The National Socialists themselves lent encouragement to the most fantastic theories by practicing a psychotic form of secrecy concerning their financial resources. Throughout the Weimar years there was a series of libel cases springing from various charges; after 1933 the records of these cases were spirited away or destroyed. From the very beginning it was an unwritten law of the party that no records should be kept of contributions. Financial transactions were rarely noted in the journal of the party business office; when they were, there would usually be a note: “To be handled by Drexler personally.” In October, 1920, Hitler, presiding over a meeting in the Münchener Kindl-Keller, issued strict orders against anyone’s making notes on the details of a transaction he had just described.39
There is no doubt that the party’s basic income derived from membership dues, small donations, the sale of tickets for Hitler’s speeches, or collections made at rallies, which might often amount to several thousand marks. Some of the early party members, like Oskar Körner, owner of a small toy store, who was killed in front of the Feldherrnhalle on November 9, 1923, all but ruined themselves in the interest of the party. Shop owners offered special discounts to the party, while others made gifts of jewelry or works of art. Spinster ladies who attended evening rallies were sometimes so emotionally shaken by the personality of Hitler that they made the National Socialist Party the beneficiary under their wills. Prosperous well-wishers like the Bechsteins, the Bruckmanns, or Ernst Hanfstaengl sometimes came forth with sizable gifts. The party also found ways to coax more funds out of its membership than just the regular dues. It floated interestfree loan certificates that the members were supposed to buy and sell to others. According to police records, no fewer than 40,000 loan certificates, each for ten marks, were issued in the first half of 1921 alone.40
Nevertheless, the party suffered from a chronic shortage of funds during the early years. Even as late as the middle of 1921 it could not afford to hire a treasurer. According to the story of an early member, the poster brigades could not even buy the necessary paste. In the fall of 1921 Hitler had to cancel plans for a major rally in the Krone Circus for lack of funds. The financial predicament began to improve in the summer of 1922, when the party’s feverish activity brought it more into the forefront. Henceforth the party could count on a wide circle of financial benefactors and supporters, not party adherents in the strict sense, but rather representatives of the wealthy middle class, which felt vulnerable to the threat of Communist revolution. These people were ready to support any anti-Communist group, from the Free Corps and nationalist leagues on the right to the crank causes that proliferated within protest journalism. It would probably be correct to say that they were less interested in giving Hitler a boost than in promoting the most vigorous antirevolutionary force they could find.
Hitler owed his connections with the influential and monied segments of Bavarian society to Dietrich Eckart and Max Erwin von Scheubner-Richter. Another such sponsor was probably Ludendorff, who himself received considerable sums from industrialists and large landowners and doled this money out among the militant nationalist-racist organizations as he saw fit. While Ernst Röhm was mobilizing funds, weapons, and equipment for the Reichswehr, Dr. Emil Gansser, a friend of Dietrich Eckart’s, put Hitler in touch with a group of big businessmen and bankers belonging to the Nationalist Club (Nationalklub). In 1922 Hitler had his first chance to present his plans to them. Among the principal contributors to the party’s funds were the locomotive manufacturer Borsig, Fritz Thyssen of Consolidated Steel (Vereinigte Stahlwerke), Privy Councilor Kirdorf, and executives of the Daimler Company and the Bavarian Industrialists Association (Bayrischer Industriellenverband). Support from Czechoslovak, Scandinavian, and Swiss sources was also forthcoming for this dynamic party that was attracting so much attention. In the fall of 1923 Hitler went to Zurich and allegedly returned “with a steamer trunk stuffed with Swiss francs and American dollars.”41 The mysterious and ingenious Kurt W. Luedecke obtained considerable sums from as yet undetermined sources, and among other things set up his “own” SA company consisting of fifty men. Cash flowed in from persons in Hungary as well as from Russian and Baltic-German émigrés. During the inflation some party functionaries were paid in foreign currencies. Among these were Julius Schreck, the SA staff sergeant who was later to be Hitler’s chauffeur, and the SA Chief of Staff Lieutenant Commander Hoffmann. Even a bordello on Berlin’s Tauen-tzienstrasse did its bit for the nationalist cause. At the urging of Scheubner-Richter, it had been set up by a former army officer; the profits went to swell the party till in Munich.42
The motives behind these contributions were highly diverse. It is true that without this support Hitler could not have launched his expensive spectacles after the summer of 1922. But it is also true that he made no binding commitments to any of his backers. The aggrieved leftists never believed in the anticapitalist stance of the National Socialists. It was all too inarticulate and irrational. And, in fact, Nazi anticapitalist ranting against usurers, speculators, and department stores never went beyond the perspective of superintendents and shopkeepers. Nevertheless, the Nazis’ sense of outrage was all the more convincing because of their lack of any impressive system. They objected to the morality rather than the material possessions of the propertied classes. This passage from one of the early party speechifiers indicates the psychological effectiveness of the irrational anticapitalist appeal to the desperate masses: “Be patient just a little longer. But then, when we sound the call for action, spare the savings banks, for they are where we working people have put our pennies. Storm the commercial banks! Take all the money you find there and throw it into the streets and set fire to the huge heaps of it! Then use the crossbars of the streetcar lines to string up the black and the white Jews!”
Hitler made similar speeches, similarly emotion-laden, against the grim background of mass suffering caused by the inflation. Again and again, he inveighed against the lies of capitalism, even while his funds were coming from big business. Max Amann, the party’s business manager, was interrogated by the Munich police shortly after the putsch attempt of November, 1923. He insisted, not without pride, that Hitler had given his backers “only the party platform” in return for their contributions. This may seem hard to credit; nevertheless, there is reason to think that the only agreements he made were on tactical lines. For the concept of corruption seems strangely alien to this man; it does not accord with his rigidity, his mounting self-confidence, and the force of his delusions.
The National Socialists had emerged victorious from their showdown with the government at the beginning of January. They found themselves top dog among the radical rightist groups in Bavaria and celebrated by a wave of meetings, demonstrations, and marches even rowdier and more aggressive than those of the past. The air was thick with rumors of coups and uprisings. With impassioned slogans Hitler fed a general expectation of some great change impending. At the end of April he gave a speech urging the “workers of the head and the workers of the fist” to close ranks in order to create “the new man… of the coming Third Reich.” Anticipating the imminent test of strength, the NSDAP had struck up an alliance in early February with a number of militant nationalist organizations. The new partners included the Reichsflagge (Reich Banner), led by Captain Heiss; the Bund Oberland (Oberland League); the Vaterländischer Verein München (Munich Patriotic Club); and the Kampfverb and Niederbayern (Lower Bavarian League of Struggle). Joint authority was vested in a committee known as the Arbeitsgemeinschaft der vaterländischen Kampfverbände (Provisional Committee of the Patriotic Leagues of Struggle), with Lieutenant Colonel Hermann Kriebel in charge of military co-ordination. The arrangements had been worked out by Ernst Röhm.