Hitler (32 page)

 

Few of Hitler's contemporaries understood his decision not to participate in the struggle over the Ruhr. The decision lent plausibility to the rumor that French funds were behind the NSDAP's conspicuous expansion of its organization. For it was obvious to everyone that the party was increasing its propaganda and outfitting its members with new uniforms and arms. But no concrete proof of such French backing has ever been found—and, in fact, it is still hard to specify which political or economic interests were trying to exert influence over the growing party. Nevertheless, the party's lavish expenditures, especially after Hitler took over the leadership, were so conspicuously out of all proportion to its numbers that there was every reason to look around for financial backers. Suspicions of this sort are not merely traceable to the “devil theory” of the Left, which could explain its defeat by “counter-historical National Socialism” only by positing a grim conspiracy of monopoly capitalism.

 

The National Socialists themselves lent encouragement to the most fantastic theories by practicing a psychotic form of secrecy concerning their financial resources. Throughout the Weimar years there was a series of libel cases springing from various charges; after 1933 the records of these cases were spirited away or destroyed. From the very beginning it was an unwritten law of the party that no records should be kept of contributions. Financial transactions were rarely noted in the journal of the party business office; when they were, there would usually be a note: “To be handled by Drexler personally.” In October, 1920, Hitler, presiding over a meeting in the Münchener Kindl-Keller, issued strict orders against anyone's making notes on the details of a transaction he had just described.
³⁹

There is no doubt that the party's basic income derived from membership dues, small donations, the sale of tickets for Hitler's speeches, or collections made at rallies, which might often amount to several thousand marks. Some of the early party members, like Oskar Körner, owner of a small toy store, who was killed in front of the Feldherrnhalle on November 9, 1923, all but ruined themselves in the interest of the party. Shop owners offered special discounts to the party, while others made gifts of jewelry or works of art. Spinster ladies who attended evening rallies were sometimes so emotionally shaken by the personality of Hitler that they made the National Socialist Party the beneficiary under their wills. Prosperous well-wishers like the Bechsteins, the Bruckmanns, or Ernst Hanfstaengl sometimes came forth with sizable gifts. The party also found ways to coax more funds out of its membership than just the regular dues. It floated interestfree loan certificates that the members were supposed to buy and sell to others. According to police records, no fewer than 40,000 loan certificates, each for ten marks, were issued in the first half of 1921 alone.
⁴⁰

Nevertheless, the party suffered from a chronic shortage of funds during the early years. Even as late as the middle of 1921 it could not afford to hire a treasurer. According to the story of an early member, the poster brigades could not even buy the necessary paste. In the fall of 1921 Hitler had to cancel plans for a major rally in the Krone Circus for lack of funds. The financial predicament began to improve in the summer of 1922, when the party's feverish activity brought it more into the forefront. Henceforth the party could count on a wide circle of financial benefactors and supporters, not party adherents in the strict sense, but rather representatives of the wealthy middle class, which felt vulnerable to the threat of Communist revolution. These people were ready to support any anti-Communist group, from the Free Corps and nationalist leagues on the right to the crank causes that proliferated within protest journalism. It would probably be correct to say that they were less interested in giving Hitler a boost than in promoting the most vigorous antirevolutionary force they could find.

