Berlin was now moving more and more into the center of the Nazi strategy for seizing power. The city was traditionally leftist, with the Marxist parties there far outstripping all rivals in strength. For that very reason it was the bastion which had to be taken. And Gauleiter Goebbels had just the temperament to pit his tiny following against the “Reds” right in the heart of their power, where they imagined themselves unassailable. “Adolf Hitler devours Karl Marx!” was one of the slogans with which Goebbels launched his offensive. From the bourgeois suburbs where the Nazi party had led a clubbish existence taken up chiefly with internal squabbles, Goebbels sent the members straight toward the bleak proletarian districts in the northern and eastern parts of the city. For the first time someone was disputing the Left’s control of the streets and the shops. Goebbels himself, sallow, looking in need of sleep, wearing a leather jacket, was also often on the scene, and became a well-known figure in the period’s gallery of types. The nervousness of the Left—which for too long had fobbed off its shadow play of world revolution on increasingly skeptical masses—was reflected in the slogan issued by the Communist Party district leadership in Berlin in answer to Goebbels’ competition: “Drive the Fascists out of the shops! Strike them wherever you meet them!”
Following Hitler’s example, Goebbels also developed his tactics by studying his opponent’s methods. The slogan squads, the parading bands, the political activity on the job, the system of street cells, the mass demonstrations, the door-to-door canvassing—all this represented techniques of building the party long practiced by the socialists, combined with the “grand Munich style” Hitler had created. Goebbels added a few intellectual and metropolitan trappings to the party’s provincial look, thereby making it attractive to more sophisticated strata of the population. He was witty, hard-boiled, and cynical in a way that usually impresses the public. Labeled by his adversaries “chief bandit of Berlin,” he adopted this insult as an honorary title.
What distinguished the Nazis from conservatives of the old school was their absence of false pride about the manner of achieving power. They were more than willing to learn from their opponents, and this gave their reactionary notions a cast of modernity. They were far more attentive to the radical leftist press than to the bourgeois papers, and in their own publications they often printed “significant sections” from Communist instructions, applying them to their own following. They tried to throw their opponents off balance by rude behavior—again borrowing from Communist practice—while at the same time pluming themselves on their innocence and idealism. “Heroes with the hearts of big children” and “Christlike socialists” were among the descriptions Goebbels gave to the Nazis in the process of creating a martyr out of the SA leader Horst Wessel. In actuality Wessel had been shot by a Communist rival for the affections of a slut; the killing was at least in part a matter of jealousy.
One of Goebbels’ most effective tactics was to exhibit the heavily bandaged victims of street battles on stretchers beside his speaker’s platform. The incident in Dithmarschen had confirmed the propagandist value of the dead and wounded, and the leaders of the party had seen that a few bloody victims were a good investment. According to police reports, the party membership rolls increased by 30 per cent after that affair. The report stated that since the battle “simple old peasant women are wearing the swastika on their blue work smocks. In talking with such old mothers you sensed at once that they knew nothing at all about the aims and intentions of the National Socialist Party. But they are convinced that all honest people in Germany today are being exploited, that the government is incompetent and… only the National Socialists can save the country from this alleged misery.”
The NSDAP made its most remarkable inroads among the youth. More than any other political party it was able to exploit the state of mind of the younger generation. In the nature of things the generation from eighteen to thirty had been especially hard hit by the Depression. Their ambition and their desire to prove themselves had been thwarted by the prevailing mass unemployment. At once radical and looking for some way to escape reality, the young generation formed a gigantic aggressive potential. They despised their environment, the homes of their parents, their educators and traditional authorities, engaged only in restoring the old bourgeois order. The young people had long ago moved beyond that order. A contemporary poem voiced this mood: “No longer content with faith in the past and yet too sound for mere negation.” Germany, it was also said, had lost not only the war but the revolution as well, and she must make up for both.
The republic was held in contempt not only because of its powerlessness but also for pretending that its indecisiveness was a virtue, a democratic willingness to compromise. The young people also rejected the republic’s unimaginative welfare-state materialism, its “epicurean ideals”—in which they found no trace of that tragic sense of life they had made their own.
They were equally unattracted to the traditional type of party that in no way satisfied their craving for “organic” forms of community—a craving awakened by the youth movement before the war and strengthened by the war experience itself. They were repelled by “the rule of old men” and bristled at the very thought of the usual party leaders, narrow-minded and self-righteous and all alike.
A good many of the young joined the Communists, although the narrow class-struggle bias of the party was for some a psychological stumbling block. Others tried to buttress their vulnerability by joining one of the many splinter groups among the wilder nationalistic conservatives. But the majority, especially among the students, went over to the National Socialists. The NSDAP was their natural alternative. In the ideological gamut offered by Nazi propaganda, they heard chiefly the revolutionary notes. They were seeking discipline and heroism and were susceptible to the romantic lure of a movement that operated close to the edge of legality and permitted the wholly committed to step over the edge. The NSDAP seemed less a party than an association of fighters who made demands on the whole man and answered a brittle and crumbling world with the battle cry of a new order.
With the influx of younger members, the Nazi party—especially before the masses began flocking to it—became for a while a new kind of youth movement. In the Hamburg district, for example, some two thirds of the party members were under thirty in 1925; in Halle the figure went as high as 86 per cent; and in the other party districts the percentages were much the same. In 1931, 70 per cent of the Berlin SA men were under thirty; in the party as a whole nearly 40 per cent of the total membership belonged to this age group. The Social Democratic Party had barely half as many young people. Only 10 per cent of the Social Democratic Reichstag deputies were under forty; among the Nazis the figure was 60 per cent. Hitler’s enlistment of the young proved to be a canny policy. He also saw the wisdom of entrusting them with high positions. Goebbels became a gauleiter at twenty-eight, Karl Kaufmann at twenty-five. Baldur von Schirach was twenty-six when he was appointed Reich youth leader, and Himmler was only two years older when he was promoted to chief of the SS, with the impressive new title of Reichsführer-SS. The dedication and faith of these youthful leaders, their “purely physical energy and militancy,” as one of them later recalled, “gave the party a momentum the bourgeois parties could not begin to match.”
All these elements had had a place in the party since 1929, even before the sudden large-scale influx of members. But the sociological range of the party remained vague. In fact, it was deliberately obscured by pretentious slogans, behind which Hitler tried to disguise the fact that he had made few conquests among the politically conscious working class and that the National Socialist Party on the whole remained restricted to its original strata of the population. Moreover, the government began again to show displeasure. On June 5, 1930, Bavaria issued a ban on the private wearing of uniforms. A week later Prussia forbade the brown shirt, so that the storm troopers henceforth had to appear in white shirts. Only two weeks later the state of Prussia prohibited membership in the National Socialist or the Communist Party for all civil servants. The new toughness of the Weimar Republic was expressed in the increasing number of court cases against members of both parties. Up to 1933 some 40,000 trials were held, as a consequence of which a total of 14,000 years’ imprisonment and nearly 1.5 million marks in fines were imposed.5