Hitler: Ascent, 1889-1939 (38 page)

Hitler paired his extreme exaggeration of Germany’s economic plight with extremist polemics against Gustav Stresemann’s policy of international reconciliation. For Hitler, the 1924 Dawes Plan was nothing but a grandiose way of sapping the German people’s energy. The 1925 Treaty of Locarno represented “boundless subordination and the deepest dishonour.”
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As he had previously with Walther Rathenau, Hitler did not shy away from
ad hominem
attacks on Stresemann, accusing him of being a traitor. For Hitler, reaching any agreements with Germany’s “irreconcilable enemy” France was like “trying to form a coalition between the goose and the fox.” The German foreign minister owed his office to “the grace of France,” Hitler sneered, and thus was more concerned about the interests of his French colleague Aristide Briand than those of the German people.
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Hitler took the same view that conservatives in general did of “Weimar culture,” seeing it only as a symptom of decadence and decline. In Hitler’s mind, German literature and art had been “made obscene and dirty.” Even in the birthplace of German classicism itself, Weimar, Hitler raged in one of his speeches, “the poisoners of the German soul are leading their filthy existence and defiling the sites of the most elevated art with nigger and jazz music.” One task of National Socialism was to “clean out this manure.”
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Hitler blamed the “degeneration” of German culture on the “corrosive” influence of Jews. Not only did Jews control the economy via the banks and the stock exchanges, Hitler thundered in August 1925, they also dominated German journalism, literature, art, theatre and cinema: “Today, they are in almost complete control culturally just as they are in total control economically over the entire world.”
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Incarceration had done nothing to dampen Hitler’s fanatic anti-Semitism, which he put on display not only at closed party meetings, but in public mass events. No other speaker in the NSDAP—not even Goebbels or Julius Streicher—raged more furiously against the “Galician riff-raff and criminal gangs…the international Jewish stranglers of blood…[and] the drones of international high finance.”
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The people of the world, he promised in June 1927, would “breathe easier” once they were liberated from the Jews. On 24 February 1928, the eighth anniversary of the announcement of the party programme, Hitler may have proclaimed: “If [the Jew] behaves, he can stay—if not, out with him!” But in the same breath he insisted that “
We
are the masters of our house” and issued an unmistakably murderous threat: “One cannot compete with parasites, one can only remove them.”
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Hitler could, of course, moderate his anti-Semitism when he was speaking before smaller, select audiences. One example is the speech he gave on 28 February 1926 in front of an exclusive conservative-nationalist club in Hamburg, in the great hall of the luxury Atlantic Hotel. Here Hitler’s talk avoided any mention of the “Jewish question,” focusing instead on the “danger of the Marxist movement.” His understanding of the term “Marxist” was very broad, however, and included both the Social Democrats and the Communists. But because the moderate Hamburg SPD, which cooperated with bourgeois liberals, was not a suitable target for attack, Hitler concentrated his bile on the KPD, whose leader, Ernst Thälmann, came from the northern German port city. Hitler deliberately called upon the fears of his audience, which included leading Hamburg merchants, of the Communists coming to power. “If Communism were to triumph today, two million people would be making their way to the gallows,” he prophesied. But there was a way of “smashing and eradicating the Marxist world view,” which was the aim of his own movement. The NSDAP, Hitler proclaimed, knew “that toxins could only be combated with anti-toxins,” and the party would not rest “until the last Marxist has either been converted or eliminated.” The initially reserved audience greeted these words with frenetic applause, and at the end of the speech, when Hitler proclaimed his vision of a “Germany of freedom and power,” he was showered with ovations and shouts of “Heil.”
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For Hitler the categories “Jewish” and “Marxist” were interchangeable. Depending on the situation, his warnings for the future could oscillate between “the international Jewish world enemy” and “the international Marxist poisoning of peoples.” On occasion he would combine the two objects of hatred. “The Jew is and remains the world’s enemy, and his greatest weapon, Marxism, is and remains a plague for humanity,” he wrote in February 1927 in the
Völkischer Beobachter
.
