Hitler’s supremacy now paid dividends in its impact on his former rivals. In February 1927, Graf Reventlow, one of the most prominent members of the DVFP, whose social revolutionary position had brought him into increasing conflict with the more conservative German nationalist leadership around Graefe and Wulle, joined the NSDAP. He was accompanied by Wilhelm Kube and Christian Mergenthaler, the leading figures in the DVFP in Brandenburg and Württemberg respectively. Another Reichstag deputy, Franz Stöhr, also deserted the DVFP in favour of the NSDAP. Hitler and Goebbels travelled to Stuttgart to welcome Mergenthaler personally into the party, amid festive scenes. As one who had earlier crossed swords with Hitler, Reventlow’s justification for joining the NSDAP was significant:
I have gone over to the National Socialist German Workers’ Party without so-called leadership claims and without reservations. I subordinate myself without further ado to Herr Adolf Hitler. Why? He has proved that he can lead; on the basis of his view and his will, he has created a party out of the united national socialist idea, and leads it. He and the party are one, and offer the unity that is the unconditional premiss of success. The previous two years have shown that the National Socialist German Workers’ Party is on the right road, that it is on the march, that it possesses unbroken and unbreakable social-revolutionary energy.237
It amounted to the seal of approval on the leadership principle, and the merging of the ‘idea’ and organization in Hitler’s person.
The process was still not complete by the end of 1927. However, the Nuremberg Party Rally in August 1927 depicted Hitler’s mastery over the Movement more emphatically than had the Weimar rally a year earlier. Hitler could afford to be relaxed about conflicting programmatic statements put forward by the arch-ideologues Feder and Rosenberg. Even Artur Dinter, who a few weeks later was to be removed from his post as Gauleiter of Thuringia and then the following year expelled from the party altogether, was allowed to speak, and received a favourable notice in the Völkischer Beobachter. What passed for ‘discussion’ at Nuremberg fell within the broad contours of the Nazi ‘actionist’ programme: anti-liberal, anti-Marxist, emotionally anti-capitalist and ‘national’ socialist, not least antisemitic. As long as doctrinaire ‘theorists’ did nothing to hinder this broad appeal of the party, and nothing to challenge Hitler’s leadership position, they were left a good deal of room for manoeuvre.238
In the case of Dinter, however, the strength of Hitler’s position became plain. Though once a powerful supporter of Hitler, Dinter’s religious obsessions – he insisted upon National Socialism being a religious reformation through purification of blood and race – incurred increasing unpopularity within the Movement, especially in Thuringia, his own Gau. Hitler felt compelled, therefore, to remove him as Gauleiter in September 1927. Dinter, as fanatically obsessive as Hitler, persisted. The religious neutrality which Hitler could not afford to endanger was placed in jeopardy by Dinter’s high profile and publicity.239 When, finally, Dinter challenged Hitler himself, accusing him of being a tool of the Catholic Church, and advocating a senate to advise the Leader, he had gone too far. Amid booing, his proposal was unanimously rejected by the General Members’ Meeting in September 1928. Even then, it was typical of Hitler that he was reluctant to expel Dinter, knowing the adverse publicity the expulsion would bring. Dinter refused, however, to accept Hitler’s exclusive authority, and publicly attacked him and the party programme. His expulsion, in early October 1928, was then inevitable.240 Strikingly, Gregor Strasser secured a written statement signed by at least eighteen Gauleiter expressing unanimity with Hitler’s decision. ‘In this situation,’ Strasser’s letter to the Gauleiter ran, ‘there must be a clear expression to the public, opponents, and especially our own party comrades, that every attempt to establish even the smallest difference of opinion in this question of principle [the mixing of religious issues with the political programme of the movement] between Adolf Hitler and his fellow workers is an impossibility.’241 No less revealing was Hitler’s self-description in a letter he wrote to Dinter the previous July. ‘As leader of the National Socialist Movement and as a person who possesses the blind faith of someday belonging to those who make history,’ Hitler wrote, ‘I have [as a politician] the boldness to claim for myself in this sphere the same infallibility that you reserve for yourself in your [religious] reformationist area.’ He put the time at his disposal to attain power and shape Germany’s fate, at least as regards the ‘racial problem’, at most at twenty years.242
With the build-up of the Führer cult, Hitler’s image was at least as important as his practical contribution to the modest growth of the party in the ‘wilderness years’.243 Of course, a Hitler-speech remained a major event for a local party branch. And Hitler retained the ability in his mass meetings to win over initially sceptical audiences.244 But whatever limited success the NSDAP enjoyed before the Depression cannot simply – or even mainly – be attributed to Hitler. As an agitator, Hitler was distinctly less directly prominent than he had been before the putsch. The speaking-ban was, of course, a major hindrance in 1925 and 1926. He spoke at only thirty-one meetings in 1925 and thirty-two in 1926, mainly internal party affairs, a good number of them in Bavaria. In 1927, his speeches increased in number to fifty-six, more than half of them within Bavaria. Most of his sixty-six speeches in 1928 took place in the first five months, up to the Reichstag election. More than two-thirds of them were held in Bavaria. During the whole of 1929, as the NSDAP began to gain ground in regional elections, he gave only twenty-nine speeches, all but eight in Bavaria.245
One limitation on Hitler’s availability as a speaker in these years was posed by his frequent trips to try to establish important contacts and drum up funding for a party with chronic financial problems.246 Not surprisingly, for a party in the political doldrums, his efforts met with little success. Though (not to the liking of the ‘social-revolutionaries’ in the NSDAP) he courted Ruhr industrialists and businessmen in a number of speeches in 1926 and 1927, which went down well, they showed little interest in a party that seemed to be going nowhere.247 The Bechsteins and Bruckmanns, long-standing patrons, continued to give generously.248 But the aged Emil Kirdorf, whom Frau Bruckmann had brought into personal contact with Hitler, was almost alone among leading Ruhr industrialists in sympathizing with Hitler to the extent of joining the NSDAP, and in making a sizeable donation of 100,000 Marks that went a long way towards overcoming the party’s immediate financial plight.249 As would remain the case, the party was heavily dependent for its income on the contributions of ordinary members. So the stagnation, or at best slow growth, in party membership meant continued headaches for the party treasurer.250
As earlier, Hitler paid little attention to administration and organization. Party bosses were resigned to his lengthy absences and inaccessibility on even important concerns.251 He left financial matters to his trusted business manager, Max Amann, and the party treasurer, Franz Xaver Schwarz.252 Behind the scenes in Munich, Hitler could rely in the party’s secretariat upon the indefatigable and subservient Philipp Bouhler, the retiring but inwardly ambitious individual who was later to play a central role in the emergence of the ‘euthanasia action’.253 Above all, it was Gregor Strasser, as Propaganda Leader between September 1920 and the end of 1927 (during which time he streamlined and coordinated propaganda activities throughout the Reich) and especially after he was made Organizational Leader on 2 January 1928, who built up, from the faction-ridden and incoherently structured movement, the nationwide organization that from 1929 onwards was in a position to exploit the new crisis conditions.254 Hitler’s part in this development was minimal, though placing Strasser in charge of organizational matters was one of his more inspired appointments.
