Hitler: Ascent, 1889-1939 (41 page)

Hitler felt his prognoses were being confirmed. “Everything is happening exactly as we predicted,” he crowed in late March 1929. “The German economy is on its deathbed.”
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Once again, the NSDAP was the party to profit most from the incipient crisis. Between October 1928 and October 1929, the number of party members increased from around 100,000 to 150,000.
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The Nazis also achieved spectacular results in the elections to Germany’s student parliaments in 1928 and 1929.
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In November 1928, Hitler spoke to an audience of 2,500 Munich University students in the Löwenbräukeller and was greeted with rapturous applause.
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The popularity of the NSDAP also grew by leaps and bounds among the rural population. “Happily, progress is being made everywhere,” Hess reported in October 1928 about a tour by Hitler of northern Germany. “The best…was the farmers of Dithmarschen to whom the Tribune spoke in Heide in Schleswig-Holstein: fine specimens of men, giant in stature, gnarled…They sat there like blocks of ice for the first hour, but gradually they were drawn in, and the applause at the end was so furious it shocked all those who thought they knew this taciturn coast-dwelling folk.”
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In the district of Dithmarschen support for the NSDAP grew after the so-called “Blood Night” in the small village of Wöhrden on 7 March 1929. Here a brawl broke out between SA men and adherents of the KPD, which left two SA men dead and a number of people injured. That provided the NSDAP with an excuse to stage a political rally, and Hitler attended the funeral for the deceased. A police observer noted that Hitler’s appearance “made a huge impression on the populace.” Afterwards farmers’ wives wore swastikas on their aprons, and some villagers began greeting one another with “Heil.” Many farmers were “extraordinarily bitter and prepared to commit all sorts of violent acts,” the police observer noted, adding that some saw the National Socialists as their “rescuers.”
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The NSDAP registered significant increases in votes in the local state and district elections in the spring and summer of 1929. In elections in Saxony on 12 May, for instance, their share of the vote rose from 1.6 to 5 per cent. It was, Goebbels wrote, “a triumph that exceeded all our expectations.”
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The following month, in the northern German state of Mecklenburg-Schwerin, Hitler’s party polled twice as well as it had in the previous election, drawing 4.1 per cent of the vote. And in the elections for the city council in Coburg in southern Germany in late June, the NSDAP achieved the first district majority in its history.
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At its rally in Nuremberg in early August 1929, the party abundantly displayed their new self-confidence. Its political leadership touted the event as “not just the largest rally of the movement, but the largest rally of politically active, nationalist Germany itself.”
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Somewhere between 40,000 (so the police estimated) and 100,000 Nazi supporters arrived by train from all over Germany and transformed the Bavarian city once again into “a brown army camp.” Hitler kept a “Nuremberg diary” for the
Illustrierter Beobachter
, a party newspaper that had been founded in 1926, in which he described the concluding event on Nuremberg’s central market square: “Showered again and again with flowers, the brown warriors of the Third Reich march by with quick steps for three and a half hours.”
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Hitler neglected to mention that SA troops had committed numerous acts of violence. The ancient capital of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation was forced to endure a four-day state of emergency.
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The places of honour in the grandstand were occupied by Hitler’s admirers Winifred Wagner and Emil Kirdorf as well as the vice-chairman of the paramilitary veterans’ organisation, the Stahlhelm, Theodor Duesterberg, and one of the sons of former German emperor Wilhelm II, Prince August Wilhelm, who would apply to join the NSDAP in December.
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Goebbels was none too pleased: “I’m getting to know Prince August Wilhelm. Fairly senile. All these Stahlhelm reactionaries who are propped up on the grandstand are not at all what I’d like to see.”
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Hitler, however, had decided to make common cause with conservative nationalists to shoot down the Young Plan. It stipulated that France evacuate the Rhineland in 1930 and, in contrast to the heavy monetary burdens under the Dawes Plan, brought Germany financial relief but expanded the duration of German reparations payments for the First World War to 1988. For the entire German right wing, agreeing to it was tantamount to accepting the Treaty of Versailles with its “war guilt” clause.
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The hostility towards the plan was led by the media mogul Alfred Hugenberg, who had been elected chairman of the DNVP in October 1928 and was steering the party on a course of uncompromising opposition to what he called “the Weimar system.” Hugenberg’s empire included the Scherl publishing house in Berlin, the news agency Telegraphen-Union, the advertising company Allgemeine Anzeigen and the film studio Universum Film AG (Ufa). Hugenberg also provided provincial newspapers with syndicated articles and thus had enormous influence even over periodicals that he did not own. On his initiative, a “Reich Committee for the German Referendum” was formed. Its members included the leaders of the DNVP, the Stahlhelm, the Pan-Germanic League, the Reichslandbund and the Vaterland Leagues. Hitler also signed on, after it was agreed that the campaign would be directed not just against the Young Plan but the “lie” of Germany’s culpability for the First World War.
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But Hitler’s decision to participate did not meet with the universal approval of his underlings. “Some of the signatories of this call [for a referendum]!” Goebbels carped to his diary. “Dear God! With regard to Hitler I can only say: ‘I’m sorry to see you in company like this!’ ”
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Ultimately Hitler succeeded in reassuring the Berlin Gauleiter that he had no intention of being manipulated by conservative nationalists. On the contrary, he was using the referendum to advance his own aims. The National Socialists, Hitler promised, “would force their way to the forefront and unmask the DNVP.”
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The referendum, which aimed to institute a Law against the Enslavement of the German People, was a failure. While its backers did succeed, just barely, in getting enough signatures to force a vote, only 13.8 per cent of the electorate turned out for the plebiscite on 22 December 1929—far below the 50 per cent participation needed to pass the referendum. Nonetheless, the NSDAP’s involvement in the initiative paid dividends. Hitler was now an accepted figure in traditional conservative and nationalist circles, and with the help of Hugenberg’s press empire, he had been in the public eye for months. At the conclusion of the campaign, Hitler and Hugenberg made a joint appearance in the packed Zirkus Krone, at which it was clear that the press mogul was no match for the Nazi chairman as a public speaker.
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The NSDAP in general looked like a dynamic young movement, far superior to its conservative allies in terms of organisation and will-power. The Landtag elections in the autumn of 1929 also suggested that Hitler’s party benefited from their opposition to the Young Plan. On 27 October in Baden, the NSDAP polled 7 per cent, and in Thuringia on 8 December, it took 11.3 per cent of the vote. The party also did well in district elections that November.
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On the morning of 3 October 1929, Reich Foreign Minister Gustav Stresemann died after suffering two strokes. One of the most important advocates of Weimar democracy was gone. “It is an irreparable loss whose consequences cannot be foreseen,” wrote Count Harry Kessler, who was in Paris at the time. “Everyone here is talking about it—the hairdressers, the waiters, the chauffeurs and the newspaper sellers…All of Paris is treating his death almost like a national tragedy.” A similar mood prevailed among the pro-democracy camp in Germany. In Berlin 200,000 people turned out to accompany Stresemann to his final resting place on 6 October. “It was a popular funeral, not a state function,” Kessler wrote.
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Three weeks later, on 24 October 1929, Black Friday plunged the global economy into turmoil. The crisis Hitler had waited for was now at hand. It was no coincidence that at precisely that moment Hitler exchanged his humble lodgings in Thierschstrasse for a nine-room apartment on the second floor of Prinzregentenstrasse 16 in the upper-class district of Bogenhausen.
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The breakthrough to power seemed to be in reach, and Hitler needed a new domicile that would reflect his new status within German politics.

