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The NSDAP was thus essentially a middle-class movement, and the proportion of university graduates, students and professors in Munich was striking.125 Conversely, despite the fact that their propaganda was explicitly directed at blue-collar workers, the Nazis did not do well with that demographic group.
Hitler’s insecurity revealed the fear of the parvenu that he would never be taken entirely seriously in the upper-class circles to which he was now granted access.
Munich social elites were probably less captivated by the aggressive anti-Semitism with which Hitler regularly enraptured his beer-hall audiences than by his bizarre appearance and eccentric behaviour. “He had the aura of a magician, a whiff of the circus and of tragic embitterment, and the harsh shine of the ‘famous beast,’ ” was how Joachim Fest put it.
“Thank God that there are still German men!” Siegfried exclaimed. “Hitler is a splendid fellow, a true slice of the German soul.”
“These questions must remain unanswered. Hitler is not an individual at all. He’s a condition.”165 Yet Hitler’s shyness in front of the camera also caused conflicts. In April 1923, on a visit to Berlin with Hanfstaengl, Hitler was recognised in an amusement park by press photographer Georg Pahl, who took his picture. Hitler immediately attacked Pahl, hitting at the camera with his walking stick.
Hatred of the media
There was no cultish worship of the Führer in the early days of the NSDAP.
Dietrich Eckart and Alfred Rosenberg, too, continually projected messianic expectations onto Hitler, praising him as the strong hand that would liberate Germany from its humiliation and shame
According to the sociologist Max Weber, the power of a charismatic politician depends on his having a community of followers who are convinced that he possesses extraordinary abilities and has been called by destiny.
He owed his phenomenal rise to the particular social and political crises of the post-war period, which provided an unusually advantageous situation for a right-wing populist of his ilk.
Initially uncertain and clumsy in his personal behaviour, he grew step by step into the role of the party leader who dispatched all his competitors for power and collected a horde of blindly loyal followers.
The demise of the currency was accompanied by the decay of fundamental social values.
“We had just put the great game of war and the shock at how it ended behind us, as well as a very disillusioning political lesson in revolution, and now we were treated to the daily spectacle of all rules of life breaking down, and age and experience being revealed as bankrupt.”
Hitler did not have it in him to become anything more than a populist speaker and would fail to achieve the successes of either Benito Mussolini or Kurt Eisner. “He has not the mental ability,”
an emotionally charged campaign accusing Stresemann and his grand coalition of capitulating to foreign interests.34 Resentments towards “Red Berlin” were greater in Bavaria than in other parts of Germany, and resistance towards this governmental change of course formed immediately.
Accusing moderates of being Communist
without military support, all his plans were condemned to failure from the very start.
Very scary
Bavaria was now essentially ruled by a triumvirate of Kahr, Lossow and Colonel Hans von Seisser, the head of the Bavarian police.
When the Reichswehr moved against socialist–communist “united front” governments in Saxony and Thuringia in late October and early November, it removed one of the pretexts right-wing conspirators in Munich cited for the need to push Bavarian troops to the borders with those central German states.
Sounds like red and blue states here?
exerted by all radical nationalist groups on Kahr to get him to “intervene against Berlin” with the goal of creating a “national dictatorship.” Seeckt declared that this was his objective as well, but made it crystal clear that “the legal path would have to be followed.”
Legal path to dictatorship, eh?
“I am prepared to support a right-wing dictatorship, if it has a chance to succeed,”
violence would not work since the state is too established and has all the weapons in its possession.”
Forced to act, Hitler had similarly gone all out when he detained and blackmailed the triumvirate.133 Once he had decided to strike what he hoped would be a decisive blow, Hitler had no more time for counter-arguments. “Herr Hitler does not engage with objections,” Lossow said at the trial by way of explaining Hitler’s missionary convictions and immunity to criticism. “He is the Chosen One and everyone else has to accept whatever he says.”
In his first newsletter, dated 3 December 1923 and signed by “Rolf Eidhalt” (an anagram of Adolf Hitler),
That did not mean constructive participation in the parliamentary process, but rather opposition and obstruction. The idea was “to extend parliament or, better said, parliamentarianism, ad absurdum.”
