Hitler: Ascent, 1889-1939 (37 page)

Goebbels felt as though he had been slapped in the face. “Was this the real Hitler?” he asked. “A reactionary?…The Russian question: completely off the mark. Italy and England: Germany’s natural allies. How horrible! Our main task is to smash Bolshevism. Bolshevism is a Jewish instrument! We must inherit Russia!” Goebbels was also shocked by Hitler’s attitude towards the expropriation issue. “The law must remain the law for aristocrats as well,” he noted in horror. “No questioning of private property! How terrible!”
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Yet despite his profound disappointment, the otherwise so loquacious secretary of the Elberfeld faction did not dare oppose Hitler openly. While Goebbels stubbornly remained silent, it was left to Gregor Strasser to defend their positions, and he was apparently so shocked by Hitler’s fury that he failed miserably. “Hesitant, tremulous and clumsy” was how Goebbels described Strasser’s reply. Feder characterised Strasser as “a beaten dog.”
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The triumph of the Munich faction was absolute. In the wake of the Bamberg conference, the Working Association North-west was finished politically, even if it did not immediately disband. In early March 1926, Strasser wrote to the Gauleiter asking them to send back all the copies of his draft manifesto, saying that he had “promised Herr Hitler to bring about the total recall of the programme.”
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It was the last time there would be any debate about the party’s main political orientation.

Hitler was clever enough not to revel in his victory. Instead of humiliating his rivals he sought to win them over with conciliatory gestures. When Gregor Strasser was injured in a car accident in Landshut, Hitler made a point of visiting him in his sickbed.
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The following September, Strasser was called to join the party leadership in Munich as propaganda director; he succeeded Hermann Esser, the very object of the initial attacks by the working association.
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Hitler was particularly eager to court Goebbels, whose political talent he had recognised early on and whose need for praise and acknowledgement were equally obvious. The way he massaged the bruised ego of the “little doctor” demonstrated his instinctive understanding of people. “Once he’s here, I’ll win him over to our side,” Hitler told his intimates in Munich. “I’ll take care of him myself. The rest of you keep your hands off.”
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In late March, Hitler invited Goebbels to come to Munich and give a speech at the prestigious Bürgerbräukeller. The man from the Rhineland was courted as soon as he arrived in Munich on the evening of 7 April. Hitler sent his personal Mercedes to pick him up. “What a reception!” Goebbels crowed.
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During the drive to his hotel, he saw giant posters advertising his speech the following evening.

“My heart was beating so hard it almost burst,” Goebbels noted about his two-and-a-half-hour address. “I was giving everything I had. There were cheers and commotion. At the end, Hitler embraced me, tears in his eyes. I’m so overjoyed.” The next day, Hitler gave Goebbels a personal tour of the party headquarters. The two men met several times, and Hitler employed his full power of persuasion to quell Goebbels’s doubts. In the end, Goebbels was converted: “I am relieved on all counts. He is a man who only sees the big picture. Such an effervescent mind can be my leader. I bow before my superior, the political genius!”

On 19 April, Goebbels spoke alongside Hitler in Stuttgart, and the two celebrated Hitler’s thirty-seventh birthday when the clock struck midnight. “Adolf Hitler, I love you, because you are simultaneously great and simple,” Goebbels gushed in his diary.
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In mid-June Hitler spoke in Essen. “A wonderful triad of gestures, facial expressions and words,” Goebbels noted. “A born motivator! One could conquer the world with this man.”
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In July, Goebbels was permitted to spend a few days with Hitler on the Obersalzberg, and he requited that honour with a pledge of absolute loyalty: “Yes, this is a man I can serve. This is what the creator of the Third Reich looks like…I am knocked sideways. This is how he is: as sweet-natured, good-hearted and mild as a child; as sly, clever and adroit as a cat; as roaringly great and gigantic as a lion. A capital fellow, a true man.”
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Goebbels’s conversion was complete. In late October 1926, Hitler named him Gauleiter of Greater Berlin, one of the most significant posts in the party’s struggle for political power.