9

Dark Star Rising

“In the past I have been a prophet in many things…at least concerning the big picture,” Hitler declared in a private missive in early February 1930. Previously, he had refused to set a timetable for Nazi success. Now he claimed he could predict with “near oracular certainty” that “Germany will have overcome the lowest point of its humiliation in two and a half to three years.” He went on: “I believe that our triumph will come about in this period. With that our phase of decay will be over, and the resurgence of our people will begin.”
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In the spring of 1930 such predictions looked like the fantasies of a provincial politician convinced that he was on a divine mission. But only a few months later, after the Reichstag election of 14 September, the NSDAP could celebrate a sudden, massive upsurge in support. The Führer, previously a curiosity on the outer fringe of the political right wing, found himself catapulted into the centre of German politics. All at once what had been vague promises to his followers seemed on the verge of becoming reality. Hitler’s party was very close to assuming power.

This development was hardly a total surprise. The Landtag and district elections in 1929 had shown that the NSDAP was on the rise, as the party noticeably increased its share of the vote wherever it chose to stand. Moreover, the campaign against the Young Plan had allowed it to position itself as
the
protest party on the far right. But the Nazis’ definitive breakthrough towards becoming a mass party only happened with the onset of the Great Depression. The economic crisis hit Germany particularly hard.
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The upturn during the Golden Twenties had been financed with short-term foreign credit, particularly from the United States, and after Black Friday, American banks had to call in their loans. That hastened the collapse of the German economy, which had already begun to decline in 1928 and 1929. The number of unemployed leapt from 1.3 million in September 1929 to 3.4 million in February 1930. One year later 5 million people were out of work, and at the height of the crisis in 1932, Germany had 6 million jobless. In fact, the number of people who were out of work was far higher, since the official statistics did not include those who, for whatever reasons, did not register at unemployment offices. In the words of the historian Hans-Ulrich Wehler, the Weimar Republic was “cast down into the abyss of an unprecedented economic depression.”
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The psychological consequences were overwhelming. The trying experiences of the post-war period of turmoil and hyperinflation had left many Germans without the emotional strength to deal with an economic crisis that exceeded everything that had come before. An apocalyptic mood of hopelessness began to take hold, even among those segments of the populace that were not primarily affected by the Depression. Faith in democratic institutions and democratic political parties dissolved, and anti-parliamentary sentiment, already rife in the Weimar Republic, was given a huge boost. Those in power appeared to have no solutions to the crisis, and the more helpless they seemed to be, the greater the demand became for a “strong man,” a political messiah who would lead Germany out of economic misery and point the way towards renewed national greatness. More than any other German politician, Hitler presented himself as the answer to these hopes for salvation.
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The hour was at hand for the man who already enjoyed the quasi-religious worship of his supporters and who had long identified with the role of the charismatic Führer.

By early 1930, it was clear that the Weimar Republic was built on sand. On 27 March, the grand coalition of Social Democratic Chancellor Hermann Müller collapsed after the SPD and the DVP became embroiled in a petty quarrel about whether to raise unemployment insurance contributions from 3.5 to 4 per cent. Underlying the squabbling was a fundamental disagreement about who should bear the brunt of the costs of combating the economic crisis. After Stresemann’s death, under the leadership of its new chairman, Ernst Scholz, the big-business-friendly DVP had become more conservative, and influential forces within the party, supported by the Reich Association of German Industry (RDI), were calling for it to end its cooperation with the Social Democrats.
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Conversely, the SPD felt that it could no longer demand any further political compromises of its constituency. The supply of common ground, as Müller put it when he announced the end of the grand coalition, was exhausted. The liberal
Frankfurter Zeitung
newspaper called 27 March 1930 a “black day,” and indeed the date marked a watershed in the history of the Weimar Republic. Henceforth, no government would enjoy a parliamentary majority. The dissolution of German democracy was under way.
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