Hitler (55 page)

Still, the complaint arose that Hitler was putting himself at too great a remove from his followers. The loyal Schneidhuber described the sense of desertion that filled “almost every SA man.” He wrote: “The SA is struggling with the Führer for his soul and does not yet have it. But it must have it.” He spoke of the “clamor for the Führer,” which remained unanswered.

It was at this period, and not by chance, that the greeting
“Heil Hitler”
became generally established. (It had cropped up occasionally before and had been deliberately introduced into Berlin practice by Goebbels.) At the same time, posters announcing meetings no longer mentioned “Adolf Hitler” as the speaker. Instead, nameless and already with the aloofness of a general concept, he appeared simply as the Führer. If party members thronged around him in hotel lobbies or offices, he reacted with irritation, would take.notice of them only reluctantly; he was bothered by so much familiarity. Nor was he happy at having hard-working party members introduced to him; he shunned social occasions with unknown persons.

To be sure, he could also show an engaging side. If he dropped his pose of unapproachability, he might chat charmingly in a group of ladies, might present himself to a group of workers as one of them, with the bluff manner of the common man, or might appear in a fatherly role, gazing benevolently over the heads of blond children. “In solemn handshakes and wide-open eyes he is unmatched,” a contemporary noted. But his intimates could not help observing how much deliberate play-acting was involved. He was constantly calculating effects, practicing the touching as well as the grand gesture. He had grasped precisely what makes a celebrity, what laws he must follow, and to what extent he must conform to a specific craving of the age. His delicate health had made him give up smoking some time ago; in the meantime, he had also been compelled to give up alcohol. Both these facts he used to cultivate a reputation for asceticism. With his clear awareness of role-playing, he was certainly the most modern phenomenon in the German politics of the period. At any rate, he knew the secrets of public effectiveness far better than any of his rivals, from Hugenberg to Brüning. These politicians had never even considered their public image, showing again their rootedness in past conditions and their lack of instinct for the mood of the present.

From this point on, there was no one who could be said to exert a significant, demonstrable influence upon Hitler. The days of Dietrich Eckart, even those of Alfred Rosenberg, lay far behind. “I never make a mistake. Every one of my words is historic,” he had screamed at Otto Strasser in the course of their quarrel. His intellectual curiosity continued to dwindle the more he fitted himself into the stylized role of “LeaderPope.” Surrounded entirely by sycophants and simple-minded members of his retinue, he gradually slid intellectually also into a state of isolation. His onetime model Karl Lueger, the mayor of Vienna, had impressed him with his pessimistic opinion of mankind. Now he himself scarcely troubled to conceal his own contempt for his followers as well as his opponents. In keeping with his fundamentally conservative instinct, he insisted that man was evil by nature, “stuff running rampant on this earth,” as he put it in a letter. And: “The masses are blind and stupid and do not know what they do.”

His consumption of people was as great as his contempt for them. He was forever demoting, rebuking, or elevating, juggling people and positions—this habit, in fact, was one of the secrets of his success. But experience had also taught him that followers wanted to be treated ruthlessly. Thus, in connection with the forthcoming election, he made impossible demands of his campaign workers. The nucleus of the party's functionaries and auxiliaries came from the traditionally unpolitical classes of the population. They were brisk, brash, and ready to throw themselves heart and soul into the contest. Their tempestuousness was in marked contrast to the dull, routine way in which the established parties went through the motions of an election campaign. During the two days before the election, in Berlin alone the Nazis held twenty-four major demonstrations. Once more their posters were pasted on every wall and fence, immersing the city in shrieking red. The party newspapers were put out in huge editions and sold to members for a pfennig apiece to be distributed door-to-door or outside factories. Hitler himself regarded these activities of his followers as a kind of process of selection: “Now a magnet is simply being passed over a heap of dung; and afterwards we will see how much iron there was in the dung heap that has clung to the magnet.”

The elections were set for September 14, 1930. Hitler hoped for fifty or, in exuberant moods, even sixty to eighty Nazi seats. He was counting on the voters of the crumbling bourgeois center, on the young people who were voting for the first time, and on inveterate nonvoters who by all political logic ought to fall to his party, assuming that they could be persuaded to vote at all.