Hitler’s instinct, as ever, was for propaganda, not organization. His ‘feel’, when it came to matters of mobilizing the masses, seldom let him down. As director of party propaganda, Gregor Strasser had been given a great deal of scope – Hitler’s usual style – to shape
the character and pattern of agitation. Following his own leanings, Strasser had made a strong push to win over, especially, the urban proletariat. Even to outside observers, it was plain by autumn 1927 that this strategy was not paying worthwhile dividends, and was at the same time in danger of alienating the lower-middle-class support of the NSDAP.255 Reports came in from Schleswig-Holstein, Thuringia, Mecklenburg, Pomerania, and other areas indicating that growing unrest in rural areas offered promising terrain for the NSDAP.256 Hitler was evidently well-informed. And at a meeting of Gau leaders on 27 November 1927 in the ‘Hotel Elefant’ in Weimar, he announced a change of course. He made plain that significant gains could not be expected at the coming election from ‘the Marxists’. Small shopkeepers, threatened by department stores, and white-collar workers, many of them already antisemites were singled out as better targets.257 In December 1927, Hitler addressed for the first time a rally of several thousand peasants from Lower Saxony and Schleswig-Holstein.258 In the New Year, he himself took over the position of party Propaganda Leader. His deputy, Heinrich Himmler, undertook the routine tasks. The future overlord of the SS empire was at this time still in his twenties, a well-educated and intelligent former agricultural student who had briefly worked for a fertilizer firm and reared chickens. With his short-back-and-sides haircut, small moustache, round glasses, and unathletic build, he resembled a small-town bank clerk or pedantic schoolmaster. Whatever appearances might have suggested, he had, however, few peers in ideological fanaticism and, as time would prove, cold ruthlessness. The young nationalist idealist, already imagining dire conspiracies involving ‘the red International’, Jews, Jesuits and freemasons ranged against Germany, had joined the NSDAP in the summer of 1923, influenced by the man whose murder he would orchestrate eleven years later, Ernst Rohm. It was at Röhm’s side that, on 8 November that year, the night of the putsch, he had carried the banner at the head of the Reichskriegsflagge unit engaged in attempting to storm the Bavarian War Ministry. From the time of the party’s refoundation, he had been active, initially as secretary to Gregor Strasser, then, from 1926, as Deputy Gauleiter of Upper Bavaria-Swabia, and Deputy Reich Propaganda Leader. In the latter capacity in the later 1920s – he was also Deputy Reichsführer-SS from 1927 before being appointed to lead the SS two years later – he proved both efficient and imaginative – apparently coming up with the idea of blanket propaganda coverage of a specific area during a brief period of time, something that became a Nazi hallmark.259
But significantly, and in contrast to his normal habits, Hitler intervened directly in drafting texts and in shaping central propaganda.260 In April 1928, he ‘corrected’ the interpretation of Point 17 of the Party’s ‘unalterable’ 1920 Programme: ‘expropriation without compensation’ meant, for a party based on the principle of private property, merely the creation of legal means to take over land not administered in the public good; that is, Jewish land-speculation companies.261
The shift in propaganda emphasis was less dramatic than the transformation of a failed ‘urban plan’ into a ‘rural-nationalist plan’.262 But it did amount to a further move away from a ‘programmatic’ stance directed primarily at winning workers from Marxism to a broader ‘catch-all’ approach to mobilization. It was a pragmatic readjustment, recognizing the possibility of a widened appeal to a variety of social groups not previously addressed in any systematic way in party propaganda. The suggestion to move in this direction came, as we have noted, initially from several Gauleiter, recognizing the potential support in their own non-urban regions. Hitler’s positive response to their suggestions accorded with his own opportunistic approach to mobilization. Unlike some in the party, wedded to a type of ‘social-revolutionary’ emotive anti-capitalism, which social groups were attracted to Nazism was for him a matter of indifference. The important thing was that they were won over. Hitler’s aim was to gain power. Any weapon to that end was useful. But it did mean that the NSDAP became even more of a loose coalition of competing interest-groups. Only the absence of a clear programme and a set of Utopian, distant goals built into the image of the Leader could hold them together – for a time.
