The Third Reich Read online

  Goebbels was now not only the Gauleiter of Berlin but head of Nazi propaganda throughout the country, and he quickly showed his talents. Under his leadership, the increasingly sophisticated National Socialist campaign machine pioneered a breathtaking array of modern political techniques—an innovative form of survey research, direct mailings, highly coordinated press and leaflet campaigns, films, slide shows, phonograph records, torchlight parades, motorcades through the countryside, and entertainment events to draw crowds and raise money. The party established a speaker’s school and a nine-month correspondence course for local Nazi operatives, with lessons in National Socialist ideology and propaganda techniques. Each regional party organization was required to enroll two speakers each term. “The major burden of the party’s campaign must be carried by the speakers,” Goebbels emphasized in a 1930 circular, because the party did not yet possess “the means necessary to saturate the entire country with propaganda material.” In addition to weekly communiqués and instructions, Goebbels’s staff produced monthly notes for speakers that offered analyses of international and domestic issues and provided suggestions for more effective local mobilization—everything from musical selections for entertainment events to the color of posters and handbills to how best to position busts of Hitler during recruitment meetings.

  Shortly after the dissolution of the Reichstag on July 18, Goebbels and the reorganized Propaganda Section moved into action. At a meeting with members of the national leadership, the district chiefs, and the NSDAP’s tiny Reichstag delegation in late July, Hitler laid out in broad strokes the basic outline of the party’s campaign. As always, he confined himself to the big picture. Goebbels’s task was to translate Hitler’s general objectives into action on the ground. He and his young staff would manage the actual conduct of the campaign, plotting day-to-day strategy and coordinating the party’s propaganda activities. It was an arrangement that remained unchanged throughout the last Nazi campaigns of the Weimar era—indeed, would be a hallmark of Hitler’s leadership style throughout the Third Reich.

  In the torrent of memoranda that followed that July meeting, Goebbels stressed to the regional party chieftains the importance of conducting the party’s campaign “in the most uniform possible manner.” At the outset of the campaign, the Propaganda Section issued a lengthy circular to the district leaders outlining the NSDAP’s strategic goals, explaining the major themes to be developed, and defining the slogans to be used. The party’s “entire campaign propaganda” was to revolve around the theme “For or Against Young,” launching a ruthless offensive “against the war guilt lie, against the Young Treaty, against the beneficiaries of the policy of fulfillment, against the jailer parties of enslaving capitalism.”

  To ensure conformity with its objectives, Goebbels expressly forbade the local chapters to “make electoral propaganda on their own.” They were “to operate only according to the guidelines determined by the Propaganda Section and with campaign materials provided to them.” This centralized control was necessary to achieve the party’s strategic goals and to keep the entire party apparatus on message. “Everywhere in Germany the same placards will be posted, the same leaflets distributed, and the same stickers will appear.” The typewritten texts of all leaflets and other campaign literature would be wired from Munich to the district leaders, who were responsible for their printing and distribution. In this way, the flow of material to the locals could be closely monitored and coordinated. The circular also dealt extensively with propaganda techniques and acquainted the party’s functionaries with the services and propaganda aids that were available from either the regional or national headquarters. Locals were reminded that newspaper off-prints, leaflets, flyers, stickers, brochures, and special illustrated posters were available. It recommended that direct mailings be undertaken by the local chapters, using a personally addressed form letter to every inhabitant of a given area. Using local Address Books that listed the occupation of the head of the household, the party was able to subdivide the population by occupation and deliver letters that spoke directly to issues relating to farmers, shopkeepers, civil servants, white-collar personnel, workers, and retirees. The party also printed special election postcards and swastika-bedecked stamps for correspondence or display on windows, books, briefcases, etc. In a political culture dominated by print media, the distribution of leaflets, as usual, received special attention. Goebbels instructed the local leaders that “flyers, leaflets, etc. should be passed out early on . . . Sunday,” the day when the parties were most active, “so that the worker, the civil servant, and the petit bourgeois has them in hand before the expected flood of trash sets in.” Parades led by trucks with large placards and filled with storm troopers were also recommended as “a propaganda device that should not be underestimated.”

  The content of these Nazi appeals was based on a crude system of marketing research that was, for its time, unparalleled in sophistication. District leaders were urged to send their functionaries into “the bakeries, butcher shops, grocery stores, and taverns,” to sample public opinion and find out for whom the people had voted and why. Local Nazi propaganda operatives filed weekly reports detailing which techniques worked and which didn’t, what sort of pitch appealed to farmers, to shopkeepers, to workers. What were civil servants, office clerks, homeowners, and tenants angry about? What worried Catholics, Protestants, and women? How had “the system” failed each, and how could the NSDAP articulate a set of appeals that would exploit their sense of grievance? This information could then be used by the national leadership in developing the party’s campaign strategy. Appeals and techniques that had originated and worked well in one locale were reported to the Propaganda Division and then incorporated into its monthly reports to all regional offices. In this way, a circular flow of valuable intelligence was generated that would serve the party well in the following campaigns.

