Perhaps even more illuminating than these remarks was the reaction to them. There was no sign of astonishment or demur among the party journalists. Here is proof of the effectiveness of Hitler’s policy of subjugating the entire internal life of the Nazi party to himself personally. Many circumstances had aided him. The movement had always viewed itself as a militant community founded upon charismatic leadership and the discipline of faith. This was the source of the dynamic confidence so lacking in the traditional parties with their interests and programs. In addition Hitler had been able to count on the background and experience of the “Old Fighters.” Almost all of them had taken part in the World War. They had grown to manhood in a climate of strict orders and obedience. Many of them, moreover, came from homes whose pedagogical patterns were based on the rigid mores of the cadet schools. Altogether, Hitler profited greatly from the peculiarities of an authoritarian educational system. It is surely more than a matter of chance that of his seventy-three gauleiters, no fewer than twenty were drawn from the teaching profession.
Once the two intraparty crises of the summer of 1930 had been mastered with relative ease, there no longer existed any office or authority within the Nazi party that did not emanate directly from Hitler. However slight a danger Otto Strasser, Stennes, or Pfeffer may have been—their names stood for at least a theoretical alternative which set certain limits to any claim to absolute power. Now the South German SA commander August Schneidhuber issued a memorandum giving full credit for the growing might of the movement not to any of its functionaries but entirely to Hitler. With busy propagandists singing his praises in more and more transcendental terms, “der Führer” was on his way to becoming a legendary figure, immune from all criticism, standing far above any intraparty voting procedures. One observer commented that the party press at this time contained nothing but deifications of Hitler and attacks on the Jews.
Still, the complaint arose that Hitler was putting himself at too great a remove from his followers. The loyal Schneidhuber described the sense of desertion that filled “almost every SA man.” He wrote: “The SA is struggling with the Führer for his soul and does not yet have it. But it must have it.” He spoke of the “clamor for the Führer,” which remained unanswered.
It was at this period, and not by chance, that the greeting “Heil Hitler” became generally established. (It had cropped up occasionally before and had been deliberately introduced into Berlin practice by Goebbels.) At the same time, posters announcing meetings no longer mentioned “Adolf Hitler” as the speaker. Instead, nameless and already with the aloofness of a general concept, he appeared simply as the Führer. If party members thronged around him in hotel lobbies or offices, he reacted with irritation, would take.notice of them only reluctantly; he was bothered by so much familiarity. Nor was he happy at having hard-working party members introduced to him; he shunned social occasions with unknown persons.
To be sure, he could also show an engaging side. If he dropped his pose of unapproachability, he might chat charmingly in a group of ladies, might present himself to a group of workers as one of them, with the bluff manner of the common man, or might appear in a fatherly role, gazing benevolently over the heads of blond children. “In solemn handshakes and wide-open eyes he is unmatched,” a contemporary noted. But his intimates could not help observing how much deliberate play-acting was involved. He was constantly calculating effects, practicing the touching as well as the grand gesture. He had grasped precisely what makes a celebrity, what laws he must follow, and to what extent he must conform to a specific craving of the age. His delicate health had made him give up smoking some time ago; in the meantime, he had also been compelled to give up alcohol. Both these facts he used to cultivate a reputation for asceticism. With his clear awareness of role-playing, he was certainly the most modern phenomenon in the German politics of the period. At any rate, he knew the secrets of public effectiveness far better than any of his rivals, from Hugenberg to Brüning. These politicians had never even considered their public image, showing again their rootedness in past conditions and their lack of instinct for the mood of the present.
From this point on, there was no one who could be said to exert a significant, demonstrable influence upon Hitler. The days of Dietrich Eckart, even those of Alfred Rosenberg, lay far behind. “I never make a mistake. Every one of my words is historic,” he had screamed at Otto Strasser in the course of their quarrel. His intellectual curiosity continued to dwindle the more he fitted himself into the stylized role of “LeaderPope.” Surrounded entirely by sycophants and simple-minded members of his retinue, he gradually slid intellectually also into a state of isolation. His onetime model Karl Lueger, the mayor of Vienna, had impressed him with his pessimistic opinion of mankind. Now he himself scarcely troubled to conceal his own contempt for his followers as well as his opponents. In keeping with his fundamentally conservative instinct, he insisted that man was evil by nature, “stuff running rampant on this earth,” as he put it in a letter. And: “The masses are blind and stupid and do not know what they do.”
His consumption of people was as great as his contempt for them. He was forever demoting, rebuking, or elevating, juggling people and positions—this habit, in fact, was one of the secrets of his success. But experience had also taught him that followers wanted to be treated ruthlessly. Thus, in connection with the forthcoming election, he made impossible demands of his campaign workers. The nucleus of the party’s functionaries and auxiliaries came from the traditionally unpolitical classes of the population. They were brisk, brash, and ready to throw themselves heart and soul into the contest. Their tempestuousness was in marked contrast to the dull, routine way in which the established parties went through the motions of an election campaign. During the two days before the election, in Berlin alone the Nazis held twenty-four major demonstrations. Once more their posters were pasted on every wall and fence, immersing the city in shrieking red. The party newspapers were put out in huge editions and sold to members for a pfennig apiece to be distributed door-to-door or outside factories. Hitler himself regarded these activities of his followers as a kind of process of selection: “Now a magnet is simply being passed over a heap of dung; and afterwards we will see how much iron there was in the dung heap that has clung to the magnet.”
The elections were set for September 14, 1930. Hitler hoped for fifty or, in exuberant moods, even sixty to eighty Nazi seats. He was counting on the voters of the crumbling bourgeois center, on the young people who were voting for the first time, and on inveterate nonvoters who by all political logic ought to fall to his party, assuming that they could be persuaded to vote at all.
The Landslide
At the right moment the right weapon must be employed. One stage is probing the opponent, a second is preparation, a third is assault.