Hitler: Ascent, 1889-1939 (40 page)

The outcome was a major setback for the NSDAP. The clear winners of the election were the left-wing parties. The SPD’s share of the vote rose from 26 to 29.8 per cent, and the KPD’s from 9 to 10.6 per cent. The Social Democrat Hermann Müller formed a grand coalition consisting of the SPD, the Centre Party, the BVP, the DDP and the DVP. The big loser was the conservative German National People’s Party (DNVP), which saw its share of the vote decline from 20.5 to 14.2 per cent. The NSDAP only polled 2.6 per cent, slightly down from their last election results in December 1924.
¹²⁵
Instead of fourteen, the party now had only twelve Reichstag deputies. They included Epp, Goebbels, Frick, Gregor Strasser, Feder and Göring, who had returned from Sweden to Germany in the autumn of 1927 under a general amnesty declared by Reich President von Hindenburg. Hitler put a positive spin on the election, which also saw the VB take a catastrophic 0.9 per cent. That caused Hitler to crow that in future there would be “only one ethnic-popular movement”—the NSDAP.
¹²⁶
But his followers were bitterly disappointed. Gregor Strasser complained that 20 May had given National Socialists “no cause for satisfaction,” while Goebbels merely noted, “Depression in me.”
¹²⁷

The NSDAP had not performed poorly everywhere, but its weakness in urban industrial centres was marked. The party had polled only 1.6 per cent in Berlin, despite Gauleiter Goebbels using every trick in the book after the temporary ban on the NSDAP in the Prussian capital was lifted.
¹²⁸
By contrast, the party had made notable gains in rural parts of Schleswig-Holstein and Lower Saxony, taking 5.2 per cent in the Weser-Ems electoral district of north-western Germany. Still, the best results were limited to the traditional Nazi strongholds of Franconia (8.1 per cent), Upper Bavaria/Swabia (6.23 per cent) and the Palatinate (5.7 per cent). In Munich, they took almost 8 per cent of the vote and remained the third most popular party behind the SPD (24 per cent) and the BVP (17 per cent). Fearing that the NSDAP might once more be banned, Hitler swore that he would sacrifice everything to prevent a grand coalition of conservatives and Social Democrats. “Munich is the headquarters of the party and must be protected,” he declared. To that end, he refused to rule out participating in a Bavarian government, but insisted that in any coalition the party must control the Justice Ministry so as to ensure there were no future prohibitions of the movement.
¹²⁹

For the party leadership, one lesson of the election was to shift their propaganda focus to rural Germany. “There better results can be achieved with lower costs in terms of time, energy and money than in the big cities,” the
Völkischer Beobachter
wrote in late May.
¹³⁰
By the autumn of 1927, the party had already stepped up its efforts to appeal to the rural population of northern Germany. On 10 December, Hitler spoke for the first time to several thousand farmers from Schleswig-Holstein, assuring them that the NSDAP was particularly keen to represent their interests.
¹³¹
In April 1928, to head off potential criticism, he amended Point 17 of the party programme, which called for a “law on the confiscation of property without compensation for public purposes.” The amendment stipulated that this demand only concerned “illicitly acquired property” and was aimed “primarily at Jewish firms that speculated in property.”
¹³²

After the election, Hitler retreated for a few weeks to Berchtesgaden. In October 1928, he rented Haus Wachenfeld for 100 marks. It was a simple holiday home in the Alpine style, owned by Margarete Winter, the widow of a northern German businessman. Hitler was accompanied by his half-sister Angela Raubal. “I immediately called my sister in Vienna,” Hitler recalled in 1942. “I told her, I’ve rented a house. ‘Do you want to come run the household?’ She came, and we moved in without delay. It was wonderful. My first Christmas up there was marvellous!” In 1933 he would convince the widow to sell him the house, which he later expanded into his “Berghof.”
¹³³

