The Coming of the Third Reich (34 page)

Ehrhardt brought his Free Corps veterans into the Nazis’ ‘Gymnastics and Sports Section’ in August 1921; they were hardened graduates of violent confrontations with Poles and others in Silesia, where the Peace Settlement had created massive German resentment by lopping off territory held by Germany before the war to give to the newly founded Polish state. The deal with Ehrhardt was brokered by Ernst Röhm, another Free Corps veteran, who had participated in the assault on Munich in the early spring of 1919. Born in 1887, the son of a Bavarian railway official, Röhm had joined the army in 1906 and became an officer two years later. He served at the front in the war, but was invalided out - shrapnel had partially destroyed his nose and badly damaged his face, and he had been seriously wounded at Verdun. After this, Röhm worked for the War Ministry in Bavaria and was in charge of arranging the supply of weapons, first for Kahr’s Denizens’ Defence Force and then for its fragmented successor groups. Known to such people as the ‘machine-gun king’, Röhm boasted a huge range of contacts on the far right. Among other things, he was a staff officer and enjoyed a high reputation in the army, and acted as a liaison officer with the paramilitaries. He clearly had a talent for organization. But his interest did not really lie in politics. Ernst Röhm was the epitome of a front-line generation that had come to believe in its own myth.
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Röhm’s penchant was for mindless violence, not political conspiracy. An analysis of his writings has shown that he used words like ‘prudent’, ‘compromise’, ‘intellectual’, ‘bourgeois’ or ‘middle-class’ almost invariably in a pejorative sense; his positive, admiring expressions included ‘strapping’, ‘daredevil’, ‘ruthless’ and ‘faithful’. The first words of his autobiography, published in Munich in 1928, were: ’I am a soldier.’ He described himself as ‘contrary’ and complained: ‘The Germans have forgotten how to hate. Feminine complaining has taken the place of masculine hatred.’
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‘Since I am an immature and wicked person,’ he wrote with characteristic openness, ‘war and unrest appeal to me more than well-behaved bourgeois order.’
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He had no interest at all in ideas, and glorified the rough and brutal lifestyle of the soldier in his acts as well as his creed. He had nothing but contempt for civilians, and revelled in the lawlessness of wartime life. Drinking and carousing, fighting and brawling cemented the band of brothers among whom he found his place; women were treated with disdain, strangers to the military life had no place in his world.

Röhm saw in Hitler, whose own penchant for using physical violence to further his ends was already more than obvious, a natural vehicle for his desires, and took the lead in building up the Party’s paramilitary wing movement, renamed the ‘Storm Division’ (
Sturmabteilung,
or SA) in October 1921. His connections in the army hierarchy, in the upper levels of Bavarian politics, and with the paramilitaries, were invaluable to the fledgling organization. At the same time, however, he always maintained a degree of independence from Hitler, never really fell under his personal spell, and sought to use his movement as a vehicle for his own cult of ceaseless violent activism rather than placing the stormtroopers unconditionally at the Party’s disposal. The SA remained a formally separate organization, therefore, and Röhm’s relations with the Nazi Party’s leader always retained an uneasy undertone. With Röhm in the lead, the stormtroopers soon began to grow in numbers. Yet by August 1922 they still counted no more than 800 in their ranks, and other, long since forgotten paramilitary movements such as the Reich War Flag, or the Bavaria and Reich League, which had no fewer than 30,000 members, all of them armed, were far more prominent. It needed much more than the influence of Ehrhardt and Röhm and the demagogy of Hitler before the Nazis and their paramilitary movement could seize the initiative in Bavarian politics.
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II

In 1922 the Nazis’ hopes were sharply raised when news came in of Benito Mussolini’s ‘March on Rome’ on 28 October, which had immediately led to the Fascist leader’s appointment as Prime Minister of Italy. Where the Italians had succeeded, surely their German counterparts could not be far behind? As so often with Mussolini, the image was more than the reality. Born in 1883 and in his early life a prominent socialist journalist, Mussolini had changed his politics dramatically during his campaign for Italy’s entry into the war, and at the war’s end he became the spokesman for Italian feelings of injured pride as the Peace Settlement failed to deliver the hoped-for gains. In 1919 he launched his Fascist movement, which used violent tactics, terror and intimidation against its left-wing opponents, who were alarming industrialists, employers and businessmen with policies such as occupying factories in pursuit of their demand for common ownership of the means of production. Rural unrest also drove landowners into the arms of the Fascist squads, and, as the situation deteriorated in the course of 1920 and 1921, Mussolini was carried along by the dynamism of his movement. His rise to prominence indicated that postwar conflict, civil strife, murder and war were not confined to Germany. They were widespread across Eastern, Central and Southern Europe. They included the Russo-Polish War, which only ended in 1921, armed irredentist conflicts in many of the successor states to the Habsburg Empire, and the creation of short-lived dictatorships in Spain and Greece.

