The Coming of the Third Reich (116 page)

12. The beer-hall putsch: armed Nazi stormtroopers wait outside Munich city hall, November 1923, for the takeover that never came.

13. Hitler relaxing, but not drinking, with his friends in a Munich beer-cellar in 1929. Gregor Strasser is on the far left.

14. Hitler leads a street march at an early Nazi Party rally in Weimar, 1926, while stormtroopers clear the way. A hatless Rudolf Hess can be seen to his left, with Heinrich Himmler directly behind.

15. The face of fanaticism: stormtroopers listen to a speech at an open-air rally, 1930.

16. The Communist threat: criminality, poverty and extreme left-wing commitment often went together, to the alarm of middle-class voters, as in this slum district of Hamburg during an election campaign in 1932.

17. The futility of Brüning’s ban on uniforms (December 1930): the brownshirts wear white shirts instead, and the effect is the same.

18. A pacifist poster warns in 1930 that ‘anyone who votes for the right votes for war’, and Nazism can mean only death and destruction. ‘German,’ it asks rhetorically, ‘shall he grab you again?’

19. The violence of the visual image: where the Nazis lead in 1928, other parties follow in later elections. (a) ‘Smash the world-foe, International High Finance’ - Nazi election poster, 1928. (b) ‘An end to this system!’ - Communist election poster, 1932. (c) ‘Clear the way for List 1!’ - the Social Democratic worker elbows aside the Nazi and the Communist, 1930. (d) ‘Against civil war and inflation’ - the People’s Party knocks down its rivals to right and left, an example of wishful thinking from 1932.

20. The choice before the electorate in September 1930: the parties target women, benefit claimants, young people and other specific social groups.

21. ‘Harbinger of the Third Reich’. A Social Democratic poster warns against the violence of the Nazis, January 1931. After scrawling ‘Germany, awake!’ and daubing swastikas on the walls, the figure of Death, dressed in a brownshirt uniform and holding a pistol, kills an opponent and marches on.

22. (
top
) Drowning out the opposition: Nazis use loudhailers to shout ‘Hail, Hitler!’ during the election campaign of March 1933.

23. (
below
) The respectable face of Nazism: Hitler, in formal attire, meets leading businessmen shortly after his appointment as Reich Chancellor in January 1933.

24. The reality on the streets: Communists and Social Democrats arrested by stormtroopers acting as ‘auxiliary police’ await their fate in a torture cellar of the brownshirts in the spring of 1933.