In June and July 1928, Hitler used a trip to the Obersalzberg to tackle a new book project, having given up his original idea of writing his war memoirs for Bruckmann Verlag publishers. Apparently he had hit upon the latter idea after receiving a copy of Ernst Jünger’s 1926 book
Fire and Blood
, which the author had inscribed with the dedication “For the national leader Adolf Hitler.” After
Storm and Steel
,
Battle as Internal Experience
and
Copse 125
, it was Jünger’s fourth book about his time as a soldier. Hitler, who made copious pencil notes in his copy of
Fire and Blood
, sent a thank-you letter to Jünger. “I’ve read all your works,” he wrote. “I’ve learned to appreciate you as one of the few powerful shapers of his experiences at the front. So my joy at receiving a copy of
Fire and Blood
from you personally, with your friendly dedication, was all the greater.”
¹³⁴
In September 1926, Elsa Bruckmann had told her husband that Hitler “is considering composing a war book and believes that everything is growing more vivid and is ripening within him; images are crystallising around the core which he had conceived, and are now crying out for completion.”
¹³⁵
In fact, Hitler never seems to have committed a word to paper; at least, no manuscript fragments have ever been discovered.

What did survive were 234 typed manuscript pages from the summer of 1928, which the American historian Gerhard L. Weinberg published as
Hitler’s Second Book
in 1961.
¹³⁶
Apparently Hitler dictated this text to his secretary over the course of a few weeks. In late June 1928, Hess described the content of the book in a letter to his parents: “Saturday–Sunday we’re going to Berchtesgaden, where I have an appointment…with the Tribune who is writing a new and apparently quite fine book about foreign policy.”
¹³⁷
Hitler had indeed formed a plan to present his foreign-policy views in a larger context. His interest had been sparked by the problematic status of southern Tyrol, which he had already discussed in a brochure in February 1926, a preview from the second volume of
Mein Kampf
.
¹³⁸
There he had announced his willingness to renounce German claims on southern Tyrol in favour of pursuing an alliance with Italy, which made him the target of nationalist attacks in the 1928 elections.
¹³⁹

But southern Tyrol was not the focus of the Second Book. In fact, the draft work recorded the basic principles that he had been promoting in his speeches since 1926. One was that “the battle for survival of a people” resided in bringing about a balance between population and territory, so that foreign policy was “the art of securing a people its necessary living space.” He also made it clear that eastern Europe was the only part of the continent where Germany could pursue its “territorial policies”—a view that ruled out any alliances with Russia and meant that Germany would have to court Italy and Britain as allies. In the afterword, Hitler stressed that the book was not an “essay on the Jewish question,” but he could not resist putting his paranoid anti-Semitic world view on display yet again: “Because they have no productive capabilities of their own, the Jewish people is not able to build a territorially manifested state. It relies on the labour and creative activity of other people as the basis for its own existence. The Jew thus leads a parasitic existence among the lives of other people. The ultimate goal of the Jewish struggle for survival is the enslavement of all productively active peoples.”
¹⁴⁰

On 13 July 1928, Hitler gave a speech to 5,000 people in Berlin about “German foreign policy,” in which he summarised the core points of the Second Book.
¹⁴¹
After the event, he took off with Goebbels for a week’s holiday on the North Sea island of Norderney. He did not continue working on his book manuscript, and over the course of 1929, he seems to have decided against publishing it.
¹⁴²
We can only speculate about the reasons behind his decision. Possibly Max Amann was concerned that the book would be a commercial failure. The sales figures for
Mein Kampf
had declined dramatically in 1927 and 1928, and the demand for another Hitler book may have appeared slight. Probably more significant, however, was the chance that opened up in early 1929 for the Nazi Party to work together with right-wing nationalists who were demanding a popular referendum on the Young Plan. Hitler’s wild attacks on mainstream politicians in the Second Book would have hardly served to further that cause.
¹⁴³
Scruples about how the book would be received outside Germany probably did not play a role, even if Hitler later used that argument to explain why he had not published it. In the mid-1930s he told Albert Speer that he was glad he had suppressed the Second Book: “What political difficulties would it cause me now!”
¹⁴⁴