Hitler’s triumph over the Strasser faction consolidated his position within the party, and at the party conference in Munich on 22 May 1926, he had his leadership confirmed by the rank and file. His re-election as party chairman was a foregone conclusion: the delegates burst out laughing when Max Amann asked if “someone other than Adolf Hitler should lead the party in the future.” The newly ratified constitution of the NSDAP declared the party programme of 24 February 1920 as “immutable” and decreed that the party chairman be given “the most generous leeway…and independence from majority decisions of committees.” In his state-of-the-party address, Hitler stressed that the organisation was in a “better than previous” position one year after its reconstitution. The NSDAP, Hitler said, had gained a foothold throughout Germany and recruited a number of “first-rate speakers.” He specifically mentioned “our friend from Elberfeld, Goebbels,” which the latter noted with great satisfaction in his diary.
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At the first post-ban NSDAP rally, on 3 and 4 July 1926 in Weimar, the once-fractious party was the picture of harmony. Weimar was chosen because Thuringia was one of the few German states where Hitler was still allowed to speak publicly. All petitions that could have been the source of conflict were sent in advance to “special commissions” so that the impression of internal unity would not be disrupted. In his speech at the German National Theatre on the afternoon of 4 July, Hitler summoned party members’ faith and readiness for sacrifice. “Deep and mystical—almost like a Gospel,” Goebbels noted. “I thank destiny for giving us this man!”
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After his speech, Hitler, dressed in an overcoat and puttees and with raised right arm, stood in an open-top car and inspected a parade of several thousand SA men. The Weimar rally was a milestone in the NSDAP’s transition to a “Führer party.” There had been no objections to Hitler’s claim of absolute leadership, and the reconciliation of rival factions seemed to have succeeded. Summing up the proceedings in the
Völkischer Beobachter
, Rosenberg wrote: “Longing became strength. That is one of the major results from Weimar. And it has its flag. And its Führer.”
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In truth, the Nazi Party’s development in 1926 and 1927 was far less impressive than party propaganda made it out to be. Growth in membership was slow. In late 1925, the party had little more than 27,000 members, and in late 1926 that figure was still only 50,000. It was not until March 1927 that enrolment reached 57,477—the number of members the NSDAP had had in November 1923. By the end of 1927, the number had reached 72,590 people.
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Even in Munich, where the party had its headquarters, the signs of stagnation were unmistakable. Little remained of the party’s dynamism, its near-constant presence on the streets from the early 1920s. Between 1926 and the spring of 1928, the Munich chapter never counted more than 2,500 members and thus failed to match its strength of 1923.
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Local meetings were, as a rule, poorly attended, and only a small percentage of members were actively involved in party life. The declining willingness of members to pay their dues also indicated that interest was waning.
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Moreover, the rivalries of 1924 persisted even after the carefully staged reconciliation. The everyday life of the party was full of feuding and resentment. In Munich, Goebbels’s rise in Hitler’s favour was viewed with envy. In February 1927 an essay by the Berlin Gauleiter in the
Nationalsozialistische Blätter
(National Socialist Newsletter) caused a furore. “This ever more intolerable youth has been insolent enough…to rebuke Frick so that even this level-headed man is upset,” Rudolf Buttmann wrote to his wife. “H[itler] will no doubt put the upstart scribbler back in his place in writing.”
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In fact, Hitler merely had Gottfried Feder give Goebbels a mild scolding. Just as he had in Landsberg, the Führer declined to involve himself or take sides in quarrels between his underlings.

