Hitler (45 page)

The continuing setbacks inevitably sapped Hitler's position within the party. In Thuringia, Saxony, and Württemberg he had to fight for his challenged leadership; in North Germany Gregor Strasser went on building up the party. Strasser was forever on the move. He spent most of his nights on trains or in waiting rooms; by day he visited followers, founded branches, saw functionaries, conferred, or appeared at meetings. During 1925 and 1926 he appeared as principal speaker at nearly one hundred meetings, while Hitler was condemned to silence. This fact, less than any ambitions on Strasser's part to rival Hitler, for a while made it seem as though the party's center of gravity were shifting to the north. Thanks to Strasser's loyalty, Hitler's position as leader was on the whole acknowledged. But the sober Protestant North Germans' suspicions of the flamboyant petty bourgeois bohemian with his alleged “pro-Rome” course came repeatedly to the fore, and many people would join the party only if they were assured considerable independence of Munich headquarters. For; quite a while Hitler had to waive his requirement that leaders of local groups in the north be appointed by party headquarters. Until the late autumn of 1925, moreover, the North Rhineland gau had membership cards of its own and would not use the membership booklets provided by Munich headquarters.

The business manager of this North Rhineland gau, with headquarters in Elberfeld, was a young academic who had made a stab at being a journalist, writer, and crier at the stock exchange, before he found a post as secretary to a nationalist-racist politician, made contact with the National Socialists, and met Gregor Strasser. His name was Paul Joseph Goebbels, and what had brought him to Strasser's side was chiefly his intellectual radicalism, which he expounded in various literary works and diary notes, wherein he often marveled at his own personality. “I am the most radical. Of the new type. Man as revolutionary.” His style ranged from such incisiveness to rhapsody, which, however, at the time was found quite acceptable. His radicalism was a compound of nationalistic and social-revolutionary ideologies; it seemed a thinner, shriller version of the doctrine of his mentor. For, in contrast to the cold Hitler, who moved in a curiously abstract world of feeling, the more emotional Gregor Strasser had been affected by the misery of the postwar era. His heart went out to the common people. Sooner or later, he believed, the proletariat would embrace National Socialism. For a time Gregor Strasser found in Joseph Goebbels and in his brother Otto Strasser the advocates for an ideological course that no one ever followed. Gregor Strasser's “program” won merely temporary importance as the fleeting expression of a socialist alternative to Hitler's “Fascist” South German National Socialism.

The special temper of the North German Nazis manifested itself in a committee organized in Hagen on September 10, 1925. Goebbels immediately took command of it, along with Gregor Strasser. And although the participants kept saying that they were not opposed to Munich headquarters, they nevertheless spoke of themselves as a “west bloc,” and of a “counterattack” against “the calcified big-shots in Munich.” They also criticized the party leadership for its meager interest in questions of program. Gregor Strasser deplored the “atrociously low level” of the
Völkische Beobachter,
Significantly, however, none of the reproaches were directed at Hitler in person or at his conduct of his office. In fact, what the critics wanted was to strengthen rather than to diminish his position. They were objecting to the “slovenly, lousy way they run things at headquarters,” and once again to the brashness of Esser and Streicher. Totally misconstruing the situation, this circle hoped to free Hitler from the clutches of the “corrupt Munich clique,” the “Esser dictatorship,” and win him over to their own cause. Here, in these early years, and not for the first time, we find that notion so widespread later on: that the “Führer” was frail and human, surrounded by bad advisers who prevented him from carrying out his honest intentions.

