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“Thus I believe that I am acting according to the will of the Almighty Creator. By defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of Our Lord.”94
we have a decrepit industrial sector with twelve million unemployed,” he declared at a rally in Stuttgart in April 1926.71 In reality, an average of only two million Germans were unemployed that year. Hitler paired his extreme
The NSDAP had not performed poorly everywhere, but its weakness in urban industrial centres was marked. The party had polled only 1.6 per cent in Berlin, despite Gauleiter Goebbels using every trick in the book after the temporary ban on the NSDAP in the Prussian capital was lifted.128 By contrast, the party had made notable gains in rural parts of Schleswig-Holstein and Lower Saxony, taking 5.2 per cent in the Weser-Ems electoral district of north-western Germany. Still, the best results were limited to the traditional Nazi strongholds of Franconia (8.1 per cent), Upper Bavaria/Swabia (6.23
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For the party leadership, one lesson of the election was to shift their propaganda focus to rural Germany. “There better results can be achieved with lower costs in terms of time, energy and money than in the big cities,”
“you, Herr Hitler, are gradually developing a contempt for people that fills me with frightful concern.”148
Hitler could belittle loyal followers in the most hurtful fashion. The Gauleiter of Lower Bavaria, Otto Erbersdobler, witnessed one typical scene in March 1929. Hitler had ordered local SA men to drive in trucks to a Nazi event in Upper Bavaria, but in order to save money, Pfeffer von Salomon had them take the train. The following day, at the party’s Munich headquarters, Hitler gave Salomon “a real going-over…screaming at him for a good ten minutes and punctuating his already unequivocal remarks by lashing the table with his riding crop.” Hitler forbade anyone in future from “deviating from
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“I never heard any praise or positive off-the-cuff remarks about party comrades,” recalled Albert Krebs, who was the leader of the party’s Hamburg chapter from 1926 to 1928 and
The NSDAP’s prospects palpably improved in the spring of 1929, however, and the critical voices faded. In the winter of 1928–9, the German economy went again into decline. In February, the number of people registered as unemployed once more broke the three-million mark.153 Prices for agricultural produce were falling, meaning that many farmers could no longer keep up with their interest payments. Many went bankrupt, and their property was auctioned off. In the northern German state of Schleswig-Holstein, a rural movement formed in opposition to the central government. Farmers took to the
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“Everything is happening exactly as we predicted,” he crowed in late March 1929. “The German economy is on its deathbed.”155
Hitler, however, had decided to make common cause with conservative nationalists to shoot down the Young Plan. It stipulated that France evacuate the Rhineland in 1930 and, in contrast to the heavy monetary burdens under the Dawes Plan, brought Germany financial relief but expanded the duration of German reparations payments for the First World War to 1988. For the entire German right wing, agreeing to it was tantamount to accepting the Treaty of Versailles with its “war guilt” clause.168
24 October 1929, Black Friday plunged the global economy into turmoil. The crisis Hitler had waited for was now at hand. It was no coincidence that at precisely that moment Hitler exchanged his humble lodgings in Thierschstrasse for a nine-room apartment on the second floor of Prinzregentenstrasse 16 in the upper-class district of Bogenhausen.175 The breakthrough to power seemed to be in reach, and Hitler needed a new domicile that would reflect his new status within German politics. 9 Dark Star Rising “In the past I have been a prophet in many things…at least concerning the big picture,”
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The economic crisis hit Germany particularly hard.2 The upturn during the Golden Twenties had been financed with short-term foreign credit, particularly from the United States, and after Black Friday, American banks had to call in their loans. That hastened the collapse of the German economy, which had already begun to decline in 1928 and 1929. The number of unemployed leapt from 1.3 million in September 1929 to 3.4 million in February 1930. One year later 5 million people were out of work, and at the height of the crisis in 1932, Germany had 6 million jobless.
More than any other German politician, Hitler presented himself as the answer to these hopes for salvation.4 The
“Die Fahne hoch”—“Hold High the Flag”—
“I am a socialist…But what you mean by socialism is nothing but crass Marxism. The masses of workers only want panem et circenses. They have no comprehension of any sort of ideals.” Hitler also reaffirmed his axiomatic belief that race and not class warfare was the motor of history. “There can only be one revolution, the revolution of race,” he proclaimed. “There is no economic, political or social revolution. The fundamental struggle is always the same: the struggle of a racially inferior lower class against a dominant high race. The day the higher race forgets this iron law, it has lost the
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“Twelve years of unlimited rule by the old parliamentary parties have turned Germany into an object for exploitation and made it the laughing stock of the entire world,” Hitler thundered. The NSDAP, he told his audience, represented a “new popular German movement” that overcame class conflicts and the selfish interests of specific social castes: “There is only one movement that recognises the German people as a whole, rather than individual groups, and that movement is ours.” In this respect, the NSDAP was a model for what Hitler had in store for all of Germany: the creation of a
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police observer summarised the content of Hitler’s speech in Würzburg on 5 August as follows: “He tried to depict the Jews as a race of foreign blood and described them as parasites on the body of the people.”
