Shortly afterward, a meeting was convoked that had not been organized in the form by then becoming customary: a briefing session in which Hitler simply issued commands. During the discussion Hitler sat silent, with a markedly bored or sardonic expression, gradually creating such a sense of paralysis and futility that the meeting wound to an end in general resignation. One of the participants later conjectured that Hitler had permitted the meeting to be held only in order to show how his indifference could ruin it.
Hitler felt his chance would come as leader of an inconspicuous but rigorously organized party. Personally, he saw no reason for discouragement, for in establishing his hold over the party he had made important progress. Henceforth, the party sometimes referred to itself officially as the “Hitler movement.” Without significant support from influential patrons and powerful institutions, the movement was now proving that if it could not win, it could at least survive on its own resources.
On May 20, 1928, a new Reichstag was elected. The NSDAP placed ninth, with 2.6 per cent of the votes, winning twelve seats. Among its deputies were Gregor Strasser, Gottfried Feder, Goebbels, Frick, and Hermann Göring, who in the interval had returned home from Sweden bringing with him a wealthy wife and extensive connections. Hitler himself, being “stateless,” had not been a candidate. But with his remarkable capacity for turning his embarrassments and disabilities to advantage, he used this circumstance to reinforce his pose of the unique leader who refused to make any concessions to the despised parliamentary system and stood far above the scramble, the deals and greeds of daily life. If he had decided to let the party participate in the elections—a decision taken only after long vacillation—it had been partly out of the desire to get a share in the privileges of Reichstag deputies. Sure enough, a week after the elections Goebbels wrote an article that cast quite another light on the party’s pretense to legalism: “I am not a member of the Reichstag. I am an HOI. A Holder of Immunity. An HORP. A Holder of a Railroad Pass. What do we care about the Reichstag? We have been elected against the Reichstag, and we will exercise our mandate in the interests of our employer…. An HOI is allowed to call a dungheap a dungheap and does not have to use such euphemisms as ‘government.’ ” Goebbels concluded this amazing confession with: “This startles you, does it? But don’t think we’re finished yet…. You’ll have lots more fun with us before it’s over. Just wait till the comedy begins.”
Yet such remarks seemed mere rhetorical taunts. The NSDAP remained a splinter party given to outré gestures. But Hitler himself, sure of his ground, his cadres ready for action, waited coolly for a new radicalization of the masses. Once conditions had brought that about, he would be able to make the breakthrough and transform his following into a mass party. In spite of all his organization bustle, he had so far not managed to emerge from the shadow of the republic, which by now was functioning competently, if without any special brilliance. It sometimes seemed as if the nation were at last ready to make its peace with the republic, to accept the gray dullness of Weimar and be reconciled to the ordinariness of history. The Reichstag election had, it is true, revealed a degree of disintegration going on in the bourgeois center, as manifested by the rise of many splinter parties. The Nazi party, moreover, could now count 150,000 members. But at the beginning of 1929 the Bonn sociologist Joseph A. Shumpeter spoke of the “impressive stability in our social conditions” and concluded: “In no sense, in no area, in no direction, are eruptions, upheavals or disasters probable.”
But Hitler understood things much more keenly. In a speech given during this brief happy period in the history of the republic, he remarked on the psychology of the Germans: “We have a third value: our fighting spirit. It is there, only buried under a pile of foreign theories and doctrines. A great and powerful party goes to a lot of trouble to prove the opposite, until suddenly an ordinary military band comes along and plays. Then the straggler comes to, out of his dreamy state; all at once he begins to feel himself a comrade of the marching men, and joins their columns. That’s the way it is today. Our people only have to be shown this better course—and you’ll see, we’ll start marching.”39
He was waiting for his cue. The question was whether the party could preserve, over the long pull, its dynamism, its hopes, its conception of its aims, and its image of the chosen leader—the whole system of fictions and credulities on which it was founded. In an analysis of the May, 1928, elections Otto Strasser had complained that “National Socialism’s tidings of redemption” had not caught the ear of the masses and that the party had failed to make any inroads into the proletarian circles. In fact, the party’s following consisted chiefly of lower-grade white-collar workers, artisans, some farm groups, and young people inclined to romantic protest—the advance guard of those classes of the German population who were especially susceptible to the rousing music of “an ordinary military band.”
Only a few months later, the scene had totally changed.
IV. THE TIME OF STRUGGLE
From Provincial to National Politics
Following our old method, we once more take up the struggle and say: Attack! Attack! Always attack! If someone says we can’t possibly have another try, remember that I can attack not just one more time but ten times over.
Hitler launched his first massive offensive against the consolidated system of the republic in the summer of 1929, and at once his advance carried him a long way. He had long been in search of a slogan that could mobilize the masses. Suddenly, Gustav Stresemann’s foreign policy offered a breach into which he could hurl the full weight of his propaganda. The debate over reparations had broken out afresh, and Hitler mustered all his energy to move the NSDAP from its role of isolated sectarian party and propel it into the limelight of national politics. By good luck his campaign coincided in time with the world-wide Depression, and derived its psychological impact from economic conditions. This gave him the opportunity to test his forces, his organization, and his tactics in a kind of prelude. The struggle that raged around the reparations question brought on the crisis that was to grip the republic to the very end, a crisis initiated by Hitler and cleverly fomented until the republic broke down.
Strictly speaking, the point of departure came with the death of Gustav Stresemann at the beginning of October, 1929. The German Foreign Minister had worn himself out trying to put over his subtle foreign policy. Branded as a “compliance policy,”[9] it actually aimed at gradual abrogation of the Versailles Treaty. Until shortly before his death Stresemann, though with considerable doubts, had backed the reparations arrangements drafted by a committee of experts under the chairmanship of Owen D. Young, the American banker. The Young Plan represented a distinct improvement on the existing conditions. Moreover, thanks to Stresemann’s obstinacy and diplomatic adroitness, it had been coupled with the promise of the Allied occupying forces evacuating the Rhineland before the date stipulated by treaty.
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