II

Nevertheless, Hitler still had a few friends in high places. One key figure was the Bavarian Justice Minister Franz Gürtner, who sympathized with his nationalist ideas. Gürtner agreed to lift the ban on the Nazi Party and its newspaper, the Racial Observer, when the Bavarian state of emergency was finally ended on 16 February 1925.⁸³ Armed with his newly won prestige and self-confidence as the nationalist hero of the putsch and the subsequent trial, Hitler promptly refounded the Nazi Party, calling on his former followers to join it and (a key new point) to submit themselves unconditionally to his leadership. Julius Streicher, Gottfried Feder, the Party journalist and propagandist Hermann Esser and others publicly buried their differences in a show of solidarity. Hitler moved to push his most serious rivals out onto the margins of politics. First, as it became legal to reconstitute the brownshirt organization, he insisted that it be subordinated to the Party, and cut its links with the other paramilitary groups; Ernst Röhm, who rejected this view, was ousted, left politics and was forced to become a salesman and then a factory hand before accepting an invitation to go to Bolivia to instruct the country’s troops in the ways of European warfare.⁸⁴ And secondly, Hitler worked steadily to undermine the continuing prestige of Ludendorff, who was not only a serious rival but was also rapidly becoming more extreme in his views. Under the influence of Mathilde von Kemnitz, whom he married in 1926, Ludendorff founded the Tannenberg League, which published conspiracy-theory literature attacking not only Jews but also Jesuits and the Catholic Church - a certain recipe for electoral disaster in Bavaria and other pious parts of southern Germany. Ludendorff’s fate was sealed when he stood as a candidate for the Presidency in the 1925 elections on behalf of the Nazi Party and received a derisory 1.1 per cent of the vote. There is some evidence that Hitler himself had persuaded him to stand in the knowledge that his reputation would be irreparably harmed by the attempt.⁸⁵ From now until his death in 1937, Ludendorff and his Tannenberg League remained on the fringes of politics, condemned to complete irrelevance and lacking in any kind of mass support. Nothing demonstrated more clearly than this the changed situation of extreme nationalism in Germany: the all-powerful military dictator of the First World War had been pushed out to the margins of politics by the upstart Nazi politician; the general had been displaced by the corporal.

With Ludendorff safely out of the way, Hitler had no serious rival on the extreme right any more. He could now concentrate on bringing the rest of the ultra-nationalist movement to heel. While disparate groups in the south gravitated into the orbit of the Nazi Party, the various branches of the Party in northern and western Germany were undergoing something of a revival. The person mainly responsible for this was another Bavarian, Gregor Strasser, a pharmacist from Landshut. Born in 1892, the son of a politically active lawyer, Strasser was well educated and well read, and his middle-class upbringing and manners made him an attractive figure in the eyes of many potential sympathizers of the Nazi movement. At the same time, like many bourgeois German men of his generation, he was stamped by the experience of 1914, the spirit of unity that he believed needed to be re-created among all Germans. After finishing his military service as a lieutenant, Strasser sought to re-create this experience and to right what he believed to be Germany’s wrongs. He fought with the Free Corps in Munich at the end of the war and then built up his own paramilitary group, which brought him into contact with Hitler. For Strasser, it was the cause rather than the leader that mattered. On 9 November 1923 he led his brownshirt unit into Munich to seize a key bridge over the river, as arranged, and when the putsch backfired he took his unit back to Landshut again, where he was duly arrested.⁸⁶