V
Few Germans had Hitler on their mind in Weimar’s ‘golden years’ of the mid-1920s. The internal developments within his party were of neither interest nor concern to the overwhelming majority of people. Little attention was paid to the former Munich troublemaker who now seemed no more than a fringe irritant on the political scene. Those who did take notice of Hitler were often dismissive or condescending, or both. Not untypical was the comment of Germany’s leading liberal daily, the Frankfurter Zeitung, casting as usual from time to time merely a contemptuous eye in the direction of the National Socialists. ‘Hitler has no thoughts, no responsible reflection, but nonetheless an idea. He has a demon in him,’ ran an article in the newspaper on 26 January 1928. ‘It is a matter of a manic idea of atavistic origin that pushes aside complicated reality and replaces it with a primitive fighting unit… Naturally, Hitler is a dangerous fool… But if one asks how the son of a petty Upper Austrian customs officer arrives at his craze, then one can only say one thing: he has taken war ideology perfectly literally and interpreted it in almost as primitive a way that one might be living in the era of the Völkerwanderung’ – the period of Barbarian invasions at the end of the Roman Empire.263
The results of the Reichstag election on 20 May 1928 appeared to confirm the correctness of those commentators who for years had been preaching the end of Hitler and his Movement.264 The electorate showed relatively little interest in the campaign – a reflection of the more settled conditions.265 As many as thirty-two parties put up lists, many representing specific interest-groups. Hitler would later make great play of this to parody the workings of pluralist democracy.266 The clear winners were the parties of the Left. Both the SPD and KPD made significant gains. The most serious losses were suffered by the German Nationalists (DNVP). Small parties and splinter-groups won, cumulatively, almost twice as many votes (13.9 per cent) as they had done in December 1924.267 With its miserable return of 2.6 per cent, the NSDAP won only twelve seats. Electorally, it had lost ground, compared with the Völkischer Block in December 1924.268 In the cities, with a handful of exceptions, the results were disastrous. Despite Goebbels’s efforts to take the fight to the ‘red’ districts in Berlin, the Nazis won only 1.57 per cent of the vote in the capital city. In ‘red’ Wedding, typical of working-class districts of the inner city, the NSDAP’s 1,742 votes paled against the 163,429 votes cast for the parties of the Left. But there were some rays of light. The returns from some rural areas, as anticipated, held out hope for the future. The best results, apart from the traditional Franconian heartlands and parts of Upper Bavaria, were mainly to be found in the north German countryside, afflicted by the deepening agricultural depression.269 In Weser-Ems, for example, assisted by the propaganda razzmatazz of the tub-thumping, virulently antisemitic unfrocked pastor Ludwig Münchmeyer, a convert from the DVFB, the vote for the NSDAP was twice the national average.270 Even in eastern Germany, where support remained very low, the loss of confidence in the dominant DNVP gave some grounds for optimism.271 Finally, there was at least the consolation that the twelve Nazis who entered the Reichstag now had immunity from legal action for their venomous attacks on opponents and – if anything even more important – daily allowances and free rail passes for first-class travel on the Reichsbahn to ease pressure on party finances.272 Among the new deputies were Gregor Strasser, Frick, Feder, Goebbels, Ritter von Epp – the former Freikorps leader, a new, much-trumpeted convert from the ΒVP – and Hermann Göring, recently returned to the fold after his absence since the putsch. ‘We are going into the Reichstag… like the wolf into the sheepflock,’ Goebbels told his readers in the Angriff. 273
There was understandable disappointment and dejection within the party. But the public response was one of resilience.274 Lessons were to be learnt. It was as obvious to Gregor Strasser as to other party leaders that the co
ncentration on the industrial working class had not paid dividends. Richer potential lay in the countryside.275 The need for a readjustment of party propaganda and organization was plain. Hitler reinforced the message at the Leaders’ Meeting in Munich between 31 August and 2 September – replacing the Party Rally which lack of funds, following the election campaign, did not permit in 1928.276 He announced a thorough reorganization of the Gau structure, according to Gregor Strasser’s plan.277 Under Strasser’s organizational leadership, greater attention was paid to the countyside, and first steps were taken in constructing a panoply of affiliated sub-organizations that became extremely important in tapping the specific interests of middle-class groups.278
Hitler’s own reaction to the election disaster was characteristic. On election night itself, in a packed meeting in the Bürgerbräukeller, flanked by Epp and the recently returned Rohm, he rejoiced first in the dismal showing of rival parties. The first conclusion from the election, he stated, was that there was now only a single völkisch movement: the NSDAP. He emphasized the fact that in Munich, the party had gained some 7,000 votes compared with December 1924. The poor results in almost every other city were not mentioned. As a second consequence, he underlined the large increase in the ‘Marxist’ vote, after three years of government by the Bavarian People’s Party and the German Nationals. He contrasted this with the fall in the vote for the Left in Munich in 1924. Finally, he added a defiant third conclusion: ‘The election campaign is fought. The struggle continues!… For us there is no rest, no break. We carry on working…’279 In fact, Hitler left within days for a holiday in his mountain retreat, to recuperate and dictate his ‘Second Book’.280 He was forced to authorize a statement on 27 June to editors of the National Socialist press, reaffirming his commitment to the legal path to power, after the poor election result had led some to the conclusion that the party would again seek power through violent action.281 Otherwise, he remained out of the public eye until early July.282