  Offering specific solutions to the country’s problems was not important, and ideological appeals based on the party’s famous Twenty-five Points were shuffled into the background. Gregor Strasser was surprisingly candid in his explanation of the Nazi message. “Everything which is detrimental to the existing order of things has our support . . . because we want catastrophe. . . . everything which hastens the beginning of catastrophe in the present system . . . every strike, every governmental crisis, every erosion of state power, every weakening of the System . . . is good, very good for us . . . and it will always and constantly be our endeavor to strengthen such difficulties . . . in order to expedite the death of this system.” Nor did the Nazis feel themselves constrained by a need for ideological consistency. When a confused supporter asked Goebbels if the NSDAP was still committed to “breaking interest slavery,” one of the party’s demands in the original, “immutable” platform of 1920, the propaganda chief responded, “I wish to God we had never heard of these miserable Twenty-Five Points.” For all their bluster about “the idea” of National Socialism, the Nazis campaigned not on a program or an ideology, but on a mood, and as anger and fear in Germany mounted, they touched a raw public nerve.

  Throughout the campaign, the Propaganda Division issued updates, refining instructions, coordinating speaking dates, and announcing rallies or appearances by Hitler. The Nazi campaign was largely negative and bereft of anything in the way of specifics, directing instead a relentless assault on the corrupt, ineffectual Weimar “system” and “the heap of special interests” that controlled it.

  More important than any particular theme was image. Hitler and Goebbels were intent on creating the impression of a vigorous, dynamic, youthful movement standing in sharp contrast to the dispirited, enervated parties of the bourgeois center and right. Energy, activism, and a fanatical determination to sweep away the old, Goebbels believed, were the keys to Nazi success. “By September 14,” he declared, “there must be no city, no village, no spot-in-the-road where we National Socialists have not appeared in a great rally.” On August 18 the Völkischer Beobachter announ
ced that a total of 34,000 rallies were planned for the final four weeks of the election campaign, and while that figure was probably exaggerated, the high-octane activism of the NSDAP could not be matched by the fading bourgeois parties. Relentlessly spurring his propaganda operatives into ever more frenzied activity, Goebbels concluded, “We want to conduct a campaign such as the corrupt parliamentary parties (Bonzenparteien) have never seen before.”

  The plan was for the campaign to gather momentum throughout August, before reaching a crescendo in the last weeks before the election. But with election day only two weeks away and all progressing according to plan, a crisis broke suddenly over the party. Tension between the Berlin SA and the party had been simmering for some time. SA leaders felt underappreciated, underfinanced, and, most galling, under the thumb of the party’s political organization. Walter Stennes, the leader of the powerful Berlin SA, wanted Storm Troopers to be put on the party’s electoral ballot and additional funding for the organization; most unsettling, Stennes expressed the SA’s growing impatience with Hitler’s insistence on legality. The SA wanted action that would bring about social revolution and feared that Hitler and the “party bosses” in Munich, with their relentless calls for restraint, for maintaining the policy of legality, were less committed to that revolutionary vision. “Some things must be changed after the election,” Goebbels complained. The SA “under Pfeffer and Stennes was too independent and positively hostile to politics.” Above all he didn’t trust Stennes.

  On August 30, Goebbels had just delivered a speech in Breslau, his sixth in four days, and was resting in his hotel, when he received an alarming message from Berlin. There were rumors that elements of the SA were planning a rebellion. “They are going to give us an ultimatum and if their terms are not met, they will go on the attack,” he wrote. “In the middle of a battle! I can’t believe it.” Later in the night those preliminary reports were confirmed. Things were worse than Goebbels had expected. SA men had stormed into party headquarters in the Hedemannstrasse, brushed aside the SS guards, smashed up the furniture and files. They were occupying the building; they were making demands; they were “in open rebellion against the Gau and against Munich. . . . Stennes is a traitor.”

  Both Goebbels and Hitler, who was attending the annual Wagner festival in Bayreuth, rushed to Berlin. In the early-morning hours, the two met with Stennes at the Duke of Coburg Hotel beside the Anhalt Station. Stennes complained of broken promises—Goebbels had agreed to place SA men on the party’s electoral list and to consult with him about suitable candidates, but had not; he complained about the burden placed on the SA and its poor financial situation; he expressed the widespread SA frustration at the course of legality pursued by the party.

  Hitler’s initial reaction was to reject Stennes’s demands out of hand, but during a night of consultation with Goebbels, he softened his stance. That night, while Hitler and Goebbels were conferring at the Goebbels private residence, Stennes and a group of SA leaders appeared, followed by a host of angry Storm Troopers. As Stennes presented his demands, the mob “stood outside chanting, growing more and more rebellious. . . . Stennes has organized his mutiny brilliantly.” Hitler listened and finally agreed to allow the SA to keep more of the dues it collected—the remainder was sent to the Munich HQ—and explained his position to Stennes. Later at a gathering of some two thousand SA men, Hitler swore his fervent allegiance to them and assured them that the revolution they—and he—so desperately wanted would come, but it would come not before but after the seizure of power. The takeover of the government must come by legal means, by mobilizing the masses, by participation in elections. The SA’s role in this strategy was crucial, their loyalty imperative, their fighting spirit essential.

