III

The years 1927-8 saw the creation of a new basic structure for the Nazi Party across the country. In 1928 the Party Regions were realigned to follow the boundaries of the Reichstag constituencies - only 35 of them, all very large, to conform to Weimar’s system of proportional representation by party list - to signal the primacy of their electoral functions. Within a year or so of this, a new intermediate organizational layer of districts (Kreise) had been created between the Regions and the local branches. A new generation of younger Nazi activists played the most prominent role at these levels. They pushed aside the generation left over from prewar Pan-German and conspiratorial organizations, and outnumbered those who had taken an active part in the Free Corps, the Thule Society and similar groups. But it is important to remember that even the older generation of leading Nazis were themselves still young men, particularly when compared with the greying, middle-aged politicians who led the mainstream political parties. In 1929 Hitler was still only 40, Goebbels 32, Goring 36, Hess 35, Gregor Strasser 37. Their role remained crucial, especially in providing leadership and inspiration to the younger generation.

Goebbels, for example, made his reputation above all as Regional Leader of Berlin, where his fiery speeches, his incessant activity, his outrageous provocations of the Nazis’ opponents, and his calculated staging of street-fights and meeting-hall brawls to gain the attention of the press won the Party a mass of new adherents. More publicity accrued from the Berlin Party’s aggressive and extremely defamatory campaigns against figures such as the Berlin deputy police chief Bernhard Weiss, whose Jewish descent Goebbels drew attention to through calling him ‘Isidor’ - an entirely made-up name, commonly used by antisemites for Jews, and borrowed on this occasion, ironically, from the Communist press.¹⁰⁰ Goebbels’s violence and extremism earned the Nazi Party in Berlin an eleven-month ban from the city’s Social Democratic authorities in 1927- 8; but they also won him the allegiance and admiration of younger activists such as the 19-year-old Horst Wessel, a pastor’s son who had abandoned his university law studies for the world of the paramilitaries, most recently the brownshirts. ‘What this man has shown in oratorical gifts and talent for organization’, he wrote of ’our Goebbels’ in 1929, ‘is unique... The S.A. would have let itself be hacked to bits for him.’¹⁰¹

A great deal of in-fighting took place over key posts in the Party organization at a local and regional level. On the whole, however, as Max Amann told one local activist towards the end of 1925, Hitler

takes the view on principle that it is not the job of the Party leadership to ‘install’ branch leaders. Herr Hitler takes the view today more than ever that the most effective fighter in the National Socialist movement is the man who pushes his way through on the basis of his achievements as a leader. If you yourself write that you enjoy the trust of almost all the members in Hanover, why don’t you then take over the leadership of the branch?¹⁰²

In this way, Hitler thought, the most ruthless, the most dynamic and the most efficient would rise to positions of power within the movement. He was later to apply the same principle in running the Third Reich. It helped ensure that the Nazi Party at every level became ceaselessly active, constantly marching, fighting, demonstrating, mobilizing. Yet this did not bring immediate rewards. By the end of 1927 the Party still had only some 75,000 members and a mere seven deputies elected to the Reichstag. The hopes of men like Strasser and Goebbels that it would be able to win over the industrial working class had proved to be illusory.¹⁰³

Recognizing the difficulties of breaking into the Social Democratic and Communist heartlands, the Nazis turned instead to rural society in Protestant north Germany, where rising peasant discontent was spilling over into demonstrations and campaigns of protest. The contradictory effects of inflation and stabilization on the farming community had merged into a general crisis of agriculture by the late 1920s. While large landowners and farmers had bought machinery on hire purchase and were thus able to modernize at very little real cost to themselves, peasants tended to hoard money and so lost it, or spent it on domestic goods and so gained no benefit for their businesses. After the inflation, government measures to ease credit restrictions on agriculture to help recovery only made things worse, as peasants borrowed heavily to make good their losses, expecting a fresh round of inflation, then found they were unable to pay the money back because prices were declining instead of rising. Bankruptcies and foreclosures were already rising in number towards the end of the 1920s, and small farmers were turning to the extreme right in their despair.¹⁰⁴ Larger farmers and big landowners were suffering from the downturn in agricultural prices, and were unable to pay what they regarded as excessively high taxes to support the Weimar welfare state.¹⁰⁵ Both the Prussian and the Reich governments had tried to alleviate the situation by tariffs, subsidies, import controls and the like, but all these proved wholly inadequate to the situation.¹⁰⁶ Farmers of all types had modernized, mechanized and rationalized in order to try and deal with the agricultural depression since the early 1920s, but it was not enough. Pressure for high import tariffs on foodstuffs grew more insistent as the farming community began to see this as the only way to protect their income. In this situation, the Nazis’ promise of a self-sufficient, ‘autarchic’ Germany, with foreign food imports more or less banned, seemed increasingly attractive.¹⁰⁷

