The Third Reich Read online

  In May, delegates at the party congress formally pronounced the NSDAP’s Twenty-five Points immutable, and early in the summer Hitler prohibited the existence of working groups within the party. To placate Strasser and his followers, Hitler courted leading men among the northern leaders, embracing those who were a potential threat to his leadership. He tapped Franz Pfeffer von Salomon, a member of Strasser’s Northern Working Group, to assume the national leadership of the SA, a position he had left vacant since Röhm’s departure in April of the previous year. Pfeffer had a long history of right-wing militancy—he was a Free Corps leader, a participant in the Kapp Putsch, and a resistance fighter against the French occupation of the Ruhr. In 1925—at age twenty-five—he became the Gauleiter of the important Westphalian/Ruhr district. On accepting Hitler’s offer on November 1, 1926, he changed his name to von Pfeffer, feeling that Pfeffer von Salomon sounded too Jewish. He understood his mission and the place of the SA in Hitler’s plans. As Hitler had unsuccessfully tried to impress upon Röhm, the SA was to be neither a secret band of conspirators nor an armed militia but an instrument of party policy, subordinate to the political leadership in Munich and, above all, to the Führer. Although tension between the regional SA and the political leadership would linger for years to come, under Pfeffer’s leadership the friction receded, and by early 1927, the SA seemed firmly under Hitler’s control.

  Hitler also had plans for Strasser’s chief lieutenant, Joseph Goebbels. Shortly after the Bamberg conference, Hitler launched a personal offensive to lure Goebbels away from his mentor. He invited Goebbels to Munich to give a speech at the Bürgerbräukeller, the Nazi holy of holies, and when he arrived at the station, he found Hitler’s gleaming black Mercedes waiting for him. As he was driven through the city, Goebbels noticed gigantic blood-red placards plastered everywhere announcing his speech. It was, Goebbels thought, “a noble reception.”

  For several days Hitler played the genial host; he invited Goebbels to join him and a lady friend for dinner; Hitler supplied tickets for concerts and the opera and offered his chauffeured car for tours of the Bavarian countryside; they had conversations tête-à-tête about party matters, each move calculated to convince Goebbels that he was a valued figure in the party, even a trusted friend of the Führer. Dr. Goebbels did not need Strasser, Hitler implied, he could stand on his own. In private discussion with a small circle of party leaders, Hitler chastised those who had challenged him at Bamberg, then proceeded to expand on the views he had propounded so fiercely at the conference. “We ask questions,” Goebbels wrote, “he answers brilliantly. I love him. A mixture of collectivism and individualism. Land to the people. Production, where one creates, individualism. Corporations, trusts, finished goods, transportation, etc. socialized.” Goebbels was overwhelmed. The disenchantment he had experienced at Bamberg was swept away by Hitler’s attentions, his show of friendship, his charisma. Goebbels succumbed entirely. Hitler “has thought everything through . . . always sees the big picture.” Such a man, Goebbels gushed adoringly, “can be my leader. I bow to the greater man, the political genius.”

  Hitler rewarded him by appointing him to head the Berlin NSDAP. It was a tough assignment, but Goebbels seemed up to the challenge. He spoke the language of revolutionary politics; he espoused a nebulous, non-Marxist form of socialism, and his attacks on capitalism, mixed with a particularly toxic dose of anti-Semitism, were vicious and unrelenting. When he arrived in the capital, the Berlin party was disorganized and in disarray, with barely eight hundred members, and the city—the “asphalt desert,” as Goebbels sometimes referred to it—was the epicenter of left-wing politics in Germany, a stronghold of both the Social Democrats and the Communists. Goebbels threw himself into the fray with utter fanaticism. He wrote incendiary articles in the party press, he pushed the SA into the streets; he provoked violent confrontations with the Communists’ powerful paramilitary Red Front. He had a natural propensity for theatricality, for public spectacle, which he would develop to great effect in the following years. After only a few difficult months, he had injected new energy, new confidence, and aggressiveness into the Berlin party, greatly expanded its membership, and given it a much higher profile in Berlin politics.

