Hitler: Ascent, 1889-1939 (35 page)

8

Führer on Standby

“I’m no longer unknown, and that’s the most important springboard for us as we give it another try,” Hitler told Ernst Hanfstaengl after his release from Landsberg. He also reassured Hanfstaengl’s wife Helene: “I promise you one thing…The next time I’m not just going to topple off my perch.”
¹
Hitler had already decided in prison to reconstitute the NSDAP, and since he refused to take sides among the warring factions, his aura had remained undamaged. Thus he was in an excellent position to unite most of the rival individuals and groups behind him. It was his intention from the very start to transform the NSDAP into an unquestioning instrument for his own will. To further this aim, his power base in Munich had to remain the seat of the party. Hitler attached sacral importance to the birthplace of Nazism: “Rome, Mecca, Moscow—every one of these places embodies a world view!” he proclaimed. “We shall remain in the city that saw the first party comrades shed their blood for our movement. It must become the Moscow of our movement!”
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He added: “The holiest site is the one in which there has been the most suffering.”
³

But conditions in Munich had changed since the rise of the NSDAP in the early 1920s. After the post-war political crises and hyperinflation, the Weimar Republic consolidated itself between 1924 and 1928. Once the reichsmark had been stabilised, the German economy recovered surprisingly quickly. In 1927, industrial production again reached pre-war levels. Real wages also grew at a healthy rate, while unemployment, which had stood at 20 per cent in the winter of 1923–4, was receding. The worst was seemingly over, and a cautious optimism was spreading through society.

Germany could also celebrate some progress in foreign policy. With the adoption in 1924 of the Dawes Plan, which tied reparations payments to the state of the economy, Germany received assurances that the military occupation of the Ruhr region would end within a year. Under Gustav Stresemann, who served as Germany’s foreign minister through a succession of governments from 1924 to 1929, relations continually improved with the Entente countries, in particular with France. In the 1925 Treaty of Locarno, Germany recognised its western border laid out in the Treaty of Versailles and guaranteed that the Rhineland would be kept demilitarised. In return, France and Belgium waived demands for further territorial concessions. In 1926, after these agreements had come into force, Germany was ceremoniously inducted into the League of Nations. The event marked the country’s return to the international community.
⁴

When Germans today talk about the “Golden Twenties,” however, they don’t primarily mean economic recovery and political successes, but rather “Weimar culture,” an unusually rich flourishing of creativity and experimentalism.
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Around 1923–4, the ecstatic pathos and social utopianism of expressionism gave way to New Objectivity, a cooler and socially more realistic outlook that set the tone in painting, literature and architecture. The most concrete expression of this attitude was Walter Gropius’s Bauhaus movement in Weimar and later Dessau. Bauhaus was an experimental laboratory for new functional architecture, furniture and home appliances. New media such as vinyl records, radio and sound film facilitated the rise of modern mass culture, whose offerings could be enjoyed by people beyond the privileged upper classes. Sports like football, athletics, boxing and bicycle- and car-racing became increasingly popular. In his autobiography the journalist Sebastian Haffner identified a veritable “sports mania” that took hold of him and many other young people in the mid-1920s.
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The capital of the Golden Twenties was undeniably Berlin, full of cinemas and dance halls where American imports like the Shimmy and the Charleston were all the rage. Women’s fashion was more practical and casual, and the page-boy haircut became a symbol of female emancipation. Attitudes towards sex were unprecedentedly liberal. All these experiences, impulses and distractions worked against the previous trend towards political radicalism—but only as long as Germany’s fragile economic recovery continued.

The times were no longer favourable for Hitler. “Today, inflation no longer nourishes the desperation politics of a putsch,” the
Bayerischer Anzeiger
newspaper reasoned. “The conditions have changed, and Hitler will have to adjust his policies.”
⁷
Nonetheless, as Hitler’s newly appointed personal secretary Hess noted, the “Tribune” was “in good spirits” and “full of his old energy” as he set about reconstituting the Nazi Party. “The superfluous fat gained at L[andsberg] is gone,” Hess wrote. “Once again he hardly has any free time. The hunt is back on!”
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Hitler had carefully prepared his return to the political stage. The first step was to get the Bavarian government to lift the ban on the NSDAP. In early January 1925, therefore, Hitler paid a visit to the Bavarian state president and chairman of the BVP, Heinrich Held. He expressed regrets for the attempted putsch, requested that his co-conspirators still detained in Landsberg be released, and promised to stay within the bounds of the law in future. At the same time, he distanced himself from attacks made by Ludendorff and other representatives of the far right upon the Catholic Church. Held’s reaction was cool. The Bavarian government, he said, would under no circumstances tolerate conditions like those in the run-up to 9 November 1923 and would use “every means of state authority” to prevent a repeat of the past. But he did ultimately agree to lift the ban on the NSDAP and the
Völkischer Beobachter
. “The beast is tamed,” Held is said to have remarked. “Now we can loosen the shackles.”
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Hitler was only able to launch his second political career because his adversaries criminally underestimated him.

