Hitler (49 page)

In the spring of 1927 the governments of Saxony and Bavaria, no longer nervous about the Nazi party, decided to lift the ban on speeches by the party leader. Hitler readily gave the requested assurances that he would not pursue any unlawful goals or use any unlawful means. But speak he would, and glaring red posters announced that at eight o'clock in the evening of March 9 Adolf Hitler would once again, for the first time since the ban, address the people of Munich at the Krone Circus. The police report on the meeting reveals how deep an impression the event made on the informant himself:

 

The circus is considerably more than half filled by ten minutes past seven. From the stage hangs the red swastika flag. The stage is reserved for prominent party members and the speaker. The seats in the boxes also seem to be reserved for special party members, since they are assigned by brownshirts. A band has assembled on the platform. No other decorations were to be seen.

The people on the benches are excited and filled with anticipation. They talk about Hitler, about his former oratorical triumphs at the Krone Circus. The women, who are present in great numbers, still seem to be enthusiastic about him.... There is a craving for sensation in the hot, insipid air. The band plays rousing marches while fresh crowds keep pouring in. The
Völkische Beobachter
is hawked about. At the ticket office each visitor is given a copy of the Program of the National Socialist Workers' Party, and at the entrance a slip is pressed into everyone's hand warning against reacting to provocations and emphasizing the need to maintain order. Small flags are sold: “Welcoming flags, 10 pfennig apiece.” They are either black-white-red or entirely red, and show the swastika. The women are the best customers.

Meanwhile the ranks are filling. “We have to make it like the old days!” people are saying. The arena fills.... Most of the spectators belong to the lower economic groups, workers, small artisans, small tradesmen. Many youths in windbreakers and knee socks. Few, hardly any, representatives of the radical working class are to be seen. The people are well dressed; some men are even in evening dress. The crowd in the circus, which is nearly entirely filled, is estimated at seven thousand persons.

It is now half past eight. From the entrance come roars of
Heil.
Brownshirts march in, the band plays, the crowd cheers noisily. Hitler appears in a brown raincoat, walks swiftly, accompanied by his retinue, the whole length of the circus and up to the stage. The people gesticulate in happy excitement, wave, continually shout
Heil,
stand on the benches, stamp their feet thunderously. Then comes a trumpet blast, as in the theater. Sudden silence.

Amid roars of welcome from the spectators, the brownshirts now march into the hall in rank and file, led by two rows of drummers and then the flag. The men salute in the manner of the Fascists, with outstretched arms. The audience cheers them. On the stage Hitler has similarly stretched out his arm in salute. The music surges up. Flags move past, glittering standards with swastikas inside the wreath and with eagles, modeled on the ancient Roman military standards. Perhaps about two hundred men file past. They fill the arena and stand at attention while the flag-bearers and standard-bearers people the stage....

Hitler steps swiftly to the front of the stage. He speaks without a manuscript, at first in a slow, emphatic way; later the words come tumbling forth, and in passages spoken with exaggerated emotion his voice becomes thin and high and ceases to be intelligible. He gesticulates with arms and hands, jumps agitatedly about, and is bent on fascinating the thousands in the audience, who listen with close attention. When applause interrupts him, he raises his hands theatrically. This protest, which occurs frequently in the later course of the speech, strikes a histrionic note, and indeed is deliberately overplayed. The oratorical performance in itself... did not strike this observer as anything remarkable.
³⁷

 

That Hitler could speak again did not remove the difficulties of the party. Yet Hitler himself, it now appeared, had gained rather than lost by the ban. For he had been tided over the period of general amused indifference, when meeting halls would have remained empty and his name and message would have only become a bore. He soon realized this and behaved accordingly, In 1927 he spoke in public fifty-six times; two years later he had reduced his public appearances to twenty-nine. There are indications that at this period he began to see the advantages of living in semidivine remoteness. The moment he returned to the masses, he was competing with the overpowering force of unfavorable circumstances. Failures began to pile up, and with this came criticism from within the party. It was directed equally against his style of leadership and against the stringently maintained policy of legality. Even Goebbels, so embarrassingly subservient to Hitler and one of the prophets of the Führer cult, assailed the strictly legal course in his 1927 pamphlet,
Der Nazi-Sozi.
Answering the question of what the party should do if its efforts to obtain a majority failed, Goebbels broke out with: “What then? Then we'll clench our teeth and get ready. Then we'll march against this government; then we'll dare the last great coup for Germany; then revolutionaries of the word will become revolutionaries of the deed. Then we'll make a revolution!”