But in the end his rather peripheral participation in the putsch did not seem to the authorities to warrant particularly harsh treatment. Strasser therefore remained at large while the other Nazi leaders either fled or were landed in gaol. In April 1924 he was elected to the Bavarian Parliament. He proved to be a talented administrator, bringing together many of the fragments of the shattered ultra-right. Once the Nazi Party was legal again, Hitler, recognizing his ability, sent him to revive it in north Germany. By the end of 1915, Strasser’s tireless recruitment drive had increased the number of branches nearly fourfold, using a pronounced emphasis on the ‘socialist’ aspects of Nazi ideology to try and win over the industrial working class in areas like the Ruhr. Strasser was contemptuous of the other ultra-right groups which thought ‘the primitive solution of antisemitism to be adequate’. He told Oswald Spengler in July 1925 that Nazism was different because it sought ‘a German revolution’ through a German form of socialism.⁸⁷ His idea of socialism, however, while it involved the state taking a 51 per cent stake in major industries and 49 per cent in all other businesses, also included the return of the guilds and the payment of wages in kind rather than in money. ‘Socialist’ ideas of this kind were developed by Strasser in conjunction with a number of Nazi leaders in the new branches of the Party in various parts of North Germany. These Party branches owed little or nothing to the leadership of Hitler during this period; the Party, as it were, was largely reconstituting itself, independently of headquarters in Munich. Soon, perhaps inevitably, Strasser and his allies were voicing their suspicions of what they regarded as the corrupt and dictatorial clique under Hermann Esser that was running the Party’s Munich office while Hitler was composing the second volume of My Struggle. Many of them had not even met Hitler in person, and so had not fallen under the spell of his growing personal charisma. They particularly disliked the existing Nazi Party Programme, and declared their intention of replacing it with one more in tune with their own ideas.⁸⁸

Particularly prominent in these moves was another new recruit to the Party, the young ideologue Joseph Goebbels. Born in 1897 in the industrial town of Rheydt on the Lower Rhine, son of a clerk, Goebbels was given a grammar-school education and went on to study Ancient Philology, German, and History at Bonn University, gaining a Ph.D. in Romantic literature at Heidelberg University in 1921, which entitled him to be addressed, as he was ever after, as ‘Dr Goebbels’. But despite his doctorate, Goebbels was not destined for the academic life. He too was a kind of bohemian, already occupying his spare time in his student days with writing plays and dreaming of an artistic future. Throughout the 1920s he wrote and rewrote the novel that was eventually published in 1929 as Michael: A German Fate in the Pages of a Diary. The novel was mainly a vehicle for Goebbels’s own vague and confused conceptions of a national revival, based on fanatical faith and belief in the future, for which the novel’s hero eventually sacrifices himself. By such means, Goebbels sought to give meaning to a life dominated by his own very obvious physical disability: a club foot, which made him walk with a limp. It exposed him to merciless teasing at school, and indeed throughout his life, and rendered him unfit for military service in the First World War. Perhaps in compensation, Goebbels came to believe that he was destined for great things; he kept a diary, he pursued women and love affairs with extraordinary vigour and a surprising degree of success, and he spurned any ordinary means of earning a living. Instead, he read avidly - Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Spengler, and above all Houston Stewart Chamberlain, who convinced him that the rebirth of the West prophesied by Spengler could only be achieved by the removal of the Jews.⁸⁹

Goebbels was different in some ways from the other leading Nazis. His intellect and temperament were often described as ‘Latin’, perhaps because he avoided vague philosophical and rhetorical declamation and instead spoke and wrote with a remarkable clarity and openness mixed on occasion with sarcastic humour.⁹⁰ Like many others, however, he had been profoundly shocked by Germany’s defeat in the First World War. He spent the winter semester of 1919-20 in Munich - it was common for German students to change universities at least once during their studies - and so, as well as being exposed to the extreme right-wing atmosphere of student life, he now imbibed the rabidly nationalist atmosphere of the counter-revolution in the city in those months. Although he sympathized with men like Count Arco-Valley, whose imprisonment for the assassination of Kurt Eisner deeply dismayed him, Goebbels did not really discover his political commitment, or his political abilities, until 1924, when, after coming into contact with a number of ultra-nationalist groups, he was introduced to the Nazi Party by an old school friend.

