26. Goebbels’s initiative may have been prompted by the fact that, from the end of 1929 onwards, preparatory work had been under way on the Party’s economic policy from which Goebbels had been excluded.107

  Hitler disliked collective deliberations as much as he did precise programme statements and ultimately regarded his Party’s economic statements primarily from a tactical point of view. From this standpoint it seemed to him of overriding importance not to alienate those business and industrial circles that had begun to support the Party or at least to show some interest in it. For that reason in January 1931 he set up the aforementioned economics department under Otto Wagener, up to this point SA chief of staff, so that in competition with other Party offices it would generate an economic plan free from demands for overly ‘socialist’ experiments.108

  What was meant by that was demonstrated, for example, by a consultation on 16 and 17 February 1931. When Wagener brought up the issue of a minimum wage Hitler criticized it as the ‘intellectual justification for communism’ and then in a lengthy exposition developed principles for the ‘calculation of wages based on t
he value of a person’s contribution to the community’. The notes that compose the minutes of the meeting contain the following statements by Hitler: ‘Healthy people for the national community’s struggle only from healthy parents’; ‘people unequal in value’; ‘Having many children must not be a disadvantage’; single people were on principle to receive ‘very limited’ remuneration.109 Hitler in other words exploited a discussion about ‘equitable’ wages to expand on his views on biology and the nation. Later in the proceedings he spoke out against ‘collectivism’ in business and put the case instead for free enterprise: ‘A guy who makes a lot of money, even if he is ruthless, is always starting up new things, taking risks etc. Not harmful!’ In connection with this Hitler mentioned Thyssen, his old acquaintance Bechstein, and Ford as models. When the issue of unemployment was broached Hitler immediately steered discussion onto familiar territory: ‘Overpopulation. Shortage of land.’ The problem cried out for a solution: ‘If our space is not expanded, we are exposed militarily to any attack. Situation increasingly critical without expansion.’ ‘Health’ will in any case be restored only if a ratio of ‘70% to 30%’ is created between those working in agriculture and those in industry.110 These economic meetings conducted by the Party leaders under Hitler’s chairmanship were continued during the following months. Unlike Wagener, Gregor Strasser, Hierl, Rosenberg, Pfeffer, and Feder, Goebbels, significantly, was still being excluded.111

  In March 1931 Hierl presented a paper he had written with Wagener in which a private enterprise economy was proposed under the ‘state’s overarching control of the economy through planning’. Goebbels was positively horrified (‘No trace of socialism left’) and wrote a fiercely critical appraisal,112 but concerns were also voiced by big business, which got hold of the unpublished memorandum.113 A pamphlet published in 1931 and written by Hans Reupke, who worked for the Reich Association of German Industry and was a secret sympathizer of the NSDAP, was designed to dispel these doubts. In it Reupke the insider explained that all earlier proposals from the NSDAP that pointed to the nationalization of businesses had in the meantime become obsolete.114 In Goebbels’s view the work was a ‘bare-faced betrayal of socialism’,115 but after the Völkischer Beobachter carried a negative review116 and a few days later Hitler distanced himself from Reupke in a conversation with Goebbels, the latter was reassured.117

  This patent confusion about the NSDAP’s future economic plans appears to have been systematically created by Hitler himself. For in these debates the Party leader was concerned above all with one thing: He wanted at all costs to prevent ‘anti-capitalist’ slogans of the kind repeatedly used by Goebbels and others from blocking his access to big business and the big banks. Whatever his economic experts advised was kept under wraps. In November 1931 Hitler ordered Wagener’s department to set up an ‘Economic Council’ chaired by Gottfried Feder. Its task was to vet official Party statements on economic policy before publication.118 When in April 1932 the council blocked the publication of economic articles even by Wagener himself, he used this as an excuse to resign his office. In the meantime his position had in any case become precarious as a result of the arrival of Hitler’s new economic adviser Wilhelm Keppler. The attempt to pin the Party leader down to specific economic objectives had failed; the Economic Council had completed the task for which it was created and after little more than a year it was dissolved.119

  Hitler’s policy of legality on trial

  In addition to the arguments concerning the Party’s economic statements, after the September Reichstag elections it was above all the clashes between the Party and the SA that were building up to a final confrontation. At first Hitler attempted to bring this source of conflict under control by an idiosyncratic staffing decision.