Hitler's personal conduct also met with criticism, particularly his arrogance toward tried-and-true party comrades. One old party man objected to “the much-discussed wall around Herr Hitler.” There were murmurings about Hitler's negligent conduct of party business and his jealousy complex in regard to his niece. In the early summer of 1928, when his chauffeur Emil Maurice surprised him in Geli Raubal's room, Hitler raised his riding whip in such threatening fury that Maurice saved himself only by leaping out the window. With “unconditional devotion” the chairman of the Investigation and Mediation Committee, Walter Buch finally felt compelled to express his view “that you, Herr Hitler, are gradually falling into a degree of misanthropy that causes me worry.”
³⁸

Faced with these rumblings within the party, Hitler canceled the planned party rally for 1928 and instead convoked a meeting of the leaders in Munich. He forbade all preparatory local meetings, and when he opened the session on August 31 he delivered a highly charged speech in praise of obedience and discipline. Only totally committed elites could constitute a “historic minority,” he declared, and thus shape history. To remain operative, the NSDAP must have at most 100,000 members: “That is a number to work with!” All the rest must be followers, rallying around and serving the purposes of the party only in specific cases. Scornfully, he dismissed a motion to elect a “senate” to aid him. He did not think much of advisers, he said. The motion had been offered by Gauleiter Artur Dinter of Thuringia; he had Dinter removed from his post and soon afterward expelled from the party. There had, it is true, been some background to this seemingly arbitrary action. Hitler had previously had a correspondence with Gauleiter Dinter in which he announced that as a politician he “claimed infallibility” and “had the blind faith that he would some day belong among those who make history.”

Shortly afterward, a meeting was convoked that had not been organized in the form by then becoming customary: a briefing session in which Hitler simply issued commands. During the discussion Hitler sat silent, with a markedly bored or sardonic expression, gradually creating such a sense of paralysis and futility that the meeting wound to an end in general resignation. One of the participants later conjectured that Hitler had permitted the meeting to be held only in order to show how his indifference could ruin it.

Hitler felt his chance would come as leader of an inconspicuous but rigorously organized party. Personally, he saw no reason for discouragement, for in establishing his hold over the party he had made important progress. Henceforth, the party sometimes referred to itself officially as the “Hitler movement.” Without significant support from influential patrons and powerful institutions, the movement was now proving that if it could not win, it could at least survive on its own resources.

On May 20, 1928, a new Reichstag was elected. The NSDAP placed ninth, with 2.6 per cent of the votes, winning twelve seats. Among its deputies were Gregor Strasser, Gottfried Feder, Goebbels, Frick, and Hermann Göring, who in the interval had returned home from Sweden bringing with him a wealthy wife and extensive connections. Hitler himself, being “stateless,” had not been a candidate. But with his remarkable capacity for turning his embarrassments and disabilities to advantage, he used this circumstance to reinforce his pose of the unique leader who refused to make any concessions to the despised parliamentary system and stood far above the scramble, the deals and greeds of daily life. If he had decided to let the party participate in the elections—a decision taken only after long vacillation—it had been partly out of the desire to get a share in the privileges of Reichstag deputies. Sure enough, a week after the elections Goebbels wrote an article that cast quite another light on the party's pretense to legalism: “I am not a member of the Reichstag. I am an HOI. A Holder of Immunity. An HORP. A Holder of a Railroad Pass. What do we care about the Reichstag? We have been elected against the Reichstag, and we will exercise our mandate in the interests of our employer.... An HOI is allowed to call a dungheap a dungheap and does not have to use such euphemisms as ‘government.' ” Goebbels concluded this amazing confession with: “This startles you, does it? But don't think we're finished yet.... You'll have lots more fun with us before it's over. Just wait till the comedy begins.”