On 26 February, ten days after the ban was lifted, the
Völkischer Beobachter
resumed publication. In the first edition’s lead article, “How to Make our Movement Strong Again,” and another piece entitled “Appeal to the Former Members of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party,” Hitler called for an end to the quarrels of the past: “Let us stand as before shoulder to shoulder, loyally as brothers in a great fighting community.”
¹⁰
In the appended guidelines for a “new founding” of the party, all members had to reapply. However, Hitler made it clear that the most basic goal of the party had not changed in the slightest: “The entire strength of the movement is to be directed at the German people’s most terrible enemy: Jewry, Marxism and the parties that are allied with them or support them—the Centrists and the democrats.”
¹¹

A day later Hitler made a public appearance in the Bürgerbräukeller, the place where he had launched the attempted putsch a year and a half earlier. The venue was crammed beyond capacity hours before the start of the event, and when Hitler finally appeared, he was greeted with frenetic applause. Several prominent figures—Ludendorff, Rosenberg, Röhm and Gregor Strasser—were not in attendance, and the party’s original founder Anton Drexler, who had just failed in his attempt to push out Hermann Esser and Julius Streicher, stayed away as well. Publisher Max Amann moderated the event in his stead. By no means did Hitler show any signs of reform. On the contrary, he took up exactly where he had left off in November 1923. The largest part of his two-hour speech consisted of hateful anti-Jewish tirades that whipped the audience into a frenzy. “The Jew,” he proclaimed, was a “tool of the devil” that had plunged Germany into misery, and the battle against this “global plague” could only be won “when the swastika flag flies atop every workshop and factory.” The entire strength of the movement, Hitler demanded, must be focused on achieving this goal.

Only towards the end of his speech did Hitler get around to addressing what was actually the topic of the event—the reconstitution of the party. He repeated his appeal to “all those who have remained National Socialists” to bury the hatchet and unite around him. At no point was there the slightest doubt about Hitler’s claim to leadership: “For nine months I haven’t said a word. Now I lead the movement, and no one has the right to place me under any conditions.” Hitler was assuming complete responsibility for the past, and now, more than a year after the attempted coup, party members could decide his fate: “If I’ve done well, then you should stop condemning me. If I’ve done badly, then I will put my office back in your hands. (Cries of ‘Never!’)”
¹²
This theatrical ending was followed by a prearranged scene of reconciliation between the rival leaders of the NSDAP’s successor organisations. Julius Streicher, Arthur Dinter and Hermann Esser of the Pan-Germanic Ethnic Community publicly shook hands on the podium with Rudolf Buttmann, Gottfried Feder and Wilhelm Frick of the VB. “The reuniting of the two feuding brothers” was a success, Hess noted. That evening, Hitler had himself chauffeured in his new Mercedes to Bayreuth by Winifred Wagner, whom he had invited to the Bürgerbräukeller.
¹³

Yet despite the public pretence of unity, the quarrels continued. The Pan-Germanic Ethnic Community was dissolved in March 1925, and the majority of its members joined the NSDAP, but the membership of the VB had reservations. Of the twenty-three VB deputies in the Bavarian Landtag, only six went over to the new Nazi faction, which had been formed under Buttmann’s leadership. Ludendorff and Gregor Strasser had already stepped down from the Reich leadership of the National Socialist Liberation Movement on 12 February. But many of the people who sympathised with its aims saw Ludendorff, and not Hitler, as the true leader of the ethnic-chauvinist camp. Moreover, in early May, Anton Drexler, who was completely disillusioned with Hitler, founded an organisation of his own, the National-Social People’s League (Nationalsozialer Volksbund, or NSVB), from the remnants of the VB in Munich, although it never seriously rivalled the NSDAP.
¹⁴