At the right moment the right weapon must be employed. One stage is probing the opponent, a second is preparation, a third is assault.

Adolf Hitler

 

September 14, 1930, became one of the turning points in the history of the Weimar Republic. It signified the end of the reign of democratic parties, and announced the initial death throes of the republic. By the time the election results became available, toward three o'clock in the morning, everything had changed. With a single step the Nazi party had advanced into the anteroom of power, and its leader, object of ridicule and idolatry, the “drummer” Adolf Hitler, had become one of the key figures on the political scene. The fate of the republic was sealed, the Nazi press exulted. Now mopping-up operations could begin.

No less than 18 per cent of the voters had responded to the appeals of the National Socialist German Workers' Party. In the two years since the last elections the party had succeeded in increasing the number of votes it received from 810,000 to 6.4 million. Instead of 12 seats in the Reichstag, it now had 107; after the Social Democratic Party it was the second strongest in the Reich. No comparable breakthrough can be found in the history of German political parties. Of the bourgeois parties, only the Catholic Center Party had been able to maintain its position. All others had suffered severe losses. The four center parties henceforth held only seventy-two seats. Hugenberg's rightist Deutschnationale Volkspartei (German National People's Party) had been cut almost exactly by half; from 14.3 per cent of the vote it had fallen to 7 per cent. Its alliance with the more radical Nazis had proved to be suicidal. With only forty-one seats in the Reichstag it was now blatantly inferior to the Nazi party, and Hitler's claim to leadership of the Right seemed to be impressively confirmed. The Social Democrats had also suffered considerable losses. The Communists were the only other party to have emerged from the elections with gains, although theirs were considerably more modest than the Nazis'. Their share in the vote had risen from 10.6 to 13.1 per cent. The Communists hailed the results in their usual fashion: “The only victor in the September elections is the Communist Party.”

On the whole, most observers recognized the historic importance of what had happened. With varying accents they attributed it to the deep crisis of the party system or saw it as the expression of a spreading lack of faith in the liberal and capitalist systems, coupled with a desire for a fundamental change in all conditions of life. “Most of those who have given their vote to the extremist parties are not at all radical; they have only lost faith in the old way.” No less than a third of the people had rejected the existing system in principle without knowing or asking what would follow it. There was talk of the “bitterness vote.”

At this point it is pertinent to recall once more the circumstances that had marked the birth of the republic ten years before; it came into being as a state no one had really wanted. Now those origins rebounded against it. It had never won more than the nation's tolerance, and many seem to have considered it merely a transitional phase with “nothing inspiring” about it, which had brought forth “no bold crime,” “no memorable slogan” and “no great man,” to quote the rhetoric of Oswald Spengler. On both Left and Right visibly growing numbers waited for the state to recall its fundamental meaning and assert its old power. All the repressed doubts of the democratic party system, all the slumbering contempt for “un-German” parliamentarism, came to the fore once more and could not be argued away. Hitler's thesis, repeated thousands of times, that this republic was a sop to Germany's enemies and the worst shackle of the Treaty of Versailles, was widely and eagerly embraced.

Interestingly enough, a good deal of foreign opinion, particularly as expressed in the British and American journals, took a similar tone, interpreting the electoral results as a reaction to the impossible harshness of the peace-treaty provisions and the hypocritical conduct of the victorious powers. On the whole, only France was incensed, although she, too, cherished a secret hope that the extreme rightist tendencies might give her a reason for a more rigorous policy toward her neighbor across the Rhine. Out of the chorus of reactions there arose, for the first time, one of those voices that was to be heard for ten years to come, condoning all of Hitler's excesses and provocation's own purposes. Thus, Lord Rothermere in the
Daily Mail
of September 24, 1930, pointed out that Hitler's victory should not be regarded as a danger; it should be recognized that the man offered all sorts of advantages; that he was building a bulwark against Bolshevism; that he was eliminating the grave danger that the Soviet campaign against European civilization might reach into Germany.
⁸

The Nazi party's victory was to a large extent due to its mobilization of the youth and of the nonpolitical elements who ordinarily did not go to the polls. Compared with 1928 the votes cast had increased by more than 4.5 million, to 80.2 per cent of the electorate. The Communists, too, had picked up votes—though considerably fewer—from among the same group; remarkably enough, they had waged their campaign with outspokenly nationalistic slogans. The Nazis were so little ready for their sweep that they had not even put up the required 107 candidates and did not have people immediately available. Hitler himself had not run for office since he still did not hold German citizenship.