  The future relationship between the SA and the Party organization was the subject of a leaders’ meeting that Hitler held in Munich on 30 November 1930. He responded to the confident demands of the SA leaders for more influence in the movement as a whole by the surprise introduction of Ernst Röhm as the future SA chief, leaving it open for the time being whether he intended to appoint the retired captain as supreme leader of the SA or as its chief of staff. In Hitler’s view Röhm had the advantage of having spent the previous few years as a military instructor in Bolivia and thus of not being involved in the conflicts among the various Party cliques. This coup was not unproblematic, however. He had after all broken with Röhm in 1925 after they had found it impossible to reach agreement about the incorporation of the Frontbann, the organization set up in place of the banned SA, into the NSDAP, and Röhm had not relinquished his idea of the primacy of the ‘soldier’ over the ‘politician’, as was revealed in the autobiography, Geschichte eines Hochverräters [History of a Traitor], that he published in 1928. The issue of the future role of the SA, whether as a predominantly independent paramilitary organization or as quasi-military aid for the Party, was therefore completely unclear. In November 1930, however, Hitler’s main concern was to promote a man who enjoyed authority inside the SA leadership corps, whose members like Röhm were mostly former officers. Apart from this, Röhm had proved his worth before the November putsch in 1923 at the interface of the army and paramilitary organizations and thus seemed the right man to impress on the Reich Defence Ministry the ‘defence’ importance of the SA and thus to engender an overall positive attitude to the NSDAP within the Defence Ministry.120 At the beginning of January 1931, however, only a few weeks after Röhm had taken up his post, Hitler felt obliged to comment on discussions in the Party and the SA prompted by Röhm’s widely known homosexuality. Without addressing the accusations in detail Hitler spoke out against ‘attacks on the private life’ of individual SA leaders. After all, the SA was ‘not a moral institution for the education of the daughters of the nobility but an association of rough fighters’.121

  As far as Hitler was concerned there were other conflicts connected with the SA that he took more seriously. In February and March he had cause to warn the SA several times about acts of excessive violence. In doing so he gave the impression that the violence was being introduced into the SA from outside. In the Völkischer Beobachter on 18 February, for example, he aimed to warn SA members ‘against provocateurs . . . , who are sent into our ranks and try every means of forcing the SA into the role of aggressor, in order to provide the present regime with legitimate reasons for persecuting our movement’.122 He took a similar line in a speech on 7 March 1931 at an SA rally in Munich, saying he would not let spies and provocateurs goad him into ‘marching the SA into the machine guns’.123 When at the end of March the Reich President issued an emergency decree restricting the right to demonstrate and the propaganda of political parties, the SA was being particularly targeted and this fuelled discontent in the organization with the ‘lawful’ route to power advocated by the Party leadership. In Berlin Goebbels was already worried that the undiminished activism of Stennes and his fellow SA leaders might lead to the Party being banned.124 In the Völkischer Beobachter Hitler issued another warning that members of the SA must keep ‘strictly to the path of legality’.125

  Hitler brought Party leaders together in Weimar on 1 April, the day on which the first Nazi minister, Wilhelm Frick, was removed from office by the Thuringian state parliament. Although Stennes was fired at that meeting, as SA boss in East Germany he had not been idle. He had gone onto the counterattack and had ordered the SA to occupy the Party offices in Berlin and the editorial office of Der Angriff. The front page of the 1 April edition of Der Angriff carried a large-format declaration by Stennes.126

  During the night of 1/2 April Hitler returned to Munich with Goebbels to put down the ‘putsch’ from there.127 The Völkischer Beobachter published a decree from Hitler empowering Goebbels, as he had done in 1926, ‘once more to carry out and complete a thorough purging of the movement’.128 Goebbels made use of the special powers invested in him to exclude the ‘traitors’ from the Party. From 4 April Der Angriff was back under his complete con
trol: He made the headline of that number ‘Mutineers’ faction destroyed’ and next to it printed a call from Hitler to the Party comrades. The same day Hitler published a ‘Final Reckoning with the Rebels’ in the Völkischer Beobachter in which he gathered together various accusations against Stennes from a wide range of sources. Amongst other topics he defended the acquisition and extension of the Brown House in Munich, a move that Stennes had inveighed against. He would ‘ensure that a memorial will be set to our comrades in the struggle today that will be seen in the decades, indeed in the centuries, to come!’ He emphasized once again the Party’s ‘strict legality’ and thundered that he would not let anyone ‘make him an oath-breaker, least of all retired Police Captain Stennes’.129 Once again he announced there would be a ‘thorough purging of the Party of all unreliable elements’130 and on 8 April in the same publication he claimed he would ‘neither slumber nor sleep until this poison is utterly and completely eradicated from our movement’.131 Absolute ‘loyalty’ was the leitmotiv of two speeches he made during the following days to the SA,132 and on 21 April he decreed that, as a further consequence of the Stennes affair, a ‘General Inspectorate’ would be created within SA headquarters to support ‘the development of the SA and SS in accordance with one set of agreed guidelines through personal contact and inspection’.133