Hitler (52 page)

Hitler surpassed all his rivals in knowing how to give the color of a political decision to the personal wishes and despairs of the masses, and to insinuate his own aims into those who held the most divergent views and expectations. When spokesmen of other parties encountered the populace, their own lack of faith became apparent despite their efforts to win the people. They, too, had no answers and could count only on the solidarity of the powerless in the face of disaster. Hitler, on the other hand, took an optimistic and aggressive tone. He showed confidence in the future and cultivated his animosities. “Never in my life,” he declared, “have I been so well disposed and inwardly contented as in these days.”
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Hitler was also able to ring many changes on his cries of alarm. He appealed to bewildered people terrified by the prospect of being declassed, people who felt threatened equally by the Right and the Left, by capitalism and by Communism, and who blamed the existing system for having failed them. The program Hitler outlined rejected everything: it was anticapitalistic and antiproletarian, revolutionary and restorational; it conjured up its dire visions of the future along with nostalgic pictures of the good old days. It was of a piece with and helped sustain the paradox of a revolutionary attitude that denounced the present state of things and aimed at reinstating the way things used to be. Hitler deliberately cut across all the traditional fronts. But while he took up a radical position far outside the “system,” he kept asserting that he was in no way responsible for the prevailing misery, and that those very conditions proved how right he was in condemning the existing state of affairs.

As if to confirm his charges, the parliamentary institutions of the republic failed their first serious test. The coalition government fell apart in the spring of 1930, even before the Depression reached its peak. The end of the coalition was a signal for multitudes to abandon the republic. What precipitated the breakup of the coalition was a long-simmering but essentially trivial disagreement among the parties on how the costs of unemployment insurance were to be distributed. But in fact Chancellor Hermann Muller's government was shattered by the general tendency to flee to the extremes, a tendency that manifested itself in all the political camps. The process revealed how thin the underlying support of the republic was, how little loyalty it could command. In the preceding few years the Weimar Republic had made some considerable achievements; but there had been a grayness about its competence, so that even during its best years it had, fundamentally, only bored people. It had remained for Hitler to tap those wellsprings which the republican politicians in their hard-working, commonplace efficiency had neither recognized nor utilized. Among these were: the craving for utopia and for suprapersonal goals; an idealism that welcomed the appeal to generosity and the spirit of sacrifice; the quest for leaders in whom the opaqueness of modern power processes would be made visible; and the demand for some interpretation of the present misery that would give heroic stature to those who were suffering it.

The slogans that formulated the “spiritual” alternatives did far more than the vague economic pledges to lead the disoriented masses toward the Nazi party. Hitler himself put aside his reservations about a mass party. For the first time the flexibility of the widely ramified party organization proved its worth. The NSDAP could effortlessly absorb the most heterogeneous elements, for it was not restricted to a single class and not hampered by a rigid program. It could offer room to persons of every background, every age, every motivation. Its membership appeared peculiarly structureless; certainly no strict class analysis applied to it. We would be wrong to see it solely as a movement of the reactionary bourgeois and peasant masses, whose impetus came chiefly from the material interests of its following. To take this view would be to miss the decisive factor in its rise.

Small tradesmen, peasants, industrialists and consumers had all become indispensable to the party. The manifold contradictions among these groups stood in the way of the formation of a class movement. Sooner or later every party had come up against this barrier. It seemed insuperable. Certainly in a period of intense economic and social distress it could not be overcome simply by making empty promises to all and sundry. There were too many politicians trying the same dodge; it soon ceased to fool anyone. Those who concerned themselves with material questions could win the masses only by promising higher wages and lower prices, more dividends and fewer taxes, better pensions, higher tariffs, higher prices to the farmers and lower prices to the consumers. But Hitler's great trick was to leap over the economic contradictions and offer instead high-sounding principles. When he spoke of material interests it was chiefly to make an effective contrast between himself and his opponents. “I do not promise happiness and prosperity, like the others,” he would occasionally proclaim. “I can only say this one thing: we want to be National Socialists; we want to realize that we cannot rightfully be nationalistic and shout, ‘Deutschland, Deutschland iiber alles' when millions of us have to go on the dole and have nothing to wear.” For his key weapon was his understanding that the behavior of human beings is not motivated exclusively by economic forces or interests. He counted instead on their need to have a suprapersonal reason for living and trusted in the power of an “alternative culture” to dissolve class limits. This alternative was a package of slogans—an invocation of national honor, national greatness, oaths of loyalty and readiness for sacrifice. He called for dedication without prospect of advantage: “And you will see—we'll be marching!”