Mussolini’s example influenced the Nazi Party in a number of ways, notably in its adoption in late 1922 and early 1923 of the title of ‘Leader’ -
Duce.
in Italian,
Führer
in German - to denote the unquestionable authority of the man at the movement’s head. The growing cult of Hitler’s personality in the Nazi Party, fuelled by the Italian precedent, also helped convince Hitler himself that it was he, and not some figure yet to come, who was destined to lead Germany into a future national rebirth, a conviction that was indelibly confirmed by the events of the autumn of 1923.
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By this time, the Nazis had also begun to borrow from the Italian Fascists the rigid, outstretched right-arm salute with which they ritually greeted their leader in an imitation of the ceremonies of Imperial Rome; the leader responded by raising his own right hand, but crooked back at the elbow, palm opened upwards, in a gesture of acceptance. The Nazi Party’s use of elaborate standards to carry its flags also derived from the practice of the Italian Fascists. Mussolini’s main practical influence on Hitler at this period, however, was to convince him that the tactic of a march on the capital was the quickest way to power. As the Fascist squads began to seize control of major cities and towns in the Italian north, Mussolini, drawing on the famous example of the revolutionary Giuseppe Garibaldi during the unification of Italy more than sixty years before, declared that he would use them as a base for a ‘march on Rome’. In order to avoid bloodshed, the Italian King and the leading politicians capitulated and appointed him Prime Minister, a position which he used with increasing ruthlessness to establish a dictatorial, one-party state by the end of the decade.
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Mussolini’s Fascist movement shared many key characteristics not only with Nazism but also with other extremist movements of the right, for example in Hungary, where Gyula Gömbös was referring to himself as a ‘National Socialist’ as early as 1919. Italian Fascism was violent, ceaselessly active, it despised parliamentary institutions, it was militaristic, and it glorified conflict and war. It was bitterly opposed not only to Communism but also, even more importantly, to socialism and to liberalism. It favoured an organic view of society, in which class interests and popular representation would be replaced by appointed institutions cutting across the classes and uniting the nation. It was masculinist and anti-feminist, seeking a state in which men would rule and women would be reduced mainly to the functions of childbearing and childrearing. It elevated the leader to a position of unchallenged authority. It espoused a cult of youth, declaring its intention of sweeping away old institutions and traditions and creating a new form of human being, tough, anti-intellectual, modern, secular and above all fanatically devoted to the cause of his own nation and race.
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In all these respects, it provided a model and a parallel for the emerging Nazi Party.