The results of this election have often been described as a landslide; its consequences were in fact even more fateful. In the consternation of election night wild rumors arose of Nazi plans for a putsch; the result was massive withdrawal of foreign funds from Germany, which worsened the already catastrophic credit crisis. All at once, everyone was interested in this new party. The adventurers, the fearful, and the opportunists made a quick adjustment to the new situation. This was especially true of the horde of eternally alert journalists who now hastily attempted to ride “the wave of the future,” and by their extensive reporting made up for the traditional weakness of the Nazi press. In many quarters it became chic to join the Nazi party. In the spring one of the Kaiser's sons, Prince August Wilhelm (“Auwi”), had become a member, remarking that where a Hitler led anyone could find a place. Now came Hjalmar Schacht, then president of the German Federal Bank (Reichsbank), one of the co-authors of the Young Plan which the Nazis had so viciously attacked. Many others followed. “Nobody likes being a failed politician,” Hitler sneered as he watched the flurry. During the two and a half months to the end of the year the membership of the NSDAP rose by almost 100,000, to 389,000. Special interest groups also tried to adjust to the shift in power and to the obvious trend. “Almost automatically the NSDAP now acquired those cross-connections and positions necessary for the further extension and consolidation of the ‘movement.' ”

“Once the great masses swing over to us shouting hurrah, we are lost,” Hitler had declared two years earlier, at the 1928 meeting of the leaders in Munich. And Goebbels now spoke contemptuously of the “September-lings.” Often, he remarked, he thought back “with nostalgia to the good old days when we were only a small sect throughout the Reich, and National Socialism in the capital had hardly a baker's dozen followers.”

What worried them was that the unprincipled masses would swamp the party and corrupt its revolutionary will, only to desert it again at the first setbacks, like the unforgotten “inflation recruits” of 1923. “We must not allow ourselves to be weighted down with the corpses of a ruined bourgeoisie,” a memorandum stated five days after the election. But contrary to such fears, the party had little trouble bringing the new members—as Gregor Strasser wrote—“into the great pot of the National Socialist idea” and melting them down. While the adversaries of the movement were still looking for soothing explanations, the party continued its tempestuous advance. Faithful to his maxim that the best time to attack is right after the victory, Hitler staged a wave of party actions after September 14 and garnered new successes for the party. In the Bremen mayoralty election of November 30 the party's percentage of the vote was almost double what it had been in the recent Reichstag election. It won more than 25 per cent of the seats in the city council; all the other parties suffered losses. The results were similar in Danzig, Baden, and Mecklenburg. In the intoxication of such triumphs Hitler at times seemed to believe that the regime could now be “voted to death,” without any external aid.

On October 13 the session of the Reichstag began amidst tumultuous scenes. In protest against the persisting Prussian ban on uniforms, the Nazi party deputies had marched through the Reichstag building and entered the chamber in brown shirts, howling and making unmistakable gestures of protest. In a passionate speech Gregor Strasser declared war on “the system of shamelessness, corruption and crime.” His party would not cringe from even the ultimate step of civil war, he announced; the Reichstag was not going to frustrate the party's goals. The people were the decisive factor and the people were on his party's side: Outside, meanwhile, brawls with the Communists were being staged, as well as the first pogrom—organized by Goebbels—against Jewish businesses and passers-by. Questioned on this matter, Hitler replied that the excesses were the work of rowdies, looters, and Communist provocateurs. The
Völkische Beobachter
proclaimed that in the Third Reich the windows of Jewish stores would be better protected than they were now under the reign of the Marxist police. Simultaneously, more than 100,000 metal workers went on strike, supported by both the Communists and the Nazis. Civil order was visibly disintegrating.