Such measures, however, did not dispel the impression of weakness that clung to the “system.” After the inglorious end of the Great Coalition there was pressure within the government itself for some sort of change in the machinery of rule. Up to this point President von Hindenburg had conducted his office with fidelity to the letter of the Constitution, although he had no particular respect for its spirit. But some members of his entourage began to say that the incompetent parliamentary regime should be replaced by authoritarian presidential rule. It is difficult to judge to what extent the President accepted such counsels; but in any case he for the first time intervened vigorously and decisively in the formation of the new government. His choice of Heinrich Brüning for Chancellor indicated that from now on he would exert influence on the daily business of government. The personality of the new Chancellor combined integrity, austerity, and sense of duty. He seemed ready for those mute self-sacrifices that Hindenburg demanded of his associates. Soon after taking office, with unseemly haste, without exhausting the possibilities for compromise, Brüning risked a vote of confidence and dissolved the Reichstag. The moment was particularly ill chosen; unemployment was increasing sharply, and terror of the Depression was mounting. In vain Interior Minister Wirth implored the antagonists to compromise and not to expand the parliamentary crisis into a crisis of the system, as if democracy were tired of itself. No one yielded, and new elections were set for September, 1930.
Nazi propaganda immediately flared to new heights. Once again the mobil agitation squads made loud and turbulent irruptions into towns and rural areas, organizing an endless succession of open-air concerts, sports festivals, “rallyes,” solemn bugling of taps church meetings. Their stock-in-trade was diatribes against their competitors. “Throw the scum out! Tear the masks off their mugs! Take them by the scruff of the neck and kick them in their fat bellies on September 14, and sweep them out of the temple with trumpets and drums!” Goebbels wrote; in this election campaign he was undergoing his first test since his appointment as Reich propaganda chief. The philosopher Ernst Bloch has spoken contemptuously of the Nazis’ “stupid enthusiasm.” But in fact that was their greatest strength. The Communists, by contrast, in spite of their grandiloquent faith in ultimate victory, seemed colorless and without élan, as though they had, not history, but only the daily grind on their side. The 2,000 to 3,000 graduates of the Nazi party speakers’ school were now thrown into the fray for marathon sessions. And though their expositions of party doctrine often sounded crude and memorized, and probably won few new adherents, the mere appearance of these hordes of preachers spread the impression of a vast party engaged in tireless and overwhelming activity. Simultaneously, the better-known and experienced party speakers addressed the populace at large-scale meetings. “Meetings attended by between a thousand and five hundred persons are of daily occurrence in the larger cities,” a memorandum of the Prussian Interior Ministry noted. “Often, in fact, one or several parallel meetings have to be held because the previously selected halls cannot hold the number of persons wishing to attend.”
Heading it all as leader, star performer, and organizer was Hitler himself. He had led off the campaign with a mass meeting in Weimar and continued his tour indefatigably, by car, by train, or by plane. Wherever he turned up, he set the masses into motion, although he had no plan, no theory of the Depression and how to fight it. But he could name those responsible : the Allies, the corrupt politicians of the system, the Marxists, and the Jews. And he had his formula for ending the distress of the people: determination, self-assurance, and recaptured power. His emotional appeals remained in the realm of generalities. Topical concerns be damned, he would declare. The German people had been ruined by wrestling with such petty matters. “Topical concerns blind our eyes to greatness.” The crisis of the parliamentary system arose from the very fact that the parties were focusing their attention on the “everyday junk,” for which people were not “willing to make sacrifices.”
Hitler’s effectiveness was due as much to the decisiveness of his manner and the impressive ritual with which he was surrounded as to his oratorical powers. His ideas could easily be translated into slogans; once planted, these sank into the deeper layers of men’s mind, took root and grew. During those weeks of the election campaign he acquired, in addition to a vast amount of organizational experience, the refined psychological technique for the larger and stormier campaigns he was to launch two years later.
The paucity of the actual Nazi program, as against the energy and noise level of its agitation, caused many people to underestimate the NSDAP. In the view of intelligent contemporaries, the party was asserting itself as a noisy, bothersome and slightly crazy phenomenon in noisy and slightly crazy times. Thus, the political satirist Kurt Tucholsky made this quip about Hitler: “The man doesn’t exist; he is only the noise he makes.” Meanwhile, on a more serious plane, little attention was paid to a memorandum from the Reich Interior Ministry disclosing the anti-Constitutional character of the party, so thinly disguised by formal professions of legality.
Instead, those most concerned with defense of the republic trusted to the pent-up explosive forces within the party. It was growing too fast, they thought; surely its inner contradictions would cause it to blow up. And surely it would be destroyed by the intellectual mediocrity, the crudeness and the warring ambitions of its corps of leaders.
Such prognoses seemed confirmed by the upheavals within the National Socialist Party in the summer of 1930. Only in hindsight could these be recognized as purges which tightened party discipline and strengthened its thrust. First of all, Hitler forced the long-delayed confrontation with the party Left, whose position had patently become more contradictory. As long as the NSDAP had been a marginal party, making a considerable uproar but not having to put its ideas into practice in legislatures or administrations, it had been easy to conceal its internal ideological disagreements. But after the recent victories in regional elections, the party was being compelled to take a definite stand. Otto Strasser and his followers obstinately held to their old principles. They advocated aggressive “catastrophe tactics,” preached crude anticapitalism, came out for extensive nationalization of industry and an alliance with the Soviet Union, and flouted the party line by supporting local strike movements. This last activity, of course, was bound to strain the party’s new and highly profitable entente with industry. In addition their habit of rashly discussing programs caused trouble, for Hitler liked to skirt such questions and keep his options open.
As early as January, 1930, the Führer had asked Otto Strasser to turn over the publishing house to him. Cunningly mixing flattery with threats and attempts at bribery, Hitler promised the refractory comrade the post of press chief at Munich headquarters and offered to pay some 80,000 marks for the publishing organization. He appealed to Strasser as an old soldier and a National Socialist of many years standing. But Strasser, who regarded himself as the repository of true National Socialism, had rejected all such bids. The final showdown came on the night of May 21, 1930, in what was then Hitler’s Berlin headquarters, the Hotel Sanssouci on Linkstrasse. Max Amann was present, as well as Rudolf Hess and Otto Strasser’s brother Gregor, when the two sides fell into a heated debate that was to go on for seven hours and to expose the full extent of their differences.