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By destroying Marxism, Hitler believed that he could eradicate class conflict and create a “genuine ethnic-popular community.” He was also constantly coming up with new phrases to describe the marriage of nationalism and socialism, the unification of “workers of the mind and workers of the fist.” National Socialism knew neither bourgeois nor proletarian, only “the German working for his people.”
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Sometimes Hitler recalled his experiences at the Western Front as a harbinger of the sort of national community he envisioned. “There once was a place in Germany without class divisions,” he declared in a speech. “That was among the companies of soldiers at the front. There were no recognisable bourgeois and proletarian characteristics there. There was the company and only the company.”
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One of the few new topics Hitler adopted after 1924 was the necessity, first advanced in December 1925, of acquiring “living space” to secure adequate food supplies for the German people. His speech at the Weimar rally in 1926 made a special point of emphasising the demand that population size and available territory be calibrated—by force if necessary. “We have to solve this question with a rough hand and a sharp sword,” Hitler proclaimed.
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After finishing the second volume of
Mein Kampf
in the autumn of 1926, he had repeatedly included the “space question” in his speeches. Hitler made no bones of the fact that he intended to resolve this issue with violence as soon as Germany’s military position was strong enough. In his first public speech after the Bavarian ban was lifted, in Vilsbiburg, he had cited the example of eastern colonisation in the Middle Ages. Back then, Hitler claimed, “the territory east of the Elbe River had been conquered with the sword and handed over to the fist of the German farmer.” In early April 1927 in Zirkus Krone, he addressed an imaginary enemy: “And should you not give us space in the world, then we will take that space ourselves.”
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Later in 1927, Hitler took to citing the title of a popular novel of the previous year: Hans Grimm’s
Volk ohne Raum
—“A People without Space.” Then, in early February 1928, he first publicly used the term
Lebensraum—
“living space.”
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Hitler rarely made it explicitly clear that the territory in question would come at the expense of the Soviet Union, but his audience could hardly have been under any illusions about the direction in which his expansionism was aimed.

Hitler’s full-throated proclamations must have appeared rather delusional at a time when the NSDAP was still only a marginal player within German politics. To dispel doubts among his followers, Hitler seized every occasion to stress how crucial “blind, fanatical belief” was to the ultimate triumph of the movement. If one had “the holiest of faiths,” he reassured them, “even what is most impossible becomes possible.”
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That prompted Hess to write to their former fellow Landsberg inmate Walter Hewel in late March 1937:

This is where the great popular leader coincides with the great founder of a religion. An apodictic belief has to be installed in listeners. Only then can the mass of followers be led where they are supposed to be led. They will follow their leader even in the face of setbacks, but only if they have been instilled with absolute faith in the absolute rectitude of their own will, of the Führer’s mission and the mission of their people.
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National Socialism depicted itself as a political religion. “What does Christianity mean for us today?” Goebbels scoffed. “National Socialism is a religion.”
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This view corresponded to the party’s inflation of itself to a “community of faith” and its programme to an “ideological creed.” Like the biblical apostles, the task of the Führer’s disciples was to spread Nazi principles “like a gospel among our people.”
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This was one reason why Hitler staunchly refused to consider any amendment of the original twenty-five-point NSDAP manifesto. “Absolutely not,” he told Hanfstaengl. “It’s staying as it is. The New Testament, too, is full of contradictions, but that did nothing to hinder the spread of Christianity.”
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At the Nazi Party’s 1925 Christmas celebrations, Hitler drew a revealing parallel between early Christianity and the “movement.” Christ had also been initially mocked, and yet the Christian faith had become a massive global movement. “We want to achieve the same thing in the arena of politics,” Hitler stated. A year later he was explicitly casting himself as Jesus’s successor, who would complete his work. “National Socialism,” Hitler proclaimed, “is nothing other than compliance with Christ’s teachings.”
