The style of the Berlin SA was particularly mutinous. Its auxiliary organizations went their own way, frequently marked by criminal tendencies and gangster behavior. The Berlin gauleiter, Dr. Schlange, could do nothing to control the storm troopers. In fact, there were instances of fist fights between the Berlin leaders of the Political Organization and the SA. But the hullabaloo was somewhat out of proportion to the size of the Berlin branch of the Nazi party. Its membership was below 1,000 and only began to attract some attention after the Strasser brothers had started building up their newspaper in the city early in the summer of 1926. “The situation within the party this month has not been a good one,” a report noted in October, 1926. “Things have reached such a pass in our district [gau] that complete shattering of the Berlin organization may be imminent. The tragedy of the gau is that it has never had a real leader.”
At this juncture Hitler decided to clean up the untenable state of affairs in Berlin. His move was a masterly one, for he made use of the crisis to shake the local party organization free of the influence of Gregor Strasser. He also stole away Strasser’s most capable adherent, for he appointed Joseph Goebbels new gauleiter of the capital. As early as July that ambitious rebel, under the impact of a magnanimous invitation to Munich and Berchtesgaden, had developed strong doubts about his radical leftist convictions. In his diary he now described Hitler, whom he had reviled so often, as “a genius… the naturally creative instrument of a divine destiny.” He confided: “I stand before him deeply moved. This is how he is: like a child, lovable, good, merciful. Like a cat, cunning, prudent and agile; like a lion, roaringly great and gigantic. A hell of a fellow; a man… He pampers me like a child. My kindly friend and master!”32 Yet raptures such as these are still accompanied by compunctions. Opportunist though Goebbels was, he was uneasy about his defection from Strasser, for he went on to say of the latter: “I suppose in the end he cannot follow along with his mind. With his heart, always. Sometimes I love him dearly.”
However, Hitler knew how to make Goebbels his man. He gave him special powers that were not only designed to strengthen the new gauleiter’s position but to create areas of friction with Strasser. For example, Hitler explicitly withdrew Goebbels from subordination to Strasser, while on the other hand subordinating the SA to Goebbels, although everywhere else the SA was jealously defending its independence from the Gauleiters. In order to placate Strasser, or at any rate to soften his resistance, Hitler promoted him to the post of Reich propaganda leader of the party. But in order to make the conflict between Goebbels and Strasser inevitable and permanent, he made Goebbels autonomous in the field of propaganda also. Goebbels’s erstwhile friends and party comrades thereupon charged him with shameful treachery—but in the short or long run all these leftist Nazi factionalists committed exactly the same treachery—unless, like the Strasser brothers, they chose expulsion, exile, or death.
With Goebbels as gauleiter of Berlin, things went from bad to worse for the already shattered power of the Left in northern Germany. The unsuspecting Strasser had supported the appointment of his supposed ally against the opposition of such Munich party dignitaries as Hess and Rosenberg. But Goebbels seemed to have had a keener grasp of Hitler’s secret intentions. At any rate, he was soon openly warring with his recent cronies. He staged brawls and started a rival newspaper, Der Angriff [“The Attack”], directed against the Strasser brothers. He even spread rumors that they were of Jewish descent and had been bought by finance capital. Gregor Strasser, remembering how he had been taken in by Goebbels, later branded himself “a dopey super-idiot.”
Cold-blooded, a master of sophistry and emotional manipulation, Goebbels started a new era in demagoguery, whose potentialities under modern conditions he perceived and exploited with unique success. To gain attention for the little-known Berlin party organization, he set up a ferocious band of toughs, who were continually instigating meeting-hall battles, brawls, and shootouts. These—in the words of a police report on a bloody battle with Communists at the Lichterfelde-Ost railroad station in March, 1927—put “anything seen previously into the shade.”33 By these tactics Goebbels was undoubtedly risking a ban on the Nazi party in Berlin—which came soon enough. But his followers were acquiring a sense of martyrdom and solidarity. At any rate, the Berlin organization emerged from unimportance and in the course of time was able to make considerable breaches in the massive walls of so-called Red Berlin.
Along with these efforts at expansion, Hitler began upon a gradual but consistent strengthening of the internal party organization. He aimed at a coherent, centralized command structure under a single charismatic leader. The hierarchic chain of authority, the strict tone with which all orders and instructions came down from the top, and the growing practice of wearing uniforms underlined the paramilitary character of a party whose leadership had been molded by the war. That leadership, as Goebbels once phrased it, had to be ready to obey “the slightest pressure with all its limbs at the decisive moment.” The restrictions and governmental controls to which the party was subject merely furthered these aims—as in general the awareness of the outside world’s hostility tautened the apparatus and furthered Hitler’s drive for total leadership. It was easy now for Munich headquarters to impose its will on even the lowest branches of the party. In the first editions of Mein Kampf Hitler had made some slight concessions to democratic elements; in subsequent editions he revised these passages, laying stress, instead, on “Germanic democracy” and the “principle of unconditional authority of the Führer.” In the party, similarly, he now warned local groups against holding “too many membership meetings,” which would only constitute “a source of disputes.”
Along with the party organization there now grew up a full-fledged bureaucracy, divided into numerous departments. The Nazi party was rapidly sloughing off its small-town club aspect—which it had retained even during its stormy early phase as a putschist party. Though Hitler’s personal life and working habits were anything but organized, he was childishly proud of the triple registration system for party members and reported with fervor on the acquisition of modern office equipment, filing cabinets, and the like. In place of the primitive master-sergeant bureaucracy of the early years, an extensive network of new bureaus and subdivisions was established; in one year, 1926, the space in the Munich central party office was expanded three times. Before long, this apparatus surpassed even the fabulous bureaucracy of the Social Democratic Party. Its size was altogether disproportionate to the small number of the NSDAP’s membership, which increased quite slowly. For Hitler himself seemed to want to build up the party in the form of a small, tough kernel of specialists in propaganda and violence. He repeatedly stressed that an organization of 10 million people was necessarily peaceable and could not be set in motion of its own accord; only fanatical minorities would be able, to move it. Of the 55,000 members the party had had in 1923, it had won back only half by the end of 1925. A year later the membership amounted to somewhat more than 108,000. But the seemingly swollen bureaucracy would be useful for the future mass party in which Hitler continued to believe with absolute confidence. What is more, the great number of party offices provided him with varied possibilities for patronage and for dividing the power of others, thus extending and securing his own.