Hitler owed his connections with the influential and monied segments of Bavarian society to Dietrich Eckart and Max Erwin von Scheubner-Richter. Another such sponsor was probably Ludendorff, who himself received considerable sums from industrialists and large landowners and doled this money out among the militant nationalist-racist organizations as he saw fit. While Ernst Röhm was mobilizing funds, weapons, and equipment for the Reichswehr, Dr. Emil Gansser, a friend of Dietrich Eckart's, put Hitler in touch with a group of big businessmen and bankers belonging to the Nationalist Club
(Nationalklub).
In 1922 Hitler had his first chance to present his plans to them. Among the principal contributors to the party's funds were the locomotive manufacturer Borsig, Fritz Thyssen of Consolidated Steel (Vereinigte Stahlwerke), Privy Councilor Kirdorf, and executives of the Daimler Company and the Bavarian Industrialists Association (Bayrischer Industriellenverband). Support from Czechoslovak, Scandinavian, and Swiss sources was also forthcoming for this dynamic party that was attracting so much attention. In the fall of 1923 Hitler went to Zurich and allegedly returned “with a steamer trunk stuffed with Swiss francs and American dollars.”
⁴¹
The mysterious and ingenious Kurt W. Luedecke obtained considerable sums from as yet undetermined sources, and among other things set up his “own” SA company consisting of fifty men. Cash flowed in from persons in Hungary as well as from Russian and Baltic-German
émigrés.
During the inflation some party functionaries were paid in foreign currencies. Among these were Julius Schreck, the SA staff sergeant who was later to be Hitler's chauffeur, and the SA Chief of Staff Lieutenant Commander Hoffmann. Even a bordello on Berlin's Tauen-tzienstrasse did its bit for the nationalist cause. At the urging of Scheubner-Richter, it had been set up by a former army officer; the profits went to swell the party till in Munich.
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The motives behind these contributions were highly diverse. It is true that without this support Hitler could not have launched his expensive spectacles after the summer of 1922. But it is also true that he made no binding commitments to any of his backers. The aggrieved leftists never believed in the anticapitalist stance of the National Socialists. It was all too inarticulate and irrational. And, in fact, Nazi anticapitalist ranting against usurers, speculators, and department stores never went beyond the perspective of superintendents and shopkeepers. Nevertheless, the Nazis' sense of outrage was all the more convincing because of their lack of any impressive system. They objected to the morality rather than the material possessions of the propertied classes. This passage from one of the early party speechifiers indicates the psychological effectiveness of the irrational anticapitalist appeal to the desperate masses: “Be patient just a little longer. But then, when we sound the call for action, spare the savings banks, for they are where we working people have put our pennies. Storm the commercial banks! Take all the money you find there and throw it into the streets and set fire to the huge heaps of it! Then use the crossbars of the streetcar lines to string up the black and the white Jews!”

Hitler made similar speeches, similarly emotion-laden, against the grim background of mass suffering caused by the inflation. Again and again, he inveighed against the lies of capitalism, even while his funds were coming from big business. Max Amann, the party's business manager, was interrogated by the Munich police shortly after the putsch attempt of November, 1923. He insisted, not without pride, that Hitler had given his backers “only the party platform” in return for their contributions. This may seem hard to credit; nevertheless, there is reason to think that the only agreements he made were on tactical lines. For the concept of corruption seems strangely alien to this man; it does not accord with his rigidity, his mounting self-confidence, and the force of his delusions.

The National Socialists had emerged victorious from their showdown with the government at the beginning of January. They found themselves top dog among the radical rightist groups in Bavaria and celebrated by a wave of meetings, demonstrations, and marches even rowdier and more aggressive than those of the past. The air was thick with rumors of coups and uprisings. With impassioned slogans Hitler fed a general expectation of some great change impending. At the end of April he gave a speech urging the “workers of the head and the workers of the fist” to close ranks in order to create “the new man... of the coming Third Reich.” Anticipating the imminent test of strength, the NSDAP had struck up an alliance in early February with a number of militant nationalist organizations. The new partners included the Reichsflagge (Reich Banner), led by Captain Heiss; the Bund Oberland (Oberland League); the Vaterländischer Verein München (Munich Patriotic Club); and the Kampfverb and Niederbayern (Lower Bavarian League of Struggle). Joint authority was vested in a committee known as the Arbeitsgemeinschaft der vaterländischen Kampfverbände (Provisional Committee of the Patriotic Leagues of Struggle), with Lieutenant Colonel Hermann Kriebel in charge of military co-ordination. The arrangements had been worked out by Ernst Röhm.

The National Socialists had thus created a counterpoise to the existing coalition of nationalist groups known as the VW, Vereinigte Vaterländische Verbände Bayerns (Union of Bavarian Patriotic Associations). Under the leadership of former Prime Minister von Kahr and the
Gymnasium
Professor Bauer, the VVV united the most disparate elements: Bavarian separatists, Pan-Germans, and various brands of racists. On the other hand, the black-white-red Kampfbund (League of Struggle) led by Kriebel represented a more militant, more radical, more “Fascist” group, which took its inspiration and its goals from Mussolini or Kemal Pasha Atatürk. However, Hitler was soon to learn how dubious it was to gain outside support at the price of what had been absolute personal control. The lesson came on May 1 when, impatient and drunk with his latest success, Hitler attempted another showdown with the government.