Early Nazism, therefore, like the myriad competing movements of the far right in the immediate postwar years, belonged firmly in this wider context of the rise of European fascism. For a long time, Hitler looked admiringly to Mussolini as an example to follow. The ‘march on Rome’ galvanized the nascent fascist movements of Europe much as Garibaldi’s march on Rome and the subsequent unification of Italy had galvanized the nationalist movements of Europe sixty or so years earlier. The.tide of history seemed to be moving in Hitler’s direction; democracy’s days were numbered. As the situation in Germany began to deteriorate with increasing rapidity in the course of 1922 and 1923, Hitler began to think that he could do the same in Germany as Mussolini had done in Italy. When the German government defaulted on reparations payments, and French troops occupied the Ruhr, nationalists in Germany exploded with rage and humiliation. The Republic’s loss of legitimacy was incalculable; the government had to be seen to be doing something to oppose the occupation. A widespread campaign of civil disobedience, encouraged by the German government, led to further reprisals on the part of the French, with arrests, imprisonments and expulsions. Among many examples of French repression, nationalists remembered how one war veteran and railway worker was sacked and deported with his family for delivering a pro-German speech at a war memorial; another man, a schoolteacher, suffered the same fate after getting his pupils to turn their backs when French troops marched past.
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Schoolboy gangs shaved the heads of women thought to be ‘shamelessly consorting with the French’, while others, less dramatically, demonstrated their patriotism by walking miles to school rather than travelling by the French-run railway. A few workers actively tried to sabotage the occupation; one of them, Albert Leo Schlageter, a former Free Corps soldier, was executed for his activities, and the nationalist right, led by the Nazis, quickly seized on the incident as an example of the brutality of the French and the weakness of the Berlin government, turning Schlageter into a much-publicized nationalist martyr in the process. Industry ground to a standstill, further exacerbating the country’s already dire financial problems.
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Nationalists had a. potent propaganda weapon in the presence of black French colonial troops amongst the occupying forces. Racism was endemic in all European societies in the interwar years, as it was indeed in the United States and other parts of the world too. It was generally assumed by Europeans that dark-skinned people were inferior human beings, savages whom it was the white man’s mission to tame.
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The use of colonial troops by the British and French during the First World War had excited a certain amount of unfavourable comment in Germany; but it was their presence on German territory itself, first of all in the occupied part of the Rhineland, then in 1923 during the brief French march into the Ruhr, that really opened the floodgates for lurid racist propaganda. Many Germans living in the Rhineland and the Saar felt humiliated that, as one of them later put it, ‘Siamese, Senegalese and Arabs made themselves the masters of our homeland’.
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Soon, cartoonists were arousing racist and nationalist emotions by penning crude, semi-pornographic sketches of bestial black soldiers carrying off innocent white German women to a fate worse than death. On the right, this became a potent symbol of Germany’s national humiliation during the Weimar years, and the myth of the mass rape of German women by French colonial troops became so powerful that the few hundred mixed-race children to be found in Germany in the early 11930s were almost universally regarded as the offspring of such incidents. In fact, the overwhelming majority of them actually seem to have been the result of consensual unions, often between German colonists and indigenous Africans in the German colonies before or during the war.
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As the Nazis and many more who thought like them exploited these fears and resentments to the full, the government in Berlin seemed powerless to do anything about it. Plans and conspiracies began to multiply. Hitler was not the only person to contemplate a march on Berlin: the ‘National-Bolshevist’ Hans von Hentig, who was to become Germany’s most distinguished criminologist after 1945, was also starting to gather arms and troops in a hare-brained scheme to use the Communist Party as an ally in a violent seizure of power with the aim of getting Germany to repudiate the Treaty of Versailles.
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The idea was not very realistic, whoever tried to put it into action; both Germany’s federal structure and its constitution made a repetition of what had happened in Italy extremely unlikely. Nevertheless, it quickly took root. Hitler embarked on a massive propaganda offensive, berating the ‘November criminals’ in Berlin for their weakness, and building up in a crescendo of public demonstrations against the French.

His prospects were greatly improved at this time by the accession of a further group of new and very useful supporters to the Nazi movement. Among them was Ernst ‘Putzi’ Hanfstaengl, a tall, part-American socialite from a wealthy background in the world of art dealing and publishing, whose snobbery always prevented him from falling wholly under Hitler’s spell. But Hanfstaengl thought Hitler’s petty-bourgeois simplicity - his appalling taste in art, his ignorance of wine, his clumsy table manners - simply underlined his patent sincerity. His lack of polish was an essential precondition of his uncanny ability to connect with the masses. Like many other admirers of Hitler, Hanfstaengl first came into contact with him by attending one of his speeches; for his part, Hitler was overwhelmed by Hanfstaengl’s drawing-room sophistication, and enjoyed listening to him playing Wagner on the piano, marching round the room and conducting with his arms as the strains of the master sounded out. More seriously, Hanfstaengl was able to introduce Hitler to influential people in Munich high society, including publishers, businessmen and army officers. Such circles found it amusing to patronize him, were entertained when he appeared at their elegant parties dressed in an army coat and carrying a dog-whip, and shared enough of his views to guarantee his loans - as the wife of the piano manufacturer Bechstein did - and to support him in various other ways. Only the most dedicated, however, like the businessman Kurt Lüdecke, gave Hitler money in any great quantity. Otherwise, the Nazi Party had to rely on its friends in high places, like the former diplomat Max Erwin von Scheubner-Richter, to steer a small portion of business funds meant for Ludendorff in their direction while it continued to draw most of its income from Party membership dues.
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