The slogans that formulated the “spiritual” alternatives did far more than the vague economic pledges to lead the disoriented masses toward the Nazi party. Hitler himself put aside his reservations about a mass party. For the first time the flexibility of the widely ramified party organization proved its worth. The NSDAP could effortlessly absorb the most heterogeneous elements, for it was not restricted to a single class and not hampered by a rigid program. It could offer room to persons of every background, every age, every motivation. Its membership appeared peculiarly structureless; certainly no strict class analysis applied to it. We would be wrong to see it solely as a movement of the reactionary bourgeois and peasant masses, whose impetus came chiefly from the material interests of its following. To take this view would be to miss the decisive factor in its rise.
Small tradesmen, peasants, industrialists and consumers had all become indispensable to the party. The manifold contradictions among these groups stood in the way of the formation of a class movement. Sooner or later every party had come up against this barrier. It seemed insuperable. Certainly in a period of intense economic and social distress it could not be overcome simply by making empty promises to all and sundry. There were too many politicians trying the same dodge; it soon ceased to fool anyone. Those who concerned themselves with material questions could win the masses only by promising higher wages and lower prices, more dividends and fewer taxes, better pensions, higher tariffs, higher prices to the farmers and lower prices to the consumers. But Hitler’s great trick was to leap over the economic contradictions and offer instead high-sounding principles. When he spoke of material interests it was chiefly to make an effective contrast between himself and his opponents. “I do not promise happiness and prosperity, like the others,” he would occasionally proclaim. “I can only say this one thing: we want to be National Socialists; we want to realize that we cannot rightfully be nationalistic and shout, ‘Deutschland, Deutschland iiber alles’ when millions of us have to go on the dole and have nothing to wear.” For his key weapon was his understanding that the behavior of human beings is not motivated exclusively by economic forces or interests. He counted instead on their need to have a suprapersonal reason for living and trusted in the power of an “alternative culture” to dissolve class limits. This alternative was a package of slogans—an invocation of national honor, national greatness, oaths of loyalty and readiness for sacrifice. He called for dedication without prospect of advantage: “And you will see—we’ll be marching!”
Nevertheless, the party still won influence and members chiefly among those middle-level groups who had clung to the rudiments of their political ideas and who had all along tended to flee from dubious existential situations into the shelter of a stern and uncomplicated system of order. Their wishes, resentments, and interests were not too well represented by the existing spread of parties. The unloved republic had alienated them from politics, but now hunger and anxiety sent them in search of “their” party in a series of aimless vacillations. In their encounter with Hitler they succumbed, to be sure, to his great demagogic powers. But almost equally they were drawn by a similarity of destinies: he, too, unmistakably bourgeois, sharing that overwhelming fear of being declassed, a failure in civilian life until he discovered politics, which had liberated him and lifted him socially. Wouldn’t the same magic affect them? Hitler’s fate seemed to be the apotheosis of their own.
It was this “sinking middle class” who joined the NSDAP in vast numbers and dominated the sociological picture of the party during those years. Yet it would be wrong to assume a direct link between economic distress and the appeal of the party. Its greatest increment of members came not in the big cities and industrial regions where the slump had struck hardest, but in the small towns and rural areas. For there, against the background of an on the whole still intact order of things, economic crisis was felt as far more elemental and catastrophic than in the big cities, which had always known such ups and downs.4
As the Depression went on, however, the Nazi party began winning its first successes among the workers. Gregor Strasser even tried to set up an organization of party cells in every shop to combat what was called “shop Marxism” (Goebbels coined the slogan, “A Nazi cell on top in every shop”). What remained of the Nazi Left was desperately trying to keep its social-revolutionary workers’ party from degenerating into a collecton of anti-Semites and petty bourgeois. “Winning a single worker is incomparably more valuable than declarations of adherence by a dozen Excellencies or ‘superior’ personages in general.” By and large, Strasser’s efforts failed. But what the Nazi party for a long time could not achieve within the class-conscious proletariat, it did achieve more and more among the growing masses of the unemployed. The SA proved to be an ideal catchment basin. In Hamburg, of 4,500 members of the SA, 2,600 were unemployed—nearly 60 per cent. Party stalwarts would be posted outside relief offices, where the jobless had to report twice a week, to hand out the propaganda sheet, The Jobless, which was skillfully slanted toward the problems of this group. They would deliberately start long discussions with the men who were standing around, and thus put across the Nazi message.
Counteraction by the Communists, who saw the Nazis challenging them in their very own domain, led to brawls and street battles. Step by step the numbers involved in these struggles increased, until gradually there developed that “silent civil war” which until January, 1933, left behind it a thin but steadily bleeding trail. Then it came to an abrupt end when the one side seized power.
The battles with the Communists had begun as early as March, 1929, in the area of Dithmarschen (Schlesing-Holstein). During a fierce brawl, two members of the SA (a farmer named Hermann Schmidt and a cabinetmaker named Otto Streibel) had been killed and thirty persons injured, some of them gravely. Hereafter the strife shifted to the big cities whose working-class districts and networks of alleys served as a grim terrain for a form of guerrilla warfare. Corner cafes and basement bistros served as bases for the belligerents; these were the so-called storm pubs; one contemporary described his as a “fortified position in the battle zone.” As early as May 1, 1929, hostilities broke out on Berlin’s East End between the storm troopers and the Communists’ military organization, the Red Front Fighters League. For days whole rows of streets were in the grip of virtual war; the strife resulted in nineteen dead and forty wounded, most of them severely. It took massive intervention by the police, ultimately supported by armored cars, to stop the fighting.