A general membership meeting held in Munich on May 22, 1926, established new bylaws for the NSDAP that were undisguisedly tailored to Hitler’s personal needs. The National Socialist German Workers’ Club in Munich was to be the cornerstone of the party; its directors also constituted the directorate of the party throughout Germany. The first chairman would still be elected—that was required by the laws regulating associations—but the electoral college for the entire party was to consist of the few thousand members of the Munich Ortsgruppe (“local group”). Thus the rest of the party was completely disenfranchised. Moreover, the Munich group alone had the right to demand an accounting of the first chairman—and the procedure for doing so was extremely complicated. In practice, therefore, Hitler’s total control over the party was assured. There would be no majority decisions binding on him. Hereafter, in fact, even the gauleiters would not be elected by local party meetings, and the same was true of the chairmen of committees. Thus factions could not form, not even powerless ones.
In order to bolster this system even further, an investigation and mediation committee (USCHLA) was created, a kind of party tribunal whose sole importance lay in its right to expel individuals or even entire local groups from the NSDAP. Its first chairman, former Lieutenant General Heinemann, misunderstood the purpose of the committee. He thought it was meant to be an instrument for fighting corruption and immorality within the party. Hitler thereupon replaced him by the more docile Major Walter Buch, and as associate magistrates appointed his obedient Ulrich Graf and a young lawyer named Hans Frank.
In early July, six weeks later, Hitler celebrated his victory at a party rally in Weimar, where the new trend was clearly manifest. All critical—or, as Hitler contemptuously phrased it, “ingenious”—notions, all “half-baked and vague ideas” were repressed. The practice that later became standard for party rallies was applied here for the first time: only those motions were admitted which “have received the signature of the First Chairman.” Instead of a wrangling party involved in differences over programs, the public image was to be that of “perfectly welded and consolidated leadership.” In his “Fundamental Directives” Hitler ruled that the chairmen of the various special sessions were “to feel themselves leaders and not executive organs of the results of voting.” In general, there was no voting, and Hitler wanted “endless discussions smothered.” For they led people to think that political questions “can be solved by people sitting on their bottoms at a club meeting.” Finally, strict bounds were set for speaking time in plenary sessions “so that the whole program cannot be wrecked by a single individual.”
After the meeting in the National Theater, Hitler, dressed in a leather belted tunic and puttees, reviewed a parade by 5,000 of his followers and for the first time saluted them with outstretched arm in the fashion of the Italian Fascists. Goebbels, watching the uniformed columns of storm troopers, jubilantly saw the dawning of the Third Reich and the awakening of Germany. But other contemporary observers found the party rally a dull affair lacking in all spontaneity—the more so since Nazism had not yet developed the brilliant theatrical effects of later years that served to cover up its ideological poverty and ideational dreariness. Among the honored guests, it was true, was Theodor Duesterberg, leader of the Stahlhelm (the conservative veterans’ organization), and another was the Kaiser’s son, Prince August Wilhelm, soon afterward to join the SA. Also present, though in the background, was Gregor Strasser, who was heard muttering gloomily that National Socialism was dead.
As a last element of restlessness and rebellious energy there remained the SA, in whose ranks the radical slogans of the Strasser clique had struck lasting reverberations. Hitler therefore let a year elapse after Röhm’s resignation before he appointed a supreme leader for the new SA: onetime Captain Franz Pfeffer von Salomon, who had been involved in various Free Corps and vigilante activities and had most recently been gauleiter of Westphalia. Together with Pfeffer, Hitler fried to settle the traditional problem of the SA’s role and to shape it into an organization that would be neither a military auxiliary nor a secret society nor a brutish bodyguard for local party leaders. Rather, it was to become a specialized instrument for propaganda and mass intimidation, under firm control from party headquarters. Hitler wanted the SA to be the translation of the National Socialist idea into fanatical, unadulterated fighting power. To underline the SA’s complete and final incorporation into the Nazi party, he arranged a ceremony at the National Theater in Weimar. The new SA units were put through mystical rituals culminating in the “oath of loyalty” and the presentation of standards Hitler had himself designed. “The training of the SA,” he decreed in a letter to Pfeffer, “must be guided by party needs rather than by military points of view.” The military associations of the past had been powerful but had had no underlying doctrines, he went on to say, and therefore had failed. The secret organizations and terrorist units, on the other hand, had not realized that the enemy operated anonymously in men’s brains and souls, so that there was little good in assassinating individual spokesmen. Consequently, the struggle must “b.e lifted out of the atmosphere of minor acts of revenge and conspiracy, raised to the grandeur of an ideological war of annihilation against Marxism, its structures and its henchmen…. The work must be conducted not in secret conventicles, but in huge mass processions. The way can be cleared for the Movement not by dagger and poison or pistol, but by conquering the streets.”
In a succession of orders and basic instructions Pfeffer further delineated the special character of the SA. He evidenced a remarkable feeling for the mass psychological effectiveness of strict, drillmasterly arrangements. His orders for meetings and ceremonies reveal the point of view of a theatrical director as much as that of a leader; he regulated every platform appearance, every marching movement, every salute with raised arms or shout of Beil. His dictates often sounded like lessons in the techniques of mass psychology. Thus he would state: “The only form in which the SA displays itself to the public must be en masse. This is one of the most powerful forms of propaganda. The sight of a large body of disciplined men, inwardly and outwardly alike, whose militancy can be plainly seen or sensed, makes the most profound impression upon every German and speaks to his heart in a more convincing and persuasive language than writing and oratory and logic ever can. Calm composure and matter-of-factness emphasizes the impression of strength—the strength of marching columns.”
But the attempt to transform the SA into an unarmed host of propagandists and to give to it the glamour but not the arrogance of the military remained on the whole a failure. Despite all his efforts, Hitler never really succeeded in shaping it into an obedient instrument for his political aims. The reason was only in part the rough cut-and-thrust temperament, the raw mercenary spirit of these perpetual soldiers. Another explanation lay in the traditions of a country that assigned special moral prerogatives to the military as opposed to the civilian, political authorities. Pfeffer’s re-educational slogans could never change the fact that the SA considered itself the “Fighting Movement” in contrast to the Political Organization (PO). It viewed the PO as merely the talking branch of the party, and contemptuously spoke the initials as “P-Nought.” In line with this attitude, the SA regarded itself as “the crown of our organization.” With a scathing glance at the “parliamentary” parties, the spokesmen for the SA declared: “One thing they can’t copy from us is our SA man.” On the other hand, those parliamentary parties escaped the permanent difficulties in which the NSDAP was embroiled because of its party army. The trouble was that the World War I officers and soldiers, with their heavy baggage of complexes, could not be expected to execute the delicate balancing acts required of the other servile members of the master race. Only the next generation was able to do that. Soon Hitler began quarreling with Pfeffer, who proved to be as unmanageable as Röhm. In fact, more so, for he did not have Röhm’s streak of sentimentality. He was not impressed by Hitler, that “flabby Austrian,” as he termed him. Pfeffer was, after all, the son of a Prussian privy councilor.