  Goebbels would prove to be an inspired choice, both in Berlin and nationally, but Hitler’s most important move at this juncture was to strike a deal with Gregor Strasser. In the aftermath of Bamberg, Strasser agreed to disband the Northern Working Group, and Hitler agreed to remove the loathsome Esser from the party leadership. He then asked Strasser to take charge of the party’s propaganda department. Then a devastating car crash in March 1926 left him seriously injured and bedridden through much of the spring, and Hitler was forced to name an interim director to manage the Propaganda Section until Strasser’s appointment was formally announced in mid-September. But Strasser was brought back into the fold.

  A tireless organizer and campaigner, Strasser seemed ideal for the position, and he took up his new task with the same boundless energy that characterized all his political actions. Between 1926 and 1928, the Propaganda Section initiated a set of organizational reforms intended to tighten the leadership’s control of the party and to enhance Nazi campaign performance. He crafted a vertical organizational structure that established a clear chain of command. He redrew the NSDAP’s regional boundaries to conform to the Reichstag thirty-five electoral districts, and the authority of the regional Chiefs, the Gauleiter, was substantially strengthened in each area. It was the Gauleiter and their propaganda staffs that were charged with executing the party’s campaign directives.

  This emphasis on propaganda, its organization and content, came as a result of Hitler’s decision, made while in prison, to take a new strategic tack. He had learned his lessons from the failed Putsch. “From now on,” he said to a follower during a visit to Landsberg, “we must follow a new line of action. . . . When I resume active work, it will be necessary to pursue a new policy. Instead of working to achieve power by an armed coup, we shall have to hold our noses and enter the Reichstag.” The party would embrace parliamentary politics not to save German democracy but to destroy it. “Sooner or later,” he said, “we shall have a majority—and after that Germany.”

  The key was propaganda, and here Hitler had quite specific ideas. Propaganda, he argued, “must be aimed at the emotions and only to a very limited degree at the so-called intellect.” Propaganda appeals, therefore, “must be adjusted to the most limited intelligence among those it is addressed to.” The art of propaganda lay “in understanding the emotional ideas of the great masses and finding, through a psychologically correct form, the way to the attention and thence to the heart of the broad masses.” To do this, it was necessary to have only a few major themes. “The receptivity of the great masses is very limited,” he added scornfully, “their intelligence is small, but their power of forgetting is enormous. In consequence . . . all effective propaganda must be limited to a very few points and must harp on these in slogans until the last member of the public understands what you want him to understand by your slogan.” “The people in their overwhelming majority are so feminine by nature and attitude that sober reasoning determines their thoughts and actions far less than emotion.” Given the limited intelligence and “primitive sentiments” of the broad masses, it was, therefore, necessary to restrict appeals “to a few points and repeat them over and over.” Equally important, due to “the primitive simplicity” of their minds, the “great masses of the people . . . more easily fall a victim to a big lie than to a little one, since they themselves lie in little things, but would be ashamed of lies that were too big. Such a falsehood will never enter their heads, and they will not be able to believe in the possibility of such monstrous effrontery and infamous misrepresentation in others.” The “Jews and their Marxist fighting organizations” operate on this “sound principle,” and, in self-defense, so, too, should the National Socialists.

  The party, for Hitler, existed for propaganda, and these w
ere the principles on which the party’s propaganda would be based. Street propaganda, recruitment drives, and mobilization for elections now became the raison d’être of all National Socialist activities. Hitler’s first priority, after establishing his control over the movement, was to create a broadly based, centrally directed party organization necessary for the NSDAP’s entry onto the stage of Weimar electoral politics. The Völkisch campaigns of 1924 had been too disjoined, lacking clarity and central direction. With the reestablishment of the party in 1925, Hitler hoped to concentrate responsibility for the conduct of nationwide propaganda in the hands of the party leadership in Munich. He was convinced that if the reconstructed NSDAP was to compete successfully in democratic elections, it needed a grassroots organization capable of attracting dues-paying members and mobilizing voters.