The program of the Strasser group was set forth in a fortnightly review,
Nationalsozialistische Briefe
(“National Socialist Letters”). Unpretentious in format, the magazine was edited by Goebbels and was chiefly concerned with escaping the narrowness of a nostalgic, backward-looking middle-class ideology and turning the movement's face toward the present. Almost everything that “was held sacred in Munich was at some time or other thrown into question or frankly run down” in the magazine. There was constant stress on the difference in social conditions in Bavaria and the north. The magazine's pronouncedly anticapitalist thrust was a response to the urban, proletarian social structure of North Germany. As a letter from a Berlin reader put it, the National Socialist Party should not consist “of radicalized bourgeois” and “be afraid of the words worker and socialist.” Thus the magazine announced: “We are socialists; we are enemies, mortal enemies, of the present-day capitalist economic system with its exploitation of the economically weak, with its injustice in wages.... We are resolved to annihilate this system despite everything.” Looking for formulas which could unite the nationalistic socialists and Communists, Goebbels found a whole catalogue of identical attitudes and convictions. He by no means rejected the theory of class struggle. He contended that the collapse of Russia would “bury forever our dreams of a National Socialist Germany.” Moreover, he questioned Hitler's theory of the Jews as the universal enemy, remarking: “It is by no means settled that the capitalist and the Bolshevik Jew are one and the same” and going so far as to say that the Jewish question in general was “more complicated than one imagines.”

The Strasser people also held quite different ideas on foreign policy from the Munich leadership. Strasser and his associates had responded to the socialist appeal of the times, but “not as to the call of the proletarian class but of proletarian nations,” in the forefront of which stood humiliated, betrayed, and plundered Germany. They saw the world as divided into oppressing and oppressed peoples and supported those very revisionist demands that Hitler in
Mein Kampf
had branded “political nonsense.” Where Hitler saw Soviet Russia as a target for conquest, and Rosenberg described her as a “Jewish colony of hangmen,” Goebbels spoke with deep respect of the Russian utopian impulse, while Strasser even called for an alliance with Moscow “against the militarism of France, against the imperialism of England, against the capitalism of Wall Street.” Even more socialistic was the group's economic program: large landholdings were to be abolished, and all peasants were to be organized into agricultural cooperatives; small businesses were to be grouped in guilds; corporations with more than twenty employees were to be partially socialized. Where enterprises continued in private hands, the personnel were to be entitled to a share of 10 per cent of the profits, the national government to 30 per cent, the county to 6 and the local community to 5 per cent. The group also advocated simplification of legislation, creation of a school system open to all classes, and payment of wages partly in goods. This last was a romantic expression of the popular distrust of money resulting from the inflation.

All this was outlined by Gregor Strasser at a meeting in Hanover on November 22, 1926. Here the rebellious mood of the North and West German party organizations, their antipathy to headquarters and the “pope in Munich”—as Gauleiter Rust put it, to general applause—emerged in public to a startling degree. At another such meeting in the same city at the end of January, this time held in Gauleiter Rust's apartment, Goebbels demanded that the group bluntly show the door to Gottfried Feder, whom Hitler had recently sent as an observer. Nor was this all. If the sources are to be believed, Goebbels followed this up with a motion “that the petty bourgeois Adolf Hitler be expelled from the National Socialist Party.”
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The challenge to Hitler's authority was to increase. In December, without knowledge of headquarters, Strasser distributed his draft program among the party members. It was meant to replace the twenty-five points so arbitrarily thrown together long ago, and to overturn the image of the party's representing only petty bourgeois interests. Although Hitler was reported to be “furious” over this show of autonomy, no one paid attention to Feder's objections. In fact, the Strasser group refused to allow Feder to vote on any motions. Only one of the twenty-five who took part in the discussion, the gauleiter of Cologne, Robert Ley, “a moron and possibly an intriguer,” came out openly for Hitler.

At the moment, the German public was passionately discussing the question of whether the royal and ducal houses should be expropriated or whether their property, confiscated in 1918, should be returned. Hitler found himself impelled by his tactical reasoning to side with the German princes, and in general with the propertied classes. The Strasser group decided, as did the parties of the Left, for expropriation of the former rulers without compensation. They also undertook, without authorization from Munich, to publish a newspaper entitled
Der Nationale Sozialist
(“The Nationalist Socialist”) and, with funds Gregor Strasser obtained by mortgaging his drugstore in Landshut, to set up a publishing house called the Kampfverlag. This soon developed into a sizable concern; with its six weekly newspapers it for a while outdid the Eher Verlag, run by Munich headquarters. Moreover, in the judgment of Konrad Heiden, its publications were far superior to those of the Munich firm “in intellectual variety and honesty.”