As Goebbels made his way in the Nazi Party, he met Erich Koch, a Rhenish Nazi and former member of the violent wing of resistance against the French. He also encountered Julius Streicher, whom he described privately as a ‘Berserker’ and ‘perhaps somewhat pathological’.⁹¹ And he was impressed by Ludendorff, whom he already admired as the great general from the First World War. Soon, Goebbels had become a Party organizer in the Rhineland. He developed into an effective orator, perhaps the most effective of all the Nazi speakers apart from Hitler himself, lucid, popular, and quick-witted in response to hecklers. He began turning his literary talents to political use in articles for the Nazi press, giving a pseudo-socialist twist to the Nazi creed. Goebbels had finally found his métier. Within a few months he was one of the most popular Nazi orators in the Rhineland, attracting the attention of leading figures in the regional Party and starting to play a significant role in deciding its policy. It was Joseph Goebbels as much as Gregor Strasser who was behind the north German challenge to the Munich Party leadership in 1925. But he too soon began to fall under Hitler’s spell, enthused by a reading of My Struggle (‘who is this man,’ he wrote: ‘half plebeian, half God!’).⁹² Meeting him in person for only the second time, on 6 November 1925, Goebbels was impressed by his ‘big blue eyes. Like stars.’ Hitler was, he thought after hearing him speak, ‘the born tribune of the people, the coming dictator’.⁹³

Goebbels and Hitler failed to see eye to eye on many central issues. Alerted to the growing assertiveness of the north Germans, Hitler summoned them to a meeting on 14 February 1926 in Bamberg, Franconia, where Julius Streicher had built up a large following for him. The Nazi leader spoke for two hours, rejecting their views and reasserting his belief in the centrality of the conquest of ‘living-space’ in Eastern Europe for the future of German foreign policy. Whereas Strasser and Goebbels had urged the Nazis to join in the campaign to expropriate the German princes, who had retained their extensive properties in the country after their deposition in the Revolution of 1918, Hitler damned such a campaign as an attack on private property. ‘Horrifying!’ wrote Goebbels in his diary: ‘Probably one of the greatest disappointments of my life. I no longer believe fully in Hitler.’⁹⁴ But, although Goebbels now wondered whether Hitler was a reactionary, he did not offer any overt opposition to Hitler at the meeting. Shocked at Hitler’s tough stance, Strasser capitulated completely and dropped his proposals. In return, Hitler mollified the north Germans by removing Hermann Esser, whose corruption had so angered them, from his post in Munich.⁹⁵

In April 1926 Hitler brought Goebbels to Munich to give a speech, providing him with a car and generally giving him the red-carpet treatment. At Nazi Party headquarters, Hitler confronted Goebbels and his two co-leaders of the Westphalian Region of the Party, Franz Pfeffer von Salomon, another leading north German Nazi, and, like so many leading Nazis, an ex-army man and Free Corps member, and Karl Kaufmann, who had made his name by organizing violent resistance to the French during their occupation of the Ruhr. Hitler berated these men for going their own way in ideological matters, lectured them on his views of the Party’s policies, then offered to let bygones be bygones if they submitted unconditionally to his leadership. Goebbels was converted on the spot. Hitler, he confided to his diary, was ‘brilliant’. ‘Adolf Hitler,’ he wrote, thinking of the 1923 putsch, ‘I love you because you are both great and simple at the same time. What one calls a genius.’⁹⁶ From now on he was entirely under Hitler’s spell; unlike some of the other Nazi leaders, he was to remain so right up to the end. Hitler rewarded him by putting him in charge of the tiny and internally divided Nazi Party in Berlin, as Regional Leader, or Gauleiter. Pfeffer von Salomon was made head of the brownshirt paramilitaries, and Gregor Strasser became Reich Propaganda Leader of the Party. Meanwhile, the annual Party meeting reaffirmed the 1920 Party Programme and underlined Hitler’s total dominance over the movement, placing all the key appointments, and in particular those of the Regional Leaders, in his hands.⁹⁷

This meeting was required by law; and following legal requirements it duly re-elected Hitler as Party Leader. The true nature of the Party’s inner workings was demonstrated, however, by a Party rally, held in July 1926 and attended by up to 8,000 brownshirts and Party members. Its time was almost wholly taken up with rituals of obeisance to Hitler, the swearing of personal oaths of loyalty to him, and mass marches and displays, including the parading of the ‘Blood Flag’ that had been held above the ill-fated march on Munich in November 1923.⁹⁸ This set the tone in a modest way for the far more grandiose Party rallies of future years. But at this point, though now united and disciplined under Hitler’s unquestioned leadership, the Nazi Party was still very small. The developments of the following three years, up to late 1929, were to lay the foundation for the Party’s subsequent success. But more would be required than leadership and organization if the Nazis were to gain the popular backing that Hitler now sought.⁹⁹