The Coming of the Third Reich (33 page)

By the time the two eventually met, Hitler had acquired the first members of the devoted band of enthusiasts who would play a key role in one capacity or another in the growth of the Nazi Party and the building of the Third Reich. Most devoted of all was the student Rudolf Hess, a pupil of the geopolitical theorist Karl Haushofer at Munich University. The son of an authoritarian businessman who had refused to allow him to study before the war, Hess seemed to be looking for a strong leader to whom he could bind himself unconditionally. Like a number of subsequently prominent Nazis, he came from outside the German Reich: Hess was born in Alexandria in 1894. Service in the war, which he ended as an Air Force lieutenant, gave him one kind of authority to obey, study with Haushofer another. Neither gave him what he really wanted, any more than did the Free Corps or the Thule Society, of which Hess was also a member. It was eventually provided by Hitler, whom he met in 1920. Antisemitism was a shared passion: Hess denounced the ‘pack of Jews’ who he thought had betrayed Germany in 1918, and even before he met Hitler he led expeditions to working-class districts of Munich to slip thousands of antisemitic leaflets under the front doors of workers’ flats.
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Henceforth, Hess directed all the force of his hero-worship towards Hitler. Naive, idealistic, without personal ambition or greed, and, according to Haushofer, not very bright, Hess had an inclination to believe in irrational and mystical doctrines such as astrology; his dog-like devotion to Hitler was almost religious in its fervour; he regarded Hitler as a kind of Messiah. From now on, he would be Hitler’s silent, passive slave, drinking in his master’s words at the regular coffee round in the Café Heck, and gradually taking much of the burden of the routine work Hitler so hated off his shoulders. In addition, he introduced Hitler to an elaborate version of the common Pan-German theory of ‘living-space’,
Lebensraum,
with which Haushofer justified German claims to conquer Eastern Europe, and which the novelist Hans Grimm popularized with his best-seller
Race without Space (Volk ohne Raum)
in 1926.
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Useful to Hitler in another way was the failed racist poet and dramatist Dietrich Eckart, a former medical student. Eckart was already active in far-right circles in December 1918, when he started publishing a political weekly,
In Plain German (Auf gut deutsch),
with backing from a number of Bavarian businessmen and also the political fund of the army. Eckart blamed his failure to get his plays performed on what he believed to be the Jewish domination of culture. He was in personal contact with other racists and ‘Aryan’ supremacists like Houston Stewart Chamberlain, whose work he did much to popularize. Like many antisemites, he defined as ‘Jewish’ anyone who was ‘subversive’ or ‘materialistic’, including, among others (in his view), Lenin and Kaiser Wilhelm II. Well connected and well off, Eckart, like Hess, was a member of the Thule Society and raised the funds from his friends, and from the army, for the Nazi Party to buy the Society’s ailing newspaper, the
Racial Observer (Völkischer Beobachter),
in December 1920. He became editor himself, bringing much-needed journalistic experience to its twice-weekly editions and expanding it into a daily early in 1923. Eventually, however, his relative independence, and his rather patronizing attitude towards Hitler, led to a cooling of relations between the two men, and he was dismissed as editor of the paper in March 1923, dying later in the year.
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Two associates he brought into the Party from the Thule Society served Hitler more reliably, however, and a good deal longer. The first of these was the Baltic-German architect Alfred Rosenberg. Another leading Nazi from beyond the Reich, he was born in Reval, Estonia, in 1893. He fled the Russian Revolution, conceiving an intense hatred for Bolshevism, and at the end of the war arrived in Munich, where he became a contributor to Eckart’s little magazine. He had already become an antisemite before 1914, as a result of reading Houston Stewart Chamberlain’s work at the age of 16. An enthusiast for the Tsarist police forgery
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,
which purported to provide evidence of an international Jewish plot to subvert civilization, Rosenberg also read Gobineau and Nietzsche, and after the war wrote polemical tracts attacking Jews and Freemasons. His main desire was to be taken seriously as an intellectual and a cultural theorist. In 1930 Rosenberg was to publish his
magnum opus,
named
The Myth of the Twentieth Century
in homage to the principal work of his idol, Houston Stewart Chamberlain. This was intended to provide the Nazi Party with a major work of theory. The book had sold over a million copies by 1945 and some of its ideas were not without influence. But Hitler himself claimed never to have read more than a small part of it and disliked what he saw as its pseudo-religious tone, and it is unlikely that more than a few of the most dedicated readers managed to plough their way through its acres of turgid prose to the end. Still, in their frequent conversations in Munich cafés, Rosenberg more than anyone probably turned Hitler’s attention towards the threat of Communism and its supposed creation by a Jewish conspiracy, and alerted Hitler to what he considered the fragile nature of the Soviet Russian polity. Through Rosenberg, Russian antisemitism, with its extreme conspiracy theories and its exterminatory thrust, found its way into Nazi ideology in the early 1920s. ‘Jewish-Bolshevism’ now became a major target of Hitler’s hate.