Realizing that they were winning support in rural areas in the Protestant north without really trying, the Nazis accelerated the shift in their propaganda from the urban working class to other sectors of the population. Now the Party turned its attention to rural districts and began to mount serious recruiting drives in areas like Schleswig-Holstein and Oldenburg. ¹⁰⁸ Hitler retreated still further from the ‘socialist’ orientation of the Party in north Germany, and even ‘clarified’, or in other words amended, Point 17 of the Party Programme, on 13 April 1928, in order to reassure small farmers that its commitment to ‘the expropriation of land for communal purposes without compensation’ referred only to ‘Jewish companies which speculate in land’.¹⁰⁹ The Nazis lost 100,000 votes in the Reichstag elections of May 1928, and with a mere 2.6 per cent of the vote were only able to get 12 deputies into the legislature, among them Gottfried Feder, Joseph Goebbels, Hermann Goring and Gregor Strasser. None the less, in some rural areas of the Protestant north they did much better. While they could only manage 1.4 per cent in Berlin and 1.3 per cent in the Ruhr, for example, they scored no less than 18.1 and 17.7 per cent respectively in two counties in Schleswig-Holstein. A vote of 8.1 per cent in another area inhabited by discontented Protestant small farmers, namely Franconia, reinforced the feeling that, as the Party newspaper put it on 31 May, ‘the election results from the rural areas in particular have proved that with a smaller expenditure of energy, money and time, better results can be achieved there than in the big cities’.¹¹⁰

Map 8. The Nazis in the Reichstag Election of 1928

The Party soon revamped its propaganda appeal to the farming community, telling them that it would create a special position for them in the Third Reich. Farmers of all kinds would be granted a ‘corporation’ of their own, in which they would work together in harmony and with the full backing of the state. Refractory farmhands, many of whom were active in the Social Democratic Party, would be brought to heel, and labour costs would at last come under tight control. After years of unsuccessful, sometimes violent protest, farmers in Schleswig-Holstein flocked to the support of the Nazi Party. It did no harm to its cause that the Party was led locally by members of the farming community, nor that it laid unmistakeable stress on an ideology of ‘blood and soil’ in which the peasant would be the core of the national identity. Even some of the larger landowners, traditionally identified with the Nationalists, were convinced. The Nazi Party’s support amongst middling and small landowners skyrocketed. Soon, farmers’ sons were providing the manpower for stormtrooper units being despatched to fight the Communists in the big cities.¹¹¹

Thus, the new strategy soon began to bear fruit. The Party’s membership grew from 100,000 in October 1928 to 150,000 a year later, while in local and state elections its vote now began to increase sharply, rising to 5 per cent in Saxony, 4 per cent in Mecklenburg and 7 per cent in Baden. In some rural areas of Protestant Saxony it nearly doubled its share of the vote, increasing, for example, from 5.9 per cent in the Schwarzenberg district in 1928 to 11.4 per cent in 1929.¹¹² In June 1929 the Nazi Party took over its first municipality, the Franconian town of Coburg. Here they won 13 out of the 25 seats on the council in the wake of a successful campaign for the removal of the previous council after it had sacked the local Nazi leader, a municipal employee, for making antisemitic speeches. The victory reflected in part the huge effort the Party put into the elections, with top speakers like Hermann Goring and even Hitler himself appearing at the hustings. But it also demonstrated that there was electoral capital to be won in local politics, where the Party now became much more active than before.¹¹³

And in the autumn of 1929 there was a further electoral bonus for the Party, in the shape of the campaign against the Young Plan (which involved the reduction and rescheduling of reparations payments, but not their abolition) organized by the Nationalists. Their leader, Alfred Hugenberg, enlisted the support of the Nazis and other ultra-right groups in his efforts to win acceptance for a referendum on his proposal for a law to reject the plan and prosecute any government ministers who signed it. Not only did the Nazis gain publicity from this campaign, they also won a degree of respectability on the mainstream right through the presence of Hitler on the organizing committee, along with such Pan-German stalwarts as Heinrich Class and the Steel Helmet leaders Franz Seldte and Theodor Duesterberg. The referendum itself was a failure, with only 5.8 million votes in favour. But the campaign had revealed to many supporters of the Nationalists how much more dynamic the brown-shirted and jackbooted Nazis were than the frock-coated and top-hatted leaders of their own party.¹¹⁴

