Even so, Strasser would not recant. He persisted in calling anti-Bolshevism totally misguided, a prime example of the way the capitalist system sowed confusion among its enemies and tricked the nationalist forces into serving its exploitative interests. Nevertheless, Strasser’s defeat was complete. His brother Otto Strasser, to gloss over the humiliation, later pointed out that Hitler had cunningly convoked the meeting for a weekday, thus ensuring the absence of the unpaid North German gauleiters, who had jobs in addition to their party functions. Only Gregor Strasser and Goebbels had been in Bamberg, Otto Strasser alleged.
In fact, February 14, 1926, was a Sunday, and almost all the principal spokesmen of the Strasser coterie were present: Hinrich Lohse of Schleswig-Holstein, Theodor Vahlen of Pomerania, Rust of Hanover, Klant of Hamburg. None of them, however, stood up to defend the idea of leftist National Socialism. In embarrassment they looked to Joseph Goebbels, the one man in their ranks with a natural gift for oratory; and like him, they felt stunned. Goebbels was cowed by Hitler’s magnetic powers, by his brilliantly staged arrival complete with a column of cars, by the organizational ability and display of wealth of the Munich group. Gregor Strasser also succumbed, for the moment at least, to Hitler’s talent for seduction. Thus Hitler had just finished fulminating against the “company of traitors” when he suddenly and demonstratively went over to Strasser and put his arm around his shoulders. Although the gesture did not convert Strasser himself, it made an impression upon the leaders at the meeting and forced them to take a conciliatory attitude. The working committee of North and West German gauleiters was in practice dissolved, its draft program not even put up for discussion, and the party took its stand against expropriation of the princely houses. Three weeks later, on March 5, Gregor Strasser sent out a hectographed circular letter to his fellow party leaders asking them to return the draft program “for very particular reasons” and because he had “promised Herr Hitler” that he would “see to the rounding up of every last copy of the draft.”
It would seem that Hitler’s vigorous intervention was directed not so much against the leftist program as against the leftist mentality of the Strasser following. Goebbels had even imagined, shortly before the Bamberg meeting, that “Hitler could be coaxed over to our terrain.” But, in fact, what incensed Hitler most was the kind of Nazi the Strasser brothers were fostering: a National Socialist perpetually engaged in discussions, involved in problems, prone to doubt and needing to square things intellectually. To Hitler’s mind, this was a deadly peril to the movement, bringing back the sort of sectarian dissension that had ruined the nationalist movement in the past. For Hitler equated all argument over ideas with sectarianism. Much as he favored and sometimes promoted personal conflicts among his followers, he hated theoretical differences of opinion. These, he thought, merely consumed energies and diminished the force of the movement. One of the secrets of Christianity’s success, he was always saying, was the unalterability of its dogmas. Hitler’s “Catholic” streak seldom emerges so clearly as in his respect for rigid, immutable formulas. All that really matters is a political creed, he would say; “that is what the whole world revolves around.” And he would add that “no matter how idiotic” a program was, “people will believe in it because of the firmness with which it is advocated.” In fact, a few weeks later Hitler took occasion to declare the old party program, in spite of its obvious weaknesses, “unalterable.” The very outmoded, archaic features of the program transformed it from an object of discussion to one of veneration. Moreover, its purpose was not to answer questions or define aims but to attract attention.
Clarification would mean only division, Hitler declared. Faith was all. Once he had insisted on the identity of Führer and idea, the principle of the infallible, immutable Führer was equally established. One of his adherents put it in a nutshelclass="underline" “Our program can be expressed in two words: ‘Adolf Hitler.’ ”
The Bamberg meeting and the concomitant humiliation of Gregor Strasser marked the beginning of the end for leftist National Socialism. In spite of the clamorous publicity stirred up at the time, especially by Otto Strasser, the Nazi Left henceforth could only be a troublesome deviation, no longer an effective political alternative. From the time of the meeting, the NSDAP was increasingly molded into a regimented leader-directed party. Thereafter, and until the end, there were no longer any battles over principles, no longer any ideological disputes; what remained was only the struggle for office and favoritism. “Our movement has tremendous powers of assimilation,” Hitler stated shortly afterward. Along with this, National Socialism no longer tried to rival the system of the democratic republic by presenting its own plan for a social order. Rather than an idea, it opposed to the republic a committed, disciplined, militant association whose members basked obtusely in the Führer’s charisma. Theirs was the “primitive force of one-sidedness” that “arouses such horror precisely in people of the better class,” that “male fist which,” as Hitler put it in one of his weirder mixed metaphors, “knows that a toxin can only be smashed by an antitoxin…. The harder head must decide, the greatest resolution and the greater idealism.” Elsewhere he assured the party members: “Such a struggle is not waged with ‘intellectual’ weapons, but with fanaticism.”
It was this ruthlessly instrumental character of the party in the hands of a seemingly unchallenged leader that soon distinguished the National Socialist Party from all other political parties and militant movements. Its discipline surpassed that of the Communists, in whose obedient cadres elements of deviation, skepticism, and intellectual resistance were continually cropping up. There were no such problems within the NSDAP; the abject way in which the anti-Hitler opposition had caved in seemed to inspire a passion for conformity. Many of Strasser’s followers now made it their ambition to convert the “movement into a handy, flawlessly functioning tool in the Führer’s hand.” Henceforth Hitler literally cracked his whip over even the highest-ranking members of the party leadership, insisting on his supremacy. The man to be hailed as “prototype of a good National Socialist,” he declared, is one who “would let himself be killed for his Führer at any time.” According to the bylaws the general membership meetings had to elect Hitler first chairman of the party; but from now on the motion to this effect would be treated as a humorous formality. As Göring later declared, alongside of Hitler’s overwhelming authority “none of us counts more than the stones on which we are standing.”31
Contrary to his usual inclination to exult over any triumphs, Hitler followed up his victory at Bamberg with conciliatory personal gestures. When Gregor Strasser was injured in an auto accident, Hitler appeared at his bedside “with a gigantic bouquet of flowers” and was, according to a letter of the patient himself, “very nice.” He used the same approach with Goebbels, who had the worst reputation at Munich party headquarters as spokeman for the Strasser clique. Goebbels found himself suddenly being wooed. He was asked to be the principal speaker at a meeting in the Munich Biirgerbrau, and at the end of his speech Hitler embraced him with tears in his eyes. “He is embarrassingly good to us,” Goebbels noted, deeply moved. At the same time, however, Hitler began to create the party machinery that would safeguard his newly acquired authority.