Nevertheless, the party still won influence and members chiefly among those middle-level groups who had clung to the rudiments of their political ideas and who had all along tended to flee from dubious existential situations into the shelter of a stern and uncomplicated system of order. Their wishes, resentments, and interests were not too well represented by the existing spread of parties. The unloved republic had alienated them from politics, but now hunger and anxiety sent them in search of “their” party in a series of aimless vacillations. In their encounter with Hitler they succumbed, to be sure, to his great demagogic powers. But almost equally they were drawn by a similarity of destinies: he, too, unmistakably bourgeois, sharing that overwhelming fear of being declassed, a failure in civilian life until he discovered politics, which had liberated him and lifted him socially. Wouldn't the same magic affect them? Hitler's fate seemed to be the apotheosis of their own.

It was this “sinking middle class” who joined the NSDAP in vast numbers and dominated the sociological picture of the party during those years. Yet it would be wrong to assume a direct link between economic distress and the appeal of the party. Its greatest increment of members came not in the big cities and industrial regions where the slump had struck hardest, but in the small towns and rural areas. For there, against the background of an on the whole still intact order of things, economic crisis was felt as far more elemental and catastrophic than in the big cities, which had always known such ups and downs.
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As the Depression went on, however, the Nazi party began winning its first successes among the workers. Gregor Strasser even tried to set up an organization of party cells in every shop to combat what was called “shop Marxism” (Goebbels coined the slogan, “A Nazi cell on top in every shop”). What remained of the Nazi Left was desperately trying to keep its social-revolutionary workers' party from degenerating into a collecton of anti-Semites and petty bourgeois. “Winning a single worker is incomparably more valuable than declarations of adherence by a dozen Excellencies or ‘superior' personages in general.” By and large, Strasser's efforts failed. But what the Nazi party for a long time could not achieve within the class-conscious proletariat, it did achieve more and more among the growing masses of the unemployed. The SA proved to be an ideal catchment basin. In Hamburg, of 4,500 members of the SA, 2,600 were unemployed—nearly 60 per cent. Party stalwarts would be posted outside relief offices, where the jobless had to report twice a week, to hand out the propaganda sheet,
The Jobless,
which was skillfully slanted toward the problems of this group. They would deliberately start long discussions with the men who were standing around, and thus put across the Nazi message.

Counteraction by the Communists, who saw the Nazis challenging them in their very own domain, led to brawls and street battles. Step by step the numbers involved in these struggles increased, until gradually there developed that “silent civil war” which until January, 1933, left behind it a thin but steadily bleeding trail. Then it came to an abrupt end when the one side seized power.

The battles with the Communists had begun as early as March, 1929, in the area of Dithmarschen (Schlesing-Holstein). During a fierce brawl, two members of the SA (a farmer named Hermann Schmidt and a cabinetmaker named Otto Streibel) had been killed and thirty persons injured, some of them gravely. Hereafter the strife shifted to the big cities whose working-class districts and networks of alleys served as a grim terrain for a form of guerrilla warfare. Corner cafes and basement bistros served as bases for the belligerents; these were the so-called storm pubs; one contemporary described his as a “fortified position in the battle zone.” As early as May 1, 1929, hostilities broke out on Berlin's East End between the storm troopers and the Communists' military organization, the Red Front Fighters League. For days whole rows of streets were in the grip of virtual war; the strife resulted in nineteen dead and forty wounded, most of them severely. It took massive intervention by the police, ultimately supported by armored cars, to stop the fighting.

