On June 30 Goebbels called a membership meeting of the gau, to assemble at the Hasenheide in Berlin. “Those who do not fit in will be kicked out!” he thundered. Otto Strasser and his followers, who had come to argue their point of view, were forcibly ejected from the hall by the SA. The Strasser group thenceforth talked of “purebred Stalinism” and deliberate “persecution of socialists” on the part of the leadership; however, the Strassers and their followers were put more and more on the defensive. On July 1 Gregor Strasser resigned his editorship of the Kampfverlag newspapers and disassociated himself from his brother’s views. Von Reventlow and other prominent members of the party’s left wing also abandoned the rebels. Some of them probably did so for economic reasons, since they owed a post, a living, a deputy seat to Hitler. But most of them acted out of that “almost perverse personal loyalty” that Hitler evoked and which persisted despite countless acts of disloyalty on his part. With great assurance Goebbels declared that the party would “sweat out this attempt at sabotage.”
Thereupon, on July 4, Otto Strasser’s newspapers announced: “The socialists are leaving the NSDAP.” But hardly anyone followed Otto Strasser. It turned out that the party had virtually no socialist members and in general very few who cared about the theoretical aspects of their politics. Otto Strasser founded a new party which first called itself the Revolutionary National Socialists and later the Black Front but never escaped the odor of mere dogmatism. Hitler’s followers were forbidden to read’ the publications of the Kampfverlag; but the subjects belabored by these publications soon ceased to attract attention anyhow. Who cared about petty revelations of party secrets when the party was obviously answering the summons of history and valiantly struggling against world-wide disaster. The masses were fixing their hopes of salvation on Hitler, not on his program.
The departure of Otto Strasser ended once and for all the sole conflict over principles within the Nazi party. It also meant a considerable loss in status for Gregor Strasser, who thereafter had no seat of power and no newspaper platform. He continued to be organization leader of the party, resided in Munich, and held many threads in his hand, but he became more and more remote from the members and the public. Only six months earlier the political journal Weltbühne had predicted that “one of these days not so far in the future he will overshadow his lord and master Hitler” and himself seize the power in the party. That was now out of the question. His more decisive defeat was to follow two years later, when he roused himself for one last opposition gesture and then, weary and broken, turned his back on the party.
Among the afterpains of the Strasser crisis must be counted the mutiny of the Berlin SA under former Police Captain Walter Stennes. The discontent among the storm troopers had less to do with the wrangle over socialism than with the recurrent rumors about bossism and favoritism, as well as the poor pay for strenuous service during the election campaign. While the storm troopers had to be out on duty night after night until thoroughly exhausted, the Political Organization was making itself comfortable in a luxurious palace. That was the most common charge. Reminded that there was to be a monument in marble and bronze to the SA in the Brown House, the storm troopers responded that such a monument looked more like a mausoleum. “As far as the PO was concerned,” one SA Oberführer wrote, “the SA is here just to die.” Things were getting more and more out of hand, and Goebbels called for help from Hitler and the SS. Only a few days after his appeal, the dissident Berlin SA men stormed the district party office on Hedemannstrasse, and there was a bloody clash with Himmler’s biack-shirted elite guards. It speaks well for Hitler’s authority that he had only to appear for the rebellion to die down. Significantly, however, he made a point of avoiding a frank discussion with Stennes and instead tried to win over the rank-and-file storm trooper. Accompanied by armed SS men, he went from one beer hall to the next, seeking out the regular tables and guardrooms of the SA. He pleaded with the units, even occasionally broke into tears, spoke of impending victories and the rich rewards that would be due to them, the soldiers of the revolution. For the time being he promised them legal services and better treatment: the funds for these benefits would come from a special levy of twenty pfennig on every party member. As for the SS, he repaid it for its services in this juncture by awarding it the watchword: “Your honor is loyalty!”
The collapse of the rebellion meant the departure of Captain Pfeffer von Salomon. With growing fatalism, the commander of the SA had watched the power of the Political Organization swell while that of the SA had dwindled perceptibly. One reason for this shift was Hitler’s own changing psychological requirements. With his sense of mission daily reinforced by mass cheering, he developed a craving for homage that could far more easily be paid by the petty bourgeois functionary type of the Political Organization than by the soldierly leaders of the SA. Consequently, the PO received the lion’s share of the party’s limited funds and was distinctly favored in the drawing up of deputy lists and other acts of patronage. But there was also the personal incompatibility between Hitler, with his semiartistic and South German temperament, and the austere, “Prussian”-minded Pfeffer von Salomon.
At the end of August Hitler relieved Pfeffer of his duties and then, as he was to do later on after his conflicts with the army in 1938 and 1941, himself assumed the post of supreme SA leader. Ernst Röhm, who had meanwhile become a military instructor in Bolivia, was called back to take over the day-to-day work of SA leader. By becoming Oberster SA-Führer (OSAF) Hitler finally made himself master of the movement; all the special privileges Pfeffer had obtained or claimed now devolved upon Hitler himself. Only a few days after assuming the post, Hitler issued an order requiring every SA leader to take an “unconditional oath of loyalty” to him personally and subsequently to have every single member of the SA do the same. This reinforced the oath taken by every member on entering the SA: “To carry out all orders fearlessly and conscientiously, since I know that my leaders will require of me nothing illegal.”
It was significant that no resistance was offered to the total subordination implicit in such formulas. Institutionally as well as psychologically the movement had at last prepared its members to fit into the totalitarian framework. In June, as a matter of fact, Hitler had revealed his totalitarian vision to a number of chosen party journalists. Speaking to them in the Senators’ Hall of the new Brown House, he had sketched a picture of the hierarchy and organization of the Catholic Church. The party, he declared, must build its leadership pyramid after the model of the church, “on a broad pedestal of… political parish priests who stand in the midst of the people.” The pyramid itself must “rise above the tiers of the Kreisleiter and Gauleiter to the body of Senators and finally to the Leader-Pope.”
He did not shy away from the comparison between gauleiters and bishops, and between future senators and cardinals, one of those present reported; and similarly he boldly transferred the concepts of authority, obedience, and faith from the spiritual to the secular realms in a series of bewildering parallels. He concluded by saying, without a trace of irony, that he did not “wish to contest the Holy Father in Rome his claim to mental—or is the word spiritual—infallibility on questions of faith, I don’t know much about that. But I think I know a great deal more about politics. Therefore I hope that the Holy Father henceforth will not contest my claim. And herewith I now lay claim, for myself and my successors in the leadership of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, to political infallibility. I hope the world will bow to that as quickly as it has bowed to the Holy Father’s claim.”7