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In his public speeches, especially in their final crescendos, Hitler often utilised religious vocabulary. He would conclude with a final “Amen!” or invoke his “faith in a new Holy German Empire” or call upon “Our Lord to give me the strength to continue my work in the face of all the demons.”
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He constantly warned his followers that there would be no shortage of sacrifices along the way. Here, too, he drew parallels with early Christianity: “We have a path of thorns to go down and are proud of it.” The “blood witnesses” who had lost their lives for the Nazi movement, Hitler promised, would enjoy the sort of reverence once reserved for the Christian martyrs.
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To reinforce this idea, the annual party rally rituals included the reverent handing over of the “bloody banner” carried during the putsch of 1923, combined with a personal oath of loyalty to the Führer.

Yet although the Nazis had no scruples about appropriating religious sentiments and customs for political purposes, they also maintained strict neutrality towards the Christian confessions. In his lead article concerning the reconstitution of the party in February 1925, Hitler had opposed any attempt to “drag religious quarrels into the movement,” insisting that the “members of both confessions must be able to peacefully coexist” in the NSDAP.
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Hitler was thus enraged when the Gauleiter of Thuringia and author of the anti-Semitic bestseller
Sin against Blood
, Arthur Dinter, began promoting the “pure gospel of the saviour” and advocated dismantling the Protestant and Catholic Churches. In late September 1927, Hitler removed Dinter from office,
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informing him the following July: “As the leader of the National Socialist movement and as a person who has a blind faith in belonging one day to the ranks of those who make history, I see your activity as damaging the National Socialist movement by connecting the party with your reformist goals.” Dinter was subsequently kicked out of the NSDAP.
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The party made little headway from the mid-1920s, as the period of relative stability for the Weimar Republic continued. Nonetheless, those years were crucial to its internal development. It was then that the foundations were laid for the movement’s later dramatic rise. “It may not be visible from the outside and it may be more in silent preparation for future triumphs,” Hess wrote to Walter Hewel in late November 1927, “but gradually the predictions for the year 1927, and our cause, are coming to pass.”
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Between 1925 and 1928, the NSDAP was irrevocably transformed into a “Führer party,” focused around a single leader at its head. “There can be no doubt who the leader and commander is,” Hess wrote. In that letter to Hewel, Hess expanded upon the importance for the movement of the so-called “Führer principle,” based on “absolute authority directed downwards and absolute duty directed upwards.” As Hess explained, Hitler “issues commands to the Gauleiter, the Gauleiter issue commands to the Ortsgruppenführer [local leaders] and the Ortsgruppenführer issue commands to the broad masses of supporters directly under them. Duty…follows the reverse path.” This, for Hess, represented “Germanic democracy.”
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The system relied on party members’ sense of personal connection to their Führer and their unquestioning subordination. Anyone who violated this principle was sure to be sanctioned. When a local Nazi leader from the Munich district of Schwabing, Ernst Woltereck, complained about Hitler’s unsatisfactory public image and threatened to resign, Hitler called a meeting of the Schwabing chapter in June 1926, at which he made clear that the party was built on authority and subordination. He as Führer would not tolerate a minor chapter leader criticising his superiors. “Were this to be tolerated,” Hitler asserted, “the party would be dead and buried.”
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In May 1927, frustrated by the lack of progress the party was making, the Munich SA under Edmund Heines rebelled. Once again Hitler took a hard line, ordering that “those who refuse to subordinate themselves have no place in the party and especially not in the SA.”
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By the end of the month, Heines had been expelled from both the party and the SA. When internal disagreements did not call his leadership into question, however, Hitler refused to get involved. Indeed, his leadership style encouraged rivalries between his subordinates. In his crudely Darwinist world view, such feuds were part of a process of natural selection that would favour the strongest and most capable of his followers. “He keeps considerable distance from minor everyday questions,” Hess wrote approvingly. That contributed to his aura as a “coolly superior…born politician of stature—a statesman.”
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