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The other man whom Eckart brought into the Nazi Party was Hans Frank. He was born in Karlsruhe in 1900, the son of a lawyer who initially followed in his father’s footsteps. While still a law student, in 1919, he joined the Thule Society and served in the Epp Free Corps in the storming of Munich. Frank quickly fell under Hitler’s spell, though he never became one of his inner circle. Hearing him speak in January 1920, Frank felt, like many others, that Hitler’s words came directly from the heart: ‘He uttered what was in the consciousness of all those present,’ he said later. Throughout his life, he was fascinated by the pornography of violence: he admired brutal men of action, and frequently used the language of violence with a directness and aggression unmatched by almost any other leading Nazi, in an attempt to seem like them; but his legal training and background gave him a residual belief in the law that sometimes sat uneasily alongside his penchant for coarse language and his defence of murderous actions. He qualified as a lawyer, with a doctorate in 1924, and his legal expertise, however limited, was to prove extremely useful to the Party. Up to 1933 he represented it in over 2,400 cases brought against its members, usually for acts of violence of one kind or another. Soon after he defended some Nazi thugs in court for the first time, a senior lawyer who had been one of his teachers said: ‘I beg you to leave these people alone! No good will come of it! Political movements that begin in the criminal courts will end in the criminal courts!’
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By the time these men and many more like them had become part of the Nazi Party, the fledgling movement had an official Programme, composed by Hitler and Drexler with a little help from the ‘racial economist’ Gottfried Feder, and approved on 24 February 1920. Its 25 points included the demand for ‘the union of all Germans in a Greater Germany’, the revocation of the 1919 Peace Treaties, ‘land and territory (colonies) to feed our people‘, the prevention of ’non-German immigration’, and the death penalty for ‘common criminals, usurers, profiteers etc.’Jews were to be denied civil rights and registered as aliens, and they were to be banned from owning or writing for German newspapers. A pseudo-socialist note was sounded by the demand for the abolition of unearned incomes, the confiscation of war profits, the nationalization of business trusts and the introduction of profit-sharing. The Programme concluded with a demand for ‘the creation of a strong central state power for the Reich’ and the effective replacement of the federated state parliaments by corporations based on estate and occupation’.
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It was a typical far-right document of its time. In practice, it did not mean very much, and, like the Social Democrats’ Erfurt Programme of 1891, was often bypassed or ignored in the everyday political struggle, although it was soon declared to be ‘unalterable’, so as to prevent it from becoming a focus for internal dissension.
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Dissension there was, however, with other causes, principally Drexler’s efforts to merge the party with other far-right organizations in the Bavarian capital. Drexler. had his eye in particular on the ‘German-Socialist Party’, a similar-sized group with virtually identical aims to those of the Nazis. Unlike the Nazi Party, it had a presence in north Germany. A merger would give more influence to those who, like Feder, disapproved of the vulgarity of Hitler’s constant rabble-rousing speeches. Hitler, fearing he would be submerged in the new movement, scotched the negotiations in April 1921 by threatening to resign. Another crisis blew up when Hitler was with Eckart in Berlin on a fund-raising mission for the
Racial Observer.