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  In the spring of 1926 the party took the first steps toward creating a tightly organized and energetic propaganda operation. Reorganization of the party’s propaganda apparatus was to be taken at the grass roots. Each local party chapter (Ortsgruppe) was ordered to organize a propaganda cell to be staffed by party members from diverse occupational backgrounds who were “infused with a fanatical, fiery spirit for our movement.” To broaden the social and cultural perspective of local propaganda operations, one third of cell operatives were to be women. As a measure to increase centralized control over local propaganda, the leadership instructed the cells to bypass their regional leaders (Gauleiter) and establish direct contact with the Propaganda Leadership in Munich.

  The drive to create this network of propaganda cells, inspired by the Communist example, was launched in 1926, but the party had neither the financial resources nor the membership to generate the sort of national grassroots activity that Hitler and Strasser envisioned. Goebbels suggested another approach. He praised the party’s expanding organizational network but warned that the party should have no illusions about its strength or effectiveness. The network of propaganda cells was “ready to break in some places,” while in others it was “too finely spun, as delicate as a spider’s web.” On the other hand, Goebbels noted that the party was truly well organized in three or four areas, and rather than expending its energies on a nationwide effort, the NSDAP should concentrate its resources in these places. He argued that “our objective in the coming winter must be to transform one, maybe two dozen large metropolitan areas into unshakable bulwarks of the movement.” These cities must be carefully chosen, and then, only after the most exhaustive and detailed preparation, subjected to an intensive propaganda barrage. Following centralized direction and guidelines from the Propaganda Section in Munich, these propaganda offensives would saturate the selected cities with leaflets, placards, parades, pamphlets, rallies, and special appearances by the party’s “big guns.” In this way, the party could maximize its very limited financial resources, employ its best speakers, and devastate its overwhelmed enemies in the targeted cities. Having secured such urban bastions, the NSDAP could launch an assault on the surrounding countryside.

  Although Goebbels’s plan found a favorable reception in the party’s leadership, it was not implemented in 1926. Instead, Hitler opted to continue the party’s emphasis on national grassroots expansion and to tighten the party’s central control over its burgeoning but loose apparatus. He confirmed that decision at the NSDAP’s first Party Day congress at Weimar, when he officially clarified the national chain of command. The local party chapters were explicitly subordinated to the regional chiefs (Gauleiter), who were in turn selected by Hitler. The local party chapters (Ortsgruppen) were required to submit monthly reports on their propaganda activities to the regional party leadership, where the Gauleiter and his propaganda staff would then pass them on to the Reich Propaganda Leadership in Munich. There they would be analyzed and used to formulate the party’s propaganda and campaign strategy.

  From 1926 to late 1927, the thrust of the party’s propaganda was set by Strasser in his role as propaganda chief, but the ideological message remained blurred. Appeals to farmers, shopkeepers, and clerks did not cease, but Strasser relentlessly pressed for greater efforts to mobilize the urban proletariat, stressing the revolutionary, anticapitalist themes calculated to attract working-class support. That position was vigorously opposed by other Nazi leaders in the less industrial south. They contended that the future of National Socialism lay not in the cities, where the Communists and Social Democrats dominated working-class politics, but in the towns and villages of the countryside, where the small-town, rural population would be more attracted to radical nationalist and anti-Semitic themes.

  Hitler chose not to intervene in these disputes. His interests at this point were primarily organizational, not ideological, and he was willing to tolerate considerable internal controversy so long as the rival factions recognized his ultimate authority to determine party policy. But since his own views remained typically vague, conflicts within the NSDAP persisted, and ideological murkiness continued to characterize the NSDAP as it entered the vigorous regional campaigns of the mid-1920s.

  Behind these campaigns was a vision of propaganda that was shared by Strasser and Goebbels. Whatever theme the party chose to emphasize, the forms, dictated by Munich, were to be the same. Even when the party was an obscure fringe phenomenon, the Nazis envisioned nothing less than the creation of an alternative political universe, a new political myth, complete with their own festivals, rituals, songs, symbols, and language. By 1927, when the party published its first propaganda handbook for local Nazi officials, the basic forms of Nazi propaganda had already emerged. The handbook described the different officially sanctioned types of meetings, festivals, celebrations, and demonstrations; it set guidelines for their organizational format, advertising, and security; and it offered instructions on how to make the most effective use of leaflets and placards, the party press, films, and other forms of agitational activity. Included among these activities were the major festivals on the National Socialist calendar: the celebration of Hitler’s birthday on April 20; the summer solstice festival on June 22; the Day of Mourning, a memorial service in honor of fallen party comrades; a reenactment of the march to the Feldherrnhalle on November 9; and Christmas. Later, the party’s increasingly elaborate annual rally at Nuremberg during September, which would acquire monumental dimensions after Hitler’s assumption of power in 1933, would be added to the list.