As reflected in their election results, in the first few years after the party was reconstituted, the NSDAP played only a marginal role in German politics. The party got a scant 4,607 votes (1.7 per cent) in the Landtag election in Mecklenburg-Schwerin on 6 June 1926 and only 37,725 (1.6 per cent) in a state poll in Saxony on 31 October 1926. The NSDAP did slightly better in Thuringia on 30 January 1927, taking 27,946 votes (3.5 per cent).
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Hitler may have been convinced, as Hess reported in early 1927, that the party was headed for an imminent “upturn” but that was not the case.
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In March 1927, the Reich commissioner for public order, who was charged with monitoring the NSDAP, deemed that overall the party had made no progress: “It has not been able to bring its membership anywhere near the level it had in 1923.”
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By the summer of 1927, the liberal Reichstag deputy and lecturer at the German Academy of Politics in Berlin, Theodor Heuss, opined that the NSDAP was merely “a reminder of the period of inflation.”
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Foreign observers felt likewise. In a memorandum in late 1927, the British Foreign Office’s Germany expert John Perowne suggested that Hitler’s star was declining: “His figure and that of Ludendorff fade into insignificance.”
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With the NSDAP’s popularity fading, Bavarian Interior Minister Karl Stützel saw no reason to extend the ban on Hitler appearing publicly. On 5 March 1927, after considerable dithering, the prohibition was lifted, and Hitler was free to speak again. The following day, he took to the stage in the town of Vilsbiburg, and on 9 March he celebrated a triumphant comeback in Zirkus Krone. Some 7,000 people packed the venue, among them “members of the better classes, ladies in fur coats and representatives of the intelligentsia.” “Lust for the sensational lay in the hot, sickly-sweet air,” noted a Munich police observer. At around 9 p.m., Hitler finally appeared with his entourage. “The people acted happy and excited, waving, constantly crying ‘Heil,’ standing on the benches and stamping their feet. Then a fanfare as in the theatre. Immediate silence.” The dramaturgy of Hitler’s appearances had not changed since 1923. Hitler marched into the auditorium, followed by two rows of drummers and some 200 SA men in rank and file. “The people greeted him in the Fascist way with outstretched arms…” the police observer wrote. “Music blared. Flags were paraded, and spit-polished standards with wreathed swastikas and eagles copied from Ancient Roman insignia.”

The observer seems to have been less than impressed by Hitler’s rhetorical skills. Hitler began slowly, but then the words came tumbling out, barely comprehensible: “He gesticulated with his hands and arms, jumped about this way and that and sought to keep his audience captivated. Whenever he was interrupted by applause, he theatrically extended his arms.” Nor was the police observer, obviously no Nazi sympathiser, captivated by what Hitler had to say:

In his speech, Hitler used vulgar comparisons, tailor-made to the intellectual capacities of his listeners, and he did not shy away from even the cheapest allusions…His words and opinions were simply hurled out with dictatorial certainty as if they were unquestionable principles and facts. All this manifests itself in his language as well, which is like something merely expulsed.
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At Hitler’s second appearance in Zirkus Krone in late March, however, the hall was only two-thirds full. In early April, around 3,000 people showed up, and on 6 April Hitler was only drawing half that number. “Hitler back in front of empty seats,” the Social Democratic
Münchener Post
newspaper gleefully reported.
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After his involuntary two-year hiatus, Hitler no longer possessed the appeal as a speaker he once had. That had less to do with fatigue, even among his Munich followers, than with his refusal to take account of all the recent changes in his speeches, which still relied upon the crisis rhetoric of 1923. Hitler stodgily ignored all signs of economic recovery. “The German collapse continues,” he asserted in December 1925, declaring a few months later: “Today we are a pitiable people, plagued by misery and poverty…Seven years on from 1918, we can say that we have sunk lower and lower.”
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Hitler liked to use comparisons with Italy under Mussolini to portray conditions in Germany in the worst possible light. “There they have a flourishing economy, while here we have a decrepit industrial sector with twelve million unemployed,” he declared at a rally in Stuttgart in April 1926.
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In reality, an average of only two million Germans were unemployed that year.