Meanwhile, Hitler was soon whipping up popular enthusiasm again, his charisma now reinforced by the leadership cult that had grown up around him within the Party. An important symbolic expression of this was the use of the ‘German greeting’, ‘Hail Hitler!’ with outstretched right arm, whether or not Hitler was present. Made compulsory in the movement in 1926, it was also used increasingly as a sign-off in correspondence. These customs reinforced the movement’s total dependence on Hitler, and were enthusiastically propagated by the second tier of leaders who had now gathered around him, whether, as with Gregor Strasser, for tactical reasons, to cement the Party’s unity, or, as with Rudolf Hess, out of blind, religious faith in the person of the ‘Leader’, as he was now generally known.¹¹⁵ At the Party rally, held in Nuremberg in August 1929, and the first such meeting since 1927, the Party’s new-found confidence and coherence was demonstrated in a huge propaganda display, attended, so the police thought, by as many as 40,000 people, all united in their adulation for the Leader.¹¹⁶

By this time the Nazi Party had become a formidable organization, its regional, district and local levels staffed with loyal and energetic functionaries, many of them well educated and administratively competent, and its propaganda appeal channelled through a network of specialist institutions directed at particular constituents of the electorate. ¹¹⁷ Despite Hitler’s repeated insistence that politics was a matter for men, there was now a Nazi women’s organization, the self-styled German Women’s Order, founded by Elsbeth Zander in 1923 and incorporated as a Nazi Party affiliate in 1928. Its membership was estimated by the police to have reached 4,000 by the end of the decade, nearly half the Nazi Party’s total female membership of 7,625. The German Women’s Order was one of those paradoxical women’s organizations that campaigned actively in public for the removal of women from public life: militantly anti-socialist, anti-feminist and antisemitic. Its practical activities included running soup kitchens for brownshirts, helping with propaganda campaigns, hiding weapons and equipment for the Nazi paramilitaries when they were being sought by the police, and providing nursing services for wounded activists through its sub-organization the ‘Red Swastika’, a Nazi version of the Red Cross.¹¹⁸

Zander was an effective speaker by all accounts, but she was not much of an organizer, and early in 1931 her German Women’s Order collapsed amid a welter of accusations and counter-accusations, of which the charge of financial corruption was the most serious. The Order was so deeply in debt that Zander herself, as the responsible official, faced personal bankruptcy. In addition, there were scurrilous reports that Zander was having an affair with the Order’s chauffeur, while brownshirts were appearing at some of its meetings dressed in women’s clothes. Gregor Strasser, now the Party’s Organizational Leader, responded by dissolving all the Nazi Party’s female affiliates, politely but effectively removing Zander from a position of authority, and replacing them on 6 July 1931 with the National Socialist Women’s Organization (NS-Frauenschaft), which was initially at least a decentralized body with its regional associations controlled by the Regional Leaders. Soon, however, it was successful enough to acquire a nationwide identity, with its own magazine for women and not only a greater degree of autonomy for its own regional leaders but also a greater degree of co-ordination between them.¹¹⁹ The fundamental problem for Nazi women, however, lay in the Party’s ineradicable male chauvinism, a conviction that women’s role was not to take part in politics but to stay at home and bear children. For the time being, it had to compromise its position in the interests of winning over female voters, but in the long run, if the Nazis ever came to power, its anti-feminist women activists seemed doomed to argue themselves out of a role.

Alongside the organizations catering for women there was also one directed at youths aged between 14 and 18, founded in 1922. This initially had the rather cumbersome title of the Youth League of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party; but in 1926 it was renamed the Hitler Youth. Beginning as a recruiting agency for the brownshirts, it was revamped in 1929 under Kurt Gruber as a rival to the myriad informal youth groups that existed on the Weimar scene, most of them opposed to the Republic. It, too, met with little success to begin with; even in January 1932 it only had a thousand members in the whole of Berlin.¹²⁰ Backing it up was a National Socialist School Pupils’ League, founded in 1929, and a League of German Maidens, established the following year.¹²¹ All these organizations were soon dwarfed in size and significance by the National Socialist German Students’ League, founded in 1926 by Wilhelm Tempel. The League, too, did relatively little until 1928, when it was taken over by Baldur von Schirach, who proved to be a durable and increasingly important figure in the Nazi movement. Born in 1907 in Berlin, he was the son of a traditionalist, ex-army theatre director in Weimar, who was married to a wealthy American woman. Schirach grew up in culturally conservative, antisemitic circles in Weimar. He was educated at a boarding school whose head emphasized character-building rather than academic education. The young Schirach was profoundly influenced by his elder brother’s suicide in October 1919, announced in a letter to his family as a response to ‘Germany’s misfortune’. By the mid-1920s he was reading Houston Stewart Chamberlain, and when he discovered Hitler’s My Struggle he was converted to Nazism, developing his commitment into real hero-worship when he heard Hitler speak in the town in 1925. Soon he had attracted the Leader’s attention with a seemingly endless outpouring of poems glorifying the movement and its chief. They have been described as ‘superior to the outpourings of other racist versifiers’ and were published in a collected volume in 1929.¹²²