  In between these fixed dates on the calendar, the party encouraged the holding of other propaganda events: “German Days” or “German Evenings”; SA marches and parades; flag dedications; memorial services for war veterans. Regardless of region or featured speaker, these ceremonies were intended to follow a set of standard procedures. The sight of the SA marching through a small town or big-city neighborhood to a wreath-laying ceremony at the local war memorial followed by a military religious service, either in church, under a tent, or in the open air, became a familiar spectacle throughout Germany after 1925.

  These Nazi festivals followed a set ceremonial form. Some ritual events might consume hours or, in some instances, days. A typical German Day festival might begin with a torchlight parade from a neighboring town, where a ceremonial military retreat was followed by a public rally. The evening would then conclude with a concert by the local SA band and a speech in the hall of a hotel. The next morning was to be given over to a ceremony honoring Germany’s fallen heroes, followed by church services, and a musical concert in the marketplace. After lunch, a “propaganda march” to neighboring villages would be planned, with brief rallies and a short concert in each, before returning for another concert at the marketplace and a speech in the town hall. Marches, music, and masses were the essential ingredients of this National Socialist event.

  The “public mass meeting” was a particularly favored option on the Nazi propaganda menu. Following the party’s guidelines, it called for a major speech and a public discussion. In the last turbulent years of the Weimar Republic, this sort of meeting, advertised in
the local press, was viewed as an effective means of recruitment. Since Communists and Social Democrats regularly attended these meetings, catcalls, insults, threats, and finally bottle-throwing melees often ensued. Such fracases were not only accorded wide coverage in the local press, giving the party heightened visibility, they were also widely seen as a rough form of local entertainment.

  The party sought to attract not the local elite, but respected representatives of the different occupational, professional, and social groups who might then lead the way for others to join. If the local bookseller or schoolteacher or farmer saw something in the NSDAP, then maybe the Nazis were not so out of bounds after all. These notables were invited to special recruitment evenings that included a ritual ceremony of great solemnity that combined many of the basic elements of the NSDAP’s propaganda repertory. Instructions for the evening were detailed down to the minute.

  Beyond these grassroots forms of propaganda, the NSDAP in 1926 held the first of what came in subsequent years to be its signature event: the national party rally. The event was held in Weimar in the summer, and attendance was modest, with only seven to eight thousand in attendance, roughly half of whom were Storm Troopers. In their brown caps, shirts, and trousers, which became their official uniform in 1926, they marched in massed formation past Hitler, who, with arm outstretched in the Nazi salute, reviewed the troops. Trumpets, drums, torchlight parades, the solemn military ritual of the retreat at day’s end—all would be essential elements in the annual rallies that would later be staged with increasing grandiosity in Nuremberg.

  The Weimar rally marked the first public appearance of a new National Socialist formation, the Security Staff or SS (Schutzstaffel). Unlike the mass SA, the SS was a small elite organization, founded in November of the previous year as an heir to Hitler’s personal bodyguard, the Shock Troop Adolf Hitler. In these early days, the SS, with its jet black uniforms with silver trim, was a mysterious unit; its duties were ambiguous and its place in the National Socialist hierarchy unclear. It was officially subordinate to the SA, but, in fact, owed its allegiance directly to Hitler. It gradually took on policing duties, ferreting out spies within the party, compiling lists of Jews and enemies of the NSDAP, and was always alert for opportunities to expand its influence. But during the party’s formative years the SS remained a small, select organization operating in the shadow of the much larger SA. It had yet to acquire the bone-chilling reputation for cold-eyed murder, sadism, and unthinkable cruelty that it would develop in the Third Reich.