But the most naked challenge to Hitler on the part of the Hanover circle came when Gregor Strasser called upon the party to abandon its timorous pledge of legality and follow a “politics of catastrophe,” prepared for the worst contingencies. He declared his resolve to seize power by frontal attack and sanctioned any means that damaged the government and shattered public order: putsch, bombs, strikes, street battles, or brawls. As Goebbels was to express it shortly after: “We will attain everything if we set hunger, despair and sacrifice marching for our aims.” The party was “to light the beacon in our people so that nationalist and socialist despair flame in a single great fire.”

Hitler had so far remained silent about the group's activities, although it was setting up a power center that threatened to become a secondary governing committee within the party and although in North Germany the name of Gregor Strasser meant “almost more” than his own. “Nobody has faith in Munich any more,” Goebbels noted jubilantly in his diary. “Elberfeld is going to become the mecca of German socialism.” But Hitler haughtily ignored the plans to kick him upstairs by making him honorary chairman and then unite the disorganized nationalist camp in one great movement. A few scornful pages in
Mein Kampf
were the only notice Hitler ever took of such projects.

Hitler's restraint was partly due to his personal affairs. For in the interval he had rented a country house belonging to a Hamburg businessman on the Obersalzberg, near Berchtesgaden. The situation of the house was extraordinarily beautiful, although the place was otherwise quite modest, consisting of a large living room and a veranda on the ground floor, and three attic rooms. In talking to visitors, Hitler made a point of saying that the house did not belong to him, “so that there could be no question of any corrupt practices, in line with the bad example of other ‘party bigwigs.' ” He had asked his widowed half-sister, Angela Raubal, to be his housekeeper. She was accompanied by her seventeen-year-old daughter Geli. The affection Hitler felt for this pretty, superficial niece soon developed into a passionate relationship hopelessly burdened by his intolerance, his romantic ideal of womanhood, and avuncular scruples, so that it was finally to end in an act of desperation. Hitler rarely left his rural retreat; when he did, it would be to attend the Munich opera with his niece or to visit friends in the city. These were still the Hanfstaengls, the Bruckmanns, the Essers. He scarcely bothered about the party; even in South Germany criticisms of his indifferent leadership were voiced; but Hitler paid these little attention. The summer of 1925 saw the publication of the first volume of
Mein Kampf,
and although the book was not a success—it sold fewer than 10,000 copies the first year—Hitler promptly set about dictating the second volume. His need to justify himself was as much a motive force as his urge to communicate.

From his mountain hideout he had followed with apparent apathy the program discussions in the North German wing of the party. His silence did not stem entirely from his characteristic reluctance to take steps. It also sprang from the politician's indifference to theory, his contempt for ideas in themselves. Moreover, he might have been secretly hoping to repeat the game he had played so successfully while in Landsberg, when he encouraged rivals, promoted antagonisms, and actually increased his own authority by slackening the reins.

Strasser's “catastrophe politics” abruptly changed the situation. Rather justifiably Hitler saw this as a direct challenge to himself, since, as with Röhm's activities, it threatened his parole and hence his entire political future. Immediately, he went on the offensive and could barely wait for the chance to strike out against the rebels and restore his authority.

 

In retrospect it would seem as if Hitler's imperious and impatient nature wrecked the party just when it was making such great strides. He was striking out at all his former associates, including Anton Drexler, with whom he was waging a libel suit. In the course of the proceedings, one of Hitler's former followers appeared as witness against him. Calling out in court to Hitler that the National Socialist Party would in the long run fail if it used his methods, the man struck a prophetic chord, “You will come to a very sad end.”

Only Hitler himself seemed unmoved by the continuing chain of failures. The certitude that had come to him as he formulated his philosophy in
Mein Kampf,
together with his obstinacy, enabled him to withstand all the crises without a hint of discouragement or resignation. It seemed as if he were once again, and with a measure of satisfaction, letting events take their course toward the highest dramatic pitch. As if untouched by all the bothersome events around him, he busied himself drawing, on postcards or in a sketchbook, baroque public buildings, arches of triumph, ornate domed halls—in short, a backdrop that expressed his unrelinquished plans for world domination and his extravagant millennial expectations.
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