—

With his movement in the doldrums, Hitler cancelled the 1928 party rally and instead called a “Führer conference” in Munich in late August to run parallel to a general party conference. In his role as party chairman, Hitler was at pains to elevate the mood of his supporters, which was visibly depressed. Those who make history are always in the minority, Hitler told his followers. The fact alone that both the other parties and the general public now opposed the NSDAP was “almost mathematical reason for the eventual, certain triumph of our movement.”
¹⁴⁵
But he was unable to completely dispel party members’ scepticism. Even Goebbels found Hitler’s comments “Somewhat tired—Munich level—I’m sick of that.”
¹⁴⁶
Discontent was not limited to the grass roots but was also beginning to be felt in the NSDAP headquarters. In response to a complaint from a Franconian Landtag deputy that some people had erected a protective wall around Hitler, denying others access to him, Walter Buch shot back that department heads in the party headquarters also had “to wait for days for contact with Herr Hitler.”
¹⁴⁷
However, the chairman of the investigatory and mediation committee himself became increasingly concerned about the Führer’s unreliability as well as his contemptuous treatment of his fellow party officials. In October 1928, he drafted a letter raising an issue that had been “weighing on my soul” for many weeks, namely that “you, Herr Hitler, are gradually developing a contempt for people that fills me with frightful concern.”
¹⁴⁸

Hitler could belittle loyal followers in the most hurtful fashion. The Gauleiter of Lower Bavaria, Otto Erbersdobler, witnessed one typical scene in March 1929. Hitler had ordered local SA men to drive in trucks to a Nazi event in Upper Bavaria, but in order to save money, Pfeffer von Salomon had them take the train. The following day, at the party’s Munich headquarters, Hitler gave Salomon “a real going-over…screaming at him for a good ten minutes and punctuating his already unequivocal remarks by lashing the table with his riding crop.” Hitler forbade anyone in future from “deviating from his original orders even in the slightest.” The party chairman concluded his sermon with the words: “Do we understand one another, party comrade von Pfeffer [
sic
]?” Salomon maintained his bearing, and Hitler shook his hand in the end.
¹⁴⁹

Hitler’s behaviour towards his subordinates was governed by how useful he thought them to be.
¹⁵⁰
“I never heard any praise or positive off-the-cuff remarks about party comrades,” recalled Albert Krebs, who was the leader of the party’s Hamburg chapter from 1926 to 1928 and briefly the city’s Gauleiter. With the “sharp sense of scent of an animal,” Hitler was able to distinguish between people “who invested him with boundless trust and quasi-religious faith” and those “who saw and judged him with critical distance and according to rational criteria.” Hitler did not much care for the latter category, although he only showed it to those concerned when he felt they could no longer be of any use to him.
¹⁵¹

Creating dissatisfaction was Hitler’s habit at public events by immediately withdrawing and ignoring local party members after bathing in mass adulation. Hitler kept his distance, ever concerned with maintaining his aura of inapproachability. In the spring of 1928, when Krebs gave him a tour of the newly refurbished headquarters of the Hamburg NSDAP, Hitler barely acknowledged the party comrades working there, although they were buoyant and clearly eager to get close to their hero. Hitler allowed Krebs to introduce them only with “visible reluctance” and later made a “number of sarcastic remarks” that Hamburg was to blame for his “inability to fulfil his hopes more quickly.”
¹⁵²

The NSDAP’s prospects palpably improved in the spring of 1929, however, and the critical voices faded. In the winter of 1928–9, the German economy went again into decline. In February, the number of people registered as unemployed once more broke the three-million mark.
¹⁵³
Prices for agricultural produce were falling, meaning that many farmers could no longer keep up with their interest payments. Many went bankrupt, and their property was auctioned off. In the northern German state of Schleswig-Holstein, a rural movement formed in opposition to the central government. Farmers took to the streets for demonstrations under black flags. A radical group led by a farmer named Claus Heim even carried out bomb attacks against local tax and government offices.
¹⁵⁴
The relatively stable period of the Weimar Republic was over.