  To thunderous cheers, he announced that he was now personally assuming the leadership of both the SA and SS. Undercover police agents monitoring the meeting were struck by Hitler’s nervousness as he repeatedly appealed to the SA to trust him. With “his overstrained voice rising to an almost hysterical scream,” Hitler pleaded for their loyalty. “We will vow in this hour that nothing can divide us, as truly as God can help us against all devils! May almighty God bless our struggle!” The assembled SA men broke into shouts of “Heil!” Hitler had succeeded in defusing the situation. The immediate crisis passed, but the tension between the party leadership and the SA did not; it merely slipped beneath the surface, ready to erupt again at any moment.

  * * *

  September 14, election day, Hitler proclaimed, was “the beginning of Germany’s reckoning” with the “criminals of the November Republic,” the “judgment day for the Young parties.” Everyone sensed a palpable change in the air when the polls opened on Sunday morning. Voters were pouring into the polling stations all over the country. Turnout, which had dipped in 1928, was exceptionally high. The Nazis were confident of making significant gains, but in spite of their tireless campaigning and vigorous predictions of victory, few within the leadership were prepared for the magnitude of the party’s surge. As the returns were tabulated on the evening of September 14–15, the outcome sent shock waves across the political world and plunged the already embattled Weimar Republic into crisis. The Nazi vote had lurched from a mere 800,000 in 1928 to an astonishing 6,000,000. With 18 percent of the electorate, Hitler’s obscure NSDAP had overnight become the second-largest party in Germany after the Social Democrats.

  The outcome came as a surprise even to the Nazis. “Fantastic,” Goebbels exulted in his diary, “an unbelievable advance.” At an election night rally at the Sportpalast, the largest arena in Berlin, he witnessed an explosion of enthusiasm and excitement “like 1914. . . . The Sportpalast a madhouse.” Ecstatic Storm Troopers carried him through the hall on their shoulders. He dropped in on one SA pub after another until four in the morning. Everywhere he was “greeted with the same scene—joy and fighting spirit.” It was, Hitler prophesied, the dawning of a new era in German politics, an era of radical political change that would sweep away the ineffectual sham democracy of the November criminals, return power to the people, and make Germany great again. Germany, he proclaimed, had awakened.

  Brüning had anticipated a spike in the Nazi vote and even hoped to use the rising threat of right-wing radicalism to convince the other parties to cooperate with his government, but neither he nor anyone else in Germany was prepared for the seismic shift in the political landscape produced by the Nazi breakthrough. Only twelve Nazis had held seats in the old Reichstag; when the new Reichstag convened in October, 107 brown-clad National Socialist deputies filed into the chamber; only the Social Democratic delegation was larger. Hitler and his party were no longer specters haunting the lunatic fringes of German public consciousness. To the surprise of all, they had swept into the mainstream of German politics.

  As Goebbels and his staff analyzed the election results, it was immediately clear that the Nazi breakthrough, though impressive virtually everywhere, was especially striking in the Protestant north. Even a cursory perusal of the election returns revealed that the Nazis, as anticipated, had done exceptionally well in rural areas and small towns hard hit by the lengthy agricultural depression. In some provincial counties, the party captured an unheard of 50 to 60 percent of the vote. In the large northern states of Prussia, Pomerania, Mecklenburg, and Hanover, the party’s vote surged past 20 percent. In Schleswig-Holstein, where two years before the Nazis had claimed a mere 4 percent of the vote, their total vaulted to 27 percent.

  Just as they had before, Nazi appeals found their greatest resonance among elements of the anxious middle class—small shopkeepers, farmers, artisans (plumbers, electricians, carpenters), lower-level civil servants, teachers, and some white-collar workers. It was a constellation of social forces that would constitute the party’s base throughout its rise to power. For small businesses, the onrushing economic crisis had been little short of catastrophic. Caught between the large department stores owned, as the Nazis always pointed out, by Jews, and the socialist consumer c
ooperatives, the small shopkeepers and artisans were growing desperate. In 1930 bankruptcies were twice as high as they were two years before, with small businesses representing over half the total. Bankruptcies in the retail trade had risen by approximately 150 percent since 1928. Businesses that had somehow managed to survive the hyperinflation and harsh stabilization of the 1920s now found themselves confronting financial ruin, and Brüning’s austerity program offered little hope of immediate salvation. Germany was mired in a “battle between the rich and the impoverished,” the Nazis brayed, and under the present system, “this battle will proletarianize more and more members of the middle class,” bringing “ever greater numbers of reinforcements to the army of the unemployed.” Only the NSDAP could keep the “uprooted and expropriated” from “falling into the clutches of international capital” and the big conglomerates; only the NSDAP would provide “protection of small business” against “the pestilence of Jewish department stores.”