The Frankfurter Zeitung wrote of an “election of embitterment,” in which the majority of voters had articulated their dissatisfaction with “the methods of governing or rather non-governing, the indecisive parliamentary palaver of the past few years.”
In his initial analysis on 18 September, the British ambassador in Berlin, Horace Rumbold, attributed Nazi success to the widespread mood of protest against economic misery, which Hitler and his movement in their youthful élan had been able to harness and turn into votes. The Foreign Office feared that Hitler’s radical agitation against the Treaty of Versailles would harden French attitudes towards Germany as well as lead Brüning to adopt a more uncompromising foreign policy.
“turn themselves over, increasingly defencelessly, to the magic of the horrible and the thrill of evil.”62 The erosion of the political centre, reflected in the dramatic decline in support for the DDP/DSP and the DVP, was primarily the result of the radicalisation of voters from the middle classes, whose fears of dropping down the social ladder and anti-parliamentarian longings pushed them in droves into the hands of the National Socialists.
chancellor Hitler would eradicate all democratic progress with a stroke of his pen: “Overnight, all republican civil servants, judges and police officers will be fired in favour of a reliable, fascist cadre…Hundreds of thousands of Hitlerites are waiting for jobs!”
anyone who hoped that the clean lines of his office would inject discipline into Hitler’s working habits was disappointed. Hitler quickly lapsed into his chaotic unpredictability, much to the dismay of those who worked with him.
not receive a salary from the party, but he claimed expenses for his numerous appearances as well as fees for his articles in the Völkischer Beobachter and the Illustrierter Beobachter—significant sources of side income.
The future president of the post-war Federal Republic of Germany captured the dual nature of the Nazi movement. On the one hand, Heuss found, it inhabited a world of strong emotions and passions. These were evident in the Führer cult, the pseudo-religious faith followers invested in one man and his world view, and the mass psychosis triggered by his public appearances. On the other hand, though, there was the bureaucratic apparatus, the strongly organised, highly efficient party machinery aimed solely at acquiring political power. “Rationalistic power calculations coexist side by side with
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extraordinary professor of “Organic Social Theory and Politics” at Braunschweig’s Technical University.
Vorwärts the SPD leadership declared: Hitler in place of Hindenburg means chaos and panic in Germany and the whole of Europe, an extreme worsening of the economic crisis and of unemployment, and the most acute danger of bloodshed within our own people and abroad. Hitler in place of Hindenburg means the triumph of the reactionary part of the bourgeoisie over the progressive middle classes and the working class, the destruction of all civil liberties, of the press and of political, union and cultural organisations, increased exploitation and wage slavery.
“Tell me who praises you, and I’ll tell who you are!” Goebbels sneered, adding that Hindenburg was drawing praise from the “gutter press in Berlin and the party of deserters.” In response to this defamation, SPD deputy Kurt Schumacher, who had been badly wounded after volunteering for military service in 1914, spoke up angrily: “If there is one thing we admire about National Socialism it’s the fact that it has succeeded, for the first time in German politics, in the complete mobilisation of human stupidity.”30
the National Socialists kicked off their campaign, making use of the latest technology. Goebbels distributed 50,000 gramophone records of him delivering a campaign speech. A ten-minute sound film, designed to be shown on big-city squares, depicted Hitler as the coming saviour of the German people. Shrill posters reinforced the central message that Nazi propaganda had been advancing since mid-February: “Down with the system! Power to the National Socialists!”32 In his first campaign speech, on 27 February at the Sportpalast, which the Völkischer Beobachter covered in a story headlined “The
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Hitler, who got just over 11 million (30.1 per cent).
“completely new” methods of propaganda. The primary innovation was to charter an aeroplane so that Hitler could appear at a number of mass events every day.53 On 3 April, Hitler embarked in a Junkers D-1720 from Munich on his first “flying tour of Germany,”
“No one was able to avoid this wave of propaganda,” wrote Otto Dietrich, who had helped organise the flying tour. “It awakened sporting interests and spoke to the masses’ need for sensation as much as it addressed people’s political interests…It was a form of political propaganda that left even American methods in its shadow.”54
Hitler was said to have spoken to 1.5 million people within a few days. Between 150,000 and 200,000 people attended Hitler’s speech in Berlin’s Lustgarten on 4 April—the event was also captured on sound film.55 There
In the Baltic Sea port of Elbing, for example, Delmer witnessed Hitler’s bodyguards, under the command of Sepp Dietrich, jumping from their cars to beat demonstrating workers with plastic truncheons and brass knuckles.60 The police did nothing to stop them. It was an indication that the National Socialists already felt like the masters of Germany, entitled to take the law into their own hands.
