The Coming of the Third Reich (The Third Reich Trilogy Book 1)

by Richard J. Evans

the river, as arranged, and when the putsch backfired he took his unit back to Landshut again, where he was duly arrested.86 But in the end his rather peripheral participation in the putsch did not seem to the authorities to warrant particularly harsh treatment. Strasser therefore remained at large while the other Nazi leaders either fled or were landed in gaol. In April 1924 he was elected to the Bavarian Parliament. He proved to be a talented administrator, bringing together many of the fragments of the shattered ultra-right. Once the Nazi Party was legal again, Hitler, recognizing his ability, sent him to revive it in north Germany. By the end of 1915, Strasser’s tireless recruitment drive had increased the number of branches nearly fourfold, using a pronounced emphasis on the ‘socialist’ aspects of Nazi ideology to try and win over the industrial working class in areas like the Ruhr. Strasser was contemptuous of the other ultra-right groups which thought ‘the primitive solution of antisemitism to be adequate’. He told Oswald Spengler in July 1925 that Nazism was different because it sought ‘a German revolution’ through a German form of socialism.87 His idea of socialism, however, while it involved the state taking a 51 per cent stake in major industries and 49 per cent in all other businesses, also included the return of the guilds and the payment of