“Whoever doesn’t obey then, will be out—regardless of who they are,”
Lovely party policy
Hitler’s behaviour while in Landsberg seems to have been an example of a technique of rule that he would develop to perfection as Reich chancellor. Divide and conquer was the best way to cement his own claim to leadership.
“4½ Years of Struggle Against Lies, Stupidity and Cowardice,”
Public libraries and schools were required to buy copies, and starting in 1936, state employees performing civil marriage ceremonies were instructed to give newly-weds a copy of Mein Kampf.
Landsberg: he did not read in order to test but rather in order to confirm his opinions. Hitler was constantly in search of mosaic stones that could be added to his already existing world view.
A good warning.
“It will always remain one of the great mysteries of the Third Reich,” wrote Victor Klemperer in LTI, his 1946 analysis of Nazi language, “how this book could have been disseminated throughout the public sphere, and how nonetheless Hitler achieved his twelve-year rule. The bible of National Socialism was in circulation years before his rise to power.”103 Indeed, in Mein Kampf, Hitler had spelled out with exemplary clarity everything he intended to do if he was ever given power. Did the people who voted for him and who cheered him on not read it?
Another share-worthy.
You read this and you STILL voted for him?
“Whoever has read Hitler’s autobiography Mein Kampf,” Gerlach wrote, “will ask himself in horror how a sadistic master of confusion could become the preferred leader of a good third of the German people.”
Hitler was only able to launch his second political career because his adversaries criminally underestimated him.
“We believe in the law and will not give a Jewish system of exploitation any legal justification for completely plundering our people.”
“No questioning of private property! How terrible!”
For Hitler the categories “Jewish” and “Marxist” were interchangeable.
Hitler seized every occasion to stress how crucial “blind, fanatical belief” was to the ultimate triumph of the movement.
“What does Christianity mean for us today?” Goebbels scoffed. “National Socialism is a religion.”
Christ had also been initially mocked, and yet the Christian faith had become a massive global movement. “We want to achieve the same thing in the arena of politics,” Hitler stated. A year later he was explicitly casting himself as Jesus’s successor, who would complete his work. “National Socialism,” Hitler proclaimed, “is nothing other than compliance with Christ’s teachings.”
“Führer principle,” based on “absolute authority directed downwards and absolute duty directed upwards.”
He as Führer would not tolerate a minor chapter leader criticising his superiors. “Were this to be tolerated,” Hitler asserted, “the party would be dead and buried.”
between 1926 and 1928 devotion was institutionalised.
Scary
In January 1928, the retired major Walter Buch became chairman of an investigatory and mediating committee which had been set up in December 1925 to settle internal party conflicts. It was an “essential institution”108 and Buch understood that the main purpose of the body was to keep disagreements under wraps.
The Correlation Committee
He also tried to assuage industrialists’ fears about his economic and political aims, assuring them that he would stand up for the inviolability of private property. “The free market will be protected as the most sensible or only possible economic order,”
it established Hitler as an economic moderate. This reputation would serve him very well after 1930, when the NSDAP’s electoral breakthrough had made the party far more interesting to businessmen and entrepreneurs.
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.”
Hitler was able to distinguish between people “who invested him with boundless trust and quasi-religious faith” and those “who saw and judged him with critical distance and according to rational criteria.” Hitler did not much care for the latter category, although he only showed it to those concerned when he felt they could no longer be of any use to him.
The Führer, previously a curiosity on the outer fringe of the political right wing, found himself catapulted into the centre of German politics.
1930, from 12 seats to...
Faith in democratic institutions and democratic political parties dissolved, and anti-parliamentary sentiment, already rife in the Weimar Republic, was given a huge boost.
Those in power appeared to have no solutions to the crisis, and the more helpless they seemed to be, the greater the demand became for a “strong man,” a political messiah who would lead Germany out of economic misery and point the way towards renewed national greatness.
The supply of common ground, as Müller put it when he announced the end of the grand coalition, was exhausted.
The dissolution of bipartisan efforts.