Merger talks began again in his absence, this time also involving a third small antisemitic party, based in Augsburg and led by one Otto Dickel, whose abilities as a public speaker were rated by some almost as highly as Hitler’s own. Unable to prevent the Nazi Party going along with Dickel’s scheme to create a merged ‘Western League’ (named after his somewhat mystical racist tract
The Resurrection of the West),
Hitler threw a tantrum and resigned from the Party altogether. This brought matters to a head, as Drexler back-pedalled and asked Hitler to name the conditions on which he would rejoin. In the end, few were prepared to do without the man whose demagogy had been the sole reason for the Party’s growth over the previous months. The merger plans were abandoned. Hitler’s uncompromising conditions were accepted with acclaim at an extraordinary general meeting on 29 July: they culminated in the demand that he should be made Party chairman ’with dictatorial powers’ and that the Party be purged of the ‘foreign elements which have now penetrated it’.
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Having secured his complete mastery over the Nazi Party, Hitler now enjoyed its full support for the propaganda campaign he quickly unfolded. It soon descended from provocation to violence. On 14 September 1921 a group of young Nazis went with Hitler to a meeting of the Bavarian League, a separatist organization, and marched onto the platform with the intention of silencing the speaker, Otto Ballerstedt. Someone switched all the lights off, and when they came on again, chants of ‘Hitler’ prevented Ballerstedt from continuing. As the audience protested, Hitler’s young thugs attacked the separatist leader, beat him up, and pushed him roughly off the platform onto the floor, where he lay bleeding profusely from a head wound. Soon the police appeared and closed the meeting down. Ballerstedt insisted on prosecuting Hitler, who duly served a month in Munich’s Stadelheim gaol. The police warned him that if he continued in this way he would be sent back to Austria as an alien. The warning had little effect. In early November 1921, shortly after his release, Hitler was at the centre of another beer-cellar brawl, with beer-mugs flying across the room as Nazis and Social Democrats traded blows. Soon the Nazis were arming themselves with knuckledusters, rubber truncheons, pistols and even grenades. In the summer of 1922, a crowd of Nazis shouted, whistled and spat at Reich President Ebert as he was visiting Munich. An outing to a nationalist rally in Coburg in October 1922 culminated in a pitched battle with Social Democrats in which the Nazis eventually drove their opponents from the streets with their rubber truncheons.
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Not surprisingly, the Nazi Party was soon banned in most German states, especially after the murder of Foreign Minister Rathenau in June 1922, when the Berlin government attempted a clampdown on far-right extremists whether or not they had been involved in the assassination. But not in right-wing Bavaria.
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The new note of physical violence in the Nazi campaign reflected not least the rapid growth of the Party’s paramilitary wing, founded early in 1920 as a ‘hall protection’ group, soon renamed the ’Gymnastics and Sports Section’. With their brown shirts and breeches, jackboots and caps - a uniform that only found its final form in 1924
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—its members soon became a familiar sight on Munich’s streets, beating up their opponents on the streets and attacking anyone they thought looked like a Jew. What turned them from a small group of bully-boys into a major paramilitary movement was a series of events that had little to do with Hitler. The relative immunity from police interference which they enjoyed reflected in the first place the fact that the Bavarian government, led by Gustav Ritter von Kahr, had long been sympathetic to paramilitary movements of the far right, as part of the counter-revolutionary ’white terror’ of 1919—20. In this atmosphere, Captain Hermann Ehrhardt, former commander of a Free Corps brigade, had established an elaborate network of assassination squads that had carried out political murders all over Germany, including the killing of several leading Republican politicians, and the murder of a number of their own members whom they suspected as double agents.
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Kahr himself regarded the Republic as a Prussian creation, to be countered by the maintenance of Bavaria as a centre of anti-Republican ‘order’, and to this end he maintained a massive, so-called Denizens’ Defence Force, set up immediately after the crushing of the Communist Council Republic in the spring of 1919. Heavily armed and militarily equipped, it clearly contravened the terms of the Treaty of Versailles and was compulsorily wound up early in 1921. Its dissolution was the signal for a reorganization of Bavaria’s radical right and a sharp increase in the incidence of violence, as its members reformed into a huge variety of armed bands, many of them Bavarian separatist in orientation, all of them antisemitic.
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