Berlin was now moving more and more into the center of the Nazi strategy for seizing power. The city was traditionally leftist, with the Marxist parties there far outstripping all rivals in strength. For that very reason it was the bastion which had to be taken. And Gauleiter Goebbels had just the temperament to pit his tiny following against the “Reds” right in the heart of their power, where they imagined themselves unassailable. “Adolf Hitler devours Karl Marx!” was one of the slogans with which Goebbels launched his offensive. From the bourgeois suburbs where the Nazi party had led a clubbish existence taken up chiefly with internal squabbles, Goebbels sent the members straight toward the bleak proletarian districts in the northern and eastern parts of the city. For the first time someone was disputing the Left's control of the streets and the shops. Goebbels himself, sallow, looking in need of sleep, wearing a leather jacket, was also often on the scene, and became a well-known figure in the period's gallery of types. The nervousness of the Left—which for too long had fobbed off its shadow play of world revolution on increasingly skeptical masses—was reflected in the slogan issued by the Communist Party district leadership in Berlin in answer to Goebbels' competition: “Drive the Fascists out of the shops! Strike them wherever you meet them!”

Following Hitler's example, Goebbels also developed his tactics by studying his opponent's methods. The slogan squads, the parading bands, the political activity on the job, the system of street cells, the mass demonstrations, the door-to-door canvassing—all this represented techniques of building the party long practiced by the socialists, combined with the “grand Munich style” Hitler had created. Goebbels added a few intellectual and metropolitan trappings to the party's provincial look, thereby making it attractive to more sophisticated strata of the population. He was witty, hard-boiled, and cynical in a way that usually impresses the public. Labeled by his adversaries “chief bandit of Berlin,” he adopted this insult as an honorary title.

What distinguished the Nazis from conservatives of the old school was their absence of false pride about the manner of achieving power. They were more than willing to learn from their opponents, and this gave their reactionary notions a cast of modernity. They were far more attentive to the radical leftist press than to the bourgeois papers, and in their own publications they often printed “significant sections” from Communist instructions, applying them to their own following. They tried to throw their opponents off balance by rude behavior—again borrowing from Communist practice—while at the same time pluming themselves on their innocence and idealism. “Heroes with the hearts of big children” and “Christlike socialists” were among the descriptions Goebbels gave to the Nazis in the process of creating a martyr out of the SA leader Horst Wessel. In actuality Wessel had been shot by a Communist rival for the affections of a slut; the killing was at least in part a matter of jealousy.

One of Goebbels' most effective tactics was to exhibit the heavily bandaged victims of street battles on stretchers beside his speaker's platform. The incident in Dithmarschen had confirmed the propagandist value of the dead and wounded, and the leaders of the party had seen that a few bloody victims were a good investment. According to police reports, the party membership rolls increased by 30 per cent after that affair. The report stated that since the battle “simple old peasant women are wearing the swastika on their blue work smocks. In talking with such old mothers you sensed at once that they knew nothing at all about the aims and intentions of the National Socialist Party. But they are convinced that all honest people in Germany today are being exploited, that the government is incompetent and... only the National Socialists can save the country from this alleged misery.”

The NSDAP made its most remarkable inroads among the youth. More than any other political party it was able to exploit the state of mind of the younger generation. In the nature of things the generation from eighteen to thirty had been especially hard hit by the Depression. Their ambition and their desire to prove themselves had been thwarted by the prevailing mass unemployment. At once radical and looking for some way to escape reality, the young generation formed a gigantic aggressive potential. They despised their environment, the homes of their parents, their educators and traditional authorities, engaged only in restoring the old bourgeois order. The young people had long ago moved beyond that order. A contemporary poem voiced this mood: “No longer content with faith in the past and yet too sound for mere negation.” Germany, it was also said, had lost not only the war but the revolution as well, and she must make up for both.