Hindenburg was re-elected as expected with a 53 per cent majority, but Hitler had gained around 2 million additional ballots and increased his share of the vote to 36.8 per cent
“Yesterday the bomb went off,” Goebbels crowed. “At 12 o’clock, Brüning handed in the resignation of his entire cabinet to the old man. With that the system has collapsed.”95 By contrast, the democrat Count Kessler reacted to the news of Brüning’s dismissal with horror: “Backroom interests have got their way as in the time of [Wilhelm II],” Kessler complained on 30 May. “Today marks the beginning of the end for the parliamentary republic.”96 And indeed the fall of Brüning represented a watershed. His departure, as historian Heinrich August Winkler pointed out, signalled the end of the
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Uniforms allowed and Reichstag dissolved. That’s the most important thing. The man is Papen. That’s irrelevant.
One of the worst clashes occurred on 17 July in Altona just outside Hamburg. After conferring with Carl Severing, the SPD police president had granted permission for 7,000 SA men to march provocatively through the left-wing districts of the city. Seventeen people died, and many were seriously wounded in the ensuing violence. “The shock at this new bloody Sunday is widespread and deep,” wrote Kessler.107
the introduction he wrote at the time for the official guidelines for the Nazi Party’s Political Organisation, Hitler grandiloquently proclaimed that the Nazi movement had not only recognised but “consciously honoured” for the first time ever “blood and race, personality and its value, struggle as a phenomenon of the ongoing selection of the fittest, soil and living space as determining, compelling and driving forces.”131
Hindenburg’s rejection of Hitler reflected the antipathy of a representative of the old Wilhelmine elite for an upstart. “I cannot entrust the empire of Kaiser Wilhelm and Bismarck to a private from Bohemia,” Hindenburg is alleged to have told one of his assistants.146 (During Prussia’s 1866 war against Austria, Hindenburg had passed through a Bohemian town called Braunau and mistook it for Hitler’s birthplace.)
Hindenburg categorically refused Hitler’s demand, declaring that “in front of God, his conscience and his country he could not justify giving the entire power of government to a single party and especially not one so hostile towards people who thought differently.” Hindenburg
The Nazi leader had demanded the “entire power of state,” which Hindenburg had been forced to reject “because his conscience and sense of national duty forbade him from transferring complete authority to the National Socialist movement, which would use it one-sidedly.”155
the SA had engaged in a whole series of politically motivated acts of violence in East Prussia, Upper Silesia and Schleswig-Holstein. They primarily targeted members of the KPD and the Reich Banner and claimed a number of lives. Attacks were also directed at trade union buildings, left-wing newspapers and Jewish locations like the main synagogue in the city of Kiel.164
the cabinet drafted an emergency decree making politically motivated manslaughter a capital crime.
the night of 9–10 August, one of the most grisly murders of the pre-1933 years took place in the Upper Silesian village of Potempa. Nine uniformed SA men forced their way into the apartment of the miner and KPD supporter Konrad Pietrzuch, dragged him out of bed and kicked him to death in front of his mother and his brother.167
two weeks later, on 22 August, the special court in the town of Beuthen rendered its verdict: five of the perpetrators were sentenced to death, one was given two years in prison and three were acquitted. The verdict elicited outraged protest from the National Socialists.
“In the entire country, who can comprehend that the leader of such a large political movement could so callously dare to declare his respect for these drunken murderers?” asked the Frankfurter Zeitung.170
In early September, the sentences of the five main perpetrators were commuted to life in prison. In March 1933, a few weeks after Hitler was named chancellor, they were pardoned.172
30 October in Essen, Hitler thundered: “Either the German people will escape from the hands of the Jews or it will degenerate into nothing. I want to be its advocate and lead it into a unified German empire.”209 Once again Hitler had made it perfectly plain that there would be no room for Jews in the new ethnically defined state.
against making Hitler chancellor. He had been “unable to discover much respect for agreements in Hitler,” Hugenberg said.226 DVP Chairman Eduard Dingeldey also warned against Hitler, calling him “an unpredictable person easily subject to outside influences.” No one, Dingeldey argued, could rule out Hitler “trying to seize power even against the will of the Reich president.”227 The chairman of the Centre Party, Ludwig Kaas,
“The times are too serious for everyone to follow his own personal interests and go his own way,” Hindenburg argued according to Meissner’s minutes. “We have to put our differences behind us and come together in an emergency community.” Hitler stuck to his guns, telling Hindenburg he would only join a governing cabinet if he received “political leadership,” that is the office of chancellor.