Hitler’s first post-prison appearance had unpleasant consequences. On 7 March, the Bavarian government banned him from speaking in public. The authorities were particularly disconcerted by his statement that “Either the enemy will march over our dead bodies, or we will march over his”—a threat that completely negated Hitler’s promises to stay within the bounds of the law.
¹⁵
Most of Germany’s other federal states, including Prussia, followed suit and prohibited Hitler from speaking as well. That robbed the party leader of his most effective weapon, his ability to stir audiences with his words. On the other hand, he was still allowed to take the podium at closed party meetings and events, and the Bruckmanns’ salon served as a kind of substitute public forum. There Hitler spoke a number of times in front of specially invited audiences of between forty and sixty guests, most of them influential representatives of business, science and culture. Here Hitler had to make a very different impression than he did in the feverish, intoxicated atmosphere of a mass event. Even in his external appearance, as the historian Karl Alexander von Müller noted, Hitler adapted to the social circumstances by donning a dark-blue jacket or even a tuxedo. This was “an entirely new school of propaganda, dissimulation and seduction,” wrote Müller. The historian was also struck by Hitler’s physiognomic changes: “His thin, pale, sickly, oft empty-seeming face had become pinched, which caused his facial bones, from his forehead to his chin, to emerge more starkly. His enthusiasm had yielded to an unmistakable streak of severity. Essentially he had already become how people would later remember him.”
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If Hitler wanted to realise his ambition of absolute leadership of the NSDAP, he had to get rid of his political rivals, in particular Ludendorff, from whom he had already distanced himself while in Landsberg. It was no accident that Hitler failed to mention Ludendorff once in his speech on 27 February. Only after the staged reconciliation of the rival factions did he pay tribute to the general “who will always be the German people’s military leader.” Conversely, Ludendorff felt disappointed by Hitler. The party chairman suffered from “a psychotic fortress mentality,” Ludendorff complained privately. The general had already announced in early February that he would withdraw from politics if Hitler reconstituted the NSDAP, although Ludendorff retained his Reichstag mandate.
¹⁷

Hitler was soon gifted an unforeseen chance to deal a blow to Ludendorff’s reputation. On 28 February 1925, worn out by the constant attacks of his enemies, Reich President Friedrich Ebert died at the age of 54. Hitler persuaded Ludendorff to stand as a candidate for the far right in the resulting elections. The other candidates were the Duisburg mayor Karl Jarres for the moderately right-wing DNVP and DVP, the Social Democrat Otto Braun, the Centre Party leader Wilhelm Marx and the Communist Ernst Thälmann. Hitler knew that Ludendorff stood no chance, but on the surface he did everything to suggest that the reconstituted NSDAP was completely behind the general’s candidacy. The
Völkischer Beobachter
published constant appeals to its readers to vote for Ludendorff with the slogan “He who wants freedom must choose the man with the iron fist.”
¹⁸

The first round of voting on 24 March was a debacle for Ludendorff, who only received 286,000 votes, or 1.1 per cent of the ballots cast, by far the fewest of any of the candidates. “Bismarck too was not made chancellor of the German people by the result of an election,” Hitler wrote in a disingenuously encouraging article in the
Völkischer Beobachter
.
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In truth, Hitler was delighted. “Very good so—now we’ve taken care of him,” Hitler allegedly remarked after Ludendorff’s complete defeat became clear.
²⁰
Because none of the candidates achieved an absolute majority, however, a run-off election was called for 26 April. Former Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg, representing all the parties on the right, won a narrow victory over Marx, who stood for the SPD, the DDP and the Centre Party. Hindenburg’s election might have been prevented had not Thälmann insisted on running for the KPD. The Communists thus played a role in installing a dyed-in-the-wool monarchist in Germany’s highest political office. “Who would have imagined two years ago that Paul von Hindenburg could become German president?” exulted the right-wing paramilitary leader Georg Escherich. “Now we have an unimpeachable, reasonable man at the head of the Reich.”
²¹
In fact, Hindenburg had a fractured relationship with the democratic institutions of the Weimar Republic, and the fatal consequences would become apparent when German democracy came under attack in the 1930s.