His attempt to impose a program on the Kampfbund had already met with failure because his partners' slow-moving soldier mentality could not follow his wild flights of fancy. In the course of the spring he had been forced to look on as Kriebel, Röhm, and the Reichswehr pried the SA away from him. He had created the SA as a revolutionary army directly responsible to him, but now Kriebel and Röhm were trying to turn the SA into a secret reserve for the so-called Hundred Thousand Man Army (the Treaty of Versailles limited the official German army to 100,000 men). They were drilling the standards (as the three regiment-sized units were called) and staging night maneuvers or parades. Hitler appeared at these affairs only as an ordinary civilian, sometimes giving a speech, but virtually unable to assert leadership. He noted with annoyance that the storm troops were being stripped of their ideological cast and downgraded to mere military reserve units. A few months later, in order to regain authority, Hitler instructed his old fellow soldier, former Lieutenant Josef Berchtold, to organize a kind of staff guard to be named
Stosstrupp
(Shock Troop) Hitler. This was the origin of the SS.

At the end of April Hitler and the Kampfbund decided that the annual May 1 rallies by the leftist parties were to be taken as a provocation and should be stopped by any and all methods. They themselves would organize their own mass demonstrations for that day, and celebrate the fourth anniversary of the crushing of the Munich soviet republic. The vacillating Bavarian government under von Knilling would seem to have learned nothing from its experience in January. It half yielded to the Kampfbund's demand. The Left would be allowed to hold a mass meeting on the Theresienwiese but forbidden all street processions. Hitler therefore staged one of his tried-and-true fits of rage and, repeating his ruse of January, tried to play off the military authorities against the civilian government. By April 30 the situation had become almost unbearably tense. Kriebel, Bauer, and the newly appointed leader of the SA, Hermann Göring, lodged a vigorous protest with the government and demanded that a state of emergency be declared in the face of leftist agitation. Meanwhile Hitler and Röhm once more went to General von Lossow and insisted not only that the Reichswehr intervene but also that, as prearranged, weapons belonging to the patriotic associations be distributed to them. (These weapons were now stored in the government armories.) To Hitler's astonishment, the general curtly refused both requests. He knew his duty to the security of the state, he declared stiffly. Anyone stirring up disorder would be shot. Colonel Seisser, the head of the Bavarian Landespolizei (state police) took a similar line.

Hitler had once more worked himself into an almost hopeless position. His only choice seemed to be to back down on the whole issue. But, true to his character, he refused to concede defeat. Instead, he doubled his stake. He had already warned Lossow that the “Red rallies” would take place only if the demonstrators marched “over his dead body.” Some of this was histrionics, but there was always a measure of dead earnest in Hitler's statements. He was ready to cut off his escape routes and face up to the alternatives of all or nothing.

At any rate, Hitler had the preparations intensified. Weapons, munitions, and vehicles were collected feverishly. Finally, the Reichswehr was tricked by a sudden coup. In direct defiance of Lossow's orders, Hitler sent Röhm and a small group of SA men to the barracks. Explaining that the government feared leftist disorders on May 1, they helped themselves to carbines and machine guns. Such open preparations for a putsch sowed alarm among some of Hitler's nationalist allies. There were open clashes within the Kampfbund, but in the meantime events had caught up with the actors. Obeying Hitler's announcement of an emergency, party stalwarts from Nuremberg, Augsburg, and Freising had arrived in Munich. Many of them were armed. A group from Bad Tolz came with an old field cannon hitched to their truck. The units from Landshut, led by Gregor Strasser and Heinrich Himmler, brought along several light machine guns. All these groups were acting in anticipation of the revolutionary uprising they had been dreaming of for years and which Hitler had repeatedly promised them. They were expecting a “wiping out of the November disgrace,” as the grim slogan had it. When Police Commissioner Nortz issued a warning to Kriebel, the answer was: “I can no longer turn back; it is too late... whether or not blood flows.”