Yet such remarks seemed mere rhetorical taunts. The NSDAP remained a splinter party given to
outré
gestures. But Hitler himself, sure of his ground, his cadres ready for action, waited coolly for a new radicalization of the masses. Once conditions had brought that about, he would be able to make the breakthrough and transform his following into a mass party. In spite of all his organization bustle, he had so far not managed to emerge from the shadow of the republic, which by now was functioning competently, if without any special brilliance. It sometimes seemed as if the nation were at last ready to make its peace with the republic, to accept the gray dullness of Weimar and be reconciled to the ordinariness of history. The Reichstag election had, it is true, revealed a degree of disintegration going on in the bourgeois center, as manifested by the rise of many splinter parties. The Nazi party, moreover, could now count 150,000 members. But at the beginning of 1929 the Bonn sociologist Joseph A. Shumpeter spoke of the “impressive stability in our social conditions” and concluded: “In no sense, in no area, in no direction, are eruptions, upheavals or disasters probable.”

But Hitler understood things much more keenly. In a speech given during this brief happy period in the history of the republic, he remarked on the psychology of the Germans: “We have a third value: our fighting spirit. It is there, only buried under a pile of foreign theories and doctrines. A great and powerful party goes to a lot of trouble to prove the opposite, until suddenly an ordinary military band comes along and plays. Then the straggler comes to, out of his dreamy state; all at once he begins to feel himself a comrade of the marching men, and joins their columns. That's the way it is today. Our people only have to be shown this better course—and you'll see, we'll start marching.”
³⁹

He was waiting for his cue. The question was whether the party could preserve, over the long pull, its dynamism, its hopes, its conception of its aims, and its image of the chosen leader—the whole system of fictions and credulities on which it was founded. In an analysis of the May, 1928, elections Otto Strasser had complained that “National Socialism's tidings of redemption” had not caught the ear of the masses and that the party had failed to make any inroads into the proletarian circles. In fact, the party's following consisted chiefly of lower-grade white-collar workers, artisans, some farm groups, and young people inclined to romantic protest—the advance guard of those classes of the German population who were especially susceptible to the rousing music of “an ordinary military band.”

Only a few months later, the scene had totally changed.

 

 

 

 

Following our old method, we once more take up the struggle and say: Attack! Attack! Always attack! If someone says we can't possibly have another try, remember that I can attack not just one more time but ten times over.

Adolf Hitler

 

Hitler launched his first massive offensive against the consolidated system of the republic in the summer of 1929, and at once his advance carried him a long way. He had long been in search of a slogan that could mobilize the masses. Suddenly, Gustav Stresemann's foreign policy offered a breach into which he could hurl the full weight of his propaganda. The debate over reparations had broken out afresh, and Hitler mustered all his energy to move the NSDAP from its role of isolated sectarian party and propel it into the limelight of national politics. By good luck his campaign coincided in time with the world-wide Depression, and derived its psychological impact from economic conditions. This gave him the opportunity to test his forces, his organization, and his tactics in a kind of prelude. The struggle that raged around the reparations question brought on the crisis that was to grip the republic to the very end, a crisis initiated by Hitler and cleverly fomented until the republic broke down.

Strictly speaking, the point of departure came with the death of Gustav Stresemann at the beginning of October, 1929. The German Foreign Minister had worn himself out trying to put over his subtle foreign policy. Branded as a “compliance policy,”
^*
it actually aimed at gradual abrogation of the Versailles Treaty. Until shortly before his death Stresemann, though with considerable doubts, had backed the reparations arrangements drafted by a committee of experts under the chairmanship of Owen D. Young, the American banker. The Young Plan represented a distinct improvement on the existing conditions. Moreover, thanks to Stresemann's obstinacy and diplomatic adroitness, it had been coupled with the promise of the Allied occupying forces evacuating the Rhineland before the date stipulated by treaty.