During his studies in Munich (which he never completed) he joined the National Socialist German Students’ League, quickly rising to the top of the branch based at Munich University, where he had been advised to study by Hitler. It was his success in this capacity that propelled him to the leadership of the national League in 1928, replacing Wilhelm Tempel. Schirach purged the League of its social-revolutionary elements and led it in extremely vigorous campaigning for seats on the student unions of individual universities. Pushing aside the traditional, rather stuffy duelling corps and fraternities, the League gained a reputation for provocative actions, and campaigned on issues such as the reduction of overcrowding in lectures (by imposing a limit on the number of Jewish students), the dismissal of pacifist professors, the creation of new chairs in subjects like Racial Studies and Military Science, and the harnessing of the universities to the national interest, away from the pursuit of knowledge as an end in itself. By the summer of 1932 they had already gained a much-trumpeted success in combination with right-wing professors and local politicians in hounding Emil Julius Gumbel, a particularly hated figure as a Jew, a socialist, a pacifist and a campaigner against right-wing judicial bias, from his chair in Heidelberg, prompting the declaration from a Frankfurt magazine that ‘Heidelberg has thus opened the era of the Third Reich in the sphere of academia’.¹²³

Carefully avoiding antagonizing the fraternities, Schirach rapidly increased the League’s vote in student elections, and in July 1931 the League was able to take over the national organization of the General Students’ Unions with the help of other, sympathetic right-wing groups. In 1932 the students voted the ‘leadership principle’ through the national Union, abolishing elections altogether. Even though total membership of the Nazi Students’ League did not even reach 10 per cent of national fraternity membership, the Nazis had completely taken over student representation in Germany. Impressed by such successes, Hitler appointed Schirach to the leadership of the Hitler Youth on 3 October 1931.¹²⁴

Not just women, young people, students, and school pupils, but also many other sectors of German society were catered for by specially designed Nazi organizations by the end of the 1920s. There were groups for civil servants, for the war-wounded, for farmers, and for many other constituencies, each addressing its particular, specifically targeted propaganda effort. There was even a kind of trade union movement, the clumsily named National Socialist Factory Cell Organization, which met with a conspicuous lack of success in trying to attract industrial workers, who were either already organized in socialist-oriented or Catholic or Communist trade unions, or out of a job and so not in need of a trade union.¹²⁵ Yet the Nazis still had a particular appeal to the lower middle classes at this time, to artisans, shopkeepers and the self-employed. Often they gathered up such people from other, similar movements. The German Nationalist Commercial Employees’ Union, for example, played a significant role in politicizing many young men and turning them in the direction of Nazism.¹²⁶ Founded in the Wilhelmine period, it articulated the resentments of male clerks in a world where women were coming into secretarial and similar jobs in ever larger numbers, and big employers in the banks, finance corporations, insurance companies and so on were often perceived as Jewish by religion, ethnic origin or simply character. Well before the war, it had launched furious attacks on Jews as the architects of the proletarianization of their members.¹²⁷ One junior civil servant, born in 1886, joined the union in 1912. and later noted that he thought that the government was dominated by Jews even under the Kaiser. When he finally left the Nationalists for the Nazis in 1932 after attending a Party rally, he noted that ‘this was what I had been looking for since 1912’.¹²⁸ With many older Nazis from such backgrounds it must have been the same.

Strasser encouraged the establishment of this extremely elaborate structure of subdivisions within the movement, even if many of the different branches, like the Hitler Youth or the Factory Cell Organization, had very few members and did not seem to be going anywhere very fast. For he had a long-term aim in mind. All of this was intended to form the basis for the creation of a society run by Nazified social institutions once Hitler came to power. Strasser expended a great deal of energy and diplomacy in the creation of this embryonic Nazi social order. In the shorter run, it helped the Party direct its electoral appeal towards virtually every constituency in German society, helping to politicize social institutions that had previously considered themselves more or less unpolitical in their nature. It meant that the Party would be able to expand with ease should it suddenly gain a rapid influx of new members. And the whole structure was held together by unconditional loyalty to a leader whose power was now absolute, and whose charisma was fed on a daily basis by the adulation of his immediate group of subordinates.¹²⁹